Goh Nakamura performs Simon and Garfunkel's "America"

Last year I marked the Fourth here by posting a clip of Paul Simon singing "American Tune", which, I noted, had a melody that stems from Bach's St. Matthew Passion, and which Bach got from an earlier work by Hassler (a factoid that has led many a web searcher to my blog). This year I'm captivated by the clip above of San Francisco musician Goh Nakamura performing on the street for a lunchtime crowd, doing "America", a song from Simon and Garfunkel's 1967 Bookends album.


Have a joyous Fourth.

Yanks sweep Mets at Citi.

Yuck. An all too familiar story: Mets outhit the opposition, but bring in fewer runs. History is made: Mariano Rivera gets his 500th save and his first-ever in the majors RBI, and Chien-Ming Wang his first win since George W. Bush was in the White House.

Hard to believe, but the Mets, now at .500, are still a viable post-season proposition. Nevertheless, I'm going to sulk for a while.

Cheery update: As this Brooklyn Paper story tells, my beloved Brooklyn Cyclones are off to a good start, and Mets starter Oliver Perez had an impressive rehab performance with the 'Clones at Keyspan Park yesterday.

@Twif: Thanks. At least your team has a perfect record against the Bronx Bullies going into the all-star break.

Gehry eclipses Gilbert on the Brooklyn Bridge

June 7, 2008. On a hazy summer morning, Cass Gilbert's magnificent Woolworth Building, near the 95th anniversary of its completion, can be seen at the left of this photo taken near the center of the Brooklyn Bridge.

January 6, 2009. On a chilly, overcast winter morning, the view from near the same spot has changed, as Forest City Ratner's luxury Frank Gehry designed Beekman Tower is rising, has begun to block the view of the Woolworth Building, and a construction crane slashes across the upper part of the tower. Not long after this picture was made, Forest City announced that, because of the financial crisis, it intended to truncate the Beekman Tower at about the level it had then reached, rather than building it to its planned seventy six stories. This would have preserved at least part of the view of the Woolworth Building from the Bridge.

June 24, 2009. According to a recent New York Magazine article by Justin Davidson on Gehry,

For a while, it seemed as though [Beekman Tower], too, would add to the architect’s miseries. Ratner halted construction halfway up and toyed with the idea of saving money by leaving it stunted. Eventually, he extracted concessions from the construction unions, and the tower resumed its upward march. The result will be an ordinary structure in a shiny dress.

Nevertheless, the website Lower Manhattan.info, reporting on "daily activities" and updated to June 16, 2009, says "Superstructure erection is on hold; the building is now 41 stories tall". The photo above, taken this morning, shows it at forty one stories; the top of the Woolworth Building's tower still peeks over its top.

Update: The eclipse is now complete (see photo below taken on September 1, 2009):

Straight talk on Iran.

Steve Kornacki has an excellent column in PolitickerNY about why President Obama is right not to utter red-meat rhetoric concerning events in Iran, and why John McCain and some of his Republican colleagues are wrong

The question isn't whether having the CIA, back in 1953 and largely at the behest of the British, put into action a coup d'état against the premiership of Mohammed Mossadegh was a good thing (I believe it wasn't), or whether Mossadegh, had he not been deposed, would have brought Iran into alliance with the Soviet Union (I think he would have gladly taken aid, military and otherwise, from the U.S.S.R., and would have proclaimed Iran "non-aligned", which, in practice, would have meant voting with the Sovs in the U.N. most of the time; in other words, much like India in the 1950s and '60s). It isn't even whether he would, bribed sufficiently, have allowed the Russkies their wet dream of a warm water naval port, right on the Straits of Hormuz.

No matter what geopolitical horror scenes you can imagine, retrospectively, from not overthrowing Mossadegh, the present reality is that even those Iranians who are protesting against the election results remember this episode of Western interference in their politics ruefully. So, right or wrong, the U.S. is constrained in the appeals it can now make. Appeals to basic human rights concerns; yes. Appeals to "democracy" (whether or not you dispute Mossadegh's status, at the time he was deposed, as "democratically elected") may ring hollow, and will, no doubt, be used by those in power to discredit the source by recalling the anti-Mossadegh coup.

Image courtesy of Tehran24.

If Charles Darwin had a Facebook page...

...might it look like this?

The page was developed by Heather Snyder and Anna Heran, of the staff of the Lloyd Library and Museum, Cincinnati, in consultation with Nik Money, professor of biology at Miami University and a Lloyd board member. Just like a real Facebook page, it will be updated from time to time by the addition of new friends and comments.

Thanks to Anna Heran for posting the link, as well as a press release, on the Archives & Archivists listserv maintained by the Society of American Archivists, and to my wife for forwarding it to me.

Happy Bloomsday.

I read Portrait of the Artist as a freshman college English assignment, and found it an interesting, if challenging, contrast to the fiction, mostly Steinbeck and Sinclair Lewis, I'd been reading at the time. I didn't return to Joyce until my thirties, when, on the recommendation of a friend, I read Dubliners. I liked the stories, especially "The Dead", very much. It wasn't until I was in my forties, though, that I tackled Ulysses, although I'd seen Joseph Strick's and Fred Haines' excellent 1967 movie adaptation while in law school (and heard the conclusion of Molly Bloom's soliloquy recited by "Ralph Spoilsport" on Firesign Theater's How Can You Be in Two Places at Once When You're Not Anywhere at All? many times after that).

Ulysses was tough going for me. I read it in small chunks, mostly while commuting on the subway. The "nighttown" sequence was particularly difficult. Once I got through it, though, I was glad I'd made the effort. It helped to make more enjoyable my visit to Dublin several years later. There's a nice appreciation of the book by Colum McCann in today's New York Times, in which he tells how it helped him to understand his deceased grandfather, a man of Joyce's time and, in his younger days, of the Dublin of Ulysses.

As for me, if I may be excused, I'm off to search for Gerty MacDowell.

(Joyce image courtesy of Hell's Kitchen.)

News from Tehran

Thanks to friend Geoff for sending me a link to Tehran24, which provides photos (the image above is taken from the site), video and text concerning events there. A post from Sunday, June 14, says the site has been "banned in Iran by government since three hours ago"; however, it is apparently still operating, as new posts went up yesterday.

Here's a clip, also taken from the site, of a street protest in Tehran two days ago (video by amirpix):

Reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.

Thanks, though, to GimpelTheFool for this excellent poem, posted "in memory of BotFer Claude Scales":

Barrow Street

I will die having walked
down Barrow Street
in New York's light
amidst the smell of coffee
roasting in the morning
past the Paris Bistro
with its red awning

having walked past
Cherry Lane where the
theatre was, and at
its corner, a restaurant
where they served your
vegetables in oval dishes,
Portugese family-style

having walked with salt
on my lips from a breeze
off the Hudson just
a few blocks away,
where liners and warships
made common progress
to their piers uptown.

When I do kick the bucket, I want my surviving friends to throw a big party, and someone has to sing this:

The Mets are messin' with my mind.

At the end of April, I was ready to give up on them. Then May brought good play and fortune, and I was beguiled. By the end of the month, the local baseball pundits were praising their resilience, noting their ability to beat good teams even with players like Delgado and Reyes sidelined by injuries. But June brought something that rhymes with it, and it ain't moon or tune. My wife, the Red Sox fan, knows all about it. The June swoon. It started with their getting swept in Pittsburgh by a below .500 team. Now they've moved on to Washington, to play the worst team in the National League. Last night, I checked in and saw a one-all tie going into the bottom of the ninth. I just knew what was going to happen: the Nats would score and bye-bye. So, I averted my eyes, and didn't check again for about twenty minutes. To my delight, I found that David Wright had scored two runs in the top of the tenth, and Rodriguez had notched another save. Tonight, however, the Mets have returned to swoonland, with Maine, who I now fear may be next to join a D.L. that looks like the aftermath of Chateau-Thierry, yielding seven earned runs.

I take some comfort in the Rays, who also have had a spate of injuries, having beaten the Yankees, and that the opening of the Brooklyn Cyclones' season is less than two weeks away

Update: Sunday brought a 7-0 win, and so a successful series against the floundering Nats. Next up, though, are arch-nemesis and division leading Phils, followed by the hated and now hot Yanks. Reasons for hope: Ryan Church is back in the lineup and got two hits last night, and Livian Hernandez has been awesome in his past two outings.

Goodbye, Koko Taylor

The drumbeat of losses from the music world continues with the death, at 80, of Koko Taylor, who reigned for many years as queen of Chicago blues. Thanks to Kevin of The Woodshed for alerting me to her passing.

I'm shocked, shocked!

Downright flabbergasted by the result of this Gallup poll.

Marshall Chapman, live in Louisville.

Marshall Chapman and I go back a ways. Our encounters have been few but fun, certainly for me and I hope for her. She gives great hug. So I've awaited eagerly a video of her in performance that I could share with, as Marshall would say, y'all. Now, through Facebook, she's provided me with the YouTube clip above, which shows her onstage with Tim Krekel at an event called Bobbie Watson's Dance or Die, at the Vernon Club in Louisville last Saturday.

This is a long clip that begins at a mild roar, but builds steadily in tempo and intensity. As Marshall says, "View to end or you'll miss some ass-shaking, kissing, and even a little poetry reading!" And, I'll add, how many rock songs feature a hot trombone solo?

P.S. Be sure to check out Marshall's website, and her articles in Garden & Gun magazine, of which she's a contributing editor.

Sad addendum: Less than a month after this event, Tim Krekel died.

There's a story here, somewhere.

Plymouth Street, Brooklyn.

Municipal Building, Manhattan.

The uncle I never met.

Photo: Tyrone Daily Herald / Christina Pryor

Thomas Jefferson Lane Jr. was my mother's younger, and only, brother. I never knew the pleasure of his company. A little less than two years before I was born, he decided to get some coffee. He was on an LST that was taking him and the rest of his Army Corps of Engineers unit from England to the Normandy beaches, and the coffee urn was near where the ship's hull struck a mine. He died the way most people who die in war do, not in the performance of some valorous act, but just by being somewhere at the wrong time. So, my only visits to him have been in Grandview Cemetery, on a hillside overlooking Tyrone, the small central Pennsylvania town where he and my mother were born and raised. The photo above, from TyronePA.com, shows volunteers removing flags from Grandview after Veteran's Day last year, one of which may well have decorated my uncle Tom's grave.

When I was about fourteen, my parents and I visited Tyrone to go through the effects of my just deceased great aunt Nina. Among her papers was a letter from Uncle Tom, sent from England, where he was stationed before the invasion. It was several pages long, typewritten, single spaced. He had no education past high school, but his prose was precise and vivid. He wrote about crossing the Irish Sea in a cattle boat, and about a girl who had caught his eye. She wasn't the one who ultimately won his heart, though. That was a young Londoner named Hazel. He married her, and she was pregnant with my cousin, also to be named Tom, when my uncle died.

Some New York harbor scenes.

(Click on images below to enlarge.)

Queen Mary 2 at her berth in Red Hook, Brooklyn, May 8, 2009, as seen from the Manhattan ramp of the Brooklyn Bridge. In the foreground are the roofs and chimneys of 19th century buildings in the South Street Seaport district. The Verazzano-Narrows Bridge is in the background, and the bow of QM2 is obscured by the eastern tip of Governor's Island.

Two tall schooners seen from the Brooklyn Bridge on the foggy morning of May 1, 2009. In the foreground is a three-master headed into the East River. In the background, sailing around the southern tip of Manhattan toward the Hudson, is a two-master, South Street Seaport Museum's Pioneer.

The Circle Line's Sightseer XII heads up the East River carrying passengers on an around-Manhattan Island tour on April 25, 2009. The boat is passing Brooklyn Bridge Park in the section of Brooklyn called DUMBO (for "Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass"); the Manhattan Bridge is at the right.

The South Street Seaport Museum's ship collection, as seen from the Brooklyn Heights Promenade on April 16, 2009. From left to right are: bark Wavertree; tug W.O. Decker; schooner Pioneer, with tug Helen McAllister behind (tall maroon stack with two white bands and black top); bark Peking; lightship Ambrose; and Gloucester fishing schooner Lettie G. Howard.

"[S]o authentic the pages smell like cheap gin."

Michael Simmons, on Barney Hoskyns' new Tom Waits biography, in LA Weekly.

Jazz and the visual arts.

Michael Sorgatz, Jazz Band at the Park (©2009 Michael Sorgatz; image posted with permission)

There is a longstanding connection between jazz and the visual arts. It had its beginning in Paris of the 1920s, where, as the description of the Smithsonian exhibition The Jazz Age in Paris: 1914-1940 explains, a number of American musicians, many of who had come to France as part of the U.S Army forces during World War I, decided to sojourn or settle. They found a dynamic cultural environment that welcomed new modes of expression in music, as it did cubism, fauvism and other manifestations of the visual arts avant garde. As many of the jazz musicians took quarters in the Montmarte district where clubs featuring new music were located, they found themselves in proximity to the flats and studios of many painters and sculptors.

Later, in the 1950s and 60s, the same propinquity between jazz and the visual arts was repeated in Greenwich Village, where abstract expressionists like Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock rubbed shoulders with John Coltrane and Thelonius Monk. A similar mixing of artists and musicians occurred in San Francisco's North Beach. This proximity sometimes showed in the choice of jazz album cover art; for example, S. Neil Fujita's painting (update: for more on Fujita, who died in October 2010, see here) that adorns Charles Mingus's Mingus Ah Um.



There are apparent parallels between jazz and some varieties of modern painting. Both employ improvisation and depart from earlier rules of formal structure. Some modern paintings display a rhythmic sense akin to jazz's syncopation, a well known example being Broadway Boogie Woogie, by Piet Mondrian, one of the artists who was present in Paris during the 1920s. Perhaps it wouldn't be too much of a stretch to connect non-representational painting (a term I prefer to "abstract" as all art is, of necessity, an abstraction) with scat singing, as demonstrated by Ella Fitzgerald in "One Note Samba":



I was inspired to write this when I attended the opening party for "Jazz and Art/an exhibit celebrating America's musical art form" at the Hudson Guild Gallery, 441 West 26th Street, Manhattan. Included in that exhibit, along with many other works, is the painting Jazz Band at the Park by Michael Sorgatz, an image of which is at the head of this post. The exhibit will be open through June 10, 2009.

The Mets seem determined to make a fool of me.

All I had to do was get snarky about their early season woes, and what do they do? Take three of four from the defending champ Phillles, win a two game series from their arch-nemeses the Braves, and win two from the admittedly floundering Pirates, the effect of which has been to lift them to first in the NL East, by a half game margin.

Nevertheless, the Times sees the Yanks' 12-5 drubbing by the Orioles as worthy of the front page of the Sunday sports section, while the Mets' 10-1 victory and ascension to the division lead gets buried on page three.

Update: As you can tell, I carry something like a 2X4 on my shoulder regarding the Mets' second team status. Jon Lewin has this to say on the subject.

Update-update: When I first posted this, I was tempted to add something about my hoping that saying good things about the Mets wouldn't curse them. No worries there, so far, as they complete their sweep of the Pirates, extend their winning streak to seven, and pad their division lead as the Phils lose again.

Stephen Bruton, 1948-2009

Stephen Bruton was an immensely talented guitarist, singer and songwriter who was part of the Texas generation and milieu that produced Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Janis Joplin, Kris Kristofferson, Delbert McClinton and many other great musicians, including his close friend T-Bone Burnett, at whose house he died this morning. His music incorporated influences of blues, bluegrass, country, jazz, norteño and rockabilly.

The clip above shows him recording his song, "Getting Over You." This song was also recorded as a duet by Willie Nelson and Bonnie Raitt, and released on Willie's album Across the Borderline.

Update: Here's an excellent memorial piece on austin360.

How are the (no longer Grateful) Dead like the Bank of America?

Michael Simmons gives the answer in this piece from LA Weekly.

The Cascades, Grace Jones, and John Fogerty on rain.

After a short break, the rain that was the City's companion for the past four days has returned. One of my Facebook friends commented a couple of days ago that she was "listening to the rain." This prompted me to reply with a link to a pop chestnut from my senior year of high school, done by a group, the Cascades, who got started in the Navy, were named for a laundry detergent and, at the time this song was recorded, had Glen Campbell on guitar (clip by ksabond):



My friend responded with this Grace Jones number (clip by v1rtu050):



As the rain continues its seemingly endless plinking on my air conditioner, I can only think of this Creedence hit from my law school years, here in a post-Creedence version by John Fogerty (clip by masigon):

Attila, lord of all he surveys.

Still, his sister got there first.

(Posted in response to my mother-in-law's request for more cat pix.)

Some good news for Mets fans.

It's looking less and less likely that we'll have to worry about another end-of-season collapse.

Downtown Manhattan: a study in architectural contrasts.

At the bottom center of this photo (taken from the Manhattan side ramp of the Brooklyn Bridge) is the upper portion of an architectural gem, identifiable by its circular windows near the top: the twenty five story 80 Maiden Lane, originally, when completed in 1912, called the "Fire Companies Building." 80 Maiden Lane was designed by Daniel H. Burnham, whose other great surviving New York commission is the Flatiron Building.

To my eye, Burnham's design for 80 Maiden Lane shows the influence of his fellow Chicagoan, Louis Sullivan, whose sole New York design is the graceful Bayard-Condict Building on Bleecker Street (photo at left).

Bracketing the visible portion of 80 Maiden Lane, but actually closer to the Bridge, on John Street, are two art deco office buildings exemplifying the "wedding cake" or "ziggurat" style that prevailed in New York from the early part of the twentieth century until the 1960s, when the zoning law was changed to encourage slender towers with adjoining plazas instead of buildings that took up the entire lot at their base and then had successive setbacks on upper stories to allow light to reach street level. The building toward the right of the photo is in the more ornate deco style prevalent in the 1920s and 30s, while that on the left is in the austere style typical of post-World War Two buildings.

On the right edge of the photo is the eastward facing facade of the neoclassical Royal Insurance Building, designed by Starrett and Van Vleck and completed in 1927. Behind, and looming over, 80 Maiden Lane is 60 Wall Street, now the U.S. headquarters of Deutsche Bank. This tower, designed by Kevin Roche, John Dinkeloo and Associates and completed in 1989, is typical of the "postmodern" style, incorporating neoclassical elements, that was typical of the last two decades of the twentieth century.

The one twenty-first century building visible in this photo is the garish chrome yellow residential condominium William Beaver House, a small part of which is seen above and to the right of 80 Maiden Lane.

Louise Crawford of OTBKB to teach blogging class.

If you're considering starting a blog, or have recently taken up blogging, and live in the New York City area, you may benefit from attending a class to be taught by Louise Crawford, of Only the Blog Knows Brooklyn. It will meet at the Brooklyn Arts Exchange ("BAX"), 421 Fifth Avenue (at 8th Street), in Park Slope, Brooklyn. The class will meet on three successive Wednesdays starting at 7:00 P.M., beginning tomorrow, April 29. The fee for all three sessions is $45.

I regret the short notice, but this is a sterling opportunity for novice or aspiring bloggers. Louise is to blogging what Emeril is to cooking.

Rooftops, Lower Manhattan

Taken from the Manhattan Bridge pedestrian walkway, April 25, 2009.

Headlights and The Love Language at the Bell House, Brooklyn, April 24

Last night my wife and I made our first visit to the Bell House, a night club and entertainment venue located in a former warehouse near Brooklyn's famous Gowanus Canal. We were hardly in the door when we were greeted by co-owner William Crane, a.k.a. Dick Swizzle. I told him we were there for the pre-nuptial party of our friends E.J. and Beth. He took us to where we got our hands stamped for free admission to the big room where the band The Love Language, from Wilmington, North Carolina, was playing. Their sound, compounded of R&B, country, and power-pop rock, was captivating, and (being a boomer) I was especially taken by their cover of Ricky Nelson's "Hello, Mary Lou", a less frenetic version of which you can hear on the band's MySpace page.

The headline act was Headlights, from Champaign, Illinois. Like TLL, this group draws on eclectic influences to produce a rich, energetic power pop sound. They have, however, even made an acoustic recording, with lovely harmonies, of the folk ballad "Come All Ye Fair and Tender Ladies", which you can hear here. The clip at the head of this post is of their encore from last night's performance, for which they invited TLL to join them on stage. The sound quality, I'm afraid, is not the best, partly because of the limitations of my little camera and partly because of the heavy reverberation in the cavernous room. Nevertheless, it captures some of the band's charismatic quality. You can hear recordings of Headlights on their MySpace page.

Update: Here's a clip of Headlights and The Love Language onstage together at the Doug Fir Lounge, Portland, Oregon, doing "Hello, Mary Lou":


The video is by secondstory. Thanks to Brett Sanderson of Headlights for the link.

Mediocrity, thy name is Mets.

Yeah, it's early. But, trust me, a loss in April counts just as much as a loss in September. I can't add much to what Jon Lewin of Subway Squawkers has to say about the current state of affairs, except that I love it that he grooves on Fibonacci sequences.

I'm posting this now in the hope that the Mets will confound me this evening.

Update: Confound me? Of course not.

Is AOL News the on-line National Enquirer?

Consider some of today's top stories:

Ex-astronaut claims government cover-up of truth about UFOs.

Florida woman attacked by wild hog.

Stripper assaulted with stiletto heel.

Bare-chested Barack.

Rice 'n' ribs from Augusta, GA in Brooklyn Heights

I saw this van parked on Columbia Heights at Cranberry Street this morning. I took the photo with plans to publish it on Brooklyn Heights Blog, but Homer beat me to the punch with a photo by Mrs. Fink. Nevertheless, I think mine is better, if for no other reason than having the advantage of better lighting.

I love Homer's explanation of the levels of meaning in this scene.