I just got a robocall telling me to vote for Dino Rossi.

"Patty Murray is a Washington, D.C. insider", the authoritative male voice said. "She's on Harry Reid's side." Rossi, I was assured, would stand up to Reid and the rest of the inside-the-Beltway establishment. He'll do what's in the best interests of the people of Washington. Washington state, that is.

Only problem (besides the fact that I wouldn't vote for Rossi even if I could) is that I'm in New York, a continent away. If this is how the Republicans handle targeting their robocalls, maybe they need some lessons from the NRA.

Is there a pot of gold in Park Slope, Brooklyn?

Photo taken by my wife from an office on Garfield Place, Brooklyn, yesterday afternoon.

The CalTex Series

With both the Phillies and Rays eliminated, I lost both teams I could have a strong reason (Tampa is my old home town; Pennsylvania my native state) to support in this year's World Series. With the Yankees out, I also lost the one team I loathe (actually, in the interest of boosting the local economy, I was rooting for the Yanks to win the AL championship, then lose the Series in seven games to either the Giants or Phils). So, I'm left to decide between the Giants and the Rangers, or simply to sit back and watch without taking sides. 


Reasons for supporting the Giants: (1) they are the representative of the Real Baseball League, as opposed to the Designated Hitter League; (2) my maternal grandfather was born and raised in California, so I'm one of those odd people who can claim roots there without ever having been a resdient; (3) my earliest baseball memory is of Willie Mays making a spectacular catch in the 1954 Series (New York Giants vs. Cleveland Indians); and (4) I love San Francisco.


Reasons for supporting the Rangers: (1) they're scrappy, low-salary underdogs; and (2) I love Texas (really; scroll down to the addendum to the linked post).

By a score of 4-2, the Giants win my loyalty.


Update: So far, so good. Giants dodge one Cliff Lee bullet.

Second update: Giants "Cain" rangers, 9-0 to take 2-0 Series lead.

Video of bike ride across the Brooklyn Bridge

I've posted several times before about my almost daily walks over the Brooklyn Bridge and back, including documenting one such, on a chilly January morning, on video. There is little pedestrian traffic on this winter day, but a fairly steady stream of bikes, mostly headed in the same direction I'm going, from Brooklyn to Manhattan. Given the hour (roughly 8:30-9:00 a.m.) this video was shot, the bike riders are likely commuting from homes in Brooklyn to workplaces in Manhattan.

Now, thanks to The Phantom of Bay Ridge Blog, I've found the clip above, which shows a complete crossing of the Bridge from a biker's point of view, from the beginning of the bike path at Tillary and Adams streets in Brooklyn to its end across from the Municipal Building in Manhattan (the action is speeded to keep the video reasonably short, and there's some nice background music). Judging by the state of construction of Frank Gehry's Beekman Tower (scroll to the bottom of the linked post), I'd say this video was made in the late summer of 2009. It being a clear summer day, there are lots of pedestrians on the Bridge, many of them tourists busy lining up photo shots. There's a bold white line dividing the pedestrian and bike lanes of the pathway, which is mostly respected on both sides, though in the video you can see some near misses, usually caused by pedestrians abruptly crossing into the bike path.

Bikes have been part of New York City life since their invention, but in the recent past, in my experience, most of them were used by messengers or restaurant delivery people. Over the last decade or so, the number of people using them to commute to and from work, or for recreation, has increased greatly. This has led to tensions between bikers and auto drivers and parkers (note: the "victory" for bikers claimed in the linked post was later partly undone in a "compromise" brokered by a local politician, allowing parking in the bike lane on Sundays during church services), as well as pedestrians. I don't own a bike--indeed, I never learned to ride one--and so might well be found on the anti-bike side of these issues. There have been times during my trans-Bridge peregrinations when I've shaken my fist and cursed under my breath at bikers who've come flying around the corners that abut the towers of the Bridge, heedless of the fact that tourists often gather there to take photos, or who've bellowed at me for having the temerity to transgress slightly onto the bike path while I'm passing groups of fellow pedestrians walking three abreast. The pathway really is too narrow, given the traffic it gets on pleasant days, to allow for strict separation of bikes and pedestrians, unlike the nearby Manhattan Bridge, which has separate bike and pedestrian paths. In general, I've found both bikers and pedestrians on the Brooklyn Bridge to be courteous to each other, but there are exceptions. I hope one of these exceptions doesn't eventuate in a serious injury.

Classic Dylan, for the first time.

Five days from now, on October 19, Columbia Records will release a "Bootleg Series" two CD set of early Bob Dylan recordings, The Witmark Demos 1962-1964. The set's title comes from these having been "demo" recordings Dylan made during the first two years of his recording career, mostly for the publisher Witmark Music, but a few of the earliest for another house. These recordings were not made for publication, but rather for the publisher to play for other recording artists who migiht be interested in covering them. Consequently, Dylan's approach to them is relaxed. Most of these songs were also recorded by Dylan for publication, and included on his early albums, from Bob Dylan (1962; follow the link and scroll down for some interesting commentary that appeared on the liner of this, Dylan's first album, then scroll down further for videos of earlier performances of some of the songs he covered on this album) through Bringing It All Back Home (1965), and a few on later albums. Some were never included in official Dylan albums, but only on bootlegs, and some others were never released by Dylan. As Michael Simmons noted in MOJO:

In addition to the obvious classics, there are renditions of little-known Bobtunes that in hindsight stand with his best from this time (15 of the songs here have never been officially released by Bob in any form). Long Time Gone is a powerful refutation of any attempt to tame the drifting protagonist. It includes the line "But I know I ain't no prophet / An' I ain't no prophet's son" - that predates the spokesman-for-a-generation furore (he may be more prophetic than he knows). With a sprightly rhythm, engaging melody and offbeat chord changes for the folk idiom, Guess I'm Doing Fine is another anthem of determination.

You can listen to 22 of the 47 tracks in this collection on the NPR website. The demo of "Blowin' in the Wind" struck me as better than the version released on The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, but this may just have been a "shock of the new" reaction. "Long Ago, Far Away", which I previously knew only from the Brothers Four Sing of Our Times album (you can play a sample here), seems badly recorded; Dylan's voice on "far away" sounding very screechy. The anthemic "When the Ship Comes In"--my favorite version has long been that of The Hillmen, Chris Hillman's pre-Byrds bluegrass group (listen here)--is here done by Dylan accompanying himself on piano, and done splendidly. Other songs I'd never heard, like the aforementioned "I'm Doing Fine", were especially pleasant surprises.

As Michael Simmons sums it up:

I'm betting a lot of young people of the 21st century will find comfort listening to this young man of the 20th as he begins his odyssey. All eras set challenges for young minds - and Lord knows everyone gets the blues. True artists make their own mistakes and learn their own lessons, but it never hurts to know where giants have trod before embarking on a journey of your own.

The Amygdaloids, "Brainstorm", with Lenny Kaye and Steve Wynn

I've posted before about the Amygdaloids, a band consisting of New York University science professors and graduate students whose repertoire is made up of songs about the wonders of the human brain. The clip above shows them doing "Brainstorm" at the CD launch party for their new release, Theory of My Mind, at Don Hill's in New York City on October 8. Joining them for this song are guitarists Lenny Kaye, of the Patti Smith Group, and Steve Wynn, of The Dream Syndicate, Steve Wynn and the Miracle 3, and The Baseball Project.

Another song done by the group at Don Hill's (and also on the new CD) is "Fearing". The music video above, featuring lead vocalist and rhythm guitarist Joseph LeDoux and drummer Danielle Schiller, was directed by Noah Hutton.

Rays are gone.

It appears I really did manage to curse both the Twins and the Rays by supporting them in their respective division series. At least I'm now relieved of having to support a Designated Hitter League team for the championship.

Braves are out, and I'm sort of sad.

Yes, I know: not quite a month and a half ago I wrote here that a Yankees-Braves series would leave me with the vain hope that both could lose. To me, the Braves have seemed, despite their struggles in the postseason, the National League's version of the Yanks: swaggering, beloved of the pundits, and, most importantly, frequent nemesis of the Mets. How I came to hate the tomahawk chant they stole from Florida State! As with the Yanks, my dislike of the team did not extend to individual players (with the fortunately brief exception of the noxious John Rocker); in particular, I've admired the two unrelated Joneses, Andruw and Chipper, and am glad to see that the latter hasn't played his last game. As I've said, I'm now committed to the Rays (a commitment that may be extinguished tomorrow), but I'd have liked to see Bobby Cox, a rare genius of the game, at least get a league pennant in his final year.

Va fa Napoli, hipster.

I've posted before about culture war in Brooklyn, focusing on the fight between middle income car drivers who live in the outer parts of the borough and mostly affluent Park Slope bike riders. David Castillo, of Blue Barn Pictures, directed the photography for the video above; a clever take on the clash between older Brooklynites and recently arrived hipsters. Note that this also involves bikes.

Sahr Ngaujah and company do songs from Fela! at St. Ann's Warehouse, Brooklyn

This Monday evening, Sahr Ngaujah and the band from the Broadway show Fela!, a tribute to the Nigerian musician and political activist Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, considered "the father of Afro-beat" (there's a good short biography here), performed music from the show at St. Ann's Warehouse, a theater venue in the DUMBO neighborhood of Brooklyn. The show was meant to be performed outdoors, in Brooklyn Bridge Park, but was moved indoors because of rain. My friend and neighbor Karl Junkersfeld was on hand to make the video above. Enjoy!

Gliese 581g, the "Goldilocks" planet.

By now you've likely read the news that an Earth-like planet has been found in the solar system of a nearby star, Gliese 581. According to the Washington Post story:

The planet, called Gliese 581g, is quite close at 20 light years from Earth's solar system. It is considered to be in the habitable zone because of its distance from its sun and its size.

Together, those two measurements tell scientists that any water on the planet will be in liquid form, and that the planet is large enough to have the gravitational pull to hold an atmosphere around it.

We don't know yet if there is any water, or any atmosphere. Gliese 581g differs from Earth in one important way. Like our moon, and like Mercury, the time it takes to rotate on its axis is synchronous with its orbital period, which means that it keeps one side facing its sun (or, in the case of the moon, Earth) at all times, while the other side stays in darkness. The side permanently facing the sun would be too hot to support life, while the dark side would be too cold. Nevertheless, there would be a band between the bright and dark sides--a "twilight zone", if you will--where temperatures could be moderate enough to accommodate life. It strikes my layman's mind, however, that if Gliese 581g had an earth-like atmosphere, such a tremendous temperature difference would result in a huge difference in atmospheric pressure, which in turn would give rise to some ferocious weather, perhaps severe enough to preclude life, at least on the surface.

What's really exciting to me about this discovery, apart from its being the first of a planet similar in important respects to earth, is that it's so close to us. Since, so far as I know, there's no reason to believe that our immediate galactic neighborhood is more likely than any other (except, perhaps, near the galactic center) to include solar systems that have earth-like planets, the fact that there are two separated by only twenty light years suggests that such systems are fairly common.

Maine, again.

We made our annual summer visit to Maine a bit late this year. As usual, we stayed with friends in Cape Elizabeth, near Portland, and I took my customary morning walk over the Casco Bay Bridge (for some views from that bridge a couple of summers ago, see here) instead of the Brooklyn Bridge. This year, we made a side trip to Boothbay Harbor.

The afternoon of our arrival, we visited Fort Williams Park and Portland Head Light, the most photographed lighthouse in America (for my views of it from visits four and three years ago, see here and here). While there, I made the shot of a schooner passing between Portland Head and Ram Island Ledge Light, above.

After Fort Williams, we went to Jordan's Farm in Cape Elizabeth to get fresh vegetables for dinner.

The next morning, on my walk to the Casco Bay Bridge, I passed a park in South Portland with this colorful floral display.

The small trawler Daryl Anne was docked at a pier below the Casco Bay Bridge.

Three McAllister tugs were docked at the Portland International Marine Terminal. The city of Portland lies beyond.

A basket of flowers decorates a doorway in South Portland.

A view of Boothbay Harbor.

Skiff, dock, and pigeon, Boothbay Harbor.

Dinner, part one: steamed cherrystone clams.

Dinner, part two: lobster.

New Marshall Chapman video: "Going Away Party", and a plug for her new book.

Marshall Chapman is a favorite of mine, so it's always a pleasure to find a new video of her in performance that I can share with you. The clip above shows her doing a slower, bluesy-er number than usual, and I think she does it very well.

Marshall's first book, the autobiography Goodbye, Little Rock and Roller, was published in 2003. Her second, They Came to Nashville, has just been published. Her new album, Big Lonesome, will be released next month.

College football begins, and a belated farewell to Vic Ziegel.

The Harvard Crimson are the consensus favorites to win the Ivy crown this year, though the New York Times' Thomas Kaplan likes Penn's prospects. Do I care? Last year I mused about the fine points of Ivy football, as opposed to we-need-new-machines-for-the-training-room-so-let's-fire-the-philosophy-department football. But for which Ivy team would I root? For the reason given in the post to which I linked above, Harvard is out of the question. Penn is a possibility; after all, I'm a Keystone State native. If I chose based on my present location, it would be Columbia. I believe the Lions actually had a winning season five or six years ago. Backing them would be in character with my sports masochism: see under Mets, New York.

Anyway, I have my undergraduate alma mater, South Florida, to root for now. When I was a student (1964-67), President John Allen's policy was to allow only "participant-oriented athletics", which, I suppose, meant anything not likely to draw a crowd. It was huge when, in 1971 (after Allen's retirement), they got into basketball. Football didn't happen until 1997, initially as an independent in what was then called the NCAA's Division 1AA. The Bulls are now a BCS team, playing in the Big East Conference. They have a fairly impressive record, with only two losing seasons (1997 and 2004) and one break-even (2005), and bowl appearances every year since joining the Big East (their bowl record is 3-2; last year, they beat Northern Illinois 27-3 at the International Bowl, in Toronto). This year, they have a new coach, Skip Holz, who had a creditable record at East Carolina, and has impeccable coaching DNA. For the first time in several years, the Bulls didn't figure in the pre-season rankings (though they were among the "others receiving votes" in the USA Today coaches' poll, no doubt reflecting admiration for the Holz brand). They opened with a 59-14 trouncing of the Stony Brook Seawolves. It was news to me that Stony Brook, a unit of the State University of New York system located about forty miles from my home, has a football team. I was doubly surprised to learn that they play in the Big South Conference, along with teams like Charleston Southern, Coastal Carolina, and VMI. (Then, again, the University of Richmond used to be part of something called the Yankee Conference, which must have had Robert E. Lee spinning in his grave.)

This coming Saturday, South Florida has its first ever game against the Florida Gators, currently ranked fourth in the AP and third in the USA Today poll. The Bulls have a history of pulling off big upsets: in 2007, they beat Auburn and West Virginia when both were ranked in the AP top 25, and last year they unhorsed the Florida State Seminoles. Florida's season got off to a slow start Saturday as they defeated Miami University of Ohio by the closer than expected score of 34-12, in a game characterized by sloppy offensive play. I see this as bad news for the Bulls, as Gator coach Urban Meyer will crack the whip and the players will be motivated to make up for a poor showing in their opener. I used to be good at predicting the Gators' fortunes from game to game, but lately I've lost my touch. Last year, I thought they would lose to arch-rival Georgia, and was happy to see that prediction come a cropper. Nevertheless, I'll go out on the limb again and predict Florida 45, South Florida 17.

I'll end this piece on a sad note, with a farewell to yet another of my Lion's Head companions of yore, the sportswriter Vic Ziegel. I enjoyed many a chat with Vic at the Head's bar, mostly about baseball back in the days when the Dodgers were still in Brooklyn and the Giants inhabited Coogan's Bluff. College football wasn't Vic's game. When I mentioned it to him once, he shrugged and said, "Well, you've got Notre Dame, Michigan, Southern Cal...what else?" Another time, I remarked on the fact that every profile of a quarterback I had read in recent memory somewhere included the words, "his profound Christian faith". This led me to ask Vic if the great Chicago Bears quarterback of the 1940s, Sid Luckman, was Jewish. "Yes, he is" Vic answered, "I just saw him last week. Looks great." He also told me that Luckman was a Brooklyn native and played college ball at Columbia.

Goodbye, Vic. I'll miss you.

Update: Unfortunately, my prognostication for Florida/USF was pretty accurate.

The worst baseball season ever?

We're up against stiff competition: strike-blighted 1994, scandal-scarred 1919. OK: I'm seeing this as a Mets fan and Yankee hater, and particularly looking at tonight's results which, for me, are bad all the way. The Mets lose to the Braves, 9-2, after having lost to them 9-3 yesterday. The Yanks win, and the Rays lose, putting the Yanks back in sole possession of first place in the AL East. The Red Sox also lose.

The outline of something dreadful is taking shape on the horizon: a Braves-Yanks World Series, in which I will be relegated to the vain hope that they both lose.

Happy 65th, Van Morrison.

In the immortal words of Paul Schiffman, "Live forever, kid!"

S-A B is five today!

Somehow, I've managed to keep cranking out the posts for half a decade. Thanks to all my regular readers (I'm not sure how big an "all" that is, but I know there are a few of you). A fifth anniversary seems deserving of some sort of hoopla, but I can't think of much to write now beyond what I did a year ago. At that time, I promised to do what I could to merit your continued attention, and invited your comments and suggestions. I repeat that promise, and that invitation.

(Image courtesy of Camden Chat.)

Eli "Paperboy" Reed at Le Poisson Rouge, August 11, 2010

Three weeks ago, I posted about Eli "Paperboy" Reed and his band, the True Loves, noting that they were to play at Le Poisson Rouge, in Greenwich Village, on August 11, and promising "a full report". I was there, and made the video above of Eli and the True Loves doing "Help". Eli and his excellent band put on an energetic and gut-wrenching show; I now think I know what it was like to be in Cincinnati in the 1960s, catching a show by James Brown and an early version of the Famous Flames.

A visit to the studio of painter George Oommen

This video clip, courtesy of Harvard Magazine, takes us into the studio of painter George Oommen as he demonstrates and explains his technique. I found interesting Oommen's analogy of his method to jazz; long time readers of this blog may recall my attempt to describe a connection between jazz and some modern painting.

Oommen's work includes purely non-representational (a term I prefer to "abstract" because all painting is, of necessity, abstract, as Magritte, somewhat tendentiously, indicated in "The Treachery of Images") paintings, as well as some representational, but very un-naturalistic, landscapes, largely inspired by scenes in his native Kerala state, in southern India. You can see images of Oommen's paintings on his website.

Culture war, New York City style: it's about bikes.

Much has been written and said about the supposed cultural divide between coastal elites and heartland (or flyover country) just plain folks, but, as Alexander Nazaryan describes it in his Daily News piece, there's an internecine version playing out here in Gotham. His analysis of the kerfuffle over a bike lane abutting Prospect Park in Brooklyn, in which our Borough President, Marty Markowitz, sided with the gas guzzlers, is illuminating:

Markowitz, the consummate politician, was playing to his base: the ethnic whites of Jewish, Italian and Irish descent who drive along Prospect Park West to their homes in Sheepshead Bay, Gravesend and Midwood. On Prospect Park West live yuppies who couldn't tell Marty Markowitz from a borscht belt yukster - and couldn't care less. They're the ones doing the biking, the ones with no tangible roots to New York who might finally spend that year in France - where, of course, they will bike from patisserie to boucherie to the wineshop in perfect pastoral bliss.

The Mets are toast, but The Baseball Project is alive and well.

The Baseball Project is the creation of Steve Wynn and Scott McCaughey, two rockers who first met at a club in Seattle and discovered a common passion for the national pastime. They rounded out the group with McCaughey's R.E.M. colleague Peter Buck on bass and Linda Pitmon on drums. The clip above, courtesy of Steve's YouTube channel, shows them on Letterman, doing "Past Time". Once again, a hat tip to Eliot Wagner (follow the link for some great photos he took of the group, with Mike Mills in place of Buck on bass, at Maxwell's in Hoboken) for turning me on to them.

Sic transit gloria mundi.

A bargeload of crushed cars, having passed under the Brooklyn Bridge, heads toward New Jersey.

Trader Joe's beers: cheap and cheaper, but not bad.

In these times, I've become an avid bargain hunter. A sixer of domestic "craft" beer from a store in my neighborhood costs from ten to thirteen dollars, tax included, which works out to roughly two bucks a bottle. So, when I visited Trader Joe's a couple of weeks ago, I checked out their beer offerings. I found that they carry several house brand beers and ales, some at $6.99 a six-pack and others at $7.99 before tax. I decided to try one of the less expensive beers, the "Vienna Style Lager". The Saranac special holiday lager I tried two years ago was also described as "Vienna style", and I liked it a lot.

TJ's offering proved a bargain. It has a rich reddish amber color and a mild, malty aroma with just a hint of hop herbaceousness. The flavor is well balanced between malt and hops, the latter adding a bit of citrus-y zest. This is a go-with-anything beer; nothing about it is attention-grabbing, but it is satisfying. The label says the beer is bottled by Trader Joe's Brewing Co. of San Jose, California, but, according to Beeradvocate, this is a "beer marketing company", so where the beer is brewed is a mystery.

On my next visit to TJ's, I noticed some cans of "Simpler Times" beer offered at a reet-cheap $3.99 a six-pack. It was available in both lager and pilsner versions. "How bad can it be?", I thought, and bought a sixer of lager. This beer proved to be as close as I can imagine to a polar opposite of TJ's Vienna Style Lager. The color is pale yellow-gold. It has a flowery nose, with a slight, earthy malt undertone. The flavor is intensely sweet and fruity, my predominant impression being of ripe plum, with a suggestion of caramel. Would I make this a staple beer? No. It would go well with spicy food, or could be enjoyed by itself (its maker, Minhas Craft Brewery of Monroe, Wisconsin, formerly the Joseph Huber Brewing Company, also makes root beer). I'm not sure if this beer is exclusive to TJ's. In any event, at less than five bucks a sixer, with tax, I'll probably have it again if I'm planning Indian, Mexican, or Szechuan take-out.

I will be trying more beer and ale from TJ's, and report on it from time to time.

Eli "Paperboy" Reed: from Brookline to Brooklyn

"Blue-eyed soul" is a term I first saw used in reference to the Righteous Brothers. As a concept, it may have originated (I'm leaving aside the blackface tradition extending from the Christy Minstrels to Al Jolson) with Sam Phillips in Memphis back in the early 1950s, musing about how he could make a million if he could find a white singer who sounded black. His wish was granted in the form of Elvis Presley, who recorded Bill Monroe's "Blue Moon of Kentucky" as if it were composed by Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup, and Crudup's "That's All Right" as if it weren't a white singer's cover. When these first Elvis recordings got some air time on Memphis radio, Peter Guralnick writes in his notes to The Sun Sessions CD, the DJ, Dewey Phillips ( a friend, but apparently not a relative of Sam), interviewed Elvis live on his show in order to ask one question: "Where did you go to high school?" When Elvis answered "Humes", the audience in then segregated Memphis knew he was white.

Since then, many white singers have aspired to achieve what Elvis did in those early recordings; none perhaps so blatantly as Lou Reed. The latest of these shares Lou's surname, if not his style. Eli "Paperboy" Reed, "a Jewish kid from Brookline" (Massachusetts, a close-in suburb of Boston), along with his band, the True Loves, does R&B that evokes sounds from the sixties and seventies (see clip above). This album review suggests, however, that Reed's music is more than a re-creation of old R&B. He spent the better part of two years studying the roots of R&B, first in Mississippi, birthplace of the blues, then in Chicago. The result, according to the review, is a syncretic style that draws on a number of sources, not all of them well known.

Reed is now, like so many critically acclaimed musicians and groups, Brooklyn based.

Eli and the True Loves will be at Le Poisson Rouge, 136 Bleecker Street, this Wednesday evening, August 11. I'll be there and give you a full report.

Christina M. Rau's Brooklyn Bridge video.

As anyone who has followed this blog for some time (and if you have, may Procrastinatus, the god of blogs, shower you with blessings) knows, I walk the Brooklyn Bridge as often as I can, which lately is more days than not. So my curiosity was piqued when I read in her blog that Christina M. Rau, a professor in the English Department at Nassau Community College and the founder of Poets in Nassau, had walked the Bridge and, as she wrote, "at the halfway point, I turned on my FlipCam and got footage of almost everyone crossing." Well, "almost everyone" didn't include me, but it's a great little clip (see above), which Professor Rau appropriately accompanied with the Beastie Boys' "No Sleep Till Brooklyn". You can read about her Bridge adventure on her other blog, Rediscovering Brooklyn: A Local Tour de Force. She also has a post about my neighborhood, Brooklyn Heights, on that same blog here, complete with a peek inside the women's room at Plymouth Church of the Pilgrims.

Untitled (Irish Hunger Memorial)

I'm sitting on a stone from County Armagh,
facing New Jersey,
listening to Van Morrison.
Two young women climb
the curving path, stop,
then talk by the fence.
One walks to the stone to my left.
"Monaghan;" she says, "so, where is Armagh?"
"Here is Armagh!" I say, and stand.
She sees the name, kneels and caresses
the rock.
"It's my home."

It's official.

The Mets suck.

Some seashore music: Lou Reed, Bruce Springsteen, and the Tams.

Lest you think that Eliot Wagner and I only like music that critics hate, here are a couple of songs from Eliot's podcasts by critically acclaimed artists (in one instance, not by the same as on the podcast), both of which refer--appropriately for this time of year--to places by the sea.

I'd forgotten what a great song "Coney Island Baby" is. Clip courtesy of Passthrufire. The song was first released on Lou's album of the same name.

One of Eliot's podcasts includes The Band's version of Bruce Springsteen's "Atlantic City". There's no live video of The Band doing it, but you can get the audio and a still of the album cover for Jericho here. The clip above, courtesy of dylanboby, is of The Boss doing the song in Paris, in 1985. "Atlantic City" was originally released on Nebraska.

Now for some real beach music:

The Tams are probably the quintessential Carolina beach music group. The clip above, courtesy of Low Country Today, catches them, with original member Charles Pope, at The Point, Charleston, South Carolina, in 2008.

Remembering Brooklyn native Barbara Stanwyck

Yesterday was the 103rd anniversary of the birth of Barbara Stanwyck, one of the most versatile, and perhaps influential, actresses of the past century. Born Ruby Catherine Stevens here in Brooklyn, she attended Erasmus Hall High School, and worked for a time at the telephone company before entering showbiz as a chorus girl in 1924. Four years later she went to Hollywood and began a career that lasted for nearly six decades. The film role for which she is perhaps best remembered is that of the villainous Phyllis Dietrichson, playing opposite Fred MacMurray in Double Indemnity:



In the 1960s she played Victoria, matriarch of the Barkley clan in the TV western The Big Valley, and twenty years later was Constance "Conny" Colby Patterson in The Colbys. Over the course of her movie career, she was nominated for four Oscars, but never won. She received an honorary Academy Award for "superlative creativity and unique contribution to the art of screen acting" in 1982. She died in 1990.

The Brooklyn roots of Chicago, and some Garden State rock: Smithereens and Southside Johnny

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I've discovered in Eliot Wagner someone whose musical tastes are almost eerily similar to mine. One thing I especially like is that we have, from a rock critics' consensus point of view, the same lapses in judgment. Eliot has sent me several CDs of podcasts he's done over the past year or so, and on them I've found, among other things, some mostly critically despised oldies that I nevertheless love. Consider the clip above of the band Chicago doing "Twenty-five or Six to Four" live at Tanglewood in 1970. Chicago is one of those bands, like the Grateful Dead, that critics love to hate. For example, here's my late Bells of Hell drinking companion, Lester Bangs, dishing on their live album Chicago at Carnegie Hall (from Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung, the posthumous anthology of Lester's writing edited by Greil Marcus; this review originally was published in Creem, February 1972):

In fact, I've only played [Chicago at Carnegie Hall] once since I got it, and never intend to play any of it again. ... Does it really matter that the songs sound exactly like they do on the studio albums except for being immeasurably more sodden and stuffed with long directionless solos? Or that the brass arrangements sound like Stan Kenton charts played backwards? Or that as technically competent as Chicago may be, there are just too many times when you can hear all the parts better than the whole?

I'm not enthusiastic about some of Chicago's stuff, especially Color My World (my taste in prom belly-rubbers runs more to the likes of My True Story by the Jive Five, or "Hearts of Stone" by Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes, about which more below), but I've found "Twenty-five" captivating since I first heard it during my third year of law school. I was surprised to learn that Robert Lamm, Chicago's keyboardist and vocalist, as well as the writer of "Twenty-five", "Saturday in the Park", and several other of their hits, grew up in my neighborhood, Brooklyn Heights, New York, and began his musical training in the Grace Church youth choir, as did balladeer Harry Chapin.

For the next critically despised piece that Eliot and I both like, here's a band from Carteret, New Jersey:


Smithereens Behind the Wall of Sleep by Celtiemama (a commercial comes first).

Sometime in 1986, when my clock radio was tuned to WNEW-FM, then an AOR station, I was awakened by a group I'd never heard of, the Smithereens, doing a song called "Behind the Wall of Sleep", from behind which wall it abruptly transported me. I immediately liked the song, both for its balls-to-the-wall style and for its intriguing lyrical references: for example, to the swinging mod London that was a cynosure of my youth ("hair like Jeannie Shrimpton"), and to a hint of androgyny ("she stood just like Bill Wyman"). Critics complained that the Smithereens sounded too much like the Beatles or the Byrds (not a bad rap, in my view), though to me they sound like neither. They aren't as good as, say, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, but they're good at what they do.

Thinking about the Smithereens led me to think of other Garden State rockers, and to depart from Eliot's play list (though I'm sure he'll approve of what follows). Two great rock acts emerged from the Jersey Shore in the early 1970s: Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, and Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes.

"Southside Johnny" Lyon got his nickname from his early love of Chicago blues that he heard on a Newark radio station while growing up in the Jersey Shore town of Neptune. He later became a fan of Memphis style R&B, with its strong rhythmic base and horns accompanying guitars and keyboard. This provided the template for his band, the Asbury Jukes. In their R&B roots and use of horns, they were like the group Chicago; unlike Chicago, they were critically acclaimed but never a great commercial success. This may have been because they were overshadowed by Springsteen. There is not, and never has been, bad blood between Southside and The Boss. They have performed together and, perhaps most significantly, they have shared band members. "Miami Steve" Van Zandt and Max Weinberg have both performed with the Asbury Jukes, as has Patti Scialfa, who became Springsteen's wife. When the Jukes' third album, the 1978 Hearts of Stone, rated by Rolling Stone one of the top 100 albums of the 1970s and 80s (in my opinion it's one of the top ten rock albums of all time, and the only one I've loaded onto my iPod wholesale, as every track is magnificent), failed to sell as well as expected, CBS Records' Epic unit dropped them. Since then, Southside and the Jukes have soldiered on, with many personnel changes in the band. Perhaps the only constants have been saxophonists Stan Harrison and Ed Manion, and trombonist Richie "La Bamba" Rosenberg. Springsteen's and Christina Black's article, "Lyon in Winter", from New Jersey Monthly, December 2007, reviews Southside's career post Hearts of Stone, noting his difficulty finding a new record deal because of his reluctance to do what the labels' A&R people wanted him to do. To free himself from such demands, he's now established his own label, Leroy Records, and has recently released a new album, Pills and Ammo, on that label.

The clip above, courtesy of handsatlanta, shows Southside and the Jukes doing the Springsteen-penned "Talk to Me" (originally released on Hearts of Stone) at Lake Como, New Jersey, as broadcast on the Mike and the Mad Dog Show in 2007. Southside manages to coax a lovely though reluctant harmony vocalist, wearing--God bless her--a pink Mets cap, to join him onstage. One of the Jukes is wearing a Mets jersey. You can see why I love this video. I figured Southside and the Jukes were Mets kind of guys.