Bio Diversity; Carol, Willie, Jules

Carol Burnett’s new book “This Time Together” isn’t really a biography. It’s a string of anecdotes with punch lines and large print and can be read in about two minutes. Hardly a tell-all, she only implies slight negatives about certain people, but mostly everybody is perfect, without sin and so lovable she should include a barf bag as an attachment to the dustcover. I loved Ms. Burnett on television but she pretty much sucked in the movies and has the dubious honor of having been in one of the worst directed (and most miscast) adaptations of a Broadway show of all time, Annie. But you would never know it from this book. Her only stab at real life is her recounting of the sad and wasteful death of her daughter although even this story is (mercifully) short and, wouldn’t you know, full of “inspiration” <~~~see quotation marks. Upon further reflection I now realize that Ms. Burnett hasn’t written a book; she’s (OMG) written a blog!

“Willie Mays, The Life, The Legend” is a true biography. It’s written by James S. Hirsch (authorized by Mays) and is satisfyingly and historically complete, although I’m not really sure Hirsch got into Mr. Mays soul as much as he would have liked (and claims). Like Ms. Burnett’s book it’s full of anecdotes but they are told within the background story of Willie Mays’s growing up in a racially segregated society in a suburb of Birmingham, Alabama. Yup, there’s lots of stuff in, and about, black and white but, still, not much new to tell us about Willie Mays the man. I’m sure he cooperated with Mr. Hirsch as best he could but part of his persona is in the withholding of the details. My connection with Willie Mays is almost personal in that I was living in San Francisco when the Giants snuck out of the Polo Grounds in NYC and into San Francisco in 1958. Not only was I thrilled by having a major league baseball team at my fingertips, I also had a superstar to gaze upon. Over the years I spent many a freezing evening in Candlestick Park for one reason, Willie Mays. Other stars emerged but, for me, he was The Man and I witnessed a lot of his triumphs as an adult (both his and mine). His days as a young phenomenon in New York were only snippets on the sports pages to me but now I was Johnny-on-the-spot and had my eyes peeled for anything-Willie. So this bio doesn’t tell me much I didn’t already know, both good and bad (and racially biased) but it has reminded me that I did know it and have now been reminded. Oddly enough, when he was dealt back to New York, and the Mets, I had also moved to Brooklyn and was a first-hand witness to his last two years of physical decline as an athlete and his retirement as a baseball player. What is so damn stupid about biographies of athletes is that, suddenly, and I’m not kidding, being 40 is the new 65. Mr. Mays was 42 when he retired from baseball (as a player) and everybody was treating him like a nursing-home patient. Good grief, nowadays 40 is the new 25!

My timing was also pretty good in that when I moved to New York Jules Feiffer had started making a splash with his cartoons in the new “alternative” Village Voice and I was an attentive witness as he burgeoned into being a true social satirist, an accomplished playwright and a raconteur of the first rank. Feiffer is now 81 and seemingly his drawing, writing and verbal powers have not diminished in the least. Has anybody seen his tour de force interview with Charlie Rose? In fact, if anything, he’s better than ever and his new memoir “Backing into Forward” seems to prove it. Although he had a horrible childhood in the Bronx and the first 100 pages are painful to read, once he was able to kick his mother to the curb the book takes off and is pretty wonderful, especially if you’re an indignant, border-line radical, liberal mouth-off like he is. Yes, I can identify.

So that’s the bio-diversity regarding the last three books I’ve read. The only thing they have in common (the books themselves, not the people they are about), is an incredible amount of name-dropping. But that’s reasonable I guess since, after all, you are known by the company you keep and these three people, in their lifetimes, knew and continue to know and sometimes stay in touch with, the headliners.

Next up: John Carey's "William Golding; The Man Who Wrote Lord of the Flies."

Summer chill

I just made my second batch of sangria using a mix I bought from Williams Sonoma. I use the basic recipe on the bottle with a couple of enhancements; namely a couple of shots of Triple Sec and a lot of sliced fresh strawberries. I will nurse this along for the next two days until the strawberries are thoroughly infused, then slice one lime and one small orange and float them on the top. Served over a generous amount of ice (to get maximum chill) it is the absolute best hot-weather drink, liquor-wise, on my particular planet. Unfortunately, the WS sangria mix is seasonal even though I, for one, would buy it all year ‘round. But, for now, here’s to a great summer!

The God of Wine and Patios

On May 17 of this year I bought this cement gent at the Living Color Garden Center in Ft. Lauderdale, FL. I liked it at first sight even though it was hanging on a wall maybe three-four feet above my head. Upon closer inspection I said to Pepper, the nursery dude who climbed up, precariously, to bring it down so I could give it an up-close perusal, that I thought it looked a little bit like me and he said that, yes, “it reflects you.” It actually depicts Dionysus (also known as Bacchus), the Greek god of wine (and other kinds of licentious debauchery) so how could I not buy him? I think the piece is what is called a “sand sculpture” (I should have asked, I guess) but there is obviously a lot of the finish that is hand-done subsequent to being taken out of its mold. He is about the size of a dinner plate and now hangs on the patio wall at the house of Earl and Bernardo, buds who live in Hollywood, FL. It seems only right that it is on permanent loan to them since I tend to crash at their place intermittently. They have an extra bedroom, a second bathroom, the best dog in the world, a wonderful backyard pool, a garden to dig around in and, now, an image of a false god to worship. Let the Medallion of Dionysus be a constant warning to them that at any moment I might show up, demanding sanctuary.

Talking points…

Prompted by various travel stories while sitting around a patio table in Florida this May; as my contribution I recalled visiting a leper colony in Tahiti. Sounds a little far fetched, I know, but it’s true and I also told three other anecdotes from that trip: 1. Visiting the Paul Gauguin Museum in which there are no Gauguin paintings because they would never survive the heat/humidity. 2. Dropping into the famous Quinn’s Bar which turned out to be an extremely rowdy, low-down, and probably dangerous, joint of which my only memory is the bizarre toilet “facility” in the back alley. 3. Being the only passenger on a small boat, at night, going from Papeete to Moorea, lying prone on the small front deck and suddenly being surrounded, on both sides, by wave after wave of dozens of phosphorescent flying fish keeping pace with the speed of the boat.

I have no souvenirs of the museum, the bar or the flying fish but I do have a spear point I bought directly from the leper who carved it. It was never intended to be used as a weapon but was, and is, purely decorative. Upon returning home (from Florida, not Tahiti) I rescued this spear point from storage (carefully wrapped and kept dry since moving into my current abode in 1993) and hung it on the wall in my bedroom. When I say I have no other souvenirs from Tahiti, one thing seeps into my mind. Soon after returning to the U.S. I came down with hepatitis and it has occurred to me that perhaps I did pick up something from Quinn’s.

If I was on Facebook…

If I was on Facebook I would have made the following comments today:

1. The current World Cup notwithstanding I don’t watch, understand or care about soccer.

2. I hate those car commercials where bystanders punch each other in the arm when they see the product driving by.

3. New visitors to my birdbath: A gray catbird, who splashed around boisterously and two beautiful little American goldfinches who sipped daintily and chirped gaily before speeding off.

4. An idea alert to Hewlett Packard: Feeling McSteamy at the moment (93 degrees and very muggy) I think some sort of small fan could be incorporated into the frame of the computer monitor…it would be nice to have a gentle breeze caressing one’s face while blogging, facebooking or just indulging in general hanky-panky. Perhaps with a small visual inset of a melting block of ice or, hey, a fan!

5. I have owned just one cellphone in my life. It has never failed me in an emergency or even just for casual use, although some of its capabilities I fail to use or even understand how to. I never saw the need for an upgrade. I am not bragging, nor am I whining, about this.

6. C'mon LeBron

A Lizard, Lounging

It was October 21, 1986 and all significant others were out of town and therefore missing a momentously important birthday. Stepping into the breach were friends Bruce, Ben and Ira. They took me to the Lone Star Café on East 13th Street (on the corner of Fifth Ave.) to see Roy Orbison (or maybe Willie Nelson) and, due to an unending stream of tequila shooters, the rest is only a blur of down-home debauchery and honky-tonk good-old-boy, red-necked delirium and if they had had a mechanical bull to ride I’m sure I would have been right up there. I’m afraid I don’t remember a lot of the details or even if we did see Mr. Orbison (or Mr. Nelson), but I somehow had my glassy-eyed photo taken without a shirt and wearing a sombrero, a stupid grin on my face and a comely chickpea on each arm, so there is some proof it all happened. Evidently the whole evening was hilarious and according to my brethren I was never again as entertaining and witty and I just hope to high heaven I didn’t try to sing along. But I probably did.

The much venerated (and maligned) Lone Star Café was not only famous for being the only western bar in NYC at the time but was in a totally inappropriate residential area, and on its roof stood the fabulous Iggy, an eyesore for days and a landmark for the less artistically picky. Iggy was 40 feet from teeth to tail and he reared his superbly ugly head in defiant disregard for anything that made any sense in the world. The legend “Too Much Ain’t Enough” was emblazoned on the building’s façade at his dangerously clawed feet.

Iggy was sculpted from steel and polyurethane by Bob Wade and was originally in a “display place,” whatever that means, near Niagara Falls. In 1978 the café’s proprieter bought the sculpture for $10,000 and, according to Mr. Wade, half of that was in bar privileges. The Lone Star closed in 1989 and Iggy pretty much disappeared although I do remember seeing him for a couple of years, a dirty and crumbling image, in a field just off the West Side Highway at about Pier 25.

Now comes the good part. Iggy has been resurrected in his full glory and now sits on the roof of the new herpetarium at the Fort Worth, Texas zoo and Mr. Wade, who now lives in Austin, was there for the installation. My research does not reveal whether or not tequila shooters were included at the opening reception but, if not, they missed a bet. Iggy was (and is) not a champagne lizard, no matter how well he’s been cleaned up, and his place in low-down NYC history is secure, as he is in my own cleaned up but low-down memory.

Piano People

Ideal scenario: I sit down at one of the 60 donated pianos that have been placed strategically throughout the five boroughs of NYC by a public-art group called Sing for Hope. After a few warm-up scales I tear into a two-minute version of Chopin’s Minute Waltz and then segue into some syncopated Joplin ragtime; finishing up with selected Sondheim standards, encouraging my audience to sing along, which they do loudly and enthusiastically; especially the ringing crescendo of the first-act curtain of the title number in Sunday in the Park with George. How thrilling and heartwarming! The only thing wrong with this scenario is that I don’t know how to play the piano.

But if I did play, the scenario is now available. On Monday morning at 9:00 the curtain went up on an art installation called “Play Me, I’m Yours” and music for, and by, the masses should be forthcoming over the next couple of weeks (it ends July 5). 36 pianos have been placed in parks and on street corners in Manhattan, 10 in Brooklyn, 6 in Queens, 4 in the Bronx and 4 on Staten Island. They have all been tuned as much as is possible (some of the instruments are pretty old) and they have all been painted/decorated by local artists.

This “installation” is by Luke Jerram, a Brit from Bristol, and similar works are expanding around the world including Sydney, Australia and Cincinnati, Ohio. Keep and ear out at a park or street corner near you and if your piano teacher was more than a half-wit maybe you can bang out a few bars, just don’t expect any tips other than of the “what did you do with the money your mother gave you for lessons?” ilk.

Postal Predation

In mid-January of this year my friend Frank passed away. Frank was always a very generous man, for decades contributing to a lot of charitable organizations. Not always a lot but enough to get him on every mailing list in the world; at least it looks that way. Since part of the income of charitable organizations is in selling their mailing lists to other groups he receives stuff from organizations, both legit and bogus, that he never contributed to in the first place. As a friend of the family I have volunteered to take on this mail and, I must say, it has been a learning experience. I’m sure Frank must have had a “contributor asterisk” by his name or something because the deluge of junk mail is nothing short of spectacular and continues to be so after four months despite my diligent notifications-to-sender that this man has passed away.

I learned that just writing “Deceased, Return to Sender” on the envelope does not work since the post office just redelivers it to the addressee. One day the timing was right and I buttonholed the mailman at the front door and he said “Oh, just throw it away” (an exact quote) which is probably not really what his employer has instructed him to advise; even though they probably wish it were so. So I changed my tactics and began opening the mail and returning everything in the enclosed return-addressed-envelopes with a note that the recipient is deceased. This works well if the envelope has postage on them but many of them do not presuming, I guess, you would be glad to furnish a stamp with your check. Since charitable organizations have “junk mail” rates I didn’t think it quite fair that we should pay full postage to return it and, I learned, putting a 44 cent stamp on an envelope by no means guarantees that instructions to remove a donor from a mailing list will be followed.

Anyway, I am persevering and I am ready to out-wait any person or robot that opens envelopes and finds a coupon marked “deceased” and ignores it. Maybe one of these days I will notice an ebbing of the flow. In the meantime I think hundreds of dollars over-all are continuing to be spent on useless mailings by charitable organizations to this one deceased gentleman. I can only imagine the thousands and thousands (or maybe hundreds of thousands) wasted in futile requests for money to the general population who do not respond. “Oh, just throw it away” is becoming an option that is becoming more attractive as the months roll by.

One more note: I have not named any particular charity just because there are so many involved. However, the worst of the worst, The Humane Society and all its incarnations can kiss my pet-lovin’ ass.

Poll Dancing

I’m never been officially asked my opinion about anything and I always wonder, when I read about polls being taken on a variety of subjects, if the results ever really include what I think on any given subject. Sometimes my opinion jibes with one side or the other (mostly I’m in the minority) but, hey, why doesn’t somebody call me to get the real poop from a person with plenty to spare?

There was a phone-interview poll taken recently by New York Times/CBS News regarding the level of concern over immigration (prompted by the current situation in Arizona) which included a statement on how the poll was conducted and it’s no wonder why I haven’t been contacted. They only called 1,079 adults! They do say that there are possibilities for sampling errors which means the results can vary from 3 to 4% either way but, hey, a variance of only 6% from a poll of 1,079 ain’t chicken feed!

My problem (besides not being asked) is that if people are like me it depends on a lot of factors as to how my answer would be forthcoming, including the time of day. Call me too early in the morning and you’re liable to get an entirely different opinion from the one I would proffer at, say, 4:30 p.m. on a weekday. Call on a weekend or while I’m eating could also slant the result, especially during dessert. I also have a penchant for changing my opinion over time depending on new evidence or even just a convincing argument from the opposing camp that makes my resolve waver. My strong stance(s) are only as good as my current information but you give me reason to change it and I will. Of course slipping me a fin can always alter my bias.

Feathers

For over a month now at about 5:30 p.m. every day a big robin visits my backyard birdbath and has himself a high old time, repeatedly immersing himself and energetically flapping around and making water fly in all directions. When he’s done the birdbath is half empty (or half-full depending on your philosophical point of view) and the water supply has to be replenished. Both the bird and I are grateful for this daily occurrence and I swear on a stack of religious tomes (depending on your faith in ideological principles) that he thanks me thusly: he hops onto the rim of the birdbath, cocks his head to one side, looks me squarely in the eyes, chirps twice, and wings away. This is a true story and I have a couple of reliable witnesses to back me up. Of course I have anthropomorphized this birdy conversation to mean “thank you” and, going further, have named this bird “Butch” because he is obviously a beefy, macho member of his particular species. Naming him Robin, although gender neutral, would be just silly.

Further to avian reality, I recently read about a couple of birds whose migration paths have been tracked all the way from Alaska to New Zealand without so much as a brunch-break on the way. They are the bar-tailed godwit (photo here) and, a bit less prolific as to the length of its non-stop migration, the bristled-thighed curlew. The godwit has been clocked at 7,100 miles in nine days which pretty much sets a record for length of flight for a bird without stopping. Although none of these aviators are named Butch (probably) they are still to be admired for their instinctive tenacity and I also have to give kudos to the something-or-other ‘pologists who gave these birds their names. Godwits and curlews don’t need anthropomorphizing to gain our attention and admiration.

In the Limelight

In 1844 the cornerstone for the Episcopal Church of the Holy Communion was laid at West 20th Street and Sixth Avenue, 127 years passed and (in 1971) I wandered in to take a look at the interior and especially the large stained-glass rose window but, although pretty good stuff, I wasn’t much impressed because of my ruined-for-anything-else trips to Europe and, especially, Paris.

In 1976, with parishioners dwindling, the building was taken over by a “commune” called the Lindisfarne Association (Google that if you want; I’m not bothering) who split after a couple of years and the Episcopal Church sold it to the Odyssey Institute, a drug-counseling organization, which seems fairly ironic because in 1983 Andy Warhol hosted the opening-night party at “Limelight,” a discothèque that, over the next 18 years or so, was regularly padlocked for drug-use and dealing. Limelight closed in 2001 and other entertainment entities gave it a go until 2007 and now, through a few years of failed mortgage payments and bankruptcies, it has become Limelight Marketplace.

LM opened last month and, 39 years after my first visit (and 166 after the laying of that cornerstone); I finally took another look last Sunday. The interior of the church has been given, well, a new interior…meaning that it looks like a new, well, interior that has been set down exclusively within the walls of the church; does that make sense? I mean not of it, but within it. Oh, well, anyway, the original stained glass windows show through here and there, mainly in the stairwells, but overall it’s a fairly ludicrous juxtaposition that doesn’t work for me architecturally.

As an urban mall it’s cute in a slick way but not my cup of pekoe. There are about 50 small-to-tiny shops on three levels with specialized inventories, mostly precious (not in the good sense of the word…it’s like saying “cup of pekoe, instead of “cup of tea”) and overpriced. The foodie goody shops have stuff that looks fresh and tasty and I’m always a sucker for anything new and chocolate-covered but overall there wasn’t much for me to purchase. Limelight Marketplace is sort-of like a modern museum of retail schmaltz and the only thing I was grateful for was the air conditioning and, oh yeah, excellent restrooms (always nice to know when one is out and about). As an example of customer service and product inventory/diversity I’m afraid I threw a scare into one poor girl in a shop that carries some nicely designed (and overpriced) tee-shirts and, although I saw her deer-in-the-headlights look, I asked the dreaded question anyway, “Do you have this in XL?”

Iconoclastic Cross Dressing Criticism

I think it’s great that Rand Paul won the senatorial primary in Kentucky even though both he and his father, Ron, admit to being ideological libertarian iconoclasts (although as a political persuasion that defies definition…at least by me). In the meantime Rand has stated that he, “as a principled critic of federal power,” would not have voted for the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Whoa! I wonder what his mother, Ru, thinks about that!