Musing About New York City

Musing About New York City

            On last week’s A Prairie Home Companion, Garrison Keillor did one of his usual bits when the show is on the road:  singing “Hush Little Baby Don’t You Cry” with lyrics made to contain a boatload of references to local sights and activities.  It always gets a good reaction from the local audience, and this version, coming from the Town Hall on West 43^rd Street in New York, was no exception.  But this one left me a little cold and perplexed, because I didn’t know half the things he was referring to.  On the other hand, maybe I shouldn’t have imagined that I ought to.  Deane and DeLuca?  I had vaguely heard the name somewhere; I had to look it up.  Duane Reade?  Never heard of it.  Looked it up.  The Rose Planetarium?  Whatever happened to the Hayden Planetarium?  I have always wanted to go there. 

            I have long had a conflicted attitude about New York City, mixed abhorrence and fascination.  I was born, grew up, and spent the first quarter century of my life in New York State, but the first time I ever set foot in NYC—and then only briefly, for a day—I was more than a year out of college.  (And on that day I didn’t see any of the usual sights; my wife and I were attending the wedding of one of her college friends in Greenwich Village.)  When I was growing up, culture, via television, came from NYC.  The Ed Sullivan Show was my window on it.  But my parents, who lived into their eighties, were born, lived, and died in New York State, and to the best of my knowledge neither of them ever laid eyes on the City.

            And “the City” was what it was called by the people with whom I went to college/university, most of whom being from either the City itself or the metropolitan area.  For them it seemed to be the center of the universe; indeed, there was nothing else worth considering in the universe.  Sometimes it felt as if they beat me around the head with it, like a truncheon.  (I asked my freshman roommate what a bagel was, having never experienced one.  He said it was sort of like a soft pretzel.  I had never encountered one of those, either.)

            A couple of days after Keillor’s program I got an email from one of the mailing lists I have somehow got on, by a writer for Hay House books, a New Age/self-help publisher, about his New York City Holiday adventure.  He and his Californian family had spent Thanksgiving week in NYC, and he detailed the eight or nine things they had intended to do, almost all of which they accomplished in spades.  They included “watching the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, visiting the Natural History Museum, walking around Central Park, attending a couple of Broadway plays, seeing the Rockettes at Radio City Music Hall, tasting real New York Pizza, exploring the 9/11 Memorial Museum, ice skating at Rockefeller Center, and just enjoying the sights and sounds of the city.”

            And I thought:  I have never done any of those things, with the possible exception of the “sights and sounds”, which I experienced in one brief, two-hour ramble around the middle of Manhattan in March 1975, including walking around part of the lower border of Central Park, walking around the base of the Empire State Building, walking past the then-closed Radio City Music Hall, and so on.

            I also thought:  this trip must have cost a bundle.  I do not have a bundle, just a small packet, pretty much all of which is obligated for paying bills.

            I was in New York City for about five days in the summer of 1995, doing a training session for the then-current-and-oh-so-urgent agency initiatives.  It was held in a hotel in Flushing, Queens, and what I saw of NYC was… Flushing, Queens.  The sessions were so exhausting that I had no energy left at the end of the day to do anything more than find something to eat, stroll around the local neighborhood (which seemed to be almost entirely Chinese) a bit, and collapse in my room.  On one evening the nominal “trainer” for the group led an expedition into Manhattan, and I think they went to Little Italy.  I was too tired to go.  But on the shuttle flight into the city I had got a good look at the Statue of Liberty from the air, on a nice clear day.  That was neat, a first and, perhaps, a last for me.

            I’ve read about New York, of course.  I read Pete Hamill’s book Downtown, about the history and geography of lower Manhattan.  I’ve recently read Dave Van Ronk’s memoir about the early folkie days in Greenwich Village, and I’ve read detective novels by astrologer/writer Mitchell Lewis, which contain a lot of local color about Manhattan.  These help my education.  In recent months I’ve seen references to the Highline and DUMBO, and, not having any idea what these were, looked them up on Wikipedia.  They sounded interesting.

            And one day, before I die, I still hope to see a Broadway show, on Broadway.  I’d like it to be something that I really want to see, not just any random play.  I’ve always been interested in the stage, and I spent a summer at Oxford doing a course of modern British drama, during which I saw Shakespeare by the RSC at Stratford and plenty of theatre in London’s West End.  I’ve seen road show performances in Washington, but never Broadway.  There was an opportunity once, back when I was in college taking a summer course in Modern Drama.  The teacher had organized a one-Saturday trip to NYC to see a Broadway and an off-Broadway show, but I didn’t go because Martha was working that summer as an elderly woman’s companion with only every other weekend off.  That was the weekend.

            Still I have hope; one day.  Maybe when the weather is warmer, and if I feel I have enough money and energy.  Things these days are never simple.  But one day, before I die.

Johnny Winter, the FM radio, and the Summer of 1972

Rest in Peace, Johnny Winter, 1944-2014, phenomenal blues rock guitarist.  He had been in poor health for awhile, and as I recall had back problems and never fully recovered from a fall that broke his hip, so he played sitting down in latter years, playing a cut-down Erlewine Lazer guitar.  I never saw him live, because the opportunities in my youth were rather limited, by location and other things. I have a clear memory of being bowled over by hearing Johnny play “Johnny B. Goode” in a live recording that was on the local (Binghamton) FM rock station, so it must have been the summer of 1972. 

 

I had got the FM radio as a college graduation present in May of that year, and it opened up a huge window into rock and other music for me.  Up till that time I had only limited avenues for hearing new music:  AM radio (Top 40), the very few times each year that a major act played at the University, and actually buying an album, usually without having heard it previously, with what little money I had.  Even if I’d had an FM radio, the college radio station had too weak a signal to reach our house, and I don’t think the Binghamton rock station (then WKOP-FM) started up very long before I got the radio.  I lived at home, so with very rare exceptions I wasn’t hanging around with people and hearing music they played. 

 

The handful of album purchases (sight unseen, or sound unheard)were carefully chosen, but among them was Delaney & Bonnie & Friends On the Road with Eric Clapton, which I still treasure.  I had never heard of them before so I was taking a bit of a chance, but it was a live album(a great plus) and it had Clapton, and it was great.  In 1972 I did get to see Delaney & Bonnie when they played at the university shortly before I graduated, but they had different Friends and no Eric Clapton.  I have since seen Clapton twice, in 1990 and again in about 2006.  While we were in college Martha gave me a couple of albums which introduced me to the Moody Blues (On the Threshold of a Dream) and the James Gang.

 

It was that same radio that finally, in 1979, allowed me to hear the entirety of The Who’s Tommy when it was played on a DC station.  The album came out in May 1969, right about the time I left Hartwick College and moved back home, so although I saw the album cover in stores I never heard it—not a note, really, from Townshend & co.—until ten years later. There were a few bits that I heard (again, on the radio) from an orchestral version that came out in late 1972 and a cover version of a couple of songs from a band called Mud.  I bought the single 45. It was… okay.  But not the actual Tommy, not even “Pinball Wizard,” until a Saturday evening in1979 when a DC rock station played the whole thing, and I recorded it on the cassette recorder that was happily included in the radio.  Ten years.  As time went on and I eventually had more disposable income, I got the album on cassette, and then on CD.  And I learned to play “Pinball Wizard.”

 

The radio doesn’t work anymore, but I still keep it.  It gave me too many gifts that will always stay with me.  Including Johnny Winter ripping it up on “Johnny B. Goode.”

 

It looked much like this, but in black.

 

Correction and addition: I have determined that the cover version I referred to came out in 1970, and was by a band called Assembled Multitude, which was basically a bunch of studio musicians doing covers, and it was of the "Overture" to Tommy b/w a tune called "Mud." I should also mention seeing the 1975 film version of Tommy, in which the member of The Who do appear (a bit). It was an over-the-top spectacle directed by Ken Russell, with Ann-Margret rolling about in an ocean of baked beans. This is just for the benefit of anyone who's interested, which I do not imagine anyone is.

 

 

W.J. Smith

 

Dr Swerdloc, OBF

'Ars longa, vita brevis'

 

Tuxedos

The other day I happened to be in Sears, which does not occur all that often, looking for a simple table lamp.  They did not have one—not a single lamp of any kind, as far as I could determine, although their web site indicates that they sell many kinds of lamps.

                While walking the length and breadth of the store in search of lamps, I noticed one of their little specialty enterprises housed in a kind of side parlor, featuring men’s formal wear.  They have a similar side parlor selling eyeglasses.  But the formal wear was interesting, because fashions change, and what they were offering on display was the kind of thing that seems to be popular these days for weddings and proms. 

                They had black formal jackets, which looked rather like old-style cutaways or morning coats, each paired with a vest-waistcoat and a matching necktie in festive hues like avocado and mango.  I have seen such things in recent years in photos from, as I noted, weddings and school proms.  Since I was perambulating the store rapidly I did not notice any matching trousers on view, and I casually wondered if they might be black (with a satin stripe, perhaps) or charcoal grey.

                I have donned formal wear, or a tuxedo, exactly three times in my life:  for my prom in junior and senior years of high school in the 1960s, and as an usher at a friend’s wedding in early 1972.  For my high school prom, the standard outfit at that time was white or off-white dinner jacket, boiled-front formal shirt starched within an inch of its life, black bowtie, black trousers with a satin stripe, and a cummerbund (also black).  Think Sean Connery as James Bond in Goldfinger.  Variations from the standard were not really contemplated.

                Just a few years later, at my friend’s wedding, we wore a double-breasted jacket and flared trousers in a kind of dark French blue, with ruffle-fronted shirts of powder blue, and big floppy bowties that matched the jackets.  That was the 1970s, and good riddance to them.  That particular experience helped me decide to forgo formal wear at my own wedding.  It was at a small church, out in the country, and the men simply wore regular suits.  (Mine was black, double-knit—as practically everything was at the time—and it lasted for many years.)

                But I have never worn the usual sort of male tuxedo, with black jacket and trousers.  Black has long played a featured role in my wardrobe, and I’ve had a number of black suits, jackets, and trousers over the years.  Plenty of white shirts and black ties.  But no tuxedos, nor have I wanted one.  I have a friend of the female persuasion who has, more than once, encouraged me to acquire one.  Her husband and sons own tuxedos, and she has argued that, if I got one, I would soon find many occasions on which to wear it.

                I do not think so.  In the forty-two years since I last wore a tuxedo, there has arisen no occasion for me that would have required a tuxedo; indeed, none for which such would even have been appropriate.  That’s not how the course of my life has tended.  Theoretically, if either of my two children should ever have a church wedding, they might ask me to attend in formal dress.  This seems exceedingly unlikely.

                So my appreciation of tuxedos and similar formal wear will remain academic, which is fine.  I can watch the trends come and go by paying attention to whatever they are wearing on televised awards programs.  And I can see the subtle changes that have come to pass (white tie giving way to black tie) in former years by watching Downton Abbey.

                Probably because they are so outside everyday dress, both business and casual, tuxedos seem to partake equally of the elegant and the ridiculous.  I like the joke Garrison Keillor told in the Prairie Home Companion movie, and more than once on the radio program.  “Two penguins standing on an ice floe. And the first penguin says, ‘You look like you're wearing a tuxedo.’ And the second penguin says, ‘What makes you think I'm not?’”  Some folks think that’s pretty funny.  I am one of them.