thelonious monk - don't blame me

I remember the first iPad pitch by Steve Jobs, the one where he says, "you can make it whatever you want . . . it can be anything you want it to be."  Well, no it can't, Steve.  Whatever you do with it, it's still an iPad.

Music really is the dreamy, customizable thing that Steve disingenuously told us that the iPad was.  Music really can be anything that you want it to be.  Thanks are owed to guys like Monk for proving that to us, to our delight.  

Joe Dimaggio, Mr. Coffee, And The End Of The World

During the early 1970’s, America was standing on the verge of the end of the world as we had known it.  The 1960’s had been a decade of great turmoil, a mix of social progress and social upheaval, a mix of war and prosperity.  The U.S. tried to simultaneously fight the War on Poverty, and the War in Vietnam, and the rush to get to the moon.  All the while, the stage was being set for the tremendous changes that have followed.  The coming of the end. 

In 1973, TV was saturated with commercials for Mr. Coffee, commercials that featured Joe Dimaggio in the role of product pitchman.  Most people seemed to take this new development in stride, but I knew instinctively that if Joltin’ Joe could do such a thing it meant that every single fucking thing in the world had been altered completely.  The world as we had known it was gone. 

I was too young to see Joe Dimaggio’s baseball career first hand, but you could not escape his importance to the culture of the 50’s and 60’s.  There was the marriage to Marilyn Monroe, for one thing.  My family regularly ate at his up-scale Italian restaurant in Flushing, Queens.  He was a tremendously dignified man, tall, handsome and highly intelligent.  I actually had him in my taxi one time, around the time of the Mr. Coffee ads.  I never mentioned Mr. Coffee, of course.  I drove him from JFK to the Delmonico Hotel on Park Avenue.  He was quiet, he just stared out the window for most of the ride.  He did ask me about the weather, but no conversation developed.   I liked Joe, and I respected his dignified solitude, which you could cut with a knife. 

In the years since the early 70’s we have seen the destruction of much of what was good and holy in American life.  The exponential rise in productivity has benefited only the tenth-of-one-percent; the unions have been destroyed and with them most of the working class; we have increasing debt-slavery; the middle class has been demoralized and largely impoverished; probable cause and due process rights have been destroyed; and forget the old fashioned covenant of good faith and fair dealing in business and politics.  The death of everything. 

It didn’t start with Joe and the Mr. Coffee gig.  Joe was just the wakeup call that something had happened while we weren’t looking.  The “wake up and smell the coffee” moment.  Maybe it was not obvious, but I think it was impossible not to become suspicious.  Joe D., the very personification of old school grace and charm, hawking a cheap coffee maker.  What’s wrong with this picture? 

I’d never suggest that the old world was a perfect place, but it did have a lot going for it.  There were progressive tax policies, policies that favored the middle class over moneyed interests.  Civil rights were on the upswing, although still under great stress.  Personal freedoms in the due process area were expanding.  And, as weird as it may sound now, the two major political parties could still work together and compromise when the needs of the country called for it. 

Something had happened at about the time that JFK was murdered, and within ten years it had been cut in stone.  After that the dominoes really started to fall.  Joe Dimaggio and the Mr. Coffee thing were the headlights on the highway.  That was a turning point.  Since then the truck has run all of our sorry asses over.  

Art Pepper Imagination Meets The Rhythm Section 1957

I just came across a side-door invitation to rediscover Art Pepper, I don't keep this stuff in my front-term memory.  I like the saxophone, but it's not where I really live. 

This is a great album though, and Art Pepper is really, really good.  I love this song too.  This song by Jimmy Scott is one of my favorites. 

Art's a great story teller too.  In fact, I'd recommend anything with his name on it, animal, vegetable or mineral.  "Art Pepper," the MARK OF QUALITY.  

Three Deaths, Part One

People die.  Some die lingering deaths that can be hard to watch.  Not as hard in the watching as it must be in the experiencing, but hard.  Some die sudden deaths, shocking, unanticipated deaths that leave psychological distortions for months in loved ones left behind.  Some deaths fall somewhere in between.  All deaths are unpleasant in their turn, but ours is the way of death.  It is the way of all flesh, the place we all go.  I have seen my share of death, but three examples stand out in memory.

Hilliary, 1966

Hilliary Carroll and I went to high school together; sometimes I sat behind him in home room.  We were both too-cool-for-school, boys who were smart enough but who were dedicated to making our own ways through the education process with little effort devoted to assigned work.  He was two years older than me as a result of having suffered a long bout of Scarlet Fever in grammar school. 

For me, the revolution consisted of heroic feats of reading books that had nothing at all to do with the curriculum proposed by the school.  And hours listening to records, or walking around town with like-minded friends, doing nothing.  (As in, “where are you going? OUT, what are you doing? NOTHING.” Nothing might have been just standing around making fun of each other, or it might include kicking over every garbage can on the block.)  For Hilliary, it was a question of fascination with small engines, fast vehicles, and danger.  Go carts, mini-bikes, outboard boat engines, motorcycles . . . he only moved on to sports cars after graduation. 

We got along great, thanks to our shared maladaptation to the greater society, our general disinterest in the things that society valued.  Getting to Hilliary’s house was not easy, but I spent a lot of time there during the high school years.  It was a long ride on two buses, or a really challenging ride on a bicycle.  I don’t recall Hilliary ever coming to my house.  What was the point?  All of the engines, the mini-bikes, not to mention the pellet pistols, were at his house.  I knew a lot of the guys in his neighborhood, and there was a big, beautiful park there, so it was not a hardship.  Also, his family was much nicer than mine, except for my sister.  His mom was a loving woman and quite the intellectual, very funny, and his father was a writer for the New York Herald Tribune. 

After high school, I never saw Hilliary again.  The last time that I saw him, I made the trip to his house, not a daily but a frequent occurrence.  He was in a bad mood.  He was trying to make some time with a girl who lived across the street.  He said uncharitable things about me hanging around stepping on his time, things that were probably justified.  I went home, and I never saw him again.  It happened quickly.

Within a month of graduating high school I had a new girlfriend, and I was spending a certain amount of time at her house.  I already had many friends in her neighborhood.  Her father worked at a big defense plant in town.  He got home from work at about four-thirty, and we’d be sitting there, me, my girlfriend and her sisters, watching “Dark Shadows” or something.  One day her dad walked in, and he was in a somber mood.  “One of the guys,” he said, “his brother died.  Car crash.”

Now I knew that Hilliary’s older brother worked at the place.  He was a diver, SCUBA and deep sea.  So, on a long shot, I asked her dad, “what’s your friend’s name?”  He gives me that look, like what difference does that make?  “Mike Carroll,” he says.

That’s how I found out about it.  I called the house and talked to Hilliary’s mother, she was putting up a brave front.  Hilliary had gotten himself an Austin-Healey sports car after graduation.  It was early in the spring of the next year.  On the night that he died, Hilliary was driving the Healey ridiculously fast through a particularly dangerous piece of road close to his house.  A piece of road where a car going too fast will become airborne and then bounce.  This happens while the road is going into a sharp turn, which can be fun or fatal, depending on the luck of the draw.  I'll bet that he had done it before, successfully.  A friend was in the car with him that night.  The friend was lucky enough to be thrown from the vehicle.  “Left-handed luck” that, but he lived and he looked pretty intact at the funeral.  Hilliary was behind the wheel when the car spun into a light pole.  He was killed instantly, and smashed up in the process.  It was a closed casket funeral.

 

The funeral was a quiet affair.  Hilliary was buried up in Connecticut; I’ve never seen the grave.  His mom carried on nicely, but his dad took it very, very hard.  He never recovered, in fact.  He never went to work, not one day, after the death.  I don’t think he ever ate at all after the funeral.  He just sat in a chair in the dark until he died; it took less than ten days. 

I took it better than that.  Not quite in stride, but to me it wasn’t totally unexpected.  Hilliary was too fond of speed and danger.  Those guys often die young. 

(To be continued.) 

James Ray- St James Infirmary

James Ray is criminally underrated.  Short, short career, that might have something to do with it.  No hits on which to anchor the career either, unless you count, "I Got My Mind Set on You," later covered by George Harrison. 

What a voice.  I love this guy.  Died young, that's the story.  RIP brother.

Whom Should We Thank For The Existence Of Modern Britain?

There's a show on BBC  Knowledge that suggests that it was exploration and innovation that made "Britain" what it is today.  Oh, really?

The exploration did lead to the Empire, and the innovation did lead to the Industrial Revolution, but a couple of things had to happen beforehand to enable the exploration and innovation bits.  Most notably the wonderfully useful English language.  Taking it further begs the question:  where did the language come from?  Almost none of it came from the inhabitants of the British Isles themselves.  It came from outside.  The language, and any subsequent successes by the nation state of England (or, Great Britain), were the direct result of repeated, long-term conquests and occupations.

First came the Celts.  The Romans were there for several hundred years, bringing with them the beginnings of modern English.  The Angles and the Saxons brought their already Latin influenced German, and they stayed, taking "English" to a very German stage of development.  The (Norman) French came to stay in 1066,  and between that time and Shakespeare's time modern English was born, developed and perfected.  I'm not qualified to speak about the linguistic contributions of the Celts, or the less occupation minded Vikings for that matter, but without the building blocks of Latin, German and French, there would be no English language as we know it.

The English are a very interesting people, and not without their successes.  I find them to be a first class movie-making people, and very literary in general (often too literary for my taste, but that's just me).  In a just world, they should have a big holiday, like a four day weekend or something, to celebrate the various streams that came together to form the English language.  Costumes of the conquerors should be worn, and great thanks should be given for all of their bloody efforts.  And a moment of silence for all of the people that had to die so that the English language could live.  Haven't the English sufficiently lost their pride by now to allow for a holiday like this?  You'd think that they should have.

Interview With The Author

This is a fantasy ego projection of an interview that might take place in a possible future where I have actually finished this novel that I have sitting around here half-done.   “Forest Park” is the current working title.  Repeat, snark alert!  This hasn't happened yet. 

Q:  Let’s start with the obvious question:  how is it that you are publishing your first novel at the age of seventy?

A:  Well, I could give you any number or reasons, from flippant to profound, but let’s just say that I finally got around to it. 

Q:  The writing or the publishing? 

A:  The publishing, I think.  A half-done first draft of “Forest Park” sat in a lap-top for years before I decided to finish it.  Before now, for decades, I felt like I had books in me, books that I wanted to write, but I had the powerful notion that dealing with publishers, agents and marketers would damn near kill me. 

Q:  It that why you decided to self-publish?

A:  Who says I decided?  I’m not sure that I had any alternative.

 

Q:  Did you try to find a publisher?  Or an agent?

A:  No.  I have no facility for self-promotion and I have a very low tolerance for rejection.  And I figured if John Toole couldn’t sell the business on “Confederacy of Dunces,” what chance did I have?  C’mon, let’s move along, this is a dull subject.

Q:  Okay . . . How about writing?  Had you written anything before? 

A:  Yeah, a lot, actually.  Journals, letters, always.  I hated school as a teenager, but I wrote nice term papers, and I enjoyed writing them.  My overall grades were dismal in my teens, but my term papers scored high.  In my early fifties I wrote some short stories, I think a few of them were okay.  I was a lawyer by then, and of course I wrote thousands of words a week doing that, it seemed like thousands anyway.  After the Peace Corps, I wrote up about a hundred thousand words about my experiences in Thailand based on journal entries.   I think some of that was entertaining.  I wrote hundreds of poems in my fifties.  I've had a blog for ten years that I put a lot of energy into. 

Q:  Did you try to get any of the stories or poems published? 

A:  Not really.  I mean, I sent some stuff out, but I got discouraged almost immediately.  I thought that some of the poetry was good, but I’m famously easy to please.  But it don’t mean nothing, as they used to say.  I read and write mostly because I love to read and write.  I’ve always been a reader.   I love to tell stories too, for that matter.  It all goes together.

Q:  When did you become interested in reading?

A:  Very young, if you count comic books!  Kidding aside, we always had a lot of books around the house, and we got two newspapers delivered every day.  We got the New York Daily News every morning at about six o’clock, so I could look at it before school.  That was a great newspaper then, this is the Fifties, I don’t know what it’s like now.  It was tabloid sized, it had lots of pictures, and it had great writers.  Everything was very punchy, intensely to-the-point.  The sports writing was top notch.  A perfect newspaper for a youngster. 

We also got Life and Newsweek every week, and the National Geographic.  The Life and the NatGeo, I went over them pretty good.  The books at home were my father’s, he had very eclectic tastes.  Many were in German; many were about engineering; there were math books and textbooks about foreign languages; the fiction was mostly very serious.  He went to a lot of used book sales.   I “looked at” those books when I was too young to read them.  I read them like you’d read magazines, you know, just open them and read a little.  I did always love the library though.  Plenty of readable books there.  The library in my town was a good one, and for the youngster there was a nice children’s library downstairs.

Q:  How about books?  When did you start to read books? 

A:  Age eleven, I’d say, for long-form fiction and non-fiction, in seventh grade.  Over the next couple of years I read books from the library about pirates or World War II, exciting stuff, I read Edgar Rice Burroughs, all of the Ace paperbacks came out at that time, Rider Haggard, Edgar Poe, books about gangsters, Sherlock Holmes, Fu-Manchu.  I read memoirs by World War II guys, like “Stuka Pilot,” by Hans Rudel, and “Zero Fighter,” by Saburo Sakai.  And more of the books at the house, I had more patience for them than before.  I found a paperback called, “The Beats,” about all of the Beat writers, real Top-of-the-Pops stuff, but I liked it.  I found that book amazing.

Q:  The Beats?  What did you find most interesting about them?

 

A:  Well, it seemed to suggest that an individual could be himself and still become successful.  That’s pretty exciting. 

Q:  What was the first serious book that you read?

A:  Nice dig, youngblood!  Maybe I should pad my list. 

Q:  No . . . I mean . . .

A:  Forget it.  I’m fucking with you.  It was probably “Junky,” by William Burroughs.  I was thirteen, I think, a freshman in high school, I hated high school with a passion.  I’m sure that I shop-lifted the book, I had mastered that behavior by then.  I had developed a voracious appetite for magazines and paperbacks and the money to pay for them was just not there, so I improvised.  I liked “Junky” a lot, I re-read it about a year afterwards.  I mean, it wasn’t a bolt-from-the-blue moment or anything, but I liked it a lot.  It was a lesson in the layers of the societal onion, worlds within worlds.  I had no idea of that stuff, what half of it meant, but I learned that there was more out there, those people on the bus had more on their minds.  Of course I remembered Bill Burroughs from the book about the Beats. 

Q:  How about school assigned reading? 

A:  I never read what was assigned by school.  It was a matter of principle with me.  I got Cliff Notes or I faked it.  I only read what I wanted to read.  A novel a week, plus the history stuff.  I hated school, but I loved reading.  Oh, I did read “Huckleberry Finn” as a freshman in college.  I liked that.  I’d already read some Mark Twain. 

Q:  Did it occur to you that you might write someday yourself? 

A:  You know, I did have a “Eureka!” moment at that time.  Thirteen, or maybe fourteen.  It was after school, I was in my room pretending to do homework.  Really, I never did homework, I always copied it from other kids the next morning.  Anyway, I’m in my room reading a pornographic novel.  I had a couple of them around, the best part of them was definitely the six or eight nude drawings by Frank Frazetta.  Those’d be big E-Bay items now, I’ll bet.  The writing itself was disappointing, even to my critical faculties, which were primitive.  I remember thinking:  I could do better than this.  The exposition was minimal; the sex scenes were shallow and not very entertaining; there was no coherent narrative, no real story.  I thought, somebody got paid to write this shit?  That was actually very encouraging to me.  I thought that maybe it would be a job that I could do, someday, if I had to.  I was always worried about the whole making a living thing. 

(Reminder, none of this interview has happened yet.  I am just thrilled with the idea that someday, who knows, it might happen, someone will want to interview me.) 

Q:  So now you’re published, or self-published anyway.  Are you making a living at it? 

A:  Shit, no.  This is a love thing.  If a couple of hundred people read the book, I’ll be totally delighted, it’ll all have been worth it.  The interesting thing these days is that self-publishing has become something of a misnomer.  You’re not on your own anymore.  Not only writers have been put out of business by the new paradigm, lots of publishing professionals are out in the street now too.  Editors, the whole lot of them.  Many of them have hung out shingles and are now in business for themselves, trying to make a living with the talents that they developed over the decades in the old, pre-Internet publishing business.  So I have help, I’m happy to pay for it, these guys are good.  So I can get an editor on as grand a scale as I think I need, I can get someone to do the packaging, it looks a lot better than I could do, I can pay for as much marketing as I can afford.  By now it looks like Forest Park will at least break even.  That’s a blessing.  But making a living?  Please, don’t mock me. 

Q:  Sorry, I was just curious.  Back to reading, what have you read more recently?

A:  More recently than high school?  That’s quite a list.  I’ve always been drawn to crap, but I’ve always found quality books rewarding too, as long as they were not too hard to read.  So I’ve always read a mix of “good” books and crap; fiction and non-fiction; newspapers and magazines.  I’ve always been a dedicated library goer, borrowing books and reading them.  I’m all over the place.  I never totally gave up comics, for that matter. 

Q:  What have been some of your favorites?

A:  Very early on, Evelyn Waugh and Dash Hammett.  Ambrose Bierce.  “Clockwork Orange;” “Lord of the Flies.”  I liked Evergreen Magazine in the Sixties, and I had a subscription.  That led me to more Bill Burroughs, and some wilder stuff, like "491," Scandinavian stuff.  Some of the Hard Boiled stuff, Mickey Spillane early on, later George V. Higgins and Charles Williford.  Nathanial West! And a lot of crap in all of these genres, Science Fiction, crime, I rather liked some of the crap too.  I recently discovered Edward St. Aubyn, I find him very good.  Over the years I read "Moby-Dick" three times, finally understanding it, more or less, at the age of sixty.  Favorites?  Of the modern guys I’d say Haruki Murakami and Jonathan Franzen.  I’m thunderstruck by those two. 

Q:  How about a favorite character? 

A:  Tom Ripley, hands down.  How could I leave Patricia Highsmith off of the favorites list?  Those Ripley books, that’s five of my top ten right there.   I only read them in the last ten years or so. 

Q:  What do you feel have been the biggest influences on your work?

A:  “My work  . . .”  That’s a little grand.

Q:  How about, “. . . on your writing so far?” 

A:  Probably newspapers.  Between journals, and letters, and legal writing, maybe I tend to stick with the who, what, when, where and how.  Be direct, don’t hide the ball.  Tell the story.  So newspapers.  Maybe newspapers and movies.  I’m pretty sure that I construct movie-like narratives.  I’ve seen a lot of movies. 

Q:  Regarding style . . .

A:  Let me cut you off right there, I’m not the one to be discussing the style of anything, or the literary this and that.  I leave the close examination of language and literature to people with much better educations that I have. 

Q:  Fair enough.  What about “Forest Park?”  What’s the book about? 

A:  It’s about the first TV generation.  It’s about the effect of the Sixties on certain young people.  It’s about the Vietnam War.  It’s about temptation and the difficulty of redemption.  It’s about the layers of culture, what you can see, what you find if you dig, and what you find if you stay right there and dig some more.  It’s about young people who walk in the world but chose not to engage with it.  It’s about friends, parents and children, it’s about right and wrong in shades of grey.  It’s about growing up, discovering things about yourself.  It’s about, not my favorite word, but it’s about alienation.

Q:  You sound like you had given that question some thought beforehand.

A:  Yeah, my PR guy helped me with that one.

Q:  What are you working on now?

A:  Oh, just more stories about tattooed fuck-ups from Queens.  I’m like Marc Chagall, I’m stuck in a frozen moment.  He and I look at the whole world through the filter of one moment in time.  For Chagall, it was the Stetl, for me it’s a little corner of Queens after midnight.