I did not think much of this picture at first, but the more I look at it the happier it makes me. This is the first picture I took with a Minolta 7000 Maxxum SLR film camera, a camera of historic provenance which reached me in a most unusual way. Mostly idle for the last decade the camera has traveled some, landing in Australia in the hands of a friend's friend before arriving at my 181 last week.
I last saw this camera roughly 13 years ago. It was in Rochester. There was a train trip upstate and back to an event most would rather forget. Details of that trip have haunted me for years. Faded memories mercurially wash up at incoherent moments, bolting through my mind.
I took this picture only to see if the camera worked, and to see if I knew how to press the button. Success. And the picture itself makes me smile. Life is random, I say. Everything is random.
I dreamed I saw my face from various angles. I was bearded in most of the angles, and better looking than in reality. I looked like Robert Creeley in appearance and in substance: Like Creeley I was self-confident and famous for publicly yet sensitively trimming words from stream-of-consciousness effluvia and making them sparkle. In the dream it was interesting to look at myself because in reality I do not know what I look like. Really, I do not. I have never understood that expression "You'll know it like the back of your hand" because I do not think I would recognize that part of my body in a random lineup.
In the dream my hairline was the same as today, and I looked older but I knew I was seeing myself 15 years ago. I was older and more comfortable in myself than I am today.
I have had dreams of baldness. Bald dreams themselves, baldly obvious, typical, predictable self-obsession, the stuff that bored the only therapists I ever saw and led them to assure me my problems were nothing new, my existential concerns simply quotidian.
I dreamed of Clint Eastwood, that we were friends having a conversation at the Distinguished Wakamba Lounge on 8th Avenue in Manhattan, and that he provoked some men of slight build into a fist fight. Clint Eastwood engaged these men in head-butting and Kung-Fu-like moves that surprised them, and which looked impossible.
As they fought one of the men handed me a couple of books, out of respect and with a knowing nod as if to say "We'll talk about this later when the boys are done fighting."
My relationship with Clint Eastwood is not clear to me now but without it the men would not have known me or appreciated my interest in the books they gave me.
The fight was efficient, artistically organized, like a mosh pit where West Side Story meets The Wild Bunch. The old man Eastwood surprised his opponents with elegant moves unexpected from a man his age. Not knowing what language Clint Eastwood's enemy spoke -- and because I was expected to return the books -- I sent my thoughts into the books that had been handed to me. Through metaphysical miasmatic memory output of sublingual skill I translated the old expression "Know thine enemy" into hundreds of languages and thousands of contexts, sending word to Clint Eastwood's opponents that they were foolish to think an old man would be an easy hit.
I woke up and typed the previous sentences. This is my first full throttle episode on a new keyboard I received last night. I opened the box and the space bar was not connected. "Cheap plastic," I thought. I lament but accept that my kingdom of nonsense is generated not with artisan tools but disposable junk.
I attached the space bar to its intended location, remembering a day at a summer program during one of the 1980s when I was presented with a diagram of a computer keyboard. The diagram was designed to point out the differences between a standard typewriter and computer keyboard. I do not recall the highlighted differences (function keys, I suppose, and the mysterious Scroll Lock) but I do remember the space bar. I typed prodigiously as a youth but I never learned to type, and I had never seen a pedagogical illustration of a keyboard similar to those at which I had thrashed out so many pages. I did not know QWERTY from SQUIRTY or Hunt and Peck from Toulouse-Lautrec. So when I looked at this diagram of a computer keyboard I was intrigued by the SPACE BAR. Computers were high-tech and advanced technologies and so I imagined the SPACE BAR was a SPACE AGE term, and that computer keyboards, like goggles and freeze-dried food, were invented by NASA. I saw stars and galaxies in the space bar of the computer keyboard, I saw my thumb not hitting the space bar but floating on it, my hands actively sculpting the future of the universe as they hovered over a small window on the galaxy.
I never said anything out loud except to laugh at myself when I made the comparatively dull discovery that the space bar was, as you know, the big thing on the keyboard that one uses to insert spaces between words.
Typing today on this new keyboard, typing full throttle for the first time, I find that I did a poor job of placing the displaced space bar into its nest. I like it, though. The space bar makes a thick racket, far louder than I might expect even from the biggest key on the board that gets smacked by the strongest of my prestidigitational extremities. The space bar roars and snorts while the little keys whimper and cackle. I want a metal computer keyboard but, to quote the Staples Singers, my money ain't that long. I want a loud metal recalcitrant keyboard that wakes up the neighbors. I want it to loudly announce each letter as I type it, I want it to loudly read each word after I hit the SPACE BAR.
I just opened the windows wide. I raised the blinds as high as they can go, letting the high sky tower over me. It is a nice thing I used to fear, opening the window. I used to imagine hoodlums, hellions, and the guttersnipes would accumulate around the open window, gather to take notes on what to steal and when to plan a robbery. I saw kids doing this on the upper east side one time. They were pointing at wide open windows in apartments and discussing what electronics were in the apartment, trading tips on how to get up the fire escape and how to figure out the comings and goings of the apartment's occupants so they could engineer an entrance into the place. I open my windows more these days but I still shut the blinds when I am not here, when I am not at this spot, when I am not occupying the helm of this desk and thereby guarding its objects from theft or malevolent contemplation. I shut the blinds in anticipation of entropical attention, an inevitable accumulation as the enemies slowly appear, the enemies that linger behind the thickets of closed curtains in windows across the street, the enemies that rise like full-grown beings from the primordial soup of my absence, sprouting like eyeballs in a children's book and tapping my windows the way fingers invisibly tap our foreheads into senility. My presence, I imagine, deflects their lurking concentrations, as no one stares while I am working, not even the hoods, the hellions, and the guttersnipes. Not the professionals, at least. I merit only professional attention. Only the most skilled and sophisticated criminal minds mingle with my solipsistic distractions, only they have graduated from raiding unlocked basement apartments and reaching through mostly-open windows to steal you.
There are strange doings inside my landline telephone lately. Strange things that seem only to happen on Sundays.
The phone rings but the ring is not normal. It rings twice quickly, not in the normal sustained single ring as if someone is calling. It rings like an intercom or an inter-office type of alert -- but I have no "inter-office" environment. My phone should not ring like this but it does and after a short ring or couple of rings I hear a loud dial tone on the phone's speaker. Nothing shows up on Caller ID. Nothing -- not even "Unidentified Caller" to indicate that a call came in.
As this happened on Sunday I stood by the phone and, underneath the roaring dial tone, I heard voices.
Their voices were faint but behind the dial tone I heard a man placing an order for food. I heard him say "chicken" and then, after thinking about it for a few seconds, he said "broccoli." Then I heard the voice of a woman who seemed happy to take the man's order. She sounded happy to hear from him, happy to repeat his order back to him, happy to be sharing this moment of communication on the phone.
They were, I assume, unaware that they were being broadcast into my kitchen.
I was enchanted by the man's voice. He dug into that word "broccoli" in a way that was hungry and wet. Pausing for a few seconds after declaring his desire for chicken I imagined him pressing his fingers to his chin and nearly smiling. Maybe his mouth watered just thinking about it, thinking about how good that chicken could be with something else, something more, something like ... Broccoli!
There is something I find disgusting about the way people talk about food. Food and the acts of consumption serve a single purpose in my life: to keep me alive. Others consider eating a sensuous experience while others reduce it to a bodily function in their manners of shoveling food down their mouths.
The landline phone weirdness disturbed me at first. I was concerned to hear a dial tone on my own phone without me picking the phone up. I imagined someone using the line to make long distance or other types of calls. That assumption is a relic of my phone phreaking pasts and is probably outdated to modern practices, but back in the day an open dial tone like that might -- if my foggy memory is even remotely correct -- have been called a "Bridge". Those things were solid gold to phone phreaks.
These "calls" came in a few times on Sunday. They left no caller ID. Listening to other calls I heard more voices but I could not distinguish what they said. The voices huddled underneath that loud dial tone. I heard more voices but after the chicken and broccoli conversation I could not distinguish the words. There also was static on the lines.
I found myself craving more of this. I wanted more random sounds to rise up from that mostly-unused landline telephone in the kitchen. Hearing just those few intelligible words excited me.
The kitchen telephone chirps remind me of a project I dipped into some time ago. Using an Internet phone software I dialed around until I found a handful of payphones in the United States that still accept incoming calls. All at once I dialed the numbers, assembling these random locations into a conference call. I brought together payphones in Wisconsin, Chicago, Wyoming, and Texas. People picked up these ringing phones. The first person to pick up was usually puzzled to hear the sounds of other phones ringing. That has never happened me that I can recall but if I was perked up by that sound of a dial tone on my kitchen phone then I imagine I would be similarly piqued to pick up a phone and hear ringing. It reverses the assumption of one who picks up a phone to call a person or place of their choosing by injecting that transaction into the complementary act of picking up a phone and expecting to talk to an unknown party.
I rang up phones in this manner several times and can not put into words how exciting it sounded. A person in Texas would pick up the phone, say "Hello?", and then stay on the line until (if we were lucky) someone in Wyoming quickly picked up one of the other phones. There would be confusion and even anger as these people asked "Who is this?" making it clear that " I just picked up this phone and you were there" and "I didn't call you!"
As these hastily random introductions are being made there lingers the ringing of the other two phones in Wisconsin and Chicago. The two parties probably are not even aware of that sound as they talk, but then a third person in Chicago picks up a phone, unexpectedly jumping into the fray. The pool of sound, this little crackling chaos sounds to me like opera, lost and confused voices spiraling in the wire and making contact in a way that is senseless but self-contained. Once the introductory dust cleared and the people started talking I found that the fascination was controlled by the physical distances between the parties and the comfort offered by the fact that these phones are not only far apart but in public places.
A breeze off the lake--petal-shaped Luna-park effects avoid the teasing outline Of where we would be if we were here. Bombed out of our minds, I think The way here is too close, too packed With surges of feeling. It can't be. The wipeout occurs first at the center, now around the edges. A big ugly one With braces kicking the shit out of a smaller one Who reaches for a platinum axe stamped excalibur: Just jungles really. The daytime bars are Packed but night has more meaning In the pockets and side vents. I feel as though Somebody had just brought me an equation. I say, "I can't answer this--I know That it's true, please, believe me, I can see the proof, lofty, invisible In the sky far above the striped awnings. I just see That I want it to go on, without Anybody's getting hurt, and for the shuffling To resume between me and my side of the night."
I was scanning more family slides -- this time from yet another random American family -- when I remembered the Thomas family cemetery. It was established in the late 1700s by forebears on my father's side, and today it occupies a remote hillside in rural Tennessee.
My father and I visited the place once in 2000. I donated $100 to the grounds that year and since then I receive an annual fund-raising letter from the cemetery.
Absent that annual letter I think the little Thomas graveyard would likely have left my mind long ago. It is not a place I plan to visit again nor is it the place I expect to spend eternity. It is, like all cemeteries, a place not for the dead for the living, and despite having met several of them in 2000 I find I have virtually no connection to my relatives in that area.
But as I wandered through the family slides of a well-to-do Ohio family and tried to re-create their lives something occurred to me. It seems that the family history that interests me the least is my own. I know plenty about it. A 40-page family tree sits in my file cabinet but I have never been inspired to travel through it. Somehow the common American pastime of genealogy has never bugged me. This seems strange. For someone who roams so many cemeteries and even made a semi-professional foray into forensic genealogy (a.k.a. "Cemetery Photography") I start to feel that my interests in graveyards and the lives of random families is a distraction -- but from what? Maybe I imagine that something about the lives of strangers will fill me with what is missing as a result of this familial indifference.
The Thomas name is common enough that I might not remember seeing it but looking at the Thomas Cemetery pictures reminds me that I have rarely if ever seen that name on a grave stone here in New York.
My father was Protestant but not religious in any measurable way. In fact after he died my sister and I were kind of surprised to learn that he even had an "official" religious affiliation. To be honest we were not so sure he did. I think of religious affiliations because "Thomas" might be a more common name among Protestants than Catholics, or more common in Appalachia (the region of my father's heritage) than other parts of the country -- and these factors might explain why I've virtually never seen a Thomas in any of the old New York cemeteries.
Whatever the case, until the fetish lifts I will continue to have a grand old time wandering the great cemeteries and milling through thousands of slides from Ohio and Florida families.
OK. Today was nothing. A big, wobbly, quivering 0.
I am thinking about a poem, a poem about the smells from 1B.
First came the dead body smell. Then came the ludicrous flowerly poof poof that filled the building with roses and lilacs (and invisible butterflies and birdies and twinkling horsies) but that failed to strangle the dead body smell.
The dead body stink stayed for 2 weeks until the police removed the green sticker from the apartment and The Service was called. The Service delivered days of arch bleach scent, more days of bleach and then more days of who-knows-what. There is a reason you call The Service and you can have no idea but to appreciate what they did to get the rotted stink of human carcass out of that tiny apartment.
I remember how the landlord held court the day J. died last month. He preached arbitrary gospel from the front step of this building as the police called in the incident. The landlord seemed to own the moment, reminding me as I exited and entered this building that "LIFE IS A PENANCE, MARK. ENJOY IT WHILE YOU ARE YOUNG. RUN."
Then I heard the police, referring to the dead man, tell their radio "We think he has a sister in Maine."
They never found a sister or a brother or a friend.
After The Service did its work the place came to smell of caulk, clay, and craftsman's material. As with all those smells the odors filled my kitchen. I shut the window.
Today the smell was of paint, the final coat of forget that seals in the memory.
This is the poem I am thinking about, but what if I never write it? Would that not make it the perfect poem? Unuttered? Unrecorded? A stuff not of critical complaint or paperwork but of braggadocio and mental adrenaline?
Yes. That poem.
Oh fuck you Jack Spicer, fuck you with your poetry about poets thinking about poems about other poets' remarks about their own poetry. Yes. Fuck you, Jack Spicer.
While continuing to rummage through old file cabinets and boxes I found this card. This card is a relic from one of the oddest encounters I have yet had while managing public web sites.
This EMPLOYMENT TERMINATION NOTICE arrived at my P.O. Box many years ago, along with a set of papers from the Division of Child Support (DCS) at the State of Washington's Department of Social and Health Services. The DCS in Washington wanted me to verify the employment and/or termination dates of an individual whose name I did not immediately recognize. This type of paperwork, unfamiliar to me, was part of a child custody or child support suit involving people I did not know. I myself had never employed anyone directly so this paperwork puzzled me. Its connection to a child support suit made it all the more unnerving.
I called the DCS in Washington and explained my confusion. I explained that I had nothing to do with this matter, that I did not know the people whose names appeared in this paperwork, and that I knew nothing about a child support or custody battle between any of my even remotest acquaintances.
The DCS person I talked to did not quiz me too much about this matter, suggesting there had simply been a mix-up in the paperwork. He suggested I return the paperwork to him with a note explaining that I knew nothing about this matter. I did as much, though I took my remove from the situation a step further by writing my comments on a Post-It note which I stuck to the papers. Imagining that my signature on the papers could somehow be interpreted as meaning I had real involvement in this case I issued my comments on separate papers. I might have been a little over-zealous about it but to illustrate my distance from the situation I did not want my name and signature to appear on the actual paperwork from this case.
This happened about 13 years ago. My memory of the details of what had actually happened is somewhat fuzzy but the substance is clear.
I mailed the paperwork back to the DCS but this strange encounter lingered in my mind. "What was that?" I kept asking myself. As with most things in my life it took me some time to understand. I can not remember now if it came to me gradually or all at once but I eventually reached a credible -- if no less puzzling -- conclusion.
About a year earlier -- before I got the paperwork from DCS -- I had exchanged a few e-mails with someone who introduced himself to me as a database programmer/administrator of some skill. He wanted to help turn my Payphone Project into a searchable resource. At the time the site listed payphone numbers and locations as free text, a format that I liked and which I could have taken farther. Pages like this list of Manhattan payphone locations included not just listings of public phones but freeform descriptions and occasional stories from site visitors who had some knowledge or experience with those phones. That element of randomness, in which a telephone book comes alive with annotations and stories behind the arbitrary-seeming data, was great fun for a while.
The person who contacted me wanted to clean up that data by formatting it and stuffing it into a database. I could understand the thinking behind this though I was basically apathetic about it. We had a brief e-mail correspondence and I think just one phone call before I let it go. I was not interested -- in fact I have never had much interest in working with other people on these personal web projects of mine, at least where the actual production of the content is concerned. Others have certainly influenced things that have happened here but I've never entered into a full working relationship with anyone -- believe it or not I've had several offers from business development and marketing types.
At any rate, this correspondence lasted maybe 3 or 4 days and I soon forgot about it.
Fast-forward just over a year: About a week after I mailed that paperwork back to DCS in Washington it all came back to me. I looked back at my e-mails from over a year earlier and found his name and those few e-mails we had sent back and forth. I did not remember him as being from Washington but I saw in his e-mail .sig lines that that was where he lived.
We never entered into any kind of working relationship but that person told DCS that we had and that he was currently employed by me. The DCS person I talked to suggested that I had hired this person to work for my company (hah!) and that perhaps I simply did not remember him. I told DCS I have no "company" and that I had never hired anyone.
As we spoke I leafed through the papers, seeing the names of the young child and the mother who appeared to be demanding money from this person. As part of the proceedings DCS inquired with me -- his supposed employer -- about garnishing his wages to help pay the child support.
The EMPLOYMENT TERMINATION NOTICE above is only one of the papers I received, and it was included as a "just in case" fallback. DCS assumed that this person was still employed by me but included that card in case I had recently fired him.
I do not know why I got involved in this. Was this person so irritated with me for not wanting to enter into a working relationship with him that he disdainfully listed me as his employer to let me know he remembered? Or did this person simply do so much freelance work that he honestly got my name mixed up with that of someone else who did hire him? The paperwork from DCS suggested this person worked for me at the time -- over a year since the time of our correspondences -- so this person had evidently supplied the information about me quite recently.
It was all very strange, the unease I felt further exacerbated by the fact that an obviously ugly child custody case had somehow lurched out of its confines to try and involve someone only remotely connected to one of the parties.
I dreamed last night I was sleeping in a bed on an airplane that rose to 165,000 feet so as to avoid bad weather at 30,000 feet. I was in First Class (obviously) and was presented with a line graph illustrating how the plane's ascent moved us close to the firmament and to God. Cabin crew and staff assured us that First Class did not get us access to God or to Heaven. I comfortably chose sleep over worries about scraping against a thin sheet of phlegm that lies between between commercial aviation and the icy stratosphere.
I have not remembered very many dreams lately. I connect this one to a Ronnie Hawkins line I've been thinking about lately: "I turned 41, I don't mind dyin'!"
This is just something I felt like doing. Rummaging through my file cabinets in a bottomless attempt to get my paperwork in order I found this 1995 picture of the bathroom sink from my upper east side apartment. Every object, it seemed, had a story underneath it. I set this picture up so you could point your mouse at some of the objects and see the story. This was fun but my arms are weak from typing. I may circle back on this image and fill in the stories behind the rest of the objects.
I just spilled a pot full of pennies from a top shelf down onto the floor. It made a terrific racket.
I heard the upstairs neighbors, probably fast fast asleep the instant before, suddenly scurrying around, madly woken up from peacable slumbers, or maybe peacably woken up from mosquito-infested torpor.
This business, as I know, of paying rent on a pod in a community mausoleum for the living comes with the echos of notice that my 1:30am noises reverberate less predictably but no less reliably than those damn car alarms that used to blast off all through the night.
I woke up feeling motivated and distracted but as the day wore on I felt weathered and confused.
Here is a poem I wrote at the bar tonight while the single alcoholic girls looked at me with a mix of curiosity and selfish disdain (which was mutual):
Mothers Day. I walked toward the window and felt that dark little opening look at me. Like a wedge, a familiar crutch. A feeble crutch. No crutch at all. I heard a radio say that a mom is the backbone of a good man. I laughed: Of what is my backbone made?
For the last few weeks I have been painstakingly scanning hundreds of slides like this one, slides of a random Brooklyn family whose 22+ years of slides turned up at an Astoria thrift shop.
I just woke from a dream and I want to write it down before I forget it.
My father called to complain about some mundane matter regarding his apartment.
I studied his voice, authenticated it, made sure it was real. I listened for his unique southern drawls and hillbilly flourishes.
I said little as he submitted to what he felt was the unique privilige of family that lets the dead call to chat with their living.
My mood on hearing his voice was not unlike those times he called toward the end of his life, drunk as a cowboy, hollering down the line at me about the good times.
I interrupted him to say "I can't understand anything you're saying." His phone was a 50¢ piece of cardboard through which his voice sounded like a stiff wind trying to ram itself through a tiny hole.
I told him I would stop by to see him. Before ending the call I announced "I just gotta say, this is a little weird that you're calling me." He understood. He knew his disadvantage.
When I saw him my mind returned to the circumstances of his death, and to the funeral. Closed casket. The funeral home swore they could dress him up so he'd look good for open casket but we said no. Only in the dream did I regret that decision.
We spoke in his kitchen and I tried to find where, where in your head did you shoot yourself? I couldn't find it. I looked at the back of his head and I studied his face, looking for the bullet holes. The coffin was on his porch but I did not look at it.
At the funeral (the real funeral, not anything in this dream) I felt like that coffin was smiling, smiling in that flat way a container grins when it is completely, soundly shut.
Talk revolved around everyday concerns. He knew most of his things were gone but specifically wanted to know what I did with his phone and answering machine.
He had been away for a while and wanted to get back on track with his apartment and the life he took away.
I was looking for more more info regarding Charley White, the "famous referee" whose burial site I spotted at Calvary last week, when I spotted a provocative headline in a 1917 issue of The Evening Independent, a newspaper from Jacksonville, Florida.
The headline announces "City of Marvelous Light May Soon Be Doomed to Darkness" but offers no detail to back this claim. Instead the headline is followed by a nightime photo of the Woolworth Building taken by one Philip Ossa, a photographer (according to the paper) who spent three months photographing New York at night.
If I read the accompanying paragraph correctly it may be that Mr. Ossa's series of photos was called "City of Marvelous Light" and the headline might indicate that the exhibit was soon to close.
I found no reference on the public Internet to a photographer by the name of Philip Ossa, but (contrary to common assumption) being unindexed on the Internet does not indicate that a person or thing never existed, nor is it a signal one way or the other of said person or thing's cultural significance. I will try for some real research tools at the library or other means. I do not know offhand how unusual night photography was in 1917 but if the pictures survive then I bet they are interesting.
That same paper did have an obit for Charley White, whose reputation seems to validate the "famous referee" headline on his tombstone. When I first spotted that phrase on his tombstone I was reminded of a recent book that covered umpires in Major League Baseball. In an interview the author of that book mentioned that even the most religious baseball fans would have trouble naming one single umpire from anywhere across the history of the game. I would think the same is true of any of the major U.S. sports. But Charley White was a boxing referee whose name appears to have been well-known among pugilists far and wide.
While passing between these two places today I noticed a grave from 1972 with a conspicuous quantity of freshly-placed decorations. I was intrigued by the abundance of grave decorations left at the site of one who had died 37 years ago. Abundant grave decorations are not unusual but they are more common at the sites of the more recently deceased. Such a quantity of markers for someone who died so long ago suggested a story was still alive.
It turns out a story is very much alive. This young man -- Phillip W. Cardillo, 1941-1972 -- was an NYPD officer killed in the line of duty while responding to a fake 911 call at a Nation of Islam Mosque in Harlem. The case was recently re-opened but remains unsolved, and a quick grab of web searches shows that the story is as interesting as I imagined when I spotted the burial site.
Cardillo was a subject of the 2005 book Circle of Six, by former NYPD Detective Randy Jurgensen. The New York Daily News summarized the case in a recent article of April 15, 2009:
THIS SUNDAY, the Blue Knights Law Enforcement Motorcycle Club, Nassau County Chapter X will hold its fourth annual ride in memory of Police Officer Philip Cardillo.
Cardillo, was fatally wounded on April 14, 1972, at the Nation of Islam Mosque No. 7 in Harlem. He responded to a phony 911 call of a cop in trouble.
As the infamous story goes, more than a dozen witnesses were let go because police and city officials feared a race riot. No one was ever convicted of his murder.
Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly re-opened the investigation two years ago.
Last year, more than 150 people participated in the memorial ride.
I just ordered a copy of Circle of Six. I would likely never have known about this story had I not spotted Cardillo's grave at Calvary today.
Another more upbeat find at Calvary today was Charley (also spelled "Charlie") White.
I noticed the words "FAMOUS REFEREE" near the top of the marker of Charles H. White and a cursory web search shows that Mr. White was, indeed, a well-known referee of high-profile boxing matches and a respected part of the pugilist scene. His New York Times obituary is here and a description of the funeral service which ended at Calvary is here.
Patelson Music House, it seems, had been on the verge of shutting down for 20 years before it was announced recently that the store would be closing.
I moved to New York in 1990 and remember a conversation with a fellow sitting next to me at a Carnegie Hall concert in November or December of that year. We talked about music, New York, and among other questions he asked me "Have you been to Patelson's?" I said yes and he quickly added "You know they're closing?"
Ever since that night in late 1990 (it was an Earl Wild concert on November 26, 1990) it seems as if any mention of Patelson Music House was followed by a knowing eulogy presaging the shop's imminent demise. The only embellishment to these increasingly long-in-the-tooth predictions came in the form of follow-up assurances that the place was really going down this time, and that the rumors were really true after all. The rumors may have taken on new urgency following the death of Joseph Patelson in 1992, but the passing of the founder and namesake of the store seems to have had less impact on its business than did this current recession, poor management, and a general consumer trend away from buying books at retail stores.
I looked through my old receipts and was at first surprised to see how few items I seem to have purchased at Patelson's in the past 18 years. I know I made more purchases than these receipts indicate -- I remember buying the Paderewski edition of the Chopin Cello Sonata there, and at least one of the mammoth Godowsky volumes published by Carl Fischer (I bought the rest at Frank Music). Patelson's reputation notwithstanding I find that I never really thought of it as a de facto source for music scores in the way I used to think Tower Records was the most reliable source for classical CDs and records. Tower's physical stores lost out to the Internet but Patelson's had other problems.
Patelson's has been part of my midtown routine since moving here in 1990 but far more often than not I purchased nothing when I visited the place. If I could not find a particular score in the shelves I tended to fear the angry sales clerks to such a degree that I rarely asked them to see if it was in stock.
Some encounters with those clerks were memorable. I asked for a copy of Tchaikowsky's G Major Piano Sonata and was assured with a confidence bordering on rudeness that no such thing existed. I got a similar reaction from a different clerk when I asked for the Dover edition of the Sibelius piano music. "Sibelius? Piano music? There is none." On another occasion I asked for a copy of the "'Trilogy' Sonata" by Philip Glass and the clerk (who seemed to fear modern music) wanted no part of it, saying "I don't know anything about that." I had to ask another clerk to get it for me.
The April 13, 2009, New York Times story describes Patelson's as a "living room" for classical musicians, a description with which I begrudgingly agree. Most times I was there I would see one musician greeting another in an unexpected but not quite surprising meeting at Patelson's.
Some would suggest that the store's abundance of public domain music made it vulnerable to Internet downloaders who grab scores for free off web sites, file-sharing networks, and Usenet, but I find it hard to imagine that these factors made a significant dent in sales. Downloading scores for reference purposes is one thing but actually using them for performance is another order of arts-and-crafts tedium. I have done this myself and would much rather spend $20 on a printed volume versus laboriously printing these scores, hole-punching and collating them, putting them in folders, then dealing with the pages that get torn or go flying around for whatever reason. Printed volumes fall apart, too, but the home-made printouts of lengthy scores are a lot more trouble than just buying published copies.
Where the Internet comes through (whether it's legal or not) is in access to obscure, out-of-print, and orphaned works that are never found at retail stores to begin with.
When I was there last week I overheard a customer saying he was visiting Patelson's having "heard the bad news" and to lament the closing of what he called "the last greatness in New York." I did not say anything to him but I disagreed with his fussy sentiment. The Carl Fischer store at Cooper Union was a far greater shop than Patelson's, not only on inventory but in its earthy, eccentric atmosphere.
I will miss Patelson's. I always gravitated to the Alkan and Liszt sections, gawking at $80 volumes of beautifully engraved Liszt editions, books with hundreds of pages of pianistic effluvia containing only 2 pages of music I might actually want. A similar bin of random "Free Arrangements" and other Liszt obscurities used to exist over at Sam Ash on 47th Street -- oh, is Sam Ash going out of business, too? Rats. Well, you can't browse much at Frank Music but I think you still can browse at the Juilliard Bookstore. Maybe it is time to rediscover the library at Lincoln Center.
Patelson's and Sam Ash seemed always to have some Liszt "Free Arrangements" volumes that sat there, unpurchased for years, like museum pieces to be contemplated. I purchased expensive volumes like those on occasion but for the most part my 4 large shelves of piano music scores do not get supplemented very often any more. I would not say I have every score I might ever need or want but it's a comfortable library. Some of the volumes have been on my shelves since grade school.
If Patelson's was the Living Room for classical musicians then what could replace or improve upon it? In the past I think that Tower Records and HMV were ersatz gathering places for the classical music audiences of this town. Academy Records might be a similar destination today, though I do not make it down to that store often enough to know. Any time I stepped into Patelson's I half-expected to see a musician friend or acquaintance. I can not say that for any other place today.
In the past I have proposed to friends and colleagues a saloon called "Sorabji's Place". Modeled after the great pugilist-themed "Jimmy's Corner" pub on 44th Street in midtown Sorabji's Place would be a classical piano bar. Where Jimmy's Corner has pictures of the great boxers Sorabji's Place would have pictures of the great pianists and a jukebox filled with smashmouth piano music of Liszt, Cziffra, and Alkan; and virtuoso obscurities by Pabst, Scharwenka, and Tausig. The daytime drinking crowd might hear the subdued but complex sound of York Bowen as small LED screens throughout the place show summary information about the composer and the music being heard. I think such a place could work if it is sincere and attracts the crowd that I know is out there -- the crowd that sold out virtually every classical pianist documentary at the Walter Reade Theater several years ago.
Yes, that is what New York needs: Sorabji's Place - A Classical Piano Saloon.
The other day I noticed that a coupon for free Reynolds Wrap posted a few years ago to My Receipts had inspired an outpouring of admiration from web site visitors who happened to find the page. I thought this was a little surprising, maybe even funny, but I made nothing substantive of it except to think wow, people sure do love Reynolds Wrap.
Now I am made aware of a darker side to this enthusiasm for Reynolds Wrap. It seems some nice folks arrive at that page and, lacking any context, they believe they are looking at an actual coupon for a free roll of Reynolds Wrap. They print the coupon and take it to their local Publix or Wal-Mart only to be declined, refused, humiliated, arrested, hand-cuffed and thrown into Guantánamo with other retail terrorists. The coupon is not valid and could not be construed as valid if printed from this site. I never scanned the back side of that coupon but I assume it is there that one would find a bar code or whatever it is that validated the piece of paper as a genuine manufacturors coupon. Without that unique information one might as well present a hand-written page saying "Free Reynolds Wrap."
It is unfortunate that this is happening but I never intended for anyone who spotted that page to think they were looking at a valid coupon for a free roll of Reynolds Wrap. Unfortunately in this case, in the same ways that other knowledge gets warped in these search-throttled times, perfectly sane and sentient people believe whatever a search engine tells them in response to their carefully crafted search query. Some folks suggest the coupon is "FAKE" while others announce that attempting to use this coupon will get you in "BIG TROUBLE", a warning I have a hard time believing.
I can't lie, though. As uncomfortable as the encounters at these Publix and Wal-Mart cash registers might be I have to laugh at knowing that people are printing such utterly non-print-worthy pages from this web site and presenting them to cashiers around the country with the expectation of receiving free Reynolds Wrap. It reminds me a bit of the Pierre Salinger Syndrome, a softly-used term that refers to an incident in which the respected newsman found some bogus documents regarding the crash of TWA Flight 800. The documents were part of a garden-variety Internet hoax but Salinger believed them, waving his print-outs of the documents for all to see.
Few people refer specifically to the "Pierre Salinger Syndrome" any more. When reaching for a punch line to illustrate that reliable information is often hard to find on-line I think armchair pundits opt instead for the more general "I read it on the Internet so it must be true," a bluntness which comprises the Pierre Salinger Syndrome and other examples of bad information looking good simply because a search engine makes it look that way.
His concentration blasted a universe into being. Immediate war he declared among instant extinctions to dry the galaxies of their bitterly different philosophies.
Invisible to history, unknown to poets and popes, his universe is inferred by the soaring, sour squalls of your griping, sublingual mind.
It huddles near his ceiling, follows him from his hole, then scrambles at his ankles like a hungry stray.
A few years ago I bought a box of 75 square feet of Reynolds Wrap and found that the product was defective. The foil was messed up with some kind of odd-smelling, viscous gunk. I made this discovery at 1 in the morning on July 6, 2006, though it appears I actually bought the product over a month earlier on May 31, 2006.
With a late-night dinner in the works I was irate enough about this unusable-looking foil that I felt compelled to bring the matter to the attention of the company that makes it. I tore off a swath of the foil and wrote a 1-page letter which I promptly took to a corner mailbox. I went to to an all-night grocery to buy what ended up being a roll of cheap-o brand-x crappy foil that is almost soft and thin enough to use as tissue.
Returning to my kitchen I put down a sheet of the trusty but mysteriously soiled Heavy Duty Reynolds Wrap and then put several layers of the untrusted brand-x foil on top so as to maximize the thickness of separation between the chicken and the filthy, filthy cookie sheet (it seriously is filthy).
I was annoyed about the defective roll of foil but I honestly bring these matters to the attention of the appropriate parties in the spirit of helping companies and individuals know that there are problems with their product. I am not trying to be an ass nor do I expect anything in return.
Nevertheless, in return for my bringing this matter to their attention the fine people at the Consumer Response Division of Reynolds Wrap sent me this manufacturors coupon for a free roll of Reynolds Wrap, either 75 or 200 square feet. I didn't understand at first why they would offer an option of 75 or 200 square feet. Who wouldn't take 200 over 75 if it's free? I soon found that many stores don't seem to carry the 200 ft. size and I looked at quite a few stores before finding it.
At any rate, when I say there's a lot of love for Reynolds Wrap I am referring to the Reynolds Wrap comment board which is suddenly clocking lots of enthusiastic remarks from site visitors who randomly find the page while looking for Reynolds Wrap coupons.
I basically loath comment boards but recently opened up comments for all my receipts and other parts of this site just to see what happens. I find I am attracted to the disembodied randomness of these things. The incoherent drive-by nature of these things, however, makes divining their substance a matter of reverse-engineering.
A friend was showing me an Eisenhower dollar coin she got in change today and it reminded me of one of the most dumbass things I ever did as a kid. In the 3rd or 4th grade my dad started collecting U.S. Mint sets. Similar to sets issued today by the U.S. Mint, these were annually issued sets of coins in mint condition, encased in a plastic container and comprising all the coinage currently in circulation. I don't remember now if these sets included the above-mentioned Eisenhower dollar but they included the Kennedy half-dollar and the rest of that year's issue of standard coins from penny up to quarter.
I didn't know this Mint Set was anything special. I just thought it was some money. So I swiped a few of the sets from my dad's den and took them to school. I cracked them open and used the coins to buy potato chips and Fanta from the vending machines at school. I might have spent a few dollars in actual coins but the value of the mint condition monies was considerably higher.
When I first learned of my stupidity I had a notion that those coins were worth thousands of dollars but I quickly was relieved of that fear by the laughter that took over my father and mother as they told me I had the world's most expensive potato chips.
What has stayed with me most about this incident was how quickly my thoughts about the matter changed. My innocent childhood mistake suddenly became an alarming debacle. I remembered dropping the coins into the slots of the vending machines. In my mind I repeatedly re-created that moment like one might replay surveillance video of a crime being committed. The simple gesture of dropping coins into a vending machine slot turned into a horrid crime, an abject act of criminal assholery, and I stayed away from vending machines for some time after this happened.
A page from that ASV Yearbook summoned a random childhood memory: We used to drink Cokes out of plastic bags. I thought nothing of it at the time but in retrospect it is something you probably do not see in America. Your Coke was served in a plastic bag if you did not want to pay for the bottle. Some folks would bring their own bottles to stores that sold Coca-Cola or other beverages. If you had no bottle but did not want to pay for one nor be bothered to carry it around then you'd get your Coke in a plastic bag. You might also be forced to get your Coke in a bag if bottles were scarce -- some vendors had no bottles at all.
A cursory web search find that this is common in the Phillipines, and apropos to nothing (though this is the real reason I wrote this) I find it impossible to get this sentence out of my mind:
As to whether it is hygienic or not, most people don't care as long as their thirst gets quenched with the cold softdrink.
That sentence enchants me. In my day-to-day use of English I think "quenched" is not commonly used -- nor for that matter is "thirst" -- and "softdrink" is usually 2 words, not one. The intent of the above sentence was to be helpful but somehow it sounds like a sales pitch -- in the way explanations of cultural idiosyncracies sometimes sound like sales jobs.
We saw a mighty grave at Calvary. Tall, the proud angel looking east, the structure looked close to collapse. The bottom had fallen away, the hillside itself eroded, the inner foundation of the tomb revealed as a buckling thicket of bricks.
A hundred years old and dangerously close to ruin I saw this tomb as a model of vanity and lies.
The complexity we imagine ourselves to be is busy within the language of lies. Reaching back through the generations of a single human being's life I think language itself is a carnival of fibs, a circus of entertainments and vagaries too thick and selfish to remember.
I see myself once here and then there as others see me. As a person who does things, spends his time this way or that, not mysterious as I imagine but puzzling and trapped by slothful poisons. Yes, yes, those things and more as I question quantity of life versus quality, the greed for more years at the backward-reaching expense of their meaning.
I have been looking at human beings in a way that is new to me. All human beings, not anyone I know but arbitrary specimens of human passing through my museum of the present, my showroom of future memory.
We are strange concatenations of matter parading ourselves, exposed, it is impossible to hide the obviousness of what we are, yet uncertainty lingers like the disdain of a stranger.
Sitting on my couch, thinking about baseball, or rather "Base Ball," as Henry Chadwick called it. As I type this the new Yankee Stadium is set to open for its first live game -- an exhibition between the Yankees and the Chicago Cubs (in which Derek Jeter got the first base hit and Robinson Cano got the first home run in the new Yankee Stadium).
My interest in baseball (we call it "baseball" today, Mr. Chadwick, though your biographer got it wrong) has diminished considerably over the last couple of seasons. I still watch games on TV and listen to the games inside my radio but I regard professional baseball as irrationally bloated with money and infested with an outsize sense of its own value to society. In baseball as in so much of modern times I think that today's standards of success -- affluence and media adoration -- will be regarded by future generations as synonymous with gluttony and waste. I recognize that ours is a free market and that money flows as freely as the market will bear but I am nevertheless puzzled by the prestige granted to athletes in our society.
Henry Chadwick's role in baseball history is well-established. He took sports journalism and made it a source for the popularity of the game. This inter-twining of disciplines escaped me until I learned that sports writers are among those who vote players into the Major League Baseball Hall of Fame.
Baseball is a stats-centric sport and because of this I imagined that the criteria for Hall of Fame inductions were more formulaic and not influenced by editorial biases. That is a foolish thought but no more foolish than thousands of other thoughts puttering un-uttered around my mind.
My similarly näive notions of journalistic objectivity were bumped around when, in high school, I learned that newspapers traditionally endorse political candidates. News sources, I thought, were objective purveyors of news and stories about the world, not sculptors of public perception. I was wrong, of course -- reporting and journalism differ in that reporting reports facts in a way that allows journalists to craft a story around it -- but I still regard with suspicion that practice of newspapers endorsing political candidates. I have never been comfortable with journalists taking unobjective positions on matters like voting and public policy. I think it depletes the meaning of journalism, reducing it to entertainment.
The return of baseball also heralds the return of Avis Rental Cars' "Wrestle With God" commercial. I call it "Wrestle With God" because the first several times I saw the commercial I thought the actor who said (in a thick Boston accent) "You guys ready to rent some cars?" was saying "You guys ready to wrestle God?" The apparent allusion to Old Testament (Genesis) Bible verse puzzled me the first several times I saw the commercial.
One of my favorite graveyard finds was Henry Chadwick's baseball-themed tomb at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn. The marker appears to be actively maintained and contains atop its obelisk a giant granite baseball. It is one of the happiest grave sites I've ever seen. The marker is decorated with a catcher's mask and other Base Ball ornaments. On the plaque we see the words "Base Ball," the two-worded name by which the game was known in Chadwick's day. Chadwick did not invent Base Ball but he popularized it through his sports journalism and by inventing the box score, contributing mightily to crafting the public's understanding of the sport.
My own understanding (if we can even call it something as rich as "understanding") of today's sport of baseball is tremendously influenced by what reporters and sports writers say. When talking with friends about baseball I, like many casual fans of the sport, will simply repeat verbatim what one announcer or another said on the radio or television. I like to imagine that my world view is pure, or at least relatively un-polluted by the presumption of media authority, but I know that as far as baseball goes I generally just believe what they tell me. Nothing could be farther from the truth when matters turn to real news. I do not listen to television news so much as I interpret it, peeling away the sensationalism and o
I was scanning more family slides -- this time from yet another random American family -- when I remembered the Thomas family cemetery. It was established in the late 1700s by forebears on my father's side, and today it occupies a remote hillside in rural Tennessee. 
