Archive for September, 2006
.. "In the Mind’s Eye." - (Hamlet: Act I, Scene I…
September 30, 2006..
“In the Mind’s Eye.”
- (Hamlet: Act I, Scene II).
.
Todd Groesbeck–you know him–has launched a new blog about painting, Gesso Just So. Go see a lot of his work. I’m very happy he’s doing this. He’s a serious painter–I will be in regular contact. He does beautiful work.
He also has a website.
“Et tu, Brute!”–(Julius Ceasar Act III, Scene I),
Vanx
. "He was a Human." I took copious notes at “Back…
September 29, 2006.
“He was a Human.”
I took copious notes at “Back to School Night” at my daughter Lydia’s school. She’s in second grade. I didn’t take notes on what the teacher said. Instead, I copied the words of the prophets scrawled on the lined paper stapled to the wall. These words were supported by impossible-to-reproduce glyphs and diagrams. The spelling was sublime.
For your edumacation:
Do not spit on electrical things–Pat N.
My feeling is sad because of a mustard attack—Lydia
How Do We Use Math?:
1) I cut up my waffles—Thomas C.
2) Thought about head size*—Lydia
3) Watching the time—Linnea
My feeling is happy. Last summer I was cutting a bush. Sumbutty was in the bush. It was Willam H. He was a human. He was digging a hole. He was pertected by a piece of wood. I was happy because I did’t cut him.—Pat N.
My name is Lydia and I am 7. My very, very favorit food is pasta because I can put chesse on it. Turquz is so, so prity. I have two OLDER sisters aaaaaa! I will play socer!!! And I Love my banana bike. I H wen people make fun of peopel and I am funny.–Lydia
________
Notice: Henceforth Pat N. shall be referred to only as Baba Pat N.
*Perhaps her old man’s?
Vanks
. Allegory of Lower Manhattan . I finished my t…
September 28, 2006.
Allegory of Lower Manhattan
Allegory of Lower Manhattan
.
I finished my triptych last night. The paintings, which are all 20 inches high, should be arranged horizontally, but Verb-Ops is a vertical.
V V-O
. Blown-Off by Greatness A three-part series on c…
September 27, 2006.
Blown-Off by Greatness
A three-part series on chance encounters with giants in the fields of art, popular music, and space travel.
PART 3: “We have a problem!”
I interviewed two Apollo astronauts as a cub reporter—Pete Conrad and Jim Lovell. I completely embarrassed myself with the latter when I asked him what it was lik
e to walk on the moon. The interview had nothing to do with space, so the question was completely inappropriate. The whole thing could have been avoided.
In my defense, this happened in 1983, years before Lovell’s book, “Lost Moon,” and the Apollo 13 movie. Characteristically, he answered me as if he were still in the Air Force and being interviewed on the radio by a civilian journalist (throughout the interview, he kept saying things like “outstanding!” and “Roger!”). “Well, you might remember,” he said politely, “that we had a little trouble up there and had to turn around and come home.”
Oh. Right. You were on that one.
I kind of let myself down there. You see, when I was a kid, I was absolutely obsessed with the space program leading up to the moon shot. I remember reading a book my dad got for me at a Gulf station that explained the mechanics of the Saturn V rocket. Of course it also had a detailed diagram of the workings of the Lunar Excursion Module (LEM), the twisted arachnoid heap that would actually land on the moon. The book had biographies of Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins. I remember reading it on my Aunt Ches’s couch. I can still see the pictures.
As it turned out, I was at a Boy Scout Jamboree in Idaho when the first moon landing occurred. They marched us one night to a field with a drive-in theater-sized screen set up. First, we sat through Nixon giving us stiff little televised shout-out on the occasion of our big national camping trip. Then they showed clips of the moon landing. Re-runs. I was really starting to loose it for the Boy Scouts. Finally there was a live performance by Up With People. I sulked back to my tent.
My enthusiasm for the space program waned after 1969. I guess most people would have a hard time naming the crews of any flight other than Apollo 11. On the other hand
, only a select group of us would ask an astronaut a stupid question like, “What was it like to walk on the moon?”
When I saw Ron Howard’s Apollo 13 more than ten years after my interview with Lovell, all my enthusiasm for the Apollo program rushed back. I even read Lovell’s book, which was re-titled “Apollo 13,” in paperback. As soon as Lovell became Tom Hanks, everyone remembered him fondly. And I felt retroactively mega-stupid. I had to make it up to him somehow.
I had my chance in Chicago sometime in the late 1990s. Lovell was speaking at an industrial controls systems exhibition in the giant McCormick center. I brought my copy of his book and sat near the back of the hall where I listened to him talk about oxygen tanks. Clicking around with some beta version of PowerPoint, he didn’t look much like an astronaut. He looked like some guy from Honeywell, or Johnson Controls, most of whom are ex-military and say thing like “outstanding!” and “Roger.”
After Lovell’s talk, I shot down what I determined would be best aisle to get to the stage exit fastest. I arrived at my destination just as he got to the bottom of the stairs where he was greeted by some handler-types from exhibition management. Waving my press pass around, I bullied up closer. I was all set to interrupt him while he was speaking, as I have done to CEOs and governors, invoking my status as a working journalist. Rather than nailing him with some kind of probing question about fourth quarter earnings or his stand on emissions controls, however, I was set to ask him for his autograph and to tell him about how much I love space.
Lovell’s radar impressed me. He locked in earlier in my approach than Larry Bossidy or Dick Cody ever did. He had this excellent roll move where he turned and grabbed two of his 
handlers, making it look like a congenial arm-around-the-shoulder buddy routine. But I knew better. I knew that he had succeeded in establishing a human shield. With his arm around these men, he moved quickly into an open freight elevator. I had seconds in which to act.
“Mr. Lovell! Hi!,” I said, darting toward the big elevator as the door began closing. “I don’t know if you remember me, but I wrote a little story about when you invested in that…”
No good. Lovell closed his keepers around him just as the doors of the elevator shut completely. I caught a sly smile from a man who was used to squeaking by on close calls.
Standing with my mauled paperback, looking at the cold grey doors of the freight elevator, I listened, crestfallen, as astronaut Jim Lovell had lift off.
. Blown-Off by Greatness A three-part series on c…
September 26, 2006.
Blown-Off by Greatness
A three-part series on chance encounters with giants in the fields of art, popular music, and space travel.
PART TWO: “Hey There, Little Insect!”
Jonathan Richman is the progenitor of American punk rock. His band, the Boston-based Modern Lovers, fused what was truly great about the Velvet 
Underground –the garage part—with a kind of naïve fun that squashed any possibility of pretension. This resulted in a kind of pure, positive energy.
Original members of the Modern Lovers left after their landmark first record to join Talking Heads and The Cars, but Richman kept going, reforming the band and performing solo—sometimes impromptu on sidewalks. His repertoire over the years has branched out from the early punk stuff, such as “Road Runner”, to rockabilly, doo-wop, and kids’ songs for adults, such as “I’m a Little Dinosaur” and “Ice Cream Man.” He has written peons to Paris and to dancing at lesbian bars, and has even recorded a brilliant country music record, on which the great Buck Owens plays guitar. You may remember Jonathan as the strange chorus/minstrel in the film Something About Mary.
I really got into Jonathan Richman while working at a summer camp for developmentally disabled kids. I was involved with the music program there, which included a concert for the parents when they came on Saturday mornings to pick up their kids. We’d gather the group of about 60 campers together, grab guitars and work out on “Blitzkrieg Bop” by the Ramones, “I Fought the Law (and the Law Won),” a Bobby Fuller song popularized in the 70s by the Clash, and “Ice Cream Man” by the Modern Lovers. Jonathan Richman fit right in at a camp that goes nuts with fun music. Every kid sang loud and loved the Lovers.
Years later I went to see Jonathan play in a small basement club in Bloomfield, NJ–a perfect venue. I ventured backstage before the show, hoping to meet him. I saw him, but he was sitting in a circle with the b
and. It looked like a pre-gig meeting, so I left it alone. The show started soon after. Jonathan almost made it through his second song when he heard a kid yelling, “play some Doors, man!,” upon which he turned around and signaled to the band to stop playing. He grabbed the mic and said, “No way, man.” He left. He did not come back.
It occurred to me that Mr. Sunshine might be a bit of a pain in the ass.
The second time I went to see him was at the old Ritz in New York. It was a bigger show, but the Ritz, an open dance hall, was a tremendous venue. My friend Gil and I arranged to meet my brother-in-law, Mike, at the Cedar Tavern before heading over to the show. Well, Mike showed up with—now get this—Jonathan Richman’s cousin! She and Mike worked together in a lab in Stony Brook on Long Island. She had come along to see the show, but she was also there on family business. She had been delegated to convince Jonathan to come to another cousin’s wedding.
“He’s kind of a pain in the ass,” she confided.
So what? This time I was definitely going to get backstage and meet him. He couldn’t be that bad, I thought—a guy whose music had brought so much joy to my world would certainly be happy to meet me. This was going to be great!
We headed to the hall and went right back to the stage door. Jonathan’s cousin poked her head in. Then she turned back around: “They said we can come back!” So in we went—Gil, the six-foot blacksmith; Mike the stone cold Irish biologist; Jonathan’s cousin; and me, Slip Mahoney, right up front. Suddenly, outta nowhere,
the star strode forward. He stopped, jumped back, and landed in a spread stance, his oddly muscular arms pointed downward, palms forward. “No,” he said, confronted by his cousin’s entourage. “No way!” He stomped back behind a big black curtain into another room.
His cousin followed as Gil, Mike, and I, somewhat shaken, perused the healthy California-style backstage catering. I sat on a couch next to a man who looked like Sonny Bono (he’d turn out to be the drummer, and his entire kit would be just a single red snare drum). Jonathan’s cousin soon walked meekly from behind the curtain.
“He’s not coming out,” she said. I must have looked dejected. “Would you like an apple,” Sonny Bono asked me, offering a red one with a distinct “here we go again” roll of the eyes.
Jonathan Richman–Sproul Plaza, Berkeley, Summer 1981
_________
Tomorrow: Part 3–We Have a Problem!
. Blown-Off by Greatness . A three-part series on …
September 26, 2006.
Blown-Off by Greatness
.
A three-part series on chance encounters with giants in the fields of art, popular music, and space travel.
PART ONE: Nothing if not critical.
Robert Hughes is my favorite art critic. He’s a big, brusque, Australian whose work indicts all that transgresses in the contemporary art world. He made a name for himself pillorying the likes of Julian Schnabel and Jeff Koons as art critic for T
ime Magazine, and he has written several landmark books. One of these is a comprehensive history of American Art that was made into a series, narrated by Hughes, on PBS.
He also authored “The Shock of the New,” a very influential book (and PBS series). I never read it. I have, however, read his monograph on Frank Auerbach at least three times.
Auerbach, a London-based protégé of Lucien Freud’s and Francis Bacon’s who paints differently and better than both of those more famous artists, creates dense, expressive, and distinctive paintings. The Hughes book gets into Auerbach’s process only as much as needed to describe the artist’s influences and illustrate his work. It details how for ten years Auerbach painted the same model, EOW, over and over and over again. Auerbach has also painted his neighborhood obsessively for decades.
There are great color prints of Auerbach’s work in the book, as well as a wonderful black and white photo of the artist’s studio—a big room in Camd
en Town caked and hung with anthills and stalactites of dried paint. Hughes’ book, which includes a charcoal portrait Auerbach made of the author, directly addresses the painter’s soul. I approach it as one might approach one’s personal Rosetta Stone.
OK. So I’m not always carrying the book around with me, but I was one spring afternoon in Greenwich Village when I saw Robert Hughes walking down the block, carrying dry cleaning in plastic bags over his shoulder. I was with my friend, Michele, also a Hughes fan.
“Look,” I said. “Isn’t that Robert Hughes?” He’s an enormous man. It was unmistakably him. “Yeah,” she said. “You should invite him to your show!” (I had an opening later that evening in a dowdy café nearby.) “But he’s a famously cranky bastard,” I said. “He’ll laugh at me!” Michele told me not to be a woos, but I was already running down the street.
[Cranky is an understatement. Linda, a friend of mine from college, owns a women’s hat shop in Soho. She says Hughes came by once and sat in the corner of the shop while his friend tried on hats. He scowled and anti-socialized to the extent that Linda felt like an unwanted customer in Hughes’ shop. Some time after my encounter with Hughes, he got into a horrific auto accident in Australia. He managed to survive--managing, also, to turn the entire continent of Australia against him. Such was the brutality of his wrath and the relentlessness of his legal onslaught.
He’s very cranky.]
I ran up to this gargantuan character that afternoon as he strode, smiling in gym shorts and a T-shirt under his bags of suits. “Mr. Hughes, Mr. Hughes!” I called. He kept walking fast, smiling as if to say, “To suck up, one must keep up.” So I did.
“Mr. Hughes, I just wanted to tell you I am an enormous fan of yours.” I was trying hard to catch my breath. “I really like your book on Frank Auerbach—as you can see my copy of it here has been absolutely mauled. You describe his work beautifully.”
Hughes looked at me and smiled quite broadly without slackening his pace. “I’m surprised that an American would have any idea who Frank Auerbach is,” he said.
This kind of knocked the wind out of me. But I persisted.
“Oh, but I know him very well,” I said. “Thanks to you! I’m a painter myself. I guess you’d say Auerbach is a kind of painter’s painter, huh?”
Hughes shook his leonine head and started laughing at my trite observation. “As a matter of fact,” I continued, perhaps insanely, “I’m having an opening at the Bell Café tonight. Here’s a card.” I handed him an invitation—it featured a still life of mine with a skull and a rayfish hanging from a hook. The obligatory ealry career homage to Chardin.
He took the card and looked at it, nearly roaring in congenial/dismissive laughter. That night I sat down with a beer next to Michele at the Bell Café. “So did you talk to Robert Hughes?” she asked. “Is he coming?”
“Yes,” I said, “and no.”
__________
Tomorrow: Part 2– Hey There, Little Insect!
Photo of Robert Hughes by Joyce Ravid
Painting: Portrait of EOW, Frank Auerbach
Sign On! Via Stephanie
September 23, 2006Sign On!
Via Stephanie
. My Long Strange Trip With The Incroyables . When…
September 19, 2006.
My Long Strange Trip With
The Incroyables
.
When double session football practices put my 5’3” body in the hospital with pneumonia at the beginning of my freshman year of h
igh school, I figured out that it was time to get serious about the guitar. Believing I had very little time to lose, I decided that the four-string variety constituted the fast track–learn a few scales and find the funky beat. Fatback chords only. I set my mind to it, and by sophomore year I was walking ballast for an outfit that would one day call itself The Incroyables.
As it turned out, two of the guys in the band were also on the football team. One of them, Toby, went beyond blurring the line between jock and freak. He obliterated it. The other one, Tom, was basically a jock and the rest of us, Larry, Marc and myself, were pretty solid freaks. All in all we were cool, even though we originally named the band after a Grateful Dead song—Uncle John’s Band. I forget why. We went heavy on Bob Dylan, Neil Young, and The Band in those early days, but we played no Grateful Dead as a matter of policy. It remains a personal policy. Let’s face it–life is too short.
Flash forward twelve years: We are playing the college circuit, doing business as The Incroyables. We pronounce the band’s name as if it were an English word—Toby got it from a comic book that featured a French Canadian stevedore. Tom, the singer, is gone, and Roberts and Joe have joined us on saxophone and keyboards respectively. Our repertoire spans Bruce Springsteen to Steely Dan, inclusive, with a smattering of original material. We feel we’re ready to up our game by kicking off a tour of the roadhouses of the Mid Atlantic states. Hey, we’ve already opened for the Good Rats, who typically open for the Grateful Dead! Sure, this presents a policy issue, but our hardcore fans (whom, of course, we secretly wish would stop following us around) assure us that two degrees of separation from The Dead is a good thing.
Cut now to our hero: I am lying on a makeshift bed at a dive called Dave’s Place in Dallas, PA, where we we’re playing through the weekend. Dave’s Place actually looks half road and half house. The proprietor tends to walk around in his bathrobe. He’s heavy and his legs have some kind of skin condition that he tells us is “from nerves.” Dave warned us on the first night about “a house full of Seventh Day Adventists who won’t like your music” next door to the bar. He is, in fact, a pretty nervous guy. It’s early Sunday morning, and we’re kind of lucky to be alive, given that our manager, Ralph, ordered the waitresses thigh at the Buckhorn Diner out on the highway the night before. And there was an incident involving a local cat who looked and dressed like Fidel Castro circa 1959 in the diner parking lot after that. We had to talk that guy down, but, frankly, it was the waitress who scared me.
Anyway, I am sleeping on a trestle-like structure formed by alternating barstools with backrests until Marc, the drummer, gives me the news.
“Rick, geddup.”
“Marc, go-way”
(The rhythm section is tight.)
“No, you gotta geddup. Because Toby and Ralph got naked and drove the van off the cliff. The Seventh Day Adventists already called the cops.”
I’m up and out the door with Marc, a rather enormous guy who nowadays plays in a biker band. I find that, indeed, the front wheels of the Van are hanging over a precipitous drop into gray bracken and probably worse. This time Toby and Ralph have gone too far. At least they’re dressed by the time Marc and I join them. We kind of push the van, grabbing it from the sides, as Ralph steers it, sitting behind the wheel. We get it up just as the cops arrive. Toby proceeds to channel a perfect Eddy Haskell to the talking cop’s Mrs. Cleaver
Cop: “The people next door say somebody’s naked here, son.”
Toby: “Well, as you can see, officer, we’re all dressed. In fact, we’ve been out here all morning fixing the van. We had a problem but it’s fixed now. Thanks for coming by!”
Cop: “Well. OK, then.”
The cop keeps his stare fixed on Toby as he walks backward, hands on belt, and gets in his car. He backs it out of Dave’s driveway and rolls up the road. His license plate says that I have a friend in Pennsylvania. It is late September.
Epilogue: We played one more night at Dave’s and blew whatever money we’d netted by the end of the weekend on two cheap roadside hotel rooms. I passed out in one of them rather early. I was also the first one awake the next morning. Half the band was sprawled unconscious around the room. I noticed a large, freshly rendered soap-on-mirror mural featuring Chilly, our sound engineer, and Roberts, our saxophone player, in an unspeakable act. It was heavily annotated in soap writing—the so-called “painted word.” I looked closely to see whether guitar tech Weeping Chimp had actually signed his work before I collapsed into an empty chair.
It was time to get serious about journalism.
Vanx
. Love and Theft (An open memo to my editor) To: …
September 16, 2006.
Love and Theft
(An open memo to my editor)
To: Art Brutwieler
Editor
Today’s Working Chemist
Washington, DC
From: Vanx Verb-Ops
Pharma Desk
Edison, NJ
RE: Our Bob Dylan Problem
Hi Art,
You may have read in yesterday’s NY Times that there is some controversy over Bob Dylan’s apparent lifting of lines from the verse of Civil War poet Henry Timrod.
W
ell, the problem is hitting a little closer to home. It seems Mr.Tambourine Man has also made “allusions” to several of my recent “Insight” editorials in TWC!
Here is one example–
“Well, the world of research has gone berserk,
Too much paperwork”*
Shall we alert legal?
Vanx
*From “Nettie Moore” on Bob Dylan’s recent album, Modern Times, Columbia Records 82876 87606 2/Sony BMG Entertainment © 2006
*Verb-Ops, Vanx, “Frankenstein Goes to the Circus” TWC, May 1, page 124
