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27 June 2004
The early 70s -- I'm in my early twenties, Willie Mays has just been traded to the Mets. Watching his first game with
them, on television, against his old team the Giants, I see Mays hit a game-winning home run and I have my instant conversion
experience, suddenly realizing that baseball is, with the possible exception of Texas Hold-'em, the most beautiful game ever
created by human beings.
In the thirty years since then the Mets have cheered and broken my heart many times, but I'm still a fan. I might have
to switch allegiance if Las Vegas gets a National League team this year, but that's a long shot.
When I do finally leave New York, I'll remember Willie's farewell to the Mets, and the game:
"There always come a time when somebody have to say goodbye . . ."
11:51 am pdt
22 June 2004
Cotty Chubb blew into town from Los Angeles yesterday and when it came to dinner plans he had big ideas -- a Path Train
to Hoboken, a small Cuban/South-American restaurant on a quiet side street there, reputed to be miraculous. My spirit of adventure
was more than a match for his, and I met him at the corner of 23rd & Sixth to begin the journey to New Jersey.
After making half a dozen phone calls on his cell -- "Sorry, could you speak up? I'm in New York -- on the street!"
-- so he wouldn't get behind on his call list while traveling underground, we descended to the trains and were soon speeding
under the Hudson River. Hoboken was charming in the early evening light, the people Cotty asked for directions had a small-town
friendliness. We picked up a couple of bottles of rose wine, because the restaurant, called Zafra, doesn't have a liquor license,
then found the place easily enough. We took a table outside, asked the waitress to put one of our bottles of rose on ice and
open the other, and then took a look at the menus.
The dishes offered were bewildering in their variety and strangeness -- vaguely familiar Cuban fare mixed up with Peruvian
specialties, heavy on the spices. We ordered several appetizers and two entrees and then sat back to an extraordinary feast
. . . a torrent of exotic tastes that overwhelmed the senses. A kind of rellenos dish made with hot Peruvian red peppers,
a tamale with a smoke-flavored corn paste and a deeply complicated salsa, a bowl of hotly spiced olives, picante shrimp in
a kind of red mole sauce with chunks of delicious Peruvian potatoes, which taste the way potatoes tasted in one's childhood,
grilled pork strips on skewers, roasted pork with a distinctive seasoning that neither Cotty or I could identify.
We talked about Lynn Randolph's work [see the Essays section for some thoughts about her paintings and some images of
them]. It turns out that Cotty has met her -- danced with her once, memorably, at a party in Houston. The world seemed very
small, very cozy, at the small table on the small street in cozy Hoboken.
In short, dinner at Zafra was swell, actually miraculous. Stuffed and lightheaded from our two bottles of wine, we drifted
back to the Path Train and were wafted into Manhattan again . . . Cotty went off to his hotel and I walked home from Herald
Square, happy I'd been lured off the island for such a treat.
7:40 am pdt
20 June 2004
NEW AMERICANS
Last Thursday I took a train up to my sister's house Upstate so I could see my brother-in-law Simon sworn in as an American
citizen Friday morning. The ceremony took place in a big courtroom at the courthouse in Monticello, New York. There were 23
other people sworn in with him that day, of every color and from all over the world.
Simon was born in Kenya in the days of the colony -- his father was an English settler (married to an American who became
an English citizen.) The motto of his English grade school there was "ANGLUS IN AFRICA STO" -- Latin for "I
an Englishman stand in Africa". In some ways the English colonials could seem more English than the English -- an effort
to keep their sense of national identity intact in the face of powerful exotic undertows. But beneath the veneer an eccentric
persona would usually reveal itself in time, since the British colonies always attracted adventurers and misfits and dreamers
. . . just as the British colonies in North America once did, a fact which helped establish the American character, freewheeling
and improvisational.
My sister met Simon in London after he and his family had moved back there, but Simon wanted to show Libba where he really
came from, and on trips back to Kenya Simon fell in love with it again, and Libba fell in love with it for the first time.
They settled and married there, had two kids, and in time Simon's father and one of his brothers also returned. The undertow
of East Africa is hard to resist, once you've been caught up in it. I've only spent a few months there but I always dream
about going back and always assume I will one day.
Simon did work contracting camps in remote places for international construction projects and documentary filmmakers,
then started his own smoked fish business, specializing in smoked tuna but also producing a superb smoked salmon. The business
became a little too successful for comfort -- because in Kenya the government expects successful entrepreneurs to share the
wealth with the bureaucracy, in ways not strictly required by law.
So a little over twenty years ago, Simon and family and business moved to Upstate New York, struggled through some tough
years and now run one of the premiere smoked fish companies in the nation. Having established his home and grown his business
here, he decided that the time had come to make it official -- which is how he came to be standing in a county courthouse
on Friday, swearing allegiance to the United States Of America, renouncing allegiance to all foreign princes and potentates.
Until the later half of the 19th Century, there was no formal immigration process in America -- people just came, and
after a certain amount of time decided they'd stay, and became citizens essentially by virtue of being here. Massive immigration
around the turn of the 20th Century required more formal procedures and restrictions -- and led to the ceremony we saw on
Friday, which was tremendously moving. At some point in the history of each of my forebears on this continent, the first of
whom arrived in 1690, he or she must have looked around and said, "Well, this is it -- I'm not going back to France or
England or Ireland or Germany." But for new immigrants today the moment is crystallized in a ceremony, and the profundity
of it is concentrated. In a way, it stands for moments in the history of every American family -- even the ones founded by
people who came here in chains from Africa -- and allows us all to get back in touch with the primal American experience .
. . the fact that all of us, even Native Americans, came here from somewhere else.
I heard a story once about an Irish immigrant in the 19th Century who worked as a miner in Montana. He always dreamed
about going back to the old country, and at the very end of his life he was able to -- but once in Ireland he got sick, and
the doctors thought he might not have long to live. He panicked. "If I die," he said, "take me home. Bury me
in Butte."
It's something that just happens -- people become Americans . . . often before they even realize it and in ways that can
never be defined. Seeing a bunch of new Americans reminds me that America is and always has been something we make up as we
go along -- the legacy of our immigrant tradition, and the source of our real glory.
8:18 pm pdt
17 June 2004
With a little luck I could end up arriving in Las Vegas in time for the opening of the new Las Vegas monorail. [See the
Favorite Links section for the official web site.] This new monorail section will link up (indirectly) with the private monorail
that already connects the Mandalay Bay resort, at the southern end of the Strip, with the Excalibur, and make it possible
to ride from there to the Stardust, near the top of The Strip. Future sections will extend the ride all the way to Fremont
Street downtown.
This is going to change the way The Strip can be experienced. The megaresorts are set far apart. Where they bunch up a
bit in the center of The Strip it's possible to walk between several of them, but the whole stretch of The Strip can only
be negotiated by car -- and barely that way. Traffic on The Strip at most times moves at a snail's pace, and parking at each
individual resort takes a lot of time. You can't really casino hop along the length of the boulevard.
But later this summer it will be possible -- and it should be mind-boggling. The big resorts are self-contained playgrounds
and shopping venues -- designed to provide everything you could possibly want under one roof, and so discourage you from leaving.
Now it will be feasible to jump easily from one maelstrom of excess to another -- The Strip will become an indigestible feast
of over-the-top sensual assault.
Will it be fun? Not exactly. Will it be insanely interesting?
Come see me in Vegas and you'll find out soon enough . . .
1:20 pm pdt
16 June 2004
As Iraq moves towards sovereignty on 30 June, whatever that's going to mean, I'm moving towards sovereignty myself. For
the past two months my life hasn't been my own, as the board of my co-op has moved with an almost undetectable speed towards
a vote on approving the buyer of my loft.
You don't really own a co-op loft -- you have all the responsibilities and expense of ownership, but the board has absolute
control over who you can sell it to, when, under what conditions and even at what price. If the loft is your only major asset,
as this loft is my only major asset, and you need to use it, this gives the board absolute control over your life. Given such
control, ordinary people, who act like perfectly reasonable human beings when encountered in the elevator, can be overwhelmed
suddenly with the peculiar seductions of power. They study the shoes of a potential buyer and wonder if they really want a
neighbor who ties his laces with uneven loops.
My board has been considerate of me, and really seems to understand my need to cash out and move on -- while not quite
appreciating the logistics of a transition like this, the awesome complications of scheduling which hinge on their vote and
its timing. I suspect that in the end they will look past my buyer's shoelaces and make a rational decision about the sale.
I'll be free of them, of this place, of Dorktown, of an almost maddening uncertainly and helplessness.
Freedom is not what I'm looking forward to, however. I expect to enlist almost immediately in another form of servitude
-- to work, to the next script, the next film, the next phase of 21st-Century storytelling. I'm reminded of a line from Dylan's
song "Jokerman":
"Freedom -- just around the corner for you,
"But with truth so far off, what good will it do?"
Service is the only real freedom -- and that's the truth.
8:55 am pdt
15 June 2004
In William Gibson's new novel "Pattern Recognition", the heroine Cayce Pollard, a coolhunter, wears a reproduction
MA-1 flight jacket, 1957 pattern, made by Buzz Rickson's, which Gibson describes as a super authentic recreation of the original
-- in a sense MORE authentic than the original because of the fanatical devotion to detail by the manufacturer. He notes that
the uneven seams of the original, the result of sewing the new fabric nylon on machines made to stitch cotton, have been lovingly
copied, even exaggerated slightly, to make the homage that much clearer.
It turns out that Buzz Rickson's is a real company, based in Japan, and that it really does make such reproductions, hard
to find and insanely expensive, with the obsessiveness Gibson so admires.
But Gibson made a mistake. He described Pollard's jacket as black, whereas Rickson's only produced the jacket in green,
since that's the only way the Air Force ever issued it. When Rickson's learned about the mistake, it decided to issue a "Pattern
Recognition" edition of the jacket in black. Gibson's fantasy jacket has thus become real.
This is cool on one level -- not so cool on another. Gibson's failure to remember the color of the jacket was a betrayal
of the obsessiveness he so admires in Rickson's reproductions. In a sense it revealed Gibson as a consumer of Rickson's obsessiveness,
not a participant in it. The jacket figures largely in the novel, in practical as well as psychological ways -- it symbolizes
the heroine's own appreciation of the care devoted to its manufacture and the whole spiritual meaning of repro flight jackets.
"Pattern Recognition" is the most important book written in the 21st Century, bursting with ideas and insights
into the new culture coming into being. But Gibson glances over certain implications of this new culture, can't quite get
his mind -- or his plot -- around them. Somehow the coolness, and deep strangeness, of a Buzz Rickson's reproduction is acknowledged
without being fully appreciated.
It leaves us with a problem. Do we want to wear Cayce Pollard's black Rickson's MA-1, which is, in fact, unutterably cool-looking,
or do we want to wear the original Rickson's reproduction, which is what she and Gibson think she's wearing?
Stay tuned.
10:03 am pdt
13 June 2004
In 1905 the burgeoning American film business was controlled by a group of mostly WASP businessmen and engineers. They
exercised their control through the mechanism of Thomas Edison's dubious claims to key patents in film technology, later dismissed
by the courts. Edison had tremendous financial resources and pursued supposed violators of his patents with lawsuits and extra-legal
assaults by hired goons. Nevertheless the Edison cartel was challenged by a group of exhibitors, mostly recent immigrants,
who were closer to their audiences, primarily urban and largely immigrant. These exhibitors began making their own movies,
whose content proved more popular than the products of the Edison cartel -- not just with American audiences but with audiences
abroad, in the countries the immigrant filmgoers had just come from.
Within about five years the independents had busted the Edison cartel and taken control of the American film business.
In time, the successful independents evolved into another kind of cartel and virtual monopoly in Hollywood, but in the wide-open
years before that happened movies were a wildly democratic and adventuresome medium. These were the years that saw the storytelling
refinements of Griffith, the emergence of Chaplin and Keaton and the triumph of the powerful female presence of Mary Pickford
on screen and in studio boardrooms, a phenomenon not seen since. In some ways, American cinema has been riding on (or regressing
from) the wave of this cultural and artistic explosion for a hundred years. Godard once said that nothing really important
had happened in the art of cinema in the years between Griffith and himself -- and there's a lot of truth in that. Certainly
not much important has happened in the art of cinema since the emergence of Godard in the Sixties. His films from that time
are still being raided for "innovations" and still seem radical. Indeed, a number of big popular Hollywood films
from the 70s, like "The Godfather, Part II" and "Apocalypse Now" are starting to look radical -- which
is even more depressing.
This depression can be countered by remembering and studying the means by which the independents challenged and obliterated
the Edison cartel a hundred years ago. Popular art has an anarchic and unpredictable aspect which corporate managers are always
trying -- and failing -- to harness and exploit. In the process they lose touch with the essential nature of popular art and
thus with the popular audience. The spiritual rot and decomposition of the recording industry and network broadcasting is
plainly writ in the economic bottom lines of those doomed enterprises.
For adventuresome popular artists, this is a good time to be alive -- as long as they realize that the media conglomerates
of today cannot be reformed. Like the Edison cartel of 1905, they must be destroyed -- and as in 1905, the task will be easier
that it looks. Once the audiences of 1905 got a taste of the films made by the independents they could not be persuaded to
patronize the cookie-cutter products of Edison and his gang . . . and no amount of money, no lawsuits or hired thugs could
change the logic of their choice, the logic of their desire.
9:52 am pdt
11 June 2004
THE LAST DREGS
On just about every liquor shelf in just about every home are the untouched bottles, the ones that never get emptied --
the discount-label brandy, the cheap creme-de-menthe. I don't even remember where mine originally came from -- they were gifts,
perhaps, or transferred from an old girlfriend's stash. I know I didn't buy them. I'm also not sure why I kept them. I guess
one thinks they'll come in handy for something one day.
And now, finally, that day has come. I've determined to drink them dry before I leave. It's not easy. The creme-de-menthe
is sickly sweet, the cheap brandy is too harsh and they both have a musty aftertaste. I can only bear a tiny glass or two
before I have to wash the taste of them out with something bracing, like a cold beer,
But I want to drink a few toasts with them to all the moments here I don't remember -- among the overwhelming tide of
those I do remember -- harsh, sickly sweet or musty moments that have left no audible echo behind.
Here's to them all.
9:06 pm pdt
8 June 2004
THE ROAD TO NOWHERE TEST KITCHEN
Many people have written to ask about the legendary Road To Nowhere Test Kitchen.
First -- a little history.
The original Road To Nowhere Test Kitchen was located in Ventura, California. It was designed to exactly reproduce the
cooking facilities available to a single male living in a small, bunker-like studio apartment behind a garage in a California
coastal community.
It had a kitchen unit from Sears which combined a tiny, mini-bar sized refrigerator with a four-burner electric stovetop
and a sink, and it had a toaster oven. It had no other oven and its only counter space was almost completely taken up by the
toaster oven.
The scientists at the Road To Nowhere Institute Of Fine Cuisine and Cooking believed, with a wisdom which time has only
confirmed, that any meal prepared in such a kitchen could be prepared in any kitchen any solvent wage-earning human being
in America might reasonably be expected to have access to.
The success of the meals tested in this facility resulted in the second Road To Nowhere Test Kitchen, located in New York
City. This kitchen precisely reproduced the cooking facilities available to a single male living in an unimproved 70s-era
loft in the center of Manhattan. A small gas range with an oven, a small refrigerator with a freezer, a decent-sized sink
and some counter space expanded the culinary possibilities considerably, and the lamb curry recipe tested and perfected here
has fully justified the Institute's advancing ambitions.
It is this kitchen in which a momentous attempt at home-made Korean dumplings will soon be essayed. Outside observers
are never allowed access to the Institute's testing, but to the thousands around the world waiting for the results of the
latest experiment, I can report that ingredients are being collected, dishes are being washed, counter space is being cleared.
It won't be long now -- not long at all.
9:48 pm pdt
6 June 2004
On 12 February 1944, George Marshall, Chief Of Staff of the U. S. Army, sent the following order to Dwight Eisenhower:
"You will enter the continent of Europe and, in conjunction with the other United Nations, undertake operations aimed
at the heart of Germany and the destruction of her armed forces."
There were other parts to the order, mostly concerned with Eisenhower's chain of command, but the above represents the
only formal operational directive he was ever given -- essentially "invade Europe and win the war." Marshall's disinclination
to micro-manage Eisenhower's campaign resulted from no lack of capacity or ambition on his part. He had hoped that when the
time came FDR would give him operational command of the invasion of Europe -- which would be the greatest combined operation,
the greatest amphibious assault in the history of warfare. In fact, FDR did offer the command to Marshall but said that he
would prefer having Marshall at his side in Washington for the war's duration. Marshall chose to honor that preference, which
more or less explains why Eisenhower became President and is well known today, while Marshall did not and is not.
Eisenhower's campaign in Europe may well be remembered as the most consequential feat of arms in the history of our civilization,
second only perhaps to the holding action fought at Thermopylae by 300 Spartans and assorted allies under the command of Leonidas
in 480 B. C. The Spartans had decided to sacrifice themselves in a hopeless stand against the invading Persian forces, which
may have numbered a quarter of a million men, as an example to the squabbling city states of Greece, to inspire them to unite
to drive out Xerxes and his apparently invincible hordes. It worked.
If Persia had destroyed Greek civilization and its proto-democracies, if Hitler had been able to establish and maintain
dominion over Europe, the world would be a far darker place today than it already is.
Before the battle at Thermopylae, the Spartans, who knew full well that they were all going to die, asked for a memorial
to be erected over their graves with these words carved on it -- "Go tell the Spartans that we lie dead here, in obedience
to our laws." The G. I.s who lie dead beneath the pristine white crosses of the cemetery above Omaha Beach did not ask
for any such memorial to be erected or any such message to be sent. If they had, it would probably have been something just
as simple -- "Tell the folks back home that we got the job done."
At the time, the message was clear enough. When Anne Frank, still in hiding in Amsterdam, heard the news about D-Day she
wrote in her diary, "This is it! The invasion has begun! I might be able to go back to school in September." She
was discovered, taken off to a concentration camp and murdered before that could happen, but a lot of teenage boys not much
older than she was died to give her that moment of wild hope, precious almost beyond imagining.
11:50 pm pdt
4 June 2004
The first news of the Allied landings in Normandy reached the America public just after midnight on 6 June 1944 in a series
of network radio bulletins based on intercepted German short-wave broadcasts announcing the event. Almost immediately, NBC
and CBS began recording the broadcasts from their New York studios on acetate discs, for archival purposes, and kept recording
them continuously for almost 48 hours. These discs have survived and can be had on cassette from companies specializing in
old time radio recordings. Of course I bought both the CBS and NBC series. I liked to listen to the recordings in bits and
pieces but always at the exact time of day they were originally broadcast -- Eastern War Time, as they used to call it.
I just got through listening to the last of the tapes, NBC broadcasts ending at 6pm on 7 June 1944.
The first 24 hours of recordings are mostly bulletins and analyses, interspersed with accounts of official communiques
from Washington and London and eye-witness accounts or wire recordings from journalists who accompanied the initial landings
and then quickly returned to England to file their dispatches. The technology of the time was crude -- no direct transmissions
from the battlefield, unreliable transmissions over trans-Atlantic phone lines, even more unreliable short-wave transmissions.
But the eye-witness accounts are riveting -- well-written reports by real journalists -- and the analyses are informed
and illuminating, even though based on less than complete information. The news programs were varied occasionally by programs
featuring prayers or music, martial and/or religious. Variety programs in the evening were reworked into patriotic rallies.
In the evening on 6 June FDR led America in a national prayer of his own composition.
On 7 June regular programming and commercials began to return to the schedule, and these are fascinating as examples of
a typical day's offering on radio then. Most of the daily soaps and drama programs are as mediocre as those on TV today, most
of the commercials as annoying -- but it all moves at a leisurely pace and has an aura of small-town provinciality which have
been superseded in our noisier and more "sophisticated" age.
All of the recordings, taken together, constitute a wondrous time capsule -- news coverage of an awesome event that seems
to have been crafted by human beings and not celebrity spokespeople for large corporate interests.
4:15 pm pdt
3 June 2004
John Lettiere writes to remind me that on this day in 1864 about 7,000 Union troops were killed within 30 minutes during
the Civil War battle of Cold Harbor in Virginia. Grant had decided, in Lincoln's words, to "face the arithmetic"
-- the brutal fact that he could afford to lose far more troops to achieve an objective than the Rebels could. He had replacements
for his losses, the Rebels didn't -- so if he just kept fighting he would win, whatever the immediate outcome of the individual
engagements. The last series of battles around Richmond, before the checkmate at Petersburg, were the most horrific of the
war -- but it was felt that war-weariness in the North was a greater threat to ultimate victory than even massive Union losses,
so Grant did what it took to get the war over.
A very similar thing happened at the end of the Second World War in Europe, after Eisenhower's armies had entered Germany.
The outcome of the war was certain, but there were still large intact units of German fighting men in the Hurtgen Forest region,
and Eisenhower took enormous Allied losses to defeat them quickly in the very difficult terrain, not all that dissimilar to
the Wilderness region where Grant and Lee had their horrific final engagements.
None of these battles is much remembered today. Eisenhower didn't mention the Battle Of Hurtgen Forest in his memoirs,
even though it was one of the toughest and costliest of the war. But these battles had no strategic and little tactical drama
-- just the horror of relentless killing on a grand scale. Perhaps societies cannot afford to remember such battles, if they're
going to keep war viable as an instrument of policy. In fact, they are the battles that should never be forgotten.
10:42 am pdt
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