Memorial Eurythmics

I attended a zoom memorial tonight for the inimitable Buddy Fox, a true stalwart of the NewYork music scene and a friend and supporter for many years.  It got me thinking-- reminiscing, in the true spirit of memorial services-- afterward watching YouTube footage of various events he produced and organized with the greatest enthusiasm and spirit.  These people who dedicate themselves to the arts for sheer passion are of a dying breed. 

It occurred to me on Thursday that the death of John Lennon, 42 years ago, was a sort of wake-up call for my generation.  Like the assassination of JFK, we all remember where we were.  In 1963 I was a little young to sense the generational significance... but in 1980, the shooting at the Dakota was like a massive loss of innocence. 

Of course, the pre-internet spread of news was slower and the moment of apprehension maybe more memorable.  I was at my job in a highbrow art gallery and of all people my mother called to tell me the news, knowing I'd be devastated.  At the time I worked in an Upper East Side townhouse and took the call in the downstairs kitchen-- on a black rotary wall-phone. The kitchen was visible from the street-- it was a huge vintage 1940's/50's room with the classic red and white vinyl floor-tile and antique, rarely used appliances.  It was like a movie set, and several film directors rented the house out for shoots.  I remember the future Mrs. Spielberg did a romantic comedy there; although they paid for the downstairs rooms, I was allowed to keep working, and I somehow bonded with the actress. She had a nude scene and sat with me on a daybed, between takes, shivering and wrapped in a blanket while we drank coffee.  They also borrowed my old Armstrong silver school flute for a scene... I remembered this all these years later, because it happened close to the time of Lennon's death. 

On that December afternoon I was first disbelieving then inconsolable when my mother phoned; she was still beautiful then, and sympathetic.  Surely I had not yet broken her heart and become a full-time bassist in LES clubs. She knew I'd come across John many times-- in the club he supported, in his home where I visited his neighbors.  We in the city took his presence for granted.  Yes, there were photographers on Central Park West and 72nd Street but for the most part he lived like any New Yorker-- shopping, walking, eating out, etc.  People gave him his freedom from celebrity.  New York was like that in former days.  On December 8, 1980, the news spread quickly-- not instantly like today-- and people began to gather in dazed grief outside the Lennons' home. It was the saddest day in the city... and there we were at the epicenter of a generational wound. 

It occurred to me today that the sorrow of that killing may have had something to do with my commitment to music-- as though one could somehow remedy a tragedy by following a path. I moved shortly thereafter into a loft apartment in a converted factory building... and I felt forever changed, redirected;  it had been a kind of coming-of-age.  The image of that vintage kitchen in the townhouse on 92nd Street (where I met people like Claus von Bulow and Gregory Peck) is forever linked to the sad news.  Time-stamped.

My son and I laughingly confessed to one another that we'd secretly binged on Sex in the City episodes during the pandemic.  I'd shunned this kind of television long before, but I was so homesick for my city during quarantine that I obsessively trolled the Manhattan-Before-1990 site, and watched almost any film with vintage scenes of New York as it was, with the Towers watching over from downtown.  This is the version my son recalls; we spent a year or so of his childhood looking at apartments-- seeking a permanent home, exploring neighborhoods and breathing in the air of old rooms.  We surveyed our home-island from the roof Observatory of the South Tower and sneaked into Windows on the World a few times where I knew a guitar-playing waitress.  

So 9/11 was the second loss of innocence of my life.  My son was only 11, had been to the post-Lennon Dakota for a playdate, but we both felt a sort of cement-bond here, in the tragically sad widowed version of New York.  Things heal, but loss remains like a scar, no matter how many new buildings have changed the skyline and face of the city.  They distract but do not replace.

After the memorial tonight I remembered the also-inimitable Stan Bronstein, who played saxophone in Lennon's New York band, and passed away some years ago.  I was lucky enough to share stages with so many of these fallen heroes of the music scene, many of which were 'orchestrated' by Buddy.

I'm reading World's End by Upton Sinclair.  At the beginning the protagonist, more than 100 years ago, is studying the Dalcroze method of Eurythmics-- an academic and obsolete unique approach to music education.  Thinking back, recalling not just the memorial speeches but the vanished dazzle of the local New York music scene, I feel a little Dalcrozean-- brown-edged vintage, 'on-the-shelf', like a dusty box of souvenirs and old postcards.  I remembered how once I tried to keep up a column where I reviewed $1 cds-- for the surprise, for the back-ended discovery.   There were bins of these-- mostly demos and overlooked efforts, but occasionally I found something-- some gem among the proverbial garbage and flowers.  The shops are gone, for the most part.  Instagram and Tik Tok have their own popularity analytics...  anything can make the statistics today.  

But we are all changed since the Lennon days.  Maybe we were punished for the freedom he was allowed to wander publicly, unprotected.  We were taught some kind of lesson.  But celebrity without instagram, etc... well, it seemed a little more tolerable, a little more human.  One had to earn it.  Not to mention that fame and notoriety were a little more separate... artists were more original and unique... even comedy seemed better.  

As we age, our memories are less accurate; it took a roomful of people to describe the deceased tonight and still we did not do him adequate justice.  Thank goodness most of us can recall the landscape we find in old photos-- and can honor musicians not for what they are but what they were.  Many of them are still here in the city-- the scarred and human version that remains in my mind and heart and will not necessarily rest in peace. 

Twinning

The other night I watched a movie called The Hot Rock with Robert Redford and George Segal and a slew of other vintage actors some of whom are no longer with us.  What held my attention most of all were the getaway scenes-- the driving, the reels of 70's New York City through the car windows-- the storefronts and bank names long deceased-- the PanAm building, the concrete corridors as they had been in the years I grew up.  There was a solidity to New York.  Even the skyscrapers were part of an architectural profile-- they stood out, they raised the skyline, but they were part and parcel.  They spoke 'city'.

In one or two scenes you could see the World Trade towers--- they were maybe not quite complete when the film came out... but this was downtown-- the world of finance and headquarters-- it was like a little island of its own, downtown... they were a symbol of future, of Internationalism.  

I remember so well the building of the Towers.  I'm old enough at this point to even remember the Verrazano bridge construction... but the Towers-- we criticized them, we dissed them... and by the time I finished college they were a fixture.  It was their version of New York that welcomed me after my months in Italy and again after graduation, when I came 'home'. On the bicentennial I celebrated them, not far from the tall ships, and walked from the Seaport to Battery Park, all the way up to Harlem. Just now I remembered I was with a Hungarian professor of philosophy-- an odd date-- but I felt a little patriotic and urban-savvy.  

Most of my 1970's city existence took place on lower floors--- study buildings, libraries, museums, my little ground-level studio, the subways and buses, rock clubs.  I worked in a gallery and was given an office of fairy-tale proportion in a grand townhouse with high ceilings and an arched window that looked out on other historic brownstones and mansions.  I felt like a princess.

In those days we did international business with Letters of Credit-- ancient banking instruments that insured payment upon evidence of shipping a painting or sculpture.  Many of the relevant institutions were headquartered in the Towers-- the shipping company, the financial offices.  I'd take the C train downtown to Cortlandt Street, into the cavernous lobby with a mall's worth of shops, before we had malls in Manhattan. There was a B. Dalton bookstore where I'd browse, a cafe where I'd grab a salad and coffee, and then upstairs to do my banking... into the elevators which clogged my ears. The shipping company was a seedy counter and desks with paperwork... but the bank... it was like a soundproofed heaven-- the window view spectacular.  I was young enough to be allowed to linger... another world there... the quiet, the altitude was like an amusement park thrill.  Like a holiday.  Give me your young and your ambitious... you can work here, we embrace you.

When I travelled and returned,  the sheer height of them beneath the plane was amazing.  The twin thing-- like sentinels.  Not many pairs of things in New York-- yes, the El Dorado, the NYPL library lions... but here they were-- anchoring the island... shapes of things to come.  We trusted them.  They were fortified and record-shattering. They were permanent future.  Years later we began to gig annually in the plaza.  I took my son; we visited the rooftop and held our breath.  My son had a little camera and photographed the Towers.  A fellow musician waitressed at Windows on the World... I occasionally visited her just to cop a view.  

We all adopted these buildings with great affection once we got over the resistance of their newness.  They were spectacles and spectacular.  They were symbols and they housed all kinds of things and people... I hung art there, sat in on meetings, saw gold and jewels in a vault, ate and drank... and mostly just inhaled the magical vista that both miniaturized and amplified my city.  It was like a spell... an architectural holiday.

For 20 years we have watched over and over the unimaginable horror of September 11th; it is compelling and terrifying.  We mourn, we grieve... all our lives changed on that day.  I have spent many pages listing the personal anguishes, describing what it was like standing beside the smoldering wreckage with small children silenced.  We've written novels, stories, songs... poetry.  The city has moved on; a whole generation of adults do not remember life before 9/11. It seems incredible-- the way someone dies in our life and we think we cannot go on... and then we do. 

No matter how many memorials, how many monuments and museums... there is nothing that does justice to the strange magnificence of what was there.  The way even the toughest of us old fucks-- we grew to love this place, these twins of solidity.  It was a vision-- a city's worth of people there, of activity... of breath.  The sealed-off world of prosperity and future which erupted into war... the people-- they brushed by us, shared elevators... and then vanished in the ash.  We breathed their cremated flesh and bone. Punished like some biblical idol-worshippers and sinners?  I still cannot make sense of it... the message, the lesson.. a foreshadowing of some massive apocalypse... the loss of innocence, of trust... ? We will go on, some of us; we will remember, yes, and we are forever changed.