Death of the Cool

Long ago in the city I had a chaste affair with a client of the art gallery where I worked.  It was sponsored and encouraged by my boss and ended when he went back to Greece. He left me a tasteful Tiffany bracelet the value of which far exceeded the sum total of all my possessions at the time.  So I returned it-- and with the proceeds I bought a great raincoat and a Husqvarna Sewing Machine-- absolute top-of-the-line with a set of fancy stitch cams and multiple accessories.  It was white metal, weighed a ton; at the time I made things and this was like the Porsche of equipment. I sewed quilts galore... wedding presents and baby gifts-- pillow, comforters... I cut up childhood dresses and patched them together; I amassed Liberty handkerchiefs and thrift-shop scrap bags. It was my companion... it welcomed me after work and kept me company through the nights I waited up for whichever musician I was living with at the time. I couldn't wait to get home to it.

Like any well-made machinery, it required maintenance.  When I took up rock and roll in earnest, I neglected it. Decades. At some point after 9/11 I discovered it was self-oiling and failed from lack of use, so I frantically searched repairs. Of course the obvious shops were not in my budget.  I instead went exploring the fashion district and came upon a tiny sliver of a storefront chock full of old machines. One had to sidestep inside down a narrow hallway to reach a worktable/counter behind which was a high wall of shelving stacked with hundreds of machines-- tagged, untagged-- all varieties.  A small, elderly Chinese man with little English greeted me and when I wrote out the brand name, he lit up.  $30, he said. Favorite. Two week.  So I lugged the thing on three subways to 27th Street and confidently left it in what I was sure were his competent hands.

You're crazy, said my boyfriend at the time.  The guy is a mechanical disaster. No, no, I insisted.  He is a genius. He has psychic diagnostic powers and magical hands. Two weeks later I called the number he wrote down on a crumpled scrap of Chinese newsprint and after about twenty rings he picked up, told me he needed a part and it would be another two weeks-- maybe another $20.  This went on... I was in and out of town; I let it go.  I prayed to the Swedish and Chinese gods.

Eight months later, I collected it, paid $60 cash, got it home to find it only sewed in reverse. Well... my Swedish neighbor upstairs was so overjoyed to see his own country's brand, he borrowed it and swore he'd get it going. I left it up there for years.  He actually fixed my black raincoat-pocket and other things.  He died several years ago; it sits now in my closet, waiting-- neglected. The Chinese repair shop is now a luxury high-rise. 

Yesterday someone posted photos of me at a glam rock show wearing a purple satin blouse. I remember how Alan begged me to dress for this one performance where I unfortunately discovered that guitar straps slip right off of satin; it was a rough gig. I'd gone to my friend Jayme's on the UWS to borrow it.. she had closets filled with vintage great clothing and things she'd remade.  It's perfect, she insisted.  No returns... I'd traded her some vinyl, fair and square. I don't know enough about fashion but I took it to a resale place and it sold in one day for a very decent price.  Wow.  Jayme.

So yesterday thinking about her...I stopped at her apartment building on the UWS.  I can't remember when I'd seen her last... years... the pandemic widened these gaps... but she called me every once in a while; we both raised sons on our own... had intimacies to share. The doorman told me she'd moved in with her brother, out of town. I was open-mouthed... she was one of those truly bohemian city fixtures.  Her apartment was old but she created this exotic and homey vibe with purple velvet and just great 'stuff'. She had excellent taste in music, too. Old Stones, Kinks, Faces...  she could tell a cool new band from a poser in a second. She was brusque but also quiet and soft-- formerly sexy and sought-after by rock and roll elite.  One of those lithe women you see among the crowds at Monterrey or Woodstock. Cameras loved her low-slung jeans and hippy tops... her great haircuts. Even when she was broke, people comped her-- her hairdresser, her doctor, her dentist.  It was uncanny. 

Apparently she'd not just left the building.  Late last night, after a deep-search for her brother, I found her three-line obituary, from June. She'd been privately and quietly cremated. I was devastated. No one seemed to know about it... as though she slipped out of a back door when we weren't looking.  She'd done this once at my Thanksgiving dinner; my friends overwhelmed her and she went into the bathroom, maybe got high, and disappeared.  She cared little for food and socializing.  Her magical husband had died young and I think she never moved on from the perfect tantric sex and bohemian heaven he provided. She did come to gigs although she often left early-- quietly.  She was also a valued and an astute critic of my work.  

I'm reading Dawn Powell; following her vintage characters through the post-war version of Greenwich Village is a trip. The apartments-- the fashion-- the wild parties and rituals of entertaining. Aside from the changes technology has imposed on dating, we're fundamentally not all that different.  Just the details-- the interiors-- the materiality.  It's another, much more desirable world. The one I could count on in Jayme's place-- the vinyl, the occult and Goth books, the exotic textiles and the layers of personality. Someone who valued her fostered animals over her own livelihood, and who would not consider life without a paintbox and a sewing machine.

I heard a young woman comment the other day 'Mid-century style is over. No one wants it'.  I took it a little personally. And yes, we Baby Boomers are beginning to outlive our utility. The 1980's and 90's have much more appeal to current generations than the women of Dawn Powell. My apartment is stocked with library, vinyl, instruments, art and tiny memories. Odd trinkets in drawers and old rock-and-roll T-shirts that are losing value. Who will recognize the stained glass heart earrings my college boyfriend made me for our anniversary fifty-five years ago... the leather bracelets I got in Berlin before the wall came down-- the Camden market coat with metal trim...?  Will my son know my Pleaides editions of Proust bought in 1970's Paris or my fifty-three Trollope novels all collected from sundry used bookshops? 

Most days we city dwellers pass thousands of people on the street... and only the few we 'know' will light us up like human candles. The recognition of our trinkets, like old fossils, do the same.  But maybe, like my old sewing machine, they no longer serve.  It occurs to me that Jayme spared us the sentimentality of death and the post-mortem inventorying and distribution. I miss her terribly today and am still recovering from the disbelief of no farewell or phonecall.  No notification, no address, no ceremony, no grave, no tree planting or charity directive. We older people have the illusion that we are what we leave behind... but in truth we have likely outlived our usefulness-- our valued possessions have little meaning to the next generation and while I can hear the endless melodies that spill out from my bookshelves and collections, they will eventually be as mute as the resonant final lesson of Jayme.

Playback is a Bitch

Last night in East Harlem a woman was sitting in her automated wheelchair, outside of a Duane Reade.  It was hard not to look-- she was beautiful-- ageless and drawn from illness.  She was breathing from a mouth device that looked at first glance like a sort of kazoo.  I hesitated, but had to ask... she motioned her head with difficulty, toward the door... so weak, thin as a young child, she could barely manage the armrest controls.  I held the door... it was an ordeal for her to just enter. She thanked me, barely speaking...  using the mouthpiece... absolutely no breath of self-pity or bitterness, she went forward... 

Me, the useless sympathy-soaked sponge of human compassion... Jesus, I asked, what sort of punishment is this for a human being-- what payback? As though there is any rationale for suffering-- for the homeless veterans, for the woman incinerated in a chocolate factory, for the souls crushed in last week's tornadoes, for my friend whose brain tumor has stripped her of her postural dignity, her grace. 

People used to console me when my sister repeatedly forged and narrated to our disadvantage... don't worry, she'll get her payback. But she doesn't.  Life doesn't work this way... childhood cancers, neuro-muscular diseases... they continue to ravage the good and the bad.  Beloved wives are hit by drunk drivers,  children fall from cliffs and brave men drown in cold seas.  

I find myself struggling often with the occupational annoyances of most career musicians-- tinnitus, compromised audio issues.  Few of us trust ourselves completely in the studio, mixing.  Many bravely step out on stage and turn their amplifiers up without consideration. It's not intentional, but there's a certain competitive performance headspace volume which comes with the territory, despite the advice of sound engineers.  

Last night I watched Woodstock: The Director's Cut... a longer version of the original which I had not seen for at least 40 years?  It's become sort of a cliché to my generation... a landmark, a cultural monument to a time that seems further and further away than ever.  I keep thinking the way I heard music back then was different from the way it sounds now.  I play vinyl records occasionally... my headphones only underscore the sense that my ears are not created equal.  Not that I would have done things differently...

Alvin Lee was incredible.  I forgot how great... having had the opportunity to travel with him in the early 80's... I could only remember how privileged I was to sit in his dressing room while he messed around on his red Gibson 335, casually churning out jaw-dropping ideas and phrases.  He was fairly quiet otherwise.  And Hendrix, of course-- that improvisational ending of Purple Haze as though he gave up on his band and just played.  You feel him move from 'stage-guitarist' into inspiration and truth.  

But the innocence-- the vibe, of course... and most of all-- the lack of branding... no corporate sponsorship or signage except messages on T-shirts and flags.  At the end of the film there's a reeling-off of musicians who have passed... and then of words-- things that have since lost their meaning-- integrity, compassion, kindness, etc... equality... 

I have friends that work at the recently fallen banks.  In the Woodstock days financial CEOs made a reasonable salary.  Greed was not the religion of corporate culture.  There was economic inequality but nothing like that of today.  There's a website that lists the payment received by each artist at the festival.  It's staggeringly modest. 

No performers at Woodstock had earpieces or pitch correction; some of the bands were awful.  Something musicians know-- the audience is often hearing something completely different.  Stage volume is deceptive.  If you played in dive bars, you never heard yourself sing. Someone had to play it back-- and it was rare that anyone recorded live performances.  It required equipment and planning, like these festivals.  Stephen Stills... in those days-- well, he was just so damn good, no matter what he became. 

The pandemic musical intermission encouraged me to rethink musical priorities.  Recently I rediscovered a singer I'd heard almost by accident in a Washington, D.C. club long ago-- Eva Cassidy.  Yes, she was doing covers, but her guitar playing was excellent, and her voice-- well, up there with anyone.  I was riveted.  It was reassuring to listen to her performance which was so fortunately captured with little fanfare and alteration by some angel in 1996.  It's humbling-- nearly perfect.  Eva passed away just months after the recording. Unfortunately, there's now a pop-up message on every YouTube video reminding the listener that a new album has been released adding strings and orchestration to these magical tracks.  Schmaltz it up, why don't you?  Okay... it's a real orchestra, but doubtful she would have approved; unfortunately, we can't speak for the dead.  Legacies and family members sell these people out.  The likes of me cannot save them.  Most often there is no Director's cut. 

I am a huge Clifford Brown fan.  He, too, died way too young; I have most all of his recorded material and among them my least favorite is the one with strings. I'm opinionated and stubborn, but why, I ask? And who will profit from this girl's brilliantly pristine performances now?  I don't know.  Current engineers can create nearly anything out of sound waves and a computer; they can even fool a dog or a whale. For the rest of us, playback, when we actually get to hear it, can be a bitch. 

Who's Your Daddy

On Father's Day I walked down to the East River.  Like most things I count on in life, it was testing boundaries, flexing its liquid muscle, changing its face from calm rippling smiles to smirks to choppy grimaces and swirls and whorls of angry warning.  The sun had set and there was little moonlight.  The humid air was a prelude to the long New York summer which no longer spreads but looms like a warm dare.  There will be fireworks... there will be sleepless nights in damp sheets with dogs howling  through open windows and passing sirens belting out their urban lullaby with even more urgent frequency.  On the concrete boardwalk, the roar of the current duetted with the city hum, like some symphonic grey wind-- the thick planetary breath which seems to crescendo in these mid-year months.  My son used to complain that he couldn't hear the stars sing.

Who's your Daddy, I wanted to ask the river on that night?  But we know that.  From whence it comes, to where it goes-- the oneness and duality, the calm and the storm.  Men deftly steer their way from one side to the other... on barges, on tugboats... while uptown the Hellsgate Bridge like a kind of red heaven threatens to take any challenger to the deep cold bottom from which few have returned.

My own son grew up without a father.  Or he grew up with me straddling the two endpoints of parenting with limited skill.  I was unprepared by my own dad whom now that he is gone I can witness as a complex mess of post-war PTSD and garden-variety guilt that sabotaged what could have been a happy and productive life.  I feared and hated him most of the time; the feeling was mutual.  Like my son, I adopted a series of role models from ballet-teachers and coaches to movie stars and literary heroes.  One day it was Atticus Finch; the next it was the gardener.  Even the Good Humor man seemed to look at me with something closer to love than any holiday or ordinary greeting from my father.  I'm not sure if it was more painful for him, but I took that on, too.   I never got to have payback, or closure, or any unravelling or confession.  It stayed the way it began-- an awkward pantomime of familial choreography at best, and at worst just the outright poison-gas cloud of anger.  Meanwhile, I was glad to get out of there-- to go off on my own to college... to experience relationships and daily life without the straitjacket of familial angst.  I was happy and in love with the world... maybe a little too generous with emotions, and a little naive.

Tonight I went by the Art Students League to see the work of a young painter and I suddenly flashed back forty-something years to my fresh young urban-independent days.  As much as I obsessed over music-- the boiling pot of fantastic ingredients that produced the bands of the downtown scene-- I was in love with the city arts-- especially the painters, whose spattered clothing and long days of physical dedication to craft were like the wizards and shamans of my imagination.  There was a community of them then-- some in the relative wasteland that was Soho in those days--- occupying huge unheated raw lofts with their yards of canvas and piles of stretchers and stacks of paint cans.  They were tormented.  They were sensualists and passion-seekers.  They looked and listened and agonized.  At night they'd congregate at any one of the bars where a beer and a burger could be negotiated for about $2 for regulars... Fanelli's, the Cedar Tavern, etc...  

They loved the young art students and were too willing to 'father' us into the New York scene.  I slept with them... loved to awake in a strange mattress on a hardwood floor to the thick smell of paint and coffee brewing on an old gas stove.   There were no televisions in these places-- no air-conditioning-- just the hot soundtrack of Coltrane or Miles' Jack Johnson or occasionally Exile on Main Street or even Beethoven for some.  An array of books--- Picasso or Velasquez or Giotto-- poets, Henry Miller, Anais Nin... Beckett.... I inhaled.

The subways were hot and gritty and covered with graffiti-tags... the colorful trains of the early 80's were still a dream... but as a nod to the New York artists, the mayor funded a program called City Walls and a few of these painters got to design and cover a huge conspicuous building-side with one of their compositions.  I remember riding downtown in an old beat-up volkswagon with the back seat removed, my eyes closed for the big reveal... there at the end of Broadway, on Houston, was a huge layering of colored mountains and horizontal strata, like a great desert cake... done by my driver named Mel Pekarsky.  Shitty Walls, he called the commission, but his creation was amazing and I'll never forget how proud I felt to know him.

My young painter at the Art Students league tonight had done a huge landscape divided into grid-squares by lengths of string-- like a fresco design... and I thought about Mel's old wall which had long been covered over but which signaled in a way a sort of go-ahead for legal and illegal appropriations of urban surface for artistic messages.  The age of Haring and Basquiat, of the spectacular trains of Dondi and Lady Pink-- was just dawning.  I looked on the internet and was happy to see Mel is still alive and creating-- teaching-- a regular job to soften his senior years and hopefully pay his studio rent.  The art world will never be the same. The Art Students League gallery tonight was a little empty and without festivity... a little clinical and derivative... no angst, no insanity, no joy.  I remember how Mel wrote me postcards back in those years-- he'd paint and draw and address the verso.  Some of them were x-rated and confiscated by the post office.  Somewhere in the boxes of things stored in my father's old house, these treasures have been turned into trash, I learned recently.  One more tragic loss in this world where Soho is a pricey mall, galleries are stores, artists have become brands and the graffiti of the 1970's is being auctioned to rich men with clean apartments and housekeepers.

Looking ahead at the long summer weeks, I can't know what is in store.  My beloved BB King's is no longer; more of my favorite local musicians have packed up and gone to Nashville or Woodstock... I can't afford much more than a good long walk to the river or an occasional subway ride.  I still have no air-conditioning, live among stacks of paintings and piles of books-- these are and were my fathers, my mentors... my instruments are still my children, waiting for me to come home and wake them up.  Tonight I will close my eyes and remember that ride down Broadway into the enormous colored mirage of that painted desert dream.  Who's your Daddy, the painter blurted out, laughing, when he heard me gasp in awe in that hot Volkswagen with the stacks of canvases where the back seat used to be.   So forty-something years later,  four days past Father's Day, I just got it.  

Rock the Vote

I am someone who talks to buildings, waves at dogs, picks up coins on the sidewalk.  Despite exasperated friends and family members, I still refuse to have a cellphone because it interferes with the private soliloquy that erupts internally when I go walking like a stray animal on city streets.  I am anonymous, I am solitary;  I am Everyman, I am channeling and composing-- listening and reacting, absorbing and emitting and eminently vulnerable (maybe that is the best part).  I am eccentric and unremarkable at this age, and I value the shade of 'fly-on-the-wall' that accompanies these 'grey' years.

There is an amount of probability that my thoughts interest no one at this stage, but fortunately we have these blogs and outlets for documenting without burdening our friends and acquaintances with the mundane epiphanies and inventions of a low-impact life.  At my age I have absorbed more than my share-- have become something of a professional observer,  and find more revelation in the associations that emerge from mental storage points.  It never fails to stun me the way random people here in this city live in proximity to one another-- a Nazi sympathizer beside a holocaust survivor, Republicans and Democrats, a billionaire beside someone who struggles for food.  We do not necessarily wear our values, although plenty of people wear the costume of a person with money, irregardless of whether they have actually paid for it.

This afternoon I voted.  My polling place is one of the beautiful churches of Manhattan.  It is humbling  to enter, and the act of submitting a ballot is like a religious experience.  Today the man managing the tables was one of those New York characters who bleeds his history to anyone who listens.  This one was an ex-con/mobster who claimed to have been the only inmate in Rikers' with a curtained cell.  He had survived lung cancer, several near-death heart failures,  a recent diagnosis of metastasized brain/stomach/liver disease… the nothing-to-lose attitude of someone who had crammed 90 lives into one, maybe embellished the re-telling.  By the time he gave me my ballot, he'd proposed marriage, was begging to write me into his will.  He was going to take care of everyone.  If only…  Still... I learned something… I had a little slice of free entertainment, an unplanned side-track in a routine day.  We traded 8's, as they say in jazz… only I mostly tapped my foot while he jammed.

One of my gripes these days is overcharging.  For every purchase, the man at the top gets the lion's share-- the man who needs it least.  No one really sees what is in my glass, I always think-- no one has a clue how I survive in New York City without private luxuries most people see as necessities.  Like so many of us, I could buy a downtown penthouse with the things I've turned down, given away.  Regrets?  I fear the shadow of bitterness I am sensing from some of my aging friends.  In this culture it is difficult not to resent the uber-availability of cheap instagram mantras and mimes, of the absence of thought, of soul-- of a sense of context and depth.  We pay for advice-- therapists, moment managers-- real estate agents, decorators-- we line their pockets while we often derive little benefit.  While delegating is a necessity… the global mass of apps and outlets makes life difficult to navigate for the insecure.  As for me, I have my own brand; free wisdom can be valuable if you know where to shop.

What is really bugging me lately-- after deleting my daily quota of voicemail solicitations (how do they get these numbers?) is the number of charitable organizations and websites who beg us for guilty donations, who twist our hearts and humiliate us-- which turn out to be dead ends, selfish vanity sites or manipulations by people who maybe give a tiny percentage to the destitute and sick and keep the lion's share for themselves...  because the 'needy' are not necessarily those of us who starve and walk and do without… but the pathetic victims of brainwashing advertisements and big business who absolutely cannot live without their estheticians and cosmetic dentists-- their personal trainers and youth-promising supplements, without BMW's and the Hamptons, colorists and birkins… who literally have traded their souls for these things-- their value systems.  Some of these people, I thought, as I voted in the massive church which requires a huge donation to host a wedding or Baptism-- even a funeral-- some of them go to church and recite things, place money in collection plates, go outside and ignore their badly dressed neighbors.  Certainly they ignored the Cuban ex-con who is trying to make a joke and enhance the minutes he has left before the timer on his terminal brain tumor goes off… whether or not he is a pure con and has made the entire story up… it matters little.  And he had more than a few things to say about city contracts, the mob, corruption at the root, etc.  He'd worked at every level in every branch of every union and non-union urban department.  He'd gone to prison for several-- for crimes, for not ratting, for his brand of con-professionalism.  Yes, I took the time to listen to his tales beyond my limit of amusement until I began to suspect his truth and plot my exit.  But he knew me, this man-- he could tell I am one of those people who converse with gargoyles and see angels, who do not refuse ghosts and beggars, who have visions and dream songs, and do not discount reality.

What I do know,  as he knows, is that the potential value of every moment is identical.  Unless you are Stephen Hawking, most moments are exactly the same length as any other-- orgasm moments, root canal moments, Academy Award moments or watching a homeless man vomit on the street.  But our value systems, and the way we use these moments, or what we produce, have become so backed up and convoluted… with all the social media connections, the odds of some world-congealing actual event like Woodstock seems dim, except in replay mode which does have a certain celebrity currency-- a guaranteed viral youtube eternity, the way my private moments do not.

Someone asked me recently about my blog-- and I explained that I generally have a point at the outset, but I let myself wander, the way I take my walks this days-- as an opportunity-- because for someone who travels little outside my city, I am like a hitchhiker who accepts a ride with no destination.  Today I let my Cuban friend drive me around and hijack my moment… fill it with tales of the mob and New York crime-- sickness and disease and the sense of God when you are fading on an operating table,  the lore of his prison tattoos and his personal eloquence, like a Chaucerian tale-teller.  The best part of all is that he directed me to the wrong voting table… and not just me-- this was a pattern--  because he never consulted the directories which was all part of his philosophy of humor and anti-bureaucracy.  In  fact, in keeping with the con artist thing, maybe he wasn't a Board of Elections employee at all… but for the moment, he was in exactly the right place, as was I.