Some of you may know that Ana, my wife, and I have been in the process of finding and buying a house, a thing Ana has been wanting to do since she was a kid. In fact, we moved to New Mexico, to Albuquerque, for the specific purpose of buying a house in a place we liked and in a market we could afford to buy one.
Well, the search for the right house didn't take us that long. We drew up, each of us, a tiered list of things we wanted, things that would be nice to have and deal breakers. For the most part, our lists were nearly identical. We looked at a few houses when we first got here, sort of feeling out the market, but we didn't begin looking in earnest until we had our financing in process, something which we did through a state program for first-time home buyers and the assistance of a real estate agent who is a family friend.
We looked at about a dozen or so - maybe as many as fifteen - houses that met out basic criteria each of us finding one we liked better than the others . . . until we found this one house. It hit all of our needs, a good number of our wants and no deal breakers. So, we put in an offer and played the horse-trading game that most Americans do to buy a car, a horse, or a house.
In the end, we got pretty much all we asked for, except price - which we admittedly low-balled - but for less than the listed price. All did not go smoothly, the process is designed, it would seem, to frustrate home buyers. We had to take - and pass - an on-line course from the New Mexico Mortgage Finance Authority. Hoops through which to jump.
In the end, we closed almost a week later than chosen by the seller - but on the day we had originally chosen in our offer. And then the next phase began. Ana didn't want to live in a bland white interior as she had pretty much all her life. So, we chose and bought and applied paint on the walls where we knew there would be furniture as a first step. We'll get to the other walls after we get fully moved in.
The plan had been to rent a truck and have a crew of our friends - six in all - assist us in loading the truck and unloading it at the new place. We got the truck, but of the six, only one showed up and gave yeoman service, service above and beyond our expectations. She helped Ana do some last minute packing and then loaded the truck for a couple of hours and then helped unload it at the other end.
We got little of the furniture - not the TV console, not the dresser, not the large corner desk that will go in my office - we each have an office, and we have a guest room - and not the bed. So, because of our friends' croissant-level flakiness, we have been sleeping on our air mattresses and will until the weekend.
The major up side is that we got the TV moved and the new service from Comcast effortlessly set up and both our comfortable chairs and Avi, our 16-pound cat, after some initial shyness - he was confined to the master bathroom while we were moving and spent most of his time there cowering behind the toilet. But after we finished making a ruckus and moving stuff around, he came out and now seems to be perfectly at home. He has discovered box-land, the future dinning/game room, which is now full of boxes, some from the apartment some out of storage. We'll be seeing to those boxes over the next several months, eventually finding a place for everything, even if that place is not with us or in our home.
We have embarked on a journey, We describe this as our "forever home" meaning that, barring some major changes, this is the house we will live in for the rest of our lives. The house won't be paid for until I turn 100, which I think is doubtful. I said from the beginning that this would be the house were my wake would be held and I meant it. The end result is a 1713 square foot house with decent bones and recently upgrades and a large back yard with mature fruit trees. But the journey wasn't all that much fun and it is still not over.
Sunday, October 19, 2014
Monday, October 6, 2014
Birthday comments and review of Kershaw Cryo II Tanto folding knife
I turned 70 today, or, more accurately, I celebrated the passing of 70 years since my birth. Among the gifts my wife, Ana and the cat, Avi, got me were a Kershaw Cryo II tanto, with their Blackwash finish. It is an assisted flipper, meaning once you have started the blade moving with the flipper tab on the back of the knife, the internal spring does the rest.
I have a fondness for the American Tanto blade shape, owning three blades in this pattern. I have an old Elishewitz-designed tanto liner-lock folder from Benchmade which I got nearly 20 years ago and have carried pretty much ever since as my every day carry knife (EDC ). While we were getting supplies at Home Depot for our painting and electrical upgrade to the new house, I found a Milwaukee assisted folder with a tanto-style blade for a small sum and added it to the cart, sort of an early birthday present to myself. It will need a good sharpening, since out of the the plastic shell display card it doesn't have all that keen an edge.
Anyway, I thought I'd give a short critique of the Kershaw. It is, as I said, an assisted flipper. Kershaw calls it a Speedsafe system, which is a trademark of theirs. It works well.
Closing the knife is via the frame lock, which is formed by a portion of the frame on the left side of the knife - when you hold it in your hand with the blade edge up - and serves to lock the knife by moving to the right and blocking the blade from closing. It is a solid, positive lock-up, and engages about 25% of the blade in what is considered an "early lock-up." It requires a bit of effort to unlock the blade at this point, and I expect it will ease up a bit as I use it. The frame lock is prevented from being bent too far outward by the patented frame lock over-travel limiter designed by Rick Hinderer, who designed the knife. It is a solid design, well tested in a variety of blades, both Hinderer's and others made under license.
This is a production knife made in China from Hinderer's design for Kershaw. For an under $50 knife, retail, the quality seems to be quite good. The blade is centered well within the frame, almost dead on. This is common on custom knives, expected, but not as common on factory-made knives.
Out of the box - a nice, simple printed cardboard box with a label on one end - the knife was sharp over its whole length. The blade, what is termed an "American Tanto" design, also has a slight belly recurve, which will make it a little harder to sharpen, but gives a great cut, especially on a draw-cut, with the curve carrying the blade through whatever is being cut. I expect, since this will be an EDC knife, to find the limits of both the factory edge and the design features.
After many years of not buying knives, I am back in the market. For years, I set an upper limit of $100 for a knife, meaning I was mostly buying production knives, with a couple of simple customs by lesser known - or unknown - makers, including a couple of fixed-blade knives from David Boye. I will hold close to that price-point, going up by maybe fifty or even as much as another hundred for the right knife. I suspect that most of my acquisitions will still hover right around the $100 mark.
As I acquire new knives, I will probably blog about them, adding photos as I can. I am still mostly a gun guy, but with the price of guns, adding more to my collection is a slow process and since I no longer carry every day, my actual needs are less. Since my health began to get less optimum - and isn't that a government-speak phrase - I compete less, if at all, so I am not buying guns for any of the disciplines in which used to compete.
I hope to be able to find a suitable place to display my knives in my office in the new house into which we are in the process of moving. We need to paint the great room before we move furniture, but then it will be a matter of unpacking boxes, in which I hope to find all of my knives, some packed away for some time.
I have a fondness for the American Tanto blade shape, owning three blades in this pattern. I have an old Elishewitz-designed tanto liner-lock folder from Benchmade which I got nearly 20 years ago and have carried pretty much ever since as my every day carry knife (EDC ). While we were getting supplies at Home Depot for our painting and electrical upgrade to the new house, I found a Milwaukee assisted folder with a tanto-style blade for a small sum and added it to the cart, sort of an early birthday present to myself. It will need a good sharpening, since out of the the plastic shell display card it doesn't have all that keen an edge.
Anyway, I thought I'd give a short critique of the Kershaw. It is, as I said, an assisted flipper. Kershaw calls it a Speedsafe system, which is a trademark of theirs. It works well.
Closing the knife is via the frame lock, which is formed by a portion of the frame on the left side of the knife - when you hold it in your hand with the blade edge up - and serves to lock the knife by moving to the right and blocking the blade from closing. It is a solid, positive lock-up, and engages about 25% of the blade in what is considered an "early lock-up." It requires a bit of effort to unlock the blade at this point, and I expect it will ease up a bit as I use it. The frame lock is prevented from being bent too far outward by the patented frame lock over-travel limiter designed by Rick Hinderer, who designed the knife. It is a solid design, well tested in a variety of blades, both Hinderer's and others made under license.
This is a production knife made in China from Hinderer's design for Kershaw. For an under $50 knife, retail, the quality seems to be quite good. The blade is centered well within the frame, almost dead on. This is common on custom knives, expected, but not as common on factory-made knives.
Out of the box - a nice, simple printed cardboard box with a label on one end - the knife was sharp over its whole length. The blade, what is termed an "American Tanto" design, also has a slight belly recurve, which will make it a little harder to sharpen, but gives a great cut, especially on a draw-cut, with the curve carrying the blade through whatever is being cut. I expect, since this will be an EDC knife, to find the limits of both the factory edge and the design features.
After many years of not buying knives, I am back in the market. For years, I set an upper limit of $100 for a knife, meaning I was mostly buying production knives, with a couple of simple customs by lesser known - or unknown - makers, including a couple of fixed-blade knives from David Boye. I will hold close to that price-point, going up by maybe fifty or even as much as another hundred for the right knife. I suspect that most of my acquisitions will still hover right around the $100 mark.
As I acquire new knives, I will probably blog about them, adding photos as I can. I am still mostly a gun guy, but with the price of guns, adding more to my collection is a slow process and since I no longer carry every day, my actual needs are less. Since my health began to get less optimum - and isn't that a government-speak phrase - I compete less, if at all, so I am not buying guns for any of the disciplines in which used to compete.
I hope to be able to find a suitable place to display my knives in my office in the new house into which we are in the process of moving. We need to paint the great room before we move furniture, but then it will be a matter of unpacking boxes, in which I hope to find all of my knives, some packed away for some time.
Friday, June 27, 2014
More Random Serendipity, June 27th Edition
So, I was going through my FaceBook news feeds and one of my friends posted a link to this site, WesternDigs, which is an archeology site. I read the article I was linked to and then noticed this one: http://westerndigs.org/vinyl-records-excavated-at-famous-60s-commune-challenge-hippie-stereotype-study-says/
When I was doing wine tours up into Napa and Sonoma County, on the way back to the City, we passed a sign for the Olompali State Historical Site. I figured it was a Native site, probably Coastal Miwok. Well it was, but it was more than that.
As the article says, the mansion there, built on the foundations of the original 1770s adobe, having passed through several hands and being bounced back and forth from the University of San Francisco - a Jesuit College my grand-godson attends - and a variety of people who all defaulted on their payments was leased by a local rich proto-hipppie and became the commune called "The Chosen Family."
WSJ First Bay Area Commune
A lot of interesting people passed through there in the year and change that the commune was up and running, including the Gratefull Dead, Janis Joplin, Hendrix, Jefferson Airplane and others as they came to San Francisco. The core group was 22 adults and 18 children, including and a little girl named Courtney Love.
A fire, while the members of the commune were attending a Gratefull Dead gig at the Longshoreman's Hall near Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco, gutted the mansion and pretty much ended things at Rancho Olompali and disbanded the Chosen Family, although they still remain in touch and hold a reunion each year at the State Park where their commune had been.
The archaeologist - E. Breck Parkman, the State archaeologist - who did the dig found a number - nearly 100 - vinyl records. What surprised him after identifying them by the stamping codes etched into the vinyl, the labels having mostly gone away, was that they weren't what one might expect at a "hippie commune" frequented by a lot of the top musical acts of the period.
There were show tunes, mainstream jazz, comedy albums, commercial folk and calypso albums. A very eclectic collection of musical styles. His opinion is that these were the records that commune members brought with them, relics of a musical past that they were, for some reason, reluctant to just jettison.
I got to thinking about that. I grew up listening to my parents records, first 78s, then LPs and some 45 singles. They were mostly show tunes, my moms passion and boogie-woogie, another passion of hers. Some calypso, some real genuine indie pressings from Jamaica by people we'd never heard of who were very good when you could understand the island patois. Some Harry Belafonte, also my mom's. And Dixieland jazz, a lot by bands my parents had seen in New York when they were dating before the War as well as some real New Orleans stuff including Louie Prima and Keely Smith - the original Sonny and Cher - and a few early rock records, like Elvis and Bill Haley and the Comets and Jerry Lee Lewis, which were my early contributions to the mix.
When I was working as a cop at San Francisco General Hospital, when discussions about music turned to show tunes - not surprising with a lot of rather dramatic gay men working there - they were surprised that such an obviously butch straight guy knew a lot of the material, could even remember some lyrics. "Are you sure you're straight?" I was asked more than once. "Yeah, but my mom loved her Broadway musicals."
And I remembered a lot of the lyrics to hymns. I had been a choir boy before I was confirmed in the Episcopal Church and pretty much lost my faith in that system of belief. I not only remembered the Christmas carols most people can struggle through, but more obscure stuff, some anthems not in the hymn books. Some are still in my head.
As I got older, my tastes in music grew more eclectic still. I liked a lot of '50s and '60s jazz, mainstream be-bop, West Coast cool, Chicago blues, Miles, Coltrane, Mingus, Mulligan, Getz - and through him a lot of Brazilian stuff, too. I listened to the radio, an old AM Emerson, as I recall, in a red leatherette case. I took it out and mounted it on a wooden board to make it look cooler and often went to sleep with the gentle glow of its vacuum tubes giving the room its mood. I listened to WINS, WMCA, all the top 40 stations and later, when I added an FM tuner to my hi-fi system, to WRVR, the voice of Riverside Church, a large interdenominational, interracial church that was the only all-jazz FM station in NYC. I listened to Jocko, the hippest DJ on the air, "E-tiddly-eye, E-tiddly-oh, this is your engineer Jock-o, coming to you on the Rocket Ship Show on Double-you-a-d-o, one-two-eight-oh on the ray-d-i-o." Jocko played a lot of stuff that was definitely not Top-40 material and mostly R&B and blues-ish.
My Dad and I built a one-tube super-heterodyne radio that covered a couple of bands. Late, late at night I'd see Dad, illuminated by the glow from that one tube, sitting at my desk, gently moving the tuning capacitor, searching for a signal with the cans on his ears. He'd beckon me over to the desk and hand me the 'phones so I could listen to a radio station from Chicago or Kansas City playing big city blues or jazz. An engineer, he explained to me the principle of atmospheric skip, which allowed AM signals to travel long distances when the conditions were right.= and the more powerfull stations might be off-air.
I got really, really bored with Top-40 radio in the early '60s with the plethora of Bobbys from Philly and the bland sameness. Occasionally there would be something interesting, but I gravitated more to jazz and blues and even some classical. I love Bach, having been introduced to him in the choir with "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring" which we did fairly often, with a lot of organ breaks for all the Baroque ornamentation Back was noted for. I devoured the "Well Tempered Clavier" by Wanda Landowska, the legendary harpsichordist and a lot of solo guitar renditions of Bach and other classical stuff as well as Flamenco.
I started hanging out in Greenwich Village and doing a column of jazz and other music criticism for the Villager, the conservative weekly that competed - not really - withe Village Voice and was edited by my Dad's sister, my Aunt E.K. I got exposed to the beginnings of the folks explosion, hanging out in small coffeehouses, like The Four Winds, The Bagamin (which was a riff on a Fred Neil song, That's The Bag I'm In) Cafe World with a stage so small that the performers were pretty much in you lap. Intimate. (I occasionally played brownie bass there, sitting in) and some of the more famous ones like Gerde's Folks City, Cafe Wha?, The Bitter End and The Village Gate, which I covered a bunch and where I ended up working for their publicist Ivan Black, a blacklisted former A-level guy at places like Cafe Society doth the Uptown and the Downtown locations.
I am not in the least surprised at the records found at the former home of The Chosen Family. I left most of my old music history where it belong and with the people to whom it belonged, my Mom and Dad. Over time, I've lost a lot of my records, some to dust and neglect at a cottage in Putnam County New York, others on the shelves of the townhouse of my ex, from which I will someday retrieve them and transfer them to the FLAC format - what my step-son considers the best format to archive recordings, since it preserves most of their dynamic range and audio quality in the analog-to-digital conversion - and store them on the terabyte external drive I got for the purpose or burn some to CD. In fact, maybe I'll hearken back to a couple of decades ago and make some mix CDs, doing the DJ bit. I enjoyed doing that, using two turntables, a mic and a mixing deck. Much easier with computers and you can sweeten up the sound and clean up the clicks and pops - or, leave them. More authentic.
So, another trip down a rabbit hole, chasing the serendipity rabbit. This may not interest anyone but me, but I had fun doing it. Sometimes you just have to sweep the clutter out of your mind and this is a good way to do it. If other people find it interesting, so much the better. Sort of like "Sidewalk Modern" decor - your discarded stuff might suit someone to a T.
When I was doing wine tours up into Napa and Sonoma County, on the way back to the City, we passed a sign for the Olompali State Historical Site. I figured it was a Native site, probably Coastal Miwok. Well it was, but it was more than that.
As the article says, the mansion there, built on the foundations of the original 1770s adobe, having passed through several hands and being bounced back and forth from the University of San Francisco - a Jesuit College my grand-godson attends - and a variety of people who all defaulted on their payments was leased by a local rich proto-hipppie and became the commune called "The Chosen Family."
WSJ First Bay Area Commune
A lot of interesting people passed through there in the year and change that the commune was up and running, including the Gratefull Dead, Janis Joplin, Hendrix, Jefferson Airplane and others as they came to San Francisco. The core group was 22 adults and 18 children, including and a little girl named Courtney Love.
A fire, while the members of the commune were attending a Gratefull Dead gig at the Longshoreman's Hall near Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco, gutted the mansion and pretty much ended things at Rancho Olompali and disbanded the Chosen Family, although they still remain in touch and hold a reunion each year at the State Park where their commune had been.
The archaeologist - E. Breck Parkman, the State archaeologist - who did the dig found a number - nearly 100 - vinyl records. What surprised him after identifying them by the stamping codes etched into the vinyl, the labels having mostly gone away, was that they weren't what one might expect at a "hippie commune" frequented by a lot of the top musical acts of the period.
There were show tunes, mainstream jazz, comedy albums, commercial folk and calypso albums. A very eclectic collection of musical styles. His opinion is that these were the records that commune members brought with them, relics of a musical past that they were, for some reason, reluctant to just jettison.
I got to thinking about that. I grew up listening to my parents records, first 78s, then LPs and some 45 singles. They were mostly show tunes, my moms passion and boogie-woogie, another passion of hers. Some calypso, some real genuine indie pressings from Jamaica by people we'd never heard of who were very good when you could understand the island patois. Some Harry Belafonte, also my mom's. And Dixieland jazz, a lot by bands my parents had seen in New York when they were dating before the War as well as some real New Orleans stuff including Louie Prima and Keely Smith - the original Sonny and Cher - and a few early rock records, like Elvis and Bill Haley and the Comets and Jerry Lee Lewis, which were my early contributions to the mix.
When I was working as a cop at San Francisco General Hospital, when discussions about music turned to show tunes - not surprising with a lot of rather dramatic gay men working there - they were surprised that such an obviously butch straight guy knew a lot of the material, could even remember some lyrics. "Are you sure you're straight?" I was asked more than once. "Yeah, but my mom loved her Broadway musicals."
And I remembered a lot of the lyrics to hymns. I had been a choir boy before I was confirmed in the Episcopal Church and pretty much lost my faith in that system of belief. I not only remembered the Christmas carols most people can struggle through, but more obscure stuff, some anthems not in the hymn books. Some are still in my head.
As I got older, my tastes in music grew more eclectic still. I liked a lot of '50s and '60s jazz, mainstream be-bop, West Coast cool, Chicago blues, Miles, Coltrane, Mingus, Mulligan, Getz - and through him a lot of Brazilian stuff, too. I listened to the radio, an old AM Emerson, as I recall, in a red leatherette case. I took it out and mounted it on a wooden board to make it look cooler and often went to sleep with the gentle glow of its vacuum tubes giving the room its mood. I listened to WINS, WMCA, all the top 40 stations and later, when I added an FM tuner to my hi-fi system, to WRVR, the voice of Riverside Church, a large interdenominational, interracial church that was the only all-jazz FM station in NYC. I listened to Jocko, the hippest DJ on the air, "E-tiddly-eye, E-tiddly-oh, this is your engineer Jock-o, coming to you on the Rocket Ship Show on Double-you-a-d-o, one-two-eight-oh on the ray-d-i-o." Jocko played a lot of stuff that was definitely not Top-40 material and mostly R&B and blues-ish.
My Dad and I built a one-tube super-heterodyne radio that covered a couple of bands. Late, late at night I'd see Dad, illuminated by the glow from that one tube, sitting at my desk, gently moving the tuning capacitor, searching for a signal with the cans on his ears. He'd beckon me over to the desk and hand me the 'phones so I could listen to a radio station from Chicago or Kansas City playing big city blues or jazz. An engineer, he explained to me the principle of atmospheric skip, which allowed AM signals to travel long distances when the conditions were right.= and the more powerfull stations might be off-air.
I got really, really bored with Top-40 radio in the early '60s with the plethora of Bobbys from Philly and the bland sameness. Occasionally there would be something interesting, but I gravitated more to jazz and blues and even some classical. I love Bach, having been introduced to him in the choir with "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring" which we did fairly often, with a lot of organ breaks for all the Baroque ornamentation Back was noted for. I devoured the "Well Tempered Clavier" by Wanda Landowska, the legendary harpsichordist and a lot of solo guitar renditions of Bach and other classical stuff as well as Flamenco.
I started hanging out in Greenwich Village and doing a column of jazz and other music criticism for the Villager, the conservative weekly that competed - not really - withe Village Voice and was edited by my Dad's sister, my Aunt E.K. I got exposed to the beginnings of the folks explosion, hanging out in small coffeehouses, like The Four Winds, The Bagamin (which was a riff on a Fred Neil song, That's The Bag I'm In) Cafe World with a stage so small that the performers were pretty much in you lap. Intimate. (I occasionally played brownie bass there, sitting in) and some of the more famous ones like Gerde's Folks City, Cafe Wha?, The Bitter End and The Village Gate, which I covered a bunch and where I ended up working for their publicist Ivan Black, a blacklisted former A-level guy at places like Cafe Society doth the Uptown and the Downtown locations.
I am not in the least surprised at the records found at the former home of The Chosen Family. I left most of my old music history where it belong and with the people to whom it belonged, my Mom and Dad. Over time, I've lost a lot of my records, some to dust and neglect at a cottage in Putnam County New York, others on the shelves of the townhouse of my ex, from which I will someday retrieve them and transfer them to the FLAC format - what my step-son considers the best format to archive recordings, since it preserves most of their dynamic range and audio quality in the analog-to-digital conversion - and store them on the terabyte external drive I got for the purpose or burn some to CD. In fact, maybe I'll hearken back to a couple of decades ago and make some mix CDs, doing the DJ bit. I enjoyed doing that, using two turntables, a mic and a mixing deck. Much easier with computers and you can sweeten up the sound and clean up the clicks and pops - or, leave them. More authentic.
So, another trip down a rabbit hole, chasing the serendipity rabbit. This may not interest anyone but me, but I had fun doing it. Sometimes you just have to sweep the clutter out of your mind and this is a good way to do it. If other people find it interesting, so much the better. Sort of like "Sidewalk Modern" decor - your discarded stuff might suit someone to a T.
Monday, January 13, 2014
Down Another Road to Serendip
Somehow I seem to be drawn down roads that lead me to things I hadn't intended when I started out. Yesterday, someone made mention in a Facebook posting about our role in international policing, so I was immediately reminded of the Phil Ochs' song "Cops of the World." I found it on Youtube and linked it in my response. The person whose page I had posted the comment on thanked me and said he'd never heard the song before.
Cops of the World - Phil Ochs
This put me back onto Youtube and a short nostalgic trip through several of Phil's songs. Then I discovered the 1983 film, done for British TV's Channel 4 entitled "Chords of Fame." It's a documentary in four parts about Ochs, his music, career and death by his own hand in 1976.
Chords of Fame - Phil Ochs
It is mostly a documentary, with pictures and film clips, interviews with people who knew Ochs and a performance of some of his music by a young actor/singer named Bill Burnett. Several critics at the time said that the use of an actor to portray Ochs diminished the film. Perhaps. It is, for me, a powerful evocation of a time when I was involved in both the fringes of the folk movement, radical politics and, less fringe-y, the US Army.
I can frequently forget those days for long periods of time, but then, something will dredge up a memory and it all comes cascading back, often accompanied by tears for all that we've lost and the people no longer with us.
So many of the poeple interviewed in the film are gone, now. We lost Dave Van Ronk in 2002; Odetta left us in 2008; and Mike Porco, the Sicilian grandfather Bob Dylan never had, the creator of Gerde's Folk City, died just short of 95 in 2010. The times have changed. Even back in 1983 much had gone the way of so many things.
The Gaslight, once a basket house, then a paying gig for folk singers who had risen a bit above the crowd, closed in 1971 and in '83, according to one of those interviewed in the film, had become "an Arab restaurant."
A brief side note - I met Odetta for the first time with Tex Konig in the Dug Out, a one-step down bar on Bleecker Street, just up the street from "The Tin Angel" made famous in the song of the same name by Joni Mitchell. The three of us sat and drak whatever we were having. Tex wasn't a drinker, but he nursed something along. Tex was a large man, over 6'5" and weighing over 300 pounds. Odetta was also a big woman, imposing, regal and one hell of a singer. And she was coming on to my friend and it was whizing right over his head. When I told him, after Odetta excused herself to move along to a gig, that she was coming on to him, hard, his response was "Odetta? Why would she bother with me? I'm just another folk singer, she's, well, she's Odetta!" I didn't have an answer for that, not then, not now and with both of them gone, not ever.
When I came back from my time in the military in '69, I moved back to New York and with a new girlfriend took over a sub-let apartment at 112 MacDougal Street, upstairs above the Gaslight and the Kettle of Fish, a bar frequented by musicians, artists and the whole gamut of people in the Village in those days. When we wanted a drink, the Kettle was the usual place until some people we knew opened "Nobody's" on Bleecker. Nobody's became one of the rock and roll bars in the city, but it was still folkies and actors and a smattering of rockers when it was more or less home base for a bunch of us.
The Kettle of Fish has moved twice from its MacDougal Street location and is now a Wisconsin-themed sports bar on Christopher Street. I can't imagine it; I really don't want to imagine it, not even a little. When I was living above it and managing the Cafe Feenjon across the street starting at the dinner hour through to breakfast the next morning, I could often be found in the Kettle with friends drinking beer or, when I was flush, Jack Daniels, neat with a cool water back. In 2009, the old location of the Kettle at 114 MacDougal was the Cafe Esperanto.
Last time I remember, the Old Cafe Rienzi, next door to the Feenjon, was a clothing store, featuring retro couture with a hippie flavor. (I learned recently that it was now a pub called the Grisly Pear, which sounds like a place I might want to hang out, if I did that sort of thing any more.) Rienzi's used to be the place to hang out, the back room especially. It drew all kinds of folks, musicians, writers, artists, actors, models and whoever showed up and seemed interesting.
I remember hearing Brian Jones jamming with a young chick guitar player named Carol Hunter early in the Stones rise to greatness. Brian stopped for a bit to marvel at this girl's playing and then joined back in. Great place to be at the time.
The old Feenjon at 109 MacDougal has been known by many names, the first I remember being "The Commons" and then "The Fat Black Pussycat" where I used to do my homework and hang out, sitting in the windows that fronted on Minetta Street, the front entrance back in the day. When it became the Feenjon - which means "coffee pot" I was told by the man who owned the place when I worked there, Bob Englehart - Bob cut through the back entrance to give it a presence on MacDougal Street, which was the main drag as the Village became a tourist mecca. The place is now a Mexican restaurant called "Panchito's" and, for reasons known only to the new owners, they painted out the sign that was above the place for as long as I knew it proclaiming "The Fat Black Pussycat Theater." History obliterated by a broad paintbrush and red paint.
At some point in my time as night manager and espresso machine operator at the Feenjon, we decided to re-open the large back room, the part that had been the main theater in the Fat Black Pussycat days. We had live music there two or three nights a week, mostly lesser-known folks, including my friend Tex before he pretty much took off permanently for Canada. But one night, for some reason, several well-known names in folk music and other forms were in town and they ended up in the back room of the Feenjon. I remember Odetta, Jack Elliot and a couple of others and David Amram, a French horn player whose musical interests crossed all borders. It was a magical night, without egos, without the music business getting in the way of the music.
The Feenjon became a Middle Eastern nightclub under Manny Dworman - whom we used to call "Manny Halfman" for reasons lost in memory - and is now a rock music club run by his son, Noam. Manny Dworman bought the place from Englehart when Bob needed to sell and take over his father's short-haul bus business in New Jersey. Under Dworman, the place became a Middle Eastern coffee house with ethnic music, often including Dworman, who was a pretty good oud player in his own right. He later moved the Feenjon to the former Cafe Wha? which he bought from Manny Roth, David Lee Roth's uncle.
So, I hope you can pardon this unabashedly nostalgic ramble. I was a bit player, the friend to some of the featured players. The only thing I have going for me is that, unlike so many of them, including my best friend from those days, Tex Konig - folksinger, storyteller, actor, fine Chinese cook, pistolsmith and martial artist - I am still here to remember it and write some of it down.
I don't usually dedicate my blogs, but for a lot of reasons, this one is dedicated to Tex Konig, who left this world just shy of 60 in July of '99. I probably wouldn't have been in all those places or known all those people if I hadn't known Tex.
Cops of the World - Phil Ochs
This put me back onto Youtube and a short nostalgic trip through several of Phil's songs. Then I discovered the 1983 film, done for British TV's Channel 4 entitled "Chords of Fame." It's a documentary in four parts about Ochs, his music, career and death by his own hand in 1976.
Chords of Fame - Phil Ochs
It is mostly a documentary, with pictures and film clips, interviews with people who knew Ochs and a performance of some of his music by a young actor/singer named Bill Burnett. Several critics at the time said that the use of an actor to portray Ochs diminished the film. Perhaps. It is, for me, a powerful evocation of a time when I was involved in both the fringes of the folk movement, radical politics and, less fringe-y, the US Army.
I can frequently forget those days for long periods of time, but then, something will dredge up a memory and it all comes cascading back, often accompanied by tears for all that we've lost and the people no longer with us.
So many of the poeple interviewed in the film are gone, now. We lost Dave Van Ronk in 2002; Odetta left us in 2008; and Mike Porco, the Sicilian grandfather Bob Dylan never had, the creator of Gerde's Folk City, died just short of 95 in 2010. The times have changed. Even back in 1983 much had gone the way of so many things.
The Gaslight, once a basket house, then a paying gig for folk singers who had risen a bit above the crowd, closed in 1971 and in '83, according to one of those interviewed in the film, had become "an Arab restaurant."
A brief side note - I met Odetta for the first time with Tex Konig in the Dug Out, a one-step down bar on Bleecker Street, just up the street from "The Tin Angel" made famous in the song of the same name by Joni Mitchell. The three of us sat and drak whatever we were having. Tex wasn't a drinker, but he nursed something along. Tex was a large man, over 6'5" and weighing over 300 pounds. Odetta was also a big woman, imposing, regal and one hell of a singer. And she was coming on to my friend and it was whizing right over his head. When I told him, after Odetta excused herself to move along to a gig, that she was coming on to him, hard, his response was "Odetta? Why would she bother with me? I'm just another folk singer, she's, well, she's Odetta!" I didn't have an answer for that, not then, not now and with both of them gone, not ever.
When I came back from my time in the military in '69, I moved back to New York and with a new girlfriend took over a sub-let apartment at 112 MacDougal Street, upstairs above the Gaslight and the Kettle of Fish, a bar frequented by musicians, artists and the whole gamut of people in the Village in those days. When we wanted a drink, the Kettle was the usual place until some people we knew opened "Nobody's" on Bleecker. Nobody's became one of the rock and roll bars in the city, but it was still folkies and actors and a smattering of rockers when it was more or less home base for a bunch of us.
The Kettle of Fish has moved twice from its MacDougal Street location and is now a Wisconsin-themed sports bar on Christopher Street. I can't imagine it; I really don't want to imagine it, not even a little. When I was living above it and managing the Cafe Feenjon across the street starting at the dinner hour through to breakfast the next morning, I could often be found in the Kettle with friends drinking beer or, when I was flush, Jack Daniels, neat with a cool water back. In 2009, the old location of the Kettle at 114 MacDougal was the Cafe Esperanto.
Last time I remember, the Old Cafe Rienzi, next door to the Feenjon, was a clothing store, featuring retro couture with a hippie flavor. (I learned recently that it was now a pub called the Grisly Pear, which sounds like a place I might want to hang out, if I did that sort of thing any more.) Rienzi's used to be the place to hang out, the back room especially. It drew all kinds of folks, musicians, writers, artists, actors, models and whoever showed up and seemed interesting.
I remember hearing Brian Jones jamming with a young chick guitar player named Carol Hunter early in the Stones rise to greatness. Brian stopped for a bit to marvel at this girl's playing and then joined back in. Great place to be at the time.
The old Feenjon at 109 MacDougal has been known by many names, the first I remember being "The Commons" and then "The Fat Black Pussycat" where I used to do my homework and hang out, sitting in the windows that fronted on Minetta Street, the front entrance back in the day. When it became the Feenjon - which means "coffee pot" I was told by the man who owned the place when I worked there, Bob Englehart - Bob cut through the back entrance to give it a presence on MacDougal Street, which was the main drag as the Village became a tourist mecca. The place is now a Mexican restaurant called "Panchito's" and, for reasons known only to the new owners, they painted out the sign that was above the place for as long as I knew it proclaiming "The Fat Black Pussycat Theater." History obliterated by a broad paintbrush and red paint.
At some point in my time as night manager and espresso machine operator at the Feenjon, we decided to re-open the large back room, the part that had been the main theater in the Fat Black Pussycat days. We had live music there two or three nights a week, mostly lesser-known folks, including my friend Tex before he pretty much took off permanently for Canada. But one night, for some reason, several well-known names in folk music and other forms were in town and they ended up in the back room of the Feenjon. I remember Odetta, Jack Elliot and a couple of others and David Amram, a French horn player whose musical interests crossed all borders. It was a magical night, without egos, without the music business getting in the way of the music.
The Feenjon became a Middle Eastern nightclub under Manny Dworman - whom we used to call "Manny Halfman" for reasons lost in memory - and is now a rock music club run by his son, Noam. Manny Dworman bought the place from Englehart when Bob needed to sell and take over his father's short-haul bus business in New Jersey. Under Dworman, the place became a Middle Eastern coffee house with ethnic music, often including Dworman, who was a pretty good oud player in his own right. He later moved the Feenjon to the former Cafe Wha? which he bought from Manny Roth, David Lee Roth's uncle.
So, I hope you can pardon this unabashedly nostalgic ramble. I was a bit player, the friend to some of the featured players. The only thing I have going for me is that, unlike so many of them, including my best friend from those days, Tex Konig - folksinger, storyteller, actor, fine Chinese cook, pistolsmith and martial artist - I am still here to remember it and write some of it down.
I don't usually dedicate my blogs, but for a lot of reasons, this one is dedicated to Tex Konig, who left this world just shy of 60 in July of '99. I probably wouldn't have been in all those places or known all those people if I hadn't known Tex.
Saturday, November 23, 2013
November 22nd, 1963 Remembered
Yesterday marked the 50th anniversary of the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the 35th President, in Dallas, Texas. Pretty much everyone in the US knows where they were on that day and what they were doing.
I had not been a huge supporter of Kennedy, but in my family even my slight praise met with some resistance from my father, who aways referred to JFK as "That good-for-nothing Irish son-of-the-rich." My dad's side of the family had little use for the Kennedys, mostly stemming from Joe, Senior, having gotten some plum Washington job that, it was felt, should have gone to my grandfather.
I guess, like most of the people my age - I had turned 19 the month before - I was somewhat taken with the whole "Ask not what your country can do for you . . ." ethos and the fact that Kennedy was a lot cooler than other national politicians. I expected great things from him and his administration.
So, on that day, I was in the upstairs bedroom of a duplex apartment, part of a mansion built as a summer house for members of the Astor family in Astoria, Queens. It was not quite as grand as it had been in its heyday, but it boasted a good-sized living room, a dining room and kitchen on the main floor, actually the 2nd floor, and two bedrooms on the top floor. It was affordable for a young single mom and her 2-year-old daughter.
I had met the woman who lived there the week before in Greenwich Village, at a small storefront coffee house called, rather grandiosely, "The Cafe World." I had been quickly introduced by a mutual friend. The woman and I sat and chatted between sets by several folksingers we both knew. Eventually, she asked if I'd like to see her haunted mansion. What young boy could resist a come-on like that from a dark, rather exotic looking woman, dressed in a style several years out of date, but not stylishly retro?
By the time that eventful Friday had rolled around, I'd spent a week with her, being taught, with patient tenderness and a good deal of skill, the art of pleasing a woman and being pleased. We had not actually consummated our relationship at that point.
It was early afternoon, sometime around 1:30 P.M. when the phone rang. My lady friend answered, spoke for a moment and put the phone down. "Turn on the TV," she said, "DG said that Kennedy has been shot."
Sure enough, anywhere you looked on the dial, the news people were talking of nothing else. It came in fragments, nothing like the way we get our news today. There was no live or even taped coverage of the entire motorcade, there were no cameramen rushing to the hospital, none of that. Just the news men, Cronkite, Huntley, Rather and others getting unconfirmed reports, tearing off flash bulletins from the AP and UPI teletypes. My lady friend and I sat at the edge of the bed, holding hands and with shocked expressions on our faces.
Then, at around 2 P.M. Eastern time, the news came that President Kennedy, despite heroic efforts of the staff at Parkland Hospital, had succumbed to his wounds. We looked at one another, I got up and turned off the TV, and in some unconscious human need for comfort and a restoration of some normalcy, we consummated our week-long bout of instruction and foreplay.
There was little else on television that weekend. Lots of pictures of Kennedy and his family from earlier days, coverage of LBJ being sworn in on Air Force One, with the widow of the late President standing near. There were even moments of silence and solemn music. The nation was in mourning.
I have been teased by some of my friends who said that it took a natural tragedy to get me to shed my virginity. After that day, nothing was the same, not for me or for any of us. It was, in truth, a loss of innocence in a great many ways. Fifty years ago. It seems like a lifetime and and yet only yesterday. The lady is dead, I am in my 70th year. And the world is a very, very different place than it was on that day in 1963.
Yesterday marked the 50th anniversary of the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the 35th President, in Dallas, Texas. Pretty much everyone in the US knows where they were on that day and what they were doing.
I had not been a huge supporter of Kennedy, but in my family even my slight praise met with some resistance from my father, who aways referred to JFK as "That good-for-nothing Irish son-of-the-rich." My dad's side of the family had little use for the Kennedys, mostly stemming from Joe, Senior, having gotten some plum Washington job that, it was felt, should have gone to my grandfather.
I guess, like most of the people my age - I had turned 19 the month before - I was somewhat taken with the whole "Ask not what your country can do for you . . ." ethos and the fact that Kennedy was a lot cooler than other national politicians. I expected great things from him and his administration.
So, on that day, I was in the upstairs bedroom of a duplex apartment, part of a mansion built as a summer house for members of the Astor family in Astoria, Queens. It was not quite as grand as it had been in its heyday, but it boasted a good-sized living room, a dining room and kitchen on the main floor, actually the 2nd floor, and two bedrooms on the top floor. It was affordable for a young single mom and her 2-year-old daughter.
I had met the woman who lived there the week before in Greenwich Village, at a small storefront coffee house called, rather grandiosely, "The Cafe World." I had been quickly introduced by a mutual friend. The woman and I sat and chatted between sets by several folksingers we both knew. Eventually, she asked if I'd like to see her haunted mansion. What young boy could resist a come-on like that from a dark, rather exotic looking woman, dressed in a style several years out of date, but not stylishly retro?
By the time that eventful Friday had rolled around, I'd spent a week with her, being taught, with patient tenderness and a good deal of skill, the art of pleasing a woman and being pleased. We had not actually consummated our relationship at that point.
It was early afternoon, sometime around 1:30 P.M. when the phone rang. My lady friend answered, spoke for a moment and put the phone down. "Turn on the TV," she said, "DG said that Kennedy has been shot."
Sure enough, anywhere you looked on the dial, the news people were talking of nothing else. It came in fragments, nothing like the way we get our news today. There was no live or even taped coverage of the entire motorcade, there were no cameramen rushing to the hospital, none of that. Just the news men, Cronkite, Huntley, Rather and others getting unconfirmed reports, tearing off flash bulletins from the AP and UPI teletypes. My lady friend and I sat at the edge of the bed, holding hands and with shocked expressions on our faces.
Then, at around 2 P.M. Eastern time, the news came that President Kennedy, despite heroic efforts of the staff at Parkland Hospital, had succumbed to his wounds. We looked at one another, I got up and turned off the TV, and in some unconscious human need for comfort and a restoration of some normalcy, we consummated our week-long bout of instruction and foreplay.
There was little else on television that weekend. Lots of pictures of Kennedy and his family from earlier days, coverage of LBJ being sworn in on Air Force One, with the widow of the late President standing near. There were even moments of silence and solemn music. The nation was in mourning.
I have been teased by some of my friends who said that it took a natural tragedy to get me to shed my virginity. After that day, nothing was the same, not for me or for any of us. It was, in truth, a loss of innocence in a great many ways. Fifty years ago. It seems like a lifetime and and yet only yesterday. The lady is dead, I am in my 70th year. And the world is a very, very different place than it was on that day in 1963.
Friday, November 1, 2013
Frightening Read - The Enemies Trilogy - Foreign and Domestic
I've read books of all kinds since I began reading over my mother's shoulder. The school administration at McDonough #9 in New Orleans were annoyed with my mother for having taught me to read before I entered kindergarten, but it wasn't really Mom's fault. I basically taught myself.
Recently a friend sent me a list of free books at Amazon for the Kindle. Among them I found a novel by Matthew Bracken called Castigo Cay, a slightly futuristic speculative adventure story mostly set aboard a sailing vessel in the waters off the South Florida coast ( A worthwhile read with similar themes) there was a list of the author's previous work at the end, including a trilogy that began with Foreign and Domestic, whose title comes from the oath taken by so many of us to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic.
The book is the first in what is called The Enemies Trilogy. F&D is set in the present, in the area around Washington, D.C., an area I used to know somewhat from having been stationed there twice in my service with the Army. Bracken gives you a strong sense of place, with great descriptions you feel would allow you to find all of the locations. He tells a story about a small group of ordinary people who get caught up in a plan by a small group within the BATF&E to gain favor with the administration and enhance their standing within the Federal Law Enforcement community. They do that by perverting their mission and breaking their oaths to the Constitution.
The frightening thing about this book is how plausible the conspiracy at the center of the plot is, given current events. I've had to read it in small increments because the believability of the plot tends to get my blood pressure up to dangerous levels. I can see it all happening just as Bracken has written it.
The splinter group of rogue federal cops uses the technique of "plausible culpability" to further the agenda so many in the real-world current administration have put forward, that gun owners and "constitutional nut jobs" pose a threat. They use "false-flag" operations, which lead to draconian anti-gun laws and it gets worse from there. Anyone who reads the news will see parallels and possibilities aplenty here.
Bracken creates believable, human characters, heroes and villains alike, and, unlike many male-oriented novels, writes strong female characters, equal to their male counterparts.
If you are interested in how the present increase in federal power, the strong anti-Constitution agenda of the administration, the ever-greater militarization of law enforcement, especially at the federal level might play out at worst-case-scenario levels, thus book and the two that follow, which I am eager to read, will be to your liking.
To say much more would get us into spoiler country. If you've read Foreign and Domestic and want to discuss it or comment on this blog, I am on Facebook as well as here.
Wednesday, March 28, 2012
Life at the Cellular Level
No, this isn't some esoteric treatise on biology. It's about my experience with cellular telephones. The first time I had access to a mobile cellular phone was as a field supervisor for a security company. Because we had a contract with an alarm company to provide armed response, and no central dispatch, the field supervisors got to lug around this hefty piece of technology that was almost the size of a military man-pack radio like the AN/PRC-77 we used in Vietnam.
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| AN/PRC-77 radio |
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| Nokia Senator 21 lbs. |
In the military, there was usually someone to tote the 13+ pound PRC-77 around for you. I got to carry my own phone. We weren't supposed to use it for anything but alarm response calls, but since it was our only link to the office, it got used, with explanations and justifications, for other things as well. When I went to another security firm, that anchor was a part of my past.
I by-passed the classic brick phone for a Motorola MicroTac, which looked like the communicator in Star Trek. (Not an accident, I later learned. A Motorola engineer I met doing tours told me that they used the familiar form factor to make adoption easier.)
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| Classic '80's brick phone |
We started using the Motorolas in the Institutional Police and officers were able to get them for their own use at the same price and with the same deal as the City, so I ended up with two of them, one for department use -- all of us on "special details" got one -- and one for personal use. When I left the IP, I quit using mine and it sits in a box somewhere with a couple of spare batteries and the charger.
I managed to live without a cell phone for a few years, but I did buy a Palm III to keep information, calendar and so forth upgrading to a slimmer Palm (actually a Handspring Visor Edge, a Palm-compatible device. Handspring was acquired by Palm shortly thereafter.) I got a great deal, since they were offering a deep discount if you gave your older Palm device to someone and they filled out the paperwork. I gave mine to my girlfriend Ana (now my wife) but she never used it.
And then I was forced back into the cell phone world. When I started driving for California Jeep Tours, the boss was surprised to learn I didn't have a cell phone. I told him that I had been encumbered with a radio and two cell phones as well as a couple of pagers when I was a cop and wanted no part of the tethered world, thanks all the same. One day, he handed me a small cell phone the size of a bar of soap. I was back in the cellular world
At some point, I realized that carrying two electronic devices -- my Visor Edge PDA and the cell phone -- made little sense, and I bought a Palm Centro, their latest smart phone, in 2007. I had expected that I could just port all my Visor Edge information over to the Centro, but that wasn't going to happen since the OS on my old Visor was one generation too old for that.
I kept the Palm Centro-- and the service -- even after business slowed down and I was seldom needed to drive. I will confess to a rather selfish act. I kept the service with AT&T even after I moved to New Mexico, meaning but never getting around to changing over my service and getting a New Mexico number. And then, a month ago, my service ended. I wasn't all that surprised and can't fault my former boss for terminating my service. I had what I called my "Census burn phone" a Virgin Mobile phone I got when I was taking census back in 2010, so I bought some minutes, reactivated it and began the search for a new service and solution.
I wanted to keep my Palm Centro. I had a lot of information on it, much of it no longer relevant, but enough that was to want to keep it in use. My old service -- and Ana's -- was with AT&T, so we looked to them first. Now, the serious drawback to the Centro is that it has a terrible browser, so I never used it to search the web. But because it is a smartphone, AT&T made a data plan at $20 a month mandatory. There was, apparently, no way around it. They also wanted a chunk of change to move Ana's service from California to New Mexico with a delay of a week or more. Needless to say, we were both . . . miffed, perhaps? Only more than that.
One of the providers would sell me a SIM card to unlock my Centro, but, again, since it was a smartphone and technically capable of going on-line, they all wanted to make me take a data plan, even if I never used it. If I was going to have to pay for a data plan, I wanted to be able to use it, and that meant a phone with a significantly better browser. I was looking at Android phones, but they were pricey. And then I saw the LED signage at the "cricKet" store near us advertising "Free Android Phones." Well, free under certain circumstances. And it looked as if it would apply to us, although it wasn't going to be free for the phone I wanted. But at the discounted price, if I ported my phone number from Virgin, it was a good deal.
Well, for some reason, which no one can explain, my number wasn't portable. But, I was told, the discount will hold. We'll see. It seems that one of the salespeople and the manager are of different opinions on the matter. And when Ana decided to upgrade to an Android phone, we got a run-around and she decided against it.
So, I find the Samsung Vitality smartphone I chose is pretty amazing, compared to what I was used to. When I came out from California with my stepson, Chris, he with an iPhone, I suffered a bit from phone -- and app -- envy. The Samsung does most of what his iPhone does, enough for me, at any rate. It is so far in advance of my old Palm Centro that I don't care that it lags behind the curve and isn't cutting edge. It does what I want, cost -- it would seem -- a reasonable amount and has enough "coolness" factor to keep me happy for some time.
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