NYC 2016

From the Nephew's Apartment

This year we decided to coordinate our visit to Frieda’s nephew with the US Open. We flew into JFK early Saturday morning before the tournament began and he picked us up in his X5. Soon we were caught in an unexpected traffic jam funneling into the Midtown Tunnel. This kicked off the theme of this trip: crowds, everywhere.

Well, not absolutely everywhere. After a family dinner at a nearby Japanese restaurant we had a pleasant walk through a mild Saturday evening in the nephew's tree-lined Upper West Side neighborhood, and a sense of awe, which can always sneak up on you in NYC, actually did overtake me as we passed through the plaza and into the little park behind Lincoln Center. 

Arthur Ashe Stadium

  But we got to the crowds on Monday, our first day at the Open, when we took the subway to Penn Station and caught the LIRR out to the venue. After getting our tickets we waited under the big board to see what platform our train would be on, and once it was announced the real crush began, the crowd cramming through a pair of double doors like toothpaste through the nozzle of a tube. At least the train was air-conditioned, a relief in the 85° high humidity, and we even found seats. 

Although we arrived at 11:30, we still had to wait in a long line snaking around the huge venue to the south entrance, but once inside the gates it wasn't that crowded. We headed for Court 17 because Monfils was scheduled to play the second match there. It's a sweet little stadium and we got killer seats in the corner, second row. However, to get to Monfils we had to sit through a woman's match with Bencic, a Swiss we had seen get beaten at Indian Wells back in March, and every minute we sat there it got hotter. The match went 3 sets and there was not a shred of shade to be had, anywhere. The slight breeze that had provided some relief early on, dwindled and died. By the time she won, we were wilting badly. I don't know how the players can do it. In the break between matches Frieda went on a supply run while I held down the great seats and when she returned with a hot dog, curly fries, and an ice cold bottle of Evian I found that it was the most delicious water I had ever tasted. She complained that, at 1PM, Carnegie Deli was, unconscionably, already out of pastrami and corned beef. How could they possibly have allowed this to happen? Nevertheless the hot dog and fries quieted the ravenous beast in my stomach and the cold water revived me. Monfils came on and displayed some of his usual verve, but the temperature continued to climb and by the end of the first set, which he won, we simply couldn't stand it anymore. We had to get out of the sun. So we abandoned our primo seats, even more desirable now that the stadium was packed, and headed for Ben & Jerry's for some ice cream and some shade to eat it in. 

The New Grandstand

 

Fortunately, we had reserved seats at Arthur Ashe. They were up in the nosebleed section, but they were shady, as more than half that stadium is, now that the retractable roof has been added. The roof also contains and thus intensifies the crowd noise, even when it's open. Nadal was playing Istomin there, not a bad match, but so far away it was hard to get interested. Other people in the vicinity were having the same problem. They were mostly eating and drinking, talking and laughing, having a party and ignoring the match. After we'd cooled off, Frieda started getting sleepy, so we left and wandered over to the new Grandstand court, stopping to watch a little of a Baghdatis match in a small court along the way. We had seats in the Grandstand for Wednesday so we wanted to check them out ahead of time. We were pleased to find that they appeared to be shady. 

Bruce Springsteen Concert at MetLife

  We were staggered by the size of the grounds, like a city unto itself, about a third larger than the French Open, with 16 matches going simultaneously, plus practice courts. All of it jam-packed with people. If you crave crowds, it's heaven. We left about 4:45 and caught the 5:05 back to Penn, itself a shit storm of commuters at that hour on a Monday, then caught the #1 to Columbus Circle, where we stopped at Whole Foods to pick up dinner fixings.

Tuesday we took the day off from tennis and strolled along Central Park West to the Natural History Museum, but then decided, due to lack of time, to save it for Thursday. Instead we headed to Artie's Deli on Broadway for the corned beef and pastrami sandwiches we'd missed out on at the tournament. We can't visit New York without having pastrami or corned beef sandwiches, preferably both. In the evening Frieda went with the nephew to a Bruce Springsteen concert at MetLife Stadium in Jersey while I took a break from the hoards of humanity, stayed in the apartment and watched tennis on the 50” TV with surround sound. The concert attracted around 80,000 shoulder to shoulder. She said it was great and the online reviews pegged it as one of his best ever. The nephew, a Bruce Springsteen fanatic who has been to about fifty of his concerts, concurred. It clocked in as his longest ever US concert at 4 hours and 1 minute.

T-Rex

  Wednesday we were back in the tennis fray and, if anything, it was even more crowded than it had been on Monday. It turned out our seats in the Grandstand didn't get shade until 2PM but we found some shady bleacher seats higher up from which to watch Pospisil and Kevin Anderson, whose wife writes a blog that Frieda sometimes reads. Then we went over to Court 8 to watch some doubles, for a change, but the seats we found there were in the sun so we didn't stay long. Some high clouds took the edge off but it was still hot. When we got to our reserved seats about 2PM shade had found them and we were able to watch Ryan Harrison upset Milos Raonic in relative comfort. But then we had to fight our way through the intense crowds to catch the 6:22 train back to the city. Between the day-people exiting and the night-people arriving, it was a two-way stampede. And then  you had the people who were just milling around aimlessly, apparently lost, getting in the way. 

The next day we returned to the Museum of Natural History and it too was jam-packed due to intermittent rain driving people to find some sort of indoor activity. We headed straight for the dinosaurs where masses of humanity milled about, snapping selfies and pictures of exhibits they didn't bother to look at, with thigh-high brats racing around, bouncing off walls and crashing into us and each other, all howling like maniacs. It was a loony bin. Finally we couldn't stand it anymore and bailed for a late lunch out on the sidewalk beneath a canopy at Ella's on Columbus Avenue. Despite all the crazy commotion at the museum, I still came away feeling profoundly impressed by the immense fertility of nature, not in terms of quantity, but rather the amazing richness of variations the process of evolution throws up. 

Central Park

  Friday we went back to Landmarc in the Time Warner Building (it's a regular stop for us) for a breakfast of their memorable pain perdu. Then we ambled over to Le Pain Quotidian in the southern reaches of Central Park for some shady seats and cold drinks while we soaked in views of the Sheep Meadow and environs. It all looked lovely from there. Because we were flying out on the Friday before Labor Day weekend and were concerned about traffic, we decided to take trains to the airport instead of a car. The E train took us to the Air Tram, an easy, smooth ride. Only problem: no seats due to the crowds. One thing the world needs more than anything else: less people. Overpopulation is all around us but people don't see it anymore because they've adapted, they take it as a given.

Top 40

Adele

Top 40 radio was invented in my home town, Omaha, Nebraska.  Previously the standard rule was that radio stations never played the same song more than once a day.  In 1949 Todd Storz, the grandson of Omaha brewing legend Gottlieb Storz, convinced his father to buy him a radio station, KOWH.  Then, one day in the early 50s, Todd and his buddy Bill Stewart, the station’s program director, were across the street in a diner waiting for Bill’s waitress girlfriend to get off work when they noticed that, even though the restaurant staff listened to the same handful of tunes on the jukebox all day, played by different customers, after the customers cleared out, when they were free to play any song they wanted, they played the very same songs.   Todd asked the staff to identify the most popular tunes and the next day the station started playing them in heavy rotation.  Ratings went through the roof. 

By the end of the 50s top 40 was the most popular radio format in the nation.  But toward the end of the 60s FM radio came in.  Rock was becoming increasingly pretentious and the single was diminishing in popularity.  With the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s,” the album became the dominant format and remained so throughout the 70s.  In the 80s and 90s popular music began to fragment into subgenres, each with its own following.  Top 40 never completely went away, but it could no longer claim to be the ubiquitous soundtrack of American life. 



The Black Keys



But since the advent of iTunes, the single has staged a comeback and, with it, top 40.  Now there’s no need to buy an album.  You can download the singles you like and put them together in your own album.  The best selling singles chart on iTunes lines up closely with YouTube’s most popular videos and the Billboard Hot 100.  In a turnaround, top 40 now dominates FM radio, once the bastion of album rock.  If you think of punk as an early revolt against the pretention of album rock, you could say we’ve come full circle now back to something resembling the mindless bubble-gum pop and innocent emotion of the 50s, albeit with dirty words and more sophisticated production.  I can keep up with what’s new simply by sampling the iTunes top 200. 

So here’s the playlist I recently downloaded:

1)  “Somebody That I Used to Know” by Gotye – An Australian transplant from Belgium.  I’m not crazy about xylophone, but top 40 is about infectiousness and this lodges itself in your head. 

2)  “Paradise” by Coldplay – A little too lush for its own good, but sticky.

3)  “Someone Like You” by Adele – She owned the year and this was my favorite.

4)  “Lonely Boy” by the Black Keys – These guys just keep growing on me.

5)  “Moves Like Jagger” by Maroon 5 – Initially felt this wasn’t up to the standards they set in “Songs About Jane” (and maybe it isn’t) but it won me over nevertheless. 

6)  “Tonight is the Night” by Outasight – Callow, but good for the gym. 

7)  “Levels” by Avicii – Swedish technopop, but the video is amusing.  Also, like the Gotye song, it reminds me of Venice, where we heard them everywhere.  It appears that, this time around, top 40 has gone international. 

8)  “Drive By” by Train – Very catchy and infectious, perhaps even more addictive than “Hey Soul Sister,” their top 40 hit from last year.  Frieda loves it.

9)  “Not Over You” by Gavin DeGraw – His best since “I Don’t Want to Be.”

10)  “It Will Rain” by Bruno Mars – Frieda loves Bruno, that’s all there is to it. 



Broken Bells



11)  “The Ghost Inside” by Broken Bells – Here the list veers a bit away from top 40.  Broken Bells is a side project of James Mercer (of the Shins) with Danger Mouse and, even though they’re a couple years old, I like the 2 songs on this list better than anything on the new Shins album.

12)  “Hidden Hand, Hidden Fist” by STS9 – An instrumental band from Santa Cruz, too jazzy to be top 40 but with some hooks nonetheless.

13)  “On the Corner” by the Twilight Singers – A project of Greg Dulli (formerly of Afghan Whigs) too dark to be top 40, but this much saccharine pop on one list needs a little leavening.  Nice wah-wah guitar solo.

14)  “Tighten Up” by the Black Keys – Yeah, and my next list will have yet another song from these guys, so there.

15)  “The High Road” by Broken Bells – Maybe the better of the 2 Broken Bells songs; at least, the more accessible. 

16)  “Rolling in the Deep” by Adele – Frieda’s favorite.

17)  “We Used to Wait” by Arcade Fire – Every list needs a touch of pretension.

18)  “Missed the Boat” by Modest Mouse – Almost an oldie, already, but Frieda loves Modest Mouse, and we didn’t have this one.    

Go, Go, Go, Little Queenie

Frieda has been on a Queen binge ever since we saw a 2 hour documentary on BIO, so I’ve got a load of their songs rattling around in my head.  I never know which one is going to be playing on my mental jukebox when I wake up in the morning, because their catalog is so deep.  Since seeing the BIO version, she picked up the original uncut BBC DVD, called Queen: Days of Our Lives, which is far superior to BIO’s edited, censored rendering.  It really gives you a sense of the trajectory of their career and the internal dynamics of the band.  We also rented a DVD of their 1986 concert at Wembley Stadium in London.  With 90,000 seats, this is the second largest stadium in Europe, and that’s not counting the floor, which was packed for this concert.  Playing for hundreds of thousands in big stadiums like this was a Queen specialty, and they were very good at engaging and involving the crowd.  I’ve been known to get bored in concert films, but not this one.  They put on one hell of a fun show.  As a vocalist, Freddie had a range and power that most rock singers can only dream of, and Brian May was a virtuoso on guitar.

This year is the 40^th anniversary of the formation of Queen, which occurred in London in 1971 when Freddie Mercury took over a group called Smile that already had Brian May (guitar) and Roger Taylor (drums) in it, recruited John Deacon (bass), and began to apply his genius toward making the band a legend and the vehicle of his immortality.  They recorded two eponymous albums in 1973 and hit the big time the following year with the album Sheer Heart Attack, containing the single Killer Queen.  Bohemian Rhapsody, a mash up of 3 different song ideas that everyone told them would never get air play, came out in ‘75, hit #1 in the UK and the top ten in the US.  With Crazy Little Thing Called Love (’79) they got their first #1 hit in the US.  Another One Bites the Dust (’80) repeated that feat, but subsequently their success here waned.  They were never as popular in the States as in the UK, Europe, Japan, and South America (except, perhaps, now).  Many of their UK hits did not chart at all in the US.  Their hedonistic, polymorphous perverse message may have ruffled the native American Puritanism.  The infamous review in Rolling Stone (“Queen hasn’t the imagination…to play rock & roll.”) of their album Jazz (’78), now considered by their archivist to have been their best album, illustrates the lack of respect for the band in America.  At the time, American rock critics were focused on the machismo of the punk movement, and thought Queen smacked of the dreaded effeminate disco.  To be honest, I too was, at the time, focused on punk and post-punk bands like the B-52s and Talking Heads, and considered Queen to be a passé glam-rock outfit left over from the early 70s. 

But a curious thing happened on the way into the 3^rd millennium, and now Freddie seems to be having the last laugh, posthumously, because those other bands, which in their day seemed to so much better express the zeitgeist, have remained stuck in the era they embodied, whereas Queen has floated free and become timeless.  In retrospect, you have to admire their courage in pursuing their own complex, eclectic, and virtuosic vision and resisting the pressure to follow the herd.  You can bet that had I been putting together a top ten of rock bands in 1980, or in 1990, Queen wouldn’t have been on it.  But now, having the benefit of hindsight, I would put them in the top five.  Their influence on subsequent artists has been pervasive.  The clearest and most prominent example among current bands is Muse, which sometimes sounds like an outright imitator, but there are plenty of others, including many American groups. 

The other day Frieda was at the grocery check-out and Tie Your Mother Down came on the sound system.  She leaned her head back, closed her eyes for a moment, and listened to the opening guitar line, then snapped her eyes open and said: “I love Queen!”

The girl behind the counter, who barely had been born when Freddie Mercury died, smiled broadly and said, with fervor, “So do I!” 

It looks like Freddie has a great future ahead of him. 

Coney Island of the Minds

A few years ago, on a trip to NYC, I took the F train out to Coney Island.  I’d never been and had wanted to go see it for many years.  It was winter, late February, and I thoroughly enjoyed the deserted and desolate tawdry seediness of the place.  I took a bunch of photos and when I got back to California eagerly showed them, but no one seemed to get my affection for it.  So I was amused, gratified, and a trifle vindicated to learn in Just Kids, Patti Smith’s memoir of her friendship with Robert Mapplethorpe, that Coney Island was one of their favorite places and they took many photos of it.  One has a sense there of being on a borderline between tacky vulgarity and the sublimely eternal.  I think this feeling intoxicated them and that Mapplethorpe subsequently sought to replicate it in many of his photographs. 

Patti Smith didn’t start out with the ambition to be a rock star.  She came to New York City from poverty in south Jersey in the summer of ’67 with nothing but a copy of Rimbaud’s Illuminations and the hope to be an artist, but without a clear notion of what that meant or how to get there.  Like thousands of other kids in those days, she wrote poetry and drew.  She did not sing or play an instrument.  

I was in the East Village myself in the summer of ’68, as Patti was, so I may have rubbed shoulders with her in Tomkins Square Park without knowing it, since she was as anonymous as I was back then.  There was some nostalgia for me in hearing about her adventures in the city in those days.  I knew plenty of wanna-be artists then, but none of them made it big like her. 

The propulsion of Just Kids derives from the mystery of how she got from being a wanna-be artist/poet and hanger-on to a rock star, and the disappointment of the book is that, after spending a lot of time describing the first phase (I must admit to some envy about all the interesting people she met while lodging at the Chelsea Hotel), she skims over the second in just a few pages.  Mapplethorpe’s transition from a hippie bead-stringer, part-time art student at Pratt, and collagist to enfant terrible photographer and darling of the haut monde also takes place mostly off stage, although his charisma and social-climbing aspirations come across.  She gives him a lot of credit for building her sense of worth and encouraging her to sing and take her poetry in a musical direction, just as she encourages him to start making photographs.  In fact, she testifies that, without him, she would never have become who she became.  And she met him entirely by chance.  But in addition to him, there were at least a dozen other people she had to meet at just the right moments in order for her career to take the path it did.  The same may be said for Robert.  Had he not met Patti, he might never have come to photography.  Subsequent steps along that path required more ‘helpers.’  But there are many who do not encounter the right helpers at the right times; in fact, to do so is the rare exception. 

Chance, or luck, plays a role in the success or failure of everyone, in every walk of life, but because the odds are so long, it plays an inordinate role in the arts.  You can see people all around Patti falling by the wayside.  And there are many more in the shadows.  It’s like walking through a hail of bullets and watching your cohorts be picked off, one after another.  Jimi Hendrix is picked off, Janice Joplin, Jim Morrison, but these are well-known people who had already, to a substantial extent, realized their potential.  There are many more people we have never heard of who were talented but unlucky.  They may not have literally died, but just been shunted off their proper path by some onerous obstacle or unlucky break, or merely missed some critical connection, so that they never reached their full potential, never found the endeavor that was right for them.  These are the vast majority, actually.  Everyone has some talent.  The question is: are you able to figure out what your greatest talents are and get what you need to maximize them. Patti knows how lucky she was.  It’s hard enough for people who know exactly where they want to go, but for people like her, who are groping, unclear where their paths lie, stumbling around, bumping into things, there is so much that has to go right for them to grasp the prize.  And so much that can go wrong and prevent them from grasping it.  The people who make it through become heroes precisely because they are so incredibly lucky.  There’s an aura of mystery and wonder, even awe, about how it could possibly have happened. 

Music



I downloaded a new playlist from iTunes recently.  I was tired of everything on my iPod so it was time for some new tunes.  Because I almost never listen to the radio, it’s not that easy for me to find new songs; either I see something in print, or see a group on TV, or some acquaintance turns me on to a song or a band.  That’s what I thought I’d do here.  Maybe you’ll find something you like. 

           

This is the first new music I’ve downloaded in quite a while.  A few months ago I downloaded three playlists, but they were all classic songs from 1954 to 1998.  It’s fun to listen to music you liked a long time ago but haven’t heard in a while, but the fun doesn’t last long because even though you haven’t heard the songs in ages, years ago you heard them scores of times, so they get old faster than brand new songs that you’ve never heard before. 

           

Now, I keep a tentative playlist going in iTunes all the time.  When I hear about a new artist or song, I check them out.  If I find a song I like, I put it on the pending playlist.  When, over time, the playlist gets to be 25 or 30 songs long, I go through and cull it down to 18 or so, and put the overflow on a backup list.  Then, every so often I add new songs and/or play around with it, shifting some songs to the backup list and moving others forward to the main list, and changing the sequence.  Rarely, I’ll come up with a list that I like so much that I just have to download it right away.  But mostly, like this time, I’m not entirely sold on the list I have, but I’m so hungry for some new tunes that I don’t want to wait until I get it perfect and so I’ll just go ahead with it.  (Perfection doesn’t exist anyway.)

           

Making a list is tricky.  Some songs I like right away, but the more I listen, the less I like them.  Other songs are just the reverse: I’m not that crazy about them at first, but they grow on me.  Then of course there’s the mood factor.  Some songs I like when I’m in the mood for them, but in a different mood, not so much. Also, I get bored listening to the same artist, so I like to have variety in a playlist, different kinds of music by different artists, songs that take you to different places.  And yet, ideally, there should be some thematic cohesion, or some dramatic arcs, and the segues should be somewhat graceful.  It’s not easy to get all of this rolling, and some playlists obviously work better than others. 

           

So, bearing all this in mind, here’s the playlist I came up with:

           

1)  “F**k You” by Cee Lo Green –I first heard this on Colbert.  Cee Lo used to be in Gnarls Barkley, who had the hit “Crazy” back in 2006.  Despite the cheeky title, and the fact that it’s about lost love, this is not a mean-spirited song.  On the contrary, it’s humorous and playful. And it absolutely gets in your head.   

           

2)  “Grenade” by Bruno Mars – I first heard this on SNL.  It’s maybe a little schmaltzy, but hooky none the less. 

           

3)  “I’m Yours” by Jason Mraz – See above, but more upbeat.

           

4)  “Hey, Soul Sister” by Train – I have three other Train songs (“Drops of Jupiter,” “Get to Me,” and “Meet Virginia,”) but none of them is as infectious as this one.  Like the previous song, it’s part of the ukulele craze. 

           

5)  “Kids” by MGMT –This bit of electronica doesn’t really fit here, but it didn’t fit anywhere.  I’ve blown warm and cool on it.  It was on a previous list and got bumped off, but then I heard it by accident a couple of times and the simple yet addictive melody line stuck with me.     

           

6)  “Heavy Cross” by Gossip – Gossip is an indie-punk band and this song rocks.

           

7)  “Never Say Never” by The Fray – Almost too sweet and tuneful.  It’s more in the same vein as “You Found Me,” “Over My Head,” and “How to Save a Life.”   

           

8)  “Little Pieces” by Gomez – Gomez is a British band that utilizes a banjo, among other things.  I’ve got a couple other songs of theirs (“See the World” and “How We Operate”) and I like “How We Operate” a little more than this one, but this is still pretty good. 

           

9)  “I And Love And You” by The Avett Brothers – This is the song I like least on the list, but I couldn’t decide on anything on the backup list that I definitely liked better, so it stayed. 

           

10)  “Lassoo” by The Duke Spirit – I have another song by this Brit band (“You Really Wake Up the Love in Me”) and it sounds much like this one, but I think I like this one slightly better.

           

11)  “I Miss You” by Extra Golden – This is a song in the Kenyan Benga tradition performed by two Americans and a Kenyan.  Extra Golden is reminiscent of Orchestra Baobab but without the horns; sunny and pleasant.    

           

12)  “Sleepy Wheels” by Big Light – Big Light is a spacey, psychedelic band from San Francisco.  The song is long and dreamy, quite different from both the prior songs.  Kind of like an evolution of Santo and Johnny’s “Sleepwalk,” mixed with The Velvet Underground.  If you like this one, try “Hard Knocks.”

           

13)  “Babylon” by David Gray – This song actually dates from the last century (1999), but I only discovered it recently, so it’s new to me, even though I already had his song “Fugitive” (2009). 

           

14)  “Stare into the Sun” by Grafitti6 – Saw an article on this Brit band on some news site.  Going by the name, as well as the song, they must be admirers of Maroon 5. 

           

15)  “Walking” by The Dodos – Another San Francisco band.  This is probably my second least favorite cut on the list, but it’s only half the length of the Avett Brothers song so you don’t get tired of it as quickly.  Like Gomez, they use a banjo. 

           

16)  “Wreck My Flow” by The Dirtbombs – A garage-punk band out of Detroit: down and dirty. 

           

17)  “Crawling in the Dark” by Hoobastank – Hoobastank’s other big hit was “The Reason,” back in 2004.  This song was on the bubble and got knocked off the list a couple times and then put back on, but the more I listen to it, the more I like it.