Tag Archives: pointless nostalgia

A Barehanded Grasp

delmonicos.jpgI have touchstones all over New York that immediately bring back incidents in my life. All it takes is an awning or a doorway to bring memories flooding back. That’s that theater I used to go to all the time. There’s that bar where my friend pissed all over the window late one night. That’s the corner where I pushed a huge metal cog into oncoming traffic.

Right now, I’m working near Wall Street, right in the shadow of Ground Zero. I’ve never worked in this neighborhood before, which is somewhat unusual in my family (between finance, insurance, and the courts, most of my relatives have worked downtown at some point or another). But I used to go down there every now and then, because my father worked here for most of his adult life (when he was working).

When I was in college, we started to meet up for lunch, and it continued as I entered the workforce myself. We didn’t eat downtown too often–as I’ve quickly found out, the meal options down there are slim pickins. More often, we’d get lunch in the Village–my dad was a huge fan of the Waverly Diner on Sixth Avenue, for reasons that escape me.

But before my current gig, my only ventures into the Financial District area were to visit my dad, and so when I walk around those narrow, sloping streets, I feel haunted by him. Particularly since he used to work in the World Trade Center. I visited him a few times there, when he worked in an office on the 102nd floor, where you could actually feel the building yaw slightly to each side. I can’t pretend to know what it’s like to have lost someone on 9/11, but I think I know something like it when I look out my new office’s windows and see workers below laying foundations, paving things over, removing all evidence that anyone was once there.

I called his death years before it happened, at least in broad terms. I declared to my mother that he’d already put us through too much grief to go easily. It would not be a quick heart attack or car accident. It would be something prolonged and painful and probably crippling to all our wallets. I said these things as jokes, but I was 100 percent convinced they would come true, and I was right.
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“A Bunch of the Boys Were Whoopin’ It Up in the Malamute Saloon…”

It’s been a brutal July thus far, on pace to be the hottest one in history. (Strangely enough, all those Brave Truth-Tellers who screamed about global warming being fake when it was sort-of cold in April are nowhere to be found.) I’m trying my best to beat the heat by thinking cold thoughts. This is a psychological technique known as Self Delusion.

While trying to find some Cold Thought Fodder, I ran across this video, and I’m so glad I did. This is an excerpt from an episode of Jean Shepherd’s America about Alaska.

Jean Shepherd, radio host, author, and raconteur (who I’ve written about here before), had a PBS program that ran for two widely separated seasons: 1971 and 1985. The later season was decent, and is readily available on DVD via eBay and similar outlets. The earlier season, which predated the VCR, is not in general circulation, except for a few episodes that were rerun in 1985. That’s is a shame, because I’ve seen many of these episodes and they are AMAZING.

The reason I’ve seen them is because I did some research for Excelsior, You Fathead!, the Jean Shepherd biography penned by Eugene Bergmann. Part of this research included a trip up to WGBH in Boston, which produced this series and a few other once-off programs starring Shep (including a bizarre show from 1961 in which Shep stood on a wharf in Boston Harbor and just riffed for a half hour, much like he did on his nightly radio show). I had the privilege of delving into their vast video archives, and came back truly stunned by what I saw.

The original series of Jean Shepherd’s America is a wonderful, vibrant time capsule. It was shot on video, which was still in its infancy back then (the producer, Fred Barzyk, told me the poor cameramen were weighed down by bulky nigh-prototypes). But because it wasn’t shot on film, which can age poorly, the footage appears as if it was shot yesterday. The episodes are all pretty much like the excerpt above: Simple shots of quiet, everyday occurrences, with Shepherd’s inimitable narration.

There’s a mind-blowing episode (“It Won’t Always Be This Way…”) about new planned communities and mobile homes. It ends with chilling footage of ghost town on the site of an old mining boom town, as Shep talks about how mankind always moves on, looking for bigger and better things, and how one day this whole planet may be similarly abandoned as we seek greener pastures out among the cosmos.

My description is not doing it justice. If there is a just god, he will make sure everyone gets to see this in some format, some day.

I also can’t think of Shep and The Cold without thinking of the poems of Robert Service. In the winter months, Shep would devote parts of shows, and sometimes entire shows, to reading this now-obscure but once ubiquitous verse. Service’s poems all depict depraved goldpanners trying to make a buck or start trouble in the frozen Yukon wasteland, who all find death in some gruesome manner or another.

My father was a huge Jean Shepherd fan, and this was one of his favorite features of the show. He loved to recite the first line of Service’s poem “The Shooting of Dan McGrew” in a deep, Shep-like vibrato: A bunch of the boys were whoopin’ it up in the Malamute Saloon

Ironically, my father died five years ago this summer in snowy, faraway land (very long story). So I think he would take perverse pleasure in hearing this Shep rendition of another Service poem, “The Ballad of Blasphemous Bill”, which comes from his program on January 15, 1965.

[audio:http://66.147.244.95/~scratci7/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/blasbill1.mp3|titles=Jean Shepherd: The Ballad of Blasphemous Bill (January 15, 1965)]

And just for good measure, here’s Shep doing another one of his favorite routines: singing loudly (and badly) along to a ragtime piano rendition of an old timey tune.

[audio:http://66.147.244.95/~scratci7/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/afteryouvegone1.mp3|titles=Jean Shepherd: “After You’ve Gone”]

Olympics of the Mind Meets Freedom of Drunken Speech

When I was in fourth grade, I was in something called Olympics of the Mind, a competition for future nerds and theatre people. This organization still exists, but at some point, it was forced to change the first word in its name to “Odyssey”, because the International Olympic Committee, in the spirit of brotherhood and good sportsmanship, sued them.

Each year, OM has a bunch of different “problems” you can choose from. They require you to develop a skit around a certain theme, usually historical (certain “problems” also involved some kind of engineering, like building a structure that could withstand a certain amount of weight). There’s also a segment called “spontaneous”, which is basically a word association game. Teams receive points for the skit, spontaneous, and “style” (a concept I have no better grasp of now than I did then).

I’m still not sure why my school participated in these shenanigans. As an adult, it strikes me as the kind of wonderful thing they do at super artsy private schools where kids discover their desks and learn ancient Greek in the third grade. I did not go to such a place of learning. Mine was a thoroughly middle of the road public school. But I was in a gifted students program that met twice a week outside my regular class, and the school thought enough of us to draft us for an OM team (though they didn’t think enough of us to allow us to meet anywhere but a large closet used to store old textbooks).

The first year I did it, the problem involved prehistoric man. I named our skit “Cro-Magnon P.I.” (still my proudest creative contribution to the world). We painted a drop cloth set and put together a few props and rehearsed for months, but even though I was a ridiculously optimistic/delusional kid (I was convinced that somehow I’d be world famous by age 12), I hadn’t the slightest expectation of winning anything. It never even crossed my mind.

So said mind was blown when my team actually won our “problem”, and we all ran up on the stage in the auditorium of the local BOCES and jumped up and down like kids who have just won something surrounded by other kids who didn’t. It meant we were going to the state OM championships in Syracuse!

It also meant I’d be going far away from home, on a bus, and staying over a few nights in a hotel, something I’d never done before in my life. My family had zero money, so we never went on vacation. I’d been to The City many times to visit family, but I’d never been outside of a 50 mile radius of my home. So Syracuse might as well have been Disneyland to me. After all, it was a college town. It was full of smart people, just like me!

The bus ride up was a combination of abject terror and delicious anarchy. My district crammed all of the kids who’d won their OM competitions into one rickety school bus. So that included kids as young as me (and younger), all the way up to high school seniors. I vividly remember one Big Kid blasting “Brass Monkey” over and over from a large, chunky, silver boom box. I remember kids shuttling from one end of the bus to the other as it scooted up the Thruway (this was in the pre-seatbelt school bus era).

BobKnight.jpgI don’t remember seeing a single parent or teacher intercede to prevent any of the madness (though I’m sure adults were present). I was simultaneously terrified and giddy. I was seriously worried that something terrible would result from all this freedom, but I was also swept up in the insanity. I was on a flaming Viking ship headed straight for a rocky shore, so I might as well have enjoyed it.

At this point, it’s necessary to mention that we were heading to Syracuse a few short days after the Orangemen fell to Indiana in a hotly contested NCAA basketball final. So as we sped toward the town in our Crazy Yellow Fun-Bus, Syracuse was still a smoking ruin of rage and resentment. Got the scene?

Someone in charge thought it would be a neat idea to give us a sneak peek at the illustrious Syracuse campus. In order to do so, we first had to drive through that troublesome neighborhood that surrounds every campus: The Shithole of Off-Campus Housing. Places where sofas are used as lawn furniture and the residents do their damnedest to grow trees made of empty beer cans and Solo cups.

And as we drove through this frat boy Beirut, we spotted one house that looked slightly better than the rest. But this was only because most of its exterior was covered by a large sheet. One of the house’s occupants had hung an enormous bedsheet from a second story window. And on this sheet, they had written, in black shoe polish in 10-foot high letters:

FUCK BOBBY KNIGHT!

Word spread through the bus by wildfire, and pretty soon the entire kid population of the bus ran to one side to witness this majestic obscenity. I’m surprised the whole thing didn’t tip over. A huge cheer rang through the bus, with much hooting and hollering. It was easily the greatest thing any kid on the bus had ever seen. I BARELY KNOW WHAT THAT WORD MEANS BUT I KNOW IT’S AWESOME AND I’VE NEVER EVEN SEEN IT WRITTEN DOWN BEFORE IN MY LIFE LET ALONE IN LETTERS THAT HUGE!

As for the OM state championships, I stayed at a Holiday Inn and thought it was the greatest thing ever because I swam in a pool and stayed up late watching cable TV (another luxury I was not used to). We did our skit again and I was convinced we were the best and were destined for stardom.

We finished next to last. The trip back home was not as much fun. However, I did take away something from my trip. I’m not all that into college sports in any form. I did not attend a “sports’ college. But whenever I find myself forced to choose sides in a collegiate game, I say I’m a fan of Syracuse, and that banner is why.