(2013)
Michael Feinstein’s interviewing Barry Manilow on the radio. He introduced him as the man who wrote the songs that made the whole world sing. A minute ago they were playing Thelonious Monk. Now they’re playing Barry singing Nature Boy as a five year old.
It was shit like this that turned me into a punk rocker. But I’m old now, and sophisticated, and all I can do is turn grumpy. So get off my lawn, Barry Manilow.
But I don’t have a lawn. It’s one of those days.
(1/21/2016)
It’s National Hug Day? Really?
I’ve always gotten a lot of hugs, though I never got more hugs than I did when I was writing for the LA Weekly. Apparently being a jazz critic means lots of hugs. I don’t know why, but then I never did understand jazz. And in a jazz bar, it’d be open season on me, hugs came in waves, big smooshy hugs, a lady’s entire anatomy pressed into mine. Sometimes I couldn’t make my way across the floor to the bar without a series of powerhouse hugs. After a while I took to staying seated and ordering from the waitress, and after she gave me a big hug, she’d take my drink order. But sitting down didn’t entirely work, the hugs would still come, just in a more cumbersome fashion. One time, sitting down, I took a lady’s iron clad bra right in my eye. I could feel the mesh, like medieval mail, jabbing my eyeball. I saw stars as she said how glad she was to see me. I said I was glad to see her, though I couldn’t see at all. I was wondering if I was going to get a shiner. I didn’t. Didn’t the next time either from a different lady, I believe steel plated. More stars, more pain. Again, no shiner. But I learned quickly, and when a lady approached with the gleam of a hug in her eye, I stood up, quite genteel, and took it like a man.
Still, I’m staying home today.
(2014)
Oy, hockey. What a blow out. Can’t believe I wasted three hours watching the Kings get their asses kicked five zip. Ouch. Not just for the score and humiliation, but for the time utterly wasted. You only get so many three hours in a lifetime, and that one was totally wasted. Sigh….
I switch channels. Wow. Huell Howser. I haven’t seen a Huell Howser since he died. He’s at Musso & Franks Grill and it’s 1995. I recognize all the help. Huell steps out of the kitchen and bumps into Benny Carter. I yell wow, loud. Benny Carter. One of his favorite places, Benny says. I really miss Benny Carter, and I never even met him. Some people you just miss because you might have got to meet them, but didn’t. Huell turns around and there’s Charles Champlin. Another wow. They’re talking about the old days. The Algonquin Round Table West, someone says. Wow, I say. Back when jazz and writing were going concerns. Then it’s Dr. George Fischbeck. Wow. I’m awash in multi-layered nostalgia. Nostalgia for this show which I never knew I’d have, nostalgia for the people he’s meeting who in turn are waxing nostalgic about times past that I’m nostalgic for even tho’ I was never there, or even could have been, chronology being what it is. Maybe it’s nostalgia for a world where writers and jazz musicians were something, and journalists had class. A pre-internet world, basically, I type in electrons. Waxing nostalgic for a hard copy world in the ether, when back then none of you would ever even see this. It’d be notes on paper in a box in my closet. Now everyone reads it and I complain. Some people just can’t be satisfied.
I type a whole other paragraph, think about it, hold down the back space key and watch it disappear, like it never was. On paper it’d still be there, a big line running though its length. Later I could read what I was thinking. Here I’ll never know. That’s language in the digital world. There one minute, gone the next.
Musso’s, though, is analog as it gets. On Christmas Eve my wife left a card for me under the tree…how about dinner at Musso’s? it said. Soon, I said, soon. I love the place. You need cash to do it right, and it’s too soon after the holidays to think about it now. But soon. We’ll sit at an old table and drink martinis and eat pot pie and oysters on the half shell and a crispy iceberg wedge with crumbles of blue cheese and I’ll imagine Bogie at the bar, not in the best of shape, or Orson Welles talking and talking and never shutting up. Or earlier, even, and there’s Charlie Chaplin, and I’m too scared to go up and say you’re Charlie Chaplin because he is Charlie Chaplin.
Old Hollywood, classic Hollywood. Funny that we’ve been here a third of a century now. I remember our first time at Musso’s, and looking at all the old people and listening in on their tales of the silent screen. They’re all gone now, long gone, and we have our own tales of a long gone Hollywood. In Musso’s all that blends together, a century’s worth of Hollywood. You can feel it. Close your eyes and you can see it. I wish I was there right now. I’d go there every week if I could, assemble a little Algonquin West. We’d eat and drink and laugh ourselves silly, then repair to the parking lot for cigars and whatever. The whateverers would giggle, the cigar smokers would blow long plumes of Cuban smoke. Flasks would pass around. See you next week, we’d say, and head off into the city looking for music, live music, and life, real life. Memories. Seeking out memories, and creating new ones.
1/3/2014
(2013)
I wrote this long beautiful piece on an endless party at the Cafe NELA last nite. It was gorgeous, that piece. Then Facebook froze and the words dissolved into electrons so fuck it. Good party though. Great even. One of those parties that will flash before your eyes.
Duley Toledo kicking out the jams.
I will vote for the candidate who promises to standardize the color coding on milk cartons, I think to myself, as the wife complains I got skim milk instead of 2% again. Oh well, last time it was 1%. At least I’m heading in a healthier direction, I said, it could have been half and half. It could have been chocolate, she said. I thought about making a soy milk joke, but she’s from Wisconsin.
Watching a David Attenborough documentary–Planet Earth–with a Sioux Indian is mildly disconcerting. Attenborough is intoning about the bison. That’s a magnificent animal I say. That’s a lot of meat, she says. We used to hunt them with arrows, she says. You could kill them with arrows? Nah, but if you could immobilize it you could hack at it. I blanch even whiter. That’s a lot of meat she says again.
I remember watching a very drunk friend make booga booga noises at some Satanists. They were trying to explain the tenets of their creed and he was making faces and crazy noises. It was the booga booga that scared them, and they fled quickly into the night. That was the New Years in August party, just before midnight. My favorite New Years Eve ever, actually, and it wasn’t even New Years Eve. Those hazy crazy lazy days of summer.
Sold a mess of LPs today, making room for books. Sold a mess of CDs this week, too. The collection gets smaller and smaller. The library–books–gets bigger and bigger. CDs I like, but they are certainly unhip. Plus I can’t read the liner notes. OK, I never did read liner notes. But even if I did read them, I couldn’t. Vinyl is hip but hopelessly analog. Cassettes I have because I haven’t transferred them onto anything else. Otherwise I trawl YouTube, though spend too much at it and you get that lazy and worthless feeling, particularly if you read the comments. Eventually, I am reduced to humming to myself, off key, as I pull books out of the closet and slip them in the empty spaces where LPs used to be. I turn off the computer and retreat into a vast and erudite tome on the middle ages, the sort that makes me so dull to sit next to at cocktail parties. We’re still in the late classical period. Rome stands, though they’ve stopped draining the marshes and malaria has returned. The emperor is up in Ravenna, near Venice. Just ain’t the same as it was in Rome’s glory days. It’ll all be over soon enough, though, and things get all fucked up and eventually, well past the last page of the book, I’ll sit here typing this.
(2013)
You know Silver Lake is not completely gentrified when the crackhead (possibly schizophrenic) babydaddy of your next door neighbor, who rants at all hours about how he is possessed by “el Diablo,” is caught sharpening a humongous machete in front of your house, spends one night in jail, and then he’s back in front of the door, macheteless but still screaming about the fucking Diablo.
G.T., Facebook
Ah wow, nostalgia. This was the Silver Lake (though it was Silverlake then, before all the gueros moved back) that I knew and loved from the mid 80’s till sometime after its third or fourth cover of Los Angeles magazine.
Crack, cool. OK, maybe not cool, but you used to be able to buy that where the Silver Lake farmer’s market is now. Or on Micheltorena across from the school. Or at Parkman, right on the sidewalk, across from the liquor store where my pal Dave got beat up for badmouthing a couple cholos. Dave always was kind of an idiot that way. It didn’t pay to be an idiot back then. Now it does, and you get to write for the LA Weekly or be a reality star or an independent film maker. Back then you got beat up by cholos at Sunset and Parkman, or OD’d on junk or got AIDS. Maybe the cops busted you in somebody’s bushes with some bear you just met on Griffith Park Blvd. Try explaining that one to the new neighbors.
I heard the worst poetry I ever heard in a bar where Cheetah’s is now. A chick screaming in free verse about sodomy. Though she didn’t call it that. She’d written the poem while so engaged. Bent over and hating herself and writing bad poetry. Seriously, that’s what she told us. I wondered why I was there. But I digress.
There used to be lots of gays in Silver Lake too. No really, I remember. You could hear their sounds of love deep into the night, plus they threw great parties. And the dykes would beat the living fuck out of each other outside the club where the free clinic is now. They wore huge boots and drove big pick up trucks and beat each other up. No tea parties in Silverlake. Not then.
There were still a few hippies left, I knew some, theirs was a different world. Talk of soap factories and love ins. We just stared, blinking in disbelief. Then we’d smoke pot together out of some ancient bong. There even remained a few ancient beatniks. Embittered, angry, hating everything…they hadn’t changed a bit. And punks, though getting into their late twenties and beyond, still scared customers away.
There was a gay bookstore, a gay steakhouse, a gay hamburger joint, a gay coffee shop, and bathhouses you could emerge from sparkling clean. We had a zillion gay weekly papers, all outrageous, and one very serious Lesbian News. There was a lesbian auto mechanic.
We had crime too, lots of it. You could have your car battery, your car radio and your car itself stolen, sometimes in the same week if it was your lucky day. We had shootings and murders and a Colombian gang that specialized in pick pocketing and breaking and entering. Suicides were popular.
We had a laundromat that had poetry readings, next to a gay bar with oiled musclemen dancing on the tables. We don’t have that anymore. Plus we had a surplus store, and still do. That, and me and my wife, are still here. Surplus and antiques.
Nowadays we have breeders and lawyers and hipsters and a zillion lovely young women who I refuse to complain about.. And oh yeah, the food was better then. I mean it was worse, but it was better. At least you could afford it.
Anyway that story I opened with was from my former editor who yelled at me for spelling Esperanza Spalding wrong (I had whooping cough, no one can spell right with hooping cough) and who I once got in trouble because I said Lemmy beat me up. And that story of his brought all that wonderful old Silverlake back. Nothing like a good machete story. Especially if no one gets hurt. If it was a machete story and someone did get hurt, well, that was what Echo Park was for. Maybe hurt is an understatement. They fished him out of the lake. Maybe they found the head when they drained it.
Or maybe they’ll find it when they drain the Reservoir.
I like to think it was used by Santerias. We used to have them in Silverlake. The botanicas on Sunset sold powders and spells, and you’d find dead chickens in the park.
I’ve never told this to the lovely young neighbor ladies. They’d be outraged. Chickens have rights too, you know. Some stories are best left to the aged and cynical.
(2012)
One time I thought it’d be fun to get all my lady friends at work to join me for a lunch. A bunch of them, actually, eight, maybe ten. Maybe a dozen, I can’t remember. They’d all been asking me out to lunch as people in offices do and as I never went to lunch with anybody I figured I could take them all out to lunch simultaneously. Get it over with. I didn’t say that, of course, but it was the idea. And it made perfect sense to me.
I explained this all to a friend. She looked at me like I was nuts. Do you have any idea what you’re doing? Going to lunch, I said. With all of us at once? I said sure, why not. How long have you been married, twenty five years? Twenty eight, I said. And in twenty eight years you haven’t learned anything? I was confused. She laughed. You’ll see. So you will come, I asked? Absolutely not, she said. But she wanted to hear all about it. That’s a lot of estrogen, she added, cryptically.
It was a catastrophe. I lost any control of events about one minute after I proposed the idea. They started fighting. The restaurant got expensive. Then more expensive. Then really expensive. You’ll need a tie, I was told. More fighting. Someone was being pushy. Another one really resented them being pushy. I’d get snippy messages, complaints. The emails began getting crazed. One of my best friends—the gorgeous, icy, brilliant blonde—backed out. She didn’t want to meet any of the others, but don’t tell them that, she said. I didn’t have to, they just assumed it. Factions developed. Some of the ladies wanted to go here. Another there. Another got so mad she just lost it and started yelling at me for what reason I do not know. Totally blew her stack, a furious Filipina explosion. I was in the eye of a female hurricane, the storm swirled all around me.
Eventually they were all mad at me for having such a stupid idea in the first place. After a couple days of this, I called the whole thing off. That only made them madder. More fights started. I hid in my corner of the office floor and avoided them all for a week or two. Never went to lunch with any of them, wouldn’t dare. Lunch was a minefield.
The lady I’d first invited laughed and laughed. I warned you, she said. Then she asked me to lunch.
Brick Wahl 