Thunderclap Newman

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Alas, Andy Thunderclap Newman has passed on. What a strange thing his namesake Thunderclap Newman was, and even stranger what a thing that Hollywood Dream LP was. I remember playing it in the car as I drove down Hollywood Blvd right after moving here in 1980, blasting the title cut out the window and thinking wow, I’ve made it. I wish there was a Hollywood, I sang along, just like there used to be, with long black cars and paper hoods and a film star on my knee. Except that my canary yellow (with grey primer) Buick Opel didn’t have a cassette player when I first moved to Hollywood, it had an AM radio, and unless KHJ was playing Something in the Air, Andy Newman’s unhurried piano never saw the inside of my beat up little car. Now, as I mash together memories, formats, and automobile sound systems I’m listening to an Accidents (long version) that I copped off the internet. Andy takes a wonderfully ancient solo like we’re watching Buster Keaton chasing his hat in a windstorm, so unhip it hurts. “I see Jimmy climbing on the milkman’s van, laughing,” sings Speedy, “on his feet were a pair of granddad’s shoes / Then I looked around / And he was gone / Are we to lose?” Then a melodic solo by Jimmy, a penny whistle, and more of Andy accompanying Buster Keaton. I recall how unpopular a party album this was at our pad. It was an acquired taste, like an aged but weird wine. Andy himself, I always thought, was even better on a b-side of Something In the Air called Wilhelmina that one can safely assume probably did not get as much airplay as the a-side. He sings nothing like Mick Jagger over a barrelhouse piano nothing like Keith Emerson and though Jimmy McCulloch does a very nice psychedelic fill it’s as unrock’n’roll a thing as you can imagine. I love it. Now Andy Thunderclap Newman is gone, following Jimmy McCulloch and Speedy Keen, and the band is gone too. Life is just a game, you fly a paper plane, there is no end.

Thunderclap Newman

Speedy, Andy, and Jimmy on the cover of Tiger Beat.

 

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Cute

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Not that we’re looking–we’re renters for life–but the wife keeps finding cute little places in the L.A. Times Hot Property section that are a million five or more. And the thing is, they are cute little places. The kind of house you see tucked away on a hillside cul de sac amid shade trees and roses. It’s gotten to the point now that cute costs as much as fifty average Americans make in one year. Pretty cost twice that. You don’t even wanna know gorgeous.

We were driving in a stretch of Burbank a couple nights ago, where the city butts up against the Verdugos and can’t go any further. Cute were the bottom end places, most of the houses were in the pretty range, with the occasional gorgeous occupying half a block. We must have gone miles, winding with the streets, once coming smack against the mountain, the bottom of a cliff really, and you could smell pine and hear birds we don’t hear down here in the Silver Lake hills. But it occurred to me as we drove along that we had never been up there before. Never been on any of those streets, and that we know no one who lives up there. They’re not in our class, the wife joked. But they aren’t. They’re in the class where cute is a mere million five, and I can’t even imagine that.

Rock dove

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We no longer have pigeons in Silver Lake. We have rock doves. Indeed, there was one on the sun deck. Just one. Very selective, our rock doves. The elite. Not like the mobs of pigeons you’d see in the Ralph’s parking lot, waiting for the crazy bird lady. But Ralphs is gone, the bird lady is gone, and the pigeons are gone, who knows where. There are other parking lots, other bird ladies. So there was just the one rock dove, gleaming after a winter’s rain. He landed on our sun deck with its million dollar view, and the mere mourning doves and finches and sparrows scurried out of its way. The rock dove carefully selected only the choicest seeds, looked about, and then, tired of slumming it, flew off to the rich people in the hills, where he can find a finer selection of avian cuisine and bird baths sculpted in Carrara marble. Meanwhile, back on our sundeck the mourning doves and finches and sparrows rushed back in, bickering, pecking, a disorder of tiny dinosaurs with no class at all. Gentrification has a long way to go among these birds.

A hoi polloi of pigeons, unwilling to discover their inner rock dove.

A hoi polloi of pigeons, unwilling to realize their inner rock dove.

Martin Shkreli

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There was a time when the funniest thing about Albania was a king named Zog. Funnier than that, though, is the fifty thousand pillboxes their nutjob Stalinist dictator had installed everywhere with enough concrete to build several Hoover dams. They’re everywhere, in yards, in pastures, on beaches, in the street, or in little clutches like eggs in a nest, their gun portals facing all which ways. That’s funny. Of course Albania is doing well now, democratic and stable, hip and beautiful, a tourist mecca. So what happens? The son of an Albanian janitor in Brooklyn gives away fifteen million dollars in bitcoins to some nonexistant human–no doubt Russian–to get the sole copy of Kanye West’s new album. Fifteen million dollars poof, just like that. Better yet is that he originally offered ten million and his supposed Kanye contact got him up to fifteen million. There are Nigerians rolling their eyes to heaven wondering why didn’t they think of that. Fifteen million dollars. Do you know how many pillboxes you can buy with fifteen million dollars? Enough to build a Brooklyn Bridge, which Martin Shkreli also owns, I’m sure. Yet something tells me this can’t possibly be true, that’s it all some weird twitter hoax. I mean good Zog, can rich people really be this stupid?

Paragraphs

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Some people write poems, I write paragraphs. This occurred to me a couple days ago, and how Facebook and smart phones have made paragraphs the ideal length since it matches both screen size and attention span. So I write pretty paragraphs.  People ask me why I don’t write a book. But what is a book but hundreds of paragraphs? I’ve already written hundreds of paragraphs. Thousands. Zillions. I spend my nights in indented servitude, writing paragraphs.

Blue Christmas

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Come Christmas I especially miss Charlie O’s…many a chilly December night I spent time in there sipping whiskey and listening to saxophoned renditions of Blue Christmas. A reharmonized Blue Christmas, perhaps, alien and even utterly unrecognizable to those of us not be bop musicians, but the head would return soon enough and it would be a blue, blue Christmas all over again. Herman Riley would let the last notes fade in a sigh and the sound of pads closing, one by one, till there was nothing but utter silence in a stilled room. The patrons would wait till every last air molecule passed through the bell of his horn into the ether before applauding. I think about that often now. For some reason I’ve thought about it even more this Christmas. The vibe is some rooms seems timeless, but alas they are anything but, and once their time is over there’s only silence and memories.
Saxophonist Chuck Manning on some night at Charlie O's.

Saxophonist Chuck Manning on some night at Charlie O’s.

Eleven hours

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Damn. Eleven hours. That might be a record. We considered breakfast but the place looked like the remains of a riot so we settled for cookies and scrapings of hummus and cup after cup after cup of strong coffee, punctuated with beer and other things. John Ramirez was reading aloud from my blog of parties past–that was new, people reading my blog aloud at my own house, but it was so late I was past the point of self-consciousness–as Carey Fosse was spinning jazz at the stereo. Heard so much Bud Powell my ears we’re ringing with it as I awoke around eleven, then noon, and finally a few minutes ago. Bouncing With Bud, over and over, every take Michael Cuscuna could squeeze into that double CD, rattling through my head between all the seizure meds and Benadryl and memories. Hadn’t heard it that album in years and certainly never heard it played in its entirety, both discs, every out take, at five in the morning. He played good, that Bud Powell. Better than I can write right now, and certainly better than I am cleaning the house right now. Instead I am sitting here stumbling through this post surrounded by wreckage and listening to Shin Joong Hyun and thinking just how groovy and swinging and punk rock a bohemian life style can be. No responsibility, just happenings, experiences, and the lies–well, exaggerations–we tell about them later.

Great tree, too. A beautiful Christmas tree. Each one like a work of art assembled by all these weirdos, and after two weeks it’s gone forever.

A wad of gum

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Had one of those surreal evenings last night, with middle aged men threatening violence, bottles breaking crazily on concrete, a very drunk clown chick, and an angry man shouting about a vomit covered floor. Inside, a man was singing Black Sabbath songs in a Santa suit. Outside a group of guys discussed Ollie Halsall, which I didn’t think was even possible in Los Angeles. At one point I stumbled into a cloud of weed smoke so thick I thought I was Bob Marley as a guy was telling me how somebody fucked somebody and somebody was mad that somebody fucked somebody even though somebody wasn’t fucking somebody anymore so why would somebody care who was fucking anybody. I said I didn’t know. Finally, at three in the morning, I received a call warning me that there might a wad of gum in my car. I didn’t pick up, but let the caller prattle on about the wad of gum (and his words now remain, like oral literature, among the blinking messages on the machine) as I sat on the sofa in the dark, wide awake, listening to Heinrich Schütz.

I love this town, I really do.

Writers and coders

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Weird time to be a writer. There’s writing everywhere, a deluge of words, and it’s all free. But in the beginning, when writing was brand new and Iraq was Sumeria, dotted with city states and kings and gods and zigurrats, there were perhaps a few hundred of us, etching sentences into clay in cuneiform, “woven” an ancient scribe wrote, “intricately like a net”. Almost no one could read then, and fewer wrote, and it took years to master their craft; writers were a specialist caste, powerful, feted, privileged. Imagine that. Kings would utter commands, scribes made them real. Now we writers plug away on Facebook between pictures of cats. Lo, how the mighty have fallen.

Yet beneath this very post, in the programming, is the work of coders. I open the source page and see their work, the thousands and thousands of characters, letters and numbers and slashes woven intricately like a net. Few now can read it, and fewer write it, and like the ancient scribes, mastering their craft takes years. I can’t imagine any of them see the irony–they, hunched over in their cubicles, are the scribes now, and if not feted or privileged, they at least make a living. My words are just keystrokes, their code makes them real.

A cold

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Helluva cold that was. It hit out of the blue–don’t they always–and rapidly whipped through the usual litany of symptoms, finishing up it’s business yesterday. I cursed my healthy immune system–that’s all the symptoms of a cold are, really, your immune system getting hysterical–and watched a lot of old movies. Some channel was showing a string of film noir, which was perfect, and even more perfect was the sticky southern gothic perfection of A Streetcar Named Desire, me crumpled on the floor, sneezing, coughing, aching, high on sweet cherry cough syrup, reciting Stanley’s lines.