MID-DAY THOUGHTS AT A SAD TIME

In the late 1970s, I lived with my two children and for a while with the composer Rain Worthington, in an illegal (to live in back then) loft on the corner of Duane and Greenwich Streets in lower Manhattan, a neighborhood historically known as Washington Market, but which real estate interests would rebrand as Tribeca.

My kids played a few blocks away at The World Trade Center plaza, and in the towers themselves. They were like the mountains in our back yard. The old West Side Highway, only blocks from our loft, was defunct, unused by cars in years, and broken at the end which made it possible to walk up the broken part and hang out on what had been a highway but was now chipped concrete with weeds growing wild in it, like a scene in a dystopian sic-fi flick, only real.

Me and my neighbors, the few other artists and outlaws living in illegal lofts down there then, would hang out on the defunct highway on warm sunny days, sunbathing and watching our kids ride their bikes over the broken concrete, helmet-less.  A few blocks lower, toward Chambers Street, a tall wire fence had been installed on the other side of which what looked like a beach was being created.

On warm summer nights some of my neighbors would climb the fence and have beach parties near the river, like other beach communities, only not.  That was actually the landfill for what became Battery Park City. The neighborhood changed so much over the next decade and more that on returning to it in recent years I constantly get disoriented and not realize when I'm only doors away from my old loft building.

Where once there were only truck docks or empty warehouses or industrial buildings there are now high-rises and fancy restaurants and all that gentrification jive. Nice for the people living there and I suppose for those who got money to move out of their lofts and found something they could like elsewhere, but for most it was the end of an era and of an intimate creative neighborhood.

I was back living in Jersey after forty years of living elsewhere when 9/11 happened, and still there when this recent attack occurred, both in my old downtown neighborhood. It's been heart rending and continues to be.

THOUGH IT'S ALMOST OVER HAPPY CELTIC NEW YEAR

HA LOWEEN

LOVING VINCENT

Not a great movie but a unique and informative one, as well as an impressive achievement. Reproducing several of Van Gogh's most famous portraits, and other paintings of his, LOVING VINCENT brings them to life with a kind of painted animation (that used a hundred painters, according to the intro) in a story based mostly on factual biographical incidents.

The voice part of the acting is good, though to me it was odd to hear English and Irish accents coming out of French and Dutch characters. And the writing pretty good, considering the challenge of creating a compelling story out of paintings (the story centers around the mystery of Van Gogh's death).

As for the directing, when the film is not visually riffing on Van Gogh's original paintings, but instead illustrating speculative scenes not painted by the artist, it turns to blacks and grays in the style of enhanced film that I always find less engaging than actual film (or its digital equivalent).

I'm glad I saw it, and on the big screen, if just for the technique of bringing the paintings—and the characters and settings in them—to life.

JUST ASKIN'

FATS DOMINO R.I.P.

There's been plenty of tributes to Fats Domino, the New Orleans piano player/singer/songwriter, who passed today [actually technically it just turned midnight, so yesterday]. So mine will be about his impact on me. I entered adolescence as a piano player in 1955, at the same time rock'n'roll became a thing, with the biggest influences on my musicianship being the piano on Johnny Ace's posthumous hit "Forever My Darling" and everything Fats Domino recorded. In those years I played all his hits whenever I could in bars and at parties, etc. Here's two poems from my last book THE VILLAGE SONNETS that mention Domino.

12

The first place I played piano professionally

in Manhattan was on the city’s skid row in a

joint with a tourist show called SAMMY’S

BOWERY FOLLIES where ancient weathered

overweight ladies sang like Sophie Tucker,

all brass and sass and volume, and dressed like

19th-century dancehall gals in the Hollywood

Westerns of my boyhood. There were old

men too, vaudeville comics in raggy striped

suits and derbies, and white-haired musicians

playing piano and banjo. My cousin Rosemary

took me and another Irish Catholic girl with

Mary in her name, and her date, certain I’d

pass for eighteen with them in their twenties.

13

        

Midway through the show this big bosomed

old lady looked down at our table and asked

who I was, maybe cause I was the youngest

in the club. My cousin said Ricky Nelson.

Invited to the stage I blushed like crazy as the

others insisted I go. Luckily there were no

guitars since I didn’t play one. I knew the Fats

Domino song Nelson covered, so I sat down

at the piano to play and sing I’M WALKIN’

more like Fats than Ricky I hoped, and felt

gratified by the applause. The manager aware

I wasn’t Nelson said he’d pay me to be the

warm-up act for the main show. I did it for a

few months till I discovered progressive jazz.

MID-DAY MINI-RANT

Why is the Republican controlled Congress's opening two separate investigations (or re-investigations) into Hilary (emails, etc.) now? Some say to distract people from the Russian investigations (Trump election interference and collusion etc.). But to me it indicates that they know the outcome already, that Trump stole the election with the help of Putin and his minions, and Clinton is therefore our legally elected president.