New York City

American X-mas Party

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Shane and I used to finger each other. Don’t worry mom, this isn’t me coming out. Fingering is a bit dramatic. It was just pre-pubescent exploring. I remember one time when we had our pants off, figuring out each other’s, in Shane’s room—my mom and Shane’s mom knocked on the door. We hadn’t heard them make their way from the living room. Shane and I rushed to button up. My mom didn’t notice the way my pants hung loosely from my hips.

I went to see Shane for the first time in ten years. His mom, an ex-police detective who had moved out to California, was hosting a Christmas party on her return to New York. I could discern which retro-fitted Harlem apartment building was Shane’s.

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Let’s ‘ave a Larf (“In which I introduce the Beatles to both Bob Dylan and the evil weed…”)

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Before (the late) Al Aronowitz brought Dylan and pot to the Beatles, he introduced Billie Holiday to the Beats. You can read his sweet tale about that encounter here. I’m reminded just now that I met Aronowitz one evening in the aughts at Amiri Baraka’s house where a tiny group had turned out for a poetry reading by an ex-member of The Last Poets. The odd few included the current mayor of Newark, who chowed down with me in the kitchen as someone’s (Amina’s?) beans moved his dad to get rhapsodic. Wish I’d taken Baraka’s words down. His offhand ode to beans was as tasty as Seven Guitars‘ melody of greens. Thankfully, though, I recall what happened after the reading when the Last Poet let on he’d become a Muslim. Baraka’s response was to pour the Courvoisier and ask: “Is God a tease? How come this is so mellow if He doesn’t want us to have a taste?”

On to Aronowitz’s (conflicted) case for natural highs…

It’s my experience that to smoke marijuana for the first time is to explore the limits of hilarity only to find that there are no limits. You laugh so hard that you get addicted to it. You want to laugh that hard again, so you smoke marijuana again. And again and again and again and again. I’m told that few ever really succeed in laughing that hard a second time, but I did. The two biggest laughs of my life were the first time I smoked marijuana and the first time the Beatles smoked it.

The latter occasion was at the Hotel Delmonico on Manhattan’s Park Avenue on August 28, 1964. The Beatles and their manager, Brian Epstein, had just finished eating their room service dinner when Bob Dylan and I pulled up in Bob’s blue Ford station wagon driven by Victor Maymudes, Dylan’s tall, slender-and wiry Sephardic-looking roadie. Victor carried the stash in his pocket as we made our way through the mob of teenyboppers on the sidewalk and into the hotel.

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Hunter Harris Goes High

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Hunter Harris’s talkback to our masters of entertainment has proven she has what it takes to become a vital voice of America. When she aims at official powers-that-be, the country benefits from her wit. Not that our ruling classes float above Harris’s usual beat. Her reporting in this swatch from her latest column places Mayor Adams inside the celebrity terrarium…

New York City Mayor Eric Adams is going through it to a degree that would make SZA¹ pick up her pen or make Martin Scorsese start storyboarding the saga of a new criminal conspiracy. On Friday afternoon Adams pleaded not guilty to five federal corruption charges, per The City.² He is the first New York City mayor to face criminal charges while in office. The news of his indictment went through Twitter like the night Trump got Covid, or the day Azealia Banks said Grimes smells “like a roll of nickels.”

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Fathers of Our Country (A Truscott Twofer)

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This is the “law and order” Donald Trump is running on

May 24, 2024

Donald Trump invited two rappers who are members of the 8 Trey Crips gang onstage with him at his rally in the Bronx yesterday.  Tegan “Sleepy Hallow” Chambers did eight months in prison on charges of gun possession and criminal conspiracy.  Michael “Sheff G” Williams served two years in prison for criminal possession of a firearm.  Both men were arrested last year along with 32 other gang members in a 140-count indictment for gang activity, murder, and conspiracy.

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Weberian at the Gates (with “Haaretz” Interlude & Post-Bust Postscript)

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“My mind is closed,” said a protestor at one of last week’s anti-Israel rallies outside Columbia’s gates. Yet she flinched at her own words once they came out of her lips. (No doubt she’d meant to say, “My mind is made up.”) I repeated what she’d said back to her. While I wished she wouldn’t shake it off too fast, there was no gloat in my game. Maybe I had a clue I’d be playing gotcha with myself soon enough.

The Columbia building occupation on Monday night had me living in contradiction, twisted and turning. I started with a hard bias against the spectacle of Ivy guys with keffiyehs and hammers.[1] But I was slain by the occupiers’ choice to rename Hamilton Hall “Hind’s Hall” in tribute to Hind Rajab, a 6-year-old Palestinian girl killed by Israeli tanks in the war against Hamas. Blunt force against property (not people) may be justified if the aim is to fix attention on the pain of others.

I wasn’t much more subtle than the window-breakers on the evening of the day last week when Iran’s regime sentenced rapper Toomaj Salehi to death for exposing the “filth beyond the clouds” of Islamism. It was my invocation of Toomaj’s case that provoked the respondent at the rally who copped to her closed mind.

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Donald Trump and the Machinery of Fame

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Let’s take a trip back to June 16, 2015, the day that Donald Trump announced he was running for president the first time. I’m taking you back that far because I want to see if I can find something…anything…normal about it.  Not normal psychologically – we all know how that search would go – but normal politically.

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Heroes Are Gang Leaders

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Robert’s Chametzky’s thoughts on Adorno’s famous line (here) reminded your editor that it was past time to post Baraka’s unassimilable story (first published in the 60s), which seems more punctual than ever…B.D.

My concerns are not centered on people. But in reflection, people cause the ironic tone they take. If I think through theories of government or prose, the words are sound, the feelings real, but useless unless people can carry them. At­tack them, or celebrate them. Useless in the world, at least. Though to my own way of moving, it makes no ultimate difference. I’ll do pretty much what I would have done. Even though people change me: sometimes bring me out of myself, to confront them, or embrace them. I spit in a man’s face once in a bar who had just taught me some­thing very significant about the socio-cultural structure of America, and the West. But the act of teaching is usually casual. That is, you can pick up God knows what from God knows who.

Sitting in a hospital bed on First Avenue trying to read, and being fanned by stifling breezes off the dirty river. Ford Madox Ford was telling me something, and this a formal act of· teaching. The didactic tone of No More Parades. Teaching. Telling. Pointing out. And very fine and real in its delineations, but causing finally a kind of super-sophisticated hero worship. So we move from Tarzan to Christopher Tietjens, but the concerns are still heroism.

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A Great Day in West Harlem

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Many of you were here for this event (and many actually organized it with true Tiemann tenacity), and some weren’t here but were in the utter vanguard of this ferocious tenants’ rights organization. We and you all were saluted on Saturday, on the event of the 35th annual West Harlem Coalition Anti-Gentrification Street Festival, with the unveiling of the street sign co-naming Tiemann Place as “Tom DeMott Way”!

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Fiesta

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For a long time I used to get up early on the day of the Annual Anti-Gentrification Street Festival. I’d join the crew that set up traffic barricades on Claremont, Broadway and Riverside and lug tables from International House—the dorm for foreign students on Claremont—down to Tiemann Place. I’ve tended to flake off lately though. My nephew Jamie and his gen seemed to have taken on the job after my brother Tom died—retiring elders like me. Yet this September I’d been more involved in prep since we’d arranged with our Councilman’s office and the DOT to schedule the “unveiling” of an official sign co-naming Tiemann Place “Tom DeMott Way” on Festival day.

Thanks to a prompt I could not refuse from an Irishwoman, Anah Klate, on September 16th I was up and out on the street by mid-morn (as grey went blue).

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Laughter in the Dark

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My first brush with the audience for Film Forum’s Ozu retrospective was a trip. I got off on the wrong block and ran into another Ozu-er who was lost too. As we found our way around the block to the theatre, he told me he saw Tokyo Story when he was teenager, which led him (eventually) to spend decades in Japan where he got married. His Japanese wife met us at the theater.

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Melancholy Serenade

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I so vividly remember watching the Jackie Gleason show with my family as a kid. I always loved the finale when Gleason would do the Joe The Bartender sketch and Frank Fontaine’s Crazy Guggenheim would come out. (Seemed like all the boys in my grade school class watched Gleason because we’d all take a shot at impersonating his signature laugh thereby driving our supervising teachers — what else? — crazy.) The inebriated Guggenheim would tell some wacko story, get a lot of laughs and then, at Gleason’s request, sing an old-timey ballad in the most beautiful baritone around.

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Bensonhurst

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I am standing on West Ninth Street in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, sometime in the 1930s: a horse-drawn ice wagon has just come down the street, and I am looking at the golden apples the horse has dropped and saying to myself (not the horse), “Your necktie is maroon.”

My mother had an elegant way with colors, which devolved on us children, a flair she developed along with her flair for elegant names; this was clear in the voluntary refinement of her name from “Esther” to “Estelle”—a habit acquired by her younger brother Yitzchak (Isidore, Izzy), who chose to be known to the world as “Morton.” My father, an affable salesman of millinery (i.e., ladies’ hats), did not care for his eccentric brother-in-law; and when he called, my father would answer the phone, saying almost nothing but declaring to my mother, after she had asked who’d called, “Itza Mutt,” reducing her to literally helpless laughter. My father liked to make my mother laugh so hard that she had to run, as best she could, out of the kitchen . . . but I digress.

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