Happy Valentine's Day



The text reads: I hope I'm first to win your prize - Cross the line My Valentine



The Curse of Fred Astaire

Okay, look. When I was young and watching old movies and cartoons, the images were black and white. Color hadn't come along yet, but once it did, the images started to change. It took awhile for things to go color, you know. The black and whites had had such images. And style. So when I was young and dreaming along with the movies, a world of release and joy and sometimes intense emotional moments would engulf me, a world of singing and dancing where a callow youth could save and redeem himself with the right production number. You might say that I began to acquire a philosophy. The pinnacle of it all was a well to do guy in dinner tie and tails and nightclubs where the only light is a soft neon glow. Brash and charming, confident with a soupcon of a stylish high society thief. Fred Astaire, song and dance man, ruled the American Dream. For well to do folks at least. As the color musicals stared to air, there was another dancing man. Part gymnast, same charm, much more athletic. Occasionally a pompous fool in a sweet musical comedy sort of way. Earthier. Working class. But as much as I liked Gene Kelly (even with the pompous parts), the world I chose was one of glowing blacks and whites, where witty bon mots were conversation. Where every now and then, if you live your life right, one might step out onto the black onyx dance floor and experience one of those moments you hang on to forever, the ones that make life worth continuing.

Now, I could never be a Fred Astaire. Ungainly, one of those plain faces made from a not quite mashed potato, absolutely no co-ordination, I was and am a mess. I couldn't even stay on key when I was a kid. I've realized that I didn't want to be like him as much as I wanted to live in that world.

"The Curse of Fred Astaire" was an independent movie made in the early to mid 1980's. Obviously, the title resonated with possibilities. Friends in the industry loaned me a VHS tape, telling me , "Ya gotta see this." The story of an overweight theatre wanna be gypsy taking dance classes (with musical numbers, of course), it was easily one of the most hysterically funny things I have ever seen. For most of the first twenty minutes. You soon realise that it isn't a send up, it isn't satire, it isn't camp - it's serious. The remaining hour is the worst dreck I've ever seen, and I'll watch anything - except La Guerre Est Finie and Last Year at Marienbad. but that is another story. I am now prepared to admit that I couldn't watch it through to the end.

Just about every time I've tried to write n this blog during the last couple of weeks, I have had problems with my aging computer. More about that soon.

In the meantime, I feel a need to comment on one of those "trial balloons" floated just a day or two after my last post. It noted that "insiders" had been told by Newt Gingrich that he was running for president in 2012.

Newt Gingrich? The man who co-authored the Contract on America? The same Newt Gingrich who tried to hound and impeach Bill Clinton out of office for a sexual indiscretion - while he was having an extramarital affair with a House of Representatives staffer 23 years his junior?

Is this satire or is it serious?

The Big Red X

They are cutting down the trees in front of my building.



About 9 trees got the red x.
Click to enlarge-you can see the x better

 Red Xs appeared on them last autumn around the time of the Putney Road repaving project. My landlord wasn't very happy about it, but said that he was told the trees were not in good health. Which is interesting as they have been there for at least 20 years in my memory, through high winds, heavy snows, and ice storms with only the loss of a branch or two (about the size of one's arm) the last year or so. I'm not even sure who said they have to go - the power company  would have such a say, but then again there are no power lines on this side of Putney Road. In one of those weird synchronicity of events things, as I type the news on the radio (national - Free Speech Radio News) is discussing saving hemlock trees from some new disease. A guy I know named Bernie told me that the state can  order it done as Putney Road is Route 5 and, after all, they paid for the repaving. I've watched those Xs nervously, knowing something is wrong - kind'a like the pictures are gone.



Before: now you see two of three on the left

and now you don't - although if you click to enlarge, you do see one of the trees being moved by a crane.

I can't believe it's already January the 20th. But then again, New Year's seems like such a long time ago. The last week has been most stressful and annoying. If I had not called in sick last Friday (the cold that won't go away) I would have worked, as scheduled, seven straight days without a day off. It's nine days when I include going in on my day off last week.

Of course, calling in sick caused another "counselling session". It seems that I have called in sick a total of 6 days in the last 6 months (counted as rolling months, by the way). That includes two days when I left early - one due to my back, the other due to the flu or cold or whatever one is calling this torment from hell. If I call in sick (or go home sick) again, I could either get another counselling session, or be fired on the spot. No matter that for the previous two and a half years I never missed a day's work.

During the last week, we've been through two major snowstorms. The day before the storm is to hit, store business is like Thanksgiving and Christmas combined. And we had a 3 day weekend for the well off office workers and bosses in the form of Martin Luther King Day. Which means that ski hungry tourists descend like a swarm of flies on a dead horse. Maybe that should be locusts on a field of cabbages. Most are snide, rude, arrogant, obnoxious, self entitled, invidious nouveau riche on their way to deservedly becoming nouveau poor. (Isn't it kind of interesting that Martin Luther King spoke up time and again for the poor and the working poor, yet the holiday in his honor can only be enjoyed by fairly well to do and government workers? At least the three day weekend isn't used to promote massive sales of white sheets.)

My favorite customer this past weekend? One of those can't do anything for themselves where is my personal assistant types. I had to walk him through swiping his credit card through the machine to purchase his goods. He read a screen message out loud, "Do I want money back? No, I don't want money back. What do I do?" "Press the 'No' button." "Which one is 'no' ?".   Customers in line were all a twitter. After he left, I waited until he was about 20 feet away and I could hold it no longer and blurted out "The one that isn't 'Yes'."

This post was originally written on Thursday Jan 20th. It is now January 24th, a Monday. All it really needed was one - count 'em - one - graphic to be uploaded. Every time I have tried to get back here to push that "publish" button something has happened. Much of the problem has been my computer, which seems to have decided that it doesn't really want to work anymore. No viruses anywhere, 90% or more of the CPU available - with opening web pages as the highest priority for tasks, no other programs running - yet all it does is sit there and play with itself. It will sometimes take 20 minutes and more to complete opening a a web page! I'll be typing and suddenly the system will freeze (except for whatever it is really doing) for sometimes as much as an hour. (Right now everything seems to be working.)

Anyway, the dark chocolate brownies with raspberry creme cheese and chocolate drizzle are finished and calling my name. There is still so much to post, so much I had wanted to post and thought I still might -but my work schedule is once again devised to drain every ounce of energy I can give. The last couple of days have been exceptionally cold, and customers have added "Nasty" to their repertoire. As this morning's temperature was -19 Fahrenheit, about the only thing that really saved me from going berserk - - is that today was only a four hour day.

Meanwhile, the store's new health care provider raised my weekly payroll deduction to just under $60.00 a week, and topped that off by refusing access to the main antidepressant I take. So for most of a week, I was off my main antidepressant, the other antidepressant, the anti anxiety, the anti itch for the oozing skin condition and the other anti-anxiety pill - in short everything - for several days waiting for payday so I could afford to renew the other prescriptions. 

The next few days ought to be fun.

Juxtaposition

So the thing is, I'm sitting here, watching the President's speech at the memorial service for the victims of the madness out in Arizona, and my screensaver kicks in. Now, I have a file set up just for the screensaver program. The file has photos I found on the web that I thought interesting, some of my own pics, a couple of movie posters, friends, old advertising, etcetera. Just as the President changed from memorializing the fallen and moved into his speech segment, my computer reached its 25 or so minutes of idle mode and turned on the screensaver. First, the screen went black - that's what caught my attention. Slowly, this movie still faded in:

It's all just too much.

After staring at the screen for 20 minutes or so, I still don't know where to begin. It's all been too much. Up to 5,000 dead birds fell out of the sky in Arkansas just before midnight New Year's Eve - buried in the AP text of the story was a note, "similar events have occurred elsewhere". Say What? Well, the next day there were about 500 or so birds which fell out of the sky dead in Louisiana. And then there was the two million birds which fell out of the sky dead over Russia in 2007. Then there are the 500 or so that fell out of the sky dead over Stockholm recently,   As I write this, there are reports of thousands of birds falling out of the sky dead in Italy, and a previously unpublished report of birds falling dead out of the sky in Kentucky.

isn't this what you'd like to see ofter waking up some morning?

Then there's the millions of dead fish floating in the Chesapeake Bay on Tuesday, oh, and there were lots of dead fish in Arkansas too - about 100,000 of them about 100 miles away from where the birds fell.Then there's the 100 tons of croakers, sardines and catfish that have washed up on the beaches of Brazilian fishing villages since last Thursday, or the hundreds of snapper fish that washed up on New Zealand beaches a few days ago - with their eyes missing. And then there's the 10,000+ dead fish which washed up on two separate Atlantic Ocean beaches this past August. Then there's the 40,000 dead crabs which washed up on England's beaches in the past few days, as well as 150 tons of dead red tilapia in Vietnam.

There's also a two headed cow just born in Georgia (the Soviet one, not ours.) And it is not the only two header born recently.

To quote Anna Russell , "I'm not making this up, you know."

So what caused all this havoc? "The test results aren't in." "We're still collecting data." "We'll have to get back to you."

Then there's the mind numbing incident in New Mexico. Point blank shooting a U. S. Congresswoman - democrat, of course - because she voted for Health Care and against an Illegal Immigrants/Immigration law which violated several of the principles upon which this county was founded. Well, it sure was one hell of a way to encourage healthy and open debate. 2nd Amendment Clobbers 1st. There has been a small tiddly bit of discussion about the political atmosphere and outrageous statements and stunts which got us there. There's even been a bit of biography on the Judge who was killed. Falling right into the reporting trap was a child of 10, a child who was born on the 11th of September 2001 no less. (Why is it always worse when a child is involved instead of, say, a US Congresswoman or a Judge?) And, ummm, by the way somebody shot out the glass doors of her campaign headquarters last November, nothing to worry about it's happened to several other legislators, too. Say What?  How do we overcome this and restore balance, fairness, common good? "We're still collecting data". "We'll have to get back to you."

Meanwhile, I've now had a "counselling session" at work. Seems that since the beginning of November, I have violated the rules on breaks 3 times. One of the dates on the paperwork was 12/25. "Excuse me person who is making my work life torture and who can fire me at any time, but may I ever so humbly point out that the store was closed on Christmas?" "That means week ending." "I don't recall signing any paperwork about it" "You know we've talked about this" "I want to see he paperwork." "I have the two from December on my desk." "I'd like to see the paperwork." "You'll have to talk to (the personnel director) about it. Two days later, I saw (the personnel director) about it. Well, it was no longer on the computer - they changed to a new system January 1st. She did have the paperwork but it had just been put in a box which was now on the bottom of a shipping pallet. :Okay, Nevermind, I said in my best Eeyore voice. I found an envelope in my mail box and I packed to go home. it had three sheets showing the dates involved, as well as the violation. Good God! I had come back one minute early from the unpaid time they call "Lunch".  And two minutes late from a (paid) 15 minute break as required by law. I never did get the paper work that I'm supposed to have signed.  I got called aside the next day - during the last week of December I had come back early from lunch on two occasions! Then, while stretching to help with a very sore back, I did something bad. So bad I had to call in on Friday because the pain was still overwhelming. 

One day later, I came down with headache/fever/sweats/bad sore throat/coughs rip the throat apart/sneezing/achy/chills kind of thing. On top of that my skin condition has been oozing and scabbing again. Then there's my cable bill which somehow went up $50.00 a month (I got that taken care of), and my failing ten year old computer which can take 20 minutes for a web page to load, ten minutes for a typed sentence to appear, 5 minutes to delete each unwanted email (I get about 250 pieces of SPAM a day), then turn around and load an intensely visually packed web page quicker than one can blink an eye. Like the car which went last February, I just don't have the money to replace it. Oh, well. At least I didn't become homeless this month. So how am I doing? I'm still collecting data. I'll have to get back to you.

B. Altman & Company

In her reply to my last post, "Austan" noted memories of B. Altman, the escalator, and wood everywhere. All of which are also part of my memories of the place. Altman's was really was a memento of another time, when grace and civility mattered, when things were built to be beautiful as well as functional.

All of the store entrances had canopies like this one.

 If you'd ever seen it, you would never forget the view of the main floor and atrium from the escalators. Sad to say, I couldn't even find a picture of the main floor, except for this from the closeout sale.
 

The first floor interior was a warm polished wood. I can't imagine anyone painting it white as in the picture above. But then again... Altman's was sold in 1985 to a group of real estate investors. It was part of a leveraged buyout that failed. By 1989, Altman's was forced into bankruptcy and closed by a judge's order. The sell off of the store's remaining inventory and fixtures followed, and the doors were closed for good Dec 31st, 1989.

It was such a shame. The store had employed over 500 people. There was a seven bed hospital with a doctor and two nurses for the staff - and shoppers who would be treated on an emergency basis. There were classes for the employees teaching the three R's. There was even a large fancy dining room on one of the floors. It was called the "Charleston Garden".

  

One side of a postcard for the dining room.

The actual dining room.

The escalators weren't installed until late 1939-early 1940's. They had originally been used at the 1939 World's Fair. I can't swear to this, but in my memory the escalators were wooden. There are now only a handful wooden escalators left - 2 or 3 at Macy's, one in a Boston subway station, and one or two in Europe and Argentina.

One of the wooden escalators at Macy's Herald Square.

One of the staircases at B. Altman's.

I remember once going to Altman's to buy either a pair of pants or a shirt - I no longer remember which. What I do remember is that as soon as I took something off a rack, a short elderly gentleman appeared at my side. He asked if I wanted to have the item tailored to fit. It would only take a few minutes. In what seemed like seconds, his hands performed a routine of measurement that only a lifetime of practice could provide. Oh, for the days of tailored clothes.

An Altman's window display from the 1940's.

another Altman's 1940's window display

 

Altman's was the kind of store that would make available a hand made "Tiffany" automobile.

When Altman's 5th Avenue store opened in 1906 (there had been two previous stores) the environs were the home of the wealthy. In deference to the neighborhood, Altman's didn't put up a sign identifying the store for 25 years.

That's the kind of place it was.

A Life in Champagne

One of the problems with the Internet is that it is nearly impossible to find what you're looking for unless it concerns the modern consumer culture (and who owns what or sells what or withholds what). I include in that a number of sites selling ephemera and memorabilia of the past. When the net first got going, it was a great collection of people's  well - collections. Memories. Images related or just liked. This all has to do with trying to locate a good picture of the interior of the B. Altman's store on 5th Ave in NYC. Let me explain.



B. Altman's store covered the entire block of 5th Ave to Madison,
and from 34th to 35th street. Most of the 5th Ave side now houses the
City University of New York's Graduate Center. 

As New Year's Eve approached, I found myself (naturally enough) thinking about Champagne. When I was a lad I don't think you could have a picture of New Year's Eve that didn't have a glass of champagne in it.

'Course, those were the days of Lawrence Welk, tiny bubbles in the wine and all that. I was thinking that so few people seemed to be buying champagne the last couple of years. It was part of the sparkle of life.

Whenever I think of champagne, I think of one of those colorful 'characters' that used to populate New York City. People like Moondog who was blind and would sit on a balustrade on the 53rd Street side of the CBS building selling his poetry and music.




He insisted that he was a viking, and wore an appropriate viking all leather outfit - even in the swelter of summer. Or there was Marsha the skinny black transvestite who treated everyone and everything she saw as the audience for her own show.

The person I want to mention was a singer named Larry Chelsi. He was something of a bon-vivant and a raconteur. An opera singer and Broadway performer, he told me once that he quit his stage career when the mob muscled in on his record contract.

I remember Chelsi telling me about his audition for Cole Porter for "Out of This World". The show featured a couple of Greek gods trying to spend quality time with a beautiful human female.Chelsi had been told to wear something toga-ish - at the request of Mr. Porter, to see how his legs and knees would look in a toga or tunic.

After finding himself at Porter's city digs, Chelsi performed his audition while running around the piano trying to discourage Mr. Porter's more amorous intentions. There's only one problem though - by 1949-1950 when the show opened, Porter had already been long confined to a wheelchair. Porter, by the by, used to tell people that it was while he was waiting for the doctors after a horse rolled on his legs (breaking them into pieces, leaving him in extreme pain) that he composed "At Long Last Love".

Once, while visiting him in his apartment in Turtle Bay, Chelsi went to unbury some piece of memorabilia from his bedroom and told me if I wanted anything, to help myself. As I could have used a drink of water, I went over to the kitchen fridge and opened it. It was stuffed - every shelf, nook and cranny containing bottles of champagne piled one upon another. He did have style.

The last time I saw Chelsi, it was on the great wooden escalators at B. Altman's. As I was heading to the main floor I saw Chelsi on the up escalator. He'd been out of town performing in some show, saw me - and yoo hooed while shaking his arm and hand at me. That particular arm and hand was wearing layers upon layers of the largest  charm bracelet I'd ever seen. Even at that distance, I could make out charms shaped like champagne bottles. Considering the carriage trade conservative nature of Altman's, I would have been mortified if I could have stopped laughing.

I did a few google searches for him on New Year's Day, and found that he passed in October '09. I was prompted to the search by an Australian friend's note. (It's always tomorrow over there.) Dave mentioned that his New Year's Eve had "probably too much champagne". In mind's eye memory, I saw Chelsi looking horrified, and with booming voice say, "There is No Such Thing as too much champagne."

Oh, about the ad in my New Year's Day post - I am thinking of getting in contact with the writer. I'd love to give it a go.

1-1-11

I know, I know  - the title's a bit hokey. But I'll probably never have a chance to do it again, so... We are quickly reaching the "Ahhhhhhh' moment - the one where its all over until next year. That moment. It's here. Unless your tastes are more Catholic, in which case ya still got Epiphany to get through.

Here it is New Year and all, but it just doesn't have that button that gets the "Ahhhhh". As if the year just finishing wasn't bad enough - we seem to say that every year now_ if you grew up in the Philadelphia area you got a great surreal slam bang finish in the Mummer's Parade. I am not going to attempt to explain it just now. Here's a general idea of what it is like.





At any rate, you can relax now.

New Year's Eve - when I have to be at work at 6:15am the next morning, the bastards.

On my very first New Year's Eve after moving to Brattleboro, I found myself walking up the hill part of Linden Street. It was the last hours of 1995 and the fireworks had just ended (weren't they at 10pm back then?). I was about even with the Retreat Clock Tower when I became aware of the conversation of three people walking a polite distance behind me. "So," asked a male voice, "what do you think Noam Chomsky does on New Year's Eve?" That was the moment when I knew for sure that I had found my place to live.


This is where I used to live, on the hill part of South Main Street.
I sent this to a friend, but I'll be damned if I can remember what year it was.

 Here, they don't celebrate "First Night" on Dec. 31st. Here it's "Last Night". I've no doubt that it took several years, 7 committees, and hundreds of meetings with the same handful of people to come up with that name. But it is the correct choice. The sad thing is that "Last Night" is mostly a police'em and fleece'em kind of thing. It's a forlorn attempt at providing an alcohol free alternative environment for celebrating the joy of survival...  (which may not be all that well advised around here, if ya know what I mean. Just sayin'.)

From my childhood through my mid teens, I always ended up watching the ball drop in Times Square while "Auld Lang Syne" was played by Guy Lombardo live at the Astor Hotel Ballroom. (Oh, Robbie Burns, where are ya lad, where are ya ?) Somewhere, in Beta Max, I have two different NY's Eve shows. One of them is from 1958 when the show was sponsored by Bulova Watch Time with John Cameron Swayze. Or something like that. It was a long time ago. And nothing has been quite right since Guy stopped playing on New Year's Eve. But it seems that every year, I keep turning on the TV shortly before midnight hoping that the world will have righted, and I can safely go about my business.



Pop Culture that used to be

So, here's the thing : today is Marlene Dietrich's birthday. I started looking through old files for a certain pic - never did find it. But when I found a still from "Blond Venus", I started to recall a particular Dietrich entrance, and..... hmmmm, wondered if it would be on YouTube and there it was... and here it is:



Now, to continue a conversation Laura and I have been having: Today's kids are sadly lacking in not only general knowledge, but in Culture knowledge as well. For instance, they don't know who Gershwin  was (George or Ira). Or Noel Coward. Or just about anything that dates back more than say, 5 years ago. I'm talking about Pop Culture here, the kind that became the universal subconscious of our nation. The testament of our dreams, fears, and hopes. So, while I was watching the clip above, I realized that today's kids and younger adults weren't really exposed to things: I grew up as TV grew up. As a 5 or 6 year old, I had access to the three major networks as well as the Dumont network (TV tuners at the time only had channels 2 thru 13). Oh, how I loved a show on Dumont - it was 'Sheena, Queen of the Jungle', starring Irish McCalla. I was 5 years old.



Later, as the late 1950's gave way to the early to mid 1960's, UHF broadcasting arrived (channels 14 - 83). In the Philadelphia market we had two, maybe three of these smaller independent channels. Unable to afford much programming, they ran old movies. Oh, the Networks ran old movies too. Late afternoon around 4:30 was the Million Dollar Movie, there was one at 11:30pm opposite or after Steve Allen and/or Johnny Carson, etc. All the movies were in black and white, but then so was everything - color television was just starting to move to the commercial arena. I was in my mid teens before I knew that the Errol Flynn "Adventures of Robin Hood" was supposed to be in color.



At any rate, we got to see all of the old Hollywood product line again and again. We knew the songs, if they had any. We knew the famous lines of dialogue. Just two days ago I was reciting: "The vessel with the pestle has the pellet with the poison...". People seemed to think I had lost my mind.



Most of our popular music was the music of Broadway: "Tonight" from 'West Side Story', "Hello Dolly", "Till there was You" from 'The Music Man'. Etcetera. And the same songs would come around again in a couple of years when they made the movie versions. And Movie Roadshows - good God, a movie palace with a huge screen, advance reserved tickets, souvenir programs, ToddAO, Super Panavision, CinemaScope! Intermissions when you could buy candy or dash to the rest rooms. Music from the movie playing as you waited in your seat for the movie to start or after it ended. Curtains that would open and close in front of the screen (and a second set of curtains which were often painted in the theme of the theatre). (Sigh)




Ocean City, New Jersey

 

Painted curtain at the Strand.

Just about anybody born after the mid 1970's would have no knowledge, no memories, of this era. And they have no idea what they missed. There may be no real reason for them to know these things, but I find it rather sad that they don't.