NEWS ITEM: Nelson Bryant, New York Times “Outdoor Life” Columnist, Dies at 96.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/13/sports/nelson-bryant-dead.html?searchResultPosition=1

I always loved the woods more than the seashore. Growing up in outer borough New York City, we had access to both. A ride on the 12 bus would take us to Orchard Beach, on the Long Island Sound. Beach-loving families would ride down to Manasquan, New Jersey for a week of ocean fun.

I, however, preferred the 90-mile car ride to Sullivan County, in the Catskill Mountains — the Jewish Alps — where many working class families summered in bungalow colonies for a few hundred bucks a month. Ah, the woods! The cool, fresh air of early morning and evening. Weenie roasts. Catching fireflies and salamanders after a soft summer rain. And oh those rainbows.

No wonder I joined the Boy Scouts, which were decidedly uncool back in the sixties. In my rainbow coalition troop, we learned how to handle ourselves in the forest. We kids became skilled in the art of cookouts, camping, hiking — skills so foreign to the tenement apartment dwellers of the Bronx.

I loved reading Nelson Bryant’s work in The New York Times, once I graduated from the tabloids to the Times. Bryant was the outdoorsy dad I wish I had, sure-footedly explaining the fine points of fly fishing. Duck hunting. Deer tracking.

And his descriptions of his Martha’s Vineyard stomping grounds — my goodness! I finally got to The Islands in my late twenties, first at a Nantucket B&B and, then a lengthy rental of a stone house on Lobsterville Road, in the Gay Head section of The Vineyard.

Oh my. Here I found both “the woods” and the seashore. Nelson Bryant’s outdoors proficiency inspired me and, in time, my family rented homes in upstate New York where I initiated my son into the wonder, the majesty, of forests. Today, he vacations upstate with friends, hikes, swims and fishes, and dreams of owning his own place up there one day.

So, here’s to you, Nelson Bryant — and to your fellow NYT writer Verlyn Klinkenborg, author of the stunning series “The Rural Life” — for keeping the campfire flames burning in my heart. Yours was a life well-lived. Congratulations.

Things snap into focus when you’re 29 and a cultural icon is suddenly taken.

On that day, the herd was thinned and a powerful voice of a generation was lost. Real New Yorkers remember that day as if it was yesterday. Most of us guys were watching football — Dolphins – Patriots — when we got the news from an unexpected source: Howard Cosell.

Some moron, some NOBODY, shot John Lennon in the back, outside his Upper West Side home in The Dakota. We were aghast. Poleaxed.

At 29 and in career ascendancy, I took much for granted. I suppose I expected John and his mates to grow old gracefully, having passed the early death age of Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison.

In a sense, The Beatles were our wiser, worldlier, older siblings. My wife and her suburban childhood friends were true Beatlemaniacs, and had seen the Fab Four live in venues throughout NYC. Even in my blue-collar/working class section of The Bronx, where Schaefer Beer was the “hallucinogenic” of choice, The Beatles were acknowledged champions, having dethroned The King, Elvis Presley, back in the 60s.

After hearing the news, I made a round of calls to my friends. DJs at radio stations such as WNEW-FM talked us all down from the ledge and kept us sane.

I made the mistake of calling my parents, lifelong Bronxites who had finally decamped to a safe, if sterile, New Jersey suburb a few years earlier. My father was non-plussed. “I heard. I never was much of a fan,” was all my dad could muster. His response only served to underscore our arthritic relationship, which clearly had deteriorated to bone-on-bone.

I worked in the marketing communications department of a major international photo news agency at the time. In the week that followed, paparazzi descended upon The Dakota and environs, to get images of celebs who came to pay respects.

One of the agency’s shooters, trying hard to make it to the agency’s top tier, called our boss, who put him on speaker. Breathless, the photographer screamed: “I got Ringo! I got Ringo!”

The call made me sick. The buzzards were circling to pick apart the carrion. In the days that followed, it got worse. I did my usual Pisces thing. I retreated from the temporal and dove far under water, only coming up to play my favorites. I especially liked “Working Class Hero.”

But some months later, one of his new songs was released. I loved “Watching the Wheels.” Why? Because that was me! He was my big brother, writing that song for ME! Me, intent on writing, when everyone around me shook their heads.

John wrote: “People say I’m lazy, dreaming my life away. Well they give me all kinds of advice designed to enlighten me. When I tell them that I’m doing fine watching shadows on the wall; Don’t you miss the big time boy, you’re no longer on the ball? I’m just sitting here watching the wheels go round and round. I really love to watch them roll No longer riding on the merry-go-round, I just had to let it go.”

Remember Amadeus? Salieri, that hack, hated his guts.

RIP John Lennon, dead 39 years today. Keep dreaming. Keep striving. Don’t stop. Fuck all the naysayers. Pigs can and DO fly.

We’ve torn each other to shreds, these last few years, and we’re in pain, and that is why I involuntarily convulsed during the new film, “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood.”

This movie is far from what you might expect, and far from a Mr. Rogers biopic, per se. Truth is, this is far from any type of picture I expected. Know this: I am freighted with truckloads of Real New Yorker cynicism. My remarks are pointed, my aim is (usually) true. I DID expect this movie to be a weepy, Tom Hanks vehicle, with Hanks as a sainted, fatherly figure in a “Lassie Come Home” type of manipulative pap.

Wrong. Rather than corny crapola, here is a highly effective father/son saga for the ages that underscores JUST how much kindness, how much healing, we need, and will continue to need, once (if?) our national nightmare is over in 2020, with the help of our better angels.

Matthew Rhys plays Esquire feature writer Lloyd Vogel. You know Rhys from “The Americans” and this Welshman’s American accent — check that, his entire performance — is pitch perfect.

SPOILER ALERTS HERE. WIMPS CAN STOP READING NOW.

He, Rhys/Vogel, is assigned to write a short, fluffy, piece about the real-life king-of-calm, Fred Rogers. Chaos ensues.

Or, rather, self-awareness ensues. The Rhys character is us, the audience. And we are, he is, largely, broken. His dad, a bloated, boozy Chris Cooper (always excellent) was a stone cold prick to his family, a selfish, toxic, bastard. It was ME, ME, ME, just when his family needed him most.

Gee, sound familiar. We have tried to stuff President Chaos’ Kryptonite into lead-lined boxes in our hearts, but his poison has become OUR poison and it has leached into our souls. We’re in a fight for our country’s existence, and we’ve limped back to our corners, and our trainers have worked on our cuts, and administered smelling salts, but to no avail; we’re about to be TKO’d, yet we come out at the bell for the 15th round and keep flailing.

That’s Lloyd/Rhys, the story’s protagonist, when we meet him.

How many times have you flared up in the last four years? How many times have you daydreamed about popping someone right in the nose? Road-rage much? Light someone up on social media?

Can you feel your anger’s onset? Are you able to push in your psychic clutch and reroute your rage? More to the point: how do you feel after you explode? How has it affected your relationships with loved ones, or at work?

These are the areas “A Beautiful Day…” explores. What the Rhys character unearths for us, the audience, is that we as a people are more in need of superheroes than perhaps ever before. But not ones that “are faster than a speeding bullet”, or “more powerful than a locomotive”, or “able to leap tall buildings in a single bound.”

Nope. Maybe, just maybe, we need superhuman kindness. Someone who listens. Cares. Encourages. Helps us to help ourselves and, in the process, each other.

Forget our roads and bridges: what we need RIGHT NOW is someone who can help us rebuild our societal infrastructure.

Anger is OK, Mr. Rogers said. It’s a perfectly valid emotion, but acting out is counterproductive. Martial arts experts know the power of restraint, which takes incredible strength. Lashing out is easy. The ability to identify and process the cause of the pain? That’s another story.

We’ve torn each other to shreds in recent years, and look what we’ve done to our country — to ourselves — in the process. If it’s corny to wish for kindness, for healing, for calm, then at this point I’d have to say the corn is as high as an elephant’s eye.

For once, let’s try a little tenderness. Fred Rogers would certainly approve.

You know I have a thing about gizmos, right? Like, I’m a late adopter — I am the last to get onboard with a new technology, or platform, or device.

I’m an analog guy in a digital world. Bytes and bits can kiss my grits.

But even Neo-Luddites like me evolve. Change is s…l…o…w…but it does come, at some point. In fact, I just made a list of the newfangled things this old-skool, Real New Yorker now uses.

What new things are you using these days. Here are mine:

• Soda Stream: I make my own seltzer. This gizmo has a small footprint on the counter and makes months worth of seltzer from a single cannister of gas. When it’s used up, you swap it for a new one at Staples, for far less than the cost (and hassle) of shlepping bottles of seltzer from the supermarket. I’m saving the planet, one grepse at a time.
• Fit-Bit: I use it at the gym and when I’m out and about, to track my BPMs and how far I’ve walked. It’s fun and gives me a sense of accomplishment. Plus, it was a neat gift from my son.
• IPhone: Man, did I resist getting on the Apple bus, because Apple is rotten to the core, as far as I’m concerned. But my trusty IPhone 6 is a Swiss Army Knife. Does everything I need, and the apps for music theory, instrument tuning, and photo post-production have lots of value. It’s a good tool. But Apple still sucks. I’m not trading up.
• Amazon Fire Stick: Amazon sucks too. BUT: this thing works like a charm and gets me great steaming gobs of onscreen entertainment. Beam me up, baby.
• Google Nest: Google sucks too!!! (Three in a row.) But this three-pod system flawlessly flings the power of the Interwebs around my L-shaped apartment, with aplomb. It was cheap, easy to set up, and works great. I’m sure I’m being spied upon with it, but yes, it does solve a consumer problem.
• Philips Sonicare Electric Toothbrush: I NEVER thought I’d buy something like this. My new dentist said they are better than the others out there, and would be a game changer, in that my mouth would feel like it does after a cleaning. In a moment of weakness, I ordered one. HOLY SMOKES! She was right! This thing is amazing. Easy to use, small footprint, powerful — and now I actually look forward to doing my oral hygiene.

So, yeah, I’m a late adopter. But I do adopt. How about you? Any new gizmos in your household?

We were all looking forward to going to the custom car show at the Coliseum that weekend. Suddenly, teachers started crying. We were told that classes were dismissed.

We lined up for the 38 bus outside of JHS 143, as the news spread. We were shocked. We wore his campaign buttons with pride and even put them into the heels of our shoes, for taps, as we walked down the school hallways. His posters were in every bar around Fordham Rd. and Kingsbridge.

He was our Paul Bunyan. He was a war hero. He beat that sweaty POS, Nixon (and HIS campaign offices were EMPTY! Not like our hero’s offices, always jam-packed with kids asking for buttons and fliers.)

The next Sunday we watched our b&w tv’s as they brought Oswald down the corridor. Suddenly, BLAM!, some fat schmuck named Jack Ruby rubbed him out, in front of everybody! Sick shit. It was the day I realized that we — us kids — all had to go it alone, had to be self-reliant, and not trust any of them; the certainty of childhood, that adults could handle things and run a proper world, was obliterated. I was 12.

Here are my Real New Yorker remembrances of Halloweens past. Add yours in the comments section and have fun tonight:

— Going to Fordham Road to buy crappy machine made costumes, then getting home to doctor them up: more blood! (Ketchup) More eye darkening! (Burned corks fished out of the garbage) More designer detail! (Dad’s old crushed fedora)

— Meeting on the top floor of our tired old Bronx apartment house and working our way down, clambering down the steps and bang bang banging on doors!

— Once finished, we’d head across the street to Fordham Hill Apartments, THE MOTHERLODE! Many buildings! Many apartments!

— Coming home with two (or more) filled shopping bags filled with candy and coins (yeah, folks put pennies, nickels and even dimes in the loot bags) and eating ourselves sick!

— Picking out the candy corn (thrown loose and unwrapped into our bags), hard candy, and raisins and giving them to our little siblings (hey, what did they know, right?)

— Falling asleep in a pile of candy wrappers, floating in a sugar high.

We dressed as ghosts. “Bums.” Pirates. Cowboys. Indians. Devils.

Favorite candy? Mounds. Almond Joy. Nestle’s Crunch. Chocolate covered mints.

Worst? Candy corn.

Worst of all? Apples and raisins. I mean, we were junk-food loving kids; what were they thinking?

Worst experience? As a little kid in a group of similar mopes, getting egged by the “big kids” from Devoe Park.

OK, your turn? Add your kid-Halloween memories below! BOO!!!!!

The new Scorsese picture, The Irishman, is coming next week.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHXxVmeGQUc

Real New Yorkers cannot wait for the film to open. It stars Bobby D. and Al Pacino and, helmed by Scorsese, is expected to be a career highlight for the three of them, as well as for Joe Pesci, Bobby Cannavale, and Ray Romano.

On days like today, I feel like Pacino as the aging Don Corleone. It’s autumn, and I imagine sitting in a backyard chair, as he did. Wind-swept leaves cartwheel as he recalls life-episodes long gone.

And I remember one raucous Passover fete at my BIL’s house. Except for him, who hails from Baltimore, we all have family roots in The Bronx. There are many empty bottles of red wine on the table. The talk turns to favorite movies and actors and Pacino’s name came up. I love Pacino, and have since Panic in Needle Park. I remember my AP English teacher at Clinton, Gail Simon, had the Playbill cover from “The Indian Wants the Bronx” — which showed Pacino in the starring role — taped over the blackboard. How proud I felt that “one of ours” made it big.

As we all shouted out our favorite Pacino roles, my wife’s cousin Ellie, who grew up around East 174th Street, near where my granny used to live, off Vyse Avenue, cut everyone off.

“Ya know, I went to school with him,” she said.

Yeah right, was the cleaned-up version of what we pelted her with. Sure, Ellie knew Pacino. Yeah, when pigs fly.

“No really. We went to school together. Herman RIdder Junior High. Only back then, he was Sonny Pacino. He was raised up by his grandparents. He was in school plays and I was in a play with him.”

Sure.

“I’ll prove it,” she said. “I’m gonna mail you something and then you’ll believe me.” Remember that this pre-dates email, jpegs, smart phones, and the Interwebs. We actually used snail mail back then.

Fast forward a week. The mail comes, with one letter from cousin Ellie. My wife opens it. “Commear, right now!” she screams. “You gotta see this!”

In her hands is a black and white photo with scalloped edges, of the type taken back when most folks used those old Kodak box cameras. It’s a picture of a school stage, crowded with kids. There, front and center, is a young Ellie and a brash looking kid in a white tee-shirt with a full head of dark hair. We peer closer.

It’s friggin’ fourteen-year old Sonny Pacino, starring in some school play.

Man, I wish I had that photo now. It didn’t survive our many moves, from Chelsea, to Queens, to Brooklyn, and back to the Bronx. But it survives up here, in my noggin.

November 1, I’ll see him again, in The Irishman.

Friggin Pacino, man! ATTICA!!! ATTICA!!!!!

It would be nice to have some joy in our lives again.

You remember joy, right? A big, toothy, unselfconscious smile. Hands thrown in the air. Eyes wide open. You remember? Like biting into a Gorman’s hot dog on Fordham Road after school on a sunny Friday afternoon in autumn. Like cutting work for a midday showing of “Star Wars” the day it opened? Like seeing your kid pop out in the delivery room and you know your life is now forever changed for the better?

You know? You remember? Joy? As in: “Yayyyyyyyyy?”

There’s no joy in Mudville right now. Only a relentless drumbeat of dyspepsia from social media and mainstream news. Only the Twittersphere’s corrosive bile, flung from our so-called leaders, uncouth liars who should have had their mouths washed out with Lava soap as children back in the day.

Last week, however, I happened to see a television commercial that actually made me smile. A little girl with a winning smile and a lot of energy turns heads at local, regional and national talent contests. Judges beam in appreciation of her enthusiasm. The child’s parents are awash in pride.

The look on the kid’s face is an expression I’d long-forgotten: pure unadultered joy!

I go online to learn more about the ad. Big mistake. The caustic comments on You Tube caught me off-guard. And that no doubt speaks more to my naivete than the ill-will of the commenters — here are but a few:

“The girl dancing makes me wanna throw up”

“If I see this commercial one more time I’m going to stab my eyes and ears out”

“She rides the short bus for sure”

“Most obnoxious untalented brat kid ever. Not dancing. Just jumping like a clumsy cloying clown and acting like a spoiled attention midget. Parents obviously blind. No talent no grace no rhythm no skill.”

Wow. Such venom. That’s a lot to unpack, as some say these days. People take the time to go online and spew about a fictional kid in an ad that encourages parents to save for entry fees? Folks, get a life!

it’s no wonder that I’m slinking towards the exit doors to various social media platforms. The thrill is gone. Too much anonymous word-bomb throwing. Not enough kindness. Certainly not enough joy.

Gorman’s is long gone. And I think I’ll pass on the opening of “The Joker.” But maybe tonight I’ll give my son a call. And then practice the piano — headphones most definitely on.

I long for pompadour days, especially now, a time when we are being high-pressure hosed with information.

When spied through the mists of time, the days of our youth are idealized. My formative years were fraught. McCarthyism. Korea. Viet Nam. Racism. No era escapes drama.

But what we have now is a defining moment in time, a once-in-a-generation turning point. Is it a wonder that I long for haircuts that seemed to take forever?

There I am, maybe all of seven years old, in a barber chair, on University Avenue off Kingsbridge Road, in a dowdy district of the Bronx. My barber barely speaks. Classical music softly plays on a tube-type table radio. He puts a ribbon of tissue paper around my neck, a futile gesture that will not prevent hair from going down my shirt until I shower.

“A trim,” I say.

“A trim,” he says. And then, he cuts, little scissor snips, interminable. Around the ears. Around the back of my head.

“Just a little off the top?” he asks.

I nod. Sure. Whatever.

He takes a hot white towel from a silver steamer near the radio and daubs dirt from behind my ears. I tense as he takes an ivory handled straight razor from his station and smack smack smack sharpens it against the brown leather strop attached to the side of the chair. With practiced ease, he braces his hand with his pinky against the back of my neck. I shudder at the power he wields, for this milquetoast has my very life in his pink little palm.

One slip, and my ear is on the floor.

Then, the styling: he shakes green glop from an ancient bottle of ODell Hair Trainer into both hands and rubs them together, before shmearing this slime onto my head. With a flourish, he takes a black comb from a blue bottle of Barbicide disinfectant and parts my hair.

Finally, my pompadour. It is the pompadour of Johnny Cash, who my mother loves despite the fact that she says he has a problem with pills. The only pills I know are St. Joseph’s Aspirin For Children, so this confuses me, but I trust the statement, as I trust all adult statements.

In time, that will change. In time, Johnny Cash will become the cultural icon to my generation that attracts me and my best friends to his 1969 concert at the Garden. From high up in the rafters, I hear him sing his “Five Feet High and Rising” and dear reader, I remember the last lyric like it was yesterday:

“Well the rails are washed out north of town
We gotta head for higher ground
We can’t come back till the water goes down,
Five feet high and risin’…Well, it’s five feet high and risin'”

My pompadour is long gone, as is my trust in authority. We gotta head for higher ground. The water is five feet high and risin’.

I was a young guy in my late twenties when I worked for a small trade newsletter publisher on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. In the “Ford To City: ‘Drop Dead!'” nineteen seventies, the area was still part of the gritty New York City of yesteryear. There on the Upper West Side were sawdust-floored stores that sold candies and nuts, Kosher meats, dairy, smoked fish, bread, cakes and cookies.

Of the bakeries, my much-older co-workers told me: go to Grossingers on Columbus Avenue for the brownies and go to Lichtman’s on 86th Street and Amsterdam for breads, black-and-whites, and cakes. And they were right.

Louis Lichtman came to New York from Hungary and the word around the neighborhood, for forty-something years, was that his cakes were sublime. So when I wanted to impress my young wife’s fancy-pants Westport aunts and uncles, I ordered a huge mocha cake.

On a hot day in late summer, I picked the cake up and placed it in the back seat of my very used, non-air conditioned Toyota Corona. Back then, what young city-dweller could afford a car, never mind one with a/c? We drove merrily up the Merritt Parkway to Westport, windows open, AM radio blasting. Our hearts swelled with anticipation.

We arrived, proudly offered the Lichtman’s cake box to our hosts, and stood back for an anointment of high-praise. This was, after all, a special order mocha cake from Lichtman’s!

My wife’s aunt opened the box, to reveal a very melted, very crooked, special order cake. It was still tasty, but it was aesthetically compromised. “Oh….” she said with disapproval that stings even as I write this so many decades later. “I can’t serve THAT!”

The dinner party survived, I survived, my wife survived and Lichtman’s certainly survived, for another ten years. But, in the late spring of 1987, Louis Lichtman’s landlord jacked the man’s rent 500 percent. The Hungarian immigrant cried as an auctioneer sold off the baker’s equipment and fixtures to a room full of his competition. They, too, would soon fail, as gentrification smothered the city’s commercial oxygen supply like cultural kudzu.

Today, the southwest corner of 86th Street and Amsterdam Avenue shelters an architectural hardware store, a dry cleaning shop, and a custom shade store. Back in ’87, Lichtman’s rent increased five-fold, from $1300 a month to $6,500. I wonder what these storekeepers are paying now?

I suppose all that is beside the point. Here’s the real story: only three years after the auctioneer’s gavel signaled the last sale of his store’s baking equipment, Louis Lichtman, the man who crafted my melted mocha cake, died of cardiac arrest, at the age of 78.

In three years, he was done.

That was almost thirty years ago. My career has carried me a long way and I am no longer the young guy with a beat-up Toyota, so eager to impress supercilious suburban relatives. And yet, when I think of Mr. Lichtman’s story arc I cannot help but to compare it with my own.

For our tales are more alike than one might think. We both came a long way. We both learned, honed and loved our respective crafts. We both cherished our city and stayed with it, even as we were ground down by it. And finally, he faced the road’s end, a fate no man escapes.

As for me, do I dare ever to retire?