Seasons Greetings

My latest piece is up at http://broadstreetreview.com/cross-cultural/on-the-sending-of-christmas-cards

It begins

I began sending Xmas cards when I was an attorney. Every current client received one. I hoped the gesture would prevent their yelling at me for at least a week. If I received a card from a client, I sent that client a card the following year, even if their case had ended. I sent cards to friends who lived outside the Bay Area too. I kept a record in my address book, allowing each to go three years without sending me a card before I dropped them. Some friends I kept on the list longer, like I was dropping messages in bottles into the ocean of time, hoping for an answer. Some friends returned cards forever and ever… then stopped. Some resumed, but others were left to my imagination to account for.

I just finished…

…”Ways of Seeing,” by John Berger, and “Human Smoke,” by Nicholson Baker. (Robert the K recommended the first and I chose the second in my efforts to form a world policy for myself.)

“Seeing,” a Marxist approach to art, was written over 40 years ago, so some of its points may have already entered the culture and lost their power by becoming familiar. (Also Berger does not value clarity in his prose style, and, being a Brit, his language choice does not always connote to an American as it might to his domestic audience.) Finally, Marxism is a narrow way to look at art, though the concentration may add potency to his remarks. I liked best his final remarks about “publicity,” which I took to mean “advertising.” There I found much with which to agree.

“Smoke” is an apple cart-turner. It is pro-pacifism. All wars, it implies, are part of one war; and no war achieves naught but evil. So far, so good; but the war which Baker selects to make his point, through an assemblage of selected events leading up to it, is “The Good War,” World War II. Most historians (but not everyone) trashed it, but the book will not leave my head alone.

Cheese Steak

Okay, gang, back to my adolescence. This one is where these pieces all began. It appeared April 5, 2009, at www.thebroadstreetreview.com, under the title “Steak Sandwiches, B.C.,” and, after reflection, I will concede that was an improvement over what I had submitted it as.

CHEESE STEAK
Let’s get one thing straight. The whole idea is a corruption. The Philly cheese steak is about as traditional as an aluminum Xmas tree.
When I had my first, fifty years ago, it was “Y’wanna getta steak?” Period. It meant meat, an Italian roll, onions – grease. Salt, pepper, hot sauce – and for the brave — chopped cherry peppers optional. The cheese – out of a can, by the way – came later.
They weren’t everywhere either. You needed a car to get them. And you just didn’t pick one up for lunch or after school or dinner. They were best ritualized. Usually, it went like this. You had nothing to do, so you went to Dewey’s – 48th & Spruce – and hung out – 15 cent cherry coke – “Poinciana” on the juke box – or, nice weather, you stood outside, and, maybe, Marty Yudoff came by in his ‘50 Studebaker and knew a party in Oxford Circle, so you and Max Garden and Gino DiPieta and Sam Blank chipped in $2.00 for gas and, only after the party, when no one had scored, no one had gotten lucky – which was out of the question really, anyway – no one even getting a date or a phone number – you went for steaks.
The place we went was Jim’s, 62nd & Noble. Jim’s was a classic steak place. Narrow as a cigar box. The grill along the north wall spattering with the meat and onions. The salt, pepper, hot sauce, napkins on the wall behind you. (A sign offering $75 if you could prove the what you ate came off any three-letter animal not spelled “cow.”) You stood in line. You paid your fifty cents. And no place to sit. Very important, no place to sit.
The great places all had one name – Jim’s, Lou’s (for meat ball subs), Nick’s (for roast beef), and Pat’s. (The exception was The White House, in Atlantic City, for hoagies. I knew guys drove the entire 120 miles for an Italian Meats Special.) Pat’s, on 9th, where Wharton crosses Passyunk, deserves a few words of its own.
Not only did Pat’s have no place to sit. You couldn’t even get inside. You stood on the sidewalk, under an overhang plastered with black-and-white photos of Pat with notable Philadelphians: Bobby Rydell; Gus Zernial; Pat with Gil Turner; with three of the Four Jays; and you ordered through a window. And ordering at Pat’s was really cool. You said, depending on your feelings about onions, “One with” or “One without.” And if you were really, really cool, you knew to say, “One with, inside out,” which meant “Scrape-the-bread-outta-the-roll.”
Cheese was not even in the conversation.

My latest…

…can be found at http://www.firstofthemonth.org/archives/2014/12/ol_blue_eyes.html

I can’t resist saying that when the editor showed it to a woman friend, she told him that when she was in college, she would have slept with whoever wrote it. (She went on to say that, regrettably, while now in her fifties that is still her highest praise for a boy author.

I thought, now why didn’t anyone react like this when it would have done me some good. Then Adele reminded me that, aside from how I looked in jeans, my writing was what first attracted her to me.

Anyway, it begins…

To get the preliminaries out of the way, at Bob Dylan’s third of three concerts at the Oakland Paramount, first, the band – Bob (piano and harmonica), Tony Garnier (bass), Donnie Herron (banjo, viola, violin, mandolin, pedal and lap steel), Stu Kimball (rhythm guitar), and especially, given the way the sound mix reached these ears, George Reville (drums) and Charley Sexton (lead guitar) – was terrific; but if you understood more than one-third of the lyrics, you beat the over-under. Second, they did nineteen songs, of which one was from the sixties and five from “Tempest,” Bob’s latest release of new material. (Last year, at Mountain View, they did fifteen songs, of which four were from the sixties and two from “Tempest.” The year before, in Berkeley, eight of fifteen songs from the sixties and none from “Tempest, even though it had just been released and could have used the promotion.) Third, as for ingratiating stage presence, Bob no longer even introduces the musicians. (If he said anything, it was “Thank you. We’ll be right back.” At least, immediately after something undistinguishable uttered from his microphone, everyone walked off stage and returned, fifteen minutes later, to resume playing, without any buzzings or dimming lights to alert those in line in the rest rooms, of whom, given the number of graying pony tails in the audience, male as well as female, there were likely to be plenty. (Of further demographic note, it being the night after the World Series, the audience sported about as many t-shirts saluting the Giants as it did saluting Bob.) And finally, when he’d played Mountain View, Bob was still varying his shows by a couple songs, night to night; but on most of this tour, he has been sticking with the same songs, in the same order, every night, regardless of whether he is moving on or sticking around.

My latest…

…is up at http://broadstreetreview.com/books-movies/s.-clay-wilsons-abc
(Again I apologize for not being able to post a link that can be directly clicked on.)

Anyway, it begins…

The perfect gift for the man who has everything, provided his possessions include an X-rated sense of humor, has arrived: Wilson’s ABC, “an audacious, illustrated alphabet,” from Wordplay, edited and annotated by Malcolm Whyte.
S. Clay Wilson, along with Victor Moscoso and Rick Griffin, was one of the original cartoonists invited by Robert Crumb to join him in ZAP. ZAP, which is generally credited with transforming comics into a vehicle for adult artistic expression, and thereby liberating all of graphic art, was one of the most influential publications of the second half of the 20th century; and Wilson, whose uncensored id-to-ink renderings of laugh-out-loud sex-and-violence blew what restraints remained upon his already freewheeling colleagues, was among its most influential artists.

I just finished…

…Haruki Murakami’s “The Strange Library.” Adele (and her friend Marilyn), who read things psychoanalytically, had interesting things about it, interpreting it as a dream which followed the event with which Murakami actually concludes his book. I, who does not, didn’t.

This was the third Murakami novel I had read. It came to me that his process entails grouping together letters into arrangements that, say, spell “sheep” or “moon” or “girl,” which cast up responses within readers’ minds, but are used by him more like cut-outs of colored paper, which he slides around within the confines of his book’s covers, governed by the laws of a universe which, while offering some restraints, were not the laws of my own and that, then, what happens to your mind, happens to your mind.

Of course, this could be said of any writer. But it was with Murakami that I first saw it, so he gets the credit.

And I join Adele and Marily in wishing that, now that he’s got this out of the way, he’ll get back
to “IQ84.”

More good news

According to the news scroll across the bottom of my cardi- machine at the gym yesterday — despite AIDs, Ebola, wars (religious and otherwise), drones, the NRA, global warming, coal and tobacco and asbestos, starvation, over-zealous police, and increasing wealth disparity — between 1990 and now the life expectancy of human beings worldwide has increased by six years.

So let’s hear it for us.

Way to go, human beings.

I just finished…

…”The End of the Story,” by Lydia Davis, and “The Chess Game,” by Stefan Zweig. I liked both. Zweig did a masterful job imagining (I think) himself into the mind of a man locked alone into an enduring solitary confinement. As for Davis, some novelists plot everything out in advance. Some say their characters take over and drive the action themselves. Davis seems to compose a sentence, and then that sentence drives her next one. That’s my major insight, and it was fun to see this play out across the pages.

My Latest

Fantagraphics has just published The Zap Interviews, a collection of conversations with the contributing artists to that culture-changing comic. I conducted one of those, with the incomparable S. Clay Wilson. (Well, he would concede that maybe Breughel compares.) I was also asked to write the Introduction, a request which made me proud. It begins:

Draw, Write, Talk
In his book “Writers’ Fighters,” the celebrated sportswriter John Schulian explains his – and other authors – attraction to practitioners of The Sweet Science. “Boxers,” Schulian writes, “not only lead more interesting lives than any other athletes, they are more willing to talk about them too.” I feel similarly about underground cartoonists. I have found them to be bright, witty, uninhibited conversationalists; and since they came of age in the 1960s, a time when, it seemed, all apples presented were to be bitten, the only commandment was to break commandments, and the golden rule was to do to yourself what you wished others would do with you, preferably in a hot tub while slugging Red Mountain wine, their conversations had much to draw from.

Bitter Orange

<To return to those thrilling days of yesteryear (my adolescence), here is one that appeared online at “The Broad Street Review,” under the title “The Square Jungle.” Its intro was lopped off, and I forget what else happened to it, but it did receive a nice reception.

Bitter Orange
“Did you know Blinky Palermo, the artist, took his name from Blinky Palermo, the gangster?” Bob Liss, the Herodotus of Hoops, asked me.
“Yes,” I said, “though I wouldn’t know a Blinky Palermo if it spat at me from the wall of MOMA. We must have read the same article in the Times.”
“Nope. This woman I’m seeing told me.”
“Did I ever tell you Blinky Palermo once gave my father a ride to my fathers-and-sons athletic awards dinner?”
“Not yet,” he said.

It was November 1955, and I was lettering in 105-pound football. That May, the Manayunk-born light heavyweight, Harold Johnson, who was so skilled and so dangerous he often had to go above his weight class to find opponents, had collapsed, seemingly without being struck hard enough to dent a lemon water ice, in the second round of a fight at the Arena with the Cuban heavyweight, Julio Mederos, a 4:1 underdog. Since Johnson had already collected the scalps of many of Mederos’s betters, including Ezzard Charles, Bob Satterfield, Nino Valdez, and Archie Moore (who, in fairness, it must be said, had four times skinned Johnson), this obliteration raised eyebrows, the most significant of which belonged to Pennsylvania’s first- term Democratic governor George Leader. Though Johnson explained he had been undone by a “bitter” pre-fight orange, handed him by a stranger, (its doping seemingly confirmed by the detection of barbiturates in Johnson’s urine), his license was lifted, and boxing was suspended in the commonwealth for 90 days until its purity could be restored. For this restoration, Leader ordered the Pennsylvania State Athletic Commission to investigate the fight, the fruit, and related matters.
The commission’s chairman was Jim Crowley, one of the fabled Four Horsemen of Notre Dame. The Special Deputy Attorney General appointed to assist the investigation was the long-time Democratic leader of South Philadelphia’s 4th ward, my father. In his 20-plus years as an attorney, he had received several other plums from the party he served, but to my 13-year-old eyes, this was the coolest.
These hearings led to the questioning of Frank “Blinky” Palermo. In association with the Murder, Inc. alumnus, Frankie “Mr. Grey” Carbo, Palermo owned, controlled and/or managed a number of prominent pugilists, amassing great influence over who would fight whom, where, in exchange for what consideration, and, occasionally, with what result. He also ran Philadelphia’s largest numbers game, once maintaining its reputation for uncorruptibilty conducting a running gun battle with a welsher who owed him 75-cents. (I am unsure of his connection to either Johnson or Mederos; perhaps his general familiarity with the customs and practices of the industry made him appear someone likely to provide educative information.)
The Friday of my dinner, most likely due to Palermo’s reluctance to provide anything beyond references to the Fifth Amendment, the hearing ran late. My father, who had taken the train to Harrisburg, had no way to make it back in time for the bestowing of my letter. Hearing of his plight, Palermo, who’d arrived by Cadillac, offered my father door-to-door delivery, a courtesy from one sportsman to another. (One may question the ethics of an attorney accepting a favor from a gangster he is investigating, but if one is 13 and the attorney is one’s father, such questions infrequently occur.)
I don’t know what resulted from the hearing. Johnson won the light heavyweight title in 1962, at age 34, only to lose it to Willie Pastrano, another prohibitive underdog, a year later. Mederos returned to Cuba and obscurity. Palermo served 7 1/2 years for his part in some contractual negotiations which included two of his associates kicking the other negotiator nearly to death.. (He died in Philadelphia, at 91, in 1996.) And my father remained a Democratic Party loyalist, who was rewarded with a Common Pleas Court judgeship in 1965.
But before and after that, in commemoration of his service to the commission, he was able to command free tickets to the fights.

I was already a fan. At a time when neither the NBA nor NFL had much TV presence, boxing commanded prime time twice a week: the Wednesday Night Fights (sponsored by Pabst ) and the Friday Night Fights (Gillette). I saw many great brawls (Carter-Arujo, Carter-Collins, and Moore-Durelle are three I am sure of). I subscribed to Sport and S.I. and read Ring and Boxing and Wrestling. Bill Stern’s Favorite Boxing Stories was one of the first paperbacks I purchased. I could name every heavyweight champion in order. I could identify the Toy Bulldog and Wild Bull of the Pampas, the Manassa Mauler, Durable Dane, Fargo Express, Michigan Assassin, Boston Strong Boy, and Boston Tar Baby, Ruby Bob and Gentleman Jim, Jersey Joe, Li’l Artha, Hammering Henry, Slapsie Maxie, Two Ton Tony, the Black Uhlan and the Brown Bomber. I knew Stanley Ketchel was shot to death at 24 and Bummy Davis at 25; that Beau Jack ended up a shoeshine boy, Sam Langford blind and penniless, Joe Louis half-a-million in debt to the IRS, and Jack Johnson an attraction at Hubert’s Dime Museum and Flea Circus.
None of these ends disturbed my dreams. I was a kid and “ends” were far away. They seemed part of the color and the drama of the sport. They were the way of men, and while I was on my way to becoming one, the full consequences of this development had not sunk in. You came out nobly with your shield or borne upon it. The bright lights poetically illuminated the center of the ring, while you returned to the darkness from which you’d come. In boxing, the best man won, no bad bounce to undo him, no teammates to weigh him down.
What could be fairer?

The first live fight I saw was from ringside, courtesy of my father’s connections, at Connie Mack Stadium, June 12, 1958. It was an all-Philadelphia gala. In the main event, the fading, formerly first-ranked welterweight Gil Turner was gifted a draw with the division’s rising star, Garnet “Sugar” Hart. On the undercard, the undefeated lightweight Len Mathews (10-0, with nine K.O.s) knocked the once formidable Henry “Toothpick” Brown into retirement in four. And in a battle of middleweights of whom few others wanted part, George “The Professor” Benton, a future Hall of Fame trainer, blasted Slim Jim Robinson through the ropes, unconscious, at my feet.
Over the next nine years, I saw fights at the Arena, the Blue Horizon, Convention Hall, and Atlantic City Convention Center. I saw Joey Giardello and Kitten Hayward, Bennie Briscoe and Gypsy Joe Harris, Von Clay and Don Warner, Leotis Martin and, after he emigrated from South Carolina, Joe Frazier. (I also once saw Palermo schmoozing in the Samsone Deli with his current tutee, Charles “Sonny” Liston. I did not interrupt the seminar to thank him for my father’s ride.) I read Hemingway and Liebling and, religiously, Jack McKinney in the Daily News. (I learned that Philadelphia fighters were known for (a) their left hooks and (b) shortening their productive years by beating each other up in gyms.) I was, I felt, earning my way into a brotherhood. I liked the chest-pounding suspense of awaiting decisions and the abrupt ends that could fall like guillotine blades before. I liked the smoke and the smell and the sweat flying when the heads snapped back. I liked the wised-up, sharp-suited men and flashy, bored women and imagining how their evenings would conclude. I liked that none of my friends shared my outre passion. I had taken these gifts from my father and layered myself with a distinctive depth.

One fighter whose path interested me, for its intersections of talent and fortune, was the North Philadelphia welterweight Charley Scott. His early results – losing four of his first eight bouts – suggested he pursue other employment. But Scott persevered – at one point winning 14 of 16 – climaxing with a ninth round knockout of Sugar Hart at Convention Hall, in October 1959, in what boxing historian/archivist John DiSanto calls “one of the greatest Philly battles ever.” That win vaulted Scott to the top of the rankings, making him next in line for a shot at Don Jordan’s shaky grip on the championship belt. But two months later, in need of Christmas money, Scott went up to Madison Square Garden on short notice and lost 5-4-1 to Benny “Kid” Paret. Paret got the shot and the title – and was later killed in the ring, defending it against Emile Griffith, whom he had called a “maricon.”
Scott never recovered from his war with Hart. He lost four of his next five. (Hart lost three of four and quit the ring.) Scott embarked on an ill-fated Odyssey that took him through Australia, the Philippines, Boston, Vegas, Paris, Fresno, Honolulu, New Orleans, Oakland. He lost 20 of his last 30, nine of his last 10. He retired in October 1966.

I was then one month into my final year at Penn Law School. It seemed a critical time. It seemed two Baskervillian hounds were clawing for my throat. I feared becoming a lawyer would imprison me within a conformity I dreaded. I hoped to write but feared the effort would expose I had nothing to say. Finally, I applied to VISTA for time to think it out.
I also sought experiences and places outside the classroom and corporate world that fit me. I volunteered in the offices of legal aid and the public defender and, some weekend nights, rode in a patrol car to observe the law at street level. I never caught a violent crime or observed a kicked-in door. Mainly I saw DUIs and domestic beefs.
One April night, two young officers shoved a broad shouldered 30-year-old – he looked 40 – against the booking desk. He smelled of alcohol. He wore a houndstooth cap. The fly on his stained slacks was down. He had a four-inch scar over one eye. The charges were Loitering and Prowling.
He had 62-cents and a billfold stuffed with papers. On a job application, he had penciled, “Have attain some excellence as a boxer.” “Hey, Pete, watch out,” one officer said. “This guy was a fighter.”
Pete laughed. “What’s your name?”
“Charley Scott.”
“Charley Scott?” I said.
He nodded.
I had seen him at Convention Hall the best night of his life. Now I saw him again. Grief and reason pin-wheeled in my head. He left for Detective Division, light on his feet, a fighter’s bounce headed toward the ring.

VISTA sent me to Chicago. A year later, I came to Berkeley and moved in with the girl to whom I am still married. I have seen one live fight since, two ham-and-eggers mauling each other for ten rounds in Oakland. I never read another Ring. I can still name the heavyweight champions but only through Ali/Frazier. My passion for the sport had vanished. I had never recovered from standing this close to its too-frequent consequences and seen them bouncing shabby, thick-tongued, unzipped out the shutting door.
AUTHOR’S NOTE: I relied heavily on http:// phillyboxinghistory. com. for career records, dates, places, and results of fights to check my memory against and to fill in its holes. Any errors are my own.