Bill Berkson Dream

Bill Berkson Dream

I’m at the Four Seasons for a quick solitary lunch, sitting at the bar. After a moment or two, I notice Bill Berkson sitting diagonally from where I am, but he doesn’t see me. He’s wearing a very expensive medium grey suit, and his hair is sculpted onto his head. He’s talking to another man, a client, and I realize he (Bill, in his other life) must be a stockbroker. This doesn’t surprise me at all. Turning sideways, I can just hear scraps of his conversation. “The residuals will knock your sox off,” says Bill, and “you wouldn’t even be here if your weren’t.” Bill sips a pink cocktail, then notices me watching. He winks, not wanting to interrupt his meeting, and motions slightly with his head towards the door. A few minutes later, I see him get up and give me another confirming look. He heads for the door, and I follow a safe distance behind. Out on the street, he shakes his head as if waking up from a daydream. “Hey, man, whatcha’ doing here?” “Not much. What was that, a ‘power lunch’?” “Nah, just something I needed to tie up . . . Hey, I’ve got to run, so let’s get together later.” Suddenly, Bill pulls his jacket lapels apart, and in a single motion, his whole outfit falls away, revealing a superhero get-up with black tights, a white T-shirt with big blue "BB" capitals in the middle. I never suspected how muscular he is. “Alright, I’m off, brother,” he adds, as he bounds away, taking 20 foot leaps down the street. I stare after him in disbelief, with mixed feelings of envy and barely suppressed admiration.

Stencils

                                                         A

                                   hovering

                             thought

                      

                    alighting

                         on a

                             memory

                                     is

                                   gone

                                                















                                                two

                                        blades of grass

                     

                                     not quite

                                         touching

A Song for the Unsung

American Football is a team sport. In team sports, it is not always possible to accurately assess the value of any single player's contribution to his team's success. Great players may play on mediocre teams, or average players may play on very good teams. The context of one's accomplishments in a team sport do matter, though truly great performers are usually recognized as such, even if based only on purely statistical measures. In football, the key positions are traditionally the quarterback, running-back, receiver, linebacker, and defensive back; but players at any other position may achieve prominence, and be appreciated for their superior play. Players whose job it is to handle the ball tend to draw the most attention, however, and it is they who become the usual focus of fans and the media. One minor exception is the punter or kicker. Once upon a time, it was common for kickers to do all of a team's kicking duties: kick-offs, punts, free kicks and field-goal tries. Over the years, these have become specialized, and today almost all place-kickers specialize as field goal kickers (who also do the kick-offs), with the punter  only doing punting. Like field-goal kicking, punting has become a specialty. Usually a punter has no other function on the field. He's a little like a "closer" in baseball, a player whose sole purpose is to do a single thing in a specific situation, and nothing else. 

Mediocre kickers are a dime a dozen. Even in the pros, kickers who were stars as college players usually do not have very successful careers. A kicker's "life" in pro football is usually very short, despite the fact that they suffer the least amount of physical abuse. Because of the job required of them, a kicker's maximum body profile tends to be a lot less bulky than his teammates. He's not expected to block, or tackle, or take hits. In fact, the rules now forbid "running into the kicker" since a kicker is in a very vulnerable position with respect to oncoming rushers, and there is a severe penalty for being flagged for that. 

You would think that kicking, given that it involves only a couple of physical functions--catching the ball as it's hiked by the center, holding it in front of one's body, and kicking it as far as possible downfield--would be a simple thing to do well. Not so. To do it well, and consistently, is very difficult. In the first place, there is no room for error. A kicker can't move to elude oncoming rushers. He has only a hectic second or two to execute his play. Clearly, getting even a poor kick successfully in the air is better than not getting it kicked at all, so the margin for error is usually razor-thin. In order to kick a ball so that the maximum amount of force is transmitted from the rising foot of the kicker, to the inert ball above, there must be a perfect collision. A slight deviation of impact will result in a "shank" or weak kick with shorter distance. Both height (length of "hang time") and distance are required for a superior kick. You want to force the opposing receiver to catch the ball as far back from the line of scrimmage as possible, and you want it to take as long as possible to reach him, in order to allow your teammates to run downfield to "cover" the receiver's return-attempt. And, of course, in cases where the field is "short" the kicker is required to attempt to kick the ball out of bounds as close to the end-zone line as he can, but without crossing it before going out of bounds, which necessitates accuracy as well as control of force.        

Most teams settle for mediocre kicking, and work to overcome the deficits which result. "Field position" is regarded as a strategic approach which is less important than having a superior offense or defense. "Short field" drives are obviously easier than long (sustained) ones, but short field approaches are typical of defensive-oriented teams, generally. Playing for position is like playing poker, whereas in the world of high-power pro offenses, a good passing game can make playing for position an inappropriate choice. The most crucial situation involving the kicking game is when a team is backed up almost to its own goal line, and must punt out of its own end-zone. A safety is always a risk in these circumstances, and no kicker wants to get caught for the dreaded two-points--or even, god forbid, a touchdown. The ability to kick for distance when "backed-up" can mean the difference between winning and losing a game.

Andy Lee has been the 49ers punter now for nine years. In each of his nine seasons, he's been a stand-out, qualifying for All-Pro status three times. He's always among the leaders in average yards, and hang-time, and his efficiency is nearly perfect--he never gets tackled, and always gets his kick away. For a decade, the 49ers have had the luxury of not having to worry about their punting game. Punters come and punters go, but good ones are hard to come by. When you have one like Lee, you feel blessed. One very vital aspect of your franchise is taken care of, reliable. In professional sports, reliability is usually in short supply. Which is why Andy Lee is a star, in a role that most fans usually don't appreciate, or appreciate enough. Over time, a great punter may actually account for several wins, singlehandedly. That's a rare gift, a claim that only a great quarterback, or a star running-back can make. 

O'Hara / Dean

James Byron Dean - 2/8/31 - 9/30/55

On September 30th, 1955, the popular young screen actor James Dean was driving his new Porsche 550 Spyder convertible towards a racing event in Salinas, California. Using newly acquired earnings from his two movie roles in Rebel Without a Cause, and East of Eden, he'd been buying fancy racing cars and competing in amateur and professional racing events, with some success. Racing had become a passion for him. Proceeding in stages towards Salinas, he was speeding at 85 mph, and had already received one speeding citation earlier that day, when, trying to beat another oncoming car to a cross-over intersection, his vehicle impacted a 1950 Ford Tudor coupe head-on, in a horrific crash. 

Dean sustained serious injuries, and was pronounced dead on arrival at a hospital in Paso Robles early that evening.         

For those too young to remember him, James Dean [2/8/31 - 9/30/55], had taken Hollywood almost by storm in the 1950's. In his first movie role, as Cal in East of Eden [Warner Brothers], directed by Elia Kazan, he blossomed overnight into a major star in the current "Actor's Studio" "Marlon Brando" mold, with a kind of sullen, smoldering eccentric persona that captured perfectly the confused, rebellious, over-emotional, adolescent spirit of early Beat Era youth. This role was followed closely by Rebel Without a Cause [Warner Brothers, 1955], in which Dean played the classic mixed up teen-ager, a gang-member with a death-wish and a flashy fragile sexiness that drove fans wild: Drag-racing, switchblades, sex, booze, delinquency--all the vital ingredients of the underground frustration with the conservative middle-class world of 1950's America. And in his third major role, and his last, he reprised this persona one more time in Giant [Warner Brothers, 1956, released after Dean's death], playing a poor white neighbor of a big Texas ranch family who strikes it rich and rises to prominence as a super-rich, emotionally wounded, but morally debased, oil baron. 

In his private life, Dean followed a parallel path. He liked to be on the edge, and automobile racing was the perfect vehicle for it. Reports concerning his love-life are contradictory, and clouded, but it seems probable that he was mildly bi-sexual, and enjoyed relationships with both women and men. Fatally handsome, and with a charming combination of flirtatious sexiness, and feinting vulnerability, he had his pick of partners. Audiences projected every kind of obsessive regard upon him. If he had not died when he did, there seemed almost no limit to the dimensions his career might have attained. 

But like the fallen heroes of history and literature, Dean's early death made him into a classic romantic idol, in the Keats/Shelley mode, and in this sense, the perfect subject for elegy and memorial. His funeral on October 8th, 1955 in Fairmount, Indiana, was attended by more than 3000 mourners. America had lost one of its true media heroes, and a movie-star legend of major proportions was born. 

In our media-obsessed contemporary milieu, it may be difficult to realize how unusual and novel the idea of turning a movie matinee idol into poetic subject matter would have been in 1955. The movie promotion system was already well into high-gear in the 1920's, and it only grew bigger over the succeeding decades. But famous figures from popular music, the cinema or the theatre weren't commonly regarded as "serious" personifications in highbrow art forms like opera, poetry or drama. 

In the early 1950's, the original New York School Poets--John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, Kenneth Koch, James Schuyler, Barbara Guest--who of course weren't known as that then, and certainly didn't think of themselves as a "movement" at the time--were experimenting with form, and seeking new strategies to express the meaning of their time. As Gay writers in the immediate post-war period, O'Hara, Ashbery and Schuyler (not to speak of Edward Field, Allen Ginsberg, Paul Goodman, Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer, John Wieners, Jonathan Williams, and James Merrill, to name a handful), they were seeking to express themselves using either older traditional structures and themes, or by adapting exotic European models, or simply by trying something new. 

O'Hara, a lyricist, a social creature, voluble and daring, ventured to declare his homosexual nature directly through his poetry. Trained in traditional literary styles and models (he won the Hopwood Award at the University of Michigan as a graduate student in the M.A. Program, before moving to New York in 1951), he was attracted to the revolutionary writings of the French Surrealists (as well as to Mallarmé, Apollinaire, Reverdy), the (early Soviet) Russians (especially Mayakovsky), and was strongly influenced as well by the new painting of the period (Abstract Expressionism etc.). Also, particularly, he was moved by cinema, and was keenly aware of the relationship between the cultural counter-currents, and the the ways that movies might mirror or inspire changes in the zeitgeist. As a progenitor of a rising Gay consciousness, he was acutely sensitive to the subtle revelations of behavior and coded cues that might be revealed on the silver screen. Gays had traditionally enjoyed the ironic privilege of identifying with both the male and female protagonists, with the femme fatale stereotype who draws men to her sexuality like a moth to the flame, as well as the male heart-throb who functions in both genders/dimensions at once. In the case of James Dean, the sexual ambiguity of his "underground" reputation did nothing to discourage this kind of fantasy-projection. 

During 1955, O'Hara had spent a good deal of mental energy meditating about the persona Dean portrayed in East of Eden. It wasn't simply that Dean was gorgeously endowed with a photogenic face, and a rustic, lyrical (almost balletic)  physical grace; O'Hara saw aspects of his own emotional development in Cal's (Dean's) intuition of his own difference, a metaphor for O'Hara's homosexual awakening, with associated guilt and confusion. O'Hara saw in the narrative a psycho-drama of his own emotional history, and when Dean was killed, he responded predictably by attempting to address the tragedy as a personal loss--not merely as a private projection, but as an allegory for society's condemnation of homosexuality, with Dean as the symbolic martyr to the cause of sexual emancipation. 

It didn't matter that Dean mightn't have been a full-fledged homosexual; what mattered was how O'Hara felt about him. Inspired by the death, O'Hara re-read Milton's Lycidas, Tennyson's In Memoriam, and Shelley's Mourn not for Adonais, as warm-ups for a serious attempt at an elegy on the late young actor's demise.     

         

The poem O'Hara eventually completed has entered the canon of post-war American verse as an artifact in its own right. O'Hara's own tragic and bizarre death--run over by a dune buggy on the beach at night [7/24-5/66]--enhances the poem's interest, in retrospect--an ironic parallel.   


For James Dean

Welcome me, if you will,
as the ambassador of a hatred
who knows its cause
and does not envy you your whim
of ending him.

For a young actor I am begging
peace, gods. Alone
in the empty streets of New York
I am its dirty feet and head
and he is dead.

He has banged into your wall
of air, your hubris, racing
towards your heights and you
have cut him from your table
which is built, how unfairly
for us! not on trees, but on clouds.

I speak as one whose filth
is like his own, of pride
and speed and your terrible
example nearer than the siren's speech,
a spirit eager for the punishment
which is your only recognition.

Peace! to be true to a city
of rats and to love the envy
of the dreary, smudged mouthers
of an arcane dejection
smoldering quietly in the perception
of hopelessness and scandal
at unnatural vigor. Their dreams
are their own, as are the toilets
of a great railway terminal
and the sequins of a very small,
very fat eyelid.
I take this
for myself, and you take up
the thread of my life between your teeth,
tin thread and tarnished with abuse,
you still shall hear
as long as the beast in me maintains
its taciturn power to close my lids
in tears, and my loins move yet
in the ennobling pursuit of all the worlds
you have left me alone in, and would be
the dolorous distraction from,
while you summon your army of anguishes
which is a million hooting blood vessels
on the eyes and in the ears
at the instant before death.
And
the menials who surrounded him critically,
langorously waiting for a 
final impertinence to rebel
and enslave him, starlets and other
glittering things in the hog-wallow,
lunging mireward in their inane
moth-like adoration of niggardly
cares and stagnant respects
paid themselves, you spared,
as a hospital preserves its orderlies.
Are these your latter-day saints,
these unctuous starers, muscular
somnambulists, these stages for which
no word's been written hollow
enough, these exhibitionists in
well-veiled booths, these navel-suckers?

Is it true that you high ones, celebrated
among amorous flies, hated the
prodigy and invention of his nerves?
To withhold your light
from painstaking paths!
your love
should be difficult, as his was hard.

Nostrils of pain down avenues
of luminous spit-globes breathe in
the fragrance of his innocent flesh
like smoke, the temporary lift,
the post-cancer excitement
of vile manners and veal-thin lips,
obscure in the carelessness of your scissors.

Men cry from the grave while they still live
and now I am this dead man's voice,
stammering, a little in the earth.
I take up
the nourishment of his pale green eyes,
out of which I shall prevent
flowers from growing, your flowers.

--March 1956 Poetry Magazine

In searching for metaphors for his sardonic, smoldering indignation against the generalized prejudice of the cultural machines of taste and permitted behaviors, O'Hara extemporizes a collective persecution originating in a kind of Hollywood of the gods--all the machinery of production-executives, publicity departments, gossip columnists, fellow aspirants and groupies and parasites to fame and talent--and imagines that he is "this dead man's voice" from the grave ("a little in the earth"), who will "prevent flowers from growing, [their] flowers." 

As a plateau in the historical progression of literary archetypes, it's probably among the very earliest examples of the use of a modern public media figure. One might have imagined that George Gershwyn, or Dylan Thomas, or some similarly early casualty could have inspired some of the same kind of classical martyrdom. But Dean wasn't just a talented actor, he represented the struggle of a whole society to come to terms with some of its biggest demons. The exploitation and debasement of talent, the relentless inquisitiveness into privacy, the corruption of innocence, the ephemeral (and empty) fruits of success. Youth identified with him as an ambassador of its own adolescent frustrations and thwarted desires.

The poem's openly fatalistic, petulant, depressed mood struck a new chord in O'Hara's poetry, one which would come to seem familiar in his work as it developed over the next decade. Its impassioned rhetorical flourishes ("the ambassador of a hatred" "I speak as one whose filth is like his own" "lunging mireward in their inane moth-like adoration of niggardly cares and stagnant respects paid themselves"), on the precarious edge of sense, are just barely admissible as serious writing. They owe more to the work of someone like Neruda, for instance, than they do to any American literary examples (except, perhaps, a work like William Carlos Williams's Kora in Hell). Bringing in a real pop cultural icon allowed O'Hara to perform a kind of exhibitionism which was a characteristic of his nature, drawing friends and acquaintances and figures from the New York art and music scene into the sphere of his public utterances. Like Ginsberg's Kaddish (for his mother Naomi), For James Dean strives for rhetorical extremities which are well beyond the bounds of "good taste" and proper practice. "Nostrils of pain down avenues of luminous spit-globes" evokes a kind of adolescent futility, of self-pity and impotent dejection, wallowing in a sort of fashionable, camp melancholy. 

But it also makes for an effective poetry. What is especially effecting is the combination of high address ("I speak as one" "you still shall hear" "I take up the nourishment") with the over-the-top imagery ("the sequins of a small, very fat eyelid"  "a million hooting blood vessels" "muscular somnambulists"), which produces a quality of barely controlled distress, or stress-induced nighmare-visions. But O'Hara's intelligence never permits the complete loss of control, and the poem ends on a determined, albeit mordant note: "I shall prevent flowers from growing, your flowers."    

If any teenager could have expressed the suppressed projection of the "cool" empathy, of the tragic "hip" shape Dean's life and romantic death embodied for them, it might have signified something of what O'Hara's poem conveys. Its level of ambiguity is such as to partially conceal the true nature of its point. Dean was among the earliest figures of the Teen Idol craze, not a rock music or torch singing musician, but an enormously charming but "immature" actor, just feeling his way in a difficult profession. O'Hara, too, was in many ways a struggling young writer, finding his way to the means to express what was, for him, his artistic eidelon.      

The Bachelor

All men are bachelors at some point in their lives. Except, I suppose, those of cultures in which boys are matched from birth to a picked bride. Bars or taverns used to be places pretty much restricted to men, though women eventually broke through that barrier. Today, singles of either sex can go to a bar alone, though there are some where no respectable woman would want to go. The idea of a bachelor is a little solemn. 

I recently saw again the movie Anatomy of a Murder, made from Robert Traver's (John D. Voelker) novel of the same name. In it, the defense attorney, Paul Biegler, is played by Jimmy Stewart. Biegler is a bachelor, who enjoys fly-fishing, talking the law and sipping whisky far into the night with his alcoholic x-attorney Parnell McCarthy, and playing jazz on an old upright piano. He isn't married, and there's no reference--at least in the movie--to his ever having been married, or having any plans to be.

A bachelor, like any single person, may become slightly eccentric in his ways, since he has no one to moderate his habits or interests. It may be that people who are single are just not the marrying type, or they've tried it and failed (divorce). Solitary drinkers may become drunks, without a woman around to keep them honest. 

Anyway, I like to think of a bachelor as one who might like a drink like this one, a little seductive, but proper, and serious, like a well-pressed grey suit. Straightforward and relaxed, with an orderly structure. A drink you could have over and over, not cloying or flamboyant. I haven't been a bachelor for almost 44 years.     

Swirled around in a cocktail shaker with ice, and poured up. 

4 parts rye

1 part praline liqueur

1 part triple sec

1/4 part amaro

dash of herbsaint

dash of Angostura bitters

Green Season

As the holidays approach--well, I guess they've already arrived, since Black Friday has happened, and "holiday shopping" has already begun--our thoughts turn to celebration, and partying, and family reunions. Family reunions used to be a tradition in certain parts of America, but they're much less common today. Our economy tends to split families apart, as the restlessly mobile culture encourages people to leave the farm, or the neighborhood, or the town where they grew up, and look for greener pastures elsewhere. America used to be a "westering" culture, one looking for new opportunities in unspoiled country. That dream is mostly history now. We aren't pioneers anymore, at least in the geographical sense. The world shrinks, and there is less open space, and so we become pioneers in other ways.  

Here's a pretty easy cocktail which will tantalize your tongue. I've been trying combinations with white vermouth lately, in preference to harder spirits, and the results have been encouraging. The Midori/Chartreuse combination is a natural, but the vermouth lightens it perfectly. Chartreuse is a classic French digestif, which can be drunk by itself (cold) or in combination (in cocktails). It needs to be used sparingly, in my experience, lest it overwhelm other flavors. Midori is a straightforward melon liqueur. 

Shaken and served up with lots of ice-fragments, it's a real winner.     

1 part dry vermouth
1 part Midori
1 part lemon juice
3/4 part yellow Chartreuse

In Memoriam - Coco Rose Faville ("Sunshine") RIP

     

Coco Rose Faville -  

Dates: 7/15/94 - 11/24/13

For almost 20 years, we lived every day with Coco, a "mini-" Siamese cat whom we acquired from a family on the Peninsula shortly after she was born. This family nicknamed her "Popcorn" because she was so bouncy and energetic. Her middle name was "Rosey" as a result of her rose-tinted nose (which doesn't show in the picture). 

As a kitten, she was a ball of energy and curiosity, and would not be deterred from pursuing something she had fixed her attention on. An aggressive eater, she would binge and regurgitate, almost like a little bulimic. She was very intelligent, and could usually anticipate everything before it actually happened. Whenever we returned home after a day's work or a weekend away, she invariably greeted us with cries of welcome and excited anticipation. She was a happy creature, delighted to be alive, delighted to share her life with us.  

We had gotten her because we thought we wanted to breed her. First, we placed her with a professional breeder in Stockton, who put her into a cage with a large feral male who bullied and intimidated her, and the mating was unproductive.  We purchased a young male from this same breeder, thinking to have the two of them breed, again without success. Later, we learned that her uterus was defective, and she was neutered. The little male, too, turned out to have defective equipment. But we didn't regret ending up with either cat. 

Coco lived gracefully into old age. At about 18, she began to develop kidney problems--a not uncommon ailment among domestic felines--and to be chronically dehydrated. She would wake up in the middle of the night demanding to be hand-watered from the sink faucet.

In her youth, she loved to be put on her little red leash, and walked out in the yard. She was inventive in play, and would chase a toy mouse around for hours. Though slight of build, she could defend her turf, and took no nonsense from the two males she shared the house with. Always affectionate, she never was temperamental, was always tractable, easy to bathe and groom, and cooperative on her visits to the vet. 

We thought of Coco as the perfect family pet, and grew to regard her as a permanent and enduring fixture in our lives--the spiritual anchor and rock of stability in a world of change and jeopardy. When she became seriously ill a few months ago, we refused to accept that she might not live forever, and tried every kind of medical treatment short of dialysis to extend her life. Finally, last week, she began to fail, despite all our efforts. Rather than put her down, which we hadn't done with any of our previous cats, we opted to let her die at home. She drew her last breath on Sunday morning, without any apparent pain, and passed into heaven. We have been in mourning since. Coco is irreplaceable, and we'll never quite get used to the idea that she isn't somewhere in the house, sleeping curled up on a pillow, dreaming cat dreams.