Indeed.

[Photo Credit: Brett Walker via This Isn’t Happiness]

Rest in Peace, Ravi Shankar.

Sarah Bernhardt cakes chez Manger.

“Vase and Gold Watch,” By Mehdi Taheri (2012)

I was downtown on Fifth Avenue. The first bit of news I got, I thought, “He’ll make it.” You know, “It’s just a flesh wound.” And then, later on, the news really came. He wasn’t just a mate of mine, he was a mate of everybody’s, really. He was a funny guy. And you realize that you’re stunned. You really don’t believe it. And you think, “God, why can’t I do anything about it?” I got well drunk on it. And I had another one for John. Then there was the confusion, the phone calls, trying to find out if Yoko was OK. There were the Beatles, and there was John. As a band, they were a great unit. But John, he was his own man. We got along very well. We didn’t see each other very often, but he would sort of turn up at your hotel. Usually, if I was in the city, I’d stay at the Plaza. If John turned up, that meant John wanted to party. He didn’t come there to discuss, you know, philosophy – although it would end up like that. I would just get into town, and there’d be a knock at the door: “Hey, man, what is going on around here?” We would get the guitars down and sing. And, in our spare time, discuss world domination. He’s rubbed off on me as much as anybody. A bit of me rubbed off on John, too, you know. He took it with him. My father just passed away, and he winked at me just before he died. I really feel a lot better about death now. I’m getting off on that wink. I’d give the wink to John.
-Keith Richards

I was nine-and-a-half when John was murdered. Funny, but at the time I thought of him as a New Yorker–an Upper West Sider, to be precise–first and a Beatle, second.

[Quote Via; photo by Ted Barron]

Word Life, I Can’t Front… [Photo Via: Hungry Ghost Food…]

From the Paris Review Interview with Jeffrey Eugenides:

INTERVIEWER

Do you write with a sense of your audience? Or is it more like Gertrude Stein said, that you write for yourself and strangers?

EUGENIDES

I tell my students that when you write, you should pretend you’re writing the best letter you ever wrote to the smartest friend you have. That way, you’ll never dumb things down. You won’t have to explain things that don’t need explaining. You’ll assume an intimacy and a natural shorthand, which is good because readers are smart and don’t wish to be condescended to.

I think about the reader. I care about the reader. Not “audience.” Not “readership.” Just the reader. That one person, alone in a room, whose time I’m asking for. I want my books to be worth the reader’s time, and that’s why I don’t publish the books I’ve written that don’t meet this criterion, and why I don’t publish the books I do until they’re ready. The novels I love are novels I live for. They make me feel smarter, more alive, more tender toward the world. I hope, with my own books, to transmit that same experience, to pass it on as best I can.

[Photo Credit: Land-Sh]

David Lebovitz’s quick trip to NYC.

My mother’s father died in the spring of 1995. I went to Belgium for the funeral with my brother and sister, mother and step father. We stayed at my uncle’s house and for the three days we were there he played Jeff Buckley’s Grace constantly. It was a mournful soundtrack and the songs are inseparable from the mental pictures and emotions I keep with me from that trip.

I don’t imagine I would have heard the Buckley record, let alone be so moved by it, unless it had been such an indelible part of saying goodbye to my grandfather, staying in the home of his only son, a man with whom I shared little language but ardent feeling.

That trip and Buckley’s album came to mind today.

Here is Janet Maslin in the Times on The Holy or the Broken: Leonard Cohen, Jeff Buckley, & The Unlikely Ascent of ‘Hallelujah’:

The album containing “Hallelujah” came out on an independent label in 1984, and then it languished. See Ms. Simmons’s account for an understanding of why, by 1991, the world was nonetheless ready for a Leonard Cohen tribute album: “I’m Your Fan,” put together by the French music magazine Les Inrockuptibles. This album prompted a major overhaul of “Hallelujah” by John Cale, once of the Velvet Underground, who re-edited the lyrics, coming up with a version that has proved more enduring than Mr. Cohen’s. Mr. Cale’s stark, exquisitely pure rendition, with an emphasis on the song’s eroticism, is by some lights (like this one) the best “Hallelujah” ever recorded.

A remarkable stroke of fate sent Jeff Buckley, then an aspiring young troubadour, to stay in a New York apartment that happened to contain a copy of “I’m Your Fan.” Buckley heard the song and, like many who have heard it, claimed he had no idea who had written it. But he included an intensely, beautifully ethereal version of it on his 1994 album, “Grace,” giving it a young man’s hypercharged sensibility rather than the Cohen-Cale seasoned one. When Buckley died young (as his doppelgänger father, the singer Tim Buckley, had), “Hallelujah” developed a cult following. “Leonard penned it, but Jeff owned it,” Mr. Light writes.

[Photo Credit: jucanlis]

From my dear friend Mike Fox in London comes this on Damon Runyon:

“Raymond Onion”

I was about ten or eleven-years-old when I read my first book by Damon Runyon. It was called Johnny One-Eye. I’ve only just learned that it was a short-story first published in Colliers Magazine in 1941. The book that I read in the late Forties, titled Johnny One-Eye, was a one-inch thick hard-cover in black rexine, and I have always thought it was complete novel. However, the facts being the facts, it must have been a compilation of Runyon’s work.

Normally, at that time of my life, I rarely read books. I blame my school for that: stuffing young kids’ heads full of Shakespeare, George Eliot, and the Brontës. Whenever I tried a book, I put it aside after a few boring chapters, thinking that I just didn’t like books (rather than comics and magazines). I was yet to realise that, simply, I hadn’t yet read anything of personal interest to me written in everyday language that I could understand.

Johnny One-Eye, I remember, had sat on my bedroom mantelpiece over the fireplace for many months. It was my mother’s book, taken out from Boots the Chemists Lending Library at probably sixpence (5c) per week. Obviously, being above such things, my mother never bothered to return it. Again, I seem to remember, I may have had a dose of the ‘flu at the time, enough to keep me in bed for a day or two, and it was then most likely that I reached for the book and read it – and thoroughly enjoyed it.

I can honestly say that it was Johnny One-Eye, and later, Tomboy, a junk paperback about New York City street gangs (then controversial but of some note as a ‘first’ today), that my older sister had just finished, which set me to reading to the extent that reading is something I’m almost addicted to today. I became a dedicated reader as a young teenager.

Last week, on researching Johnny One-Eye, I found that more than a few of its present day book reviewers are disseminating an error in describing its plot. They state that Johnny One-Eye was a dog, when in fact it (he) was a kitten. They have mistakenly taken as their source the eponymous 1950 Pat O’Brien film, whose producers made the change from cat to dog for reasons known only to them and Damon Runyon, who was duly screen-credited for Story.

For me, the remarkable thing about Runyon was that his all-American characters pretty much described my father, his friends, and cohorts from the large community of Jewish spielers in the East End of London, where my father was born. A course bookmaker, my dad would take me along to visit his friends on the other side of town on occasional Sundays, to watch him and them all sitting round a blanket-covered table, drinking whisky and smoking havanas, playing rummy for money with a double-deck of cards. Better than that, my dad would take me for lunch at any one of a dozen fine kosher delis and restaurants where I wolfed down dishes of lockshen soup, plates of salt-beef and latkes, chrane, pickled cucumbers and rye bread – and we’d carry home cholas and hot beigels and the greatest cheese-cake I’ve ever tasted in my life. (Note: British Jews say ‘byegul’ unlike the American ‘baygul’. Why? I couldn’t tell you. Similarly: shmairil and schlemiel; shmock and schmuk; salt-beef and corned beef; smoked salmon and lox.)

So, I actually knew Harry the Horse, Benny the Blond Jew, Nicely-Nicely Johnson, the Lemon Drop Kid, et al, long before I introduced myself to Runyon.

Why I loved Runyon on my first reading was much more about his language, his scrupulous use of the present tense, and his characters rather than his plots. In fact I didn’t care for his ‘normally’ written work about non-Broadway subjects much at all. But I’m sure that if I read them now, as an adult, I’d like them; probably very much. Sadly, I learned not too long ago that Runyon was a noted anti-Semite. I’m sure that was a hard thing to be in a Jewish town like New York peopled by characters he wrote about that were almost certainly and mainly Jewish. How could they not be? Never mind all that, I love Runyon and his Broadway, and like The Pat Hobby Stories, I go back to them again and again when I feel enough time has passed for me to enjoy them anew.

So, to answer your question: with Runyon (and Pat Hobby) I have no favourites. The whole of them, taken together, is my favourite, just like my kids.

From your ever-lovin’

Oink!

PS: A poignant little story about my pre-teen reading.

When I was about nine-years-old I somehow came into possession of a Bugs Bunny comic. This was rare because in the immediate post-war period Britain was pretty much bankrupt and anything imported was severely restricted to the necessities. Every dollar was needed to pay our huge war-debt to the United States. I loved Warner Bros. cartoons because they were the very best, and because they had Mel Blanc. At the end of the Bugs Bunny comic was a little ad offering a year’s subscription for a dollar (if I remember right). Now, it happens I actually had a US dollar coin that a very kind Canadian serviceman lodging in one of our flats had given me. So I cut out the ad, filled in my address, dropped in the dollar coin and posted it off to an address in Poughkeepsie (I’ve never forgotten the name). Sure enough, weeks later, a copy of Bugs Bunny dropped through our letter-box and continued doing so for one year. Only as an adult did I realise what a very kind gesture this was. The air mail costs must have eaten up any profit to the publishers after just a couple of weeks. I find that very, very touching, and now you know why I love America.

Today, let’s spend some time with Jimmy, shall we?

[Photo Via]

“Flower at Thousand Island Lake” By Brian Ernst 

Via Test Pressing, here’s Norman Mailer’s 1974 Esquire article on graffiti.

From My Modern Met…

It wasn’t freezing yesterday but it was grey and rainy and I wanted to make soup so I tried this one, a green pea and ham soup, from April Bloomfield’s book, and man was it ever good. I mean, really good.

Happy Monday.

Picture by Fabio Stachi

Food 52 gives gives us 12 holiday cookies.

Hooray for Friday. Here’s one of the best NYC trooping songs you’ll ever hear. Course it’s good to listen to no matter where you are. You won’t be able to keep still.

[Photo Credit: Robert Doisneau]

Painting by Marjorie Guyon.