NYC Again

It’s another quick hitter to NYC.

Rolling up the Kensington early on a rainy Saturday morning I wonder what surprises await. Well, this ride is different. For all the thousands of times I’ve ridden this road I’ve never seen so little traffic. None of that “will I make it to the station on time” tension. OK, good start.

Amtrak Empire Service arrives at Penn Station only a half hour late. Pretty good by Amtrak standards. But, we agree, it seemed as though the time passed more quickly than usual. It’s, I conclude, the commuter syndrome: you know, after a while an oft taken route becomes so familiar that time passes differently.

We check in once again at HIEX on W. 45^th   (home of those delicious morning time cinnamon rolls). I open my Surface to check my email. (A topic for another day: why would Microsoft build a device that lacks basic features like a spam filter?) I find a weeks old email from daughter Jennifer announcing a gig in New York City. I reread it and, oh my, it’s scheduled for this Monday. Does this mean she’ll arrive in New York on Sunday? I reach for the cell phone. We connect.

She’s already here! She’s staying with her friend Catherine in Brooklyn. Is this not the absolutely most pleasant surprise! We quickly make plans to meet. We’re headed to Whiskey Park, a favorite watering hole. And on the way we’ll walk right by Benoit where we have late dinner reservations. It’ll be easy to stop in and add a third person. Which we do.

Somewhere around the second Veuve for Shelley and IPA for me, Jennifer swings through the Whiskey Park door looking fabulous as ever. Another round then off to dinner, reunited and it feels so good.

SUNDAY IN NEW YORK

We hit the streets late morning. It’s a beautiful late summer day. We cruise 5^th Avenue and toss some high end retail spotting a couple of items, pants at Ann Taylor for Shelley, shoes at Cole Hahn for me. Mark them, we’ll be back in the neighborhood before we depart.

We hail a cab and head for the Metropolitan Museum. The principal reason for this trip is the exhibit, “Sargent: Portraits of Artists and Friends”.  It proves to be well worth the trip. It’s extensive, ninety-two paintings and drawings. For every towering full length portrait like the astonishing Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth there are a dozen more intimate close-up portraits, each a vibrant, living portrayal. We learn that Sargent worked his skill amazingly fast. Some of these portraits, finished in mere hours, seem as complete as paintings labored over through days of sittings. Some of the oil paintings seemingly fully finished are noted to be “sketches”.  Sargent was a contemporary of the Impressionists and a close friend to many of them. And often he fills the spaces around the portraits with blushes and swirls of color as impressionistic as any they might have painted. Then, in the final two galleries, a revelation. Sargent, we learn, gave up portraiture in 1907. For the rest of his life (he died in 1925 at age 69) he turned to painting from nature. In keeping with the theme of this show, paintings from this period depict artists outdoors at their easels. In vibrant scenes bathed in sunlight the artists are portrayed as integral parts of the landscape in which they are working.  And finally watercolors, several painted at Viscaya in Miami, male nudes in tropic daylight, discrete yet homoerotic.

 

As we work our way through the last galleries a text arrives. Jennifer and Catherine are on the front steps.

We join them and walk through a Central Park packed with New Yorkers enjoying the beautiful late summer afternoon. Frisbees fly, kiddies frolic, roller skaters skate, bicyclers bicycle, joggers jog, picnickers spread their spreads. Passing Bethesda fountain we’re drawn to a gathering in the beautifully tiled Angel Tunnel. We find Tribal Baroque (Jennifer knows them from San Francisco) busking there. We take in a tune, then press on.

Our destination is the Russian Tea Room for Caviar and Bellini’s. Well, for all but me. I make due with Russian beer (Baltika…nothing special). And then high tea during which the tea is pretty much ignored in favor of more Bellini’s and beer. Jennifer and Catherine depart. We head back to the hotel stopping on the way to make the previously spotted purchases.

We’re not done yet.

In my student days trips to New York (I was often on the bus that left the Greyhound station at midnight and arrived in New York at 8:00 AM) meant live jazz. But with the exception of our honeymoon visit to the Village Vanguard, I hadn’t  had a taste in years. So we reserve at Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola for the 9:30 show. The venue proves to be an all-together pleasantly warm room on the fifth floor of the Time Warner building on Columbus Circle.  We pull up at the bar securing superior sight lines. More champagne, more beer. On the bill: The Cookers, a septet of veteran jazz musicians. Cook they do. Their set follows a pattern. They open collectively working a complex chart. Then all but one horn player leaves the stage; the one remaining launches a long solo backed by the piano, bass and drums rhythm section. They are all virtuosi. I’m particularly taken by Donald Harrison on alto. And we both agree that Cecil McBee, the bassist, and George Cables, the pianist, are wonderfully subtle and that Billy Hart, the drummer, in his distant youth, listened to too much Elvin Jones.

And then we’re done.

Back to LA, Pt. 2

It’s hardly possible to consider Los Angeles, indeed pretty much all of that huge hunk of territory known as Southern California, without confronting traffic. LA is, after all, the city that grew from a pleasant place under the warm California sun to a megalopolis after the introduction of the automobile. It must have seemed so simple back then: put anything any place. It won’t matter because all you have to do to get there is climb in your car and drive off. Fair enough, but as the city sprawled in the post war years, despite the broad streets that wound through it for astonishingly long distances, getting about by auto became more and more difficult. The ingenious solution was freeways. Limited access multi-lane highways weaving through the city to move traffic along swiftly.

And as has been known forever, make something easier, more convenient and folks will flock to it. Soon enough the freeways jammed up. The solution: more of the same. Now flyovers fly over ten lane with an additional four commuter lanes roads. And of course, that’s where all the drivers head.

SoCal freeways are never not busy, not day, not night, not in the still hours before dawn. The speed limit may be sixty-five but don’t expect to drive that speed for long. Cruise control is useless. Drive, just drive. Speed up, slow down, change lanes, and stay alert. Watch out for those motorcycles that ride the white lines between the lanes.

Throw that many drivers zipping around as fast as they can go and inevitably accidents will occur. Lots of accidents. The first thing to do when heading out on the freeways is to tune the car radio to the news station: traffic and weather together every ten minutes. And accident updates because there’s always accidents somewhere on the system. The traffic reports may, if there are any, suggest alternate routes. Take the advice and you find yourself driving the “surface” streets along with everyone else who has harkened to the same advice plus the locals who are there anyway. Stop at traffic signals and deal with unfamiliar traffic patterns. Better yet, just stay on the freeway and crawl along bumper to bumper. It may seem eternal but nothing ever is.

So I found myself on the most notorious of all, I-5, headed south from LA to visit my friend Jim in San Marcos. Five lanes abreast we’re moving slower than the tides. The news radio clues me into to the neigh apocalyptic reason, a car on fire further on down the road. Looks as though this particular jam is gonna last a long time.

And I reflect. A few weeks back Dale and I were among the dozen or so who turned out to hear singer songwriter Ray Bonneville at the Sportsmens. Ray talks up the audience between numbers and always has something amusing and thought-provoking to say. This night he reflected, “People complain about the airlines. But they fly me at three hundred miles per hour and get where I want to go in hours rather than days.” So it is. We’re all out here jammed up, creeping along because we can be. It’s no great fun but it’s better than it might be.

Back to LA, Pt. 1

Every trip to Los Angeles has been memorable. None more so than my first.

It was the summer I turned fourteen. My father piled me, my two younger brothers and my younger sister in the car and headed out early in the evening. Travel in the west then, it was the mid-fifties, was not so simple. There were no interstate highways. Our route from our home in Carson City, Nevada to Southern California meant crossing the Sierra Nevada Mountains and the Mojave Desert almost exclusively on two lane highways.  Our early evening departure was part of dad’s plan. We’d cross the mountains before dark then cross the desert at night.

We headed south from Carson City across the eastern slopes of the Sierras. By nightfall we’d reached Bishop, California, where we stopped for dinner. And then we went to a movie!

No really. And it was a great movie, “The Killing”, an early Stanley Kubrick flic. Even at that tender age when I didn’t know Stanley Kubrick from Stan Lee, I was riveted by its cinematic technique, flashback after flashback all tied to the start of a horse race and an ingenious plot to rob the racetrack.

When the theater let out we rode off across the Mojave. Somewhere in the dark before dawn hours, my father stopped for coffee. Up till then coffee for me was laced with milk and enough sugar to qualify as a dessert. But l felt that under the circumstances that wouldn’t do. Instead I ordered mine black. I’ve had my coffee that way ever since.

We arrived in downtown LA very early in the morning. We checked in to the Biltmore on Pershing Square where my father had reserved. But we were so early there was no room ready for us. We were put in a pallor on the mezzanine. And I had my introduction to 50’s LA smog. The windows faced east up Olive St. At first the view up the street was clear. But as the morning traffic grew haze began to form. It thickened and began to turn greyish orange. Before long, maybe an hour or two, we could no longer see up the street. We went out of the hotel to get breakfast. The smog made breathing difficult, my eyes watered, my throat hurt.

My father was there on business, government business. He was with the Interior Department Bureau of Indian Affairs. Which meant he had to leave us, although briefly, to attend to business. So later that day he directed us to Pershing Square to wait while he took care of whatever it was he had to take care of. Look at Pershing Square on Google Maps today and you’ll see it described as “The most singularly ugly public space in LA.” Back then it was a vibrant central city square, all palms and grassy swards. And it was then the Hyde Park of Los Angeles. Free speech was celebrated.  Orators abounded. Communists! Atheists! Shocking and yet intriguing to a young boy raised in a devout Catholic family. I went from one speaker to another soaking it all up.

What else? We went to Disneyland, of course. And on the trip home we stopped again, this time in Riverside, California for another movie though not a memorable one this time, a western I seem to recall.

I’d grown up a city kid. Then mid-way through seventh grade my family was plunked down in Carson City, Nevada. By the time we visited LA, it was becoming ever so clear to me that I didn’t belong in a Podunk little town. I wanted to go back to a city, a city like Los Angeles.

It would be twenty years before I got back.

LA Pt 2: Drive

 Of course the sun is shining.

Of course flowers bloom everywhere

We’re in LA 

Ask any Angelino for driving directions and he or she will tell you what freeways to take.

No really. We were driving out Sunset Boulevard headed for Century City when I was overcome by severe “are we there yet” anxiety. At a light we pulled up next to a police car. I rolled down the window and asked for assistance. I expected one of two possible answers. “Keep going.” or “You’ve gone too far.”  But no, the officer started off on what freeways I should have taken and which ones I might head for now. “What if I keep going this way?” He allowed as how I could do that but his look told me he thought was loco.

But I prefer driving Los Angeles overland, or as Angelinos would have it, driving on “surface streets.”  It’s the ever changing scene that takes me that way. One moment you’re driving past funky junky strip malls and the next you amidst gleaming steel and glass high rises. From a low end neighborhood you quickly pass into a high end one. There are residential streets here that look for all the world like tree lined streets in New England at mid-summer.

This is, I’ve noted before, a post-Fordian city, a city built concurrently with the era of the automobile. It stretches, if you count the scant water surface, over five hundred square miles divided into over eighty districts and neighborhoods. (Buffalo by the same measure covers a titch over fifty square miles.) Within and wherein that vast space, all of it accessible by car from the earliest days of the twentieth century, this city growed randomly. It made little difference where anything or anyone was. Hop in your car and drive there. By the forties congestion ruled; construction of the freeways commenced. And if you build a system to rapidly move cars, the drivers will all head there and rapidity become a memory.  While all those drivers are jammed up out there, I cruise the generally broad streets.

Jennifer was flying in from San Francisco. I plotted an overland route to pick her up in Burbank at Bob Hope Airport. Garminella is along on this trip; I’d shipped her out here in advance. I hadn’t as yet had a chance to utilize her so I saw this ride as the opportunity. We set out together. She was intent on getting me onto a freeway. Ignoring her set off flurries of “Recalculating”.

{Garmenilla speaks: It was nice to be out of the box after two years on a shelf in the closet. It was nice to be up on the dash doing what I was meant to do once again with Jack, with whom I’ve had a long and er, complex relationship, behind the wheel. And he totally ignored me! My job is to quickly and efficiently get us to our destination. And in LA that means getting out on the freeways. He never took a single turn I directed him to. Knucklehead! }

There are times when freeway driving is just unavoidable. We set out for Long Beach to take a whale watching three hour cruise. (We watched the hell outta one whale.) It’s a haul from here to there. Only taking freeways made any sense. While Bill drove Alvaro navigated. That meant that while one was behind the wheel the other wielded a smart phone apped to continuously update traffic.

Summing up: A poem by Bill:

                Getting There

                        by William Tutton

 

Cars

cars  cars

cars cars, cars

cars cars cars cars

cars cars cars cars cars

cars cars cars cars cars cars

cars cars cars cars cars cars cars

including ours.

 

             

 

LA Pt. 1: Lights

Of course the sun is shining.

Of course flowers bloom everywhere.

We’re in LA.

We’re invited to Molly and Heather’s house to view the sunset from their patio. The house is about half way up the side of a hill above Silver Lake, the actual lake (Soon to be drained we’re told. Wouldn’t that be awful.) not the neighborhood although it’s in the neighborhood which extends to include our apartment which isn’t near the lake at all. Got that?

It’s a lovely home built in the California cottage style in 1927. The first homeowners here worked at the Disney studios. They could take the stairs that climb the hillside down to the trolley line that delivered them to the studio doors.

Bill and Alvaro are with us. Mark Weinstein stops by. Glasses are filled and refiled. Molly proposes a toast, “To Kenmore.” Indeed five seventh of us are from there, none regretting not being anywhere near there now.

Reaching the patio involves climbing a coupla short flights of stairs up from the backyard. The patio is built into the hillside above the house. No, really, the patio is higher than the roof of the house. The view is fabulous, down the valley, west over Hollywood, down and out over the LA basin.

The sun does its firey ball dropping below the horizon thing. Colors emerge in the southwestern sunset style. It’s all so beautiful. As the colors fade away, Venus emerges, brighter than the lights of the helicopters, two or three of which seem always to be airborne over Los Angeles.

Lights go on all around us. I’m in mind of those iconic pictures of LA at night, the foothills all around the basin set alight by houselights from the homes that cling, often precariously, to the hillsides. We are, it occurs to me, one of those lights.

Aboard the Southwest Chief

The Southwest Chief, successor we learn to the legendary Santa Fe Super Chief, is a step up, a significant step up from the Lakeshore Limited. It starts when we check a bag at Union Station in Chicago and are directed to the Metropolitan Lounge, set aside for sleeper car patrons and others of such a distinguished lot. Unlike the general waiting room, the lounge offers comfy chairs and complimentary stuff. Had we arrived on time instead of over three hours late, it would have been a pleasant place to spend a long layover. But soon the Chief’s conductor walked through the lounge scanning tickets. He then led us over a circuitous route to an imposingly large two story train.

Back on the Lakeshore Limited we occupied what Amtrak calls a roomette, emphasis on the ette, a tiny compartment in which, when it wasn’t made up for berths, two people could sit opposite each other knees touching. Boarding the Southwest Chief, porter Joseph Washington lead us to the compartment that would be home for the next coupla days. The prospect was a pleasant one, modest size yet ingeniously comfy.

By early evening we were rolling over the plains, snow covered furrows, roads laid out with a ruler.

We wake up the next morning in southwestern Kansas, still on the plains but now no snow on the ground. This will be a full day so after breakfast in the dining car followed by showers back in our compartment we, suitably enhanced, head to the observation car and stake out seats. The day just gets better and better. In the southeast corner of Colorado the plains become scrubby high desert. The train begins a slow ascent. As we climb we’re enveloped by fog. We breakout into sunlight as we enter New Mexico. Herds of antelope sport in broad green fields. Still we climb. And as we do the scenery becomes ever more spectacular.  Hillocks rise, become pine covered hills that become craggy mountains “That trail you see cut into the side of mountain is the remains of the Santa Fe trail that wagon trains took west in the 1880’s,” the conductor informs us. Higher still, we enter the tall Aspen grandeur of the Carson National Forrest.  

In late afternoon we plunge down to Albuquerque, a major stop for Amtrak. It’s a chance to step out, stretch our legs and toss the stands along the platform selling mostly junk jewelry and ersatz Indian gear. Then “All Aboard” and we depart into the fiery southwestern sunset.

My dislike of the vasty desert is no secret. When driving to southern California there’s just no way to avoid crossing it. There’s no way to avoid crossing the desert on the train either but mercifully the crossing is at night. We sleep through it and awaken in the far flung ‘burbs of LA.  

 

Aboard the Lakeshore Limited

 

Late morning, rolling across snow covered fields thirty minutes or so west of Toledo. We were scheduled to be in Chicago by now. We’d told anyone who cared to listen, well, just about anyone, that we were taking the midnight train. Indeed, departure time from Depew was 11:59. We’d called for a cab to pick us up at ten leaving lotsa time to spare. But knowing that a train originating in New York City could well be delayed passing through the winter storm that had earlier dumped a foot of snow on Buffalo, I checked the Amtrak web site around nine and, sure enough, the train was running an hour late.

“Hi Kenmore Cab. Pick us up at eleven instead of ten.”

Check the internet.

“Hi, Kenmore Cab. Pick us up at midnight instead of eleven.”

Check the internet….oh, you see how this is going.

We arrive at the station at 2:20, board the train at 3:05. The cute blond porter makes up our beds. I climb into the upper berth. Sleep soon settles over me.

A shaft of light from the rising sun wakes me. Clearly Cleveland. Back to sleep.

A few hours later breakfast in the dining car.

This is gonna be ok. Had the train been on time we’d have faced a long stretch, five hours or so, in the Union Station waiting room in Chicago. Now it’ll be a quick change to the Southwest Chief and on into the western night.