Sunday, August 26, 2007

Summer Days Summer Nights Are Gone

"Summer days, summer nights are gone..
I know a place where there's something going on"
--"Summer Days" by Bob Dylan from LOVE AND THEFT

We made our annual pre-first day of school pilgrimage to Staples to start loading up on school supplies and generally to begin our reality testing as to the fact that those lazy crazy hazy days of summer are dwindling down to a precious few..

Our younger kids got their school lists in June and this weekend we started to gather folders, notebooks, pens, graph paper, etc. I think we do this every year -- we like everyone else apparently, try to go the week before school begins to start to get some supplies (I think it helps the kids deal with some of their back-to-school anxiety), but so does eveyone else and the store was quite jammed. I always think of the Staples TV commercial that my late Dad adored, and I guess I do too, which is the middle aged guy whooping it up, swinging around the aisles with a shopping cart, while the holiday tune "It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year" plays in the background. He is followed by his drooping kids, despairing at the return of Fall and homework..

Since we are an edu-ma-cation centered home, my wife also begins to enter the mourning mode in mid August. She bought a copy of "How to Get Along at Work with People You Hate" and a magazine on ideas for starting home businesses..She is a special education art teacher who works with special needs kids (primarily autistic and emotionally disabled).. She loves the kids, but like anyone who is employed in an organization, the adults often leave a lot to be desired..

Anyway, we were remembering a fantastic summer a few years back. We had rented a place in Bearsville NY, a lovely little home with the Esopus running through the backyard. The kids were younger, 4 years through 11 years I guess. I work year round so we spent a few weeks up there and then went up every other weekend that we could. The kids had a great time. We were relaxing but in the process of selling our first home in Clinton Hill and buying our current place in Flatbush. But in between the phone calls, faxes and Fed Exes, we enjoyed our summer in the country. We went to a concert at the old Woodstock site near Monticello. We saw great outdoor theatre--- "Rip van Winkle" featuring giant puppets. My son and I searched the backroads nearby until we found Big Pink, where Bob Dylan and the Band recorded the legendary Basement Tapes in 1967. As a matter of fact, less than mile away, on Stoll Road, Bob Dylan had had his mythic motorpsycho accident in 1966. Our next door neighbors who included a volunteer fireman were wonderful and we went with them to the 4th of July parade in town. We loved that summer. Wading in the Esopus, visiting the town.

Speaking of puppets, one day that summer, we went to the Woodstock Library. I had a NYPL card and we were able to get a Woodstock Library Card and visited often. They always have amazing used booksales at the library and we have picked up many gems over the years. Everyone was very friendly. Anyway, we were browsing around the library and a young guy came in with his daughter. Our kids were in the childrens' room looking at books and playing with kids toys. The young dad, a little grungy but very friendly, started doing a puppet show for his daughter and our kids. Mostly kid-talk with puppets. I recognized the dad immediately. Suddenly, the mom shows up in a granny dress with heavy-framed glasses. "Ethan, we gotta go". And that's how our kids met Uma Thurman and Ethan Hawke. My wife and I were polite and cordial but frankly starstruck. The librarian lady said "Your kids had a very famous playmate". My son (you might remember him, the 16 year old autograph hound, who, by the way, this summer completed a film that was shown last week at the NYC Summer Arts Institute at the Tribeca Film Institute) still hocks me for not getting an autograph.

Speak, Memory.

--Brooklyn Beat

Current Reading

  • Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid that Sparked the Civil War- Tony Horwitz
  • A Sultan in Palermo - Tariq Ali
  • Hitch-22: A Memoir - Christopher Hitchens
  • Negropedia- Patrice Evans
  • Dead Funny: Humor in Nazi Germany - Rudolph Herzog
  • Exile on Main Street - Robert Greenfield
  • Among the Truthers - A Journey Among America's Growing Conspiracist Underworld - Jonathan Kay
  • Paradise Lost - John Milton
  • What Is Your Dangerous Idea? Thinking the Unthinkable - John Brockman
  • Notes from the Edge Times - Daniel Pinchbeck
  • Fringe-ology: How I Can't Explain Away the Unexplainable- Steve Volk
  • Un Juif pour l'exemple (translated as A Jew Must Die )- Jacques Cheesex
  • The God Delusion - Richard Dawkins
  • Pale King - David Foster Wallce
  • David Bowie: Starman bio - Paul Trynka
  • Tobacco Stained Mountain Goat - Andrez Bergen
  • The Future of Nostalgia -Svetlana Boym
  • Living in the End Times - Slavoj ZIzek
  • FIrst as Tragedy Next as Farce - Slavoj Zizek
  • How to Survive a Robot Uprising - Daniel Wilson
  • Where is My Jet Pack? -Daniel Wilson
  • Day of the Oprichniks - Vladimir Sorokin
  • Ice Trilogy - Vladimir Sorokin
  • First Civilizations
  • Oscar Wilde -Andre Maurois
  • The Beats - Harvey Pekar, et al
  • SDS - Harvey Pekar, et al
  • The Unfinished Animal - Theodore Roszak
  • Friends of Eddy Coyle
  • Brooklands -Emily Barton
  • Abraham Lincoln - Vampire Hunter - Seth Grahme-Smith - Entertaining and historical
  • Dictionary of the Khazars - Pavic
  • Sloth-Gilbert Hernandez
  • War and Peace- Leo Tolstoy
  • Charles Addams: An Evilution
  • Life in Ancient Greece
  • Time - Eva Hoffmann
  • Violence - S. Zizek
  • Luba - a graphic novel by Gilbert Hernandez
  • Life in Ancient Egypt
  • Great Apes - Will Self - riveting and disturbing
  • Lost Honor of Katherina Blum - Heinrich Boll - could not put it down
  • Yellow Back Radio Brokedown - Ishmael Reed (author deserving of new wide readership)
  • Living in Ancient Mesopotomia
  • Landscape in Concrete - Jakov Lind - surreal
  • 'There Once Lived A Woman Who Tried To Kill Her Neighbor's Baby'-Ludmilla Petrushevskaya - creepy stories - translation feels literarily "thin"
  • Mythologies - William Butler Yeats (re-read again & again)
  • How German Is It ? - Walter Abish
  • The Book of Genesis - illustrated by R. Crumb - visionary
  • "Flags" - an illustrated encyclopedia - wish I could remember all of these. Flag culture
  • Sirens of Titan - Kurt Vonnegut
  • Ubik - Philip K. Dick
  • Nobody's Fool - Richard Russo
  • Hitler's Empire - Mark Mazower
  • Nazi Culture - various authors
  • Master Plan: Himmler 's Scholars and the Holocaust - Heather Pringle
  • Eichmann in Jerusalem - Hannah Arendt
  • Living in Ancient Rome
  • Traveling with Herodotus -R. Kapuszynsky
  • Oblivion - David Foster Wallace - Some of his greatest work
  • Infinite Jest - David Foster Wallace - still wrestling with this great book
  • Netherland - Joseph O'Neill - staggeringly great read
  • Renegade - The Obama Campaign - Richard Wolffe
  • Mount Analogue - Rene Daumal
  • John Brown
  • Anathem - Neal Stephenson - love Stephenson but tough slogging first few chapters
  • 7 Deadly Sins
  • ALEX COX - Alex Cox
  • FIASCO by Thomas Ricks
  • I, Fellini - Charlotte Chandler & Federico Fellini
  • Best of 20th century alternative history fiction
  • Judah P. Benjamin - Eli Evans - Confederacy's Secretary of State & source of the W.C. Field's exclamation
  • Moscow 2042 - Vladimir Voinovich - Pre-1989 curiosity & entertaining sci fi read; love his portrayal of Solzhenitsyn-like character
  • Gomorrah - Roberto Saviano - Mafia without the It-Am sugar coating. Brutal & disturbing
  • The Sack of Rome - Celebrity+Media+Money=Silvio Berlusconi - Alexander Stille
  • Reporting - David Remnick - terrific journalism
  • Fassbinder
  • Indignation - Philip Roth
  • Rome
  • Let's Go Italy! 2008
  • Italian Phrases for Dummies
  • How to Pack
  • Violence - Slavoj Zizek
  • Dali: Painting & Film
  • The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight - Jimmy Breslin
  • The Good Rat - Jimmy Breslin
  • Spook Country - William Gibson
  • A Blue Hand - The Beats in India - Deborah Baker
  • The Metaphysical Club - Louis Menard
  • Coast of Utopia - Tom Stoppard
  • Physics of the Impossible - Dr. Michio Kaku
  • Managing the Unexpected - Weick & Sutcliffe
  • Wait Til The Midnight Hour - Writings on Black Power
  • Yellow Back Radio Brokedown - Ishmael Reed
  • Burning Down the Masters' House - Jayson Blair
  • Howl - Allen Ginsberg
  • Cat's Cradle - Kurt Vonnegut
  • The Palace Thief - Ethan Canin
  • John Adams - David McCullough
  • The Wooden Sea - Jonathan Carroll
  • American Gangster - Mark Jacobson
  • Return of the King - J.R.R. Tolkien
  • Gawker Guide to Becoming King of All Media
  • Jews and Power - Ruth Wisse
  • Youth Without Youth - Mircea Eliade
  • A Team of Rivals - Doris Goodwin
  • Ghost Hunters -William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life After Death - Deborah Blum
  • Dream -Re-Imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy - Stephen Duncombe
  • Love & Theft - Eric Lott
  • Exit Ghost - Philip Roth
  • Studio A - The Bob Dylan Reader

Current Listening

  • Alexi Murdoch Wait
  • Wilco Summer Teeth
  • Wilco The Album
  • Carmina Burana - Ray Manzarek (& Michael Riesmann)
  • Polyrock - Polyrock
  • 96 Tears - Garland Jeffries
  • Ghost of a Chance Garland Jeffries
  • Yellow Magic Orchestra
  • Mustang Sally Buddy Guy
  • John Lee Hooker
  • Black and White Years
  • Together Through Life - B. Dylan
  • 100 Days 100 Nites - Sharon Jones & The Dap Kings
  • DYLAN: 3 disc Greatest...
  • Glassworks - Philip Glass
  • Wild Palms - Soundtrack -Ryuichi Sakamoto
  • Dinah Washington - Best of..
  • Commander Cody& His Lost Planet Airmen Live at Armadillo