Lance Mannion

On the train platform something like joy pours out of the cloudburst heart

Posted Saturday morning, July 11, 2020.

Waiting for the train. New York City, March 2020. Photo by Gabriella Bhaskar for the New York Times.

At first they stand, orphaned, like a line of birds,
First on one foot, then the other, in unison,
Like any other unnamed someones, as if poised
For a firing line, until someone thinks he knows
A train is coming in the sparrow-morning light,
And someone else taps a pack of cigarettes
Against his gloved hand, not exotic,
But it’s as if he’s slipped into captivity. One
Of those corner-of-the-eye, white-sky
Days, late winter a hammer against the
Platform, and gathered above the grave-
Line of the gap enough snow
To consider the blue clouds floating,
Like forgiveness, above us all. Only two
Are cresting at this moment, one a show
Of hands, an explosion of clapping, the
Other a mask of a baptismal face
Failing behind the city’s blood-brown
Skyline. Whoever screamed just then,
Then quieted, then shouted, high, like a crow,
Leaves me filled with absence, listening
For silences, cupping my ears. For
A moment, nothing is being celebrated,
Nothing undone, or measured, nothing
Moves, or rings, in the air, and in the next
Moment sirens are continually dying in
The distance. In the time it takes the train’s
Doors to open, and close, and for the train
To swirl us all off, half in, half out, of
Our own wills, underground, something
Like joy pours out of the cloudburst heart,
And whatever feelings each one of us has had
Goes off into the daylight without us.

----”Men Waiting for a Train” by David Biespiel, courtesy of the New Yorker, May 11, 2020.

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Filed under Morning Song.

Photo up top is from a feature story in the New York Times by Christina Goldbaum and Lindsey Rogers Cook that includes many more terrific photos by Gabriella Bhaskar. To read the story and view the photos, follow the link to "They Can’t Afford to Quarantine. So They Brave the Subway."  at the Times website.

Buster Keaton understanding how the magic worked

Posted Tuesday morning, May 12, 2020.

Buster Keaton on hold: assiduous googling isn't turning up what movie this shot is from, but whatever it was and wheneverr it was made, it  looks like Keaton had come to understood pretty well by then how the magic worked.

New York City, 1917: Twenty-one-year old Buster Keaton setting an example for us all who need to understand how the “magic” is made…

At a studio on East 48th Street, a young vaudeville star named Buster Keaton was making his first film, Butcher Boy, directed by the comedian Fatty Arbuckle. At the end of his first day on the set, Keaton brought the camera home, where he took it apart so he could fully understand how the magic was made…

---from “March 1917: On the Brink of War and Revolution” by Will Englund.

Quichotte's impossible dream of New York City

Posted Wednesday morning, December 11, 2019.

In “Quichotte”, Salman Rushdie’s retelling of “Don Quixote”, set in the United States of the 21st Century, his version of Cervantes mad knight, an elderly traveling pharmaceutical salesman named Quichotte, who’s had his brain melted by watching too much TV in motel rooms across the country, and his Sancho, the much wished-for teenage son he’s imagined into rebellious existence, are about to enter New York City, home of Quichotte’s Dulcinea, Salma R, a former Bollywood star turned Oprah-level popular talk show host. Quichotte explains to Sancho what lies before them: two New York Cities, an invisible, ideal one, and a “real” one that acts as a shield against entry to the ideal city by the unimaginative, unappreciative, and unworthy. Here’s Quichotte’s description of the “real” New York City. You’ll see why I keep putting “real” in quotation marks:

“There are two cities,” Quichotte said. “There’s the one you can see, the broken sidewalks of the old place and the steel skeletons of the new, lights in the sky, garbage in the gutters, the new music of the sirens and power drills, and old man tap-dancing for change, whose feet say, I used to be somebody, but his eyes say, no more, buster, no more. The flow of the avenues and the clogged-up streets. A mouse sailing a boat on a pond in the park, a guy with a mohawk screaming at a yellow cab. Made men with napkins tucked in under their chins in a red-sauce joint in Harlem. Wall Street guy in suspenders getting bottle service in nightclubs or doing tequila shots and throwing themselves at women as if they were banknotes. Tall women, short bald guys, strip steaks, strip joints. Empty storefronts, closing sales, everything must go, a smile missing some of its best teeth. Construction everywhere but still the steam pipes burst. Ringleted men with a million bucks in diamonds in the pockets of their long black quotes. Brownstones. Music. Food. Drugs. Homeless folks. Twenty years ago they were gone but now they’re back. Snow plows, baseball, police cars promising CPA, courtesy, professionalism, respect, what can I tell you, they have a sense of humor. Every language on earth, Russian, Punjabi, Taishanese, Creole, Yiddish, Kru. Also, let us not forget the beating heart of the television industry. Colbert at the Ed Sullivan Theater, Noah in Hell’s Kitchen, The View, The Chew, Seth Meyers, Fallon, everybody. Smiling lawyers on cable saying they can make you a fortune if you get hurt. Rock Center, CNN, Fox. The warehouse downtown where they shoot the Salma show. The streets she walks, the car she goes home in, the elevator to her penthouse, the restaurants she orders from, the places she knows, the places she goes. The people who know her number. The things that please her. The whole ugly-pretty city, beautiful in its ugliness, jolie-laide, that’s French, like the statue in the harbor. All this is there to see.”

“And the other city?” Sancho asked, frowning. “Because that’s a lot right there.”

“The other city is invisible,” Quichotte replied…

Quichotte’s description of the City builds towards Salma and the City as she knows it. His “real” New York City is real to him because it’s her home and where he expects to meet her in person---he has sought her, sung her, dreamed her, known her with all of his heart though they have been always apart to this point---and declare his love at last. But that doesn’t change the fact that his description of New York City is realistic---as long as you ignore that includes Stuart Little.

It also includes Tony Soprano---or is it Michael Corleone?---Travis Bickle, and Bo Jangles. When you remember that throughout, Quichotte's view of life is determined by what he’s watched on TV and the books he’s read---he’s well and widely read---and that his favorite television show is “Law & Order: SVU”---Mariska Hargitay was his first Dulcinea until he saw Salma on Salma---you realize that his “real” New York City is a jumbled conflation of images from TV, movies, books, and newspapers and news shows. And those images pile on top of other images so that the references contain references to references. The guy with mohawk is a reference to “Taxi Driver” but the most famous movie or TV character to yell at a yellow cab isn’t Travis Bickle, it’s Ratso Rizzo. Followed by Oscar Maddison.

And, of course, his Salma is herself a figment of his imagination. 

But here’s the thing.

While all the images in Quichotte’s real New York City are conjured from his overstuffed imagination, they’re at the same time things you can see in the real real New York, and I’m not automatically excluding the mouse in a toy sailboat on a pond in Central Park. The guy with a mohawk screaming at a yellow cab is, in various shapes a sizes, a regular sight on street corners in every neighborhood and borough every day of the week, every hour of every day. But it’s almost impossible to see him apart from Bickle and Rizzo and Madison, as not in a scene from “Taxi Driver”, “Midnight Cowboy”, or “The Odd Couple.”  You can’t see New York City---be in New York City---without seeing “New York City” and being in “New York City” as it appears in “On the Town”, “On the Waterfront”, “Do the Right Thing”, “The Godfather”, “Serpico”, “Manhattan”, “The Wolf of Wall Street”, “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”, “The Apartment”, “West Side Story”, “Ghostbusters”, “Spider-Man”, and “Law & Order”. By you, of course, I mean me. Your New York City is made up out of your own cinematic allusions, along with memories of the books you’ve read, the news stories you were struck by and that stuck with you, the tales you’ve been told, the visits you made, the life you lived there, the life you’re living there, the songs it makes you sing, the music you hear in the air...

All cities and places---and all people too---are far more than the measurable, quantifiable, historically and journalistically accurate and verifiable facts about them. 

Every place we go, every person we know, is an amalgam of the physically present present and the imagined and remembered whenever.

What’s “real” to us is made up of the real and the unreal. The people we know and love, or hate, or take for granted, we love, hate, or take for granted because of what we remember about them, other people they remind us of, events we associate with them, and the attendant emotions those memories, reminders, and associations they recall. It’s the same with places. It works the other way too. Our reactions to movies, stories, songs, memories, and imaginings, and our feelings and thinking about them are shaped by our experiences in the “real” world.

That’s why we have to discipline our thinking, why we have to be careful with whom and with what we compare our thoughts and against which we measure our judgments.

"Nothing is good or bad but thinking makes it so," says Hamlet. I’d edit that to "Nothing is but thinking makes it so, at least when seen from our personal certain point of view. 

Which reminds me of something else I like about Quichotte's description of New York City to Sancho: Obi-wan and Luke on the hill above Mos Eisley.

"You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy. We must be careful."

I feel that way about New York sometimes. It's part of its attraction.

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"Quichotte: A Novel" by Salman Rushdie is available in hardcover and for kindle at Amazon and as an audiobook from Audible.

I’m an Amazon associate and earn a (very small) commission for books etc. bought through the links on the blog.

New York City as Leon Trotsky found it

Mined from the notebooks, Monday, November 11, 2019. Posted Sunday night, November 24.

Filthy, jostling, and always on the make: The view down East 47th Street from Times Square, New York City in 1920, not long after Leon Trotsky lived there. That’s the Palace Theatre in the center of the photo and, its sign peeking out from the photo’s far left, is the Columbia Amusement Company Building, home of the Columbia Theatre, a famous burlesque house. Via Wikipedia.

New York City values, circa 1917:

The city was a jumbled mass of contradictions...It boasted the world’s tallest skyscraper---the four-year-old, 57 story Woolworth Building---and the rank tenements of the Lower East Side. Row upon row of chocolate-hued brownstones lined Manhattan’s cross streets. It was a natural place of business for both J.P. Morgan, the financier, and Max Eastman, the radical editor of The Masses. Southern blacks were settling in uptown Harlem even as the flow of Catholics from Italy and Jews from Russia had been closed off by the war. In Yorkville, on the Upper East Side, German-Americans read German-language newspapers and ate sauerbraten and strudel in German restaurants. Irish-Americans vied for political power’ Sicilian mobsters had started to amass a different kind of power. The Catskill Aqueduct, a huge public works project that would carry clean fresh water to the city from upstate, was months away from opening. Real estate developers were casting their eyes on the uncrowded upper burroughs.

New York was filthy, jostling, physically unencumbered by seemingly any controlling vision, and always on the make…

In the winter, skaters flocked to Central Park; in the summer, Coney Island drew its millions of visitors. New Yorkers had a choice of three baseball teams to root for, one in Brooklyn and two in Manhattan. Only the Giants were any good. People elsewhere in the country looked askance at New York’s social reforms, its immigrants, its high life, its power, its New York values. Across the nation Wall Street was loathed…

---from “March 1917: On the Brink of War and Revolution” by Will Englund (6)

The favor New York City does the nation

Posted Thursday afternoon, May 23, 2019.

One of the best opening sentences in the history of magazine journalism:

To keep the rest of the county happy, New York maintains an ever-normal granary of acrobats in hotels in cross-streets off Eighth Avenue.

---from "Handspring Hall" by A.J. Liebling.

A wonderful breakfast among a handful of miscellaneous wanderers

Posted Friday morning, March 23, 2018.

 

Image courtesy of WABC-TV.

Couple weeks ago I joked that Denis Johnson had sneaked a birthday card to me into his short story “The Largesse of the Sea Maiden”.  I could have added he sneaked a winter post card from New York City into it too, but I wouldn’t have been joking and he didn’t sneak it. The story includes a number of post cards from the City to the point that’s almost the reason to read the story. Almost. But it is a reason. A good reason.

The narrator is a California advertising executive nearing the end of his career returning to accept an award in the city where he’d started that career decades before:

It was I think around 1 a.m. Snow six inches deep had fallen. Park Avenue looked smooth and soft---not one vehicle had disturbed its surface. The city was almost completely stopped, its very few sounds muffled yet perfectly distinct from one another: a rumbling snow plow somewhere, a car’s horn, a man on another street shouting several fain syllables. I tried counting up the years since I’d seen snow. Eleven or twelve---Denver, and it had been exactly the same, exactly like this. One lone taxis glided up Park Avenue through the virgin white and I hailed it and asked the driver to find any restaurant open for business. I looked out the back window at the brilliant silences falling from the streetlamps, and our fresh black tracks disappearing into the infinite---the only proof of Park Avenue; I’m not sure how the cabbie kept to the road. He took me to a small diner off Union Square, where I had a wonderful breakfast among a handful of miscellaneous wanderers like myself, New Yorkers with their large, historic faces, every one of whom delivered her without an explanation, seemed invaluable. I paid and left and set out walking back toward midtown. I’d bought a pair of weatherproof dress shoes before I leaving San Diego, and I was glad. I looked for places where I was the first to walk and kicked at the powdery snow. A piano playing a Latin tune drew me through a doorway into an atmosphere of sadness: a dim tavern, a stale smell, the piano’s weary melody, and a single customer, an ample attractive woman with abundant blond hair. She wore an evening gown. A light shawl covered her shoulders. She seemed poised and self-possessed, though it was possible, also, that she was weeping.

---from the title story in the collection “The Largesse of the Sea Maiden” by Denis Johnson.

Roaming through the gloaming, New York City edition

Posted Tuesday morning, March 20, 2018.

“Winter dusk on the Battery.” Photo by Joseph Dolman. March 15, 2018. Copyrighted.

For more beautiful photos of New York City, visit Dolman’s webpage, CityEdition and follow him on Twitter.

Just another briefly successful species

Posted Saturday morning, February 24, 2018.

“A three-foot deep pile of zebra mussel shells about 50 yards long are piled up along the Lake Winnebago shoreline in April 2012 at Wayside Park just north of Fond du Lac. Scientists want to use an experimental chemical on an inland lake in Wisconsin in hopes of finding a way to stem the spread of the invasive mussel.” Photo by Mark Hoffman courtesy of the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel.

This is objectively, scientifically fascinating, until the end, when it gets subjectively, scientifically scary…

By luck or superior adaptation, a few species manage to escape their limits, at least for a while…Their populations grow at a terrific rate; they take over large areas, engulfing their environments as if no force opposed them. Then they hit a barrier. The drown in their own wastes. They starve from lack of food. Something figures out how to eat them.

When I lived in New York City, zebra mussels invaded the lower Hudson River, the western boundary of Manhattan island. An inch or two long with wriggly bands of brown and white, zebra mussels are capable of spitting out a million eggs a year apiece. The species originated in the Azov, Black, and Caspian Seas on Europe’s Russian- and Turkic-speaking periphery. Globalization has been good to it. Escaping their native waters, zebra mussels hitchhiked around the world in ship bilges and ballastwater. They have been recorded in Europe since the eighteenth century. The Hudson first saw them in 1991. Within a year zebra mussels constituted half the mass of living creatures in the river. In some places tens of thousands carpeted every square foot. They covered boat bottoms, blocked intake tubes, literally smothered other species of shellfish with a blanket of striped shell…

Bust followed boom; the population collapsed. In 2011, two decades after the mussel was first sighted in the Hudson, its survival rates were [according to one long-range study] “1% or less of those in the early years of the invasion…They [exhausted] their food supply, but they were also attacked by a local predator, the blue crab, which had learned to eat the newcomers…Fifteen years ago, when I went to a park at the edge of the Hudson, I couldn’t step into the river---the sharp edges of open mussel shells were too thick underfoot. Nowdays at the park the creatures are mostly gone. Children splash happily in the shallows. Crumbled shells lie in the sediment, testament to the mussel’s collapse.

Humans are no different [microbiologist Lynn Margulis believed]. The implication of evolutionary theory is that Homo sapiens is just one species among many, no different at base than [zebra mussels]. We and they are controlled by the same forces, produced by the same processes, subject to the same fate…Homo sapiens, in Margulis’s eyes was just another briefly successful species.

---from “The Wizard and the Prophet” by Charles C. Mann.

A rare night in June

Posted Monday evening, June 26, 2017.

Portraits of NewYork: Pearl Street in June. https://t.co/0l3I4XECLD @agreatbigcity #lowermanhattan #streetscene #streetphotography #nyclife pic.twitter.com/gw2ciGsWa4

— Joseph Dolman (@CityEdition) June 16, 2017

Gold Mine Cafe, the Bronx

Posted Wednesday evening, June 14, 2017.

Kingsbridge life: Under the No. 1 train at 231st & Broadway in the Bronx. https://t.co/0l3I4XECLD #newyorkcity #diners #trains #thebigapple pic.twitter.com/fNvwl3zBXk

— Joseph Dolman (@CityEdition) June 4, 2017

New York City Talk

Posted Thursday night, June 8, 2017. 

A couple of normal guys having a normal New York City type of conversation. Chris Christie and Donald Trump. Photo by Evan Vucci/AP. Courtesy AP via the New York Daily News.

"So I says to myself, I says, self, you better obstruct this justice."---DrLearnaLot on Twitter, illustrating how they talk in New York City.

Chris Christie, wildly unpopular Governor of New Jersey, Trump flunky, top level apologist, occasional gofer, and walking indictment waiting to happen says that what sure sounds like efforts by the president to obstruct justice in conversations with then FBI director James Comey were just so much talk. New York City talk. It's the way people normally converse in the president's hometown where folks just say what's on their minds and don’t really mean any harm or offense by it.

From the New York Daily News:

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie said that President Trump’s woes with the intelligence community stem from the fact that he prefers “normal, New York City conversation.”

The controversial Republican governor was asked why Trump’s behavior upset officials such as former FBI Director James Comey, set to testify on the Russian meddling investigation on Thursday.

“What people don't understand is that they elected an outsider president,” Christie told MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace Wednesday afternoon, adding that Trump didn’t have political experience beyond the local level.

Lots of people do understand that. It's one of the many reasons they didn't want him to be president.

“What you're seeing is a president who is now very publicly learning about the way people react to what he considers to be normal New York City conversation,” the governor continued.

Christie said this like he thinks it's a defense that gets Trump off the hook.

This is a type of New York City conversation Christie seems to mean: A small number of parties---often no more than a couple of people---who know each other and have done business together in the past, talking in a private office, or on the shop or factory or warehouse floor, or over lunch, or just walking down the street on their way to separate subway stops, give their word and shake hands in agreement over the delivery of specific goods and services for a certain amount of money---Twenty cases of widgets at fifty bucks a case by Tuesday, say---with neither one thinking about how their New York City talk might sound to outside parties because what's it to those outside parties, and neither worrying that what they're hashing out might be improper or illegal because it's just routine, the way they've always done business, the way everybody does business.

Might happen, conversation veers away from the business at hand and one of the parties says to the other, Maybe you can do me a favor? And that can lead to trouble. Usually doesn't. Usually things are fine. But that's usually because the favor involves only the few parties concerned. If it works out, it works out. If it doesn't, it doesn’t, but nobody's really hurt except the parties concerned. No major laws have been broken, and no one's the wiser. It's just the way things are done, and everybody knows that's how it is.

The thing is, all the deal-making and exchanging of favors, even when it's innocent is done for the personal advantage and gain of the parties concerned. Their mutual advantage is the hope and intent, but mutual is only a hopeful adjective, the intended noun phrase is personal advantage.

Presidents don't---can't---talk to the director of the FBI, not to mention United States Senators, foreign heads of state, and the American people the way New York real estate developers talk to contractors, potential investors, and employees. Presidents can’t make deals and exchange favors for their personal gain and advantage. They're not supposed to, at any rate. The lives and livelihoods of millions depend on the president making decisions without considering his personal advantage and gain. That's why there are laws governing his behavior in office and where laws are absent or the ones in place ambiguous there are protocols and traditions that constrain him.

Even if Donald Trump had been the most scrupulous and honest businessman in New York, if he'd always been on the up and up in all his normal New York City conversations, the fact that he'd thought he could continue having conversations like those once he got to Washington as President of the United States would have been a signal of his unfitness for the job, because only a solipsistic moron would think there's no difference between putting together a real estate deal and leading a nation of 300 million people living and working in a global economy with the fate of that nation and the world depending on your leadership.

Trump has never been on the up and up. His New York City conversations might have been normal, but in a different way, as in normally crooked if not outright normally criminal. You shouldn't need to have had political experience to know that the way a shady real estate developer talks to a mark he's trying to bilk in another of his real estate scams isn't the way a president talks to one of the nation's top law enforcement officials. But Trump is a solipsistic moron. He sees no difference between being president and being a shady real estate developer. Trump thought that as president he could just go on being Donald Trump.

This was nuts.

Like I said.

But his response to finding out that it's not the case is even nuttier. His response has been to be even more himself.

Getting back to what Christie said…

“What you're seeing is a president who is now very publicly learning about the way people react to what he considers to be normal New York City conversation…”

Learning?

Donald Trump has never shown a capacity to learn anything, let alone learn from his mistakes beyond “Next time find a more gullible mark, lead with a better lie, and cut your losses sooner and run away faster.” But if he's learned anything new and different from this, all it's done is made him mad and more determined to do whatever he wants to do.

Christie may think he's excused the president. What he's done is call attention to why he never should have been elected  in the first place and why he needs to be removed from office in less than a New York minute.

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To read all of Christopher Brennan’s story at the Daily News, follow the link to Chris Christie says Trump exchanges with Comey 'normal, New York conversation'

Welcome to Union Square

Posted Wednesday night, April 19, 2017.

Union Square nights: A friendly oasis. https://t.co/0l3I4XECLD @agreatbigcity #streetscene @UnionSquareNY #streetphotography #newyorkcity pic.twitter.com/q8Mkfxtkjq

— Joseph Dolman (@CityEdition) April 20, 2017

How to be a columnist like Jimmy Breslin, according to Jimmy Breslin

Revised Friday evening to include more quotes from Breslin, because what was I thinking leaving all that good stuff out?

Mined from the notebooks, Wednesday night, March 22, 2017.

He was no good, and he could prove it. Jimmy Breslin in 1970. Photo by Michael Evans, courtesy of the New York Times.

Breslin’s gone, as you probably heard.

I didn’t get to know of Breslin as a columnist. To me he was a book writer. Can’t recall for certain what was the first book of his I read. You’d think, Mets fan that I am, it’d have been Can’t Anybody Here Play This Game? But I have no memory of it. Just about every book I bought or was given when I was a post-Hardy Boy reading kid lives on the bookshelf at the Old Mannion Homestead, but that’s not among them. Maybe I read Pop Mannion’s copy, if he had one. If he did, it’s lost. But if it wasn’t Can’t Anybody Here Play This Game?, it was surely The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight.

I still have that one. I remember feeling very grown up when I bought it with my allowance money. I also remember Mom Mannion’s frown of disapproval when she saw what book instead of the latest Allistair MacLean I’d bought. I don’t know how it was on her radar that she knew it was something I probably shouldn’t be reading at my age. Come to think of it, it was probably the movie she was aware of and she’d read a disapproving review in The Evangelist, our diocese’s weekly newspaper. I don’t know why she didn’t make me hand the book over.  I’m guessing the reason she didn’t was  the Catholic magazine she subscribed to, St Anthony’s Messenger, which I remember as being a little more hip than The Evangelist, was less censorious.

Breslin would have appreciated Mom’s quandary.

The next of his books I read was How the Good Guys Finally Won which I remember as being one of the best books on Watergate going. Charles Pierce remembers it that way too:

Pierce, getting ready to quote Breslin:

And his Watergate book, How The Good Guys Finally Won, an account of the downfall of Richard Nixon as seen from the office of then-Speaker Tip O'Neill, is one of the most underrated studies of those events, and certainly the most entertaining, but with gleaming edge to it when it was needed.

Consider, for example, Breslin's description of the hiring of John Doar, a hero of the Kennedy Justice Department when civil rights workers were being killed in the South, as lead counsel for the House Judiciary Committee's investigation of Nixon's crimes. Breslin was sharp enough to see what Doar's hiring would mean. You can hear the bell tolling away in the background.

Breslin, quoted:

And so John Doar came to Washington. Melvin Laird assured people in the White House that Doar was a fine choice. "He will not find anything if there is nothing to find," Laird said. "We couldn't ask for anything more." Which was a proper determination, providing that Richard Nixon was more or less innocent, as Laird at the time believed. The one who knew differently, Nixon, said nothing. He should have. For John Doar believes in everything Richard Nixon does not. And John Doar is a fearsome opponent.

Breslin as a columnist I got to know later, like I said. But again it was through a book. The collection called The World According to Breslin. I did read some of his work in its natural environment, newsprint. Our local paper ran his columns occasionally. This started after Son of Sam made Breslin more famous or infamous by association. I remember one he wrote in the summer of 1979 particularly, and I remember it best for a single sentence. Skylab’s orbit was deteriorating and it was coming back to earth, in pieces as it broke up and burned up re-entering the atmosphere 945 years ahead of schedule. People down below began to wonder where those pieces would land and worried it might be on top of them. Breslin hoped so. Well, he hoped pieces would come down on New York City and make hash out of certain people. He made a list he thought the world---the part of it where he lived and worked, at any rate--- would be better off without. He put himself at the top of the list. He felt he deserved to be hash.

“I’m no good and I can prove it,” he wrote.

That line has been cracking me up for almost thirty-eight years. I use it seriously about myself. Most people don’t believe me, if you can believe it. But it’s a fact. In fact, I’m thinking of making it the new tagline for the blog.

Breslin’s list includes people who were notorious in the day but I’m guessing only the names of Billy Martin and Truman Capote resonate today. If Skylab had waited just a couple more years to begin its descent and Breslin made his list sometime in the 1980s there’s a name would've made the list that resonates today, although I wonder if at the time Breslin would have foreseen lasting fame for the bearer of it. Actually, first time Breslin mentioned the guy he didn't use his name. He referred to him as "a young builder named Junior with a Big Ego."

Breslin despised Donald Trump from the get-go.

At any rate, I was thinking I should re-read one of Breslin’s books in his honor. Not The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight. Table Money. It’s another novel. A fine one. About Irish working class types in New York City. It’s brutal. It’s beautiful. It’s down in a box in the basement and I don’t know which box and don’t feel like searching for it at the moment and beside, I should read something new, new to me, something of his I haven’t read. That’s what I decided the other night upon hearing the news he was gone. I put The Good Rat on reserve at the library. It arrived today. I started it tonight. It’s about the trial of a pair of cops who'd been moonlighting as hitmen for the mob. Breslin wasn't looking forward to covering it. He didn't think there'd be much in the way of material for a column. He didn't foresee a book coming out of it.

I was hesitant about this trail from the start. These criminals held their secret meetings at a bar next to a golf course. If you look at how mobsters live today, you would say middle class and be right. The late, great Queens defense attorney Klein the Lawyer once said on behalf of some beast, "How could he commit a crime? He lives in a house." Middle class drowns excitement wherever you run into it. And the idea of cops who use their badges to murder depresses me. It it dreary and charmless and lacks finesse. It promises no opportunity to marvel, much less laugh.

Then he heard the chief witness for the prosecution, the good rat of the title, begin his testimony.

Then the trial starts and I am pulled out of my gloom. An unknown name on the prosecution witness list, an old drug peddler, a lifelong fence, steals the show and turns the proceeding into something that thrills: the autobiography of Burton Kaplan, criminal. Right away I think, Fuck these cops. I have found my book.

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At this time we point out that Kaplan required no help from mobsters in any of his business ventures, legal or not. He made millions selling marijuana, for example, and virtually none of it went to to gangsters. He was a big earner for the Lucchese Mafia family in many businesses, though, and everybody was afraid of bothering him. Some associates believed he could have them killed. Mafia danger is the illusion of Mafia danger. Also, mob families couldn't move in on him because they didn't know how to do what he was doing. He was in crime as a business, not an underworld dodge played on street corners and alleys. Gangsters can't do what he did because it requires effort and thought. Kaplan ran legal garment businesses that made great money and let implied threats do the heavy lifting. Gangsters can manage private sanitation pickups or union organizing with violence, but Burt's schemes required actual work.

____________________________________

...Now, after doing so much evil, he is at last committing what he believes is an atrocious, unforgivable act.

Throughout the trial Kaplan refers to himself by various street names for an informer. He is asked what he means when he says this.

"A stool pigeon is a rat. Just like me."

Burt Kaplan's voice looses eagles that swoop and scream and slap against walls. He carried his loyalty to the Mafia almost to the end, until he believed there were leopards about to pounce. At the last stroke of midnight he turned in his claws.

Judd Burstein, one of Kaplan's lawyers, says, "He is probably the last true believer in the code of the Mafia, the omerta." He is about to become what he despises.

The trial took place in 2006, but Breslin reaches back in time from time to time to reminisce about tough guys he covered in his youth. In the process, he writes about the earliest days of his own career as a columnist, which began when he was assigned to cover the sentencing of a mobbed up union boss named Tony “The Pro” Provenzano. Maybe you heard of him. If you did, it might be because Breslin turned him into words other people have been unconsciously quoting and paraphrasing ever since, thinking they’re just saying what things are when they’re really relating the world according to Breslin:

Because I came from Queens, which nobody in the history of New York newspapers ever wrote about or even saw, I was reputed to be streetwise and tough. Which was untrue. I didn’t fight. I chased stories, not beatings. But knew where to find people who were somewhat less than our civic best, and so editors clung to the illusion. At the old Herald Tribune, they asked me one Thursday night if I could cover the sentencing the next day of Tony Provenzano in federal court in Newark. He was the Teamsters’ second to Jimmy Hoffa and had been convicted of extortion. They really wanted to get Tony Pro for pushing somebody down an elevator shaft, which he sure did. The reporter who’d been covering the trial had written about Tony’s two wives, who in unison called for him to be injured.

Breslin went. A number of things about Tony the Pro riveted his attention, one of which was his pinky ring. Provenzano was proud of it and liked to show it off while pretending he was doing anything else but.

I wrote about it all, including the ring. At the newspaper this was regarded as exceptional. Reporters had written about tough guys before, but not about their jewelry. There was a sudden new respect for me. I knew exactly how to take it. I announced I was great. Big JB Number One. It happened you needed no extra ability to do such a story. It was all there, like an order in a store being placed on the counter in front of you. A moron can pick it up and go home. Just write down what they do and say. But I declared that it took tremendous courage and talent to do the story. I had to contend with murderers. Why shouldn’t I boast? I wasn’t out of some Harvard or Princeton that gets people jobs on their school name. I attended John Adams High School, Ozone Park, Queens, the full five years. Was I nervous about the mobsters? You want to be afraid of something, be afraid of being broke.I remember John O’Hara wrote me a letter. I made sure everyone was looking when I threw it on the floor. “I don’t need him.” Garson Kanin also wrote. “Who is he?” I flipped that one away too. I then went out into the night for a thousand drinks. I went everywhere. I walked into the Copa like a heavyweight contender…

Later, when David Berkowitz sent me a letter that became famous, I was asked why the dangerous fruitcake wrote to me.

I said, “What are you, crazy? Who else would he write to?”

Exactly, the point. Who else? Who else could tell the dangerous fruitcake’s story? Who else could tell any New Yorker’s story? Who else would you want to?

_______________________________________________________________

Pierce’s appreciation of Breslin includes appreciation for another of Breslin’s novels, World Without End, Amen. Story of a disgraced New York cop who travels to Ireland to forget and winds up drawn into the Troubles by his estranged father, a gunman for the IRA, a fantasy set in an alternative universe because, as you know in our universe, only Muslims can be terrorists.

Pierce’s post is a dual eulogy. He writes in praise of Chuck Berry too. Not Chuck Berry the guitarist. Not Chuck Berry the pioneer rock and roller. Chuck Berry the wordsmith, the near-poet Pierce credits along with Breslin with re-inventing American English. To use a Berry-ism, motorvate on over to Esquire to read the whole piece.

The Subway at Twilight

Posted Wednesday evening, March 22, 2017.

The subway at twilight: 7 train rounds the bend into Queensboro Plaza this evening. https://t.co/0l3I4XECLD @agreatbigcity #springequinox pic.twitter.com/hYSXuYzmvc

— Joseph Dolman (@CityEdition) March 21, 2017

Winter is going

Posted Monday night, March 20, 2017.

Esplanade evenings: First day of spring. https://t.co/0l3I4XECLD @agreatbigcity #newyork #cityscapes #nyclife #sunsets #bigapple #skylines pic.twitter.com/Lu8BQaUWzw

— Joseph Dolman (@CityEdition) March 21, 2017

Ghost sign

Posted Friday morning, March 10, 2011.

No such thing as the past: Ghost sign in the village for real estate agent Emil Talamini, who died in 1970. https://t.co/0l3I4XECLD #nyclife pic.twitter.com/6x9PEyKGWP

— Joseph Dolman (@CityEdition) March 2, 2017

"Phil Sheridan standing guard over the Stonewall Inn"

Posted Sunday morning, February 12, 2017.

Our longtime comrade in blogging, one of the smartiest of the smartypantses at Lawyers, Guns & Money, Professor Erik Loomis has been in New York City over the weekend and tweeted this post card from lower Manhattan. Saturday afternoon around three, February 11, 2017. Copyright Erik Loomis 2017.

“The Free Republic of the Upper West Side”

Posted Wednesday night, February 8, 2017.

79th & Broadway: The Free Republic of the Upper West Side. https://t.co/0l3I4XECLD #NYC #StreetScene @agreatbigcity #streetphotography #UWS pic.twitter.com/wrC1xAVFhx

— Joseph Dolman (@CityEdition) February 9, 2017

"Harbingers of Spring"

Posted Wednesday evening, February 8, 2017.

On the #waterfront: Harbingers of spring. https://t.co/0l3I4XECLD #sunset #HudsonRiver #nyc @agreatbigcity #bigapple #nyclife #seeyourcity pic.twitter.com/twvzyVabnn

— Joseph Dolman (@CityEdition) February 6, 2017

Remembering Ol' Blues Eyes at the Paramount when he was Young Blue Eyes

Posted Monday night, January 2, 2017.

Paramount Theater building in Times Square, where Frank Sinatra sang in 1942, caused a riot and became somebody. https://t.co/0l3I4XECLD pic.twitter.com/S0v3HMv3sH

— Joseph Dolman (@CityEdition) January 2, 2017