Friday, September 16, 2011
Post-Grunge, Seattle Rocks On
Nirvana at Beehive Records in Seattle on Sept. 16, 1991, for the release of “Nevermind.” More Photos »
by William Yardley and Sean Patrick Farrell
Kurt Cobain spoke of his band’s breakthrough single at a concert here that turned out to be one of Nirvana’s final performances in the United States.
“This song made Seattle the most livable city in America,” Mr. Cobain told the audience.
Then he ripped into the opening chords of “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” an anthem of indifference polished just enough to give it popular appeal.
Now, 20 years after Nirvana soared from obscurity to superstardom and the Seattle scene was anointed as rock relevant, a new exhibition, a film and a tribute concert planned for the anniversary make it clear how different things really are here now.
Seattle has become even more livable since Mr. Cobain’s dry declaration, way back in January 1994. The city still rocks, and its rockers still ache, but more gently now. Flannel? Sure. Screaming? There is less of it from this new stage.
Once mostly boom, bust and Boeing, Seattle rebuilt itself on high technology, global commerce and well-educated newcomers making waterproof peace with the weather. The Pacific Northwest, long a mysterious corner of the country, stepped out of isolation and into cliché: coffee, computers and Kurt, the voice and face of grunge.
“The times for Seattle to be sort of a misty forgotten land are over,” said Jacob McMurray, the curator of “Nirvana: Taking Punk to the Masses,” the exhibition at the Experience Music Project here.
The anniversary events are canonizing — and continuing to commercialize — the moment when, some people say, alternative music fully broke through to the mainstream. Yet many of the dark clubs where Nirvana and bands like Soundgarden, Alice in Chains, Pearl Jam, Mudhoney and the Melvins built followings are gone.
Read more:
Thursday, September 15, 2011
Cell Phone Etiquette for Morons
by Beth Mann
So you have a cell phone? Okay, well good for you. I do too! Fancy, isn't it? But remember, there are some rules to remember when using that spiffy telecommunication device of yours in public:
1. You're not special because you have a cell phone. Small children and homeless people have cell phones. There are probably pets out there with cellular devices. Remember that when you're walking down the street barking orders like you're Donald Trump and thinking people are impressed. We're not.
2. Using a cell phone in a theater is the height of rudeness. Don't even dare convince yourself otherwise just because other people are doing it. People also pick their nose and urinate in their pants in public. Wanna follow that lead too?
That glow from your cellphone is extremely distracting to those around you. God forbid you simply try to be present and enjoy the show instead of likely recording crappy video that no one will watch.Read more:
3. Using your cell phone excessively in the following places is also rude, rude, rude:
- Public transportation
- Restaurants
- Libraries (Come on...are you serious?)
- Church (See above.)
- In a grocery store line (You're too close to me. I can't run from your inanity.)
- The beach (Is anything sacred? Can you just be in nature for ten damn minutes without a phone glued to your face?)
- A date
4. Annoying cell phone rings showcase your shallow personality. Just go with something simple. No one needs to know about your love of Rhianna's Umbrella, you know what I mean? Keep that a secret. And don't let it ring incessantly if you're not prepared to answer it. Turn the damn thing off and spare us Toby Keith or whatever weird shit you're into.
- A museum
Top Chef, Old Master
by Michelle Legro
They called him “fat boy,” this seventeen-year old apprentice in the studio of Florentine painter Verrocchio who would receive care packages from his step-father, a pastry chef. The bastard son of a Florentine notary and a lady of Vinci, the boy’s doting step-father gave him a taste for marzipans and sugars from a very young age. The apprentice would receive the packages and devour them so quickly—crapulando, it was called, or guzzling—that the master felt the need to punish him, instructing the boy to paint an angel in the corner of a baptism of Christ, a mediocre painting which hangs in the Uffizi because it includes the first work of Leonardo da Vinci.
After three years as an apprentice, twenty-year old Leonardo took a job as a cook at the Tavern of the Three Snails near the Ponte Vecchio, working during the day on the few commissions his master sent his way and slinging polenta in the evenings. Polenta was the restaurant’s signature dish, a tasteless hash of meats and corn porridge. The other cooks at the Three Snails cared little about the quality of the food they served, and when in the spring of 1473, a poisoning sickened and killed the majority of the cooking staff of the tavern, Leonardo was put in charge of the kitchen. He changed the menu completely, serving up delicate portions of carved polenta arranged beautifully on the plate. However, like most tavern clientele, the patrons preferred their meals in huge messy portions. Upset with the change in management, they ran Leonardo out of a job.
Much like a modern struggling artist, Leonardo da Vinci was in his daily life a line cook, tavern keeper, and chef-for-hire. “My painting and my sculpture will stand comparison with that of any other artist,” he wrote in a humble introduction to Ludovico Sforza, the future Duke of Milan, by way of a job application. “I am supreme at telling riddles and tying knots. And I make cakes that are without compare.”
Sforza took him on neither as a cook, painter, or sculptor, but instead as a lute player and after-dinner entertainer. Leonardo attempted to show his lord his new inventions for fortifications, catapults, and ladders, but Sforza paid little attention until the lute-player fashioned his inventions out of marzipan and jelly. Sforza charged the young man with refurbishing his kitchen, a task which would consume the life of Leonardo and the entire Sforza court.
Five hundred years before Modernist Cuisine’s exhaustive look at molecular gastronomy, The Kitchen Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci envisioned a culinary world as studio and laboratory, where food was to be prepared efficiently, beautifully, and ingeniously. Unfortunately, Italian food of the late fifteenth century had less to do with the luxurious feats of Ancient Rome and more to do with the rustic tastes of the Goths, whose dishes included meats and birds for those who could afford it, and an endless parade of porridge and gruel for those who could not. Leonardo was horrified by much of the food that was served to him, both at court and at home, and he included in his notebooks a running list of dishes that he hated, but that his own servant insisted on serving him: jellied goat, hemp bread, white mosquito pudding, inedible turnips, and eel balls—which he notes, “this dish if eaten often can cause madness.”
The notebooks, which include a history of Leonardo’s tenure as chef at the Sforza court, is primarily a collection of recipes (cabbage jam, snail soup), wayward thoughts (“Would porridge balls in gold-leaf attract My Lord’s attention?”), dining etiquette (“On the Unseemly Behaviors at My Lord’s Table”), household tips, (“On Ridding your Kitchens of Pestilential Flies”), and household inventions (“The Machines I Have Yet to Design for my Kitchen”).
Read more:
What if the Secret to Success Is Failure?
[ed. An interesting examination of school curriculums built around character development, as well as academic achievement.]
by Paul Tough
Cohen and Fierst told me that they also see many Riverdale parents who, while pushing their children to excel, also inadvertently shield them from exactly the kind of experience that can lead to character growth. As Fierst put it: “Our kids don’t put up with a lot of suffering. They don’t have a threshold for it. They’re protected against it quite a bit. And when they do get uncomfortable, we hear from their parents. We try to talk to parents about having to sort of make it O.K. for there to be challenge, because that’s where learning happens.”
Cohen said that in the middle school, “if a kid is a C student, and their parents think that they’re all-A’s, we do get a lot of pushback: ‘What are you talking about? This is a great paper!’ We have parents calling in and saying, for their kids, ‘Can’t you just give them two more days on this paper?’ Overindulging kids, with the intention of giving them everything and being loving, but at the expense of their character — that’s huge in our population. I think that’s one of the biggest problems we have at Riverdale.”
This is a problem, of course, for all parents, not just affluent ones. It is a central paradox of contemporary parenting, in fact: we have an acute, almost biological impulse to provide for our children, to give them everything they want and need, to protect them from dangers and discomforts both large and small. And yet we all know — on some level, at least — that what kids need more than anything is a little hardship: some challenge, some deprivation that they can overcome, even if just to prove to themselves that they can. As a parent, you struggle with these thorny questions every day, and if you make the right call even half the time, you’re lucky. But it’s one thing to acknowledge this dilemma in the privacy of your own home; it’s quite another to have it addressed in public, at a school where you send your kids at great expense.
Read more:
by Paul Tough
Cohen and Fierst told me that they also see many Riverdale parents who, while pushing their children to excel, also inadvertently shield them from exactly the kind of experience that can lead to character growth. As Fierst put it: “Our kids don’t put up with a lot of suffering. They don’t have a threshold for it. They’re protected against it quite a bit. And when they do get uncomfortable, we hear from their parents. We try to talk to parents about having to sort of make it O.K. for there to be challenge, because that’s where learning happens.”
Cohen said that in the middle school, “if a kid is a C student, and their parents think that they’re all-A’s, we do get a lot of pushback: ‘What are you talking about? This is a great paper!’ We have parents calling in and saying, for their kids, ‘Can’t you just give them two more days on this paper?’ Overindulging kids, with the intention of giving them everything and being loving, but at the expense of their character — that’s huge in our population. I think that’s one of the biggest problems we have at Riverdale.” This is a problem, of course, for all parents, not just affluent ones. It is a central paradox of contemporary parenting, in fact: we have an acute, almost biological impulse to provide for our children, to give them everything they want and need, to protect them from dangers and discomforts both large and small. And yet we all know — on some level, at least — that what kids need more than anything is a little hardship: some challenge, some deprivation that they can overcome, even if just to prove to themselves that they can. As a parent, you struggle with these thorny questions every day, and if you make the right call even half the time, you’re lucky. But it’s one thing to acknowledge this dilemma in the privacy of your own home; it’s quite another to have it addressed in public, at a school where you send your kids at great expense.
Read more:
My Superpower Is Being Alone Forever
by Joe Berkowitz and Joanna Neborsky
It’s pretty hard to reverse engineer a meet-cute. These things either happen or they don’t. If you were really serious about it, you could probably arrange for, say, an errant shopping cart to go charging off in someone's direction and then you could rush up behind it saying, "Sorry, sorry!" and that’s how you'd meet, but then you’d have to live with yourself for the next 50 years or so, knowing that, basically, you're Elmer Fudd. Sometimes when a radiant single lady comes floating along the sidewalk like a dream, I think about stopping her. But I never would. It just seems as intrusive as a catcall—or an errant shopping cart. I might as well be passing out handbills for a shady-sounding sample sale. So instead I say nothing and then she’s gone. We won’t be accidental seatmates at a dinner party later. It’s a missed non-connection, a moment less significant than if we’d been on line together at Whole Foods buying the same artisanal sherbet. How-we-met stories are overrated, anyway.
Read more:
Little Kids Rock
by David Bornstein
With school underway, I asked my eight-year-old son this week if he had any interest in learning guitar. He said he’d prefer the piano. I was pleased, but hesitant. I had my own stint with after-school piano lessons at age eight — plinking out notes from classical pieces that were foreign to me. My progress was agonizingly slow and I gave up within months.
Music education hasn’t changed fundamentally since the 1970s. Students are still taught to read notation so they can recite compositions that they would never listen to on their MP3 players or play with friends. The four “streams” in music education — orchestra, chorus, marching band and jazz band — have remained constant for four decades, while a third generation is growing up listening to rock and pop music. And my experience as an eight-year-old is all too common. Many children quit before making progress with an instrument, then regret it as adults. Others play violin or trumpet for the school orchestra or band, then drop the instrument after graduating from high school.
This is a loss for all. Playing music enriches life. That’s why so many adults wish that they could play an instrument, particularly guitar or piano, which are ideally suited for playing with others. The question is: Why do schools teach music in a way that turns off so many young people rather than igniting their imagination? Adolescents and teenagers are crazy about popular music. At a time when educators are desperate to engage students and improve school cultures, can we do a better job of harnessing the power of music to get kids excited about school?
The experience of an organization called Little Kids Rock suggests the answer is a resounding yes — provided we change the way music is taught. Little Kids Rock has helped revitalize music programs in over a thousand public schools and served 150,000 children, most of them from low-income families. The organization has distributed 30,000 free instruments, primarily guitars, and trained 1,500 teachers to run music classes in which students quickly experience the joys of playing their favorite songs, performing in bands, and composing their own music. Along the way, the organization is working to institute a fifth stream in American music education: popular music — or what it calls “contemporary band.”
“Students truly experience just about immediate success in Little Kids Rock,” explained Melanie Faulkner, supervisor of elementary music for Hillsborough County Public Schools, in Tampa, Fla., where 14,000 students in 83 schools are served by the program. “The children feel like they’re right there making real music. And the success spills over into other areas of school.”
The key to Little Kids Rock is that it teaches children to play music the way many musicians learn to play it — not by notation, but by listening, imitation and meaningful experimentation. “The knowledge you need to get started playing rock music is very limited,” explains Dave Wish, the founder of Little Kids Rock. “In high school, my friend Paul taught me a couple of chords and, boom, my life was changed forever.”
“Making music is as much a physical act as it is a cognitive act,” he adds. “We don’t begin with theory when we want to teach a child to play tee-ball. We just bring the kid up to the tee, give them a bat, and let them swing.”
On the first day of class, Little Kids Rock teachers place guitars in the hands of their students and get them practicing chords that will enable them to play thousands of songs. (Many simple lessons are freely available online here.) The kids decide what songs they want to learn and the class is off and running. Their progress is remarkable. Within a year, eight- and nine-year-olds are playing electric guitar, bass guitar, drums and keyboards, and giving concerts, even performing their own songs. And the effect is predictable: the children can’t get enough of it.
Read more:
With school underway, I asked my eight-year-old son this week if he had any interest in learning guitar. He said he’d prefer the piano. I was pleased, but hesitant. I had my own stint with after-school piano lessons at age eight — plinking out notes from classical pieces that were foreign to me. My progress was agonizingly slow and I gave up within months.
Music education hasn’t changed fundamentally since the 1970s. Students are still taught to read notation so they can recite compositions that they would never listen to on their MP3 players or play with friends. The four “streams” in music education — orchestra, chorus, marching band and jazz band — have remained constant for four decades, while a third generation is growing up listening to rock and pop music. And my experience as an eight-year-old is all too common. Many children quit before making progress with an instrument, then regret it as adults. Others play violin or trumpet for the school orchestra or band, then drop the instrument after graduating from high school.This is a loss for all. Playing music enriches life. That’s why so many adults wish that they could play an instrument, particularly guitar or piano, which are ideally suited for playing with others. The question is: Why do schools teach music in a way that turns off so many young people rather than igniting their imagination? Adolescents and teenagers are crazy about popular music. At a time when educators are desperate to engage students and improve school cultures, can we do a better job of harnessing the power of music to get kids excited about school?
The experience of an organization called Little Kids Rock suggests the answer is a resounding yes — provided we change the way music is taught. Little Kids Rock has helped revitalize music programs in over a thousand public schools and served 150,000 children, most of them from low-income families. The organization has distributed 30,000 free instruments, primarily guitars, and trained 1,500 teachers to run music classes in which students quickly experience the joys of playing their favorite songs, performing in bands, and composing their own music. Along the way, the organization is working to institute a fifth stream in American music education: popular music — or what it calls “contemporary band.”
“Students truly experience just about immediate success in Little Kids Rock,” explained Melanie Faulkner, supervisor of elementary music for Hillsborough County Public Schools, in Tampa, Fla., where 14,000 students in 83 schools are served by the program. “The children feel like they’re right there making real music. And the success spills over into other areas of school.”
The key to Little Kids Rock is that it teaches children to play music the way many musicians learn to play it — not by notation, but by listening, imitation and meaningful experimentation. “The knowledge you need to get started playing rock music is very limited,” explains Dave Wish, the founder of Little Kids Rock. “In high school, my friend Paul taught me a couple of chords and, boom, my life was changed forever.”
“Making music is as much a physical act as it is a cognitive act,” he adds. “We don’t begin with theory when we want to teach a child to play tee-ball. We just bring the kid up to the tee, give them a bat, and let them swing.”
On the first day of class, Little Kids Rock teachers place guitars in the hands of their students and get them practicing chords that will enable them to play thousands of songs. (Many simple lessons are freely available online here.) The kids decide what songs they want to learn and the class is off and running. Their progress is remarkable. Within a year, eight- and nine-year-olds are playing electric guitar, bass guitar, drums and keyboards, and giving concerts, even performing their own songs. And the effect is predictable: the children can’t get enough of it.
Read more:
Wednesday, September 14, 2011
The Opposite of
The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference.
The opposite of art is not ugliness, it's indifference.
The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference.
And the opposite of life is not death, it's indifference.
- Elie Wiesel
The opposite of art is not ugliness, it's indifference.
The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference.
And the opposite of life is not death, it's indifference.
- Elie Wiesel
The Shame of College Sports
by Taylor Branch
“I’m not hiding,” Sonny Vaccaro told a closed hearing at the Willard Hotel in Washington, D.C., in 2001. “We want to put our materials on the bodies of your athletes, and the best way to do that is buy your school. Or buy your coach.”Vaccaro’s audience, the members of the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics, bristled. These were eminent reformers—among them the president of the National Collegiate Athletic Association, two former heads of the U.S. Olympic Committee, and several university presidents and chancellors. The Knight Foundation, a nonprofit that takes an interest in college athletics as part of its concern with civic life, had tasked them with saving college sports from runaway commercialism as embodied by the likes of Vaccaro, who, since signing his pioneering shoe contract with Michael Jordan in 1984, had built sponsorship empires successively at Nike, Adidas, and Reebok. Not all the members could hide their scorn for the “sneaker pimp” of schoolyard hustle, who boasted of writing checks for millions to everybody in higher education.
“Why,” asked Bryce Jordan, the president emeritus of Penn State, “should a university be an advertising medium for your industry?”
Vaccaro did not blink. “They shouldn’t, sir,” he replied. “You sold your souls, and you’re going to continue selling them. You can be very moral and righteous in asking me that question, sir,” Vaccaro added with irrepressible good cheer, “but there’s not one of you in this room that’s going to turn down any of our money. You’re going to take it. I can only offer it.”
William Friday, a former president of North Carolina’s university system, still winces at the memory. “Boy, the silence that fell in that room,” he recalled recently. “I never will forget it.” Friday, who founded and co-chaired two of the three Knight Foundation sports initiatives over the past 20 years, called Vaccaro “the worst of all” the witnesses ever to come before the panel.
But what Vaccaro said in 2001 was true then, and it’s true now: corporations offer money so they can profit from the glory of college athletes, and the universities grab it. In 2010, despite the faltering economy, a single college athletic league, the football-crazed Southeastern Conference (SEC), became the first to crack the billion-dollar barrier in athletic receipts. The Big Ten pursued closely at $905 million. That money comes from a combination of ticket sales, concession sales, merchandise, licensing fees, and other sources—but the great bulk of it comes from television contracts.
Educators are in thrall to their athletic departments because of these television riches and because they respect the political furies that can burst from a locker room. “There’s fear,” Friday told me when I visited him on the University of North Carolina campus in Chapel Hill last fall. As we spoke, two giant construction cranes towered nearby over the university’s Kenan Stadium, working on the latest $77 million renovation. (The University of Michigan spent almost four times that much to expand its Big House.) Friday insisted that for the networks, paying huge sums to universities was a bargain. “We do every little thing for them,” he said. “We furnish the theater, the actors, the lights, the music, and the audience for a drama measured neatly in time slots. They bring the camera and turn it on.” Friday, a weathered idealist at 91, laments the control universities have ceded in pursuit of this money. If television wants to broadcast football from here on a Thursday night, he said, “we shut down the university at 3 o’clock to accommodate the crowds.” He longed for a campus identity more centered in an academic mission.
The United States is the only country in the world that hosts big-time sports at institutions of higher learning. This should not, in and of itself, be controversial. College athletics are rooted in the classical ideal of Mens sana in corpore sano—a sound mind in a sound body—and who would argue with that? College sports are deeply inscribed in the culture of our nation. Half a million young men and women play competitive intercollegiate sports each year. Millions of spectators flock into football stadiums each Saturday in the fall, and tens of millions more watch on television. The March Madness basketball tournament each spring has become a major national event, with upwards of 80 million watching it on television and talking about the games around the office water cooler. ESPN has spawned ESPNU, a channel dedicated to college sports, and Fox Sports and other cable outlets are developing channels exclusively to cover sports from specific regions or divisions.
With so many people paying for tickets and watching on television, college sports has become Very Big Business. According to various reports, the football teams at Texas, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, and Penn State—to name just a few big-revenue football schools—each earn between $40 million and $80 million in profits a year, even after paying coaches multimillion-dollar salaries. When you combine so much money with such high, almost tribal, stakes—football boosters are famously rabid in their zeal to have their alma mater win—corruption is likely to follow.
Read more:
I Survived Target's Missoni Disaster
by DG Strong
Like approximately 356 of my Facebook friends, I spent Tuesday morning driving from Target to Target looking for Missoni. Missoni! Missoni! Are you sick of hearing the word yet? In the last day, various media outlets have been going mad about Target's Missoni disaster. When the megastore chain announced it would be selling the beloved brand's clothes, fans went crazy -- a little too crazy. Buyers crashed the Target website, and there were reports of stampedes, and assorted other frenzies. And I should know, because I witnessed Missoni Madness firsthand.I'm not even a particular fan of the Missoni aesthetic, but Target has been running the groovy spy-woman commercial for it so incessantly that I'd become practically hypnotized into thinking I really needed some new bath towels and a sweater (autumn is almost here!). I'd be helping the economy, after all -- God Bless America, blah blah blah. Also: Target sells those movie-theater-boxes of candy and I was completely out of Lemonheads.
I spent Monday night looking at the Missoni-for-Target look book and had settled on the items I wanted. No, needed. And I had what I considered an inspired battle plan for Nashville's various Target locations sketched out on a Post-it note: hit the more "Country" Target first for the menswear (figuring farmers in bargello knit cardigans was probably an unusual combination) and then, if necessary, hit the "Soccer Mom" Target for the bath towels (figuring moms would be busy in school drop-off lanes offloading the Cassidys and Calebs of America). I wasn't even going to bother with the "Fancy Urban" Target (the one with the Starbucks inside); every skinny jeans'ed hipster girl within a 15-mile radius of the place would be in line there for a melamine bowl and a tote bag.
So I set my alarm for 7 a.m. and by 8 o'clock on the nose, I was the sole car in the parking lot of Country Target. Could it be that my plan was unfolding perfectly? Would I just waltz in, get exactly two black-and-white Famiglia Wavy bath towels, two black-and-white Famiglia Wavy hand towels, and one black-and-white men's cardigan? Alas, no. Country Target had apparently missed the memo about the upcoming flame-stitch feeding frenzy and not all of the stuff was out yet. A few bowls here and there, a scarf. No towels. No menswear. Worrisome.
Read more:
Mr. Rodgers’s Neighborhood
by Nile Rodgers
It took me a long time to realize that the things my parents did were not exactly normal. I was about 7 years old, and it was the tail end of the 1950s, when it started to dawn on me that they were . . . well, let’s just say they were different. For instance: my friends and I got shots when we went to the doctor and we hated them. But my parents stabbed themselves with needles almost every day, and seemed to enjoy it. Weird.
Most of my friends’ parents sounded like the adults in school or on TV when they talked. People understood them. My parents, on the other hand, had their own language, laced with a flowery slang that I picked up the same way the Puerto Rican kids could speak English at school and Spanish at home with their abuelas.
And then there was the matter of how they talked. My parents and their friends spoke this exotic language very slowly. There were other odd things. For instance, they often slept standing up, and this group narcolepsy could strike right in the middle of the most dynamic conversation. Someone would start a sentence: “Those ofay cats bopping out on the stoop are blowin’ like Birrr . . . ” and suddenly the words would begin to come out slower. And. Slower. Soon they wouldn’t be speaking at all. Eventually our living room would be filled with black and white hipsters suspended in time and space, while I ran through the petrified forest of their legs. My favorite game was waiting to see if the ashes from their cigarettes would ever drop. Somehow they almost never did.
I can still remember the day when I finally realized that there was a name for this unusual lifestyle. My parents were junkies! And their slow-motion thing was called nodding out.
Oh well — it was nice to be able to name the thing. This was my life, and as far as I was concerned, there was nothing uncommon or uncomfortable about it at all. In fact, for a while, at least, it was a carefree Shangri-La.
My mother, Beverly, was a beautiful, brilliant black girl whose family descended from southern sharecroppers. She got pregnant with me when she was 13, the very first time she had sex. Bobby, my stepfather, was white, Jewish and central-casting handsome. They were an unusual progressive pair: they smoked pipes, dressed impeccably and read Playboy for the articles. Even in beat-generation Greenwich Village, New York City, circa 1959, interracial couples weren’t exactly commonplace.
Mom’s maiden name was Goodman. Technically, it was Gooden, but her father, Fredrick, appropriated the name from a huge Goodman’s Egg Noodles billboard that hung outside of the Lincoln Tunnel on the New Jersey side. The family story is that Fredrick had been forced to flee the cotton fields of Georgia after he used a tree branch to beat a white man he’d caught raping his sister. Grandpa Fredrick (never one to let a good story go to waste) told me that he saw the sign just after his car exited the tunnel. He thought the name would help people up north think of him as a “good” man. In the end, I guess it sort of worked. Twenty long years later, after the Woolworth C.E.O. he chauffeured passed away, Grandpa got the Cadillac as thanks for his service.
By the time Beverly Goodman was 12, she was already what they used to call a fast girl. She was also hip. She knew things that most civilians didn’t. She listened to Nina (Simone) and Monk (Thelonious) and TB (Tony Bennett) and Ahmad Jamal on a regular basis, and was so down she called them by a single name (except Jamal, maybe out of respect for the fact that he’d gone through the trouble of changing his name from Freddy Jones). She spoke with confidence, just a peg down from arrogance, which only big-city intellectuals could get away with, even if they were only 12. She had art, literature and music all around her.
Read more:
It took me a long time to realize that the things my parents did were not exactly normal. I was about 7 years old, and it was the tail end of the 1950s, when it started to dawn on me that they were . . . well, let’s just say they were different. For instance: my friends and I got shots when we went to the doctor and we hated them. But my parents stabbed themselves with needles almost every day, and seemed to enjoy it. Weird.
Most of my friends’ parents sounded like the adults in school or on TV when they talked. People understood them. My parents, on the other hand, had their own language, laced with a flowery slang that I picked up the same way the Puerto Rican kids could speak English at school and Spanish at home with their abuelas.And then there was the matter of how they talked. My parents and their friends spoke this exotic language very slowly. There were other odd things. For instance, they often slept standing up, and this group narcolepsy could strike right in the middle of the most dynamic conversation. Someone would start a sentence: “Those ofay cats bopping out on the stoop are blowin’ like Birrr . . . ” and suddenly the words would begin to come out slower. And. Slower. Soon they wouldn’t be speaking at all. Eventually our living room would be filled with black and white hipsters suspended in time and space, while I ran through the petrified forest of their legs. My favorite game was waiting to see if the ashes from their cigarettes would ever drop. Somehow they almost never did.
I can still remember the day when I finally realized that there was a name for this unusual lifestyle. My parents were junkies! And their slow-motion thing was called nodding out.
Oh well — it was nice to be able to name the thing. This was my life, and as far as I was concerned, there was nothing uncommon or uncomfortable about it at all. In fact, for a while, at least, it was a carefree Shangri-La.
My mother, Beverly, was a beautiful, brilliant black girl whose family descended from southern sharecroppers. She got pregnant with me when she was 13, the very first time she had sex. Bobby, my stepfather, was white, Jewish and central-casting handsome. They were an unusual progressive pair: they smoked pipes, dressed impeccably and read Playboy for the articles. Even in beat-generation Greenwich Village, New York City, circa 1959, interracial couples weren’t exactly commonplace.
Mom’s maiden name was Goodman. Technically, it was Gooden, but her father, Fredrick, appropriated the name from a huge Goodman’s Egg Noodles billboard that hung outside of the Lincoln Tunnel on the New Jersey side. The family story is that Fredrick had been forced to flee the cotton fields of Georgia after he used a tree branch to beat a white man he’d caught raping his sister. Grandpa Fredrick (never one to let a good story go to waste) told me that he saw the sign just after his car exited the tunnel. He thought the name would help people up north think of him as a “good” man. In the end, I guess it sort of worked. Twenty long years later, after the Woolworth C.E.O. he chauffeured passed away, Grandpa got the Cadillac as thanks for his service.
By the time Beverly Goodman was 12, she was already what they used to call a fast girl. She was also hip. She knew things that most civilians didn’t. She listened to Nina (Simone) and Monk (Thelonious) and TB (Tony Bennett) and Ahmad Jamal on a regular basis, and was so down she called them by a single name (except Jamal, maybe out of respect for the fact that he’d gone through the trouble of changing his name from Freddy Jones). She spoke with confidence, just a peg down from arrogance, which only big-city intellectuals could get away with, even if they were only 12. She had art, literature and music all around her.
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