Thursday's Place: Chelsea Hotel

It was, in its prime in 1885, the tallest structure in New York City.  When I first moved to the neighborhood, just a block away from the Hotel that resides on West 23rd Street, I thought that I had never heard of it.  After a very short time, and with the aid of local amateur historians, I realized that the Chelsea Hotel was known to anyone familiar with 20th century words and music; or even notorious deaths.

Perhaps we should get the lurid stuff out of the way first.

In October of 1978, Sid Vicious, a resident of the Chelsea Hotel who was a member of the punk rock group, The Sex Pistols, and who is generally regarded as the worst bass player ever to have appeared on a stage, woke from a heroin-induced coma to find his girlfriend, Nancy Spungen, stabbed to death in the bathroom.  It was a great mystery who had done this to her.  [No, it really wasn't. - ed.] Not long afterwards, after subsequent arrests and a couple of suicide attempts, Vicious killed himself.  Thus, the Chelsea Hotel was lodged in the cultural consciousness of my generation.

For the generation before mine, it was the suicide of Charles R. Jackson, the author of the harrowing novel The Lost Weekend, that marked the hotel's infamy.  Others have died there, as well, some infamous, some notorious.

However, as it was a residential hotel, it is especially known for those who have lived there and, importantly, have created there; whether in the arts, literature, music, fashion, or film.  If ever there were a location that served as the nexus for the overlapping counter-culture in the mid-century, it is within the ancient edifice, complete with wrought-iron, faux balconies.

Here's a brief list:

Mark Twain
O. Henry
Dylan Thomas [He died there, too; after drinking way too much at the White Horse Tavern]
Arthur C. Clarke [He wrote the novel, 2001: A Space Odyssey there]
Sam Shepard
Arthur Miller
Tennessee Williams
Jack Kerouac
Brendan Behan
Thomas Wolfe
Valerie Solanas [Apparently, she was some kind of writer; chiefly, she is known for attempting to assassinate Andy Warhol]
William S. Burroughs
Allen Ginsberg
Gregory Corso
Lilie Langtry
Eliot Gould,
Leonard Cohen,
Janis Joplin,
Tom Waits,
Patti Smith,
Jim Morrison,
Iggy Pop,
Jeff Beck,
Dee Dee Ramone,
Cher,
Édith Piaf,
Joni Mitchell,
Bob Dylan,
Robbie Robertson,
Alice Cooper,
Bette Midler,
and
Jimi Hendrix

So, imagine how much of our cultural treasure has been written, composed, painted, or filmed within that building.  There are, or were, bronze plaques by the entrance dedicated to the poets Dylan Thomas and Brendan Behan, both of whom were residents.  As it's been some years since I was last in that neighborhood, and as the hotel is on the National Register of Historic Places, I'm sure others have also been mounted.

There is much to be read online about the Chelsea and its habitues; since Robert Mapplethorpe, the controversial photographer, lived there, as well, there are ample, artistic photos also to be found that illustrate the creative life in that splendid, sometimes luxurious, sometimes seedy, building.

Some stray pictures:

Nice, vintage entrance that I hope survives its recent renovation

In my day, the early 1980's, it was at the height of its seedy chic, as evidenced by this room

Although Dylan, wearing what must have been his great aunt's hat, found it a good place to play sock drawer basketball

A lobby like no other

See what I mean?

Leonard Cohen has a song, one of his best known, about a brief time he spent there with Janis Joplin, but it contains a lewd lyric and, hey, this is a family weblog.  It's called Chelsea Hotel No. 2, if you wish to hear it.

Here, instead, is a family friendly song by Joni Mitchell about awakening at the hotel:

Thursday's Place: Duke's

It was a moment during a surf trip with my oldest surf buddy.  We've known each other a long time.  We were in seminary together.  We were hospital chaplains together.  We were chaplains in two Episcopal Church schools at the same time.  I was his best man, he was mine.  Every year, depending on personal schedules and income, we surf either Orange County, California or Ocean County, New Jersey, with occasional side trips to Narragansett or Long Island's south shore.

The bar at Duke's

We have, over the past 37 years, come to develop a particular manner of communication, often based on pre-verbal grunts.  On this day, we were slightly more eloquent during an early dinner at Duke's, a restaurant named for the "father" of surfing and well-situated at the foot of the pier in Huntington Beach, California.  I was about to devour a huli huli chicken dish when he started.

The fabled huli huli

"You see that grandmother over there?", he asked, pointing his chin towards the restaurant's front door.

"Which one?"  It was a Tuesday in the early evening and nearly every patron other than ourselves would have satisfied that description.

"The short one."  Again, not really narrowing it down.

"The woman in the tropical print?"

"No, the shorter one."

"In the Polo stuff?"  It was true, the woman was head to toe in silhouetted ponies and helmeted riders.

"No, the even shorter one."

"On the left?"  If so, she was short.  Under five feet.

"Yes", he said.

"I see her."

"That's her."  There was a revelatory tone to his identification.  I was puzzled.  I was trying to remember what diminutive, older women we had been talking about at some point over the decades that had now entered his consciousness.

"Is it?  Her who?"

"You know."

"I don't."  I didn't.

"From the thing...way back.  You know.  The movies; the TV show."

"I Dream of Jeannie?"

"What? Barbara Eden is here?"  He jerked around in his chair, monetarily forgetting the grandmother in question.  Barbara Eden has a certain hold on the imaginations of men of my generation.

"I don't know.  Who are you talking about?"

"The surfer girl.  What's her name?  Gadget."

"Gidget?"

"Yes.  That's Gidget.  The real Gidget."

"No."

"Yep."

"Is she the hostess who seated us?"

"Yep. She's the hostess of aloha."

"Wow.  Wait, the what?"

It's true.  Kathy Zuckerman, nee Kohner, is still the Tuesday night "Hostess of Aloha" at Duke's.  [No one really knows what that means, so just go with it.] Her father, a Hollywood scriptwriter, who was entertained by her stories of days spent on the beach in Malibu in her fifteenth summer, wrote them all down, with some fictional flair, in a slight volume released the same year as was Jack Kerouac's On the Road.  Gidget, the Little Girl with Big Ideas became so popular that it spawned an entertainment industry, helped to define a "lifestyle", and made its protagonist the stereotype of all women surfers.

Mrs. Zuckerman today

Other than the location, its view, and the huli huli chicken, that's about all that is special about Duke's, one of a chain of similarly-named restaurants near beaches in Waikiki, La Jolla, Lahaina, and, of course, Malibu.  It has little local history, and its cache is the product of market studies and focus groups.

Nice view, though

However, despite prices that make Midwesterners balk, Duke's is a pleasant place for apres surf, as it sits on a beach that enables one to watch some of the best amateur surfers in the world, even if they are simply members of the local high school's surf team.  Plus, you know, it has Gidget, and that is worth something to those of us from the mid-20th century who still, in our dotage, shred as many waves as we can whenever we can.

Lee Konitz

As long as there are people trying to play music in a sincere way, there will be some jazz.

He was a good looking guy, a little inebriated but carrying it well in his athletic frame.  He was around thirty, had Gallic features, and was wearing chinos with a slightly worse-for-wear cotton dress shirt.  He wasn't wearing a tie, none of the young men in this place did, and he hadn't shaved for a day.  Still, given he was in the company of some rather strange, and also inebriated, men, he stood out.

Mainly it was because he was standing in front of the saxophonist who was on the stage and looking at him like he had just seen the face of God and lived.

As the dumb-struck man was a writer and in the midst of a colossal block that had prevented him from progressing on a novel that was, at that point, rather prosaic in its narrative style, he had gone with friends to Birdland, the famous jazz club, to forget about sentences, paragraphs, dialogue, and character development for a night of music, wine, mad dancing and wildness.  While not specifically looking for inspiration, the writer found it while listening to this week's person and, in so doing, would make literary history.

Lee Konitz is a jazz saxophonist; he plays the soprano, alto, and tenor saxes, although generally prefers the alto when he still performs, now at the age of 87.  While there are other musicians who have tragic childhood tales of daunting, even terrifying, experiences, Konitz was born in Chicago in 1927 to middle-class Austro/Russian emigres and raised to respect learning and labor.  Again, unlike a surprising number of other musicians, he could read music and transpose in his head, and was trained in composition and music theory.  He enjoyed the music of the big bands that he would hear on the radio, wanting nothing other than to compose and play with such organizations.  Because his favorite was Benny Goodman, he requested the gift of a clarinet from his parents.  Shortly afterwards, he would switch to the other woodwind and prove so adept that he was able to improvise even before he learned to match the fingering to the printed notes.

At the immediate conclusion of the Second World War, the teenage Konitz found himself performing with a variety of standard jazz bands, although he was becoming very attracted to the newness and freedom of the jumpier, improvisation-based jazz known as bebop that was being pioneered by many of the younger musicians, especially Charlie "Bird" Parker.  By 1947, he was playing compositions by the jazz great Gerry Mulligan and arrangements by Gil Evans.  After proving his chops with this formidable group, Konitz was asked by Miles Davis to sit in with his combo and attempt something radically new. 

From 1949 to 1950, Konitz, along with Mulligan, worked with Davis to record the songs that would eventually be included in 1957's Birth of the Cool, one of those albums that is always on the list of essentials.  As jazz, like sermons, is a form of proclamation, its product is best honed when played live before an audience, so both musician and listener form a moment of artistic Gestalt.  So, Davis, Konitz and their compatriots made the rounds of jazz clubs, becoming popular especially at New York's Village Vanguard, Blue Note, and, of course, Birdland.

Which brings us to that moment of wonder for the novelist and the saxophonist, where the interplay of horn and woodwinds brought him his moment of epiphany.

The novelist was Jack Kerouac and the manuscript which had been so vexing him would one day be entitled On The Road.  Of that moment in October of 1951, Kerouac would later write, "The tune they were playing was All the Things You Are . . . they slowed it down and dragged behind it at half tempo dinosaur proportions-changed the placing of the note in the middle of the harmony to an outer more precarious position where also its sense of not belonging was enhanced by the general atonality produced with everyone exteriorizing the tune's harmony."

Well, it meant something to him, anyway.

While Miles Davis, Gerry Mulligan, Charlie Parker, Art Pepper, Dave Brubeck, Charles Mingus, and Ornette Coleman are all better-known, Konitz played with and outlasted them all; he was playing at the Blue Note just a couple of years ago.  Beyond his influence on Kerouac, Konitz also influenced three generations of musicians with his original compositions and imaginative takes on American standards.  In fact, he is now so well-regarded that a couple of young saxophonists recently told me that they no longer wish to play like Parker, but like Lee.  In fact, what they said to me was, "Charlie who?"

Here, enjoy some more, won't you?

Thursday's Place: The Dune Shacks of Provincetown

Edward Hopper's rendition of the Cape shacks

There is something about the extreme points on the eastern shore of the United States that draws the liminal.  Save for the weather and seasonal climate, there is a lot in common between, say, Key West, Florida and Provincetown, Massachusetts.  These are communities that attract artists, writers, low-lifes [that may have been redundant], highly original entrepreneurs, and unusual businesses; the general vibe of creativity and celebration is found everywhere from the high-colored exteriors of the restored homes to the latest culinary creation on the plate in front of you.

Duval Street, Key West

Commercial Street, Provincetown

Drug and alcohol use seems to be rather freely engaged, too.  I suppose that follows from both places having once been popular with pirates.

As the artistic class, represented by Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, and Jimmy Buffet [well, why not?] found creative encouragement in free and easy Key West, Provincetown was no different.  Even though it is hampered by having distinct seasons, punctuated by a sometimes brutal winter, it still became a haven for those who needed the relaxed solitude [and cheap alcohol] of a liminal community .

While there is nothing quite like the quaint re-purposed fishing shanties of Key West, Provincetown may have something much better, especially for those who found that their art and its creation was more akin to a monastic endeavor than a ceaseless bacchanal.

Since that area of the Massachusetts coast can be treacherous and historically remote, shacks were built in the 19th century on the sand bluffs along the Provincetown and Truro border to house the members of an early incarnation of the U.S. Coast Guard and to serve as shelters for the survivors of shipwrecks.  So common were such wrecks that, in 1865, when Henry David Thoreau was hiking the dune trails of Cape Cod, he noted the many wizened men who would comb the beaches looking for the flotsam from recent wrecks, warily regarding an obvious city dandy like Walden Pond's resident.

While the shacks eventually lost their original purpose, as a series of lighthouses would be built to warn mariners of the coastline, they continued to be re-built season after season, often with driftwood found along the beaches, and by the 1920's were offered for sale or lease to those interested in a rustic retreat along the coastline.  One of the first to purchase a dune shack was Eugene O'Neill, arguably America's greatest playwright, as a place for solitude and concentration.  It was here that he would write "Anna Christie" and "The Hairy Ape".

As O'Neill was respected and connected in the creative world, others would hear of the shacks and begin their pilgrimage, to greater or lesser [mostly lesser] effect, to the dunes over the next decades. Even though the shacks had no electricity or running water and the heat, as even summer evenings on the Cape can get cool, was supplied by meager fireplaces, poets, writers, and artists such as e.e. cummings, Jack Kerouac, Norman Mailer, and Jackson Pollock, would find their way to those shacks in that liminal zone on the tip of Cape Cod and, with the pilgrimage, some inspiration.

To get a flavor of shack life in the 1920's, Henry Beston's The Outermost House is still in print and contains one of the more important meditations on waves and water in the chapter entitled "The Headlong Wave".  It's worth reading for anyone who enjoys that part of the coastline, or who happens to be an elderly surfer.

Nineteen of the shacks still stand, all but one now owned by the U.S. government [naturally].  One may enter a lottery, however, to earn a chance to reside in one of the shacks for a period of time, and there is a program that encourages their continued use by artists.

Only one tour company owns the rights to carry tourists through the shack zone, which is why it's a bit expensive and offers some questionable historical facts, but it's worth it if one is interested in this side show in American arts.  Certainly, any visit to the outer reaches of Cape Cod should include at least a passing glance at those humble structures that represent so much of Eastern maritime history and the lively arts of the American Century.

Thursday's Place: Caffe Trieste

It's not a very prepossessing place, although the places featured on Thursdays rarely are.  That lack of pretension is probably what made or makes them popular, as they attract a crowd that doesn't want the surroundings to distract from their own affectations.  Also, they tended to be cheap, like those whom they attracted.  Since I primarily write of places that were popular with the creative class, that's no surprise.

In the 1950's, the North Beach neighborhood in San Francisco was an enclave of Italian immigrants filled with culturally specific restaurants and groceries familiar to anyone who has ever grown up in an ethnic neighborhood.  As with a dynamic that we have noted before with the Coventry Road section of Cleveland, North Beach began to attract a more bohemian crowd who found the relaxed atmosphere and low rents to be desirable.

This was aided somewhat when the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti opened a small bookstore in the neighborhood where one could find inventory not to be found in other stores.  As the genre of literature he promoted became dominant, and as he also opened a small publishing press for those who could not find support in the mainstream industry, the City Lights Bookstore became the magnet for those who would transform the Italian neighborhood to that of the counter-culture.

Looking every bit the Frisco poet

In the midst of it all, opened in 1956, was the Caffe Trieste.  Its owner, Giovanni Giotta, missed the real espresso and cappuccino of his hometown in Italy and opened the only place outside of New York's Little Italy where one could find the real thing.

[A note for those younger than I: In the days before ubiquitous, boutique coffee shops, espresso was basically mud in a cup and cappuccino was mud topped by a blast from a can of Reddi-Wip.  No, I'm not kidding.]

As both City Lights and Caffe Trieste opened around the same time, a trip to North Beach could include both on the itinerary and the coffeehouse offered the perfect place to read some volume purchased from Ferlinghetti.  Shortly afterwards, it would become a perfect place to write something to be published by Ferlinghetti.

Hence, one could order a proper espresso in the Caffe and be surrounded by habitues such as Alan Watts, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Richard Brautigan, Bob Kaufman, Gregory Corso, Michael McClure, and Kenneth Rexroth.  Lawrence Ferlinghetti, now 100, still frequents that large, copper cappuccino steamer.  Paul Kantner, one of the founders of Jefferson Airplane and creator of the "San Francisco sound" in rock music, made it his home away from home; and Francis Ford Coppola wrote the draft of the screenplay for The Godfather in a quiet corner.  Well, not so quiet when he was there, as he wrote with a portable, manual typewriter.

Giotti, commonly addressed as "Papa Gianni", would preside over his small, corner business for sixty years, surrendering his mortality at the age of 96 in 2016.  In addition to brewing the first, and still authentic, cup of cappuccino on the West Coast, Giotti was also an amateur musician who would share that talent with anyone who would come through his door.

From his obituary:

By the early 1970s, more than a dozen coffee shops dotted North Beach, but none was as musical as Caffe Trieste. Gianni and his son Gianfranco began performing for the cafe on Thursday mornings in 1970. The concerts grew so popular they were switched to Saturday afternoons.Mr. Giotta, who had studied opera in Trieste in his early 20s, would be joined onstage by Gianfranco, a semiprofessional singer, and Mr. Giotta’s wife, Ida; his other son, Fabio, would sing and accompany on accordion. The family would perform solos, duets and full choruses, primarily from Italian and French operas. Favorites were “Chella Lla,” “Figaro,” “Katerine” and “Funiculi, Funicula.” Professional singers visiting San Francisco began to stop in.

While Giotta would open other branches of Caffe Trieste in other areas of northern California as his success grew, the original was the only one that maintained that neighborhood cache and, as it turned out, the only one to survive his family's legal battles over his will.  After a few months of concern that this literary and artistic landmark would close, it was saved when cooler heads prevailed.

While North Beach is no longer the artistic cauldron it once was, and San Francisco currently is working through some traveler-unfriendly realities, one may still enjoy an honest cup, gaze upon the collected photographs of those who made the culture of the American Century, and marvel at what it is to be in the right place and the right time and reap the rewards of hospitable service to one's neighbors.

Thursday's Place: Cornelia Street Cafe

The Cornelia Street Cafe

Greenwich Village, NYC

The quintessential place of verse and song, along with free espresso refills guaranteed to keep you going for 36 hours while on a very tight budget.

The Cafe was on my original lists of places to include on these Thursday musings, written as they are as a writing workout and also to mark places that have been significant in literature, history, music, or surfing.  [Those are the things that interest me, along with Christianity and Christendom so, if you're reading this, that's what you're stuck with.]

It was at the bottom of the list, though, as I wanted to get to the places that no longer exist or are in danger of disappearing for good.  No chance of that happening to the Cornelia Street Cafe, of course, as it has become a fixture in Greenwich Village and the place that started a hundred careers in the arts.  Yeah, about that.

In December I learned that the Cafe was closing, another victim of NYC's absurd rents.  Let's face it, keeping the graft flowing to pols and unions is expensive, and the Cafe's rent of $33,000 a month was a bit ridiculous.  One has to admire the dedication of its owners for keeping it going and even expanding it for over four decades.  When I read of its closing, I felt yet another potion of my youth surrender.  Is that too melodramatic?  Again, you chose to read this.

During my New York years, I knew times of plenty and times when my budget forced me to choose between eating or buying a subway token.  I always lived in Manhattan and, save for a period as a hospital chaplain in Queens, always worked there, too.  Through all of those changes in attire, attitude, hair style, and artistic taste, the Cornelia Street Cafe was always there and always affordable.

The first time I was there was to hear a local poet recite his works and have what turned out to be my first real cappuccino.  That was all I could have as the Cafe's offerings came from a sole cappuccino machine and a toaster oven.  Those brioche did smell good, though, but, at $1.50, they were out of my price range [that was the equivalent of two subway tokens].

The last time I was there it had expanded to the space next door and the space next door to that.  It had a bar, two kitchens, and a full menu.  There was still poetry, though, and music of all sorts; now with a green room for the performers.  As the independent voice in poetry and song became more popular, the cafe appeared to become more prosperous, but still fulfilling its original mission of supporting the local creative community.

From their self-written history:

Singer-songwriter Suzanne Vega started out here, as did Eve Ensler’s Vagina Monologues; senator and presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy and attorney-activist William Kunstler have read their poetry; Dr. Oliver Sacks continues to read his prose. Nobel Laureate Roald Hoffmann presents a monthly Science Series; members of Monty Python & the Royal Shakespeare Company intermittently perform. Cornelia Street now offers some 700 shows a year, two a night, ranging from science to songwriting, from Russian poetry to Latin jazz, from theatre to cabaret. In 1980 Stash Records released the award-winning album, Cornelia Street: The Songwriters Exchange, a collection of songs born at the café.

Through the years, my favorite part of time spent at the Cafe was listening to people of whom you had never heard.  It didn't matter, as they all brought some verve to the place.  Some were better than others, but all of them were serious and were trying to do something original and entertaining.  That's increasingly rare, isn't it?

I left New York in 1986, when there were still a number of the locales that had produced what the rest of the 20th and early 21st century would appreciate in terms of art, verse, music, and literature.  One could lean against the same wall by the same sign under which Jack Kerouac had been photographed, listen to The Ramones and Blondie perform live, sit in front of Allan Ginsburg as he recited his latest, hear Joe Walsh give an impromptu performance in the Sam Ash music store when he was looking for a new axe, and wander down Bleeker Street and read the signs in front of establishments that had served as the settings and references in a dozen dozen songs and books.

Now, Greenwich Village looks like an outdoor shopping mall with a disturbing sameness to the street vibe.  Ah, well, such it is to live in the stream of history.  It seems, with the closing of the Cafe, like I'm trying to listen to the Peter Gunn theme without the bass line.

More may read here and here.

B. Traven

The creative person should have no other biography than his works.

There is a place of ephemeral legend in Mexico, known in Spanish as "El Camino", that doesn't exist on any map, save those written in the hearts of those who yearn.  It refers to the experience of outsiders who come to the southern states to find...well, either something or nothing, depending on their desire, and become lost within the quest.  It has claimed many people, men and women, through the years.  There have been explorers, of course, who have worked their way through the jungles and beaches of Mexico; there have been poets, artists, and any number of musicians.  J. Frank Dobie, Ambrose Bierce, William Cullen Bryant, William Burroughs, Jack London, Katherine Anne Porter, Edna Ferber, Jack Kerouac, Hart Crane, and Ken Kesey offhand come to mind as just a few of the gringos and gringas who have, one way or another, hiked the mythical El Camino.  Personally, I've known a number of surfers who have looked for oblivion in the Meso-American waves.

During the 1920's and 30's a series of riveting novels, set mostly in Mexico and mostly about the spiritual experience of El Camino, had been best-sellers in Europe.  Their author, known only as B. Traven, had remained aloof from any sort of publicity.  He lived somewhere in Mexico, no one really knew where, and wrote in German, with his publisher translating his works into the various languages of his continental audience.

In 1946, the filmmaker John Huston began his walk of El Camino.  Having spent several years as the ne'er do well son of a recognizable and bankable stage and movie actor, Huston had been a boxer, drinker, flunky, go-fer, writer, and general dogsbody in the film industry until, to quote from Steely Dan, "he crossed a diamond with a pearl" and wound up writing the screenplay for and directing "The Maltese Falcon", a critical and box office hit that earned serious money for his studio, made a leading man out of Humphrey Bogart, and created the entire genre of film noir.

The only problem with being a success in a world of transient fame was that one was only popular until the next big movie came along.  This is why Huston was sitting in a humid café in Mexico City waiting to meet a man who did not exist.

Having lived and traveled freely in Europe and familiar with the popularity of Traven's work, Huston was particularly interested in Traven's 1927 novel, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, especially as it was the first and only Traven book translated and marketed in the United States at that time. That the novel was an American best-seller and a terrific story convinced Huston that it should be translated to the screen.  Before he could begin to do so, however, the whole world was distracted with World War II.

When Huston returned to civilian life after directing documentaries for the War Department, he again returned to his Sierra Madre project.  His first item of business was receiving the author's permission to use his novel, something that was trickier than it ordinarily would have been since no one was really sure of Traven's whereabouts or true identity.  Still, Huston was not one to be daunted and he began a near Quixotic quest to contact the author and receive his permission.

So it was that Huston found himself waiting for Traven to join him for a drink or three.  However, instead of Traven, a man introducing himself as Hal Croves turned up, explaining that he was serving as Traven's representative and had the power of attorney necessary to complete their contractual negotiations.  While Huston initially suspected the Croves was Traven, he was willing to indulge him in order to complete the film.  The meeting went well and the two met again in Acupulco to finalize the deal and appoint Croves as a "technical adviser" to the film.  In 1947 the filming began on location in Mexico with Croves a familiar personality on the set.  Once filming was completed, Hal Croves disappeared.

Tim Holt, Humphrey Bogart, and Walter Huston; and maybe Traven in the tent, who knows?

Of course, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, starring Humphrey Bogart and Huston's father, Walter, was a huge success; nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture of 1948 and earning Oscars for Best Screenplay Adaptation and Best Director for John Huston.  With the popularity of the film and the reignited interest in the novels of Traven,  reporters became interested in the elusive author.

However, the only connection to Traven was Hal Croves, who had not been seen for over a year.  A particularly intrepid reporter for a Mexican newspaper began a search for Croves and, instead, found a fellow in Acapulco named Traven Torsvan, a recluse called "El Gringo" by his neighbors.  His interest piqued, the reporter discovered through immigration paperwork that Torsvan was born in Chicago and had come to Mexico in 1930, eventually establishing residency.  Using questionable techniques, mainly bribery and petty theft, the reporter established that El Gringo was receiving royalty checks in the name of "B. Traven" along with correspondence from other authors.  When confronted by reporters, Torsvan, like Croves, disappeared.

A decade later, after interest in Traven and his true identity had cooled, the mysterious Hal Croves, in absentia from the human race since 1947, reappeared to serve as Traven's official representative in negotiation with European filmmakers interested in emulating Huston's success with Treasure.  He would even attend film festivals in Europe, only to be peppered by reporters with questions about his true identity.

Croves would die in 1969.  His widow, who had also been his secretary, would then reveal the true story of B. Traven.  Senora Croves told the press that her late husband had, in fact, been a German anarchist named Ret Marut [aka Otto Feige].  In Germany, her husband published a successful novel, The Death Ship, and edited an anti-government magazine for which he was eventually arrested and sentenced to death.  He managed to escape to Mexico, altering his identity to that of an American émigré.

During his years south of the border, in addition to writing over a dozen novels and short story anthologies, Feige/Marut/Torsvan/Croves/Traven also managed to work as a photographer for some expeditions into the Mexican jungles [from which the above photo, maybe of Traven, comes], as a translator and guide, and as an inn-keeper.  It was a busy life for him, but since he may have been five or so people, perhaps not that unusual.

There is now an entire industry devoted to claiming to know Traven's real identity and disparaging other theories.  It's rather entertaining but largely meaningless.  As Traven noted, for a true artist it's about the work, not the biography.  His story is yet another tale of those, like his characters, who travel El Camino in search of something that they never entirely find and leave behind a life more full of questions than answers.

B. Traven's novels are now all available in English and most are still in print; some are even available in e-book format.



Traven.  Maybe.

Some Recent, and Obtuse, Jack Kerouac References

If you're a reporter journalist, when in doubt, Kerouac out.

Have to write an obit of a perfectly ordinary local musician?  Kerouac that thang:
Asa Brebner, at 65; guitarist/songwriter in Boston bands and alone

He was known for an astonishing range of music, from roots-rock and punk to R&B and gospel, along with an edgy, Jack Kerouac-meets-Charles Bukowski* wit that “did not suffer fools gladly,” said longtime bandmate John Pfister.

Have to write a review of a tedious one-woman show that is, for some reason, supported by your publisher?  It's Kerouac time:

Work is a four-letter word in Claudia Shear’s 'Blown Sideways Through Life'

Under Pam Wiley’s snappy direction, Carrie McQueen delivers a spirited, R-rated, syncopated and rapid-fire performance. Shear’s jazzy language owes a debt to Jack Kerouac and other beat writers.

Have to write...something...about this year's [so far] most peculiar contender for the Democratic nomination?  There is only one way to go, and that's Kerouac:

Ladies, we need to talk about Beto

Beto spent the better part of the winter musing on his Medium account about the vicissitudes of life like a discount Jack Kerouac, only to emerge from his period " adrift" to announce that he's in fact running for vice president.

Rubin: Beto O'Rourke: Savior or slacker?

"Jack Kerouac-style, he roams around, jobless (does he not need a job?) to find himself and figure out if he wants to lead the free world," Nia-Malika Henderson wrote at CNN in January, during what she called Beto O'Rourke's "excellent adventure." "This is a luxury no woman or even minority in politics could ever have.'"

Beto and the White House

There was hope among Democratic partisans that after Mr. O’Rourke ended his impersonation of Jack Kerouac he would challenge John Cornyn, the other Republican senator, next year. But he dreams bigger than that. Instead, as he revealed last week, he would try to turn an unimpressive three terms as an obscure congressman into a run for the presidency. Mr. O’Rourke’s rollout was accompanied by a profile in Vanity Fair, replete with an Annie Leibowitz photographic album.

 *I found myself wondering what was trying to be said about the deceased musician, as both Kerouac and Bukowski were notorious drunks.  It's not really a flattering comparison.

Thursday's Place: The White Horse Tavern

There are places, some merely of the imagination, that have taken hold in history and fiction as they represent an era, a time, or a shared cultural experience that has since faded, but is certainly mourned. These places are pockets of nostalgia for what once was or could have been. Most of those to be featured, if they existed at all, are no longer with us, replaced by parking lots, or “big box” stores, or ugly houses. However, if you’re with the right people, or in the right place, to evoke them is to evoke an era that may be long gone, but permitted some creativity and joy.

The White Horse Tavern
New York City

This week's "place" is seminal in the promotion of poetry, both the kind found in high school textbooks and the kind found in court dockets, and of the folk music craze of the 1960's that produced much of the influential music of that generation and beyond.  Bonus: It's still open for business.

From something published earlier in The Coracle:

In the late 1950's, Richard Farina, a Cuban-Irish college drop-out born in Brooklyn in 1937, showed up in Greenwich Village with a dulcimer and a slight repertoire of folk songs such as people had never heard before. Turns out he was also adept at writing, having had short stories and poems published while still a student at Cornell. Being of an attractive and rakish nature, he hung out at many of the favored bars of the creative class, particularly the White Horse Tavern [where Dylan Thomas drank himself to death; Norman Mailer drank and punched people; Jim Morrison of The Doors drank too much, Jack Kerouac drank such a prodigious amount that he was banned from the property; and Delmore Schwartz, come to think of it, drank himself to death, too].

While I would encourage the reader to follow the link to the story of Richard Farina, as he is an interesting and virtually unknown personality in the development of 1960's counter-culture, I couldn't help but notice the importance of The White Horse Tavern on Hudson Street in Greenwich Village in trans-generational, self-destructive, British and American literature.  It is here that the more lubricious writers and artists have gone to appreciate their mortality, either in 1 and 1/2 ounce increments or in quantities more vast and eternal.

Like many of the places of which we will speak on Thursdays, the White Horse started as a neighborhood bar, in this case for the longshoremen working the docks in Chelsea.  Its venerable history, stretching back to 1880, has witnessed and/or participated in all of the societal and economic changes that have visited that portion of New York City.  As the neighborhood became less working and more middle-class, and distinctly more "artistic", by the 1950's the Horse [that's what the locals called it] had become a place to hear folk music, Irish folk music, poetry based on folk music, and folk musicians.  Oh, and the Welsh inebriate who hung out there all of the time because it reminded him of a pub back home.

[Really?  I've been to Wales and never saw any place that even resembled the Horse.  I think the Welshman preferred it because they let him run a prodigious tab.]

I lived nine blocks north of the place when I first moved to New York.  I never went there, as the Eagle Tavern on 14th had better Irish music, and The White Horse Tavern had become touristy enough that it was selling, God help us, t-shirts behind the bar.  In a city not lacking in places for dark slouching, or bars where poets and writers regularly got or get drunk, I really wasn't interested, until I was told they served a really good cheeseburger.  It was good, and if I could afforded them on a regular basis, I would have gone the way of Dylan Thomas, except with beef fat instead of whiskey.

So storied is The Horse in literature that it has its own page on the website of the Academy of American Poets:

The White Horse Tavern, built in 1880, has been a stomping ground for New York’s literary community since the 1950s when the bar’s most famous patron, the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, was introduced to this longshoreman’s haunt. The White Horse holds the dubious distinction of being the place where Thomas drank his last whiskey. In November of 1953, Thomas beat his own personal record by downing eighteen shots of whiskey. Soon after the last drink he stumbled outside and collapsed on the sidewalk. He was taken to the Chelsea Hotel and there fell into a coma; the next morning he was transferred to St. Vincent’s Hospital where he died. In addition to the many portraits of Dylan Thomas that adorn the walls, a plaque commemorating Thomas’s last visit to the White Horse Tavern hangs above the bar. The bar soon drew more literary figures as patrons, including James Baldwin, Norman Mailer, Anais Nin, and James Laughlin, the founder of the publishing house New Directions. In addition, the bar was a gathering place for both the Beat writers, like Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, as well as the New York School poets, such as John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara.

Anyway, any place that has such a hold on literary imagination should be visited at least once, even if it isn't the most convivial in the city.

Although, there is a tradition that is maintained that I've always appreciated.  Jack Kerouac would get so drunk at The Horse that someone once wrote "Jack, Go Home!" on the men's room wall.  While there have been some well-done renovations and restorations to the bar performed in the last sixty years, and the wall painted many times, some individual or series of individuals always ensures that, somewhere on that wall, that command to Kerouac still appears.

That kind of wit needs to be admired, don't you think?

The Coracle's Saturday Literary Corner

Michael Chabon [I confess he's one of my favorite authors] in the latest Paris Review:

"I never read introductions,” says Rose, the younger of my two daughters. She thinks it over for a second, frowns; the statement doesn’t quite ring true. She amends it: “Well, I’ve read two,” she says. One turns out to be Jack Kerouac’s introduction to Robert Frank’s The Americans, required reading for a photography class: “But it was fine because I like his style.” The other is Sherman Alexie’s introduction to his own The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (a favorite book, and author, of Rose’s), because “it felt like it would be rude not to.”

I suspect that my daughter’s antipathy toward introductions (we did not discuss postscripts) is fairly common among avid readers. People who never bother to read what is more properly styled as a foreword (in which one writer presents the work of another) or a preface (in which the writer herself, often retrospectively, reflects on her own work) are likely as numerous as people who don’t bother with user manuals before launching the software application or powering up the widget. 

You will not find me among either group; in the second instance out of hard experience but in the first out of love, pure love, from the time of my first encounter, circa 1979, with John Cheever’s all-too-brief preface to his Stories, which contains the following passage, in which I now detect a premonitory stirring, two decades ahead of schedule, of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay: “These stories seem at times to be stories of a long-lost world when the city of New York was still filled with a river light, when you heard the Benny Goodman quartets from a radio in the corner stationery store, and when almost everybody wore a hat.”

Finally, Some Truth About the 1950's

The Libeled Decade

Read most pieces online, watch the majority of documentaries, and you’ll be faced with a constant refrain: The 50s was a decade of repression, conformity, and suburban boredom while the 60s was a time of freedom, excitement, and free expression...(The decade) was economically prosperous yet intellectually stimulating, as artists like John Ford, Charlie Parker, Dave Brubeck, and Jack Kerouac pushed the envelope of expression.

I'm fatigued with lightweight educators and their students telling me how dire and dour the 50's were, thus revealing their remarkable historical retardation.  I was alive then, although but a child, and remember it as a time of freedom, as opposed to the bizarre and self-imposed constraints of this "woke" age where people are afraid to say or think anything that may damage the narrative uber-mind of the elites.

Before any of the contemporary sons and daughters of privilege start pranging on about "persons of color", I would remind the reader that, according to the language of our neo-Marxist Woketopia, I'm a p.o.c., and was accepted in those days according to my character, not my genetic background.

This Week in Gratuitous Jack Kerouac References

I have to say, it's been a banner week, too.

Holiday Gift Guide 2018: Road Trip Old-School Style With These Low Tech Gifts For Travelers
[Invoking JK to sell over-priced, useless gear. Genius!]

Nowhere but Everywhere: Experiencing Côte d’Ivoire 
[JK will help tour guides convince people to visit a country that's on half-a-dozen watch lists. Yeah!]

Huckberry’s NYC Popup Store Prepares Customers For Adventures 
[Buy our flimsy, overpriced junk and regard yourself as an...Adventurer! Since JK mostly lived in Salvation Army gear and a red plain overshirt given to him by his mother, this seems...odd.  Also, the JK-inspired "West Village Drinking Tour" should probably come with the reminder that Kerouac drank himself to death.  Now, that's a holiday tour, eh?]

Los Angeles Through the Centuries, Glimpsed by Kerouac, de Beauvoir, Waugh and Others 
[In JK's case, he was probably seeing two L.A.'s.]

And, the piece de resistance:
Harmony Delivers Kerouac-Inspired Fall/Winter Collection
[Yep, because when I think of fashion, I think of JK.]

 

At the New York Public Library, a permanent exhibit will showcase the library’s millions of treasures

Getting up close with the New York Public Library’s treasures is going to get a lot easier starting 2020. Thanks to a $12 million donation from philanthropist Leonard Polonsky, the NYPL will debut a permanent exhibition in the fall of 2020 that will showcase items like the Declaration of Independence written in Thomas Jefferson’s hand; manuscripts from the likes of Maya Angelou and Jack Kerouac; and original sheet music from Beethovan and Mozart.

This Week's Jack Kerouac Reference

It's a corker.  See #6.

The top 10 male fragrances for fall

"I'd like to smell like a dissipated alcoholic, please", said no one, ever.

Alan Watts

I knew some iconoclastic and original clergy in the early days of my church service.  Their experiences, education, and world view were expansive and unconstrained by conventional spiritual thinking.  They were inspiring in word and service.  If not for them, I doubt that I would have continued to study for ordination.  I also know that, if I were to start the ordination process today, I would not be as welcomed as I was 36 years ago, as clergy have largely become bland, narrow, and uninspired.  Alan Watts may have been an extreme case of that expansiveness, but we once were served by more people like him than what we have serving these days and we were the better for it.  This was originally published on September 28, 2012. 

It may seem odd to find a fellow on the Friday list who was "defrocked" after only six years as an Episcopal deacon/priest, but Alan Watts was very much a product of his time who, sometimes indirectly, taught us much of what prayer and meditation could do in the contemporary age.

As with many of those whom I admire in the Episcopal Church [such as Muhlenberg, who was originally a German-speaking Lutheran, and Schereschewsky, a German-speaking European Jew], Watts came to the Church through a rather un-conventional route. Although, as far as I know, he wasn't German-speaking.

Alan Watts was born in London, England during the First World War and was baptized in the Church of England. As a boy, he loved the "Dr. Fu Manchu" stories by the writer Sax Rohmer [as did I when a boy, although I can't admit that too publicly as the Episco-cats now consider those works "racist"] which encouraged a fascination with Eastern religion and the occult, a fascination that became his life's work as Watts' intellect matured.

While still an adolescent, he published an essay in a reputable journal of Buddhist studies. After moving to New York City in the late 1930's, he continued his studies in Eastern thought while reading the works of Lafcadio Hearn, among others, and even sitting in counsel with Joseph Campbell, the well-known scholar of archetype.

He was ordained to the Holy Order of Priests in the Episcopal Church in 1945 and served for five years as the chaplain for Northwestern University, just outside of Chicago.

Why, you might wonder, did a man of intellect with specific interest in Asian religion and philosophy seek ordination as a Christian, not to mention an Episcopalian? Well, that's the interesting part.

Clearly, having been raised in the Church of England, Watts was comfortable with Anglican/Episcopal theology and worship. That's one portion of the answer. Another is that the Anglican/Episcopal tradition has always been one of scholarship and academic orientation. To be ordained in the Episcopal Church, one must have at least a master's degree or its equivalent; have a working knowledge of at least one Biblical language, and a familiarity with the lively arts.

Certainly, anyone who reads The Coracle's Friday profiles or of the Anglicans/Episcopalians who make up the lesser feast days on the church calendar will note the overtone of academic achievement. A parish may see its rector as that person who fixes the toilet, re-sets the parish house door, and rakes the yard, but he/she is also someone who has published academic and other articles and earned at least one, and perhaps multiple, graduate and post-graduate degrees.  A broad appreciation of human spiritual inquiry is intertwined with ecclesial service.l

But, there is another reason, and that's what makes Watts story interesting to me, as it also displays something that may be lacking in the contemporary church; something that might explain its current lassitude.

Watts' fascination was with ritual, Eastern or otherwise. While he was living in New York, he worshiped at the Church of St. Mary the Virgin in the Times Square area. It is still there, and the place where I worship on those stray Sundays off when I happen to be in the city. St. Mary's, which is also known as "Smokey Mary's" due to its famous use of great amounts of incense, is an Episcopal Church that upholds like no other the "high church" tradition of Anglicanism. During worship, the lections are chanted, as is the liturgy itself, the music is of a lofty and very traditional standard, and the liturgical action coordinated to bring a sense of spiritual mystery and wonder to every aspect. It is not for those who find church attendance a distraction on their way to their kids' soccer game.

Watts had never experienced the like in a Western religious setting and realized that there were common elements to human spiritual expression that need not be constrained by cultural barriers or labels such as "East" or "West". This realization lead him to continue his studies within the Episcopal Church and to serve as a very interesting university chaplain. He was deposed [the canonical legal term for the vulgar, but more familiar, "defrocked"] as his wife left him and sued for divorce. Yes, in Watts' day, Episcopal clergy could not be divorced. For personal reasons, I find that notion amusing.

His time as an Episcopal priest did produce a very interesting work, Myth and Ritual in Christianity; a book that explains in an uncommon manner the intention behind the things we do in church. It's one of my favorites.

After being liberated from the Episcopal Church, Watts became the first scholar to effectively present Eastern philosophy to Western audiences. He wrote seemingly countless books and articles.  He was published in everything from scholarly journals to Redbook and Playboy.  He rubbed shoulders with everyone from the composer John Cage to the psychiatric icon C.G. Jung. He met Jack Kerouac and is a character in one of his novels. He still has an eponymous website, found here, where much more may be read.

Today's Gratuitous Jack Kerouac Reference, Marketing Edition

NEW YORK, Aug. 14, 2018 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- Inspired by Jack Kerouac, Muzen Audio launches "On The Road" speakers. Inspired by the late Jack Kerouac, an iconic American novelist, the On the Road ("OTR") portable radio and bluetooth speakers cater to individuals seeking adventure and beauty. Muzen listeners live life to the fullest, using sound to enrich their everyday experiences at home and on the go.

Today's Gratuitous Jack Kerouac Reference

How my summer road trip prepared me for the year to come

Max Perkins

While New York is a city of perpetual, dramatic change, when I first moved there around 1980 there were still buildings and venues that had lingered since the earlier part of the century and were hallowed in literature and music. One could still hear jazz at the same clubs that attracted The Beat Generation, drink coffee at the Howard Johnson's in Greenwich Village as did Jack Kerouac, and sit at a table in the Rose Room at the Algonquin Hotel that was once shared by the "Round Table" critics; the Cornelia Street Cafe was tiny and sold just coffee and some very dry pastries, and the bar stool where Dylan Thomas had his final sixteen whiskeys was still functional, even if those who sat at that bar weren't.

Not only was the Scribner Building still in place on 5th Avenue, but its sumptuous bookstore was also in service.  In fact, Charles Scribner, Jr. still ran the family business.  [An aside: Scribner was the senior warden of St. Bart's Church in Manhattan; when I visited there one Sunday and signed their guest book I received, later that week, a handwritten "thank you" from him.  I still have it.]

This profile, originally posted on September 7th of 2012, was a remembrance of my early days in a New York that's not around anymore.  I would lament its passing, as one laments the passing of youth, if I were of a sentimental and less realistic nature.

When I first moved to Manhattan at the age of 25, there were some sights that I wanted to see.  Not the usual ones, like the Empire State Building or Statue of Liberty, not that there's anything wrong with viewing those, but there were places of more esoteric history that claimed my curiosity.

CBGB, The Mudd Club, and The Bitter End were among the collection, as they were places strongly identified with the music I favored at the time.  Just about anything on Bleeker Street, as anyone familiar with post-war, "Beat Generation" literature could recognize locations featured in those stories.  Let's see, the J.J. Hat Center, then on Herald Square, mainly because I received a catalog from them every so often.  [Why? I never knew.]  The original Abecrombie and Fitch, back when they sold fishing and hunting equipment rather than pan-sexual clothing of questionable taste.  The offices of the Village Voice.  The music stores on "guitar alley".  I'm sure I could think of others if I put my mind to it.

Certainly, though, one of the sites was the Scribner bookstore and its adjacent offices on Fifth Avenue. 

It became a Benetton store around the time I moved from Manhattan.  I don't know what it is now, but I'm sure it sells some equally useless nonsense.  In my day, it was a place that understood the spiritual and liberating nature of books; like a small temple of literacy.

But it was the offices that particularly attracted me, because once upon a time, in the glory days of American literature in the first half of the 20th century, up those narrow stairs would ascend the literary lions who shared not only the same publisher, but the same editor.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, Ring Lardner, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, and many others were nurtured in their art by Maxwell Perkins [pictured up top].  He was so precise and helpful that even Hemingway's notorious ego surrendered to Perkins' suggestions, including chopping away nearly one-third of The Sun Also Rises.

Just walking up those antique steps to the Scribners' offices seemed like a self-guided museum tour, leading to the same hallway where the distinctive voice of literature in the American Century was wrought.  My first visit I was lost in a rapture of letters until a security guard stopped me and asked my business.  When I explained why I was there he said, "Oh, you're one of those."

Of Perkins, more may be read here.  There is also a very good biography, titled Max Perkins: Editor of Genius, that I would recommend to anyone who is interested in 20th century American literature and what went on behind the scenes in the vintage publishing world. 

One of Perkins' letters to a young writer included this quotation, which reflects what was important in capturing the American experience in prose:  "I think, in truth, that the best writing of all is done long after the events it is concerned with, when they have been digested and reflected upon unconsciously, and the writer has completely realized them in himself."

The Great Gatsby, A Farewell to Arms, Look Homeward, Angel, and The Yearling all reflect this wisdom.  See how gracefully balanced is Lardner's short story "Haircut" and appreciate what a storyteller and an editor can create when working in harmony.