Occasional Holy Man and Luthier Who Offers Stray, Provocative, and Insouciant Thoughts About Religion, Archaeology, Human Foible, Surfing, and Interesting People. Thalassophile. Nemesis of all Celebrities [except for Chuck Norris].
He Lives Vicariously Through Himself. He has a Piece of Paper That Proves He's Laird of Glencoe.
Please read the whole thing, even though the journalist struggles mightily to lay fault with the miscreant’s mother, the Christian response of the congregation is admirable. It's always tricky when a church hires non-theistic staff. They never quite seem to get what the church is about.
Regrettably, what is left unsaid is that the hate crime hoax essentially destroyed the congregation.
With that, I was introduced to Michael McCurdy, an artist whose work you have probably seen time and again, especially if you're an avid reader, but whose name, like that of many commercial illustrators, remains obscure in some corner of an etching.
Our paths crossed in a manner that was familiar during my Berkshire years, where people of artistic accomplishment and those, such as myself, of less artistic vocations lived together in the quiet and bucolic town of Great Barrington. This was in the days just before the flood of New York-based weekenders invaded; the days before artificially inflated real estate prices, before the need for seven sushi restaurants in a town of 7000, before the traffic jams and sour tempers.
As I was still a faculty member and not yet a school administrator, I had summers that were organized around fishing, hiking, and an awful lot of reading. With that loosely structured schedule, it was not uncommon for me to stop by Arlo Guthrie's place, as we were neighbors, to look at what he had done to transform an old Episcopal parish into a music library and performance venue, to give a ride to the 20th century's most seminal news photographer, to nod at Hugh Downs as we bought newspapers on Main Street, and to have Don Westlake detail the plot of his latest "Dortmunder" novel while seated next to me at a restaurant. [Yes, I'm a name-dropper.]
Meeting Michael was even easier, as he was a member of my wife's parish choir and I would see him at coffee hour on those stray Sundays when I wasn't substituting for a vacationing rector or vicar. As noted above, our first meeting came after my wife had made reference in a sermon to my habit that particularly hot and humid summer of reading tales of Arctic and Antarctic exploration. Although an obscure interest, I found an academic colleague in McCurdy, who was researching what would become the one children's book that he both wrote and illustrated, Trapped By The Ice, the story of Ernest Shackleton's ill-fated, yet ultimately remarkable and stirring, voyage to the South Pole.
During the course of that and many other seasons, Michael would introduce me to his long and accomplished history of work and art. McCurdy lived in an old farmhouse on the outskirts of town with a barn that had been transformed into his studio [a video of which is found below from when he was visited by Martha Stewart as part of her eponymous TV show]. He still had, on one of the shelves, the toy printing press, a childhood gift of his parents, that had ignited his interest in what would become his life's work.
It should be no surprise, I suppose, that he was interested in the people of a former age, as he always seemed to me more of a man of the earlier part of the century. Born into comfort, educated by the best of private schools, a prep school art teacher for a time, and a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War, he and his family repaired to the Berkshires where the children could be raised in peace and he could build not only his artistic reputation, but a publishing concern that would match art and verse with works both contemporary and classical. Once, while at a particularly stunted house party, when the conversations were halting and awkward, Michael simply sat at his host's piano and began to play a variety of music, from common to classical, that resulted in people unwittingly singing from the Episcopal Church's hymnal [the 1940 edition, too].
As with any artist, we could prattle on about him, but displaying a sample of his creations would be more interesting [click to enlarge, please]:
While the woodcuts are his best-known medium, I've always been partial to those watercolors that illustrated his children's book about Shackleton, as that simple volume was the result of many, many of our conversations and some interesting and fun correspondence with the survivors of the survivors of the expedition.
McCurdy's collected works may now be found mostly in the archives of the Boston Public Library; illustrations and broadsheets from his publishing company are housed at the University of Connecticut's Dowd Research Center. Many of the works that he illustrated are in print, still, and can be found in bookstores both on-line and physical, particularly The Bookloft in Great Barrington, which has always been partial to local writers and artists.
Around the time our family left the Berkshires for the Litchfield Hills, Michael was diagnosed with a degenerative nervous disease that would ultimately rob him of his ability to create and to make a living. With that knowledge, to which I and others were sworn to secrecy so that he would be able to gain work until it was no longer possible, we spent a long evening at dinner in his farmhouse [with some rather good scotch, I seem to partially recall].
At one point of the evening, observing the sun setting over the mountains, he asked, "Did
you ever just want to get on a road north and drive until it ends?
Just to see how far it would take you and what you would see? I guess
that's the role of the artist, isn't it? To supply that wonder. To
take someone wistfully to another place; a place unfamiliar but within
their own imagination."
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:
The average cost of a journalism degree is $154,532. Most of the reporters with whom I worked in the '70's were high school graduates; all of the reporters with whom I worked would have been mortified to make such errors.
The people who lately have told me that we would be a better society if government were in charge of every aspect of our lives are middle-class whites who have never been on a tribal reservation. If so, they would see what life under total government control is like. It does not look preferable.
“Thanksgiving is the time to fight with your family” is certainly an original notion. Does the staff of The Nation need psycho-therapy? Their familial relationships seem pathologically bellicose.
I resist criticizing coaching as I'm hopeless in calling football plays, but I can't help to notice that the Browns head coach is not just inexperienced and immature, but he's charmless and dull-witted. That may explain a lot about the locker room's weird shenanigans.
As with the author of the article quoted [who is a peer, a fellow Crash Street Kid*, and someone with whom I have an acquaintance], it is the die-hard fans for whom I have sympathy.
*Cleveland reference that requires more explanation than I have time for this morning. Suffice it to say that Terry and I are neighborhood guys.
Well, Murph, you actually have to live in the state you represent, not just say you're looking to live in the state. Fortunately, as a senator, you are not required to have a functional knowledge of the law.
