Month: October 2009

Posted on

Not By George

Looks like it’s Tangential Connections to George Plimpton Week here at Virtual Memories! Here’s another passage that stuck with me from George, Being George:

MYRA GELBAND: By the late 1980s, of course, the magazine evolved, and the kind of journalism George did for [Sports Illustrated], which was his signature journalism and I would guess his most commercial, took a backseat to the type of hard-sports journalism that became prevalent in the 1980s with the advent of things like ESPN and cable television.

I think it became harder for George to figure out stories that would work for the magazine, because his interests had changed, too — he wasn’t gonna go suit up and play football for us, and we weren’t gonna run those kind of stories. So it became a little more challenging for him to get into the magazine.

So SI faced the challenge of 24-hour sports coverage by . . . trying to replicate it on a weekly basis? Rather than play to the strengths it had in long-form writers like Plimpton, Dan Jenkins, Frank Deford, etc.? Because the media only got faster, but SI has to keep coming out once a week.

I’m not saying anything new; here’s a piece from 2007 by John Levin on why SI sucks. Still, I knew there was a reason that the only articles I remember from the last 10 years of SI were Frank Deford’s long pieces on Bill Russell and Roger Bannister and Edmund Hillary. (Wait: 1999 was 11 years ago, huh? Man, that decade just flew by.)

And of course, the most memorable piece published in SI in the past 30 years was Plimpton’s Sidd Finch prank, from 1985. The section on that article in George, Being George is hysterical, as expected. There’s a great passage from one of the Paris Review young’uns, detailing how afraid he was that he and Plimpton were going to get mugged by a trio of thugs, until one of the thugs realized who Plimpton was and told him how much he loved the Sidd Finch article.

Oh, well. I guess this means last April’s TEN-PAGE FEATURE ON A PROFESSIONAL SURFER was SI‘s attempt at getting back to its roots.

Gripegripemutter. . .

Posted on

George on the block

As I mentioned a while back, one of my favorite recent discoveries is NYC Grid, in which blogger Paul Sahner posts a new photo essay of a block of NYC each day. About a month ago, he covered 72nd St., between York and FDR. I found this post fascinating, especially because of the series of beautiful townhouses at the end of the street.

On a whim, I looked up real estate listings for the street and found a couple of openings in those gorgeous buildings. If I can just get a $749,000 mortgage together and convince a co-op board that Rufus is a pretty quiet dog, I can get 1,168 square feet (with an additional $1,849 in monthly maintenance fees)! Or with a $1.25 million mortgage (plus $4,000/month in fees) I could get almost 2,100 square feet!

I shouldn’t be snide. The apartments are gorgeous and the location is insane; they’re just so far beyond what I’d ever be able to pay for a place, it made me sad.

1565461.1

Anyway, this past weekend, as I was reading George, Being George, I noted the many references to George Plimpton’s apartment and the connected Paris Review offices in a townhouse on E. 72nd St. The speakers mentioned the multitude of parties held in Plimpton’s apartment, and the way the staffers at the Review were pretty free to meander into his home (to the chagrin of his wives).

I just didn’t connect the dots with NYC Grid until I read this quote:

BEN RYDER HOWE: The first thing you noticed, coming to work at the Review office, was George’s block, the last before you hit the East River. That block was incredible, with red brick sidewalks and, down at the end of it, his building, the smallest, black as coal. You’d think it was a tenement, not a warren of small luxury apartments.

The street scene was bizarre, too. You had all those cancer treatment centers, with people coming there from all over the world. I remember seeing a Saudi sheikh on the promenade who was between chemo treatments, and he was out there smoking a cigarette. Or you would see someone who had just come out of Sotheby’s, at the corner of York, with a two-thousand-dollar egg cup or something.

Toward the river, opposite George’s building, were huge, ugly apartment buildings, outside of which you might see powerful people screaming into their cell phones as they paced up and down the street. You’d see people who were obviously having secret rendezvous down on the promenade.

George’s building had four entries, 527 to 541, the last of which, with his apartment, gave right onto the river. It was right there under the promenade, practically at your feet, narrow as a sluice at that point, with big ships squeezing past each other between Roosevelt Island and the FDR Drive. Sometimes, at about four o’clock in the afternoon, when you were just completely delirious from reading all those unsolicited manuscripts, you felt like one of those ships spinning on the tide.

On the next page was a b/w photo of the door to 541. Sure enough, it was the very building I’d searched out weeks earlier, at the end of the street, overlooking the East River. And those huge prices?

TERRY QUINN: My first visit to 541, I asked him, “How did you get all this space right on the East River? It must have cost you a million dollars.” And I think he said that when he and others in the building outbid some developers for the whole block of apartments, his piece cost sixty thousand dollars. He said it was the only good financial decision he’d ever made.

Sigh.

Posted on

What It Is: 10/19/09

What I’m reading: I finished Moby Dick last week, and got swept up in George, Being George, an oral history of George Plimpton, over the weekend. Reading the section on Plimpton’s divorce from his first wife, I felt really sad for his kids. I went to college with his oldest daughter, but don’t recall having any interaction with her during our time at Hampshire. When I finished that chapter, I thought, “Man, I hope she has kids and they give her a big hug today.” Outside of that, the book’s very entertaining. The scenes at the Paris Review offices sound like they were wonderful, although I’m guessing that, had I submitted a resume back in my post-college days, my name would’ve triggered a lack of a callback. (Not that Plimpton was anti-semitic, so much as, um, well, it just sounds like there weren’t many Jews (or black people) working at the Review, is all I’m saying.) Midway through the book, it occurred to me that Plimpton was “Fitzgerald who wanted to be Hemingway.” I thought this was a pretty good insight until I reached the last quarter of the book, where I learned that Plimpton had in the 1990’s adapted Fitzergald and Hemingway’s correspondence into a dramatic dialogue that he performed with Norman Mailer and Mailer’s wife Norris Church (who played Zelda). So I’m no genius. Anyway, it’s a really fantastic book, despite the sadness of the closing years of Plimpton’s life, where it became clear that his devotion to the social sphere had taken its toll on his body (and was part of his inability to be a good husband). Here’s the only passage that I dog-eared:

JAMES SCOTT LINVILLE: The only time I saw George nervous was when he was about to interview Andy Warhol for the magazine. There was something in Warhol’s voice, which had always been so flat, almost inhuman-seeming, but here . . . well, I thought: My God, he really wants George to like him. I realized he’d have had to have been hurt by the Edie book years before, and here he was talking to him. And George, George clearly did not like him, but he was fascinated by him. I suddenly realized these two guys had in some sense studied each other, for decades, how the other fashioned himself in the media — George of course with his effortlessness, the patrician thing, and Warhol . . . well, whatever he was. It was clear they had each paid attention to how the other had moved through some grid of public awareness.

It’s a topic I’d love to spend time writing about, trying to understand these two representative figures and how they shaped our ideas of celebrity. But I’m too busy watching the Balloon Boy story unfold. (Just kidding; I laughed about the story when it first began and devoted zero time to it after that.)

What I’m listening to: Nothing specific; just letting the iPod shuffle away.

What I’m watching: Adventureland (meh), the Yankees (yay!).

What I’m drinking: Not a thing till I’m over this cold.

What Rufus is up to: Wearing his coat when we go out for walks, and making friends at our local dry cleaner. I was a little nervous when the proprietor said, “Greyhounds are very valuable in Korea!” but he didn’t make any comment about how tasty their haunches are, so yay.

Where I’m going: Probably down to suburban Philadelphia, to deliver a TV. Don’t ask. Also have a get-together with a bunch of pals at Peter Luger in Brooklyn on Thursday evening.

What I’m happy about: That my wife’s pal Kate delivered her baby! Welcome, Charlotte!

What I’m sad about: Getting snow on Thursday. And being sick for basically two straight weeks. Grr.

What I’m worried about: Pettitte will have That One Inning this afternoon in Anaheim. You Yankee fans know what I’m talking about.

What I’m pondering: When NJ diners began getting liquor licenses. Was it around the same time they got rid of their jukeboxes?

Posted on

A whale of a time

I finished re-reading Moby Dick this week. Here’s something from Chapter 132: The Symphony:

There is no steady unretracing progress in this life; we do not advance through fixed gradations, and at the last one pause: — through infancy’s unconscious spell, boyhood’s thoughtless faith, adolescence’s doubt (the common doom), then scepticism, then disbelief, resting at last in manhood’s pondering repose of If. But once gone through, we trace the round again; and are infants, boys, and men, and Ifs eternally. Where lies the final harbor, whence we unmoor no more? In what rapt ether sails the world, of which the weariest never weary? Where is the foundling’s father hidden? Our souls are like those orphans whose unwedded mothers die in bearing thme: the secret of our paternity lies in their grave, and we must there to learn it.

This talk of life’s cycles reminds me that I should write about last weekend’s 20-year high school reunion. Problem is, I was coming down with this bounceback cold during that time, so my recollection’s a bit addled. I’m pretty sure I didn’t say anything embarrassing, but I likely made some remarks that sounded pompous. How could I not?

The first person I saw reminded me that I stabbed him in the hand with a pencil when we were 12. The second person told me he still remembers how I was cracking jokes after punching a hole in the base of my index finger with a glass tube in chemistry class when we were 16. (It was quite a scene; one of the girls in our class almost fainted from my blood loss.) I don’t recall any other stories of manual violence, but I did enjoy chatting with people I hadn’t seen since before the Berlin Wall fell.

Posted on

Shoot the bride

I’m sick as a dog, but I oughtta give you something nice to look at, dear reader. So here’s a photoset from this past Sunday. A young bride-to-be hired my wife to take photos of her in her wedding dress in NYC. I tagged along to carry stuff and take candids. We shot in Tribeca, Washington Square Park, and . . . the subway!

I also shot a minute-long video of our bride getting serenaded in the park:

So enjoy the pix! I’m going to rest and recover.

Posted on

4 and 20 (thousand) blackbirds

On Saturday morning, whie Amy napped, I heard the CAW!s of The Blackbird Gang right outside my window. I took a look outside and discovered that our backyard was their newest turf:

IMG_1445

I was worried that blackbird-on-blackbird violence might lead to a drop in our property values, but the upside of roving gangs like this is that they never spend more than 10 minutes in one place. Really: hundreds of birds descended on our yard, filling the trees, noshing on our weeds, chattering away on a Saturday morning, and then one of them got the signal, and they all flew off.

Posted on

What It Is: 10/12/09

What I’m reading: Moby Dick, George, Being George, Crumb’s Book of Genesis, and a whole ton of Planetary comics (while I was home sick) in anticipation of the final issue. Which turned out to be a non-event.

What I’m listening to: Not a lot. My head’s been so stuffed up, most music sounds kinda muffled.

What I’m watching: American Splendor, in honor of Harvey Pekar’s 70th birthday last week, the Yankees’ playoff games, and a pretty humorous Parks & Recreation.

What I’m drinking: NyQuil. I’ve been wiped out by a chest cold since Monday, and figured that booze would just zap my poor immune system even further. Reading the label, I discovered that one is not supposed to take more than four 30ml doses of NyQuil in one 24-hour period. If you’re the sort of person who would even consider four doses of this stuff in a day, you probably aren’t going to be deterred by that warning. Wowza.

What Rufus is up to: Packing his things for a 3-night stay with his pal Tut.

Where I’m going: To Cincinnati, to visit Amy’s pals Ken & Denise for a long weekend.

What I’m happy about: Seeing a lot of old pals at my 20-year high school reunion on Saturday.

What I’m sad about: Not getting to talk to everybody I wanted to talk to at the reunion. But at least some of those people are local(ish), so we can try to get together sometime this fall.

What I’m worried about: The fact that two old classmates independently asked me if I’d gone into politics, while two others asked if I was now a lawyer.

What I’m pondering: Writing a post about my annual movie-traditions.