One of the benefits of being a working musician is that I get into places I’d never get into otherwise—the Washington Press Club, say, or Robert Mondavi’s villa. And I get to do it as an insider. Musicians inhabit that gray area between staff and events coordinator. We arrive early, stay late, and get access to everything behind the scenes — the kitchens (some of them are horror shows) and dressing rooms and rear passages. When the guests are asked to leave the hors d’oeuvres table and sit down, we can say to the servers who are shooing everyone away, “We’re in the band,” and keep on sneaking sushi appetizers.

Saturday, my jazz band performed for a fundraiser at Baltimore’s American Visionary Art Museum, the first museum in the nation devoted solely to “outsider art,” that is, art made by untrained artists. It’s a wild place because most of these artists have wild visions, often brought on (or exacerbated by) mental illness. These artists are (or were) janitors or truck drivers or cotton farmers who, in their spare time, made a 1/50 scale replica of, say, the Titanic with match sticks or pointillist paintings done with a darning needle or a collage made from twenty years’ worth of gum wrappers. I never tire of visiting the museum. It feeds the head and heart as few museums can. Check out a sample show: AVAM

The guest of honor at Saturday’s fundraiser was Patch Adams, the medical doctor whose unorthodox methods – using humor to help patients – won him fame and notoriety. Robin Williams played him in the 1998 movie, ”Patch Adams,” which was another of Williams’s mawkish muck-ups. Having seen the movie, I didn’t have high expectations of Dr. Adams. But he surprised me. He’s down-to-earth, funny, and a genuine do-gooder, setting up free medical clinics around the world. He’s visually striking too: a big guy, six-four, with a grey pony-tail to his waist and a bushy mustache, he dresses like the original hippy, vested, multi-layered tie-dyed, necklaced. His best line: “If you have only a week to live, I’m your man.”

As this was the Visionary Art Museum, the two-hundred diners, many in formal wear, were be-decked in strings of blinking lights and funny hats. Some wore costumes. All were here, presumably, because they had deep pockets and were keeping the museum solvent. As you know, it’s hard to keep much of anything going nowadays.

During one our breaks, I was eating a tepid chicken dinner in the corner of the room with my bandmates (we are always grateful and surprised when the hosts give us the same meal as the guests’; usually we get a club sandwich) and I heard the MC introduce a man named Donovan, who would be doing a benefit with Sir Paul McCartney on April 4. I couldn’t see the stage from my seat. But I could hear: Donovan was an Englishman. I figured he was just another rich guy like the rest in the room. Then I turned my attention to my plate, thinking my sautéed French beans were pretty good, though the chicken was predictably dry. This Donovan guy said words were really important to him. Then he began reading a poem. Our piano player said, “He could read a grocery list and make it sound good.”

I might have zoned out for a moment because the next thing I heard was “That’s John Sebastian on stage,” to which I said, “No way.” But, sure enough, it was John Sebastian, the singer/song-writer who led the Lovin’ Spoonful through eight hits in the 1960s, then went on to a solo career whose highlight was the 1976 hit “Welcome Back,” which became the theme song for “Welcome Back, Kotter.” And the guy before him was – or was not – Donovan. Apparently Sebastian and Donovan are good friends and go way back. Leaving my chicken, I got close to the stage. Sebastian has weathered the years well. Though his voice is tired, he remains a good performer, humorous and chatty.

He was joined by fellow Spoonful bandmate Steve Boone. They did three tunes. When they performed “You Didn’t Have to Be So Nice,” I got a little wistful and moony because it’s a gently romantic song, with touching lyrics, and its mood seems to make all of us aging Boomers too vulnerable, our dreams and aspirations framed by the optimism of the 1960s and the confusion of 1970s and now, here we are, middle-aged or more and all we can do is look back and shake our heads in wonder at how far we’ve come and how long it’s been since we first heard that tune and it’s amazing some of us survived.

Here’s John Sebastian’s rendition of “Mellow Yellow” from Saturday’s event.

I never did learn whether or not Donovan was in the room. But that’s what it’s like for those of us in the band. We’re often on the sidelines, pre-occupied with our warmed-over food and wondering when the speeches will stop so we can finish the gig and, if lucky, get home early,

Video: the Lovin’ Spoonful performing “You Didn’t Have to Be So Nice”

Sound clip of Donovan’s now-classic Mellow Yellow

Related posts

• No related posts.

Jill and I just went a week without a phone—due to a mix-up as we changed carriers. For six days we heard no phone-ringing in our house. It was very nice. We have two (land) lines; home and business. The business is my band, Jazz Caravan. The band line rings all day. Ninety percent of the calls are from solicitors trying to sell me credit cards, better phone service, payroll software, and so on. The other ten percent are from people who think Jazz Caravan is a club. They want to know when the show starts. Nowadays, I never answer the band line. I check the messages once a week. Every few months the band line gets a legitimate inquiry that leads to paying gig, which pays enough to make keeping the band line worthwhile. But only barely.

We also have cell phones but seldom use them. Unlike most of my peers, I have yet to integrate cell technology into daily life. I reserve the cell for travel. Without question, they’re handy (literally), but they’re also high maintenance. You have to charge them every day; you have to keep track of them; you have to remember to turn them on or off; and then you have to answer them . . . or not. This, in addition to your land line—unless you’re one of those people who has forsaken the old-tech home phone.

There is something reassuring about having a land line. It feels solid and predictable and seems to give the house a center of gravity. The first thing I do when I walk in the door is pick up the phone to see if there’s a message waiting. (Long ago I gave up on answering machines because it seemed I was replacing them every year. I could never be sure they were doing what they were supposed to do.)

Most of our friends know that we almost never answer the phone. This is Jill’s doing or, rather, not doing. Until I met Jill, I always answered the phone. It was like answering the door. When Jill and I moved in together, I was amazed that she could let the phone ring and ring and not answer it. She insists on talking only when she feels like talking. Otherwise, she’ll check the message later. Really, no phone call is so pressing that it must be answered now. It took me a while to get used to this. But it makes sense.

In the days before automated message services, everybody answered the phone for obvious reasons: a phone call was either an opportunity you couldn’t afford to miss or a message you needed to hear sooner rather than later — because you might not hear it until much later. Also, phone talk was something special, in part because it was a novelty but also because it was high-tech. By the time I was a teenager, phone-talk was cheap and central to daily life. So central that I always picked up the phone because, really, there was nothing else going on. That may explain why today’s teenagers are so enamored of their cell phones, which they coddle and cradle like pets, taking them out at every opportunity to stroke, coo at and talk to. At bottom, not much has changed: I would have done the same.

If you’re one of those people who walk around all day with a cell phone attached to your ear, you need to reconsider what you’re doing. Sorry, but, come on, think about it—you’re attached to a phone! All day. Unless you’re working at a telethon or sitting at the switchboard of a phone company or piloting a rig across the country, what’s the point? If you want a laugh, watch the second installment of the Star Wars trilogy, “The Empire Strikes Back,” and look for the scene in Cloud City, when Lando Calrissian is about to shut things down before Darth Vader’s arrival. There is a close-up of Calrissian’s assistant standing near a door. Attached to the back of the assistant’s shaved head and terminating at his ears is a thin band – it’s a communication device that looks remarkably like those we have today, only it is flashing little red lights. When I first saw this movie, in 1980, I believed that, yes, in the far future, we’d have something like this, but I didn’t imagine we’d see it in my lifetime. This bit of Hollywood prognostication remains one of the few instances in which sci-fi fantasy actually got it dead right.

(Calrissian’s assistant himself was another dead-on prediction. Though his shaved head was meant to look strikingly odd in the movie – remember, in 1980, many of us still had long hair and blow dryers — he’d fit in easily among today’s hipsters.)

Ear bud phone technology has gotten to the point where it’s hard to tell who’s plugged in and who’s not. Whenever I pass someone who is muttering to him/herself, I always assume it’s a phone call, even when there’s no visible evidence of hardware. This may not be a good thing, I’ve decided. This summer, I tell myself, I’m going to get an I-Phone. I’m not sure what that means, except that I’ll have access to the internet virtually anywhere at any time. Generally, I’m enthusiastic about technology. But taking it on, I remind myself, is a mostly a luxury, not a necessity. Stay tuned.

Related posts

• No related posts.

Last week, Jill and I bought a digital converter for our old analog TV and joined, finally, the digital “revolution.” Mind you, ours is not HD-TV, just digital, which allows us to access – so far – about 30 stations, three times as many as before. All we wanted was access to WNET, Washington DC’s public broadcasting station, which is so much better than Maryland’s PBS—because Maryland’s is especially fond of pre-empting our favorite shows, like “This Old House,” with endless reruns of the Celtic Woman special (a blonde lassie flailing at the fiddle while strapping lads stomp wild Celtic mating dances around her) or the Yani special or the Those-Great-Doo-Wop-Hits-From-the-Fifties special, all of which convince us that Maryland’s PBS has decided that its target audience is between the ages of 60 and 80. It’s confounding. By contrast, the DC station shows vintage movies and indie films and Front Line and lots of other, intellectually stimulating stuff that we can’t get our MD station to air. Actually, the MD station’s programming has become something of a controversy in our state. Jill and I are seriously thinking of sending our PBS donations to DC.

So we were stoked about the prospect of getting WNET. All we needed was an antenna. Nearly everyone we know has cable. But we refuse to get cable—for two reasons: it’s expensive and addictive. Whenever I travel, I often spend my nights sitting on my hotel bed, surfing the 100 cable channels for something good to watch. Rarely is there anything worth watching. And still I surf and surf until, hours later, I drop exhausted onto my pillow, feeling mildly depressed and slightly dirty, as if I’d spent all that time cruising triple-x stations. Or playing a nickel slot machine all night without a win.

And then there’s the scam of “basic” cable as opposed to “premium” cable. If you want a station like Turner Classic Movies, you pay a hefty extra fee each month. We already get our movies through Netflix. And you can’t get first-run movies any faster on cable (or not much faster) than through Netflix. And cable can’t offer as broad a selection as Netflix. As you can see, I’m pretty adamant on this topic. All my arguments aside, my refusal to get cable comes to nothing more than my own weakness. I simply can’t trust myself to live in a house with cable TV—I’d be watching it eight hours a day.

Jill was hoping we’d get cable so that she could watch Animal Planet. But she’s a good sport and went along with my insistence that we get an antenna and make the best of it. Both of us like the idea of an antenna, it’s so retro. We also liked visiting Baynesville Electronics, one of the largest independent electronics supply stores on the east coast. It got its start in 1955 and still retains a retro look, like something out of the 1960s. And it’s crowded with all kinds of cool gear, including big TV antennas. Best of all, the staff is knowledgeable and will show you how to do stuff, like splice wires or read your installation diagram.

$200 later, we walked out with an antenna, a five-foot antenna mast, a fifty-foot down-lead cord (to the TV set), a chimney bracket (for the mast), 100 feet of aluminum cable (for the lightning rod), and the lightning rod anchor. Yeah, it looked kind of complicated. The antenna itself is a bristly array of aluminum rods and fins that, once assembled, extends six feet from the mast. After I strapped it to our rear chimney, I had to run an aluminum cable down the side of the house and stake it deep into the dirt in the back yard in the unlikely event that lightning strikes the antenna. Then I strung a guy wire from the antenna to a cinder block (on the roof) to keep the wind from turning the antenna like a weather vane. I aimed it south to D.C. It pulls in great reception. So many new channels that — guess what? — Jill and I have been wasting way too much time cruising the selections. We found one that plays nothing but old TV series, kind of a poor man’s Nickelodian. Another shows only winter sports, mostly skiing. Another broadcasts Japanese news in English. Yet another is all Chinese. We assume that these channels come from D.C., whose incredibly diverse metro area must be the size of Chicago’s.

While on the roof, I was surprised to see other antenna perched atop neighbors’ houses. They looked old. Surely their days are numbered now that digital TV is upon us. The rooftops of every neighborhood of my youth were studded with TV antennas, of course. Our new one does homage to that quaint past. At the same time, it stands in defiance of cable’s monopoly and our voracious consumer culture, both of which make it hard for us to resist the alpha-wave-inducing eye candy. Walking through Sam’s Club the other week, I couldn’t resist gaping at the big-screen TVs and wondering if our life would be just a notch richer if we owned one of those spectacular sets. Who needs to go to the movies anymore?

At bottom, there’s something honest about an antenna because it announces all that we take for granted or ignore, i.e., the mass of electricity we’re dumping into the atmosphere every second of every day. An antenna is nothing more than a crude aluminum net erected to catch the haphazard wash of radio waves spilling over the earth’s surface. We live in a world so fraught with electromagnetic radiation – from cell phones, computers (wireless, anyone?), radios, televisions, garage doors, any and every remote-control device, and, of course, the sun — that we ourselves must be bombarded and perforated with radio waves every minute of our lives. I don’t know that this is a good or bad thing. It’s the ocean we swim in.

Sometimes a rogue signal will cause our garage door to open seemingly by itself. One time this occurred while we were on vacation and a neighbor happened to read one of my online posts that announced that I was traveling. He emailed me about the garage, a message I picked up on my wireless laptop. Then I was able to call him on my cell phone and have him close the door.

If you haven’t seen the Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoon episode called “Metal Munching Mice,” you should seek it out. Broadcast in 1961, not long after television had taken over America, it lampooned our obsession with the boob-tube. The plot: Boris Badenov recruits a troop of six-foot mechanical monster mice (from the moon) to eat all of America’s TV antennas. As a result, the country’s economy tumbles, since nobody is watching TV commercials anymore, and everyone starts leaving the U.S., since there’s no TV to watch. Boris plans to take over the country but, at the last minute, he is foiled by Bullwinkle, who discovers he has a mesmerizing power over the moon mice when he begins to “sing” like Elvis Presley.

The premise of the “Metal Munching Mice” was the assumption that the stalwart, ubiquitous TV antenna would never disappear except under the most outlandish of circumstances. As we watch it disappear now, we should grant that sixty-some years was not a bad run for this modest technology, especially considering the rapid growth of everything surrounding it. Really, it’s surprising its obsolescence took so long. And still, as our roof demonstrates, it’s not quite gone.

Related posts

• No related posts.

Jill and I have learned that Mr. Herstein passed away recently. He owned a dusty, crowded lamp shop on Howard Street, downtown. Howard Street used to be the Baltimore’s premier avenue for antique shops. There are still a couple of high-end stores there. But the street is long past its prime, as Mr. H’s shop illustrated. For many years, Jill and I had heard about him from our fellow antique collectors. Some days he was open, some days he was not. One sun-beaten August morning some years ago, we found him open, hunkered in a wooden desk chair at the back of his sweltering shop, next to his fridge-sized safe and surrounded by a scatter of aged lamp parts -— as if he himself had been left there by a careless Maker long ago.

Mr. H. looked 90 and seemed to be melting: a little puddle of a man, his bearded face sunk into shoulders and his chest sunk into his ribs. He has trouble talking, the result of a stroke, we supposed, and his arms were bumpy from a condition that Jill and I could only guess at.

He said he’d been in his shop for 20 years. We thought it more likely 60 or 100 years. His place was such a forgotten wreck, I could hardly believe I saw a couple of customer tags on a few floor lamps behind his cluttered counter.

Mr. H eyed us curiously because — I was thinking — he hadn’t seen anyone enter his shop in a long time. We told him we were looking for vintage chains for a hanging lamp. The new chains were too thin and shiny.

“For old chains like that,” he said, “you gotta go in the basement.”

Yes, I nodded eagerly: the basement! I’d been once before. It’s dim, dirty, and scary as hell.

Painfully he pushed himself out of his chair, then shuffled to the back room, where salvaged light fixtures were heaped in a knee-high tangled mass that reminded me vaguely of those horseshoe crab heaps on dark green beds of seaweed at lowtide way up on northern shores. Right on top of the heap I found an old ceiling pan with heavy chains, all of it painted silver: more paint stripping?

Mr. H pulled out a pen knife, picking at it to retrieve the blade. I recalled that every old man from my childhood had carried a pen knife. It was as necessary in those days as a cotton handkerchief.

“This’ll get it open,” he rasped.

He jimmied the knobless basement door, then pushed it open. “Be careful,” he cautioned.

Because I’d seen it before, I was not stunned by the mess down there: aged brass light sockets scattered over the dust-black concrete floor— so many sockets there was no place to step . . . except on them, as if I were crunching my way over a shell-strewn shore. Dangling from a ceiling joist, a single bulb illuminated the dank space: there was a listing workbench in one corner, crowded with blackened wooden trays of dust-covered parts. Then the dark-dark far back, which beckoned the adventurer in me.

I started picking and probing, finding plenty of pieces that might be useful if they could be cleaned.

Jill called down to me every few minutes as if checking on a spelunker dangling in a chasm. There was so much junk here, I could have spent hours pawing through it: who knew what I might find?

As I stepped gingerly into the darkness, I could make out another naked bulb, whose pull I yanked, giving me more dim light to search by. Soon I was in the far back under yet another weak bulb, wondering if the mold down here was toxic.

Finally Jill came down, knowing I wouldn’t surface unless forced to. Emerging from the gloom, I found her laughing at the foot of the stairs as she surveyed the incredible mess.

I said, Mr. H is gonna sell me some of this dusty, rusty stuff, even though he himself hasn’t been down here in decades.

Upstairs again, with blackened hands, I showed him what I’d found, including a fistful of chains. “You don’t want these,” he said, tapping two large solid brass fittings that would bring plenty online—not that Mr. H was going to auction them or sell them to anybody. He simply knew their value and was obliged to charge what they were worth: clearly more than I wanted to pay. I nodded in agreement.

When we catalogued my selection, he said, “I don’t want to make you pay too much but then I don’t want to let you have it too low.” I suggested we throw in the painted light pan I found in the back room. We paid him $12.

Jill said she wanted to buy his display case. She’s always doing this, asking about what obviously isn’t for sale or what can’t be seen. Mr. H said she’d have to wait until he’s dead. Then, apparently prompted by the thought of his own demise, he told us about old Baltimore, how there used to be a toll gate just north of Druid Hill Park and how the politicians used to be too obviously crooked. When he started out, he said, you had to be careful if you were Jewish, like him, and it was tough to find a job. Blacks, he said, were all but invisible. He ended up working for the government as an acoustical engineer—and he still writes reviews for one of the engineering journals.

So what are you doing here? we sputtered.

“This?” he croaked, smiling his crooked smile and raising the gnarled fingers of one hand as if to draw the crumbling shop into his palm: “This is just a hobby.”

Related posts

• No related posts.

We in Baltimore make fun of the “Greatest City in America” slogan blazoned across the city’s park benches. I don’t know whose idea this was but, obviously, the slogan begs for mockery. I mean, let’s get real. Most of us would prefer “Charm City” as a slogan because we are, at bottom, a Southern city in the best sense, which is to say that we’re friendly and casual. And, yes, strangers here will likely call you “hon’.” That said, if we’re not the Greatest City in America, we’ve got to be one of the coolest. If you live here, you know what I’m talking about. Baltimore is quirky and diverse and arty in all the best ways. A case in point would be the Literary Cabaret we put on last Friday night.

Some background: as the president of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs , I am obliged (happily) to raise funds for the organization so that we can continue to help writers, as we have since 1967. Just this past Friday, I hosted a one-night-only Literary Cabaret fund-raiser at Frazier’s, a bar in Baltimore’s quirky, down-home Hampden neighborhood. Our outstanding roster of readers and performers brought in a great turn-out – Frazier’s was packed. We enjoyed a wide array of readers of poetry and fiction, interspersed with musical acts and even a couple of videos by writers. Many of the acts highlighted writers who also happen to be musicians. Madison Smartt Bell, for instance, the internationally acclaimed novelist, is also a composer and performer of rock music. Novelist and short-story writer Geoffrey Becker, who won the 2008 prestigious Flannery O’Connor prize for short fiction, is a blistering blues guitarist.

What made the event a success was the generosity of these many writers and performers, coming together for an evening of fun and sharing—it made for good vibes. Let me be frank: I’ve never been among so many artists where so little ego was on display. That’s why Baltimore is so cool There’s lots going on and, sure, plenty of ambition, but very little attitude. This modesty seems the legacy of Baltimore’s dock-side, steel-making past. Nobody came to Baltimore with expectations of wearing gold cufflinks or silk ribbons.

Here’s the roster of writers, performers, and editors who participated in our event:

Madison Smartt Bell, Victoria Vox, Rahne Alexander, Joseph Young, Atlay Washington, Michael Kimball, Liz Sesler-Beckman, Jessica Anya Blau, Jen Michalski, Geoffrey Becker, Todd Whaley, Ron Kipling Williams, Linda Joy Burke, Patricia Schultheis, Susan Durraj, Stephen Reichert, Adam Robinson, Clarinda Harriss, Eric Heavner, E. Doyle-Gillespie, Pete Pazmino, Nicole Pekarske, David Bergman, Chris Toll, Kevin Robinson, Justin Sirois, Stephanie Barber, Johndre Jennings, Kendra Kopelke, Shirley Brewer, William Tandy, Mary Azrael, Jen Michalski, representing the following publishers and organizations: Baltimore Review, Smartish Pace, Eight Stone Press, JMWW, Brickhouse Books, Publishing Genius, Passager, Narrow House Recordings, Rahne Alexander, Jazz Caravan, Michael Kimball, Joseph Young, Linda Joy Burke, Poetry for the People, Geoffrey Becker, Aware & Outraged and Victoria Vox.

Much thanks all of these people and organizations. Also let me thank ever-energetic Rosalia Scalia for her help with PR, also Christine Stewart for help locating some of the talent, my ever-conscientious student volunteers – Lizzie McQuillan, Jillian Delos Reyes, Amy Wilson, Samantha Harvey, Dan Corrigan, and Ed Poche – Ray King and Frazier’s for the great space, Scott Netro, and Jill Eicher for the photos and logistical management.

Related posts

• No related posts.