An Editor's Notes

John Stewart

2008-01-22T11:24:00.000-08:00

On John Stewart’s Death
A Fan’s Notes

In my bedroom in my small apartment in Manhattan there’s a big, framed poster under glass from the Bombs Away Dream Babies concert I went to in Cleveland. They weren’t selling posters; this one was the marquee of the evening. I went back the next day and got the place to give it to me. John looks like Gary Shandling in the poster.

I was about 30 then, so you can do the math. I first became aware of John Stewart when I was away from home in a Catholic boarding school. A quick friend of mine there played guitar and had a good collection of folk albums. He had one by the Cumberland Three and I noticed John’s voice. Later on a Limeliters’ album I obsessed over a song called ‘Heading for the Hills’. I looked to see who wrote it---(John Stewart). Of course I was buying all the Kingston Trio albums and paying close attention to John.

A few years later I’m in college in South Bend, Indiana. It’s I think 1966 or ’67 and the Kingston Trio is coming to town on their last tour. They’re not coming to Notre Dame this time though. They had earlier in the fall for a football weekend concert when I remember how haunting John’s voice was when he got a chance to do a couple solos. This time they’re playing downtown at a big, old theater. No one on the floor wants to go with me on the cold Saturday afternoon of the show, so I go out to the highway alone and hitch hike the short distance into town. Pretty soon a generic car stops to give me a lift. Well, I wouldn’t be telling you this if it weren’t the Trio that picked me up, in a rental car they’d driven in from Chicago. I remember the older-than-college-guy laughter and verbal confidence among them. Brother-less me, I felt so cool being with them.

I got married out there a few years later, moved to Cleveland with a little daughter who would crawl around the floor while I stood or sat in the top floor of a double-house apartment smoking Tareytons and listening incessantly to ‘California Bloodlines’.

That daughter is 38 now. There are two other grown daughters, and an ex-wife. On Sunday I emailed the three girls to tell them John Stewart had died.

I was in Boston for the weekend when I got the news. I had none of his music with me. It wasn’t till Monday night that I got back to it, and the big poster.

For over 40 years, with occasional, irresistible, obvious exceptions, I listened to John Stewart almost exclusively. You can imagine how I feel. Some of you know.

Bill Gunlocke
bgunlocke@nyc.rr.com

2007-07-27T14:29:00.000-07:00

I Found a Free Weekend Getaway
Our Town downtown
July 30, 2007

A month ago I stayed in someone’s apartment near Washington Square while they were away. I went over to the park to read that Friday evening while it was light out because I had nothing going on and because I hadn’t spent much time in that park recently. I wound up sitting there for maybe three hours listening to music, watching folks walk by, hardly reading it was so stimulating to just watch and listen.

I came back the next morning with the Times and a cup of coffee, and when I realized that I didn’t actually ***[ital]have[ital]*** to go hurry back to the apartment to watch the women’s tennis final from Wimbledon – or anything on the TV for that matter – all day or all year or all the rest of my life, if I didn’t want to, I was liberated to think that I could sit in the park and watch people go by and listen to music, go get my book, and come back for more. I did that ’til dark. I did it the next day, too. It was like being on vacation. (Anybody who has a weekend place or a summer cottage without a TV will tell you that that’s an [the?] all-important component in being “on vacation.”)

Here’s what I thought about while I sat there:

The fountain ought to be on all the time. The empty dry pool that’s there when it’s off certainly does allow for some noisy, tourist-interesting entertainment. But those guys would find other places to put on their show, and New York’s filled with all sorts of entertainment. Parks are better with fountains on on hot days. It’s a beautiful thing to look at.

There’s no coffee there. You can get all sorts of popsicles, big pretzels, water in bottles, soda pop. But you have to walk a ways out of the park for a cup of coffee. I don’t want the Shake Shack – I just thought it was odd that no one in such an entrepreneurial city was selling coffee from a truck near there.

I love dogs. I grew up with dogs. I had a dog that died at age 16 just before I moved here nine years ago. I still miss him, and have his old dog dish out where I can see it in my apartment. Sometimes in the kitchen I’ll find myself sweeping crumbs off the counter on to the floor as if he were still around to lick them up. I catch myself maybe once every couple months when I’m out somewhere around dinnertime thinking I better get home to feed the dog. That having been said, the dog obsession in/around the dog runs is a little much. No one else’s obsessions are fun to watch.

Some of the music is so good that you can’t believe it. You also can’t believe that so many of the listeners won’t put a measly dollar in the basket.

I saw six impressively strong, alert, no-nonsense plainclothes cops round up six easily-over-40 black drug dealers. While I was watching this occur not 100 feet from me, another dealer strolled by me on my bench and, with his eyes and a soft mumble, tried to sell me some. I wondered how the three black cops felt putting cuffs on these toothless old tigers.
That there are bathrooms at all is a nice surprise. God, are they dirty though. I feel bad for women.

I’d make the bathrooms cleaner even if I had to have an attendant in there all the day. I guess I’d clean up the whole place a little. I’m not sure what I’d do. Make sure the grass is green. Keep the fountain on. That fountain being on makes the whole place feel cleaner. When it’s off, the place seems faded and dried out a bit.

I wouldn’t put a Shake Shack place in the park. That’s all too cute. I don’t hate those places. We all have to eat. But I’d rather have the chess guys in the corner even if they don’t mean much to me. I don’t play chess. But it annoys me to see people standing in a long line at the Shake Shack or at a sushi place or at a breakfast place that will not be as good as Denny’s.

If you don’t have a weekend getaway, get away from your TV and sit in the park the whole time. Read a book, read the paper, hears some tunes, talk quietly on your phone, go get a sandwich and bring it back.

—BILL GUNLOCKE
bgunlocke@manhattanmedia.com

2007-07-20T06:07:00.000-07:00

When Barry Goes ‘Downtown’, He’ll Go Without Me
Our Town downtown
July 23, 2007

When you read this, Barry Bonds may have already hit the last home run he needed to get beyond Henry Aaron. Boo, that’s what I say. Here’s how much I say Boo: I have not watched baseball all year. Which is something when you consider that I twice went to Tucson to see the Indians in spring training with my youngest daughter. And that I would have named my oldest daughter Willie if I’d known then that I wouldn’t ever have a son.

One night last week I stopped for one beer up the block at 10:00. It’s not a sports bar but there’s an old TV at either end of the place. I took out a pencil and made little notes in a notebook about stuff rather than get into the Mets, or the Yankees on the tube. And I’ve stopped watching Sports Center too because they, after having excoriated (basically buried) Bonds over the last couple years, now count down his march toward Aaron like it was Aaron himself going after Ruth. And while I still save the sports page till last every morning to savor it like I have since I was a kid with major league pennants on my pajamas, I find myself now getting through it as quickly as the business section.

The other day after Bonds hit two in one game against the Cubs at Wrigley Field, he said, after having sat out for a couple games, that he felt ‘rejuvenated’. Here’s what I thought: maybe he went and got his human growth hormone, or whatever he might use, level adjusted after the recent dry spell he’d gone through. That’s what I thought. That’s what his history has put in my mind. That’s why it’s no fun for me anymore. I don’t even know if he’s using anything right now, but if I have to think about it, that’s a turn-off. It distracts me from the game. I used to think, like every man who went to college was supposed to, that baseball was ‘the perfect game’ and getting home was like the Odyssey and all that. Steroids have taken that away from me. Just like Michael Richards’ racist rant has taken the fun out of Seinfeld. When he slides into Jerry’s apartment now, I don’t just see Kramer anymore. That ruins it. I don’t watch it at all anymore. Jason Giambi hit a home run last year when I was sitting in a bar and I looked down at my glass rather than watch his trot around the bases.

It’s weird what we get outraged by. James Frey’s being dishonest in his memoir rocked the world for a month or more. We hated him. Giambi we still love, the big lug. Well, I don’t.

We’re supposed to hate Bud Selig instead. I don’t, anymore than I hate any wealthy, long-ago-compromised business guy. I don’t expect high standards from a club owner. Maybe the Rooneys who owned the Steelers were good guys, but I can’t remember anyone else. So I have no reason at all to expect an owner/commissioner to be a morally courageous guy. He might be a good dad. I’ll bet he is. But he’s certainly no one you should expect to go to the wall or against the grain. He’s a grabby mogul. Come on.

Who I am holding it against, besides the players themselves, of course, and their parents and the managers who are supposed to look out for the boys (Say it ain’t so, Joe), are the sportswriters. Where were they? Where was Lupica, and Dave Anderson and William C. Rhoden and all the other sportwriters in this town and all around the country who’ve got bold things to say about Tom Coughlin, and Dick Cheney even ? Yo, guys, you didn’t notice? Didn’t see muscles where there weren’t any the year before? Didn’t see homeruns flying off the bats of second basemen? I’ll read James Frey before I’ll read those guys about Bonds again. They’ll be blaming Bud Selig, anyway, or George Bush when he owned the Rangers. If they’d have done their job at the time, maybe things would be different this summer for me, and Hammerin’ Hank Aaron.

Bill Gunlocke

bgunlocke@manhattanmedia.com

2007-07-15T14:39:00.000-07:00

John, Paul, George, Ringo—and Harry
Our Town downtown
July 16, 2007

Last week I saw an ad in one of the dailies for back-to-back shows on PBS; one was on John Lennon, one was on Paul McCartney. I didn’t watch either of them. But I have an old Walkman that gets a few TV stations and I happened to take a walk through the East Village the night they were on and so listened to some of the Lennon one. (Try doing that with your TV.) Anyway, while I’m not much of a music listener anymore, and seldom put any tunes on, my whole being lights up when I hear almost any Beatle tune. One will come on in a bar once in awhile, and for three minutes life for almost everyone in the place I have to believe is transformed. I think I can see it in their eyes and from the way their lips are moving a little with the lyrics. Conversations stop for a bit, maybe just a second. In my 60 years, nothing has been as big in life as the Beatles. I’m way more a sports nut than a music guy, but not even Willie Mays was as big. Or Michael.

I can remember driving through the hills of Western New York as a teenager on my way from my rural hometown to Cooperstown with my girlfriend to see Casey Stengel and Ted Williams inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. On the ride there, on the car radio, we heard ‘Paperback Writer’ for the first time. Whenever the Hall of Fame comes up in talk among buddies and I tell them I was there the day Casey and Ted Williams went in their eyes light up. My biggest memory though was not the ceremony but that drive through the hills on the way there and back with that new Beatle tune on. (I think ‘Rain’ was the flip side.)

Here’s why I’m thinking of that today. Some day maybe 50 years from now some guy will be sitting at a keyboard telling some readers that the biggest thing in the life of the culture during his lifetime were the Harry Potter books. He may be from here or Omaha or Birmingham or Cape Cod or from a rural town in Western New York and he’ll remember his equivalent of driving to Cooperstown. Whatever it might be; the first book, the birthday gift from his now-dead mother, the third time he read the second book, the night he stood in line at the big store in the mall with his buddies at midnight to get the newest one, how he read 700 pages in one weekend.

The Harry Potter thing is so big my eyes water about it sometimes knowing it’s like the Beatles to millions of kids. Years from now they’ll happen upon one of the movies flipping though the channels. They’ll buy the books for their kids hoping to light up their lives. Publishers will release 25-year anniversary editions. 50-year boxed sets will appear. J.K. Rowling will come out on stage at 75 at the Oscars for some special honor and the kid that plays Harry in the movies will walk onstage looking eerily like what John Lennon might have looked like if he had lived that long.

I wasn’t, and am not, a reader of the Harry Potter books and while I really thought the first movie was wonderful, I have not seen the others. Like my father never listened to the Beatles, I guess I wanted to leave the books for the younger generation and not be that baby boomer can’t-miss-a-thing guy about them. But I did observe it all wide-eyed. I used to own a bookstore and just the publishing phenomenon of Harry alone was enough to fascinate me. I had made a note to go to the Scholastic store on Lower Broadway for some Harry Potter event on the evening of September 11, 2001. I may have even thought about it that morning when I woke up. I saw Jim Dale at the big Barnes & Noble on Union Square read in all the characters’ voices one night. I’ll never forget the kids’ faces in the audience. It was a kind of Beatlemania.

‘It took me years to write, would you take a look…’

Bill Gunlocke

bgunlocke@manhattanmedia.com

2007-07-06T12:18:00.000-07:00

My Friend Says It’s The Schools
Our Town downtown
July 9, 2007

So my old Midwest-college friend lives in Westchester now with his second wife and a couple new kids and when, over beers in a little Mexican place in Mt. Kisco on July 4th, I again tried to get him to come to his senses and move back into the city with his new family, he said he understood all the reasons I was giving, but that the schools were much better up there, and that’s why people moved there from Manhattan.

I’ll get to the schools in a minute. No doubt they’re better there. But that’s not the definitive reason my buddy’s staying, or most of the others up there are. I think they just like living there. They use the schools as a cover, so you don’t see the real reasons, like how much they like walking into the back yard while they’re on their cell phones, or how handy it is that they have a washer and dryer right by the back door. Or that all their late-parents’ photos and dining room table chairs are right there in their basement instead of in a storage unit in Queens. I also think they like having a car with the ballgame on. And they like the playing fields nearby, and a library in town that stays lit until 9:00 at night. They can get the Times and bagels and pizza and Starbucks and the new Ian McEwan book right there on Main Street. That’s why they’re there, even though, of course they miss all the things I—or you—could throw at them to try again to get them to see how cool it truly is here. They may, indeed, from the remove of the suburbs, think the city is cooler than even we do; they just aren’t coming back yet. It’s the schools, they reiterate.

Let’s say it is the schools. No doubt schools are a big part of why they left and aren’t coming back for a while if ever. How can it be that the schools are worse here? Why would that be? Is the Merrill Lynch office worse here than the one in Stamford? Are the bagels not as good as in Armonk? Can you not buy Crocs here? Is there a bigger Bergdorf Goodman in Darien? Are there better musical theaters in Scarsdale than on Broadway? Of course not. Then how come all those places you can think of have better public schools than we do here?
Can it be a money thing? Does New York City not have the money? That can’t be, can it? There must be plenty of money, if the city can drive by the big brokerage houses and throw money—suitcases full of it—out the window at them to get them to stay here. There were more suitcase filled with loot, weren’t there, to throw at the Jets to get them to move into the city? There’s money. The city just doesn’t spend as much per pupil on its schools as Westchester towns do.

More is at work—or not at work—than that. My buddy’s oldest kid, from this new batch, before they moved did go to a public school here. It wasn’t bad, he says. But he mentioned this: there was a broken part of the outer door to the school. I think he said like a panel. It was broken when the school year began; it was still not fixed when school let out in June. Come on. That’s not because of money. I’d say that that’s a lack of will.

Maybe the lack of deep attention—the kind of deep attention that’s given, along with mountainous tax breaks, to brokerage houses—to the schools is because the city’s school kids are mostly minorities. You know that’s some of the reason. That has to be addressed. It is not being addressed enough. If it were, the schools would be better. How can we live here knowing not enough is being done for the kids and feel so good about living here?

—Bill Gunlocke

bgunlocke@manhattanmedia.com

2007-06-29T07:48:00.000-07:00

The Mike Bloomberg Show. Would You Watch?
Our Town downtown
July 2, 2007

When the Clintons were running for their second term in the White House, somebody commented that they’d win for sure because we had become an all-consuming, TV-watching nation and the Clintons offered us a sitcom-worthy dysfunctional-family show that we were in no way going to cancel just yet. They were just too much fun to watch, what with no 9/11 upon us and the Silicon Valley tiger still roaring along and balancing the budget. They were a fascinating show to watch in that easy time.

That very TV obsession of ours could be why Hillary and Rudy are in the lead. They’re two people we like to watch for whatever odd and not-odd reasons. They’re just weird enough to be ever-interesting to us in a TV way. You’d watch 10 minutes of John McCain and start flipping through the channels. Five or ten minutes of John Edwards. Surprisingly, I don’t think we really want to watch Obama for a whole season. He’s turned out to be kind of boring. You wouldn’t think he’d be, but he is. I think we thought he’d be like Tiger Woods or Derek Jeter because he made you think of them in his bi-racial gracefulness and his likeability and intelligence. But those guys, who were just picked as the country’s favorite two athletes, do something. They win majors and World Series rings. Obama just talks calculatingly and always looks good. Who wants to watch that? He’s too mild for a hit TV show. Other than the fact that he supposedly smokes and that his brother-in-law coaches hoops at Brown, he’s not tube-interesting in any special way.

Fred Thompson is the worst-looking human who’s ever even considered running for president. He looks like a criminal. Or a warden. Who’d watch that show without squirming? Mitt Romney is too-nice-looking. Something seems odd about him for that reason. Interestingly odd, because we don’t know anybody quite like him in our own lives, but not enough people want to watch that show. The Mormon show is already being done on HBO.

So, what about The Mike Bloomberg Show? Would you watch it? Would people outside New York watch it enough to make it a hit? Remember, hits are what people want. Hillary or Rudy would be a hit, no doubt; she probably the bigger hit with Bill’s potential infidelities a part of the plot. Of course, though, Rudy’s got quite a supporting cast of characters himself. It’ll be a tough call to see who of the two will go up strong against Monday Night Football.

But what about Mike? What’s he got that’s good TV material? For one, he’s a billionaire. That’s TV-interesting. He has a bunch of homes, luxury homes like you see in those heavy Sotheby’s real estate ‘books’ they put in the Times now and then. Maybe like the Clintons sold over-night stays in the White House, Mike could put up people in his Bermuda home, or one of the others, if the Lincoln bedroom is booked. Maybe President Bloomberg would refuse to go to Camp David or even live in the White House like he eschewed Gracie Mansion in favor of his nicer digs on 79th Street. That is good TV material. So, is his size vis-a-vis his good-looking, model-tall girlfriend. So is just the fact that he’s a president with a girlfriend. A bachelor in the Oval Office. Boffo TV. A Jewish bachelor in the Oval Office, to boot. Better yet. With a Jewish mother still alive. Come on. It’s getting good.

Plus, he’s got that voice. If Tom Brokaw and Barbara Walters –and Newman--can make it big on the tube with their voices, why can’t Mike with his? That voice of his is an odd instrument. It may go over big, like Urkel. It’s a clean voice, a little bit of a sissy voice maybe, but clean in a good way. And it’s precise and confident, like that of a successful guy who’s used to being at the head of the conference table. That might work on the tube. And he’s certainly got the clothes for the role. He dresses perfectly. His haircut is good too.

I think the show would fly. I think he thinks so too. Stay tuned.

Bill Gunlocke

bgunlocke@manhattanmedia.com

2007-06-21T15:07:00.000-07:00

A Penny for Your Thoughts. Really?
Our Town downtown
June 25, 2007

You shake your head at the headline in the Times, ‘Schools Plan to Pay Cash for Marks’. You can’t resist the impulse to get angry about it and you get mad at Klein and Bloomberg, and Gates and Jobs, and everybody involved in TV while you’re at it, that they’ve let it (hell, hurried it, actually) come to this; that we have to pay kids now to open a book and read it long enough to answer some simple questions on a test. How lame is that! You couldn’t be lamer, if you ask me. Bloomberg and Klein and every person in town who cares about kids, or claims to, should all get in a big room and have that headline projected up on a huge screen at the front of the room. The rest of the day or week or year (or years) should be taken up with how it’s come to that and what can be done about it that week to make a dignified correction to our way of schooling so we don’t have to stoop to paying kids. No one could leave until the ‘what can be done’ part is decided upon and set in motion by the end of that week.

In this city, with the richest history of transforming lives through opportunity and education in the world, it’s come to this: We’re going to pay kids to study?

It’s not unprecedented though, this paying kids to do well in school, even in my life. In the small rural Western New York State town I grew up in, four brothers lived two doors away. Their father was a doctor. He was kind of a moody guy who wouldn’t wave to you even if he was driving by slowly and must have seen you waving to him like you waved to just about everyone in a town that size when they were driving by looking for someone who might be waving at them. You’d eventually learn to line yourself up with trees next to the sidewalk as cars passed, to avoid all that waving, But none of this eagerness or hiding mattered to the doctor; he would stare straight ahead and just keep driving.

The doctor was a smart guy and played chess at lunch time when any of the four boys were around to play with him. He liked the Yankees and would always watch their games with the boys. I envied all that and used to hang out over there. They always had big cases of pop in the garage and your large glass was always filled with ice and exotic brands from the cases, like Cream Soda. The doctor smoked and had a wooden dispenser-like thing on the knotty-pine wall in the TV room where one pack of Camels would be replaced by another when he took one. Like a Pez dispenser on the wall. There was a stuffed fish on a plaque right next to it.

Their mother was smart too. She was on school boards and library boards and if women had been allowed to take up the collection at mass at the Catholic church she’d have been extending the long-handeled basket among the pews with the best of them. So, the four boys were smart and mostly a cut above the other kids in the small parochial school just up the street from them—and me. I wasn’t in class with any of them. Three of them were older, one was decidedly younger. I amend that: one year I was in class with the boy two years older. So small was the town and the Catholic grade school we went to, that when I was in third grade, the third and fifth grades were combined in one classroom. I remember him being real smart. I also remember him having a bottle of prescription red cough medicine in the back pocket of his heavy corduroy pants. He’d take a slug out of that whenever he wanted. The brothers were a confident bunch, and the nuns loved them.

But they didn’t get good grades just because the nuns loved them. They were smart and would have gotten good grades in the rural setting our growing-up took place in if they’d never even bought their school books. At home, they had stacks of comic books and sports magazines and the whole set of the Hardy Boys. That they’d get ‘all A’s’ was a given. But that didn’t stop their ol’ man, the doctor, from giving them a dollar for every A they got. We couldn’t believe that! A dollar!

Looking back on it, it was having all those books and magazines and comics that made them know stuff in school. The dollar for every A was after the fact. Yo, presidential-hopeful-despite-your-denial Mike Bloomberg, you must know that. Come on.

Bill Gunlocke

bgunlocke@manhattanmedia.com

2007-06-15T14:19:00.000-07:00

May I Recommend ‘Falling Man’
Our Town downtown
June 18, 2007

My middle grown daughter loves Three Lives bookstore in the Village and goes there a lot apparently just to hang among the books and see what's new. She said she picked up Don DeLillo's new novel 'Falling Man' off the table and read the first paragraph and put it down when she realized it was about 9/11. She obviously hadn't seen the back of the book, which she must have assumed was a just the standard picture of DeLillo or some old blurbs about 'Libra' or 'White Noise'. The back is an extension of the blue sky of the front cover, but with the Twin Towers standing up through the clouds.

I'd read the book; that's how we got talking about it. I thought of it as my story, like you would if you read it. We all take that day personally. But I've been wondering since my daughter mentioned putting the book down, what younger people who saw the towers fall or heard all the noise carry around with them. A buddy (and a father) always reminds me that you never really know what your kids are thinking, and I know that, but I wonder how the world looks to the young people who were probably out at a bar or a restaurant the night before. Are they OK? I mean she said she put the book down after seeing it was about 9/11. The book makes you think about it all again. The Times’ Michiko Kakutani didn't care for it, but she is so annoying you can't read her anymore.

I wonder what the young people make of how long it's taking us older people to get the new tower or the memorial (which is it? I can't remember) built at Ground Zero. What do they think of Chase getting a great deal-among-older-guys to build there? What do they think of the pictures of the men in dark suits and shovels with hard hats on, all smiling like Robert Moses?

Do sirens get them thinking about it still? A woman at dinner the other night told me she still thinks about it every time she hears an especially persistent siren. I saw a long line of cop cars twice last week speeding somewhere and I wondered. I cried a couple times reading 'Falling Man'.

DeLillo's the guy people had been waiting for to write about 9/11. The day was all so personal and proprietary that his take on it was certain to bug some critics. It did. But I almost started reading it again right after I got to the ending. It held me in a way that I wound up not wanting to let go. It was the first thing since the attack that felt like the days after. For all the photos and all the great amateur footage of the days after I've stared at, this book felt the most like it.

I hope they build a bookstore down around Ground Zero. Downtown needs more bookstores. There have to be places a daughter can go where she can happen upon something like a book by Don DeLillo. Where else can you go but a bookstore and not be assaulted by the cheese of commercial signage and taxicabs with last night scores in lights on top?

I gave my ‘Falling Man’ to the woman of the couple I had dinner with the other night. I don’t know if they’ll read it or not. They have TiVo and that doesn’t mean they’re watching less TV. They’re just watching fewer commercials. They’ve got stuff backed up like stacks of old ‘New Yorker’s waiting to be watched. It’s tough for a book to get face-time in the world of TiVo. Even if Charlie Rose has an author on often, he gets more turned on by guys who invent stuff like TiVo.

What can you do? You can’t make people read Don DeLillo’s ‘Falling Man’, even New Yorkers who should have been in line waiting for it.

bgunlocke@manhattanmedia.com

2007-06-11T08:48:00.000-07:00

Way Too Many Cars Here, For Sure
Our Town downtown
June 11, 2007

I don’t hate cars. Nobody does. A letter to the editor in this issue even points out that Al Gore rode in cars to his various readings around town a couple weeks ago. Cars are a remarkable invention, honed over the decades to fit us in so comfortably behind the wheel that even the clumsiest of us seem to coordinate feet, eyes and hands well enough that we get to our destination without causing a wreck. You wouldn’t think that was possible after watching people waddle and veer as they ‘walk’ along the sidewalks here. Somehow behind the wheel they waddle and veer less. Go figure.

I miss having a car sometimes. I have listened to almost no music since I moved here nine years ago. The car was where my tunes were. How can you listen to Bruce Springsteen sitting in your apartment anyway? You have to go through the gears on some of the best tunes to get everything out of them. Think the triumphant Jerry Maguire screaming ‘Free Fallin’’.

Too many cars in a small area is a bad scene though. New York City is too small an area for all the cars that come in here every day.

Last week a buddy came in by car from Connecticut to take me to breakfast on my birthday. The rigmarole he went through to try to find a place to park on the street near my apartment was nuts, a stupid way to spend time. The drive to find a place in a parking garage was a wander. When we did find one, the guy waved us off; he was full already at 7:30. We begged him and he let us stay for two hours while we ate. After breakfast, my friend said he‘d give me a ride to work. No going. He had to drop me off three blocks away from the office, so heavy was the traffic. Later after work my kids were coming to get me for a birthday dinner. They called to say they’d be late because of the traffic on the avenues and the cross-streets in the Village.

So who can not be for some version of Mayor Bloomberg’s adoption of London’s charging drivers who want to go into the business/busyness area of the city? People think it’s a bold plan on the mayor’s part. It was bold for London mayor. Once you saw it worked there, how could a New York City mayor not try it? I like Mike, but it takes no genius to follow a leader who’s figured out a way to lessen a major problem. He’d have been a fool not to propose this.

It has to happen. Some version of it. Do I like the idea that it’ll take all sorts of movie cameras to monitor it? Of course not, who does? But what are you going to do? Outlaw cars and make it look like that little area by the river in San Antonio that they always show during Spurs games? You want some cars. Wouldn’t you rather have cars going by than a street fair in your neighborhood every day? I would. Cars and their movement give some energy and pace to the place. But they have to be controlled.

One thing I’d like to see happen if the number of cars is reduced in the city is for the street light patterns to change. One of the maddening things about living here, without a car, in a city that gets pats on the back for being a great walking city, is to have the street lights timed so that if you walk at a normal pace you get stopped at every corner as you walk along the avenues. It can drive you nuts if you have to go far, especially if you walk the same route every day. You find yourself breaking into a trot every few blocks just to break the pattern. But the pattern gets you again the next block.

Oh, and one more thing; while the mayor’s putting up the cameras to catch the scofflaws, I wish he’d order as many more cameras as it takes to monitor the speed of all the cars in the city. It is unconscionable how fast some cabs and other cars go up and down the streets here.

Bill Gunlocke

bgunlocke@manhattanmedia.com

Teaching to the Test is a Good Thing

2007-06-01T08:15:00.000-07:00

Our Town downtown
June 4, 2007

If you want to be thought of as cool or progressive or humanistic, you say you don’t like tests. When it comes to schools, you say, don’t teach to the tests. You say No Child Left Behind is misguided, because it makes teachers do just that, teach to the tests.
If you’re one of those, you’re like me. And, like me, you probably thought, or just intuited, that the whole-language approach was better than phonics for teaching kids to read. But we were way off on that, according to almost all the studies. Maybe we’re way off on the tests too. I hope we are, because it was just announced last week that the city schools are going to test the kids in grades 3 through 8 five times a year now in both math and reading. Even the high school big kids are going to be tested in all their subjects four times a year.
I surprise myself; I’m all for it. I changed my mind. Can I change yours? The tests can only help the schools here where all kind of help is needed. You can’t avoid tests, shouldn’t avoid them.
If you go to the gym, there’s a scale. Fat guys—and thin guys—weigh themselves routinely with their little towels around them. They want to see how they’re doing. They want to know that what they’ve been doing is working. They want to know if it’s not working, so they can do more, or do something different. If they run, they use a good watch to time the whole thing. Same with swimmers. You might see either of them checking their pulse in the neck or at their wrist. If they use the treadmill, they monitor the monitor. Golfers want to know how far their drives go at the driving range. It’s only natural to want to know how you’re doing. Coaches also want to know how you’re doing.
Teachers do (did, at least) too. Remember in grade school how you’d have a spelling quiz every single week. There would be math quizzes all the time. You’d have to do questions at the end of every chapter in history. You have to do the same in science. It isn’t like we sat outside under an apple tree listening to a teacher who changed his costume every class to look like Louis Pasteur one period and then Ben Franklin the next and then Rosa Parks. Mostly it was read the stuff and you’ll be tested on it. Wasn’t that sort of teaching to the test? Weren’t we studying for the test? What’s the big deal about tests?
These new tests are only like 45 minutes long. It isn’t like they’re anxiety-inducing, all-day deals. They’ll probably be about 30 minutes when you factor in classroom management and forgotten pencils. What’s the big deal? Do teachers avoid tests now because the whole system is so bad, they’d rather not know how the class is doing? Or is part of their reluctance to embrace the new testing program a result of teachers not wanting to have to grade a big stack of tests five times a year? But now the kids can take the test on computers, and they can be graded easily that way.
There are all sorts of things that should be tried in an effort to improve the school experience in the city’s public schools. These tests will certainly not be the whole answer, but they can help by showing what’s working and what’s not working. Coaches at half time get handed a clipboard by one of the assistants and on it are stats like the number of offensive rebounds the team got in the first half. The numbers tell who on the other team is killing them, who’s in foul trouble. Once these numbers are looked at, adjustments can be made to do better in the second half, in order to win the game. That’s the goal. It’s the goal of school too. You want the kids to do well. If some numbers on these new tests will give the teacher and the principal some guidance in going forward, how can anyone resist them? It isn’t like these kids are studying the sonnets of Shakespeare with such intensity that one period five times a year devoted to a test will knock them off their game.
Good for the Mayor and Chancellor Klein.
—Bill Gunlocke
bgunlocke@manhattanmedia.com

If the Mayor's Running, We Need Imus Back

2007-05-25T07:17:00.000-07:00

Our Town downtown
May 28, 2007

I wish Imus were still on. He probably will be again. He’s gotta’ be. You can’t get by on Charlie Rose and those other guys. I’ll bet Imus could get more out of Warren Buffett over the phone in 10 minutes than Charlie got in fawning over him for an hour a couple weeks ago. Warren would laugh at/with the I-man which would tell you something about him you wouldn’t get on another show where, if they’re like Charlie, they’d do all the laughing, for some unknown reason. No, actually it’s not unknown; they’re so overly impressed with the guest they have on that they’re giddy/nervous and can’t control themselves. Imus wouldn’t really give a damn about Warren Buffet unless he found out Warren liked his favorite singer Delbert McClinton. Of course that’s not totally true, but at least Imus may have been drunk in Omaha once which is worth something when it comes to talking to Warren Buffett.

Which is why you wish Imus were on now when all sorts of pols are running around trying to look and sound presidential. (In saying all this I don’t excuse Imus for what he said about the Rutgers girls. He’s a genius and such folks make darker mistakes than average bears do.) With Mayor Bloomberg quietly checking out his chances, I’d love to hear what Imus would say about it. Did you notice the Bloomberg ad (for the company, not Mike) during ‘60 Minutes’ last week? That had to be a campaign ad, didn’t it? A campaign ad in the sense that it got his name out there. I think that’s what it was. He’s serious about this idea of being president. If he finds out he’s got no shot, he’ll say he only ever wanted to our mayor, but he’s out for all he can get. A guy with all those homes, wants it all. If he brought out his standard line about being short and Jewish and divorced , Imus would tell him to get some cowboy boots from his good friend out in Santa Fe, He’d tell him to marry that big, good-lookin’ girlfriend of his, and he’d tell him to call the I-man’s friend Kinky Friedman about the Jewish problem. He’d probably get Kinky on the line where Kinky would tell the mayor he could use the line he used in his Texas gubernatorial race: ‘If you elect me the first Jewish governor of the state of Texas, I’ll reduce the speed limit to 54.95.’ It would be funny and Mike would laugh out loud which you don’t see or hear him do much. And it would all be done with Imus wearing his cowboy hat, and not like Charlie Rose wearing a bespoke suit from the same tailor the Mayor might go to.

You wish Don Imus were on today when, as I write this, folks are lining up at the Barnes & Noble on Union Square to hear Al Gore talk about, and read from, his brand new book. I-man doesn’t like (or at least, didn’t like) Al Gore. I’m not sure why and I don’t want to speak for the deposed radio star. But you could probably reach into your own mind and come up with the reasons he didn’t like him. It would be fun to hear Imus go on about it. Someone has to. Gore’s being treated like he’s Brian Wilson being inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He’s not that. Al Gore was never a major talent. He’s hot right now though, and you need someone who’s an insider/outsider like Imus to talk about it. You can laugh about Imus and the hat and all that and dismiss him as a racist cowboy if you want, but do you want to hear Larry King and Chris Matthews and Bill Moyers with Al Gore, more than with Imus? Imus is smarter than all four of them is why you want to hear Imus. And he’s not excited by, impressed by Al Gore. Hell, the I-man was so relaxed, unimpressed, not excited about meeting then-candidate Bill Clinton, he was the one who dubbed him Bubba.

The whole campaign for president will be a great spectator sport. I read where XM radio is going to have 24-hour coverage of it starting pretty soon. But with the mayor of our city maybe going to run, and with Al Gore maybe going to run, and with Hillary Clinton for sure going to run, you want Imus telling you what he sees in them.

Bill Gunlocke

bgunlocke@manhattanmedia.com

A View from the Corner

2007-05-18T14:11:00.000-07:00

Our Town downtown
May 21, 2007

David Crohn’s cover story on the preservation of the character of the South Village got me thinking about neighborhoods and how they change.

If I stand on my corner at 21st and Third and look up Third to 23rd I can see huge construction. I don’t usually notice it, huge as it is. I notice the posters all along the side of the site, advertising movies, and sneakers, and newly-released CDs. Eventually there’ll be some big high rise. What used to be there seemed like it would always be there, like it had always been there. When I moved into the neighborhood five years ago, some of the places on this block under construction were places that stood like veterans, to me the rookie, and I wanted to get to know them and wanted them to know who I was. The big corner newsstand was one of those that sold Foreign Affairs and Boston papers and all the fashion mags. I remember I had run up there the morning after 9/11 to get a newspaper. There were no newsstands open that day in the East Village where I lived then.

Up from the newsstand was a wonderful bar with the wonderful name, Poolbeg Street, named after a street in Dublin. Vinny the bartender by the door knew sports. We got to know each other. Up the block from there was Johnny Fox’s, another venerable pub. Now they’re gone. Those three places mattered to me and to other neighbors. People from outside the neighborhood would take cabs to come there. A big apartment building will make it a whole different block.

Across the street and back toward me is a Starbucks. I don’t go to it anymore. I never went much. I stopped going to all the Starbucks because I read where the owner was asking the city of Seattle to pay for most of the cost of a new arena for the NBA team he owns there. He’s just like all the rest I decided, and he lost me. It’s funny about Starbucks. Those who hate it, hate the chain-ness of it, I guess. They hate its everywhere-ness too. But a block away from where I’m standing in the other direction a new Dunkin’ Donuts opened and people haven’t stopped smiling since. Is it the color of the place? Does it seem less arrogant than Starbucks? Does it remind us of home somewhere, like Tim Hortens reminds Canadians of home? It can’t really be the coffee. Can a chain be lovable? Dunkin’ it seems may be one that can be.

While I’m looking left, I can see that Pete’s Place is dark and will stay that way. Closed awhile ago for health violations, it never re-opened. To have sat in one of the small front tables when they opened the big windows and have the morning sunlight light up your orange juice while you read the paper was as good as breakfast got in the city. Gone now. The citation from the health department was probably just the tipping point. The rent was likely killing him. Sweet-tooth Dunkin’ coming in across the street wouldn’t have helped.

You wonder how long before other places go. The CVS won’t go (and the lines in there won’t go any faster, until the manager calls on the three young employees sitting in different aisles stocking shelves to come up and man a register), but other places might. Please let the first one be the pizza place. I used to say I’d never had a bad pizza. I can’t say that anymore.
Up the street is Molly’s, the great atmospheric Irish pub with the great burger and the sawdust floor and a fireplace in wintertime. Almost next to it is the Lyric Diner which doesn’t close and whose neon sign which raps around its corner-front is classic. Rolf’s the famous German bar and eatery is painting itself white as I write this. It’s worth a trip in late fall and definitely around Christmas time to look in the window. It’s like looking at an applause-inducing stage set. I’ve never gone in, but I’ve smiled through the window at the wonder of the inside.

There are more bars, two of which drive the tenants of my building nuts with their late-night street-smoking/talking noise, and a Korean grocery and a classy flower shop. Two busy bagel places. A Blimpies I’m standing across the street from. A vintage clothing shop that has a wonderful used book section. A small newsstand near Dunkin’ where the guys from the methadone clinic on the block congregate, bumming smokes from one another.

There’s a lot on the block. I’m sure yours has lots too. And change lurking, among all those things.

- Bill Gunlocke

bgunlocke@manhattanmedia.com

What It Is Ain’t Exactly Clear

2007-05-18T14:07:00.000-07:00

Our Town downtown
May 14, 2007

The picture in the Times last Friday of some NYU kids romping in the fountain in Washington Square Park after the graduation ceremony was the standard-fare shot of the predictable merriment that goes-on on such a day. The lead picture on NYU’s web site that day showed one of the graduates making bubbles.

Maybe they’re protesting at Oberlin’s graduation or at Evergreen State’s. You don’t hear about it though. You’d think there’d be some kids walking out on some speaker. If they’re not doing it in Washington Square Park, where are they doing it? I’m not suggesting they do it. I’m just thinking about why, with a very unpopular war on, in which all the casualties are kids their age, there isn’t much protest.

There are a couple reasons. First I think TV makes the whole world go flaccid. If you’re a student, Jon Stewart and Keith Olbermann and Bill Maher are making all the clever signs for you. No need to festoon your dorm windows with peace signs. It’s easier to sit and watch the TV people be clever about the war. All that sitting doesn’t really lend itself to a Chicago 7 lifestyle either.

The main reason (although it’s hard to raise anything above TV as the cause of most of the culture’s inactivity) is that the kid making bubbles is not worrying about the draft. Neither are the kids hopping into the fountain. For all the claims of how much this war is like Vietnam, to my graduation day memory it’s not. The draft loomed huge back then.

Indulge me: My father hardly talked to me after the ceremony. What was there to talk about? We hadn’t really talked in a few years. The war was going on in Vietnam and we didn’t agree on one thing that that war spawned. He was bothered by my long hair, my cigarettes and my bellbottoms. He didn’t care for the music. He was older than most of my friends’ fathers and he wasn’t a guy who was going to wear long sideburns like many dads did then. That bugged me. He wasn’t one to watch the Smothers Brothers or ‘Laugh-In.’ He thought the army might even do me some good. That bugged me. He’d been an officer in World War II. Sensing all that in him, I had to do things like play ‘The Eve of Destruction’ over and over at a high volume (Wouldn’t you think a junior in the dorm near Washington Square would have played that same song the other day, that loud, and over and over, while whoever spoke tried to speak at the commencement?) I had to wear a white armband at my graduation.

The draft dominated the lives of college students then. Not a day went by we didn’t worry over some table about it. All of us, it seemed, knew a kid back home somewhere who, with no student deferment like we had, got drafted after high school, sent to Vietnam, and was killed. As soon as school was over for us, we were no longer going to be protected from maybe the same fate. It drove us crazy. I could say we talked about nothing else, but that wouldn’t be true. We still read the sports page, played the jukebox. Motown was big. But draft worries dominated. I wound up teaching in an inner-city grade school in Cleveland to beat the draft. Guys somehow got in the National Guard. Others didn’t. Many friends went to Vietnam. Part of me envies them the experience. Hard to explain.

Anyway, it’s very different today, certainly for the students in an era of a volunteer army. They can take five or six years to graduate. We couldn’t. We, for all our protests, knew we were lucky to be white boys with a few bucks in our families. We got news from home about a kid from our high school that had been killed. The draft connected us to him. The college kids now don’t have that.

-- Bill Gunlocke

bgunlocke@manhattanmedia.com

What if Costco Came to Town?

2007-05-18T13:45:00.000-07:00

Our Town downtown
May 7, 2007

I’ve got a buddy Joe who lived here for awhile. He’s got this saying that seems to apply to so many things. We might have been talking in a bar about the increasing number of women getting face lifts and boob jobs and how many of them were going back for more work. Joe would just say ‘The biggest distance is between zero and one’. He’d say that about all sorts of things. Once you get started at something, the rest of its attendant pitfalls or exaggerations or addictions seemed to follow. Naturally, inevitably, according to Joe’s law.

I thought of Joe the other day when I read about Martha Stewart gearing up for a line of foods next year in Costco. It scared me that she’s teaming up with them. Her cachet will prompt more people to stop in the store for the first time and that will be their Joe’s-zero-to-one moment. They’ll get hooked. You know they will. They’ll be buying those big Kirkland brands, telling themselves that they aren’t at all like the Wal-Mart shoppers they read about. ‘Costco’s different. They sell wine more than any place else does. Did you know that? You should see the fish they sell. And their wages are very impressive. The only reason we keep that Escalade and don’t go to a Prius is that we need the space for when we come over here to Costco. Or when we go to Target. We buy in bulk. Did I tell you about the wine selection?’

I went to a Costco a few years ago. I was in South Florida at my sister’s and a buddy who moved down there came by for breakfast one morning; when we’d finished he asked if I wanted to ride over to Costco with him. I’d heard some kind of buzz about the place but didn’t really know what it was, so I said OK. It turned out to be pretty cool. I liked the lighting in the place. It was very bright, but that may have had to do with the bright sunshine outside the windows and the big doors. I don’t know if all the stores are like that. My friend bought a bunch of stuff. I grabbed a very big bottle of Kirkland Omega-3 fish oil tablets for cheap. But I got out of town before I got a real chance to get to ‘one’.

I could be vulnerable in a big way to any kind of chain store. I grew up so far out in the sticks that we had to go toward town to go huntin’. (That’s not my line. It’s John Cooper’s the old Ohio State football coach’s. I always wanted to use it.) My western New York hometown was very rural and very small. Try 2,003 people. We couldn’t even field a football team. We played soccer, as did a lot of the small towns around there. Main Street was only a block long, with a few shops on the highway that went by one on end of the street, down by the Mayflower restaurant, where the Greyhound bus stopped. Jim’s Diner was at the other end of the block, across from the post office, next to Stanley Niles’s 5 & 10 where you could buy a gold frame with a picture of Kim Novak in it. I bought caps for my cap gun in there. If you wanted BB’s for your BB gun you had to go up the street to Percy Shetler’s Gun & Tackle shop with a note from your parents that it was OK for him to sell you BB’s.

But we didn’t have a McDonald’s and there was no place to buy Levis. Oh, you could get Dickie’s at Homer Schaefer’s men store and all sorts of work pants and boots with steel toes, but we wanted Levis and to get them you had to go to an hour to Rochester, like you had to go there to get a Wilson baseball glove or the new Trini Lopez album with ‘If I Had a Hammer’ on it. We’d have killed for a Wal-Mart.

They have one about 20 minutes from town now. And the once-childhood-lively Main Street is pretty empty.

What’s my point? There’s no Costco here, you’re thinking. There will be. There’s a Home Depot. We sometimes go to Chipotle’s for lunch. You should see the line. Joe says it’s that way everywhere. It was no doubt such lines forming at the spanking-new airline terminals that allowed Penn Station to be taken down.

-- Bill Gunlocke

bgunlocke@manhattanmedia.com

An Inconvenient Truth

2007-05-18T12:23:00.000-07:00

Our Town downtown
April 30, 2007

Even with Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Joel Klein running the schools, two guys who have glossier resumes than you normally expect public school heads to have, even with them at the helm, only about half the city’s high school kids graduated in four years, according to important numbers released last week. That means half the kids didn’t even show up for school or class or something; you almost can’t go to class every day and not graduate from the city public schools. That 50% rate is about the same as the rates in Rochester and Syracuse and Buffalo. Half the kids in those places must have not really bought the program either.

That’s a glum statistic, isn’t it? It’s so flat and predictable it hardly dents our consciousness anymore. And, of course, the rest of the statistics show that the suburbs do much better. You’ve all heard that. And you know there’ll be the mandatory news reports about how much more they spend in Westchester per pupil, and you’ve all heard that the teachers there make more. And they’ll say New York City doesn’t get its fair share. And of course we want our fair share and we want our kids to have schools like Westchester does, or wherever it is that it all seems to work, as seen from here.

But look; we have Michael Bloomberg and Joel Klein. That’s big, isn’t it? Bloomberg is a bright mogul and a philanthropist and the good mayor of the biggest place in the country. Klein was a big lawyer in the Clinton administration. That should be the turnaround team you’d dream about. Two mature, accomplished guys in good suits, men used to succeeding, turning their attention to the problems of urban education. Westchester should be so lucky as to have two guys like that in charge of the schools, you’d think. They weren’t just given the reins, they grabbed for them, so fed-up were they by the failure they saw, so convinced were they that they could make things better.

Don’t you wonder why then, even with the two sharp guys running the system, the system scored about like Rochester did, or Buffalo, or Yonkers, places that didn’t have Westchester advantages either? Like major league batting averages seem to top out in the .300’s, no matter what gear or substance or training methods are used, is it going to turn out that 50% is about where urban school graduation rates are going to settle?

We seem to be settling for that number. We try to get our own kids in schools, private or public, where the rates are better. And of course the numbers are way better in Manhattan.
But does that mean we shouldn’t worry about the rest of the city kids? Are New Yorkers so remotely taken up with worrying about Iraq and Darfur and snowmobiles in Yellowstone that they can’t even see the disparities and injustices close to home? How can a borough that has renowned colleges and public lectures on everything from global warming to the Shirtwaist Factory fire not be talking all the time about the failure of the local public schools, schools that may not be where their kids go, but where kids go nevertheless and who need help from somewhere? Schools in the same city, for God’s sake, where the publishing industry is centered, where Harry Potter is published. Schools where the kids of the people who deliver your mail go. Why don’t we demand of ourselves to make the schools work for those kids? We New Yorkers want to save the whale and save Darfur and save the next Penn Station from the wrecking ball and save ourselves from Wal-Mart. We should want to save the 50% of the kids that don’t graduate on time. Shouldn’t we be marching over that? Why do we accept such a high rate of failure where New York City kids are concerned?

-- Bill Gunlocke

bgunlocke@manhattanmedia.com

Video Did Not Kill the Radio Star

2007-05-18T12:20:00.000-07:00

Our Town downtown
April 23, 2007

Most of the massive commentary the past two weeks on Don Imus’s screw-up was made by people who had been more-than-occasional guests on his show (exchanging and grinning the whole time, by the way; I heard them all over and over enjoying the hell out of being on with Imus and his pals) claiming that they sensed all along his potential to do/say what he did. Blahblahblah. It was ass-covering all the way, as you’d expect among the hyper image-conscious.

If the I-man could get behind the mic for a minute he’d call them all ‘a bunch of lying weasels’. And he’d be right. Here’s what I used to hear, and it fascinated me: The caller could be Tim Russert or Doris Kearns Goodwin or Jeff Greenfield or Brian Williams or Jon Meacham. To a person they’d almost always allude to some comment made maybe an hour earlier or the day before on the show by Charles or Imus or Bernie. And they’d call each of the guys by name. It at first surprised me. They were listening to Imus first thing in the morning? I guess I figured they’d be watching CNN or some such thing. But on the mornings when they were on, they definitely had been listening to the show way before they were scheduled to appear. They were regular listeners. They of course didn’t say that last week.

Radio—and not just Imus and Stern—has a lot of regular listeners, an engaged audience, in a way that TV doesn’t. Sure, television will hook you with a few shows. In the six or so hours it’s on in most homes every night with its hundred-plus channels, it would have to grab you occasionally. Friends rave about ‘The Office’. My oldest daughter, who wouldn’t know Brady Quinn from Anthony Quinn, says ‘Friday Night Lights’ is the best show that’s EVER been on. She and her sisters wouldn’t miss ‘Grey’s Anatomy’. They’ve got TiVo of course. People, for certain, love ‘The Sopranos’. I’m sure there are other shows with a big following. Maybe six others for all I know. But viewers don’t seem as deeply hooked on them as radio folks are hooked.

Radio folks are proud of their listening schedule. They love ‘This American Life’. They’ve loved Garrison Keillor like people loved Will Rogers. The Car Guys; what’s not to like, after all these years, still? Howard Stern. Do you think Matt and Katie and Charles Gibson matter to people like Stern matters to people? Do you think Chris Matthews matters like Imus mattered? Does CNN have the fervent following that NPR has? No way. Radio people are proud of their habit. TV people aren’t quite. They know it involves popcorn.

Radio by its nature is better. Bill Moyers and Charlie Rose would do better on radio than they do on TV. Oprah might too. Larry King was great years ago on late-night talk radio. His vanity was easier to listen to than to watch. Maybe Oprah is getting a little harder to look at the more she tries harder to look good. Radio would take care of that. Radio is good for you, like Guinness.
If video killed the radio star, it’s not how you think. Take Ray Suarez. He was about the best voice on NPR. TV seemed like a step up to him and now he’s a regular on the Jim Lehrer News Hour, which is so good it’s almost radio-good. But only almost, and Ray Suarez isn’t the guy he was on the radio.

Imus wasn’t much on TV either. I never watched him if I could help it; I always listened unless I was somewhere that didn’t carry his radio show. Then I’d watch occasionally. It was different, in more than the obvious ways. When I listened on the radio, I didn’t have to do anything but turn it on and set the volume. I could go do what I wanted then. Stir protein powder in my orange juice, look at my teeth in the bathroom mirror, read the easy parts of the morning paper. Yeah, you say, but you could still do those things with the television going, listen to Imus on the TV like it was radio, just don’t look at it. But I really couldn’t. TV doesn’t work that way. You know that. I’d have to go in to see what the I-man was doing every now and then, see what hat he was wearing that day, my spoon left standing in the juice glass.

-- Bill Gunlocke

bgunlocke@manhattanmedia.com

I Was an Imus Guy

2007-05-18T12:18:00.000-07:00

Our Town downtown
April 16, 2007

It’s maybe 1972. It’s morning and I’m sitting in my Volkswagen bug listening to the radio. I’m in St. Brendan’s grade school parking lot in a suburb of Cleveland where I moved after college because I was already married with a week-old child at graduation and I needed to beat the draft by teaching and I found a Catholic grade school in Cleveland that needed an English teacher.

I should be in the classroom already because it’s 7:55 and the kids will be coming soon and I have to be ready for them. But a disc jockey named Imus is on the radio and he’s being so funny and smart and bold and his voice is so good, that I don’t want to get out of the car until his bit is done.

Imus was in Cleveland for a few years. Maybe twice actually. When he moved here, I could get him there still. I didn’t listen to him every day that he was on. There was some music usually going in the car. But I listened to him enough that people thought of me as an Imus guy.
Am I still an Imus guy? Probably. Do I think he was wrong as could be with the Rutgers comments? No doubt. Do I think he should lose his show over it? Yes, when I think of the young women who play for Rutgers in front of hugely white crowds a half an hour from a mammoth city where a guy who they’ve never heard of is calling them names for no reason except to get a rush from saying something forbidden; and even though he doesn’t for a second think they are what he and Bernie called them, he couldn’t keep his tongue away from saying what it wanted to say because it had been trained for a lifetime to want to risk it all for a laugh.

I’ll learn to live without him. Actually I’ve been living without him since Christmas when somebody got me a Sirius radio. I’m hooked on all the talk stuff on there including Howard Stern, who I had never listened to before. Never, even though I’m a life-long talk radio listener. Now I listen to him sometimes, and I think he’s a genius.

Imus was a genius too. Look at that face and those eyes. He has a great voice. He’s smarter by nature than any guest he’s ever had on the show. If fools who couldn’t have been listeners want to still keep writing that he was a shock jock and write him off as that, well they’re just stupid. If they think Jon Stewart is smarter and funnier than Imus was for four hours every day, they didn’t listen to him. They probably wrote him off because of the cowboy hat, which I think he wore to keep himself and everyone else from taking him too seriously. He was so smart he could have been a scold or a wonkish diatribe guy. His hat kept him where he wanted to stay. He wanted to make fun of himself and his co-workers, his wife, his Jewish producer, Archbishop Egan, black people, rednecks, homosexuals, pols, the Hamptons crowd.

He knew music, he’d been a Marine, he collected first editions, he played chess with his young son, he loved his brother Fred, he was a recovering alcoholic and drug user, he chewed Nicorette gum like jelly beans. He’s helped sick kids for years. And he helped me through more than one bad morning. He was a very big deal to me. It’s Friday morning and it’s the first day Imus is not on the radio. The whole thing is sad.

In the messy-with-books-and-papers back seat of that VW I sat in and listened to Imus in in 1972, there could easily have been a beat up paperback of “Cat’s Cradle” or “Slaughterhouse-Five” or, my favorite, “God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater,” by Kurt Vonnegut.

-- Bill Gunlocke

bgunlocke@manhattanmedia.com

I’m Still Thinking Mike

2007-05-18T12:16:00.000-07:00

Our Town downtown
April 9, 2007

A few weeks ago we said here that we hoped Mike Bloomberg would run for President. Wouldn’t you know, right after we said that we read that he was in a slump, with the cops’ shooting of Sean Bell and the mayor’s not coming home when the 10 African immigrants burned to death in a Bronx fire; school bus problems, homeless family problems. OK, it was a string of non-successes for sure. But they weren’t utter-political-failure events, any of them. They didn’t change my mind. In fact now more than ever I hope he runs.

I just got an email from Obama—you probably did too—talking about his amazing feat of raising Hillary-level bucks. Oh, it is quite something, all that money so soon. He’s magic right now. He’s D-Wade. I don’t know what we want that’s more than that from him. Maybe nothing. He’s fresh when we need fresh. Not just because of Bush and Iraq either. We just want fresh. It’s a TV land we live in and he’s the new show. That’s the appeal. His being black is not something we’ve never seen before. His having gone to Harvard Law School is not out of this world either. Joe Biden was way off; Obama’s not articulate in some special new way to white people. Even the most sequestered white people have seen black politicians, actors, newscasters, and Tiger Woods. And Oprah, for God sakes. (Joe, seeing a U.S. senator with hair plugs is way more unusual to America’s eyes than seeing an articulate black person.)

I don’t know though that his freshness will not wilt. There’s no guarantee. He’s going to have to work at it and make fresh statements about the same old issues that are out there being talked about by all the candidates and he’s got to do it in a voice that’s better than anybody else’s. He’s got that ability. We’ll see how he does.

Hillary has a terrible voice. I don’t know if she can overcome it if she’s paired against Obama. Elizabeth Edwards has a wonderful voice with a great ability to choose the perfect word, but her husband doesn’t. He’s hard-charging smart but he’d be the weatherman on my broadcast team. Not the lead anchor. Obama would get that, with Elizabeth in the chair next to him. Hillary would get the weekends.

Rudy fascinates me, and not all negatively. Currently I’m fascinated by this though: Does he really think America will elect him and have his wife be the First Lady? There is no chance in hell that they’ll do that. Drop out now. Go back to your old haircut and get a show on TV or radio. You have a better voice than Obama and your sentence structure is the best I’ve ever heard in a candidate. So get a show. You and Judith are not going to be living in the White House.

John McCain’s soft voice is as phony as Woody Hayes, the old Ohio State football coach who slugged a player on the opposing team during a bowl game. He could talk just as soft as McCain though. I don’t trust that voice.

Mitt Romney is a guy if he lived on your street in whatever town or city you lived in, you’d probably call him The President. He’s got something in that way for sure. But he’s from yesterday and you’d be thinking of a president in some old movie. He can’t be president in these times. He’s just too old fashioned, even if it’s appealing on some level.That leaves Mike Bloomberg, who you’d never call Mr. President on your block. He wouldn’t live on your block. He’s got too much money to live near you. And I wouldn’t pick him for my news team either. He looks like a cute parrot and his voice doesn’t carry at all. And he bugs me that he needs so many material goods. All those homes. It’s sinful really. But I’ve got different sins of my own. So do you. He’d make a good president.

-- Bill Gunlocke

bgunlocke@manhattanmedia.com

My Night with the Knicks

2007-05-18T12:15:00.000-07:00

Our Town downtown

April 2, 2007

Three times in the last month I stood outside the Garden waiting for the guy with the tickets. It was fun standing there (I’m pathologically early to everything, so I’ve spent a lifetime standing waiting in such scenes) looking at the crowd of game-goers within the crowd of commuters. It was fantastic stuff to stare at. It was one of those times since I moved here eight years ago, I wouldn’t have wanted to be anywhere else. It was exhilarating being alone right then and there waiting for a friend with the buzz of a game in the air.

The most recent of three games I saw (the first two were college games in the Big East tournament) was a Knicks game. If you’re already laughing or cynical, I understand. The sportswriters and talk show guys here have been merciless in their attacks on the whole Knick situation, mostly going after Isiah Thomas, for awhile going after him every single day. It was way overdone. Isiah Thomas is as accomplished in what his life work has been as anyone in this city. He was a better basketball player and leader than almost anyone in town’s been at what they do. He was one of the top ten of all time probably. In the history of the game. (Sportswriters may deep-down hate jocks and look for every chance they get to pile on. Ever notice how they take every chance they get to say it’s just a game? Even while they’re making a living sucking up to them?)

My ticket was free. Long story. And the price on it said $65. OK, that’s a lot. But so’s the ticket for the Joan Didion play with Vanessa Redgrave which didn’t get a hot review. So is the ticket to hear Betty Buckley at Feinstein’s. You think Sir Bono lets you into his shows for cheap? And where in those shows do you get to see LeBron James fly through the air without a script or a play list and throw down a dunk like you’ve never seen before? (The Knicks played LeBron the night I was there.) Where in those events (wonderful as they are) does the outcome go down to the last few seconds? Where in those performances do you stand up and exult over something unexpected and raise your arms and scream in jubilation? 65 bucks? By this city’s standards with $7 pints of Guinness, and $2000 apartments so small that you have to pay extra to keep most of your stuff in storage in Queens, $65 is not that bad. And don’t forget these guys are risking crutches every minute they’re on the court.

You get two good hours for the ticket price, even if some of it like the Knicks dancers is cheese. But so what? You could easily spend more on an average meal with drinks than that. You could spend that at the Joyce Theater where the dunks are scripted. Jon Stewart was at the game. So were some other young big shots that they showed on the big screen. That’s cheesy to show them, of course, but it’s a TV world we live in.

The game’s out by 10:00 and you go home by foot or cab or train and you get your mail and hang out for awhile before bed and that’s a good night. If you were a kid your mother would tell you to make sure you washed your face and hands after bring in a crowd like that.

The next night West Virginia played Clemson in the NIT finals in the same Garden. That would have been fun to go to. But there are so many things to do in the city that you can lose track. We list some things to do every week. The dailies list stuff every day. Time Out does a great job at keeping up with it all. There is so much stuff. The same night as the NIT game, Bill Bradley was reading at the big Barnes & Noble and Pete Hamill was leading a discussion near NYU about an Irish novelist at the same time, in addition to all the other sports and movies and theater and dance and gallery openings. Makes you wonder if St. Peter won’t ask us why we were inside that night watching TV. And what’s with NetFlix in New York City? he might wonder. There wasn’t enough to do in the big city?

-- Bill Gunlocke

bgunlocke@manhattanmedia.com

You Should Have Been There

2007-05-18T12:11:00.000-07:00

Our Town downtown

March 26, 2007

If you’re like me, you were maybe thinking if you’d been to one monthly Public Meeting of The Panel for Educational Policy at Chambers Street you’d been to them all. A sober PowerPoint presentation of dry material. An earnest report by some well-meaning staffer. Maybe a half hour of questions from some of the few parents that bothered to come. In the four meetings I’d been to, it felt like school.

Last Monday it was different. You should have been there. There were twice the usual number of people. The extra half were all festooned with white sashes that had something written in big Asian letters on them. They spoke in their language among themselves and took the front three rows of seats. They were organized and purposeful, you could tell. The woman in front of me sat up in her chair like she was waiting to see the pope.

The meeting began when a dozen panel members and Chancellor Joel Klein ambled in and took their seats behind a long table. I watched Klein as he came in and wondered if he was sighing to himself when he saw the bigger group in front of him. The four times I’d been there, he played with his Blackberry the whole night and seemed less than engaged, to say the least, by the whole process.

When you come to these meetings there’s a table outside the doors to the room with a stack of handout sheets. It’s the agenda for the night. Monday night’s had these four points: I. Executive Session (this takes place in private before the public meeting starts); II. Citywide Science Curriculum; III. Fair Student Funding; IV. Public Comment.

At some point early on, maybe within the first 15 minutes, before much of the agenda had been attended to, with the Chancellor comfortably settled in with his good friend Mr. Blackberry, there was a noise from outside the big open wooden doors, somewhere out in the open area where there are easy chairs and coffee tables, where the stack of agendas was, somewhere out there a menacing chant was going on. It came closer and suddenly about 30 people marched in to the back of the room carrying signs and chanting, among other things, “Listen to the parents!” They were loud in the room which isn’t big. It’s like the size of two classrooms, but with oriental rugs and big chandeliers hanging from very high ceilings. These folks with their signs looked nervous, but more thrilled, to have barged in to such a setting. Mr. Klein put his toy down.

Anyone with a camera in the room was now aiming it toward the back of the room. The chanting kept up, an occasional voice leaped out from the group cadence and belted out a solo, “Listen to the parents!” The look on the faces of the purposeful Asians in the front rows was glum. I’m guessing they were angry too. Here they were, as orderly and scrubbed and serious as any New Yorkers could be, sashes in place, and in barges this noisy group of Black and Hispanic folks taking up the “teacher’s” time again just like it was in high school. You felt sorry for them.
But you didn’t dislike the noisy group at all. You were impressed actually by their spirit and their passion. Listening to them speak individually though when Klein ultimately gave in and gave them time to go to the microphone stand, you wish that they would barge into their neighborhood libraries with their kids and make sure their kids knew how to read. Or you wish they knew to demand of the Panel that their kids be taught to read as well as the kids at Dalton, where I think Klein’s kids went or go.

Later when things quieted down, a half dozen of the Asians got their chance to go to the microphone. You learned they were Koreans who were there to express their anger and pain over a book that they’ve found in the schools that doesn’t accurately depict the suffering their people went through at the hands of the Japanese a half century ago. I don’t know what it said on their sashes.

-- Bill Gunlocke

bgunlocke@manhattanmedia.com

I Hope Mike Runs

2007-05-18T12:10:00.000-07:00

Our Town downtown

March 19, 2007

I thought about Bloomberg twice on Thursday. A friend and I were e-mailing about various candidates and I said I liked Obama most right now but it was for purely charismatic reasons. I like him like I like Tiger Woods whatever that means about him—and me. I said I don’t dislike Hillary. I like her more than I like Bill, in fact. I’m their age and I can see him sucking up to every teacher he ever had and even those he didn’t have when he was in school and hanging around after class with them. Brown nose comes immediately to mind. I don’t see her that way. Edwards I loved the last time with his two Americas mantra. I even made phone calls for him in some union office here. His new guy-on-the-far-left pose though seems just that, a pose he practiced in the mirrors of his newly-built mansion. It’s too nakedly ambitious. His admitting he made a mistake in voting on Iraq is being seen, mostly by him, as some big act of courage. He’s saying it to get votes now that 2/3 of the country is against the war. Where’s the courage in that?

Then I said maybe Gore will trim his hair and his waistline and make a run. I even noticed that Bill Bradley has a book just out. He seems pretty good to me still. Finally I said that if Bloomberg ran he’d be the most competent among the lot of them. (Rudy is probably the closest in competence to the mayor. He’s hampered of course by some of his unsavory affiliations. All these guys know questionable types though. You think the people with three or four homes near the mountains and the beaches and the golf courses got them from selling Christmas trees or licking Green Stamps?)

That I think Bloomberg’s the most competent doesn’t mean I’d for sure make phone calls for him if he ran. I might though. Here’s why: He doesn’t seem a bit phony. Think of everyone in the list above except for Bill Bradley and there’s a phony component to them. They’ve been running for office for so long they’ve forgotten how to talk like real people. Mike doesn’t sound ultra-real himself, but that’s probably what he’s always sounded like. He seems cautious and shy and not in love with the sound of his own voice. That doesn’t mean he’s not ambitious or too rich. It just means he doesn’t sound phony and that’s refreshing. Even the way he’s not-running running doesn’t bug me because of his shy manner.

The second time I thought of him was later on Thursday night outside of a bar where I’d been having a couple pints, talking with a work mate, and occasionally looking up at the one small TV screen in the place to catch a glimpse of the college hoops scores. I’d gone outside in the cold drizzle to see if anyone was out there who I might bum a cigarette from. Like a leprechaun, a little young guy from Ireland sprang from nowhere it seemed and was handing me a half-empty gold pack of Benson & Hedges that I think he wanted me to notice because on the pack was a no-nonsense label that said ‘Smoking Kills’. I think he knew we’d ask where these were from. Ireland? England? His voice gave it away. Ireland it was. He was over with his girlfriend to show her the States and he was staying up in Woodlawn with some friends he’d met here before. He was so glad to talk to us outside. He said we were like meeting Bill Gates. He was funny. We smoked and went back in.

I looked at the pack of smokes with the label. There was another label on the back that said ‘Smoking is highly addictive, don’t start’. I thought of Bloomberg. He got the city to change its smoking ways. That was big in a town that too heartily identifies with Sinatra’s rendition of itself. The mayor did the right thing, though I whined like a lot of other people and thought he was a creep, out of touch with the real guys. He probably is out of touch in a lot of ways since he’s gathered so much stuff. But I hope he runs for president.

-- Bill Gunlocke

bgunlocke@manhattanmedia.com

There Ought to be More Madness Here

2007-05-18T12:07:00.000-07:00

Our Town downtown

March 12, 2007

Here’s a note that came early in the week from Steve Bloom, who writes a lot of sports for us:

The [NYU] Violets finished the 2006-07 season by winning the ECAC Division III Men’s Basketball Metro Championship last night at Coles over Richard Stockton College, 58-55. They ended the season with a 22-6 record. Pretty darn good. It was fun covering the Violets. Thanks for encouraging me to follow the team.

Steve wrote a cover story on the NYU team at the end of January and got hooked on going to the games. None of the rest of us went to any of them, but some of us commented at the time of the article how surprised we were at the description of the game atmosphere. It was more the stuff of college sports than we had imagined NYU games would be. Cheerleaders, pep bands, excited crowds. Just up the street from the Angelika.

We thought it was great that it was that way. I especially did. I like college sports so much that I this year bought season tickets to Fordham basketball. One of my daughters went there but she could care less about their hoops. I go up to the Bronx because the gym is classic and the atmosphere is fun. Fordham’s in a good league. The coach is a show and the student section tosses baby dolls in the air behind the basket while the other team is shooting free throws.
You leave these games feeling different than when you walked in. You’re on cloud nine if your team won, way down if they lost. It’s better than going to concerts, which someone once said are totally emotionally ‘safe games’. Bruce never loses or even gets the ball stolen. You get to cheer baskets scored against no defenders. All the fans go home happy like they won a game. But, no risk, no real reward. That’s why sports are so wildly popular everywhere. Even as a spectator you invest something of yourself. You risk something. It’d be easier to rent a movie you’ve seen before on Saturday night than to watch a basketball game and maybe have to go through the pain of losing, but if your team wins, it’s a rush. How many real rushes have you gotten from NetFlix?

Last week and weekend the Big East Tournament was held at the Garden. People all over the country watched it on their tubes. That’s what I usually do. This time I went over to it. I bought a ticket Friday afternoon from a scalper whose looks and manner you’d know not to trust in a movie, but I was in a hurry to get inside and it turned out all right. Cost me $80. Craig’s List, which I don’t really know how to use, wanted at least $100. So I saved $20 there, I figured, and I stayed away from the $7.75 beers once I got inside.

The atmosphere was charged, better than a concert. Guys had money bet, guys had loyalties; they didn’t want their school to lose. People there had hats and shirts on from all over the Big East. Pep bands played the songs their fathers had stood and clapped to. March Madness was just underway.

The Garden is lit perfectly for basketball. The lights above the seats are dimmer there it seems than in other arenas; that makes the court seem brighter in contrast like a boxing ring at a big fight.

You think while you’re there that there ought to be big-time basketball interest all year long in New York—for the colleges. In Philly they have a little hoops world all their own with St. Joe’s and LaSalle and Villanova and Penn and Temple—and Drexel. It’s a great tradition. Why couldn’t New York develop such a thing among St. John’s and Fordham and NYU and Columbia and Manhattan. Men and women’s teams. Have a Christmas tourney in the Garden. It’d strengthen all the programs. It’d help keep some of the local talent here. And it would give you another reason to go to a game.

-- Bill Gunlocke

bgunlocke@manhattanmedia.com

The Schools May Have Picked a Winner

2007-05-18T12:05:00.000-07:00

Our Town downtown
March 5, 2007

Did you see that the city’s Department of Education chose a woman named Martine Guerrier to be the Chief Family Engagement Officer? If you don’t have kids in the schools or aren’t a news junkie, the appointment wouldn’t get your attention. It got my attention because this Martine got my attention the three times I went to a school board meeting this year. They don’t call them Board meetings; they’re called Panel for Educational Policy meetings. That sounds like they might be of a new order and of a higher nature than old-time Board meetings. Well, I never went to one of those sessions, but at these the level is not high. It’s so low in fact that nobody goes, unless you think 20-30 people showing up to listen and talk about a school system that has more than 1,000,000 kids is a good turnout.

The lone exception to the boredom of the proceedings and the boredom on the panel members’ faces (Chancellor Klein looked by far the most bored; he arrogantly [there’s no other word for it] played on his Blackberry the whole night(s)) has been Martine Guerrier. She can’t help it. She’s not showing off. She’s just sharper and more alert than the others. It doesn’t take much to be sharp at the Chambers Street meetings I’ve been to. But she’d be sharp in any crowd.
In this new job she’ll represent the parents of the more than 1,000,000 kids. She is a wife and mother and has a 10-year-old son. With that, and her intelligence, diligence, and speech pattern, she’s a great fit for the job.

That’s all I really know about her. I googled her after I first watched her at a Panel meeting. There wasn’t much about her. I was fascinated enough by her to do that. Watching her exceptional talents at the meetings was like seeing some random game on TV and finding yourself rooting for a player you’d never heard of because he got your attention somehow. It happens with supporting actors sometimes. You’re taken with them and start to follow their careers. Or you catch part of a song and you’re hooked on that singer. If your instincts are good, it doesn’t surprise you totally that some of those first impressions are validated and the person goes on to be somebody big.

That’s how I feel about this Martine Guerrier. She’s young, African-American, smart in a non-annoying way, likable in her manner and unafraid to ask for clarification of some point—at the meetings I attended—that otherwise would have just laid there in its own jargon.
The position she’s got now could be a place where she’ll be able to shine. Representing all the kids’ parents could be a huge, powerful opportunity to move the city to do more. There must be significant things that need doing or there wouldn’t be just half the students graduating in four years.

Running the city’s schools must be a bear. No place has figured it out. No other city has, for sure. It doesn’t seem to matter if the mayor takes control or a woman runs them or a board. There must be something essential that’s being missed. I wish they’d find out what it is. The kids are waiting. What probably will happen is that it will all be done by some computer programs in the frighteningly-not-too-distant future. Teachers will still be in the room but kids will learn music from Winton Marsalis and history from Bono, like we learn cooking from Rachel Ray. In the meantime, before we turn the thermostat way up to Fahrenheit 451, the schools need flesh-and-blood humans to run things. Sharp people are what are needed most and typically schools don’t attract the bold, energetic types that go into more alluring-for-them careers. This Martine might be one of those, and we better use her well while we have her.

-- Bill Gunlocke

bgunlocke@manhattanmedia.com

Far From Gramercy Park

2007-05-18T12:04:00.000-07:00

Our Town downtown
February 26, 2007

In Jackson, Wyoming last week I notice the rear of two cars parked in front of Bubba’s, the place you get breakfast; one has an Alaska license plate and a sticker that says Eskimo Women Kick Ass, the other car is from Wyoming and has a sticker that says Charlton Heston is my President.

In the local paper is news from the state legislature in Laramie about proposed legislation that seeks to do away with citizens being allowed to drive with an open container of alcohol.
These sightings are sent to you not to mock out-westerners with muddy tires like New Yorkers are supposed to do. They’re sent to show you how far from Gramercy Park you can get in a week.

Here’s what you can do in a week when your pregnant youngest daughter’s water breaks a week early in Jackson Hole and you gotta’ get there. The last-minute price of a ticket out of here is too high by any standard and you find one a lot cheaper out of Cincinnati, which you book because your college roommate is a lawyer in Columbus and you can stay with him and he’ll drive you to Cincinnati the next day. But first you go to rural Ohio with him while he refs a basketball game between same-town high school rivals Washington Courthouse and Miami Trace where it’s senior night and there’s a testimonial and silence for three kids from the two schools who were killed in a car crash earlier in the week. The National Anthem is sung by two students with a guitar with a pain you haven’t heard before.

The plane gets me to the Wyoming hospital an hour before the young couple is leaving with their baby for the two-minute drive to their house on Flat Creek Road. My ex-wife’s flight is delayed by snow so I’m glad I made it.

The kid is a beauty. Lucy Macauley. No staring at her wishing you could tape an odd ear back. She changes your life like friends said she would. It’s like there’s a Christmas tree in the room now. My son-in-law says the next day that the biggest of their two dogs slept in their room by the crib. He’d never slept in their room before.

I don’t ski and am getting tired of visiting my daughter out there without doing anything with the snow. This time I take a lesson in cross country skiing. It’s rewarding like swimming laps is and I go three other times. You can see the real skiers coming down the Tetons just a few hundred yards away. It’s beautiful to watch. You envy them. Later in a bar at the base of the mountain they all look in their ruddiness like Brett Favre and Sheryl Crow. You think you look like Bob Denver to them.

At another bar one night a snowboarder from Birmingham, England says he and his mates go into Yellowstone the day before to get near a geyser. He says there are two bears in front of the geyser so they can’t get very close. He is awed.

On the fifth night in town, I decide I’ll stay away one night from the baby’s house and let my ex have her to herself. I go to the local high school basketball game. The Jackson team is the Broncs. The Lady Broncs play first and the team from Lander Valley they play has three very good young players I think are Mexicans. The next morning my son-in-law says they were most likely Americans Indians. There’s a reservation in Lander he says. The crowd at the game wasn’t much different from the crowd in rural Ohio. Maybe the Jackson men have longer arms and bigger hands. Rangier, I guess. Cowboys.

A week after Lucy is born, her mother and father decide they’ll bundle her up and put a little knit cap on her head and put her in one of those papoose things and go outdoors into the snowy landscape with her for the first time. They take their two dogs in the car with them and drive off for a walk along the Snake River.That’s a long way from Gramercy Park, a short drive for them. And they don’t need a key.

-- Bill Gunlocke

bgunlocke@manhattanmedia.com

C-Span, the Opposite of Sex, Is About My Speed

2007-05-18T12:02:00.000-07:00

Our Town downtown

February 19, 2007

I was in South Florida a weekend ago, in the home office of Anna Nicole coverage. I didn’t pay attention to it because I’d never followed the trial over the money from her old husband, and I couldn’t watch the fat version of her on that TV series (I was kind of in love/lust with her in those old black and white jean ads she did and wanted to remember her that way). A lot of people must have been watching that fat show, even a lot of people who when you mention TV to them or say you don’t watch it will tell you they only watch the History Channel and “The Wire.” They must somehow have heard about her somewhere. They’re claiming they didn’t watch the stuff about her death either but I’ll bet they did. Most people are TV addicts, and if they go on about Bill Moyers and Bill Maher and “Washington Week in Review,” that’s a cover, and it’s still TV anyway and it’s nothing they couldn’t get in a magazine or a newspaper.
I don’t watch any of that stuff (I’ve got other vices), but I could become a C-Span addict. And not just “Booknotes” and “Q&A” and all that very tempting weekend stuff about authors that keeps you from reading. I mean the sober, opposite-of-sex “Washington Journal” morning call-in show that must actually be set in Pittsburgh in Mr. Rogers’ old studio, so welcoming and clean is the whole enterprise. Enterprise is too sexy a word for it. Compared to the C-Span morning hosts, Garrison Keillor is Tom Waits. It’s like the innocent morning radio I heard as a kid. It’s like a yellow record.

You’ve noticed “Washington Journal,” I’m sure. Looks boring and you’ve hardly ever stopped. And no doubt every time you have landed on it for even a minute, it’s always an unfashionable woman representative from Illinois talking to a guy who looks like a seminarian about a school bus seat belt bill. You run from it and head to the networks, or Imus.

I don’t run from it, or to it. I just turn to it sometimes on my Sirius radio (forget iPods and flat screens, get satellite radio and free your legs to move about, or lie down and stare at the ceiling; you can’t do that with even the biggest flat screen). When I’m sports-talked out, or I’m Howarded out on Sirius, I turn the dial to “Washington Journal.” It’s the same thing as on the television. And I get ready for the day listening to citizens (that’s what they seem like when they call in that show; they’re not consumers there) call about the war or the candidates or the Washington Post editorial on Joe Biden—or seat belts. It’s not bracing, I admit, but it’s not bullshit either, and that’s a good way to start the day. So, back to Florida. My sister who I was visiting wanted to go to the beach on Saturday after we stopped by and saw her newest grandchild. I was certainly up for both things, but what I really wanted to do on a perfect sunny day on my first day down there from the brickyard cold of here was watch Barack Obama make his announcement of his running for the White House at 11:00 that morning on C-Span. I lost. I had to go. And I could catch the highlights later on the CNN. But I wouldn’t catch what C-Span would be giving. With C-Span, you’re on the steps of the Illinois capitol building before Obama is. The announcer, if there even is one, is silent while the camera watches the flags flap in the wind or catches the ambient sound of the citizens as they gather at the foot of the steps waiting for the candidate-to-be to show up. It’s like politics unplugged. Unplugged is good.

-- Bill Gunlocke

bgunlocke@manhattanmedia.com

You Know The Preacher Likes The Cold

2007-05-18T12:01:00.000-07:00

Our Town downtown
February 12, 2007

Yeah, it was cold last week. I say I like the cold but even I will admit my face hurt in an almost scary way one morning walking to work. One night I went to a play on Theater Row and I had to cut through the Port Authority terminal to get out of the wind for a couple minutes even though I had on a knit cap and all that. I slept with that hat on a couple of those nights.

But I actually loved it. I like gloves and that hat and a muffler and the way getting warm feels. Bitter cold makes me appreciate four walls and the way they keep the wind and the wolves away.

Some people can’t stand it. They start complaining every year in October that the cold is coming. They find nothing fun about it. It makes them mad. They dream of getting out of it. I had a cab driver here once when I was visiting before I moved here and I was going from a restaurant on Spring Street back uptown where I was staying with an old college roommate. The cab driver was a bright young guy and we got to talking as is my wont, and it came out that we were both divorced fathers with daughters. Three for me, one for him. He was younger and newer at it and he lamented how much he was missing his young daughter up in Toronto. I empathized and tried to comfort him. I figured he was in graduate school or had been transferred here and was just driving a cab to supplement his salary to pay his child support. When I asked him what he did when he wasn’t driving, he said he did nothing else. He drove full-time. I thought about the picture of his daughter on the visor above him and how sad he was about not seeing her often and I so I asked, well, couldn’t you drive a cab in Toronto and be nearer to your daughter? He shook his head and said, Man, it’s too cold up there. I didn’t know what to say.

Some people are warm-blooded and like the cold. I remember some guys in grade school when we’d have snowball fights would throw their coats and sweaters off and be in their T shirts winging hard ones at us. No hat, no gloves. They just weren’t bothered by the cold. The same guys were too hot in just a T shirt on the dog days of summer. Their warm blood boiled and made them miserable.

A friend of mine has been visiting from Florida. He moved there because he’s one of those people—cold-blooded I guess—who’s miserable in winter. He may not ever have gone to the beach down there though he lives only 10 minutes from it. He’s not there for that. He’s simply there not to be cold.

We’re all wired in our particular way. How’s this for an example? The Florida guy I just mentioned said one day last week that he was watching tube while I was at work and he had to turn it off because there was a high-pitched squealing noise coming from it. I said I’d never heard anything. A couple nights last week he was watching something and he called me in to show me the noise. I looked at him and grinned thinking he was fooling me or was going nuts. I heard nothing; not a thing other than the show that was on. He couldn’t believe it. He had to turn it off, it was bugging him so. Later he turned it back on and called me in again. Same thing. He’s no clown. Very rational guy (No doubt there was some noise emanating from the tube). He’s also a music-obsessed person. He’s a graphic designer and listens to tunes incessantly while he works and whenever the TV isn’t on. I’m not a music-obsessed person. I wonder if that sounds he hears and I don’t has something to do with it. His ears are different. I think he’s just wired to need music.

At night last week when his TV shows were off and his CDs had stopped spinning he needed the heat up so high I could hardly sleep.

-- Bill Gunlocke

bgunlocke@manhattanmedia.com

Take These Chains from My Heart and Set Me Free…

2007-05-18T11:57:00.000-07:00

Our Town downtown
February 5, 2007

Last week in her back page essay, Gaije Kushner’s headline asked, ‘Wal-Mart, Coming Soon to a Block Like Yours? It could happen here.’

I could see us avoiding Wal-Mart. But we didn’t avoid Home Depot. And there are Staples all around. I buy a can of soup sometimes at the CVS on my block. I buy milk and orange juice there too in a pinch. As in pinching pennies; stuff is cheaper there. Barnes & Noble has a store card—like my CVS does—that gives you discounts that you can’t get at the smaller, cozier, warmer bookstores, which is why there are fewer of those great small bookstores even in this town where people have money and where the publishing world is centered.

I don’t have one of those B&N cards; I’m always somehow in a hurry and can’t fill one out. Maybe I don’t want to be one of those people who obsess over money things in bookstores. Those people who do obsess will thumb through the books in their neighborhood bookstore and then go home and order online from Amazon or someplace even cheaper. We could all be that way if we let ourselves. Those people (us, if we’re like that) would be at Wal-Mart in a heartbeat, or quicker—and feeling good about it—if vitamins or teeth whitening strips were cheaper there. Costco and Target are chains and are putting small independent stores out of business too, but they have some cachet that allows the normally-hand-wringing watchdogs over globalization to let down their guard, just like they do for anything Steve Jobs comes out with even if it’s for sure putting good old record stores out of business.

My kids mock me—Mr. Sixties—for going to chains at all. They go to neighborhood coffee shops that aren’t Starbucks. They buy their books at Three Lives bookshop. Their drugstore is Bigelow’s. I try to defend my occasional stops at B&N and Starbucks by saying on my soapbox that the real homogenization of society is not from chain stores but from television, and that sitting like zombies in front of a flickering rectangle every single night is way more lemming-like than all the lines of folks going in all the chain stores in the world. They don’t even answer that claim, they’re such TV addicts.

But even though I’m right about TV being the great chain store of culture, my kids are right about me being a hypocrite for going to chain stores. What the hell did I move to New York for? To eat at Boston Market?

I’m working on the coffee. There are plenty of local shops and restaurants to get a coffee from. I don’t need a chain for that. Do you? Bookstores for sure I can find that are independents. I go to them already. You can find them too. They’re the ones without escalators, and without the Godiva Chocolate bars by the cash registers.

When we read about someone who doesn’t e-mail or who still uses a Smith Corona typewriter we think that’s authentically cool. I think it’s authentically cool that my kids go to Three Lives for books and Jack’s for coffee. I should follow their lead for a change.

Here’s how the small stores could make it easier for me and you to go to them. Stay open as late as the chains. Small bookstores if you’re listening: You and the neighborhood libraries have to stay open as late as the chain bookstores do. If Friday’s stayed open longer than the neighborhood bars every night, they’d get most of the beer business eventually. You can’t close early and expect people not to go where the lights are still on. If you don’t at least do that, you can’t complain. And if we don’t at least make an effort to get our books from those small places, and our coffee and our vitamins and our beers from neighborhood spots, we won’t be able to complain when we’re standing someday in line trying to figure which two sides do we want to go with the Carver sandwich at Boston Market where the bagel place used to be.

-- Bill Gunlocke

bgunlocke@manhattanmedia.com

Norman Mailer: The Long Goodbye

2007-05-17T14:50:00.000-07:00

Our Town downtown
January 29, 2007

I’d said my goodbye to Norman Mailer a few years ago when he was reading at the Barnes and Noble on Union Square. I’d lingered over his departure from the stage and watched him as he shuffled past the escalator, through the fiction section, with the help of two canes. I thought that would be the last time we’d see him.

But it wasn’t. Thursday night he was back on the fourth floor of the store reading from his big new novel about Hitler’s childhood. He looked a little stronger than the last time. He looked a little different too. You likely saw the Times photo in the book review a week ago. His hair straighter than you remember it. He looked like Irwin Corey meets Pat Riley. His voice was stronger than you’d think for someone turning 84 any minute. It’s a great voice, unmistakable for 40 years.

There were already people standing behind the rows of seats when I got there at 6:15 for the 7:00 start. There were heavy coats in everyone’s arms and they shifted them around as they read from Mailer’s new book or looked at books on the tables they found themselves near. In front of me was a brick of a book filled with black and white photos of individual London buildings. Did you know there’s a Museum of Childhood in London’s East End?

I was right behind three camerapeople standing on chairs filming the event. They mostly obstructed my view of Mailer reading at the table. Sometimes I’d look at the little monitor screen that was on the side of one of the cameras and watch him that way. That didn’t bother me. As I said, I had said my goodbye a few years ago. I only came last night to briefly see what he looked like and to see who would turn out. I wouldn’t be staying for the whole thing. I had somewhere to go.

The crowd was much younger than I thought it would be. Sure there were people my age who remember reading ‘Armies of the Night’ in college. There were quite a few faces there that you knew were somebody, especially when they got to go beyond the velvet rope to a seat that was being held for them by a friend or spouse up near the stage waving at them. But there were a lot of kids in their 20s and 30s.

Mailer alluded to that age group before he started reading. He mentioned how he’s normally ‘unduly pessimistic’ about the state of reading and books. But he said coming into these stores ‘cheers me again’, seeing so many young people reading books in the store so intently, like in a library. He meant specifically the big stores which you wouldn’t think he’d like, but he appreciated the crowds they could accommodate for such a reading. He probably missed the crowds, living up in Provincetown all year now. He was glad to see the people who’d come out on a cold night for him.

It was a clear night too, and as you looked at him up there, small, with his hair as white as the typed pages he was reading from, you could see the night over Union Square out windows on either side of the stage. It was that deep blue dark with lights from offices and restaurants like jewels on a velvet display cloth. Out the left window you could see those numbers flashing on that 14th Street building changing as fast as numbers at a gas pump when you’ve only got two dollars, like you often did when Mailer’s hair was dark and thick with curls and he was the darling, maddening cock of the literary walk.

-- Bill Gunlocke

bgunlocke@manhattanmedia.com

The Mayor Needs to Bust a Move

2007-05-17T14:48:00.000-07:00

Our Town downtown
January 22, 2007

When almost half the students in the public schools here don’t graduate in four years, something astounding needs to be done. New York isn’t alone in its need for something astounding to be done in the schools. All the major cities’ schools are just about equally unsuccessful. Those cities have given or are giving their mayors more control over the schools, like here. I haven’t read where any city has turned it all around, have you? We haven’t turned things around here. Other cities are looking to us to lead the way.

Will the moves that Mayor Bloomberg and his Chancellor Joel Klein announced the other day be the astounding changes that are needed? They don’t seem big enough or interesting enough to make much of a difference at all. They don’t seem radical. Isn’t something radical needed when half the kids aren’t engaged enough by what’s going on in school to graduate in four years in what can’t be at all a rigorous curriculum? Teachers getting asked to evaluate their principals. Tougher tenure standards. Eliminating some regional superintendents. Those aren’t major moves. A new formula for more equal funding of individual schools is a good thing, no doubt. But I’ll bet most people didn’t read the whole article in the daily paper about it. There was nothing headline grabbing about it. There needs to be something big done.

When the mayor said no more smoking in bars where the mirrors were almost brown from smoking traditions, that was a big move. When the mayor of London started charging extra for cars to enter the crowded part of the city, that was a major move. Bloomberg didn’t say we’re going to shift the monitoring of smoking in the city’s taverns to the department of social services. No, he said no more smoking. The London mayor didn’t say we’re going to make sure there are four people in every car entering the central city or they’ll be given a warning and possibly a ticket. No, he started charging them to go there and fewer of them now go there. Bold moves got results.

If the other cities are looking to New York to see how urban schools can work, then let’s do something radical. Columbia, NYU, Fordham, New School, Bank Street Teachers College; they’re here. Random House is here. Scholastic is here. Barnes & Noble and Strand are here. All those people that dress for those party pictures in the Sunday Times are here. Spike Lee is here. George Soros and Mike Nichols are here. Stern is here. The Times is here. Charlie Rose’s table is here. Shouldn’t we be able to come up with a way to make our schools bright and stimulating for the kids and lead the way? Seriously. We have a very bright guy as mayor who ought to be able to get the city’s minds and megabucks to turn the schools around. Don’t say Principal for a Day. Please.

The way it’s set up now must suck for the teachers as well as the kids. Who can feel good when the failure rate is so steadily high? Imagine the atmosphere in the hallways or the teachers lounge or the school library or the lunch room when half the kids aren’t graduating in four years. The media in town complain more about the Dolans’ handling of the Knicks and Rangers than they do about the schools. I didn’t say the callers to sports talk shows worry more about that stuff, I said the daily papers do. That’s ludicrous.

Someone has to bust a move. Ask Oprah to run the schools. I would. I’d try something more than what’s being done. Bill Gates is helping here. How about some New Yorkers? The mayor could get this done if he called upon the right people.

-- Bill Gunlocke

bgunlocke@manhattanmedia.com

David Lynch, the Beatles and Me Go Way Back

2007-05-17T14:47:00.000-07:00

Our Town downtown
January 15, 2007

There may have been bigger crowds for a reading than the one at the David Lynch reading last Thursday night at the tall Union Square Barnes & Noble, but I’ve never seen one that big, and I’ve been to them where you have to stand way in the back and you start looking at whatever books are in front of you on a table because you can’t see.

Last night I didn’t even get to the floor where the reading was. They wouldn’t let me; it was already filled to capacity and I was a half hour early. It was like Obama was in the building there were so many people standing by the security guards at the foot of the escalators hoping against hope that they’d let them go up. I gave up and left when I heard the rousing greeting Lynch got a floor above me. I knew it was too late then. The first floor as I left looked like the 24th of December so many people were killing time waiting to still maybe get up there or at least to see him on his way out. I didn’t care about him that way.

Sure, I’d loved ‘Blue Velvet’, but I’d never watched ‘Twin Peaks’ and any of the rest of his movies that I saw didn’t knock me out like Velvet did. I didn’t come to see David Lynch the film guy anyway. I came to see David Lynch the Transcendental Meditation guy. That’s a lot about what his book is about. I wondered as I looked at the crowd last night how many of them were into T.M. I hoped all of them were.

Here’s why: We all do thousands of things to try to change our life in some way. Maybe that’s mostly what we’re doing all the time. That’s likely what we’re hoping when we go to a movie. That’s what we’re browsing for in a bookstore. Some insight or some companion to our life. That’s what got me to an introductory lecture about T.M. over 30 years ago. It was in the wind then. The Beatles had gone to see the Maharishi and learned to meditate. Mary Tyler Moore did it. The Philadelphia Phillies did it. So did a Beach Boy. It was a zeitgeist thing. I paid my money and got a mantra of my own. It surprised everyone. They wouldn’t have guessed I’d be into such a thing. It seemed like a religion to them and they saw me as a longtime lapsed Catholic who was not much for devotion.

Well, other than the three pieces of fruit and a clean handkerchief and some flowers for the little private ceremony to honor the tradition of meditation, there was no ‘religion’ at all. There wasn’t even any philosophy or any psychology. T.M., we learned, was not psychological, it was physiological. It was rest, deep rest. And rest was what was needed to reduce stress. Once the stress was reduced we’d lead better lives with more energy and more focus. We were supposed to do it twice a day, morning and evening, 20 minutes each time. Sit in a quiet place.

I have done that for 30 years now. David Lynch has too. When I think of all the things I’ve not sustained interest in, it’s amazing to me I’m still doing it.

Last Friday down on Broad Street, the T.M folks opened up the lobby of a building they are refurbishing as some kind of center here. I may never get to it. I’m not much for organizations. I’m not even telling you the address. I’m not suggesting anything. All I’m doing is sharing my enthusiasm and respect for something that lived up to its billing. It’s the best thing I’ve ever done for myself.

-- Bill Gunlocke

bgunlocke@manhattanmedia.com

Is There An End To This Endless Summer? Please.

2007-05-17T14:45:00.000-07:00

Our Town downtown
January 8, 2007

On the sill of a window that looks onto the rest of the office here, I have three books propped up facing me and a card from a photo exhibit I went to. I like the color of each, and the design. The one I find myself looking at the most is a book by Thomas McGuane. ‘The Cadence of Grass’. It’s a hardback novel and the image I stare at is a scruffy field out in Montana where the story is set and where McGuane lives. There is snow on the field but not much. Straw is sticking up through it and so is various brush. There’s a barbed wire fence and in the far distance you can see a mountain range. The sky is grey and it looks full of more snow. All this is in black and white in a grainy way. You could be parked along the side of this field or be standing where the photographer was with your dog or a rifle. You could hear your boots crunch in the snow.
I could go on about this picture. I find myself looking at it more this month. I like the snow of it. I like the emptiness of it too and the foreboding. But it’s the snow and cold of it I’m craving.
This weather here now is nothing. I hate it. When I was a kid I hated ACC sports with its Dukes and North Carolinas and Virginias. The weather of those places bothered me. It was all so temperate. So mild. Genteel. It was golf and tennis and tobacco farms. It’s been that way here so far this winter.

Where I came from in western New York, men (not my father, darn it) ice fished and had coon dogs. They had insulated boots and big coats to go hunting in. Those men in those coats with their hunting tags on the back took up a lot of room on the row of stools in Jim’s Diner on Main Street. You’d brush against their heavy coats going down the aisle of the place. They’d sit there and stir their coffee with thin spoons and smoke cigarettes all the while talking about the outdoors.

I have a young son-in-law in Wyoming. He and my daughter live near ski mountains and so a photo of a field near them won’t look as wonderfully bleak as McGuane’s dust jacket does. But it gets so cold there some nights that he has to keep his truck (a nice one; he’s no farmer from western New York. This is ski country) plugged into a generator so it’ll start in the dark of morning when he and one of their two dogs head out to plow driveways. That’s not Duke versus the Virginia Cavaliers in women’s lacrosse. That’s cold in a rugged way, like ice fishing.
I’ve only been near it once, but it seems in the dead of winter here, Montauk might offer some of that for the year-round folks. We’ll get ours soon. Soon enough, many of you are thinking. I can’t wait.

All this is to say that mild is boring. In art or sports or love. Deepak Chopra is boring with that voice. Yoga magazines with their cotton clothes and those ads for smooth stone day spas are too mild. Weather can be too mild.

One of the beauties of living here for me is that the big buildings block a lot of the winds that blow hats away in other places. Wind for some reason I don’t like. But snow and cold are bracing. The coffee tastes better when it’s freezing out. So does a beer in a neighborhood bar with its warm lights. Getting home to your apartment building suddenly matters more. Mail is even better when it’s cold out. There’s something civilized about a magazine in the mail box when nature is having its way out on the street. And how about the grace of fleece-lined slippers when you finally get home? You can even wear a knit cap in the house and look like Kurt Vonnegut on the back of ‘Breakfast of Champions’. That picture might make a good addition to my windowsill.

A week late. Happy New Year.

-- Bill Gunlocke

bgunlocke@manhattanmedia.com

The Days When Newspapers Were Champs

2007-05-17T14:43:00.000-07:00

Our Town downtown
January 2, 2007

‘Tunney,’ the new biography of one of the legends of the 1920s, boxer Gene Tunney, begins near the water off the West Village. Tunney’s old man worked on the docks and lived on Perry and then Bank Street to be near his work. The future champ who would knock out Dempsey twice went to St. Veronica’s grammar school and as a teenager coached boxing at P.S. 41.
The beginning chapters depict a neighborhood of working class people. It’s all different now of course. You’d have to own one of the boats that Tunney’s father unloaded to live there. Not many kids are there now who might grow up in the ring. Luckily the great apartment buildings are still there and the old sidewalks and the old trees and the school buildings that evoke that era. Which is of course why people sensitive to that don’t want it messed with by developers.
Here’s something in the book that sticks with me. Years later, Jack Cavanaugh who wrote the biography was on the train to Connecticut where he lives. Next to him was a noticeable guy who turned out to be Gene Tunney, and a conversation ensued and the book grew out of it. Anyway, the part of that train story that I liked was this: ‘Like most passengers in the car, he was immersed in one of New York’s three afternoon newspapers of the time, the nightly ritual for daily riders to the Connecticut suburbs from Manhattan.’ Is that a great scene or what? Don’t you ache for that way of spending your time? Three big wide newspapers to choose from to read on the train and then after dinner at home.

I was maybe 11 years old in the late 1950s when my father brought me by train into the city from our rural western New York hometown to see the Yankees play a weekend series against the Orioles. Of course I wanted to see Mickey Mantle and Yogi Berra and Whitey Ford like any other kid who collected baseball cards and listened to Mel Allen on the radio. But the guy I wanted to see most was Gil McDougald. He was by far my favorite player. I couldn’t wait to watch him bat with his odd stance and to watch his easy long throws from third base to first base. He captivated me.

So, that first night in town, a Friday, when my guy Gil amazingly won the game with a single in the ninth, I was excited about getting up to a newspaper article in the New York paper the next morning telling about my hero’s hit. That’s what I did every morning at home; jumped out of bed to grab the sports page. What I still do. We got the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle. Another Rochester paper in the late afternoon. So, that’s how I figured it would be here. I was wrong. I think I found seven or eight New York papers throughout the next day in the hotel lobby’s newsstand. I bought them all and ripped out the articles on McDougald’s winning single for a scrapbook I kept on him.

Newspapers were what fathers did at the breakfast table back then. They were what mothers were doing at that same table when you came home late at night in high school.

Some nights now, in the face of a television filled with games and movies and talk, in the face of a computer filled with even more stuff, in the face of a cell phone filled with free calls after 7:00, I’ll still grab a Post or News and take it home with a couple slices of pizza and sit at the table like my parents did pretending in a way that I’ve got an evening paper in front of me.

It’s one of the great pleasures to walk to a newsstand here and grab a paper. Tunney’s old man did it. Tunney did it. Dempsey did it. At night it’s especially rich. The way the light hits the stacks. Some of the stands look like they could have been around back then. I read recently that the mayor cut some deal with a foreign company to get new ones and to replace the old ones. Ouch. Sometimes he can be way too natty. Luckily I haven’t finished reading ‘Tunney.’

-- Bill Gunlocke

bgunlocke@manhattanmedia.com

Putting All The Presents In Focus

2007-05-17T14:41:00.000-07:00

Our Town downtown
December 25, 2006

Other than the cameras I bought for my three kids, everything I bought for everyone else was a book. I may have bought twenty-five books. I do it every year. It’s partly selfish. I like bookstores and I like staring at the stacks and shelves until the book I’m looking for shows itself, gets my attention somehow.

That is a great pleasure. And it’s like no other in the cultural world. Think of the shallow satisfaction of scrolling down that cable channel that lists all the programs, maybe it’s the TV Guide channel. There aren’t many Eureka moments in that exercise. Maybe here’s the difference. In the bookstore, you’re maybe getting a text for the next semester of your life; you may be buying an epiphany. With the tube, you’re cutting class.

For me, it was in the bookstores that I had my shopping fun. But all sorts of non-bookstore stores were filled all over town, all over the country, in many places around the world. It’s easy to mock out the buying spree or frenzy or madness or whatever it’s called. I’ve mocked it too. My bookstore habit at Christmas has always been in my eyes an act of superiority to the folks going up escalators and through malls. But I have to admit when I’m honest that the other shopping shares a lot with my bookstore thing.

What intense shopping for gifts calls upon us to do is focus. It’s no time for strolling anymore or window shopping. It’s game day. All you know and all you’ve seen has to come together to find a gift that fits the person. You have to get to the right floor, find the right size, remember what the room looks like where the lamp might fit, did I get him a blue sweater last year? This is using our wits. There’s nothing better. We don’t really want to be cutting class. Jerry Seinfeld didn’t really cut class. He wrote a show. Walt Whitman wrote “Leaves of Grass.” Thoreau wrote “Walden.” We like life best when we’re focused. That’s the beauty of a camera, the focusing on some smile or luster or shadow and squeezing the trigger. The photos we then e-mail out to friends are a kind of satisfaction, but not as close and personal as that focusing that came before. That’s why golf obsesses even the greatest athletes like Michael Jordan; the focus it requires. The poker craze, same thing.

Shopping allows all of us once or twice a year to have to focus in on a task. Of course we’d rather cut class and not do it, but if you give yourself over to it, it has satisfactions. Right through to the wrapping and the card.

Speaking of cutting class instead of shopping, a bar can look like a warm hideout from it all, especially now with ESPN on the bar tube. In the leafy, aging suburb of Cleveland I lived in for most of my adult life, there was a bar called Bud’s White Door, a frill-less place where you didn’t go looking for a bride. It was guys’ place mostly, beers, cigarettes and old-gold tin ashtrays. Anyway, on Christmas Eve day they cleared off one of the tables in the back by the payphone and set out a couple big rolls of wrapping paper, with a big tape dispenser and a scissors and ribbon. Of course it was free. I never used the service, was never in there that day, but I thought it was funny, brilliant, crazy. It also seems loving to me now.

Lots of things seem loving this time of year. The early darkness makes lights in windows seem warmer.

-- Bill Gunlocke

bgunlocke@manhattanmedia.com

A Good New York Night and Why You Live Here

2007-05-17T14:40:00.000-07:00

Our Town downtown
December 18, 2006

It was last Thursday and I could have stayed home and read the magazine that just came in the mail or finished re-reading James Joyce’s ‘Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’ which had jumped off the shelf at me in an airport store in Salt Lake City at Thanksgiving or gone down to First Avenue and watched the NFL game at a favorite bar and eaten chili out of a big white bowl there.

But I had promised myself for two days that I’d go down to 4th Street to KGB (it’s a bar, and more than that) to a reading where three known women novelists were going to read from their latest work in support of an organization I’d never heard of but which sounded interestingly worthwhile in the listing in Time Out New York. ‘Behind The Book’ it’s called and they get authors to go into classrooms and they work with teachers to make it a lot more interesting than just having an author go into classrooms and read. I know that because when I got to KGB, I was one of only three people who are pathologically early to things like I am and I talked to a woman from the organization who was placing some cards promoting its mission on the wooden surfaces around the small second floor bar space in KGB that is one of the great spaces you’ve been in. Think the warm lighting and colors from the movie ‘Reds’.

So, yes, I did go. And the women who read were wonderful and maybe some of the 30 or so listeners fell in love with them like I did for being smart and lively-minded and beautiful standing in that good light reading to us with cars outside making some noise and kids too. The only thing missing was smoke. They say there was an ordinance in Boston that made an exception to the no-smoking laws there; it said that if now-dead former Celtic coach Red Auerbach came to a game and wanted to light a cigar like he used to when the great Celtic teams he coached had the game in hand he could. Well, KGB ought to be the exception here. I remember lighting up there when I used to go there all the time when I first moved here. I used to live closer.

It’s funny about this city; every neighborhood is so self-contained with its own taverns and bodegas and pizza slices and dry cleaners that you don’t have to go back to your former neighborhood to see the old bartenders and pizza guys like you thought you would. You get to the point where you think you don’t miss them, but you do. Walking from the Gramercy Park area where I live now down Second Avenue toward 4th Street past where I used to live and where I seldom walk now for some reasons, reminded me how suburban the rest of the city is compared to downtown south of 14th Street. It’s a better world down there. Pete Hamill wrote something like this once, that it’s one of the sad things in life to regret not living any longer in a place you shouldn’t have left. That’s me and the regrets I have over leaving a studio apartment on 13th Street. I can’t even walk down that street.

Anyway, on my way to KGB a little bit before 7:00 when I’m not even sure I want to be going to it, I’m passing all the places I used to pass and when I come to the wrought iron fence along the side of St. Mark’s Church, my eyes almost water as if I’m seeing my late mother sitting there against the fence unaware of me. But it’s not my mother, it never is; it’s a soft-faced black woman who I haven’t passed in the four years since I moved away, but who I used to pass in my going and coming on the street every night for four better years. She would sit there each night, shaking a big plastic cup like you’d get a $9 beer in at a Yankee game and she’d shake it all night. I used to give her a dollar every night.

We stared at each other, nearly gasping or collapsing in recognizing each other, like mother and son almost. I gave her ten bucks and smiled at her with wide eyes and told her she looked great. She smiled and was glad to see me I could tell and kept rattling the cup. I think I loved the women who read later because my heart had been opened by her and the walk downtown toward home. Merry Christmas to her. You too.

-- Bill Gunlocke

bgunlocke@manhattanmedia.com

The Women At Land’s End

2007-05-17T14:38:00.000-07:00

Our Town downtown
December 11, 2006

When we started The Water Log column, we didn’t really know where we’d go with it. It was started on a belief we had that there must be all kinds of stories to explore around the water here in NY. There had to be, we figured—there’s so much of it! We envied the days when there was such booming activity on the city’s docks that there was a regular beat in one or more of the papers called The Shipping News. We wished for that kind of waterfront busyness now, if only so we could have used that great name for our column.

Last week, I grinned when Becca Tucker, who writes The Water Log, told me about two groups of women downtown who knit hats, scarves and other warm things for the mariners and seafarers who go out to sea from here. There you go, I thought, that’s what you find if you look for it, or are just open to it. That’s the beauty of a column, the payoff of a beat—women in Manhattan who knit hats and scarves for men who go out to sea. Would you have guessed it? Even in so huge a city as this, with so much varied activity, that’s still a surprise isn’t it? In an age when people can order Christmas presents from Banana Republic on a laptop while sitting on the couch watching TV, isn’t it a wonderful throwback to think of the women getting together downtown here once a week and making hats for mariners they don’t even know? Isn’t that the best thing you’ve heard in a week?

It is for me. It seems that’s what we need. Eliot Spitzer thinks he’s what we need, and Rudy and Hillary and McCain and the governor of Iowa think they’re what we need. I’m more impressed with those women with their knitting needles. Maybe it’s the lack of vanity in the whole enterprise of making things for somebody else that impresses me. Maybe it’s envy of the men and women who go out to sea. There are a lot of reasons why such things move a person. It made me grin. I see the city differently now. I see people on boats and ships leaving and arriving in the cold. I see those women.

There are all sorts of ways people give of themselves, give their time, to help out. There are soup kitchens and homeless shelters and Big Brothers and Big Sisters and literacy groups that all need people. You could coach a team if you wanted. There are all kinds of opportunities to pitch in and do the equivalent of what the knitting women do. Christmastime always brings with it stories of kids and their families who need things. Churches and various other groups serve meals and need volunteers to help with all that. We all think of doing it. Some people actually do it. There’s still time this year.

One thing we say we’re going to do in the paper is list volunteer opportunities every week. We haven’t done it yet. Even the listing of such things seems to get put off, just like the doing of them does. But we will start compiling them soon and listing them. For us as well as you. Listing them isn’t enough. No more than watching 60 Minutes is enough or reading editorials or voting or listening to NPR. Not if you want to be like those women in Water Log.

-- Bill Gunlocke

bgunlocke@manhattanmedia.com

On Coming Out Of the Holland Tunnel at Night

2007-05-17T14:37:00.000-07:00

Our Town downtown
December 3, 2006

This big city can look good from all sorts of angles. If the photo books you've seen don't capture all of the vantage points, some exhaustive photo web sites do. There's not a view blushing unseen in this town.

There are a lot of spots that satisfy my eye. Most of them involve apartment buildings with stoops and fire escapes. None of them involve new buildings. When I first moved here, I made the observation to the friends I'd left behind in the Midwest that the people here were just the same as they were back there; they just had better looking buildings as backdrops to their activities here and that made them look more interesting. I said that in part to make them not feel left out, but I really did mean it. It's been brought home to me many times since—when I'm on a bus or in a cab cruising by Penn Station or the Garden. NO ONE looks interesting in front of those places. The same people back in their neighborhoods, walking in front of a row of apartment buildings with fire escapes and stoops, look cool—and look like they’re on their way to more cool.

Here's why that's on my mind today. I just returned from a few days in Jackson, Wyoming where I was visiting my youngest daughter, who has lived out there for 10 years already, and members of my extended family who happened to be there for Thanksgiving. It’s like being in another country at first, but once I got acclimated to some stunning visual differences, and acclimated to being around my daughter in the flesh instead of by e-mails and photos of her propped against books on my shelves, I loved it like everyone who goes there does, and I saw New York from there as being as cramped and crowded as a weekend movie theater. My eyes were stretched by the vastness of the place, and the daily sights of the Tetons and the majesty of the Elk Refuge redefined for a few days what beauty was.

Oh, I got into it. I wanted a Carhart jacket and an old Subaru station wagon with two dogs in the back, or at least I wanted the women who were driving them. I wanted to know how to ski, though I’ve been saying that for 10 years. I even thought of fishing and hunting. The people there looked independent to me and they looked good going about their day with the mountains as a backdrop (in front of Penn Station who knows).

If you figure the people who left their country and came to America must have been wilder-eyed than their neighbors who just stayed put there, you have to figure the folks who left Vermont to go out to Jackson Hole must have a wild-eyed look too. They do.

On the bus to Salt Lake City the last day out there (the planes were grounded because of snow), there was a guy in front of me who was 69 years-old, with a wide jaw and wire-rims and wild eyes and thick hair, who worried that he might not make his plane connections to Buenos Aires where he was meeting a friend and a guide to go hiking in Chile. He had a wife who was 27 years younger, and that wasn’t working out he said. He sat there in a blue watch cap reading a Penguin paperback of The Canterbury Tales. I wanted to know more people like him and didn’t want to leave just yet. But the plane taking me and two other daughters and one son-in-law was leaving for Newark later that day.

The ride from Newark to my apartment didn’t shake me out of missing the views of Jackson Hole. Neither did the single-lane, under-repair trip through the Holland Tunnel. But once we emerged out the other end, there it was, there they were—the fire-escape apartments and the stoops in front. Up the block were bars and newsstands and small restaurants with neon signs. It felt like home. There was nobody at home waiting for me. But these buildings and the way they were arranged were warm enough just then.

-- Bill Gunlocke

bgunlocke@manhattanmedia.com

Putting $1.93 Billion On The Books

2007-05-17T14:36:00.000-07:00

Our Town downtown
November 27, 2006

I can’t tell you what the extra $1.93 billion that the high court said must be spent by the state on the city’s schools is going to do for them. An earlier lower court decision had said the city should get a lot more than that every year, $4.7 billion. I don’t know what that would have done either. For sure it would do more, but more of what? What would move city public schools forward in a way not much has—in decades?

Here’s all I know from having taught a half dozen years in grade schools and high schools in suburbs and in the inner city as they called it in Cleveland then. (They weren’t public schools; they were all Catholic schools, but the black kids in the inner city schools were not Catholic.) I also have three grown daughters whose school days I watched closely. So here it is, after 30-some years of trying to pay attention:

At the big library downtown in Cleveland there’s a plaque at the entrance that says ‘Kids Who Read Succeed’. I think that too. That what I believe after my teaching and parenting experiences. Kids who read succeed. That may be the only thing I’m certain of from my time in the classroom and my time with my own kids.

So, I’d say take that $1.93 billion and do something about reading. I’d say screw social studies or cultural history and teach the kids to read. Don’t worry about calling part of the new Mets stadium Jackie Robinson this or that. Don’t worry about Arthur Ashe this or that or Roberto Clemente if you aren’t prepared to go to the wall for these kids to teach them to read. Those names are good names, but it’s too easy to feel good about ourselves with those kinds of gestures. These kids need to learn to read or they’re screwed.

A few years ago I taught juniors English in a Catholic boys’ high school here. It was a school for mostly poor kids that came in from other parts of the city. The guys were mostly black and Hispanic. Most of them wound up going on to college, but not really. They got in because the colleges needed bodies and maybe the school’s principal knew people in admissions. Many if not most of the kids dropped out of college. I know why, so do you. They couldn’t read well enough to do the work. It wasn’t because they didn’t know math. It wasn’t because they didn’t know science. That wouldn’t hold anybody back in their program. Not being able to read easily is what made school too tough for them.

Here’s what I told them one day in class. I don’t know why [italics that italics] day. I think it just came to me that day and I risked saying it.

I said if a bunch of Harvard freshman came into town and you wound up hanging with them for the weekend, you’d know your way around the world’s most dynamic city way better than they would. If they wanted to get a beer, you’d know ways to get that or drugs better than they would. If there were a fight you’d be better at it; you’re tougher. If there were a basketball and a court you could kill them. You can dance better than they can. You’re stronger and your teeth are better. You’ve got better hair. Many of you can speak two languages. You can probably talk to girls better than they can. You’ve probably had more sex. If you watched TV with them, you’d know more sports and could figure out the plot of Law and Order quicker than they could. So what do they have that you don’t? I asked them. I paused. Then I said, they can read better than you can. You can do every other boy thing better than they can. But they can read better.

So, I’d say the city schools should do something about making kids learn to read easily. Maybe I’d take the money and buy every kid a subscription to a magazine he liked. Maybe I’d give them a gift certificate for any three books they wanted from a local bookstore. Each semester they’d get to get three. I’ll bet the kids at Harvard had books and magazines around their house. The city should use some of the new money that’s coming to give its kids the same tools to succeed.

-- Bill Gunlocke

bgunlocke@manhattanmedia.com

A Place To Be Thankful For

2007-05-17T14:35:00.000-07:00

Our Town downtown
November 20, 2006

We give thanks in all sorts of ways every day, when we acknowledge, if only to ourselves, our gratefulness, our appreciation, our enthusiasm for the things we enjoy that someone else made possible for us. We’re lucky to live in this country and this city. We have a lot.

Here are some things that I’m thankful for here, in addition to friends and family of course:
Trees. You notice them more here than you do in a car somewhere else. You use them here, against the rain without an umbrella, against the sun on a park bench. In smaller cities and towns I’ve lived in, with more woods around, more lawns with trees, I never appreciated trees like here. Like I never appreciated flowers other places like I appreciate the colorful bunches of them outside little grocery stores here. Gramercy Park I live a block from and I seldom notice it with any appreciation when I walk by. The flowers in all colors a block away at the store get my attention way more often.

Walking lets you see the park and the trees and the flowers, and so much else at a pace you can absorb it at. You can fall in love for a second or two with a passerby. That doesn’t happen most other places. You have to give thanks for those times. And for the views up and down the avenues when you’re crossing the street. Maybe as residents we’re not supposed to look up at buildings like rubes, but looking uptown when you’re crossing the street is to see the massiveness of this place, and the beauty of its design and is a sight to be thankful for.

So are all the newsstands with the three great dailies, and papers and magazines from all over the world that you don’t see in other cities you’ve lived in. So are the bookstores here whose numbers are decreasing as people order on line or watch TV instead of reading. But there still are chain stores and independents that you can walk to from your apartment. I envy myself sometimes when I’m strolling up to Union Square at 9:00 at night to roam around four floors of books. Who of my friends or yours who live elsewhere can do that? It is a great perk of living here.

Cabs are another perk. I take one to work on Fridays. Just to go at a different pace and look out a window. It’s a treat, and I’m thankful that the cabs skim along the street in front of my building even if I don’t need them but once a week. I like their color; that yellow brightens up the street.

Other things I’m thankful for: The old people in my building. The East River a few blocks from my place. Rutgers for winning and giving college football fans here a local team to follow. Doormen. Molly’s on 22nd and Third. Pizza available every couple blocks. The Mexicans who make the pizzas and do so many other things here. The church bells at noon that I can hear from my apartment. AMC Loews’ $6-before-noon tickets on weekends. Steve ‘The Schmooze’ Somers on WFAN, the world’s nicest guy, who appreciates life like we all should. Stores I never go in for being open and giving color and variety to my walks. All the people on the sidewalks for giving color and variety to my walks. All the great old apartment buildings that make me and everybody else on those sidewalks look interesting.

It’s a great city to live in. We each give our own thanks all the time for our luck.

-- Bill Gunlocke

bgunlocke@manhattanmedia.com

We’re Way Beyond Not Being in Kansas Anymore

2007-05-17T14:33:00.000-07:00

Our Town downtown
November 13, 2006

Jack O’Shea is the guy the Chicago Tribune is sending to its paper-in-difficulty, The Los Angeles Times, to see if he can keep it together in the midst of declining readership, or figure a way to remake the paper for the new-and-getting-newer (you gotta’ say exponentially so) media world. He doesn’t promise miracles. He told the Tribune, ‘We’re all stumbling around in shifting sands. The business model is changing under our feet.’

No kidding. Don’t you feel that way, about all sorts of things? Stumbling. Shifting. Maybe it was those planes with passengers in them torpedoing the sides of the World Trade Center that shook our world and has it still rumbling beneath us. Or maybe it was a lot of things in the last few years. I think that’s it; it is a lot of things in addition to the planes crashing into us. Even in addition to Iraq. We’ve sped a long way from even not being in Kansas anymore.

First. Computers have changed the landscape, the office, school, home. If I look out of my office which I’m doing right now with one eye at the main office floor with writers and editors and salespeople and distribution people and graphics people, they’re all looking at the computers on their desks. For a break they (we) all check e-mail and some sites that matter to us. That’s a lot of time in front of a little screen. If we saw such a world in a sci-fi movie we’d find it sterile and scary. At night we watch another screen till sleep time when we’re increasingly finding it difficult to sleep.

Cell phones are more a watershed than the computer maybe. Think about it. They’re an illusion of course. We aren’t as close to home, or to each other, as we think.

Steroids have us hesitating to have heroes. Plastic surgery is redefining what we see in another person. Viagra is redefining something too (Maybe there is a time to just hang it up.)

HBO, TiVo, iPods, Blackberries, satellite radio, digital cameras, phone cameras, blogs, Netflix. It’s all come fast. Faster than ever before. You pick up the phone to call the Marriott here to make reservations for your parents who are coming for a long weekend next month and you get a voice—a nice voice no doubt—who you so know is in India that you don’t even bother to ask anymore. How could the business model not be changing under our feet? The newspapers where we’ve always kept up with changes are changing themselves. Soon the Times pages size will be as small as the Albany paper. The Wall Street Journal is trimming its size too. Do you even know what Google is up to? Wikipedia? What should I do with my red Random House College Dictionary Revised Edition that has a page up front with a list of editors who maybe taught at the University of Chicago or Johns Hopkins or Columbia. These were older guys. The Google guys and the Wikipedia guys are younger guys. Should I keep my red dictionary, in case the lights go out or a fuse blows? I think I will. But that may just be me. My kids if they still have dictionaries I gave them over the years probably couldn’t lay their hand on them. Should I give them a set of Wikipedia for Christmas? Shouldn’t every house have a set? That’s becoming a long-time-ago notion, like Kansas. And there’s no going back. That’s why Jack O’Shea knows to make no promises.

-- Bill Gunlocke

bgunlocke@manhattanmedia.com

How Many Times Can You See Madonna’s Kid?

2007-05-17T14:32:00.000-07:00

Our Town downtown
November 6, 2006

Beyond the time-killing, time-wasting, sit-you-in the-same seat-for-hours-on-end nature of television, there is the issue of its repetitiveness. I generally only go to it for sports now, but I can remember how it all works from watching the games. The end of the Jets game a week ago: The catch-not-a-catch in the end zone to maybe tie it up at the end of regulation was shown so many times, you thought maybe the receiver Chris Baker was going to turn to the camera and say I’m not going to do another one. But he’s not Marshall McLuhan and I’m not Woody Allen, and the replays continued from all angles.

I was somewhere the other night where I saw John Kerry on the tube in front of microphones. I didn’t hear what he was saying so I don’t know if what I was seeing was the original gaff where he was, they say, trying to be a jokester; or was I watching his defense of his gaff? Whichever it was, I’m sure it was shown as much as the end-zone-catch-not-a-catch. I’ll bet you could turn to any of the news channels and news-funny shows like you could the sports shows on that Sunday night and see the Kerry scene tens of times. That’s a skewed view of the world, isn’t it?

To see an event replicated like that. What does that do to us? TV now in essence clones an event and parades it before us like identical new sheep. Or wait, yikes, is it we who are the sheep? If we’re sitting where we always sit in the same position, only the clothes are changed, are we clones of ourselves or just very similar to everyone else who’s sitting somewhere watching in their same seat, same pose they always sit in?

Maybe, unless it’s the Zapruder film or Willie Mays’s 1954 catch, we really don’t need to see it more than once. Did your father ask you to come down the stairs in your gown five times in a row on your wedding morning? Did your mother pick up your report card a dozen times and scrutinize it? How many times did you lose your two front teeth? Why do we want to see so many TV clips over and over? Or do we just sit down in that one place we always sit and strap ourselves in for the night and take what the box gives us? Even if we think we’re masters of our time with TiVo, sitting is sitting. As I say to those kids who sit with a cardboard sign on the sidewalk asking for money, when I see ‘em sitting down early—for the day—on a nice sunny morning, I say (and this is made up, but that doesn’t really matter), I’ve got a friend who’s crippled and he’d give anything to be able to walk around on a nice day. Why do you want to spend your day like this?

Think how many times you’ve seen Madonna and the baby lately, Red Auerbach and his cigar, the end zone ‘catch’. As I write this it’s early on a Friday morning and I noticed on the way into work both tabloids had Tom Cruise on the cover about his new mogul-ness. At this moment for sure he’s being talked about on the morning shows, at least every time the news is updated on the half hour, and likely there’s a special segment with a movie insider/reporter on each network talking to the host about Tom and what it all means, and they’re probably showing him hopping on the couch again. Tonight they’ll have it on the nightly news if they didn’t last night and you’ll get to see him hopping again. He only hopped that one time though.

-- Bill Gunlocke

bgunlocke@manhattanmedia.com

Things That Go Bump In The Night

2007-05-17T14:30:00.000-07:00

Our Town downtown
October 30, 2006

The mail room in my 20-story apartment building near Gramercy Park has a bulletin board with various notices on it, like ‘math tutoring available’ and ‘coffee table for sale’ (with an unflattering Polaroid-quality photo of the table, hinting at an overweight cat somewhere just out of range). For months there were more intense messages there; updates about the noise coming from two popular bars across Third Avenue that was driving the street-facing tenants nuts.
I live in the back of the building and heard none of the noise. It bugged me to read the Cindy Sheehan fervor these note-makers were going on about it with. Jesus, I thought, if you don’t want clubs near you, live in Elmira. But then all I had to do was throw my junk mail into the shiny trash receptacle and head up one flight to my silent one-bedroom retreat. I didn’t have to live with it. I knew I was being insensitive, but I just couldn’t feel their pain. To me they were being a pain. I had to stop reading their updates.

Eventually they stopped. The messages, that is. The noise hasn’t, at least nothing is different from the look of things across the street. The two bars draw a crowd. One has even drawn me in occasionally with its Monday mug-of-Bud-for-a-dollar deal (you’ve never seen mugs so small or thick-walled). Here’s what I noticed as I sat on a stool there a few Mondays ago watching the ESPN pre-game in the not-yet-crowded place: The noise almost drove me out. I’ve spent more time than my kids know in such places over the years and I’ve never been so bugged by the noise. Two young ladies catching up on their weekend a few feet away sounded like they were screaming they were so loud. But they weren’t screaming. There was just nothing to absorb the sound of their conversation, which increased in volume as it bounced off bottles and a varnished floor and a tin ceiling, and out the door upward toward the Munch-ish faces trying to keep it together in the front of my building.

I almost put a note on the bulletin board the next day telling what I’d discovered about the bad acoustics. I wanted to let them know it wasn’t the kids’ fault, it wasn’t the smokers at 1:00 in the morning huddled outside; it was simply the lack of curtains on the bar windows and a rug and a ratty couch or two. But I didn’t say anything. Maybe I only half-believed that acoustics were the root cause of their sleeplessness.

I’ve recently had guests. One guy for a week, another guy the next. They both snored—unbearably. I almost didn’t sleep a wink. I wanted to kill. I gained sympathy for the note-makers. I knew I was going to be guest-free soon, but that didn’t help as I tossed and turned my radio on to all-night sports talk to take my mind off the noise. I couldn’t live that way for long.

The people upstairs from me who I don’t know and who must be new or have a new job that brings them home every weeknight at around three a.m. have been waking me up for weeks with their footsteps, shoeless as they are. They also sound like they might be decorating Christmas cookies up there every night; I hear the faint dropping onto the floor of what sounds like the little red hot candies you’d use to make buttons on the snowman cookies. It’s like a payback from the tenants on the Third Avenue side.

-- Bill Gunlocke

bgunlocke@manhattanmedia.com

You Can Not Be Hopeful About Stuyvesant Town

2007-05-17T14:28:00.000-07:00

Our Town downtown
October 23, 2006

In one of the last scenes in ‘Rudy’, the father (Ned Beatty), having finally entered Notre Dame Stadium for the first time in his life, to watch the unlikely event of his son playing in a game, looks out on the legendary field and sighs, ‘This is the most beautiful sight these eyes have ever seen.’

If Mr. Ruettiger were to go to a game there today, he’d find a different place, one not quite so beautiful. The stadium has since been enlarged to accommodate 20,000 more fans with souvenir-buying money in their pockets. It’s too big now. But money rules, even on hallowed ground that you thought would never be tampered with.

Everywhere it seems the hallowed is giving way to the dollar. Homes, once thought of as stately mansions, are now bought and razed and replaced by over-sized, three-car-garaged, two-glass-backboards-in-the-driveway monstrosities. I recently read that the beach road in Fort Lauderdale where Spring-breakers trolled for years past T shirt shops and small Elmore Leonard motels now has an over-sized St.Regis hotel (no wet T shirt or limbo contests there) taking up most of a block.

Here on Astor Place, a tall curvy apartment building that looks like it jumped off the real estate ads in the Sunday Times Magazine for new South Florida condominiums, gleams like an alien spaceship, its ground floor wholly taken up not by an independent bookstore or a vegetarian restaurant but by a Chase bank branch. To many in the neighborhood, it sits obdurately, incongruously on hallowed ground.

Up the street from me the comfortable Gramercy Park Hotel used to offer reasonable rates on rooms. It had its traditions. It was a place to suggest to friends who were coming to visit. That’s all over now.

Which is all to say that despite the assurances that have been given by the new owners of Stuyvesant Town that traditions will be honored, you gotta’ wonder. Do you even have to wonder? There’s no stadium that isn’t being torn down or altered to squeeze in more luxury boxes. What’s the chance Stuyvesant town will stay the way it is. There’s no mountain resort that isn’t going against the cowboy tradition and luring in Ritz Carltons. The trends don’t bode well at all for Stuyvesant Town staying the way it is.

I’m not really intimate with the place, even though I walk by it daily. I’ve run through it occasionally on an exercise jaunt. A guy I taught high school with a few years ago lived there with his wife who was also a teacher. A young guy who went to Fordham with my nephew lives there with his wife who’s in law school. I read a book a few years ago, a memoir by a woman who grew up there. I go to a bar across First Avenue from there to watch sports on TV and eat great bar food and I’ve always assumed the people who come in there are mostly from Stuyvesant Town.

That may be why I like the place. I choose to go there over the many other Irish bars that are closer to my apartment. I tell my friends that it’s a ‘real’ neighborhood bar. By that I mean that the neighborhood uses it for food and drink and wedding anniversary meals. It’s named after a fireman who was killed on 9/11. It’s that kind of neighborhood. If the Ruettigers lived in Manhattan, they’d go into such a place. They’d likely live in Stuyvesant Town.

-- Bill Gunlocke

bgunlocke@manhattanmedia.com

The Day The Music Died

2007-05-17T14:26:00.000-07:00

Our Town downtown
October 16, 2006

When the sketchy report of a small unidentified plane crashing into an Upper East Side apartment building eventually clarified into the death of Yankee pitcher Cory Lidle, I thought about kids who were coming home from school that afternoon and hearing the news. Here's why my thoughts went that way.

On February 3, 1959 I'm a 12-year-old kid at home alone. I've either got the Asian flu that's going around or I'm faking some sickness to get out of school that day. My mother's gone down to Main Street in our rural town to get me some lemon sherbet and maybe some sports magazines to keep me occupied. There is no TV on during the day for kids then and she feels bad for me lying there in my pajamas with nothing to do but thumb through old baseball magazines that I had saved in a high stack in the nightstand next my bed.

On the top of the nightstand is a gray plastic GE radio that I had on constantly whenever I was in bed. I'd fall asleep at night to the sounds of baseball and basketball games that I could find then on stations from places like St. Louis or Pittsburgh and on real clear nights I could get Chicago. New York City stations were hard to find from my room in my remote small town west of the Finger Lakes. But I could hear the Yankees on local stations and I followed the exploits of my favorite player Gil McDougald. I kept a scrapbook on him and wore his #12 all through Little League.

In the mornings and after school on rainy days and in the evenings when I was supposed to be studying spelling words or doing a page in my math workbook I listened to a music station. I liked Jackie Wilson and Bobby Darin best. I knew a lot of songs that were popular because my four-year-older sister watched American Bandstand and she and her girlfriends drooled over Elvis and Fabian and Frankie Avalon who they listened to on her record player with the thick spindle that held stacks of 45s.

So, while my mother is gone in search of some treats for me, I lie there and listen to tunes, waiting to hear Ray Charles or the Everly Brothers, mostly wanting to hear Lonely Teardrops or Sea Cruise or La Bamba. I imagine being a teenager and hanging out like the big kids do in Homer Schafer's Candy Kitchen on Main Street with its shiny rainbow-lighted jukebox.

At some point while I'm alone in my reverie, the disc jockey interrupts a song and tells about a plane crash way out in Iowa. He says Buddy Holly was on the plane and so was Richie Valens and the Big Bopper and he says they're reported to be dead. I first think of my older sister who's away at a Catholic boarding school. I think of her and her friends the previous summer in a cottage we had rented and I see them putting a Buddy Holly record they'd just bought on the record player and singing along to it. I wonder if she had heard. Then I think of my buddies across the street at St. Joe's grade school and I want to tell them that the Big Bopper died in a plane crash, and Richie Valens. And Buddy Holly. I want school to be out so I can call them. I have never had such news to tell.

-- Bill Gunlocke

bgunlocke@manhattanmedia.com

The Closing of a Good Bookstore

2007-05-17T14:25:00.000-07:00

Our Town downtown
October 9, 2006

I remember as a kid watching a cowboy movie at the small-town theater and seeing a shot glass slid down the bar of some dance hall/saloon to a thirsty wrangler who hadn’t shaved and who had one strong boot up on the railing. Even at 10 years old I felt I’d missed something by not being around to live in such a setting where, it appeared to me, basic needs were met.

I thought about that when the smoking ban went into affect here and you couldn’t smoke in saloons anymore. I thought how a 10-year old kid is going to see old movies some day where people smoked and it’s going to look real authentic to him. Just like the cowboy bar looked more leathery and manly than the world I lived in outside the theater, a late 20th century bar with people drinking Rolling Rocks and smoking Marlboro Lights will look less plastic and way sexier to the kid than the computer-wanking life his parents have made for him.

Sometimes you know, in your own time, that something is the real thing and you’re grateful for it and glad it’s around. Molly’s on 22nd and Third is such a place. So is The Strand bookstore. You’ve all got stores and bars that are that way for you. When you walk into them it’s like pushing through the swinging doors of that wild-west saloon. You’re transported into a better-lit place with way better textures than the Apple store.

Bookstores can be that way. Independents especially. No matter the season or your age, you un-wrap the college muffler from around your neck as you cross the store’s threshold and you’re a sophomore all over again, the world of ideas right in front of you, arranged on shelves and in shining stacks. No parents over your shoulder, no summer reading list killing your desire. You can order any book you’re thirsty for and they’ll slide it down your way.

One of the good ones just announced it was closing. Coliseum Books across from Bryant Park and the big library on 42nd Street. It has a great feel to it. The deep space going back to the next block. No escalators. A coffee shop that doesn’t feel like Dunkin’ Donuts. Sturdy blown-up book-jacket posters leaning randomly against tables and counters. I like that.

I had only recently become a regular in there. Our offices are nearby. I was coming to think of it as one of my places. I’d walk out of the offices some mornings or in mid-afternoon, a pencil between my teeth like a pirate to look like I was working, and head the few blocks to the store.

I was in there the other day after it was announced that they’d likely be gone by Christmas. Oh what a sad time that is not to have a good bookstore. The good fall titles are still up front. The big new art books are on display. That’s when a gift-wrap table is set up. From the speakers you hear Brenda Lee and Bobby Helms and if you’re lucky the Ronettes will be singing Come on It’s Lovely Weather for a Sleigh Ride Together with Yo-o-u-u…

Those are timeless moments. They only happen in a few places. There’s about to be one less of those now. And all the websites in the world can’t give you the satisfactions that one of those places can.

-- Bill Gunlocke

bgunlocke@manhattanmedia.com

You Don’t Have to Go to New Orleans to Help

2007-05-17T14:23:00.000-07:00

Our Town downtown
October 2, 2006

This may mean something, if you’re looking for something.

A couple evenings a month I go to the basement of the Jesuit church on West 16th Street and spend the night as a volunteer at the homeless shelter there. The rough picture that just entered your mind of that duty is, I’m going to say, rougher than it really is, or I wouldn’t be doing it. The shelter is a spotless vast cafeteria that the boys’ school connected to the church uses. Chrome-and-plastic lunch chairs are stacked in twos on long-table tops. The floor shines.

Sometime after 8:00 a dozen or so men are dropped off by bus from a downtown center where many men and women gather nightly waiting to be shuttled to one of the shelters around the city. I used to volunteer at a Quaker Meeting House in the same system. That was spotless too, smaller and cozy. When the men file into the shelter, they head right to the two storage rooms where metal, folded cots are waiting. Most of the men have been recent regulars at the church shelter and know which bed is theirs. They grab fresh linen from the shelves. There are soft stacks of gym-white towels.

Near one of the front tables is a TV that I take out of storage and have plugged in for them. I grab bread and lunch meat and juice and milk from the fridge and spread that out for them. They find the same welcome there every night. They look grateful—and very hungry.

And they look tired. Most, after they’ve washed up and made their beds, are down for the count within an hour. They seldom say much to each other. Maybe bum a smoke and go outside. One, maybe two, guys watch television till 9:30 or 10. It’s quiet then and I flip all the switches that turn out the big lights on the high ceiling above them. I read by the lights of the vending machines for another hour or so and then sleep on a cot like theirs.

Morning comes quickly and the men board a bus again around 6:00 to head back to the center to start another day. There’ll they’ll get medication that most of them appear to be on. How they’ll spend their day varies; one guy sells books on 6th Avenue. Another guy does house repairs. Many watch TV all day at the center or hang out in libraries and bookstores. I’ve never seen any of them around. I look for them though.

Sometimes I wonder why I wouldn’t do this once a week, or more even. I miss nothing socially on the two nights I do volunteer. There I am in a setting stimulatingly different from my small apartment. There are a dozen guys grateful to have someone helping them and liking them. It uses some part of you that doesn’t normally get used.

That’s the point of this. There are ways you can use those parts of yourself all around the city. While I sit by the vending machines at the shelter and read till I’m ready for sleep, I sometimes look over the church bulletin that I may have taken on my way downstairs. I’m always impressed by what they do. Just at this one church there is the homeless shelter that runs every night of the year. There’s a ‘Welcome Table’ that serves 700 meals to hungry people on Sundays in the big cafeteria. They give out donated clothing to anyone that needs it then too. When I say ‘they’, I mean volunteers.

There’s a ‘Food Pantry’ at the church a couple Saturdays a month that dispenses groceries. They serve 100 families. They, again, are volunteers. Spanish speakers are especially needed.

There’s an ‘Education Outreach Program’ that lasts 12 weeks and meets twice a week to help people who are trying to recover from their homeless situation. Volunteers become mentors. There are also adult education programs and GED and ESL programs. All needing you and me to help with them. They don’t beg for your help or your
vote or slide fliers under your door. They mention it in the bulletin that they do these things and are in need of volunteers.

And this is just in one church, on one cross street in town. Imagine all the places in this city that do the same kinds of things and are looking for someone to help them do it.

-- Bill Gunlocke

bgunlocke@manhattanmedia.com

Mr. Klein Needs To Pay More Attention In Class

2007-05-17T14:21:00.000-07:00

Our Town downtown
September 25, 2006

You’ve seen those C-SPAN panels or book readings where the camera pulls back from the participants and you notice the audience seats in the room are so sparsely filled you’re uncomfortable for the whole enterprise. You wonder why some somebody didn’t call a professor they knew and ask him to bring his class down to fill the seats.

That’s about how it was at the Tweed Court House on Chambers Street a week ago Monday for the first public meeting of the Panel for Education Policy. (Think school board). There were name-place cards in front of each of the dozen panel members’ seats at the big table and one for Chancellor Joel Klein, water bottles, microphones, all that. They had a guy announce in Spanish that there were translation services available. You could even have had sign language going on if you had called in advance. There was a PowerPoint-ready screen behind the big table. It was set up like there was going to be a real meeting.

I counted just 25 people in the audience, that’s including me and a few people with media chains around their neck. So maybe 20 people out of a school system of over a million kids and almost two million parents were in those seats.

Here’s what they saw:

A meeting so uninspired and so perfunctory you wondered how they were getting away with it. You wondered if the mayor walked in and saw the proceedings if he wouldn’t have thrown the whole panel out. But then you wondered if maybe the mayor knew very well how these meetings go and he was alright with that. Then you got cynical. And then you thought people should send their kids to private school. I don’t mean those pockets of parents with all sorts of degrees who send their kids to the good public school programs. Those kids are going to do all right no matter where they go to school because there are books and shiny computers all over their house. I mean the parents of kids from other households who of course can’t afford private schools and whose kids don’t get into the good programs at their school and have to rely on the people in front of them at the big table to give their kids something of quality.

They couldn’t have seen much quality in the proceedings that night. (One woman on the panel, the glaring exception. She was the lone exception in the other panel meeting I attended over the summer which was also lame, but I blamed that lameness on it being summer. I’m trying to get in touch with her to see what she thinks of it all.)

I mentioned here, after the first meeting I attended, that Chancellor Klein tinkered incessantly with his Blackberry virtually the whole time. It seemed crazy to me that he wasn’t more sensitive to what even the few people in the audience, some with press credentials, might think about such a distracted way of spending his time in the center seat at the table.

Well, he did it again last Monday. There he was chairing the opening meeting of the new school year and there he was again scrolling around on his little machine and thumbing messages while points were being made on the screen over his head. I’m as old as he is and I know the world is not lived out like a feel-good TV show, but even I was shocked at his insouciance.

Does his indifference at the only two meetings I’ve seen him at mean he’s that way in the day-to-day running of the school system? No. But it does show a lack of regard for the public, which is a criticism that’s been lobbed the administration’s way about how they run the schools.
Something needs to be changed. Something needs to happen to make more than 25 people in this huge city come to meetings about the schools. One thing: Joel Klein could put away his Blackberry and not look at his watch like he had better things to do.

-- Bill Gunlocke

bgunlocke@manhattanmedia.com

Why Is Manhattan In The Dark?

2007-05-17T14:19:00.000-07:00

Our Town downtown
September 18, 2006

The best light in the world is the light in a classroom. There is nothing warmer in a rough world than to go by a school on a darkening fall afternoon and see the rectangles of bright yellow in the brick walls of a neighborhood school. In some cities and towns, when school is closed at the end of the day, that same great light shines till late in the neighborhood library.

Not here. The lights do not stay on late in our libraries. In the nine downtown libraries, the latest a light is on is 8:00 and in only one of the nine is it on that ‘late’ more than once a week. Eight of the nine only have one night till 8:00? Yep. Check it out. Here are the numbers in the downtown branches:

New Amsterdam: One night till 8:00. Not open Sunday (or Saturday). 37 hours a week.

Jefferson Market: Two nights till 8:00. Not open Sunday. 40 hours a week.

Epiphany: One night till 8:00. Not open Sunday. 44 hours a week.

Chatham Square: One night till 8:00. Not open Sunday. 44 hours a week.

Seward Park: One night till 8:00. Not open Sunday. 44 hours a week.

Hamilton Fish: No nights till 8:00. Not open Sunday. 33 hours a week.

Muhlenberg: One night till 8:00. Not open on Sunday. 36 hours a week.

Ottendorfer: One night till 8:00. Not open on Sunday (or Saturday). 36 hours a week.

Tompkins Square: One night till 8:00. Not open on Sunday. 36 hours a week.

It astounds me that in Manhattan such a disregard for literacy and literature and learning exists. If that’s all the city thinks of its libraries, what does it think of its schools? Its students? The dog runs in the parks are more open.

The Barnes & Noble on Union Square is open every day from 10-10. That’s 84 hours a week. What does that say about the supposed progressive mentality of Manhattan that rails against Starbucks and other chains and generally thinks government is the enlightened answer to civics needs? Is it saying we’re turning over the dissemination of ideas and literature in our culture to a chain book store because our elected government on who we’d rather rely doesn’t care enough to keep the local libraries open? It may be saying: Can’t you see we’re too busy reading about people like Les Moonves and Sumner Redstone in the Times every day, we can’t worry about libraries.

How much money can it cost? How much real money can it cost to keep a few small library buildings open 12 hours a day—like Barnes & Noble? In this mammoth town where an obscene amount of people make oodles of money without wearing work shoes or breaking a sweat, there isn’t enough money to keep these libraries open longer? What if the oodle-gatherers gave some money to their local libraries instead of giving it to their alma mater which is near Boston somewhere?

Shouldn’t libraries be the community center where young mothers take kids to get an armload of picture books? Shouldn’t they open up early and stay open late to accommodate students? Shouldn’t their lights be on in your neighborhood?

-- Bill Gunlocke

bgunlocke@manhattanmedia.com

Not Just School Kids Need Notebooks

2007-05-17T14:18:00.000-07:00

Our Town downtown
September 11, 2006

The school year is as clean now as a kid’s new notebook. Follow that notebook in your mind through fall and winter, through spring, all the way till June. What you imagine happening to it may mirror the year for the more than a million kids in the system.

Some kids will lose theirs the first week. Some kids will never get a notebook and they’ll have to ask the kid next to them to rip out a page of theirs and get asked by the teacher why they handed in a paper with those raggedy edges, and where’s your notebook? Others will doodle in theirs. Some will write little. Some will take obsessive notes and need another notebook by Thanksgiving. Some teachers will require notebooks and ask to see them. Others will require them but never ask the kids to do much with them.

Some things New York does great. Subways and places to eat. Newsstands. Broadway shows. Shoe stores. The critical mass is here for things like that to work. But critical mass doesn’t ensure good schools. It probably makes it all more difficult. The management of over a million kids is a monumental organizational effort. Each kid you can assume has at least one custodial parent. That’s way over a million parents to contend with. The number of teachers and buses and boilers and custodians and computers and banging lockers and lunch room chairs and wads of gum in the drinking fountains is staggering. The schools are close to the street with its menace. Cell phones in class are an issue.. Perverts might be across the street. Pervert teachers are in class in some cases. Union battles with the administration. This all adds up to failure. Remember that shockingly low number of kids who graduate in four years? 58.2 percent. The Giants expect back-up QB Jared Lorenzen to complete more passes than that out of a hundred, and that’s with vicious linemen coming at him.

Keep thinking about the notebook. It could get stolen or a kid could get whacked on the head with one. Or it could be a place where kids go when it’s boring or noisy or redundant in Math class to write a story or a song lyric. Some might draw a cartoon and show it to the friend next to them. Others might be too private to let anyone see what they’re up to. Some kids might not have a pen or a pencil with them to do anything.

Too many kids will put their heads on their notebooks like thin pillows and go to sleep. That happens. Way more than you know. Ask your kid. It has to be sleeping or no pens or lost notebooks that keeps so much failure happening.

Here would be a good use of a notebook. What if all of the daily papers here had a reporter in the schools all the time taking notes? The papers have reporters embedded in Baghdad, in Lebanon. There are writers in restaurants and theater seats every night. Why not in the schools? What if they each picked two or three representative schools and got access to everything in them. They could look through the libraries and see how current the books are and how often the kids can come in to use the place. They could go into classrooms and see what goes on. Ask to see the gym equipment. Ask to see homework. They could eat with the kids. They wouldn’t have to talk to parents or union officials or Joel Klein like they mostly do now when they write about education.

I’d read their columns or reports. I’d rather read about life in a real class than read about Snapple contracts and union negotiations. Who really cares if Snapple and the city cut a deal? Who cares about cell phones one way or another that much? The issue of loser assistant principals and what to do with them could be dealt with better by the papers if they had writers in the schools all the time. The reporters could tell us about noise and kids sleeping on their notebooks.

But it almost certainly won’t happen that schools are covered closely that way. Why that is so is one of those questions you could put up on the blackboard at the beginning of the year and still be discussing it come June. Is it sexist? Are schools still thought of by the press as places where mostly women work and the places where moms wait outside to pick the kids up? Of course. And would reporters rather write about a fight between the teachers’ union and the mayor? Of course they would. The editorial pages may routinely write about kids being the future, but the editors assign their writers to almost every other part of the city rather than to the schools where the future they claim lies.

Who’s going to use their notebooks well this year? That’s the question, for kids--and adults.

-- Bill Gunlocke

bgunlocke@manhattanmedia.com

Three Sisters and 9/11

2007-05-17T14:17:00.000-07:00

Our Town downtown
September 4, 2006

Five years later my eyes can water if I’m listening to someone whose 9/11 story I’m hearing for the first time. It doesn’t have to be about them losing anyone. It doesn’t have to be about them being on Chambers Street when they heard the sound. It can even be second-hand.

Here’s one that did it recently; last week, actually. My youngest daughter was visiting from Wyoming and the other two daughters and a son-in law and I were sitting at Molly’s on Third Avenue talking about everything and nothing when somehow the subject came up. I know what it was; the Jackson Hole kid said the husband of one of her former college roommates who she’d seen that afternoon had worked in the financial world in one of the towers. He and another young co-worker met in the lobby that day and even after the plane struck the first tower, the other guy went upstairs to work. The husband decided not to. That buddy and other work buddies of his are gone.

Then I asked my kids to remind me how they first heard that day. One was waiting on 6th Avenue in the Village for a cab to take her uptown. She could see straight down at what other people were looking in that direction at. The other daughter on Christopher Street saw the news on television and went up higher up in the building with friends and saw the second plane strike. The son-in-law then lived alone further downtown and was walking to work when the sound of a plane flying too low got his attention.

I’d heard some parts of those recollections before. I had surprisingly never asked the daughter who was already living in Wyoming then how she heard. She said she was staying at her boyfriend’s when the radio alarm went off and the station it was set for was talking about planes and terrorists and New York where her sisters and her father lived and she frantically tried to call us all day but couldn’t get through till late that afternoon. Her cousin who lives in Wyoming, too, and did then, lost her college roommate in one of the towers. I cried when I heard the high school the girl had gone to in Philadelphia retired her field hockey number in a ceremony that fall. Her name was Joanna. I thought of her again last week when I took the three daughters to see Sweeney Todd and heard the love song about Joanna. Imagine the times her parents have heard the name or some song like that.

My college roommate lost a good friend who was the greatest lacrosse player in Cornell history. When I visit him in Connecticut there’s a book of poems by his friend whom I never met that Cornell has since published. It sits on the table by the chair where I read up there and I look through it each time I notice it.

I’ve talked about my 9/11 so many times; how I was on the phone with a buddy from Cleveland who routinely called me every morning. That morning he called and was just going to hang up to take his dogs out for a walk when he said that something just came on TV about a plane hitting the World Trade Center but he had to go. I didn’t have a TV and didn’t think much about what he said. I tried to make a call I was supposed to make about work, and couldn’t get a dial tone. I hit the zero button and an operator said excuse me but I’m in Queens and I’m seeing another plane hit the World Trade Center. I said Oh Jesus and grabbed my camera and walked from the East Village against the grain of people walking silently, some women and kids arm-in-arm. I didn’t really know what was going on until I listened to a parked car’s 1010 WINS report. I kept walking and got as close as I could. I was staring down at my camera when I heard a black woman scream next to me and I looked up to see the first tower finally give in to what had happened to it and fall to its knees. I was in the middle of the street and I put my hands to my mouth like people do.

-- Bill Gunlocke

bgunlocke@manhattanmedia.com

You Won’t Need Your Raccoon Coat Here

2007-05-17T14:16:00.000-07:00

Our Town downtown
August 28, 2006

You see Texas Longhorn hats on the street. They are the popular hats now. The burnt orange is faded just right. The popularity could be a result of Vince Young. It could just be that they’ve always been the coolest college hats and now they’re finally in. Like the blue Michigan hats with the big yellow (maize, actually)’M’ were in for years.

It’s good to see out-of-state college stuff in Manhattan. It’s like seeing the Montana license plates on that old Subaru in the East Village. If we’re from everywhere here, the hats and shirts say where some of that everywhere is. A red Nebraska hat is very cool. So’s a Florida gator hat. An IU shirt says you lived in Bloomington for four years. A handsome Asian woman used to run in the East River Park in a perfect blue-with-yellow/gold-script-Cal hat on. There is no finer look than she had in that hat.

On Saturdays you see it most. Guys up early for a paper and a coffee. Girls heading to the gym. Wisconsin shirt. Tulane sweats. They look interesting in their fading school stuff. Connections are implied to their old friends, their school, sports teams, some major that was more interesting than the field they’re in now. It’s like a campground sticker on a rear bumper. There’s something un-plugged about an old college shirt. That’s why Bill Murray slept in a classic gray one in Lost in Translation. In plastic, screaming-light Tokyo, his college-guy shirt said he had some plainer, more idealistic past.

You hardly see any local school shirts or hats here. Yankee caps for sure, many Giant hats, but not many of NYU or Fordham or Columbia. And those might as well say Vassar for all they resonate, compared to say, a UNC hat or the Kansas hat with the Jayhawk on it.

Which is to say that New York is missing something without big-time college sports. Imagine if Vince Young or Brady Quinn or Adam Morrison played here. Or even came here to play against a big NYU team. Fordham used to play football in Yankee Stadium. NYU when we were young had a guy like J.J.Redick and two teammates who went into the NBA. The first sports magazine we remember had a basketball player from Fordham named Ed Conlon on the cover. Now what do you have? Name a college athlete in this whole big city. Cincinnati has stars at Xavier, Philly has big hoops at Penn and St. Joe’s and Villanova. Atlanta has Georgia Tech, and the Georgia Bulldogs are nearby. Chicago has DePaul and Northwestern. Boston had Flutie and still has his BC.

All that is better than pro stuff. Ask the kids in the T shirts. Ask yourself, you went to school somewhere.

On a drizzly fall Saturday afternoon a few years ago, we were sitting with a buddy drinking beer at the bar at the Corner Bistro. We’d had the great burgers and were watching, let’s say, Michigan State-Michigan on the TV. And as we watched we could also see, when we looked around the bar, the way the streets looked outside the window. With the game on and with the trees of the West Village set against a gray sky and with a couple beers in us, it looked like we were near campus in Ann Arbor and the game was going on a few blocks away and when it was over girls in camel hair coats would come into the Bistro. But of course we weren’t and they didn’t. No victory march, no pennants above the bar like there should have been, no blow-up of a ticket from the 1976 game when the team went to the Gator Bowl. No bartender who knew the coach. There is no coach here, no Bear, no Woody, no Joe Paterno, no Charlie Weis. There are no sophomore tailbacks. There is no school song.

It’s the time of year for all that. We’ll see it on TV. Game Day will set up its traveling show anyplace but here.

Why can’t Fordham be big-time again? NYU against Syracuse would be a natural. Violet pompoms might look cool. You think it’s neat to see Law & Order trucks filming around town? Imagine seeing the ESPN trucks and hearing a marching band.

-- Bill Gunlocke

bgunlocke@manhattanmedia.com

Is Manhattan Too Smart For Its Own Good?

2007-05-17T14:15:00.000-07:00

Our Town downtown
August 21, 2006

Let’s start with something that happened nearly 30 years ago. In Ohio. A friend of ours when we lived there had to go to Boston for an urban-planning-grad-school-related conference, and we worried that she might never want to come back. When she returned from her trip she announced to our surprise and relief that she couldn’t live in Boston. She said she couldn’t live in a place where everyone watched ‘Saturday Night Live’. She wanted more variety of thinking.

According to the latest numbers from the Census Bureau, she couldn’t live here either. (Actually she married someone else and now lives in Lake Tahoe, which makes sense—on both counts.) According to the new figures, Manhattan is becoming more educated all the time. More residents have degrees than ever before. Those who don’t have degrees are going to find it harder to get or keep jobs that pay enough to live here.

That’s the bad part; that the non-degree folks are leaving. With them goes some of that variety of thinking. With them go muscles that didn’t come from the gym. With them go experiences that didn’t come from grad school and web sites and Netflix. Do you want to live in a place where everyone watches Seinfeld and Jon Stewart? Thank God for the doormen, who already don’t live in Manhattan, for just being around us with their experiences that aren’t ours. You notice it when you see them out of uniform. They don’t dress like collegians. They don’t read the Times. You can tell some tenants crave to touch the working energies and class resentments (how could they not have them when they see the packages from Crate and Barrel arriving in mounds every day?) that the doormen and the porters bring into a building. Some folks will hang by the desk and talk the doormen’s heads off. Are these tenants lonely? Or do they miss something of their past, the city’s past, when people of different incomes lived closer to each other. Maybe they’re from Ohio. It’s a good thing the maintenance men in the building. Do you think the guy next door to you in your building could fix your drain? Could you?

Downtown still has working class people. You don’t have to rely on doormen for your dose of reality as much as people in other parts of Manhattan do. But there will be fewer and fewer of the working class all the time. Rents go up here. Jobs leave. They leave. In moves Donny Deutsch. Crate and Barrel boxes, too.

There’s nothing wrong with college grads rolling into town. There’s certainly nothing wrong with them (us) per se. It’s the displacement that’s the negative part of the trend. In most towns and cities--and in earlier Manhattan--you can rub up against economic variety in the neighborhood. A guy down the street might be working on his car. A neighborhood kid throws the paper on your porch. In winter he shovels your driveway. Here it’s not that way.

When George Bush got re-elected, the next morning a few people were talking in the lobby of our big apartment building. One of them said it’s time New York secedes. Ok, so that person was by nature annoying, but none of the group dared say anything in contradiction. They smiled in accord, assuming that everyone within ear shot or between the rivers would certainly feel the same way. And whether they would feel the same way is not the point. The point is that in a town where every one watches Saturday Night Live, a certain like-mindedness is assumed. It’s like being students at Oberlin.

Manhattanites take pride in their politics and their cultural awareness. One of the perks of living here is to not be in Ohio anymore. But to have too much of the same mindset is not good. If too many working class people leave and are replaced by bloggers and Onion readers, the result could be a sameness that could turn this part of the city into its own gated community.

-- Bill Gunlocke

bgunlocke@manhattanmedia.com

City Should Be Ashamed Of Its Dark Libraries

2007-05-17T14:13:00.000-07:00

Our Town downtown
August 14, 2006

You have to give The Daily News credit for talking about the paltry number of hours the libraries are open here, in its August 6 edition. Their writer, David Saltonstall’s opening line was: It is the shame of the city. It’s too bad they didn’t play it big on the front page. ‘Shame of the City’ would have made a bold cover story. We wish they’d have screamed it. They scream about other stuff.

This whole city from time to time screams about all sorts of things: Isiah Thomas, George Bush, cars, chain stores, taxi fares, subways, A-Rod. It amazingly-to-us never screams about those bad library hours.

Is it because the people who have the megaphones here don’t need the libraries, don’t use them, and so don’t think they’re that important? Is it because Barnes & Noble has partially filled the vacuum left by the libraries being dark so often? Or are libraries considered a kind of lower class thing? Like public pools and feeding pigeons. Where’s the Straphangers Campaign for libraries? Where are the politicians? Where are all of us?

We noticed it when we moved here seven years ago. We were shocked at how late the libraries opened in the morning, some days they didn’t open till after lunch. Some days not at all! Night hours were more uneven. We were embarrassed to tell our friends back home. Back there the libraries opened up every morning at 9:00 and closed at 9:00 at night. Seven days a week. It was where you went to read The Economist or USA Today or The New Republic. It’s where your kids met their high school friends to giggle and do research for a paper due tomorrow. It’s where the Xerox machines were. The libraries were as open as the grocery stores. 84 hours a week, with all sorts of comfortable chairs. Here the average branch is open 38.4 hours a week. Shame of the city is right. Shame on the city.

How does that fit with a city that has Lincoln Center and the 92nd Street Y? And Random House and a plaque that says e.e. cummings lived here on Patchin Place? How does it fit with a city that calls itself Book Country?

It doesn’t fit. You probably can’t really believe that the libraries are so not-open here. 38.4 hours a week? That doesn’t fit with any of your received notions about what kind of place this is. You wouldn’t be surprised if you read that some less progressive, less ‘literate’ places had meager library hours, but NewYork City?

You’ve been fooled maybe by the two lions at the big research library on Fifth Avenue with the banners hanging like it’s the Met. That place gets photographed seven days a week and tourists sit next to construction workers on the steps and eat panini sandwiches every day. Patrons also sit there on those steps in the morning waiting for the place to open. They could sit there all day on Sundays and Mondays. The place is closed on those days. On Tuesdays and Wednesdays it doesn’t open until 11:00. The lions and the banners are there every day. Maybe you thought that meant the place was always open for business. Imagine what tourists think when they find out they’re two hours—or two days-- too early to go up to the third floor to see the wonderful reading rooms they’ve heard about.

And what about kids? Students. They know what it means. Kids pick stuff up. If parents and leaders think store hours are more important than library hours, are you surprised they think checking out the gizmos at Circuit City is cooler than reading?

Maybe you don’t need the library for your life. You’ve got books and money to buy more. You’ve got magazines coming in the mail and you buy a newspaper every day, and your computer gives you all sorts of stuff to read. But there are parts of the city where a Barnes and Noble isn’t handy. And there are parts of town where there are no book shelves in the apartments and no desks and no magazines coming in the mail. Those places need libraries. Where can kids who live there go to do their homework, or read a magazine?

Two weeks ago in this space we suggested that the libraries in the city should be open till 11:00 every night. We’ll keep suggesting that. Shame on us if we don’t.

-- Bill Gunlocke

bgunlocke@manhattanmedia.com

It Takes Mountains of Cash to Live Here

2007-05-17T14:11:00.000-07:00

Our Town downtown
August 7, 2006

They couldn’t be less alike in most ways. Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and here. In Jackson the air is clear and fresh and your eyes see mountains with sunlight playing in the snow on top. Here of course there’s none of that natural splendor. There, of course, there’s none of the mix of stuff and people that we have.

What both places do have in common though are ridiculous prices on places to live. It’s not surprising that both places cost more to live in than Cheyenne or Elmira, but that they cost an arm and two legs is ridiculous. Sure, in both places space is at a premium. Manhattan is only so big and Jackson for all its big sky-ness is surrounded on all sides by land in a government trust; like 97% of it is untouchable, so there’s little land available and the price of it is Tetonic.

And yet a lot of both places’ cachet is built on some images that belie high prices. Jackson Hole’s main image is of tough skiing and cowboy license plates. A dominant Manhattan image is of young artists and fire-escape buildings. Neither image is all false. Those components are authentically a part of each place. But there’s less in both towns of small-scale, cowboy-up, long-neck-beer-bottle lifestyle and Lower East Side poetry slams. The rent and cost of buying in either place is sending the cowpokes and the poets packing.

A mature single woman artist in Tribeca said the other night that after moving there 20 years ago from the Midwest for the art-making culture of the place, she’s ready to cash out, sell her space and move somewhere else where reading and writing and art matter like they once did there. In Jackson there are skiers who have to move on after a few seasons if they fall in love out there and want to start a family.

It seems during the day in both places that all sorts of economic levels live right there where you do. Here, the construction worker and delivery people and the mixed faces on the subway make it seem like some peaceable kingdom where all God’s children live in harmony. Out there, Mexican laborers and snowboarders eat lunch next to second-homers from Grosse Point

But here at night most of those folks go home to the outer boroughs, and there they go over the pass to Idaho. School teachers, nurses, street musicians, restaurant workers, reporters. They can’t live in the place where they work. Costs way too much. And they take away a lot with them. They take away soul. Think of the building you live in here. Is it as lively as the city streets were during the day? Or is it a bunch of folks with a disproportionate amount of those canvas bags they got for supporting WNYC or the Natural History Museum. The good looking fireman you saw in a diner at lunchtime doesn’t live in Manhattan. Neither does that hot young dance instructor you see walking to her studio in the morning. They aren’t in your building. In Jackson, the ski instructor lives over the pass in Victor, so does the girl who sings folk music in the bar at base of the mountain.

Ok, it isn’t like the exodus from here hasn’t created new artistic communities in Brooklyn and Queens and other places. And it isn’t like there aren’t more cool bars and even a bistro maybe in Idaho since the prices drove folks over there. But, come on, for all the cool photographs that make some bars in Brooklyn look so good you want to live above them, if the artists and writers could still afford to live here there’s no chance most of them would live over there. And for all the benefits touted about the new Jackson that’s springing up in Victor, the ski culture and history in old Jackson is what they really want.

It’s a question of money. And it’s too bad that so many people, for reasons of the unreasonable amounts of money needed to live in Manhattan, where Kerouac and Dylan once lived, have to take a bridge or a tunnel out of here when night falls.

-- Bill Gunlocke

bgunlocke@manhattanmedia.com

Starbucks Rages Against The Machine

2007-05-17T14:09:00.000-07:00

Our Town downtown
July 31, 2006

We pay an extra $7 a month on our cell phone bill to have our free evening minutes kick in at 7:00 instead of 9:00. We complained when our new contract asked for payment to get those early hours we used to get for nothing, but they could have asked for $14 and we’d have signed on. You have to have 7:00. You can’t call anybody after 9:00 without knowing you’re cutting into some TV show they’re hooked on. They probably aren’t going to answer, or, if they do, are only going to give you one ear. The other ear and both eyes aimed, with a new kind of intensity, with the one distracted ear occupied on the phone, at a big television set.

Even 7:00 is not a guarantee anymore. The feeling-guilty will tell you they’re watching Discovery or the History Channel, but they aren’t. The hours before 9:00 are the re-run times and they’re probably memorizing the lines they haven’t already. You almost can’t call people at night. Mothers used to cradle a portable phone in their ear and talk while they were bathing their kids more readily than most of us will take a call now during Deadwood (we’ve never seen Deadwood, but we know it’s being talked about as though it were a great, gritty book, which it isn’t).

The TV is on in most houses and apartments from 6:00 on, maybe earlier, until midnight, likely later. That is six hours—and more--a night. Don’t even get us started on TiVo which is allowing people to think they’re raging against the machine by skipping commercials, when really all they’re doing with it is saving precious minutes to watch an extra show of some kind.

There seems to be nothing to do in the house anymore but watch the tube. The big sucker is right there, dominating the room, and getting more dominant all the time, with the wall models and high definition. And even if there’s nothing on, there’s NetFlix with its Great Books illusion. It’s all hard to escape. If you’re in the house, you’re in front of the box, your expanding butt in the same place for all six hours.

There are only a few places to go to escape. (One sadly is not the library here which ought to be open till 11:00 every night of the week.) The best places to go are bars and bookstores and Starbucks. All of which are better for you than staring at pretty-much-boring-repetitive stuff on television. And even if bars have increasingly festooned their walls with giant screens, all three places offer a lot for human beings to do that is more productive and more potentially an epiphany than staying in the house on a couch.

Bars are everywhere in the city. Why not walk out to one after dinner for an hour and a half. Two drinks a day are good for you they say. If you’re single you might meet someone. If you’re married or a couple you might be turned on by the whole experience. Norman Mailer once said that couples likely don’t have much sex after a night of TV watching, so numbing is the whole experience. Better to go have a couple than sit at home. You don’t have to go to a club. A good neighborhood bar is a great thing. Be a regular. Read the paper there, look up at their tube if you have to, watch the Mets, but don’t sit at home like Montag’s wife in ‘Fahrenheit 451’.

Or you can go to a bookstore. There are plenty of chain and independent stores in this city with an amazing amount of great books to look through and buy. You can have a coffee or something and sit there with your purchase and be stimulated in a way that Chris Matthews can’t stimulate you.

Or, of course, you can go to Starbucks. It’s not fashionable to say it but Starbucks may be the best cultural advancement in this country in a decade. We’ve seen in countless of their windows, as we’ve walked by, people reading, talking, working on their homework or their play or writing their Christmas cards or paying bills or falling in love or just looking out the window. There was no place else to do that before Starbucks, bars and bookstores being the lone exceptions. Certainly there weren’t coffee houses in such numbers, serving quality like Starbucks does. There just weren’t. And if you want to complain about their everywhere-ness, what are a hundred or so stores that stay open late in your neighborhood, compared to the millions of TV sets in this city and all the thirsty eyes watching them?

-- Bill Gunlocke

bgunlocke@manhattanmedia.com

No Cell Phones In School? How About No BlackBerries?

2007-05-17T14:06:00.000-07:00

Our Town downtown
July 24, 2006

The Panel for Educational Policy is what they call the school board here and they had a ‘public meeting’ last week at the Tweed Court House at 6:00 p.m. We happened to notice it that day on the city’s web site where we’d gone looking for something else. Our eyes just landed on it. There’s no bold type urging you to look at the announcement, or to come to the meeting. Barnes & Noble puts more work into signs and window displays and web site announcements for author readings at which they might not sell 10 books than the city put into letting you know the school board was having a meeting that night and you’re all invited.

As a result maybe 20 people out of a city, of what, more than 7,000,000 million people were there in a meeting room that was so impressive—like everything about the building—that they could have held a private art auction in it. High, arched windows, chandeliers, upholstered high-backed chairs, optimistically (or cynically) arranged for an audience five times the size of the one that showed up. In the back of the room was a lone TV camera.

Up front was a string of tables put end-to-end to make one long table for the Panel of 13 to sit at with Chancellor Joel Klein in the center. Each member had a name tag in front of them and a bottle of Crystal Geyser water. Two big windows were behind them. The meeting started on time.

It very quickly became, despite the chandelier lighting and the rich fabric on the nice chairs, like any other meeting. An agenda was referred to and projected onto the wall (above an old fireplace? Can’t remember, but it was that kind of room), and there were four points on it, none exciting. One point, a little embarrassing actually, was about the 58.2 percent graduation-in-four-years rate (which we’ve refused to applaud here). Klein was pleased with this rate, while acknowledging that much still has to be done. One older panel member told the Chancellor, ‘…by the way, your numbers were wonderful.’ 58.2 percent is wonderful? Hell, an autistic high school kid from Rochester hit six three pointers in a row in a real game, and Joel Klein and a board member are pleased that 58.2 percent of their students graduated in four years?

Going through the agenda took them maybe 35 minutes. A couple people read reports about the budget and about how parents who have difficulty easily understanding English can be helped by the Translation Unit. A few panel members made a few remarks and that was that.

While all this was going on, the Chancellor was fiddling with his BlackBerry. The whole time! He looked like an uncle with a transistor radio at his niece’s graduation trying to get a Yankee score. Occasionally he’d look back at the what was projected on the wall and turn back to his BlackBerry, like the uncle, noticing in the program that they were still way too early in the alphabet for his niece to go up for her diploma, going back to his game.

Klein only put it away when it came to the last part of the evening, ‘Public Comment’, which meant it was time for anyone in the audience to go to a microphone and ask a question or make a statement. Five or six people did. A couple of the speakers scolded the board and the Chancellor for this or that. The Chancellor responded to the criticism by just going on to the next questioner. The whole public portion of the session took maybe 15 minutes and then the meeting was adjourned. By the time we left the meeting, stopped in the rest room and walked out onto Chambers Street, the Chancellor was already in front of the black car waiting to drive him away.

When the meeting started on time we were impressed by the group’s professionalism. But the BlackBerry, and the lack of engagement with the public representatives in the big room and the quick getaway, made us cynical about even that. Did it really matter to the Panel for Educational Policy or to the Chancellor that anyone showed up at all?

-- Bill Gunlocke

bgunlocke@manhattanmedia.com

Kids Are the Schools' Top Priority. Say What?

2007-05-17T13:28:00.000-07:00

Our Town downtown
July 17, 2007

We said here a couple weeks ago that we wouldn’t take part in the applause for the 58.2 percent graduation-in-four years rate in the city’s high schools. It seemed to us that it was 41.8 percent below where it should be. We didn’t use that last number two weeks ago. We did suggest though that a 100 percent graduation rate should be the standard in the public schools here, just as it is in the private schools. Doesn’t it seem unconscionable that anything less--so less--has become acceptable? Shouldn’t there be T shirts saying 58.2 Percent is a Failing Grade? Shouldn’t the board have to go to summer school? Shouldn’t mothers be banging pots and pans and marching in front of the school board building? Shouldn’t someone’s head roll? 58.2 percent is a failure.

Last week there was an insert in the Times from the school board. It was a ‘Summer 2006 Guide for Parents and Families’. It looked like something from a school board. It looked governmental. It had the feel of a summer course schedule from a community college like you’d find in the library by the tax forms. If you don’t have kids in the schools you pitched it probably. We didn’t pitch it. We kept it so we could keep staring at the slogan on the cover. Here’s the slogan: ‘Putting Children First’. Sounds good, right? Sounds caring and progressive and it fits the feel-good, sensitive approach of the rest of the cover with its three racially-balanced pictures of kids engaged in school work, and with its culturally sensitive message written in a half dozen different languages at the bottom of the cover. There’s nothing wrong with that approach and we’re not trying to be cynical. But the slogan is strange. Putting Children First.

Indulge us: Does that mean that they didn’t used to put children first and that this a new approach? Did they once put something else first? Were children second before the new slogan? Who was first in the old order? Teachers? Parents? Custodians? School librarians? Textbook salesman? Volleyball coaches? Yellow-bus drivers? Crossing guards?The teachers union? What do you think? This is a topic for a call-in show (which now that we think about it would be a great idea, a daily call-in show about the schools).

Is that curious logo a symbol of what’s wrong with the city schools? Maybe. Well-intentioned as it is, it does say something about how the people in charge see their charges. It does reek of a public relations agency. It’s soft soap. It’s not real, it’s not focused. It’s a vague slogan that means nothing. You can’t take it seriously. It doesn’t register. It doesn’t say anything. The Latin slogans that festoon the breast pockets of the blue blazers that the private school students wear say more to those kids’ parents even if the parents can’t read Latin. At least they look serious.

No doubt the school board thinks that Putting Children First is serious and inspirational and that it signals some commitment to the city’s public school students. You have to wonder about the grit of the commitment when the message is so softly American Greeting.

More important than anything this city sets its sights on, more important than having a new indoor lacrosse team in the Garden, more important than the Second Avenue subway, more important than rat poison, is the education of kids, even if that goal is so often expressed that it becomes its own meaningless slogan. Nothing is more important than that though. Why doesn’t the city act like it? Why doesn’t it absolutely pay enough to get the teachers it needs? Why doesn’t it absolutely get all it needs to get students excited by reading and the other skills they’ll need to be stimulated by life? Why doesn’t it absolutely provide for the task of educating young people? Maybe ‘absolutely’ would be a stronger message than the slogan they used on that cover.

-- Bill Gunlocke

bgunlocke@manhattanmedia.com

The City's Immigrants Got Game

2007-05-17T12:18:00.000-07:00

Our Town downtown
July 10, 2006

Most Manhattanites probably don’t know what to do with their feelings about the last few weeks’ World Cup soccer games. On one hand, if they watched them, they were likely drawn in by the non-stop movement of the helmet-less men and the stirring crowds with their singing and their flags and their love of country that we haven’t had in our lifetime here. (Did you notice that the U.S. players were the only ones who didn’t belt out their national anthem? You wonder why. Lots of reasons, for sure. None of which are Iraq or that the Star Spangled Banner is not a great tune. Sorry.)

On the other hand, soccer has for so many years been knee-jerk-dismissed as something white kids play in Fairfield County and Grosse Point with moms who pick them up in cars we of course would never drive, that there’s probably a reluctance to say: Hey, now I see what the fun is in this soccer, I envy you moms and your little kids who get to run around like that on those big fields while my kids spend their Saturdays in a special class at the Museum of Natural History.

People here have dug in their heels on so many issues that soccer represents to them that it was probably too tough for some of them to embrace it. And not to mention the dug-in sports guys who think soccer is for pansies, and always will.

But for many, many New Yorkers there was no conflict at all. The recent immigrants here have soccer in their blood. You can see it in some of the bars during the year that have live satellite feeds of games from Europe and Latin America. People will pay 20 bucks or so to go inside on an early Saturday morning to watch a game and drink beer with the windows covered. You’ll see Brits and Irish guys and Mexicans having a smoke on the sidewalk out front during halftime.

There’s a great pizza place on Third Avenue in lower Gramercy Park where the TV is on in the room past the counter where you can sit and eat. Soccer is on a lot in there. The two or three middle-age Italian owners sit there at a table strewn with Italian newspapers and, between work obligations, watch the games and talk about them knowingly—in Italian, which must be the most beautiful language. Customers come in to talk with them about the sport and to look at the foreign papers. The counter and the kitchen are manned by younger Mexican guys, most of them in baseball caps.

You sit there and you watch them, for a couple reasons. First they’ve not only learned English, they’ve learned Italian. The owners, it appears, were not about to learn Spanish, which you could take to mean they don’t respect the Mexicans. Or you could recognize it as a sign of respect that they believe the Mexicans can learn their Italian language. And the Mexican guys there all have. Italian is the lingua franca of the pizza place. Maybe the schools system here should take a page out of the owners’ book about language and high expectations.

Anyway, between making pizzas the Italian-speaking young Mexican guys sneak a peek every chance they get at the TV hanging at a bad angle for them. Their eyes are as wide and unblinking at the soccer game as ours are over a two-strike pitch in the ninth inning. You envy them their soccer passion and you feel for them for how far away from home they are, from where they once played all day in the sunlight.

You wonder how we look to them. They can tell some of the customers wish the owner would change the channel to the Yankee game or put on Jeopardy. And the owner will often do that. You wish he wouldn’t, even though you know a lot more about baseball than you’ll ever know about soccer. You surprise yourself that you wish that some soccer game were on the tube. But you grew to like the soccer conversation the two regulars would have with the one owner who sometimes gets wine for them out of the cooler by the table with all the papers. And you liked the way the Mexicans would look at the guys at the table when some team they all liked
scored a goal.

-- Bill Gunlocke

bgunlocke@manhattanmedia.com

City Schools Still Blowin' In The Wind

2007-05-17T12:05:00.000-07:00

Our Town downtown
July 3, 2006

The news that the city schools’ graduation rate has improved should be a feelgood story, shouldn’t it, that things are improving under Mayor Bloomberg and his school guy Joel Klein?

What about this though, what about how long it has taken in this big, rich, supposedly-progressive city to get the graduation rate up to 58.2 percent? You read it right. 58.2 percent. That’s hard to accept as a success, isn’t it? Just a little over half the kids graduate on time from schools that certainly aren’t very challenging. And that’s the highest in 20 years.

For some private schools in the city 58.2 percent might well be the number of graduating seniors who are spending the summer traveling before they go off to college in the fall or maybe it’s the percentage of those graduates going on to schools ranked in the top 20 in the U.S. News and World Report’s survey. Certainly those schools graduate everyone, and their course of study is more challenging than the public schools’ curriculum.

Think of the difference between the two scenarios. Think of what 58.2 means in one part of the city and what it means in another. Same city. Same mayor. Same Yankees. Same Mets. Same local TV news anchors on the same oversize TVs.

But it’s two different worlds. There were cover stories saying it was two different worlds 40 years ago when a whole generation of baby boomers was starting to get mad at the world their parents had made in which school systems were not equal. Unequal schools seemed to symbolize what was wrong with everything. Unequal schools implied racism and insensitivity and it couldn’t go on, we promised ourselves.

Well, here we are with our iPods and our TiVos and our Whole Foods and our Jon Stewart and in the 40 years since we read Time and Newsweek about how bad the schools were for poor people, we’ve traveled to Hawaii and Boulder and learned about wine and joined Netflix and the local Pilates class and have seen all the “Law & Order” episodes and are now into “Deadwood” and worrying about global warming while buying our shower soap in plastic bottles. Will our kids hate us some day for those plastic bottles of soap? Will we hate ourselves for our failure to make the schools equal? Probably not.

We didn’t see our parents worrying about it to our satisfaction. Do our kids see us worrying about it enough? They see us worrying about their school needs, public or private. But they don’t see us worrying about poor people’s schools. They see us maybe watching “Frontline” and Bill Moyers and “60 Minutes” and all those correct shows and maybe they see us not eating meat even and marching in little marches against the war.

But do they see us doing what we said we’d do, fighting for school equality, fighting for poor kids? That’s what we said we’d do. But all we’ve got it up to is 58.2 percent in New York City where Bob Dylan sang “Blowin’ in the Wind” on 4th Street.

What’s to be done to get it up to 100%? And why not a hundred? Why would we not accept anything less than 100% at Collegiate and accept even 98% at a public high school? It’s high school we’re talking about, not Princeton. Why can’t it get done? What if it were a given that all the kids in New York City would graduate from high school in four years? Wouldn’t that direct the curriculum and the teachers and the parents? And wouldn’t they then direct the kids towards a degree? 58.2%? In New York City where Dylan came?

-- Bill Gunlocke

bgunlocke@manhattanmedia.com

Fewer Catholic Churches All The Time

2007-05-17T11:53:00.000-07:00

Our Town downtown
June 26, 2006

There are more Catholic churches in neighborhoods than there are libraries, and in many neighborhoods there are more of them than there are Starbucks. But there are fewer of them all the time.

The archdiocese is planning to close more of them soon. Other cities are doing the same. There are reasons: the migration of many Catholics to the suburbs, the high cost of fuel and other maintenance expenses, the paltry number of nuns and priests. Of course, loss of faith is a big reason too. And so, in a big way, is television, which you can accurately blame for just about everything that’s slipping away in our culture: family meals, reading, evening papers, conversation, sleep, fitness (if you really think McDonalds is why kids and the rest of us are fat you’re gullible. Generations before this one grew up on whole milk and Sugar Smacks and chocolate chip cookies and Twinkies and Hostess cupcakes and 3 Musketeers bars and mashed potatoes and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on Wonder Bread and red cans of Coke and sugar-laden Kool-Aid and Sara Lee coffee cakes.).

Many Catholics who traditionally marched off to church on Sunday morning kid themselves that they’re doing something religious by watching CBS Sunday Morning. People find television’s flickering lights irresistible, and the flicker of candles on an altar can’t compete.

Which is too bad, because there’s something to be said for combing your hair and walking up the street to sit with a crowd of folks for an hour or less and listen to some music under a vaulted ceiling and some words that usually are much more challenging than even the most progressive politician’s. The church nearby us consistently sermonizes about war and death and selfishness. Its bulletin is dotted with pleas for food and clothing donations for the hungry and the homeless.

The parish runs a homeless shelter and a soup kitchen. It also holds weekly meetings for gay and lesbian parishioners, as well as a discussion group on peace and justice. For believers or non-believers, it’s a place to get a message. But the ranks are thinning and so are the donations.

One thing the Church could do to re-invigorate itself is to change its anachronistic policies regarding who can be a priest. As it stands now, only young men who have no ardent desire to be with a woman are the norm. That has caused problems which everybody knows about in numbers which may be way beyond those reported. There are other problems too which stem from the all-male club that runs things in Catholicism.

Here’s a telling anecdote. A woman, a cousin of ours (we went to Catholic grade school together), in her late 50’s has for nearly 20 years been a dorm prefect in a small Catholic college in New England. For the past half dozen years she has been the head of all the prefects. She’s a lovable person and has no doubt been befriended and admired by all who’ve come in contact with her, students and administration alike. In the past year the college has restructured the way the residential life of the campus will be administered. The new model allows for no one without a master’s degree to be a prefect. So, she’s out at the end of this month. It was a shock to her and left her, divorced and barely solvent, wondering where to go next. When we suggested she might talk to a monk or a priest there that she may be close to who could give her guidance or maybe find her some other job at the school, she laughed and said that she did indeed have men there she’d known and worked with for years but they would never meet with her. They couldn’t she said, they were forbidden by the administration to meet with females alone; they might develop a fondness for a woman and their vows might be tested beyond what they could endure.

That’s nuts. It’s time for the Church to allow for married priests and for women priests.

-- Bill Gunlocke

bgunlocke@manhattanmedia.com

Yankee Stadium Still Gets the Real Fans

2007-05-17T11:41:00.000-07:00

Our Town downtown
June 19, 2006

The ticket said 105 bucks and there were four of them. Who knew where that meant they’d be? Box seats, of course, but that doesn’t guarantee you’ll be seen on TV behind the home plate netting talking on your cell phone. Box seats can stretch out to where you can cheer Bernie Williams the next inning when he comes out to right field after a home run. They can stretch up high to where you can see the geometry of the diamond which you can’t do a few rows behind the first base dugout which is where 420 dollars in tickets got us the night we saw the Red Sox beat the Yankees two weeks ago.

Here’s what you can see from there. You can see how the lights light up the mustard on your first hot dog of the night. You can marvel at the green of the field. If you’re honest and not being phony like Bob Costas and all the other baby boomers who lament that all games aren’t day games, you acknowledge that night games are great. When else does the Bronx look as verdant and bright as Chavez Ravine or a Padres game? Day games in the Bronx, except on those perfect days that you say to yourself are like California, are grey events with hot dog wrappers blowing in front of the batter. Night games are stunning. They’ve become the greengrass setting that Costas and his kind really mean when they rhapsodize about baseball’s Elysian Fields.

What else you notice and what you’re surprised to observe is how many regular guys and their buddies or regular guys and their families are even closer to the dugout than you are with your ticket that would have cost 105 bucks if you weren’t sitting there compliments of the company your daughter works for like we were. There they are, these guys from New Jersey or in from Rochester for the big series drinking their Buds in brown plastic bottles that cost nine bucks a piece and eating food that they order from the girl in the aisle with the machine on her belt that prints out receipts. They’re having a time.

But you didn’t think they’d be there because you’d been reading newspapers and magazines and watching news stories on the television about the high cost of tickets and the prohibitive cost of
an evening at the ball park for the mythical ‘family of four’. But they were there in their Jeter shirts and their Mattingly shirts with their kids carrying little bats they’d bought from a vendor
on the way in.

It’s always that way and you shouldn’t be surprised that they’re there, but you are because the media has told you they aren’t there anymore.

But you should have known you can’t believe the commentators about baseball. Did you believe ’em when they said they used to know the batting averages of every major leaguer when they were kids? Did you believe ’em when they said – and they ALL say this – that they used to be able to walk down the street when they were kids in the Bronx or Brooklyn or St. Louis and hear the game coming out of the radio in every window they passed? Come on. They’re the same guys who’ll wax poetically about the purity of the game and the perfection of baseball’s slow pace, and then have to belong to a fantasy league to jazz it all up for themselves. That’s like someone telling you how water is the perfect drink and then you catch them dropping a Fizzie in their glass.

In front of us you could see the injured Jeter standing up, his longnecked head above the dugout. You wanted to holler and say hi to him, let him know that he was your guy. But you didn’t because you were shy and hadn’t paid nine bucks a piece for the beers that might have helped you whoop it up a bit. In front of us, they didn’t holler to Jeter. They were saving their voices to boo A-Rod and to get the attention of the girl in the aisle with the receipt dispenser on her belt to get some more beers.

-- Bill Gunlocke

bgunlocke@manhattanmedia.com

Two Westerners Argue Against the Freedom Tower

2007-05-17T11:10:00.000-07:00

Our Town downtown
June 12, 2006

What the out-of-town couple said over beers a few weeks ago was the tipping point for us. They were in from out west for the first time in 10 years, and they went all over town to see things they knew when they used to come here as younger singles. On one of their recent mornings back here they took their now-married selves and their three grade-school-age kids to Ground Zero. It was surprising that night in the bar to hear how moved they’d been when they got to the space. We’re still moved by the memory of it all, so maybe it shouldn’t have surprised us when they were, but it did. They are in no way patriotic types, or sentimental. They’re city planners and generally react to things very rationally, very progressively. They usually, sometimes annoyingly, don’t want to appear to share the common sentiments. They were surprised themselves at their reactions.

It was the urban planner in them that went on then, over more beers, about the remaking of the World Trade Center site. They’re big newspaper readers and news-watchers and had kept up with the stop-start folly of what’s gone on so far down there. They shook their heads, like we have, over the lack of impressive progress at the site. Then they said they thought the idea of going ahead with the skyscraping 1776-foot Freedom Tower was insane. Who would want to work in it? Who would not sometimes feel insecure in it? Who needs it anyway? they said. No way would it really honor or be an homage to the sturdy, stolid twins that went down.

So, what then would they want instead of the tower, we asked, what would be a better thing to do down there? They were in accord on this, it was apparent that they’d been thinking about this maybe even before they went to the site; build stylish, essential buildings for people to work and live in, they said, create a memorial space, of course. But most importantly, recreate the dimensions of the towers in lights, like that brief month-long memorial experiment six months after the attack. They were emphatic about that. It would be safer than stacking people in another tower. And it would be a beautiful reminder of what was. And they hadn’t even seen the lights-up-into-the-sky like we had. They just knew they’d be better than what was proposed. They’d looked at pictures of them, seen them on the news. We agreed with them, and it wasn’t the beer talking. We’d been thinking for some time that those lights were the best timeless solution.

Now the friends are back in Nevada and we wonder if there are people here who think like they do. Like we do. Their lack of any enthusiasm for the design they‘d seen mirrored our own. And given that we hadn’t heard anyone here say much positive about the design, we think their lack of enthusiasm must mirror the out-of-towners’ feelings too.

Buildings always look better under construction than they do when completed. The naked light bulbs, the big cloths hanging, outside elevators, hard hats, all sorts of equipment and activity, and potential. The finished product is too sleek and cool and you especially miss those naked lights. The ground floor stores wind up being stores like they have in malls or like you get plenty of catalogs from and they turn out not to be as interesting as the construction workers who used to sit there at lunch time and stretch their legs and their personalities. New buildings wind up being dull.

The two beams of light would not be dull. They’d play with the evening and the late night darkness in magical ways. They would be ghostly and heavenly and sublime. No compromised 1776-foot building could move us like those lonely twin lights shining to infinity.

-- Bill Gunlocke

bgunlocke@manhattanmedia.com

The Mayor To The White House?

2007-05-17T11:08:00.000-07:00

Our Town downtown
June 6, 2006

More than a few e-mails from us to out-of-town friends in the past couple months have contained suggestions, at first gingerly, that Mike Bloomberg would make a good president. Those suggestions followed a paragraph or two extolling the mayor for the way he’s run this town. No mean feat when you consider the psychological after-effects of 9/11 with its unknown economic and fearsome security prospects.

This city has grown into impressively good shape during his time in office; so good actually that the assumed outrage over his ‘buying’ his way into a second term after ‘buying’ his way into office initially hasn’t had legs. He is the undisputed boss here and we appear, in polling numbers and in voting margins, to very much like being under his watch.

The e-mails to the midlands were not meant to sound like the views of a New York insider with moxie or of someone so living on Saul Steinberg’s wide coast that they felt that no one but a New York pol could do the job. They weren’t meant to shock either. It wasn’t an effort to get a rise by picking a can’t-win guy. The suggestion simply came out one day in the middle of an e-mail discussing the likely candidates for the next presidential election; Bloomberg slid into our mind somehow and grew by letter’s end into a surprisingly obvious choice. The obvious choice, as we thought about it more.

Since then, we’ve walked around with that notion in mind, that Michael Bloomberg should be president. We’ve watched him speak, we’ve read about his way of dealing with the big and little things of New York. That watching and reading, not to mention living day-to-day here with him in charge, has only supported our growing respect for his presidential capabilities. Additionally we’ve watched and read about the people on the short list for president, mostly Hillary Clinton and John McCain. At this point it’s hard for us to find much about either of those two that’s impressive, McCain’s increasingly-long-ago Vietnam experience notwithstanding. Both Clinton and McCain are so transparently altering themselves to be liked by everyone that either could easily substitute as the host of the Larry King Show.

Bloomberg couldn’t host that show. His whole being is so ‘not that’ that he stands out in his engaging, shy way above the embarrassment of the usual politics. There’s a quiet grace in his manner that’s a pleasure to observe. He never embarrasses himself or us.

Now there are rumblings in the press that maybe the mayor himself is considering the presidency. He denies it of course and says he has the greatest job in the world right here. He’ll finish out his term he promises. But sometimes rumblings are an engine turning over getting ready to go somewhere. He may definitely mean it when he says he’s got the best job in the world. This certainly is the greatest American city. Remember a few years ago when there were articles comparing New York and L.A. like they were neck and neck in some race for the best place? Like they were equals in their own way? You don’t hear that anymore. You seldom even hear about L.A. anymore. Five bucks to anyone who can name the mayor there. We’ve got Mike Bloomberg, who is so respected that a friend, who moved here not long ago after working in Dennis Kucinich’s Washington office and therefore shouldn’t think much of a guy like Mike, thinks he’ll go down as the greatest mayor in New York’s history. You’ve heard such things, maybe thought them yourself. Maybe such a guy should run the whole big show.

He’s smart; speaks intelligently, if not inspiringly. Knows the world. Knows how it works economically. He hires good people. He can keep the business of America running smoothly. And his concern for kids’ education is deep and fearless. On foreign policy matters, he’d be practical and smart. Other than a wife, what doesn’t he have that the job usually requires?

-- Bill Gunlocke

bgunlocke@manhattanmedia.com

What To Do About Cell Phones in School

2007-05-17T11:04:00.000-07:00

Our Town downtown
May 29, 2006

A friend old enough to have gone to scores of movies in the days before cell phones observed the other night that he didn’t remember himself or his wife or anyone else for that matter sprinting to the pay phones as soon as the theater let out. He did recall though going out after most of those movies for dinner or drinks with other couples, all with children at home in the care of sitters. Occasionally, in the restaurant or bar one of the mothers would look for a quarter in her purse and excuse herself to make a call to check on her kids. The other women would invariably mock-grimace when she left the table and would joke how maybe they were being bad mothers for not checking in on their kids. But they had told the sitter, hadn’t they, where they’d be going for dinner and had even looked up the number of the place and written it down right by the phone before sincerely saying, “We won’t be late.”

That is indeed how it was. Safety was assumed then. If no one was paged at the bar, there were no problems. The biggest issues of those nights centered around who had to see the sitter home and what should be said if it appeared that maybe the boyfriend had stopped over after the kids were asleep.

Now of course it’s a different world because of cell phones and our addiction to them. Cell phones sit in our pockets and our purses like a pack of cigarettes. Given a break in the action, we light up one call after another. Those same mothers now would be making calls and receiving calls until just before the movie, during dinner, in the cab. The baby sitter at home would be puffing away on the phone breathlessly even before the kids went down.

Mayor Bloomberg must be tired of seeing all that kind of smoke in the city schools and he wants to get rid of it like he got rid of cigarettes in the bars. Many people hated him for that tavern fiat, swore that the bar business would be decimated by it. But time proved them wrong, him right. Some addicts still moan of course but the ban has caused many smokers to rethink their dependence on butts and has prompted them to quit. Thank the mayor for that.

But he’s got as tough a crowd—maybe a tougher one-- now to convince that he’s looking out for their health. Mothers at work, or at home, fathers too, want to be in touch with their kids should a need arise. They say they want mostly to know that the kids are alright. They site 9/11. That’s their trump card. And it’s hard to argue against that. But Bloomberg knows the chaos of many of the schools he oversees and he’s willing to take drastic measures to impose some order on them. Phones in the schools must be a big problem: thefts of them, dropping them, phones ringing, text messaging; imagine the lunch room.

The mayor is right to want to rid the city schools of all phone mischief. Too much of the street has been brought into the schools for too long. He’s right to want to rid places of learning of all distractions. But maybe there’s a way to do it in this case that doesn’t give the phone-addicted parents withdrawal symptoms.

Here’s a simple solution. So simple it sounds, well, simple. We called a Catholic grade school in the city and asked the principal there if they have an issue with cell phones in their school and what they do about it. He answered that cell phones were a non-issue there. He said they let the students bring their cell phones into the school but they have to be kept in their book bags or back packs and can’t be seen or heard. If they are seen or heard, the kid gets after-school detention. The kids don’t want to stay after school, so they keep their cell phones off and out of sight. No calls in school, no text messaging. The parents know these are the rules and support the school in its enforcement policy. The principal said he can’t imagine why the public schools are having such a time with cell phones.

Neither can we. Maybe the enforcement policy in the public schools should mirror the one in the Catholic school we called. Is that too simple?

-- Bill Gunlocke

bgunlocke@manhattanmedia.com

We Want You To Let Us In

2007-05-17T10:56:00.000-07:00

Our Town downtown
May 22, 2006

If you had your pick of places in this country to write about on an ongoing basis could you beat telling someone you write about downtown Manhattan? For sure, there are other places where events could compel you; New Orleans this year or the Mexican border of some southwest states in the upcoming months or out to Iowa with the pols. And in some romantic notion of independence, the idea of Bozeman or Austin are certainly alluring. But for a week-to-week area to cover, what can beat this downtown?

The idea of downtown anywhere is exciting. It’s where you go to mix it up, with art and colorful fashion storefronts, cool comic books and record stores and foreign films, food from Ethiopia. It’s the stroll-theater part of cities and towns everywhere. In small towns it’s where the pool hall is. It’s where you want to hang out with your friends and where you hate to leave when it’s time to go home. But that’s where this downtown is different. You don’t have to leave this downtown; you can live in it.

You may, in fact, be one of those New Yorkers who say, “I never go above 14th Street.’ Or above 23rd or Canal or Houston. It’s a matter of pride, a happy assertion of living in a place where you fit. Away from the town or house or the apartment building you grew up in. Away from parents. Away from an old order. It’s your place.

We want to be in this place, too--with you, even while knowing that we’re coming to one of those places where everybody wants to be the last person to have arrived, after whom no one else is needed. But we think we can bring something to you that will allow us to be your companion. We want you to let us in.

Like newcomers anywhere, we’ll bring fresh eyes, and sometimes wide, curious ones.

E.B.White, in an essay he wrote in 1949 called ‘Here is New York’, talks about newcomers to New York. And while we aren’t newcomers to the city, only to your part of the city, his observations may apply:

There are roughly three New Yorks. There is, first, the man or woman who was born here, who takes the city for granted and accepts its size and its turbulence as natural and inevitable. Second, there is the New York of the commuter—the city that is devoured by locusts each day and spat out each night. Third, there is the NewYork of the person who was born somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something. Of these three trembling cities the greatest is the last—the city of final destination, the city that is a goal. It is this third city that accounts for New York’s high-strung disposition, its political deportment, its dedication to the arts, and its incomparable achievements. Commuters give the city its tidal restlessness, natives give it solidity and continuity; but the settlers give it passion. And whether it is a farmer arriving from Italy to set up a small grocery store in a slum, or a young girl arriving from a small town in Mississippi to escape the indignity of being observed by her neighbors, or a boy arriving from the Corn Belt with a manuscript in his suitcase and a pain in his heart, it makes no difference: each embraces New York with the intense excitement of first love, each absorbs New York with the fresh eyes of an adventurer, each generates heat and light to dwarf the Consolidated Edison Company.

We will likely feel our way our around your part of the city for awhile, getting to know the touchstones and the character of the place. We’ll point out things that excite us that some of you may have seen or been to many times, others of you may have never noticed what we did. No matter, we’ll evolve into downtown as you have, as other publications have before us.

We’ll bring you stories by writers whose names you’ll get to know as the weeks go by. We’ll introduce you to people downtown we find interesting, tell you about the things they’ve done or are planning to do. We’ll pass along our enthusiasms about shows and art we’ve seen and food we’ve tried. We’ll be learning as we go about our new ‘home’ and that’ll be stimulating for us.

We hope that translates into a paper you’ll like.

-- Bill Gunlocke

bgunlocke@manhattanmedia.com