Fedora, Rollerina, and why I am stuck in New York City

 Blog
May 312010
 

It started when I stepped on my laptop.

I learned that when you step on a laptop screen, it makes a satisfying crunching sound, but the satisfaction is extremely short-lived.

That horrifying incident happened right after the Eurovision broadcast ended. I immediately phoned Apple to see if I could get it fixed quickly. My friends Ken Kleiber and Josh Koll were over to watch that cheese smorgasbord, and they came with me to the Mac Hospital.


Fedora

Fedora pours a mean gin martini

And good thing. After I turned my laptop in, I correctly required a drink. We walked into Greenwich Village, and I directed them to Fedora’s, just north of 10th Street on 4th Street, in one of the Village’s several geographic improbabilties. I’ve known about her place for a while. She’s famous for being a Village staple. Every night, she descends from her upstairs apartment to attend to her long-running restaurant/bar. Fedora has been hostessing for a half-century.

The moment we walked in, I saw her. This tiny, 90-year-old lady behind the bar, simultaneously out of place and so emphatically in charge of the room! I went right over, sat on a bar stool, and introduced myself.

Finally, Fedora! She made us some gin martinis, and the bottle threatened to weigh her over.

Fedora had bad news. She had recently broken her back.

“How did you do that?” Ken asked.

“All those years of lifting beer and wine boxes,” she said.

“Oh! It was a beer-related injury!” I said.

There's nothing to not love about Fedora

So even though a year ago she was full of energy and nowhere near retirement, this year Fedora had to admit that age had caught up with her. She was retiring.

“I’m renting it to the people from the Waverly Inn,” she said.

That meant, of course, that the glitterati are about to take over this place. This handsome, messy claptrap of a downstairs bar, with the ignored wooden phone booth and the rat’s nest of wires left over from years of casual, D.I.Y. improvements. Of the plain wooden bar rail worn smooth and shiny by decades of tipsy forearms. Of the secret stairway, sealed behind plaster in 1932, when Prohibition was at an end and speakeasy rules were no longer required.

Now Graydon Carter of Vanity Fair, who had for years been making overtures to Fedora for her space, had won, and if his habits are any guide, he will turn this neighborhood joint into a place where only the elite have the phone number. He’ll keep the bar. But he’ll clear away the dust and commodify the anonymous history to make it exclusive.

Fedora rattled off Carter’s home address, which I won’t give here, but I will say that it’s next door to her own son’s home.

But she’s tired. There’s something majesterial about seeing an older person admit the fight has been well fought.

No one can say Fedora didn’t see it through. She started in 1952, she told me, or was it 1953? The bar itself opened in 1919, not long after the building itself was built and purchased for nearly nothing. Her son, the dentist, has his practice upstairs, and he sent his Tony Graham Manhattan cartoon poster, from 1977, down to the vestibule. I saw it and was instantly 10 again. My parents bought the same poster, in color, for me in 1981, I think, at the Washington Square Art Fair.

It hung in my room until high school, and I memorized every tiny joke on it. It was an early Where’s Waldo, in which you had to struggle to find the icons amongst the long-running New York stalwarts. There was a streaker in Spanish Harlem, and King Kong on the Empire State Building, squished in bold black ink lines amongst the bygone pubs and stores and galleries and Blimpies with the old logo. I had memorized that poster. You might be able to blame it for winding me up here in Manhattan, pining for all that’s lost. (Including Tony Graham, who I met as a child but died nearly 20 years ago.)

Such as Fedora. I am so powerfully thankful (pause. let me remember that. I am aware of my gratitude in this moment) that I got to meet her and hang out with her for a few hours, and drink her gin martinis. This was the New York that I moved here for, of the dusty wires and low ceilings and countless nights spent by anonymous drinking locals, and now it’s vanishing. It’s mostly gone, replaced by trendy lounges that pretend to be Old World and forgotten when, in fact, they require you to know telephone numbers that you will never be privy to.

Fedora asked me my name, and she remembered it. I am now a part of the history.

Midway through our evening at Fedora’s, a table for four came to eat. Among them was what looked to be a woman, although few true women would dress in a pillbox hat with fingerless lace gloves. She smelled wonderful and had a lilting Southern accent. Her companions eventually left, and someone identified the stately woman as Rollerina. She was herself a stalwart of a dead Manhattan. She was a city fixture in the 1970s, when she would roller-skate everywhere, and she was an icon of Studio 54. Someone played her in the movie.

We took some pictures with Rollerina (also spelled as Rollerena), and she must have taken a liking to us, because she invited us to go out with her for the night. She led us to a nearby bar on Christopher Street.

Rollerina demanded an escort

Actually, she led me. Ken said she took a definite liking to me. She took my arm without it being offered, because I am too modern and gauche to have proffered it.

As we strolled at a pace I can only describe as antebellum, Rollerina told me that she had once been drafted from her home in Gravelsnatch, Kentucky, to serve in Vietnam. She declined to say how long she had been there, but she said it was enough. Afterward, she decamped briefly to Chicago in 1968, departing just before the convention to arrive here in Manhattan, where she has stayed ever since. She is now retired (from a law firm, I learned later). She barely gives interviews, she says, except for the one that she gave tonight to the reporter for the New York Times, who is preparing a farewell to Fedora. That’s why we found her there.

“Kiss my dingleberry ring!” she commanded, holding aloft a black, blocky ring on a slender, feminine hand. “It will make you immune from gonorrhea.” Of course we kissed it. The sense of play was powerful.

Rollerina was charming, but drifting through her perfume (Acqua de Parma, which she attempted to give me a bottle of) was the distinctive note of Miss Haversham Havisham [Per Albert Williams' supercilious comment, below]. Her past was her world, a theme I understand completely. Nothing is the same, she said. All the things that were lost became her refrain. The old, great places are gone, and she lost around 500 friends to AIDS in the 1980s and early 1990s. Christopher Street was quite the place then, she said. “You can Google it,” she told us, her new gaggle of young men, by way of instruction.

But she still dresses as Rollerina. She never once lifted her pink veil for us. She has no taste for the drag queens of today. “I like to sit on the subway and people think I’m a lady,” she said, sniffing at the muscled, Amazonian caricatures of femininity on offer today.

The magazine people are keeping the sign. (Photo by Ken Kleiber)

She knew Halston. She knew Warhol. She lived through the hurricane twice, and for her survival, she was rewarded with obsolescence.

Now Fedora goes, albeit after a long and rich life. She will never settle for being a shadow. Nor will Rollerena.

I’ve been in New York City for 17 years this year. That qualifies me for a long-termer, but I can’t enter the world that Fedora and Rollerina made. That fact tantalizes and tortures me. Their planet was one of amplified community, intense playfulness, and of course, unspeakable horror.

I inherit their diminished world, but thank God I smelled their perfume and downed their martinis before it was all over.

Last week, I was in Chicago and I pined to move back. But a night like this couldn’t often happen in Chicago. There may not be many more nights like this left in the old gal named Manhattan, but while they’re still here, it’s why I’m still here. When the last rat-trap becomes a pastiche of itself, I guess it will be time to finally go. Unlike Rollerina, I will lift the veil.

Is Sarah Palin the second coming of Andrew Jackson?

 Articles, Blog
May 282010
 

I saw Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson at the Public Theater. It grabbed me. Musicals that portray little-known aspects of American life strike a chord in me: Floyd Collins and Dreamgirls are two of my favorites, and my thesis musical at NYU, Americo Presents the Stars and Stripe Cavalcade, was a Cabaret-style skewering of all those milky American myths we’re force fed throughout grade school.

It also grabbed me because of what it managed to do: make Andrew Jackson a character who sings. Brendan Milburn and I struggled with how to make John Brown sing (I mentioned this a few weeks ago after my visit to Harpers Ferry), but Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson solved it by making its subject a rock star. Old Hickory was a young emo dude in tight, tight pants, and who spouted vulgarities as he guided his own outsized ego around the stage like a parade float. John Brown would be a rock star, too, I decided.

But BBAJ was more than just a diversion to me. It was a very clear metaphor. Although its first drafts were written before we’d ever heard of Sarah Palin, it seemed to warn about the American tendency to nurture cults of personality into positions of power, where they can really do some awful damage, such as creating the Trail of Tears.

Good grief, I thought. Are we going through this again? I began to see a lot of similarities between Old Hickory and that woman on Fox News. They were both the products of their own vicious, divided, violent times, when old ways of doing things were falling apart and a new way was clearly demanded.

• Both Palin and Jackson rose from the wildernesses of their nation
• Palin claims to be the choice of the people. Jackson, too, was swept to office with a rally cry of populism
• Jackson was known as a fierce military man; Palin can shoot a moose from the sky
• Both came from modest families, had weak educational backgrounds, and began political careers in lowly posts
• Both Palin and Jackson gained support by claiming to despise elitism, federalism, and business-as-usual Washington; both deeply mistrusted those in power
• They share fierce nationalism, and both implied they were the right kinds of patriots, as opposed to the people who disagreed with them; for both, humble roots are the noblest pedigree of a true American
• Palin has a persecution complex, and a paranoia about a constant tide of enemies — or at least, pretends to in many speeches. Jackson did, too, and his letters prove it
• Palin’s private life turned into a major campaign issue; Jackson’s wife Rachel was dragged through the mud for being a bigamist; the validity of the marriages of both were eternal topics of debate
• Both paid attention to political details, gathering supporters in a broad range of classes and occupations, and collecting the support of crucial news organizations to paint their opponents as undemocratic, elitist, and exclusive
• Jackson was about the preservation of the white yeoman gentry; Palin is the heroine of the middle-class Christian
• Palin quit the governorship mid-term, Jackson quit the Senate. He did it to run for president later. (He was also the governor of Florida for just nine months)
• The morality of both were intensely questioned while, ultimately, it was their values (less than their abilities) that earned them followers. Every move Palin makes is examined for its propriety; so were Jackson’s
• Palin and Jackson both derive(d) power by whipping Americans into a state of furious anti-Federalism
• Both were widely judged to be incompetent for the presidency, with little state and legistlative experience
• Jackson mocked his opponents with sneering nicknames such as “the aristocrats” and “the Monarchial party”; Palin employs derisive nicknames routinely, such as with “fatcats”
• The fortunes of both turned on the actions of an unemployed painter: Joe the Plumber’s antics may have cost McCain/Palin points, while an unemployed house painter tried to assassinate Jackson on the steps of the Capitol (he had two guns, but both misfired)
• Both had sons who required special attention; Palin’s son Trig is well-known, but what’s largely forgotten is that Jackson adopted an Indian, Lyncoya, who was orphaned after Jackson and his men killed some 850 in the Creek War. (I can only imagine that caring for these children absolved some inner conflicts, and at the least softened them to criticism for their political actions.)

Andrew Jackson

Sarah Palin

Although he was responsible for many military deaths in the name of his various causes, he was also fond of duels. He murdered a man, a political rival named Dickinson, in a duel once. He let the other guy shoot first. “Great God, have I missed him?” Dickinson asked his second. But no, Jackson has taken the bullet, right near his heart, and now that his rival’s shot was spent, he took his turn. He pulled his trigger and polished Dickinson off.

Yeah, Jackson was a badass; there’s no doubt of that. But being a badass does not make you fit for anything except a bottle fight. But one can never underestimate the American tendency to elect the person they wish they were like, rather the one who is probably most fit to lead.

Because Americans thought it would be a great idea to vote for the underdog, he eventually won the presidency in 1828. Upon his inauguration, he threw the doors of the White House open for all Americans to celebrate. They trashed the place, smashing the china soiling the furniture, and nearly collapsing the floorboards.

That turned out to be one of American history’s greatest metaphors. In truth, he was not well equipped to navigate Washington, the rules of our government, and his own murky beliefs about just how far the Federal government should extend into states’ lawbooks. When push came to shove, and when it came to implementing his agenda, he couldn’t hack it.

He wound up creating the Trail of Tears — an abhorrent act of genocide, a national shame forever — and because of the deaths and destruction he approved and enabled, many call him the American Hitler. He ratified dozens of treaties but pretty much broke them all. He also had a big hand in creating the system in which the President rewards the party die-hards by giving them positions in his government. We all know what kind of fanaticism and divisive gamesmanship that can breed now.

Some people say he averted a civil war over the role of federal power. This, though, had much to do with the machinations of the people around him, and let’s not forget that a real civil war came 30 years later, and he also did nothing to eliminate slavery, which would have averted that, too.

BBAJ suggests pretty strongly that maybe it’s not a great idea to let the people decide everything that governs them. You don’t elect someone who plays outside the rules and still expect them to advance the game. It’s probably not any better an idea than letting corporations and business take over the government and wriggle out of regulation, as has happened in the past 30 years and which has now resulted in two ongoing wars over oil and an entire sea turned into a garbage pool by BP.

Even though the crowd that attends New York theatre is a bit more versed in American history than Mom and Pop Walmart usually is, most of them didn’t know that much about Jackson. How could we, when our mythology has done so much to expunge his sins from the record? After all, Jackson is enshrined on the $20 bill despite the fact he worked tirelessly to abolish the national bank entirely, going as far as taking federal money out and giving it to state banks. (Mostly unregulated, they frittered it away, causing a depression).

Looking forward, what is Sarah Palin capable of? Jackson thought any attack on him was an attack on his people, and Palin sure talks that way, too, showing the same steadfast ambition for the highest office that he wanted, and eventually scored twice. She’s certainly a rock star to her followers, and her platform and snide verbiage is every bit as effective as Jackson’s was in the 1820s and 1830s.

I do see one difference, besides the fact Jackson hated corporations: He was adamant that no state had the right to “nullification,” meaning it could not strike down, individually, any federal law it wanted. But Sarah Palin has already come out in defense of Arizona’s immigration papers law, saying the federal laws were not to Arizona’s satisfaction. In that, even though I can’t stand the guy, I lean toward Jackson’s side. Defending unity has its benefits; Palin’s version, though, sounds more like anarchy.

She hasn’t given us a Trail of Tears, and she may never do so, but history is almost always a guide, at least of what’s possible. And history is always a warning never to underestimate the underdog in a bottle fight.

Fun with CatPaint

 Blog, Photos
May 282010
 

Last weekend, someone introduced me to CatPaint for the iPhone. I am afraid I have not used the discovery for good.

All this app does is take any picture and let you stamp it with pictures of kitties. Each time you add one, your iPhone meows. That’s it. Yet it’s knee-slappingly hilarious.

Here is a CatPaint creation from earlier today. I saw a truck at a stoplight, snapped it, and catted it up. I’m so ashamed that I am enjoying it this much.

Free college tuition for scooping sundaes!

 Blog, Video
May 272010
 

When I was in Branson a few weeks ago, my buddy Kenny Kleiber tuned me into College of the Ozarks, which runs an ice cream parlor that sells ice cream made by its students. I’d written about this place a few times before, both for WalletPop.com and for the departed Arthur Frommer’s Smart Shopping magazine, so I knew tuition was free if you were accepted. It was fun to be able to see it in person.

We ran over and asked — right there on the spot — if we could shoot a little video, and they were gracious enough to welcome us. It was lots of fun, and I like what they’re doing there, even if they welcomed the snide Sarah Palin there as a speaker recently.

There’s something to enjoy about this one, particularly with the Deliverance-style music at the start. That was the editor’s selection.

Fun fact: The shirt I’m wearing is what I unimaginatively call my Travel Shirt. When I have a flight of more than 8 or 9 hours, such as to Australia or South Africa, it’s the one I wear. I believe it’s the also one I wore on my very first travel writing assignment from Arthur Frommer, to the Galápagos Islands. Lumberjack plaid is timeless.

Today’s Philly flavor

 Blog, Video
May 272010
 

What can I say about this one? In the green room, the monitor was showing Bill O’Reilly doing his pre-tapes for guests for Thursday’s show. Dennis Miller did his segment, and John McCain was starting his just as I was called to sit in the chair. It’s nothing short of distracting to hear him prepping his guests before the interview begins. How else can I explain why I said “dollars” instead of “cents,” why I mysteriously equated problems for retailers with the proposed new credit card rules, and why I blurted out “Hey Carrie-Lee” as if it was a single syllable.

Live and learn. Worse things have happened. Worse things will.

Regardless… hey!  Isn’t TV fun?

I tweeted this after I finished: “Sometimes you don’t have to perform better to improve; you just have to stop beating yourself up over the mistakes you made.”

True, that.

Behold! The Library of Congress’ Twitter stacks are revealed!

 Blog, Video
May 202010
 

A few weeks ago, the Library of Congress announced that it would be archiving every public tweet ever sent on Twitter. So I thought it would be a fun idea to head down to Washington, DC, and find out exactly where all those tweets would indeed be living, and why such an esteemed archival entity would want to collect the murmurings of our waking online dreams.

A horrifying thing happened when we were shooting this. You can see the opening and closing shots of the video, in which I’m outside the Madison Building. Well, after we were finished with our shoot, my camerawoman and I collected ourselves on the lovely benches out front, where government workers eat their bag lunches and suck down nicotine. Then we headed down Pennsylvania Avenue to grab a beer at a watering hole and talk to some young, beer-buzzed Capitol Hillers about Twitter.

About 20 minutes later, the PR rep who appears in this video called me. Now it was his voice that was a-twitter.

“Jason, you didn’t happen to leave anything behind, did you?”

Nope, I said. Not me. I have everything. I asked my camerawoman, too, just to make sure.

Her face fell. Yes, she said. She suddenly realized we didn’t have the black ripstop bag containing our tripod.

“Oh, hang on. Yeah, my camerawoman did. She’ll be right back to grab it. Thanks!”

The PR rep was stern. “I’ll tell the police. There’s a bomb scare.”

The LoC, you may know, is on Capitol Hill. In fact, it’s directly across the street from the Capitol. And when the tripod bag fell behind the bench we were using, she missed it, but the intensely zealous Capitol Police didn’t. There were barriers in the street, stonefaced cops in bomb gear, and a lockdown of the entire Library at an hour when everyone wanted to go home. All over our forgotten bag.

What can I say about my crew? We’re a federal menace.

My camerawoman was detained for nearly an hour while they took down her information. “Happens all the time,” the cop told her.

All so we could bring this video to you. Please be grateful. Please laugh.

How travel writing is becoming something by and for the wealthy

 Articles, Blog
May 182010
 

On Saturday, I pretended to go to Portland, Oregon. There was a conference of travel editors going on, and because they were all using the Twitter tag #satwpdx, I was able to follow what the various speakers were saying. (Go to a professional conference from a diner table at the Star on 18th!) That was $1,000 saved!)

First, someone started telling the gathered that they will not hire writers who have accepted free trips or parts of free trips, such as if the hotel comps a stay for them. I find this policy insulting on several fronts. Primarily, it assumes I’m a shill with no editorial principles of my own, and that I’d be a pushover for any freebie. I know this isn’t true. There’s a P.R. agent who recently told me that her boss was afraid to invite me to something because they suspected I would be nasty about the product. (I didn’t know this until after I’d gone. And I wasn’t nasty.)

No one bats an eye when the White House Press Corps is given special access to the President and his Cabinet, although, as George W. Bush’s treatment of Helen Thomas proved, you can certainly lose that access if you displease the President. Because that’s what a travel industry comp is: access. It’s the same as when an electronics company sends or loans a product to a technology blog for review. It’s access to the product. It just so happens that you can’t send travel to the journalist. They have to go to the product.

Yet, perhaps because of industry snobbery from “real” journalists, it’s assumed that travel writers are always going to be swayed. Well, any editor worth anything has a stable of reporters he or she trusts. It’s only the bad editors who keep hiring writers who just want freebies.

You’d be able to spot whitewashing from a White House Press Corp reporter as quickly as you could call cheerleading in a tech reporter’s blind rave, and you can see it in a travel writer, too. Appraising things for how I see them is what has made some public relations people wary of me, I guess. Ultimately, that’s not what they want me to do, and I know that. But my editors know I’m there to do my job.

She'd better be nice to him, or she's out

Nowadays, few publications have the cash to properly pay for hotels and airfare and other expenses themselves. Traveling is expensive. Yet they also won’t allow freebies. Travel writers are usually forced to pick up the financial slack themselves.

So, to Portland, I tweeted:

If pubs say all #travel must be fully paid, are we in an age when it helps for writers to be wealthy? How might that skew coverage?

I think it’s more than a fair question. It’s one that needs to be asked.

If the magazine won’t pay, and comps are forbidden, that means your writer had better be rich. And rich writers will mostly report on one kind of product. If you don’t believe it can skew coverage, pick up the New York Times Sunday Travel section. The Times bans the acceptance of all comps. And you can see the sort of product it mostly covers: stuff appealing to the upper or upper-middle class, or at least to travelers with those kinds of pretensions.

(I know more than a few publications that won’t accept comps, but will allow writers to take comps if they take them on behalf of another publication as long as they aren’t told about it. But it shouldn’t surprise anyone that the general comp policy is mostly for appearances.)

Soon in Portland, one of the speakers, an editor of a big national publication, apparently told everyone that now that he’s getting away with paying writers only 50¢ a word — $1.50 less than he used to — there’s no way to put the genie back in the bottle. Writers are getting less money for their stories, and they’re putting up with it because, quite frankly, the reduction in outlets has made them desperate.

This had me riled up. Travel writing is already one of the least cost-effective forms of journalism there is. It requires too much time and hits you for too many ancillary costs. If you don’t pay writers a decent wage, you’re just making the whole genre something for the elite to dabble in. I tweeted out:

If you pay writers a pittance, you’re ensuring many must be independently wealthy, and that, with expenses policy, skews stories.

Those two tweets were enormously popular. They were retweeted by strangers for two days, and I gained more than 50 new followers.

Guide book wisdom: Branson, MO

 Blog
May 182010
 

“Although I didn’t know it at the time, I visited an area near Branson when I was 10 and 11 years old… It was the depths of the Depression, in 1939 and 1940. The poverty-stricken people of the Ozarks (this was a region closer to the Lake of the Ozarks, north of Branson) were very different from what many of them are today. Their homes were more like shacks. On the walls of their one-room abodes were, invariably, pictures of Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt torn from a newspaper.

“They were populists. They believed that a prime function of government was to assist the underprivileged. They disliked large corporations intensely and had a similar disregard for the wealthy. They had no interest in show business celebrities, and wouldn’t dream of standing in a line for autographs. They had a personal dignity to them.

“They wore they religion lightly, making no public show of it. Their patriotism was in their hearts and not on garish display. They worshiped in their own way and respected the right of others to do the same. Their preachers were poor, same as them… They were, in sum, about as far as you can get from the movement known today as the “religious right.” They would never have been political allies of the rich. They would have hated the idea of performers amassing giant personal fortunes from publicly displayed patriotism, or immense trust funds, mansions, and investments from religious production numbers. Indeed, they would have been astonished to see performers charging admission at all to gospel-singing, let alone the gospel performed with scenery, costumes, and laser lights.”

—Arthur Frommer, Arthur Frommer’s Branson, Macmillan Travel, 1995

FDR
F.D.R.

Two days ago in Philadelphia…

 Video
May 142010
 

Watch my media training in action on Fox Philly! I was not expecting to hear the question about college kids starting businesses. But I was prepared to talk about major brands that are named after real people. So I doggedly went after that angle instead.

“Did you know Chef Boyardee was a real guy?” I asked instead of actually answering her question. Now that I know that’s such a smooth diversionary tactic, I’m going to use it all the time.

“License and registration please.” Beat. “Officer, did you know Chef Boyardee was a real guy?”

I evaded like a politician, and no one even noticed.

My slick response was based on the best media training advice I ever got: “Don’t answer the question that was asked. Answer the question you wish had been asked. No one will notice.”

Now that you know that trick, you’ll start noticing that every Senator under the sun uses it daily.

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