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TIM
Existential Stuff

How did this column get its name, and what does THAT have to do with the Invention of The Beastie Boys?

June 27, 2014

Now, there is a reason these piles of sad, frightened, adamant, arrogant, deeply opinionated and frequently dilettante-ish words are called NOISE, THE COLUMN.

When I was merely 19/20, a wee pup of staggering pretension, I hosted a somewhat notorious radio show called Noise, The Show.  My kind peers at WNYU provided me with thirty minutes a week to play classic punk, hardcore, and noise music.  I played lot of demos – local and otherwise – on that show, too, and was very engaged in the local New York City punk scene, and that’s kind of what today’s story is about.

People seemed to really like Noise, The Show, which was on the air for exactly a year – 52 episodes, to be exact.  Maybe 53.  Maybe 51.  Does it matter?  No, it doesn’t.  It was quite popular during its brief but exceedingly loud and volatile run, and 33 years later – 33 YEARS the lifespan of JESUS, for the LOVE OF THE SIX-ARMED MAHAKALA, who wears a crown of five skulls and is the “fierce” side of Avalokiteshvara, the Buddhist bodhisattva of compassion (much in the same way that Roger Waters represents the angry, vengeful side of compassionate Dave Gilmour, the Bodhisattva of the gently persuasive arpeggiated guitar) – people still seem to recall Noise, The Show quite goddamn fondly.   You can find scraps of it on YouTube, on sundry download sites, and there’s even a facebook group or two commemorating it.  What can I say?  People like punk rock, and it was a bit more of an exclusive club in 1981/82, and the tribes needed someone/something to gather around.

The following happened during the salad days of Noise, The Show. I was 19 ½.  When you’re that young, half-years matter.

In the Autumn of 1981, Two high school students, both barely 17, had requested a meeting with me, and now these two wiry young men, both with hair shorn to the closeness of suede, sat on a low bed in my NYU dorm room (the legendary Weinstein dorm, a locale sure to crop up again in my tales), looking up at me with expectation of the wisdom of experience I would most surely dispense.

The difference between 19 and 17 is enormous (or 19 ½, as the case may be). Do you recall?  And not just that, we’re talking almost 20 and barely 17.

They had found me through my radio show.  As explained, I frequently went out of my way to play, book, promote, and assist local bands.  It was not at all uncommon for young bands to seek me out for advice, or to needle me for a favor.

For a few weeks prior to this meeting, someone had been calling the studio during my show shrieking a request.  That wasn’t unusual; I would normally get fifty or more phone requests per half-hour.  What was unusual about this request is that none of us in the studio – not me, not my engineer, not anyone else hanging around the little WNYU radio studio on the 9th Floor of an utterly pedestrian bird-shit colored building on LaGuardia Place — had heard of the band.  But these calls kept coming, no matter how many times we countered that the band being requested apparently didn’t exist.

There was something else different about these calls, too.  Whoever was yelping and screeching on the other end of the line was funny. Not hostile, or pleading, or supplicating, as song requesters usually were, but genuinely funny.

I was usually too busy spinning records to actually speak to the people who called in, but something about this felt different, so after my show one evening, I called one of the these persistent mystery callers back (I gathered there were two of them who had been making the calls).

When I reached them, I quickly got them to admit that there really was no such band as The Beastie Boys (for that was the name of the band the callers kept on adamantly requesting). The band was, shall we say, in development.  But whoever these kids were, they had a relentless charm, some kind of underlying sweetness, and it made me want to meet them and offer whatever wisdom an almost 20-year old college DJ who was spectacularly full of himself could offer.

(Now seems a good time to mention that Mahakala is also usually portrayed holding a cup made out of a skull, out of which he is drinking blood drawn from the hearts of his vanquished foes.  But this was far, far from my mind when my 19 ½ year-old self spoke on the phone to these so-called Beastie Boys, who were imploring me to give them some drops of advice.)

So I summoned Adam Yauch and Michael Diamond to my dorm room.

I explained that there was one absolutely sure-fire way for a band that was almost­ a real band but not quite a real band to actually become a real band:  Book a gig.  Even if you’re not ready, even if you don’t think there’s any way you can be ready, if you actually book a show, you get yourself ready. So I volunteered to book them a gig.  If I did that, I rationalized firmly, they would actually have to get their act together.  Because, surely, once you saw your name in a newspaper ad, with a date and place attached to it, you then had to show up and play, or we would all look like asses. 

Michael and Adam nodded respectfully.

I picked up the phone.  There was a strange little place on 6th Avenue and 9th Street called The Playroom.  It wasn’t an A-list club, it was barely a B-list club, but they did punk rock shows, and I knew there was one coming up that I was promoting on the radio show.  So I easily talked the club into allowing a new band called the Beastie Boys to play third on a bill, opening for the far-more battle-tested Reagan Youth and the legendary Bad Brains.

There were two halves to the Weinstein Center for Student Living, on University Place between Waverly and 8th Street. My room was in the back half.   My 6th Floor window overlooked a courtyard, through which all manner of reasonably happy, reasonably horny, reasonably stoned, occasionally studious young scholars and lovers and drug addicts and music geeks passed, hurrying from class to room and room to cafeteria and cafeteria to date.  It was a perfectly normal late afternoon in New York City.  Ronald Reagan was in the White House, the Los Angeles Dodgers were about to beat the Yankees in the World Series; MTV had been on the air for three months, and far away in Sweden, just two weeks earlier, the first public cellular phone network had gone into service.  If anyone had told me that with this little meeting in my little dorm room, a tiny cog in the great timepiece of music history had just turned in a significant way, I would have said you were high, then I would have asked you where I could get whatever it was you had smoked/sniffed/swallowed.

Slightly to my surprise, the band got their shit together and showed up to play the show I booked for them at the Playroom.  They climbed on stage, and Michael Diamond stepped to the microphone.  “This is for Timmy Sommer,” Michael snapped, in that weird yapping voice he used on stage, “who doesn’t believe we exist.”  These were the first words the Beastie Boys ever said on stage.

Did I mention that the President of Weinstein Dorm was a gawky lefty named Warren Wilhelm, who later changed his name to Bill DeBlasio?  I think I was too distracted by all that Mahakala stuff to bother with that info.  Oh well out of space.

 

From the Web

Arts and Entertainment, Existential Stuff, Opinion

Meringue, Merengue, and Further Evidence that the New York Times is Edited by Chimps (and not the cute suit-wearing kind)

June 26, 2014

In yesterday’s New York Times, an article about the heated congressional race between Charles Rangel and Adriano D. Espaillat contained the following paragraph:

“Mr. Espaillat, deployed timeless political tactics in his second attempt, lining up endorsements from local leaders in the Bronx and East Harlem and relentlessly sending sound trucks to blare everything from meringue to a cover of ‘I Believe I Can Fly’ at voters, from morning to night.”

The above is an EXACT quote.  I did not change any punctuation, spelling, or wording, or move anything around.  Nor am I taking this paragraph out of context.

Where can I even BEGIN?  Aside from the obvious error – “I Believe I Can Fly” is SOOOO last century – look – I mean JUST LOOK – at the comma placement in the above paragraph:  Perhaps, MAYBE if that paragraph had been written by Yakov Smirnoff and the fast-moving developments impelled Smirnoff to dictate to his assistant Hodor who then read the copy over the phone to Mickey Rourke back in Times HQ, maybe, MAYBE such a bizarre placement of punctuation MIGHT be excusable.

In Soviet Russia, Commas place you!

(The reporter, by the way, is named Nikita Stewart, and Odin forgive me for ethnic stereotyping, but maybe I’m not so far off with the Yakov Smirnoff thing?)

Secondly – well, thirdly, since really, did I really need to have the earworm of “I Can Believe I Can Fly” sluiced into my brain? – well, at least I should be thankful it wasn’t “Carry On My Wayward Son” by Kansas – Merengue is a much-treasured and popular form of dance music, with long roots in the Dominican Republic.  MERINGUE (which according to reporter Stewart and the Times was blaring from the sound trucks) is a light, sweet, fattening desert made from whipped eggs and cream, popular in France and Switzerland.

Confusing Merengue and Meringue is a RIDICULOUS error, especially in a New York-based paper covering a story that took place in Harlem, and my editors at the Great Neck South Southerner, who kindly tolerated my ramblings about Syd Barrett and Wire in the late-ish 1970s, would have handed me my precious, pretentious, precocious ass ON A PLATTER if I made a mistake as IDIOTIC as that.

(Goddammit, why did I have to mention “Carry On My Wayward Son”?)

But maybe…maybe there ARE trucks that “blare” meringue. Maybe, just maybe I’m being a little too hasty in my judgement.

Perhaps these trucks cruise down the cool, neat streets of Lausanne in the moments leading up to New Years, dousing Swiss revelers with rich, fluffy, sugary meringue.

These revelers, all with masterfully tuned Swiss watches precisely set to count down the minutes and seconds until the New Year, their usually cool Swiss inhibitions loosened by the sweet, fruity Kirsch that they imbibe during the holiday seasons, virtually BATHE in the meringue spurting out of the Famous Meringue Camions de Pompiers (the Fire-Trucks re-fitted during the New Years’ Holiday for the SOLE purpose of dousing the happy Swiss with Meringue).  And perhaps this tradition of the New Years’ Meringue-dousing originated in 1848, to mark the adoption of the first constitution of the Swiss Federation.

“Regarde, maman, les camions de meringue sont ici!” shriek the children as they see the Meringue Trucks entering the famous Rue De Bourg.  The little ones climb on their parents’ shoulders, hoping for a good soaking of the silky, sweet confection.

“Soyez prudent, Pierre!,” warns Mama, with a gentle smile of reproach.
“L’année dernière, vous aviez trop et vomi partout dans la grand-maman et l’ambassadeur d’Autriche!”  (Be careful, Pierre!  Last year you had too much  meringue and threw up all over Grandma and the Austrian ambassador!)

So, maybe that WAS Meringue being blared from trucks at candidate Espaillat’s rallies.

OR MAYBE, heck I am gonna go out on a limb here and say it is LIKELY (will you, dear reader, allow me this episode of limb going-on-out-ness?) THAT THE NY TIMES IS NOW BEING EDITED BY CHIMPS NOT EVEN SMART ENOUGH TO PLAY TAMBORUINE WITH LANCELOT LINK.

(Oh, and many thanks to a TRULY PROFESSIONAL editor, Great Neck North’s very own Nancie S. Martin, for tipping me off to this Editorial Altamont.)

So, the next time you get all mad at the New York Times for running yet another article on a useless piece of shit talentless Deejay and making you somehow feel guilty that you don’t give one single sloppily-coiled ice-cream-powered pile of shit about said Deejay; or when 6 articles in a single month tell you that you now have to move back into the neighborhood the Times spent all of last year telling you to move out of; or when the transparency of the Times’ mission to shill for the Russian billionaires who Bloomuiliani made the non-tax paying masters of Manhattan just becomes, oh, so INCREDIBLY transparent; please try to have pity and remember this:

CHIMPS EDIT THE NEW YORK TIMES.

The New York Times is edited by chimps who not only spray commas around a paragraph with the subtlety of Foster Brooks reading excerpts from a Jenny McCarthy anti-vaccination rant, but CHIMPS who CANNOT TELL THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A HIGH-END DESSERT AND A FORM OF CARRIBEAN DANCE MUSIC.

Chimps, I tell you, Chimps.  And not the good suit-wearing kind.  Mean, poop-throwing, ill-mannered chimps.

Tim Sommer has achieved a degree of notoriety as a journalist, avant-garde musician, music producer, record company executive, club and radio DJ, and VJ on MTV and VH1.

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TIM
Features, Life

Noise, The Column: If Only I Was Thor!

June 25, 2014

Apparently, I have a very similar email address to a Norwegian named Thor Sommerseth.

Not infrequently, I receive emails intended for this Thor Sommerseth.  This is true. These are written in Norwegian and include a lot of exciting looking words featuring o’s with slashes through them.  I have translated a few of these emails, and they are disappointingly mundane; they often involve work in risk management, and one even detailed what mighty Thor was expected to bring to a Church brunch.

Nevertheless, sometimes I like to pretend that I AM THOR SOMMERSETH, I mean JEG ER THOR SOMMERSETH, and not mundane ol’ Timothy Sommer; and I imagine what it would be like to march around the apartment, loudly proclaiming “I AM THOR SOMMERSETH, my will shall be done, now bring me a Fresca or I shall DAMN you to the Gods of the Clan Æsir, though honestly a Diet Ginger Ale will probably do the trick, too, preferably Canada Dry.  May the God Nídhögg rain FIRE on you if you bring me Schweppes! Actually, if it’s all you’ve got, Schweppes would be okay.”

In that spirit, I also like to imagine what kind of letters I would write if I was, indeed, Thor Sommerseth.

Dear Columbia Pictures Television:

My name is Thor Sommerseth.  My father and his fathers before him were proud holders of the bloodline of the clan Sommerseth, and may I remain true to the spirit of my paternal ancestors until the day the God Ragnarok dies and brings this world to an end in shuddering cataclysm of fire and ice; my mother, of the clan Adelbaum from Bayside, New York, was named “Most likely to Get a Partial Tuition Flute Scholarship” in the 1959 Miss Beth-El Synagogue Competition.

Over the last few years, I, Thor Sommerseth, have made quite a name for myself in the Norwegian television industry.  But you probably already know that.

I, Thor Sommerseth, initially rose to prominence as associate producer of Trondheim’s second most popular morning show, titled En Annen Morgen av Svarthet is Og ld Med Sporadiske Muppets  (Translation:  Another Morning of Blackness, Ice and Fire with Occasional Muppets).   More recently, one of the shows I, Thor Sommerseth, developed, Black Metal Idol, made headlines when the winning act was found to be responsible for the burning of 8 churches in the Sørlandet district.

After receiving the blessings of the God Loki of the Jötnar Clan, and under considerable pressure from my mother’s side of the family, the Adelbaums, I, Thor Sommerseth, have decided to attempt to sell some properties to the American television industry.  I have geared these specifically to the American marketplace.

Three of these shows are what you Americans call “sit-coms” (here in Norway we call these types of shows “Dagligdagse Distraksjoner fra Dorbannelsen av Endeløs Natt Enøydes, Raven-Flankert Gud Odin har Kastet Over Oss” – that translates as “Mundane Distractions from the Endless Night that the One-Eyed Raven-Flanked God Odin Has Cast Upon Us”); one of these “pitches” is a “reality” show, and the final idea, which is my favorite, is a courtroom show.

Here are the sitcoms:

SHE’S THE MONKEY SHERIFF

WHO’S DAT MONKEY

MAMA’S MONKEY

Each of these are fairly self-explanatory.

The reality show, which is also fairly well explained by the title, is called:

WHO WANTS TO MARRY A MONKEY

Finally, I, Thor Sommerseth, have saved the best for last:

JUDGE C*NT 

This is a show in which everyday cases are brought before a judge, who happens to be a total c*nt (this sounds like a winner to me, Thor Sommerseth!).

You may be surprised that I, Thor Sommerseth, am not suggesting any shows of the “saga” nature, involving great mythical kingdoms and the actions of fantastic beasts and giants; I, Thor Sommerseth, understand these are quite popular in the United States.  I have dabbled in this genre before, but I find it brings me bad luck:  in 2006 I produced a series called Gilligan’s Island of Ice and Lava, which was cancelled before it was even aired due to the presumption that it would offend Njörðr, one of the Gods who protects the sea; and I personally believe that a mini-series I co-wrote in 2009, My Mother The Car Who Is Inhabited by The Soul of Hrímthursar the Frost Giant,  angered the Gods, since the Adelbaum’s had a significant alignment problem with their Hyundai very shortly after the series was aired.

Thank you for your time.  I, Thor Sommerseth, look forward to working with you, and bringing the power of the creative spirit that originated in the bowels of the primordial realm of Niflheim to the American syndicated television market.

Kind regards, I am Thor Sommerseth

 

 

From the Web

Life

Noise, The Column: The Long Echo of Steve Rossi and Stuart Sutcliffe

June 24, 2014

The incredible Josh Alan Friedman, one of the greatest annotators of the spirit of New York City, once wrote that yesterday’s cheers have a very short ccho. But the length of an echo does not necessarily explain the power and cultural resonance of a voice.

In this spirit, I want to mark the passing of a star of the last century, Mr. Steve Rossi. Steve Rossi was probably best known as the smooth crooner who teamed up with light-socket-haired funnyman Marty Allen. Allen & Rossi were one of the last of the great handsome man-and-a-monkey/shyster-and-the-shyster’d couplings that defined comedy for nearly a century (and descended in a straight line from the “Dutch” comics of Bowery Dime Museums of the late 19th Century and Vaudeville, reminding us that much American comedy is based on the immigrant’s experience of confusion and assimilation). Allen & Rossi were so loved that they appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show 44 times (imagine being big enough to host SNL 44 times!), and were so well respected that they were personally chosen by Sullivan to appear on the same shows that the Beatles appeared on (in fact, Allen & Rossi appeared on three of the four Beatles/Sullivan shows). Steve Rossi was a much-loved figure amongst classic Vegas entertainers, and he worked regularly until the end of his life.

There was a time when fame was less a construct of social media and bad behavior, and more the result of artists who worked their asses off, made people laugh and cry, and left them wanting more of both; in many ways, that time is lost forever (though, of course, many artists still work hard for their success, and achieve fame via creating distinct, original, and creative work). We should always honor those men, like Steve Rossi, who stepped into the spotlight night after night after night in nightclubs glamorous and grim, and knew that their survival depended on treating every audience like a fresh ingénue to be wooed, seduced, and conquered. These entertainers, these people like Steve Rossi, are one of the treasured legacies of our culture, and I hope that there will be many, many beautiful journeys ahead for Mr. Rossi, who passed this weekend at age 82.

Today we also remember another star, one who did not live past 21.

Despite the fact that Stuart Sutcliffe achieved virtually no fame during his too-brief life, he is known throughout the world today, and his spirit and style helped shape one of the most ubiquitous creative forces of the last one hundred years.

Stuart Sutcliffe, who would have been 74 on Monday, June 23, was the original bassist for the Beatles; far more significantly, his deep artistic heart and his extraordinary sense of style (specifically his James Dean-meets-Dean Moriarty-meets-Left Bank cool) profoundly defined who the Beatles were and what they were to become; in fact, I don’t think it’s going too far to say that Sutcliffe’s powerful desire to inject the Beatles’ relatively pedestrian (circa 1960) music with the artistic heart of the American beats and abstract impressionists is what created what we came to know as “the Beatles,” and caused them to achieve a creative style and a cultural ambition that set them far, far apart from their Mersey and Hamburg contemporaries who played very similar American-based rock and pop. Sutcliffe, who was John Lennon’s best friend, was also essential in inspiring Lennon to bring a healthy dose of artistry and lunacy into the nascent rock band, and I personally believe Sutcliffe’s spirit was a formative part of Lennon’s personality until the day Lennon died.

In 1960 on the Beatles first trip to Hamburg, Sutcliffe met Astrid Kirchherr, and the two fell in love; Kirchherr (and her ex-boyfriend, Klaus Voormann) set about re-making the Beatles in their own image, turning them into remarkable existentialist hipsters, and most notably (in terms of the band’s long-term imaging) intimidating John, Paul, George, and Stuart into giving up their greaser-style DA’s and replacing them with fashionably sloppy French bowl cuts. Sutcliffe ended up leaving the Beatles to stay in Hamburg with Kirchherr – where he died of a stroke, violently young, in 1962 — but the effect that Sutcliffe, Kirchherr, and Voormann had on the Beatles is literally incalculable; they are minor players in very, very key roles on one of the great stages of history.

The Buddha said that all phenomenon is the result of causes and conditions; which is to say that in the great and massively diverse planetarium we call Entertainment, or Amusement, or the Silly, Serious, Tragic, and Trivial things that Distract us, nothing arises out of the blue. Nothing. A fundamental element of the Beatles’ character lies in the outsider interests of Stuart Sutcliffe, who we honor in this column; and the beautiful, twisting, corny, ever-shifting beast that is American comedy, descended from the trials and errors of the immigrant experience as interpreted by Weber & Fields, Abbott and Costello, the Marx Brothers, Olsen & Johnson, Martin & Lewis, and Allen & Rossi, also lay deep in the heart of Steve Rossi, who we also honor today, and bid farewell to. Your cheers echo loudly in my heart, Mr. Rossi.

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Existential Stuff, Life, Opinion

Noise, The Column: Dear NYTimes.com Are You Freaking Kidding Me?

June 23, 2014

On Saturday, I clicked on nytimes.com hoping for two simple things: an insightful piece marking the 50th anniversary of the murder of civil rights workers Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner, and an efficient rundown of the World Cup group standings and a preview of the day’s matches.

I found neither.

Instead, in SATURDAY’S nytimes.com, I found a preview of FRIDAY’S Italy vs. Costa Rica World Cup match. To repeat: a preview of FRIDAY’s match in SATURDAY’S paper. For the love of god, have they COMPLETELY stopped caring over there?!? Is Corky from Life Goes On editing the weekend sports’ section?

As for my modest hopes that the Great Paper might have a piece marking the anniversary of one of the most symbolic events in the Civil Rights movement (the Sheriff-authorized torture and slaughter of three college students who were helping African Americans in Mississippi achieve their constitutionally protected right to vote), instead I found a front page piece on something REALLY important: this REALLY COOL 30-something couple got a WHALE of a deal on an apartment on the Lower East Side! You JUST HAVE TO BE WILLING to look below Delancey!!! Since I read ntytimes.com and I am a MODERN New Yorker, isn’t THAT what matters to me?

I mean, is there ANYTHING more TIMELY than ANOTHER story about how WONDERFUL it is to be a kind-of young couple with OODLES of extra income getting an INCREDIBLE DEAL on an apartment in Co-op Village below Grand Street on the Lower East Side, and how LUCKY you are that there now diners near you that don’t JUST serve kosher food, and oh my oh my how SCRUMPTIOUS it was of that WONDERFUL Robert Moses to tear down those icky tenements and build these terrific BIG BRICK TOWERS where you can practically STEAL a two bedroom! Oh, all that AND a preview in SATURDAY’S paper of a major sporting event that took place on FRIDAY! Now, THAT’S JUST GIVING UP. And seriously, NYTIMES, on the 50th anniversary of one of the FUNDAMENTAL socio-political moments of the 1960s, MAYBE, just MAYBE you could have put something about THAT on your front page, instead of Amy Chozick’s offensive piece about finding a great deal on 1,200 square feet in Seward Park Cooperative.

I am sure Amy Chozick is a perfectly nice person who likes the Dum Dum Girls and gets sad when Sara McLachlan coos over pictures of abused puppies, but if I see one more piece by someone reminding us how cool and cutting edge the east fucking village was ten or fifteen years ago, I will remind them that some of us remember the East Village when it resembled Haiti after one of Papa Doc’s particularly gruesome bunga-bunga parties (yeah, I know I am mixing up some regimes there, but you get the idea); and listen, nyfuckingtimes, don’t even THINK of having someone tell me how “real” the East Village used to be UNLESS they are old enough to remember this handy acronym, dispensed as truly life-saving advice when I was a sprout during the Reagan administration: Avenue A means you’re Adventurous! B, Bold! C, Crazy! D, Dead! FDR: Found Dead in River.

Chozick’s piece reminded me of something Prince Charles, no bunga-bunga party thrower he, once said about the horrific modern architecture encroaching on London: Ol’ Charles – well, he wasn’t so old then – said that modern architects were going to finish the job the Luftwaffe started, and ruin the great old city. And you know what? The Chozick’s of the world, hot on the heels of endless years of Bloombuialani making the City safe for Russian Billionaires and Disney, are going to finish the work of Robert Moses, that hater of everything ethnic, rough, indigenous, and neighborhood-y in New York City. I know it’s really took late to save Manhattan, but I would rather the New York Times not rub it in my face every day.

Oh, and back to the World Cup: At the very effing least, I expect to open the goddamn paper of record (I said, THE PAPER OF RECORD) and see reasonable timely previews – NOT FUCKING PREVIEWS OF FRIDAY’S MATCHES IN SATURDAY’S PAPER (someone should really be fired for that), and I would have liked to see the group standings. But publishing the standings of this ENORMOUS world-wide sporting event was just too much for the widdle bitty Times to handle; apparently, the Times sports writers exhausted all their brain power writing those sixteen fucking pieces on California Chrome and needed to lie down with a Pamprin and an Enya CD, and therefore they can no longer be reasonably expected to meet even the MOST MEAGRE requirements for timely or accurate coverage of THE WORLD’S MOST POPULAR SPORT.

And as for not mentioning the 50th Anniversary of the murders of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner…that is a desperate, shivering shame.

Timothy Sommer has achieved some degree of notoriety working as a musician, record producer, MTV/VH1 VJ, journalist, club and radio DJ, and music industry executive.

From the Web

Existential Stuff

REMARKABLE INFORMATION! An Interview with a Legendary Man of Words!

May 13, 2014

Recently, I had the REMARKABLE good fortune to sit down with Zander Crane Pierce, the legendary crime author and one of the Heights’ most famous residents!  Zander, of course, is the creator of Ryder Aday, the hard-boiled P.I. who prowls the streets of Brooklyn raisin’ hell and ropin’ in the bad guys!  Aday’s catch phrase, “I don’t make the rules…I just break ‘em!” has been in the Merriam-Webster dictionary of Idiomatic Phraseology since 1994.

Between 1951 and 1975, Z.C. Pierce wrote 71 Ryder Aday books, including Aday to Kill, A Murder Aday, Aday to Pick Up Trash, Aday in Vegas, Aday in the Docks, A Dame Aday, A Bad Night to be Aday, Aday Chasing Reds, Aday in the Bathhouses, Aday in the Nuthouse, Aday in Hollywood, An Apple Aday Keeps the Reaper Away, Aday in Court, Aday Turns to Knight, Aday to be Stabbed in the Back, I Dodge A Bullet Aday, Aday to Love ’em and Leave ‘em, Aday on the Bowery, Aday at Yankee Stadium, The Night We Called It Aday, Aday at the Remodeled Yankee Stadium, and many others.

Eleven different movies have been made based on Pierce’s Ryder Aday books, with the lead character being played by actors from Vic Damone to Brian Keith, Mike Mazurki to Peter DeLuise, and perhaps most famously by Fred Williamson in 1974’s Aday to be Badasssss.

Mr. Remarkable visited Zander Crane Pierce in his basement apartment on Hicks’ Street.  Pierce brought the whole building in 1974 with the money he made from selling all rights to the Ryder Aday character to Sid and Marty Kroft (who intended to develop him into a Talking Chimp P.I. for a Saturday Morning series, to be voiced by Louis Prima; Prima’s catastrophic stroke in 1975 prevented the show from going ahead).  Today, Pierce lives in the front quarter of the basement, the only part of the building he actually still owns; Pierce has had to sell off the building piece by piece,  largely due to a gambling addiction in the 1980s that saw him lose nearly 20 million dollars betting on Division I College Basketball (he lost 800,000 dollars alone on a single Brandeis vs. Hamilton game in 1990).  As for the rest of Pierce’s once-considerable fortune, most of it was lost in the divorce settlement with his third wife, newscaster Pia Lindstrom.

I would be delighted to announce that Pierce is a spry and sharp 84 years young.  But that would be a lie.  He is a confused, unwashed, and due to a fall on Montague Street in 2013, he hasn’t left his basement hovel in 15 months.  Nonetheless, we should honor great men like Zander Crane Pierce, and Despite his recent ignominy, Mr. Remarkable was delighted to sit down with his legendary Brooklynite, and discuss one of this boroughs most fascinatin’ fictional characters.

PIERCE:  Did you bring the Ramen, Gertrude?

MR R:  I’m not Gertrude.  But I did bring the Ramen you requested.

PIERCE:  Hmmm. Shrimp?  You brought me Shrimp Ramen?  Do I look like a Chinaman to you?

MR. R:  No, no Sir.  There’s chicken there, too, right underneath.

PIERCE:  Damn right there is.

MR. R:  We met once before, at a Seder hosted by Clay Felker and Norris Mailer in 197 –

PIERCE:  We met once before, at the premiere of The Jolson Story.  Who knew Larry Parks was a commie bastard?  I did, that’s who.  I could smell the stink of red on him a mile away, yes I could.

MR. R:  I wasn’t at the premiere of The Jolson Story.

PIERCE:  Jolson?  Why the hell are we talking about Jolson?

MR. R:  Uh, right, we are here to talk about Ryder Aday.

PIERCE:  Of course.

MR. R:  What’s your favorite Ryder Aday movie?

PIERCE:  That would have to be Aday Waay Out West, the comedy starring Pat Buttram, Slim Pickens, Aldo Ray, and Carol Doda.  That was a helluva picture.

MR. R.:  Yes, 1967.

PIERCE:  Yes 1967 what?

MR. R:  That’s the year they made the picture.

PIERCE:  What picture?

MR. R:  Aday Waay Out West. 

PIERCE:  Now that was a funny picture.  Almost as good as Jolson Sings Again.  Y’know, history has not been kind to Larry Parks. I went to the premiere of that film with Jinx Falkenberg.  Do you know how good Jinx Falkenberg looked in a sweater?  As Mr. Webster said, ‘Voom comma Va-Va-Va-Va.’ God help me.

MR R:  Uh huh.

PIERCE:  William Demarest tried to make the moves on her that night.  Now, as far as I’m concerned, Demarest can do no wrong, but if he’s gonna go pilot fishin’ offa my pier, he’s no better than Larry Parks, that dirty red.  Sure could sing, though.

MR.R. Larry Parks?

PIERCE:  I’m talking about Demarest, you idiot.  Few people knew that.  Demarest could sing like a little bird.  A sweet little bird.  Such a pretty sweet little bird.

MR. R:  Let’s talk about Ryder Aday.

PIERCE:  Of course.

MR. R:  Who was the inspiration for Ryder Aday?

PIERCE:  That’s easy.  Demarest.

MR. R:  You saw him as an older man?

PIERCE:  I never saw Demarest!  What the Tom, Dick, and Harry are you accusing me of?  I didn’t see him as an older man, a younger man, or an in-between man!  I love the ladies.  Always did.  Just ask Wanda Hendrix, Virna Lisi, Dagmar, I dated ‘em all!

MR R:  Abby Dalton…Yvonne Craig…you had a bit of reputation!

PIERCE:  Whaddya mean I had a reputation?!?  I don’t care what you heard, I love the ladies!  I mean, yes, I took a bath with Demarest once – we all did.  The man loved his baths.  It was a very small tub.  Extremely small. Yes, I sponged his back a little.  But that’s all!  Okay, we took a nap together afterwards. But Demarest was always napping!  He said it’s what separated the real men from the lady boys.  Yes, we spooned a little.  That much is true.  Fred MacMurray took pictures.   Boy, did he take pictures.

MR. R:  Did that have anything to do with Fred Mac Murray being cast as Ryder Aday in 1961’s Aday in East Berlin?

PIERCE:  In a word, yes.  But I thought he did a good job.  He used a light meter an’ everything.  The contrast in those pictures was amazing.  Why, Life magazine could have used them.  I mean if they went in for that sort of thing.

MR R:  Are there any plans for any more Ryder Aday mysteries?

PIERCE:   Are you kidding! I don’t own the rights to the character.  Sid and Marty Kroft, those little gonnifs, they sold it to the Wetson’s hamburger chain, and then Wetson’s went under, and I think the bankruptcy court gave it to some creditors, I dunno, then somehow Albert Shanker got a hold of ‘em and when he died he willed them for perpetuity into the pension fund of the United Federation of Teachers. Can you imagine?

MR R:  Yes.

PIERCE:  Yes what?

MR R:  Yes, I can imagine –

PIERCE:  You couldn’t imagine a red nose on a clown’s face.  So anyway, around that time I was dating Lori Saunders, and I thought it’d be nice to write a character she could play in a TV show or a film, so I came up with Sassy Ba’dey, wrote a coupla those stories, Ba’dey at the Montreal Olympics, Ba’dey for Badguys, but no one was buying.

MR R:  Yes, I remember that!

PIERCE:  You don’t remember bupkiss.  You didn’t even remember when you, me, Larry Parks, Billy Martin, Lou Walters, and Arnold Steng went to the Latin Quarter and pulled a train on Irish McCalla.

MR R:  Excuse me?

PIERCE:  Irish McCalla, my friend. All you needed to do was promise that broad a pancake breakfast and she’s on her back faster than Max Baer Jr.

MR R:  Surely you mean Max Baer Sr.?

PIERCE:  No, I most certainly mean Max Baer Jr.  Demarest showed me some pictures.

MR R:  I’m not sure I know what you’re talking about.

PIERCE:  Don’t play coy with me!  Abby Dalton’s been talking to you, hasn’t she?  What did she tell you about Demarest?  I don’t care what the world thinks, he was my sweet little Willie.  Is that ramen done yet?  Because my stories are on TV.  Can you see yourself out?  Frickin’ Abby frickin’ Dalton.  Thinks she’s the Queen of Sheba, that one.

Mr. Sommer’s opinions and general grasp of reality are entirely his own, and may in no way reflect the actual character of the people whose names are mentioned in his column. 

Timothy Sommer has achieved some degree of notoriety working as a musician, record producer, MTV/VH1 VJ, journalist, club and radio DJ, and music industry executive.  He is currently writing the book for I, Madame!, a Broadway musical based on the life and work of Waylon Flowers and Madame, and he continues his work to preserving the music and memory of New York Mets organist Jane Jarvis.

 

From the Web

Life

REMARKABLE INFORMATION! How a Fella on Hicks Street Helped Send Man Into Space!

May 4, 2014

Hooray for a Hometown Boy!  On April 20, a small museum on Hicks Street opened to honor Doktor Dieter Viehmann, whose work in propulsion mathematics helped put men on the moon!

You may not have heard of ol’ Dieter, but his precise calculations helped his pal, Robert Goddard, launch the first liquid fueled rocket!  The little one-room (plus alcove) museum has been opened by Die Deutsch-Amerikanische Freundschaft Gesellschaft für Wissenschaftliche Verbesserung und Vergesslichkeit der Dinge, die Geschehen Kann oder Maynot Haben, Bevor wir Geboren Wurden, so Lassen Sie uns Einfach mit Dingen, Warum Nicht? (The German American Friendship Society for Scientific Improvement and Forgetfulness of Things that May or May Not Have Happened Before We Were Even Born, so Let’s Just Get On With Things, Why Not?), and it tells you simply everything you need to know about the legendary Herr Doktor Dieter, who emigrated to Brooklyn Heights in 1921, where he set up a little basement workshop on Hicks Street.  Communicating by mail and telegram with the famous Doctor Goddard, who lived in Ohio, our homeboy Herr Doktor used his knowledge of obscure math concepts like Continued Fractions and Sphere Eversion to help calculate potential parabolic velocities.  Viehmann’s personal eccentricities and extreme political beliefs later stained his reputation, which is perhaps why it’s taken so long for him to be honored in his hometown; Viehmann was deported in 1938 when it was alleged he was conducting experiments in Mendelian Eugenics (his phrase) on neighborhood dogs that he kidnapped, and he further damaged his reputation by standing on the sidewalk outside the Ahavas Israel Shul in Greenpoint every Friday night for four years and cooking ham and buttermilk soup in a giant tureen while singing “You’re a Grand Old Flag” in Yiddish.

After his deportation, Viehmann used his almost obsessive knowledge of the Fourier Coefficients (a0=1af0f[x] dx, ah=2af0f[x]cos 2πhax dx, and so on) to help the Third Reich develop X-Ray Weaponry.  Alas, his tic-like habit of singing the patriotic songs of Irving Berlin in Yiddish (it is likely the Herr Doktor suffered from an undiagnosed form of Tourettes Syndrome) caused his undoing, and following prolonged torture by the Reich’s most notorious interrogator, Wilhelm Tim-Tuefel, Doktor Dieter Viehmann died a horrible death in the Brandenburg an der Havel Prison camp outside Berlin.  The new Viehmann Museum doesn’t gloss over this, and they include an actual page from the Doktor’s Prison Diary, in which he writes “I have cut out my own tongue with a shard from a broken mirror to stop me from singing the most disgraceful songs that caused my spiritual defenestration.  Yet I cannot help humming them.  Why, oh why, did I ever let my darling wife Mitzi take me to that production of This is The Army by that merciless Hebrew genius of melody?”

In happier news, the museum also features a great little ball pit for the kiddies!

And Now.,..The Three Dot Round-Up! 

 Mr. Remarkable highly recommends the great new show at Faux Felines, that terrific new drag club on Kent and 11th in Williamsburg!  I was especially taken by a special Tribute to Lady Newscasters, starring Miss Christiane A Man Poor, Lady Diane Saw Ya, and the REAL Lara Spencer (who knew?!?  She tucks very well!)…I had a simply scrumptious meal at Le Pain Quotidien on Montague Street, but I got nothin’ but quizzical looks when I asked them why their John didn’t have “traditional” French toilets…All you young ‘uns can go on and on about Game of Thrones, but just give me a little Adam 12 on the ME Channel, and I’m happier than Joey Heatherton with a Percodan prescription!…As I write this, the New York Mets are STILL playin’ above .500!  I haven’t been this surprised since Christine Longet was set free.  I have a bet with Mister Marty Allen (“Hello Dere!”) that if the Amazin’s finish above .500 for the season, he has to dye his famous crazy hairdo Mets’ Blue and Orange!…Hey, if you’re like me, you have very fond memories of Sid and Marty Kroft’s Banana Splits TV show – I mean, there is nuthin’, and I mean zero-zilch-nada-null-нульовий-bupkiss-rien-nix-nought- aon rud-doodley squat- គ្មានអ្វី- שום דבר –nuthin’ funnier that chimps in people’s clothing singin’ rock music, is there?!?  Well, good news for all of you lovers of jaw-flappin’ simians in tuxedos!  The FX Network is gonna be airing MonkeyTV, a show based around an all-chimp group called Guns’n’Lemurs, and their rise to the top!  I can’t wait, and until then I’ll stand in front of the TV holding my banana!…Speakin’ of bananas, I don’t go to Broadway much these days – the prices for tickets are higher than Paul Simon’s bail, and the quality is lower than Paul Simon’s tail! – but I must say I am truly looking forward to seeing Harvey Fierstein’s new musical about Harry Belafonte, The Banana Boat Song Trilogy.  It opens at the Lunt-Fontanne Theater in September!   Maybe by the time it opens, I’ll finally be able to take the R Train from this luverly little town to the Big Apple!…AND THAT’S WHY I LOVE LIVIN’ IN BROOKLYN!

Mr. Sommer’s opinions and grasp of reality are entirely his own. 

Timothy Sommer has earned a considerable reputation as a musician, journalist, record producer, music industry executive, MTV/VH-1 VJ, and purveyor of minor cultural dada-ism.  He is currently writing NOVA, OTTO? AVON, a palindromic history of the German love for Lox and Shakespeare.  He also continues his efforts to get one-time New York Mets’ reliever and long-time Toronto Blue Jays team medic Ron Taylor into the Medical Wing of the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame. 

 

 

 

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Existential Stuff

REMARKABLE INFORMATION! The Right to Bear Anchovies!

April 19, 2014

I find Monty Q’s on Montague Street a perfectly serviceable, generally pleasant, and thoroughly convenient eatery.  I truly do.  But the other day I went in there and requested anchovies on a slice or two of pizza, and the gentleman behind the counter looked at me like I had just walked into a Taliban Cave asking if they had seen my signed photo of Rebbe Manchem Schneerson.

Seriously, my friends: the look on the pizza man’s face was as blank as the look on Oliver Cromwell’s decaying gob after he was posthumously beheaded and what remained of his rotting melon was stuck on a pike outside of Westminster (that’s right – the leading figure in the English Civil War was dug up after his death and beheaded by Charles II, the son of the King that Cromwell had beheaded!).  So…I thought to myself, perhaps if I DREW an anchovy, this gentleman would know what I was talking about! So I reached for a pen and on the back of a take-out menu I sketched, from memory, a reasonably efficacious and completely satisfactory one-dimensional representation of the slim, surprisingly radiant silver fish of my desire.

Still…no reaction.

I then phoned an actor friend of mine – hi, Kevin! – and, handing the phone to the counterman, I asked my thespian acquaintance to recite Ezra Pound’s “Sub Mare,” the poet’s famous ode to the humble yet resplendent anchovy.  Kevin did what he was told, and in his prosodic, almost Olivier-esque lilt, I heard Kevin say “And one gropes in these things as delicate Algæ reach up and out, beneath Pale slow green surgings of the underwave, ‘Mid these things older than the names they have, These things that are familiars of the god.”

A tear came to my eye, but the white apron’d gent behind the counter at Monty Q’s still looked at me with the empty, uncomprehending look that recalled history’s most famous hydrocephalic, Charlie Brown.

I decided to try one more thing.  I remembered that I had an old drag queen acquaintance, the lovely Miss Salty Manchovy.  I thought to myself, surely, s/he, of all people, could make my food industry friend comprehend my request (because I still thought of us as friends, despite his ignorance; only a glass partition and a gaggle of Garlic Knots separated us, and aren’t we all the children of Njörðr, the Norse God of the sea and the wind?).  So I borrowed a nearby laptop (thank you, Lashaniqua!), and embarked on an Internet search to see what had come of that delicate flower of the sea, Miss Salty Manchovy.  See, I hadn’t spoken to her since 1988, when we had gotten in an argument over whether Bea Arthur was taller than Julia Child (she isn’t; it’s a known fact that only Brienne of Tarth is taller than Julia Child).

Well, it turns out that my dear friend had ‘retired’ Miss Salty Manchovy many years ago; instead, s/he had taken a great interest in the history of New York City politics, and was now living and dressing as Miss Mess Byerson, a character that honors the life and work of Bess Myerson, who was the head of Consumer Affairs under Mayor Ed Koch (and, lest we forget, the lovely Miss Meyerson was also the first Jewish Miss America!).   In fact, Mess Byerson is currently touring in a drag show based on the political machinations of the Koch administration,  along with Miss Edwina Kock and Lady Donald M. Anus.  And I know what you’re thinking!  Was Ed Koch our tallest mayor?  He was, after all, a towering 6 feet 2 inches!  Ah, but our NEW Mayor, Bill DeBlasio, measures in at 6’ 5”!!!  Bizarrely, Mr. DeBlasio is DWARFED by City Councilman Robert Cornegy Jr. (who represents Bed Stuy/Crown Heights) who is nearly 7 feet tall.

I seem to have become distracted.  Please forgive!  Anyway:

All of this left me anchovy-less, sans anchois, ohne sardellen, בלי אנשובי, sin anchoas, click click violent-horizontal-wagging-of-the-head click anchovies click, and so on; in any language, my friends, your humble and hungry correspondent was left standing in a pizza place in Brooklyn that not only didn’t have any anchovies, but seemed to be completely confused by the notion of putting these on a pizza.

CAN YOU IMAGINE?!?  WHAT KIND OF PIZZA JOINT, especially in the borough of Brooklyn, the noble pizza-loving County of Kings, CAN’T PUT ANCHOVIES ON A PIZZA?!?  Now, we may not always WANT anchovies on our pizza – I mean, if there was a TV channel that only showed the work of Nat Hiken (the creator of Car 54 and The Phil Silvers Show/Sgt. Bilko), I wouldn’t want to watch it all the time; and I occasionally want ice cream that doesn’t have peanut butter cups in it…but it’s nice to know that we can have anchovies on the pizza when we want it! And truly, should any place that CAN’T put anchovies on a slice of pizza even CALL ITSELF a pizza joint?!?

I, my friends, adamantly say no.  This I state, aver, affirm, maintain, declaim, testify, and avow.  And I know what you’re thinking:  as long as we are discussing the height of famous statesmen, is Michelle Obama our tallest first lady?  After all, she towers nearly 6 feet over the neatly parquet’d historic floors of the Executive Mansion.  Well, my friends, she is only TIED for this honor; she is the same height as the estimable Eleanor Roosevelt.  And I am sure that the great Eleanor, the niece of one President and the spouse of another, would agree:  A pizza place without anchovies is like Martin without Lewis, Rossi without Allen, Petrillo without Mitchell, Durante without Jackson, Burns without Schreiber, Olsen without Johnson.

And a lifetime of slurping, chewing, munching, masticating, thoroughly enjoying and ALWAYS FOLDING pizza has led me to come to this conclusion:  When you walk into a pizza place, there should be television in the joint tuned to a soccer game (Juventus, A.C Milan, Man City, Ashton Villa, it hardly matters) and they should readily – no, HAPPILY – be prepared to dispense anchovies on request.

And if they can’t do that, they have no RIGHT to call themselves a pizza place.

Mr. Timothy Sommer’s opinions and grasp of reality are entirely his own.

Tim Sommer has achieved a degree of success as musician, record producer, major label executive, DJ, and personality on MTV and VH1.  He is currently composing Rebel Mensch, a rock opera based on the life of Judah P. Benjamin, the Confederate Secretary of State and the first person ever Bar Mitzvah’d as a reform Jew, and he continues his efforts to get New York Met pitcher Al Jackson in the baseball Hall of Fame. 

 

 

 

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Existential Stuff

REMARKABLE INFORMATION! Baseball is Back, Staples an’ all!

April 9, 2014

Recently, a rather stunning headline in the sports pages caught my eye: “Aroldis Chapman Has a Head Full of Staples!” cried the scribe.  What a gorgeous sentence (though I will confess I have added the exclamation point, because it adds a certain visual beauty and aural panache to an already splendid phrase). Ah, such true poetry is so readily available to us in the most unlikely sectors!  We must only keep our eyes wide, my friends.

Now, the details behind the dazzling line of copy I recorded above hardly matters; suffice to see that Mr. Chapman, a left-handed pitcher of Cuban-Andorran descent who can throw a baseball at an almost supernatural speed, was quite recently on the receiving end of a batted line-drive to the forehead that nearly resulted in his premature defenestration from mortality (or, as they might say in Catalan, the native tongue of Andorra, esports induïda per decapitació); and the injury did, most indeed, leave our dear fast-balling friend with head full of staples.

What matters is this:  Baseball is back.

Baseball, which kept us company as a lonely child, and thrilled us when our middle school world was full of taunts and the snail-gray of boredom; baseball, which taught us math, patience, frustration, and loyalty to team and town; baseball, whose elegant pace reminded us of the need to breathe amidst the now-continuous distractions of the day, and whose green fields are full of space yet demand attention; baseball, whose radio and television announcers comforted us through long summer nights and shorter autumn days with tube-warmed voices as familiar as our mothers; baseball, which never changes yet is always in motion, and which continually promises us a spot under lights or sun in which to simultaneously richly relax and deeply focus; baseball, which allows us to have the heroes of every stage of our long lives immediately recalled simply by seeing the number on a uniform; baseball, which belongs to the sepia city and the sluicing subways and the green fields and the crystal blue country skies, all at the same time; baseball, which declines to grow old, even as we do; baseball, which refuses to be rushed in an era where now has already come and gone; baseball, my dear friends, which like the beautiful cream-colored bird glimpsed from the Brooklyn Bridge and silhouetted against the skyline, mysteriously vanishes with the chill and returns with the first rumor of spring; baseball is back.

And to honor the return of baseball, and inspired by the accidental poetry to be found in the headline about the fastballer felled by fickle flicks of ashen bat, I am going to present you with some baseball haikus, to remind us of the grace, simplicity, and poetry inherent in our greatest game.

Aroldis Chapman/Has a Head Full of Staples/A courageous Red.

Moe Berg, Atomic Spy/Heisenberg’s sworn enemy/Batted .243.

Third Base Coach Ed Yost/Relays signals in my dreams/Of Miracle Days.

All Hail Pumpsie Green/Who sought solace in Holy Lands/With pal Gene Conley.

They called him The Bird/He flew, he skipped, then flamed out/What a character.

Alex Rodriguez/Shame, shame, shame, shame, shame, shame, shame./Shame, shame, what a shame.

I have seen few sights/As disturbing and odd as/Davey Johnson’s neck.

On Montague Street/We stop and pause at a plague:/Jackie was signed here.

…AND THAT’S WHY I LOVE LIVIN’ IN BROOKLYN. 

Tim Sommer has been employed to varying degrees of gainfulness as a musician, record producer, DJ, VJ, and music industry executive.   The first baseball game he ever attended was on July 8, 1969, at Shea Stadium.  The New York Mets scored three runs in the 9th to come from behind and beat the Chicago Cubs, 4 – 3, giving Jerry Koosman the win.  

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Existential Stuff

REMARKABLE INFORMATION! Facts, facts, facts!!!

April 3, 2014

Hello, Princesses and Princes in this, the most Kingly of Counties! Ah, yes, if you were kind enough to visit me in this space last week you may have noticed that, ah, um, I went a little Margot Kidder on you all!  And if you were in the vicinity of Henry and Joralemon Streets last Tuesday at about 10 PM, that barking you heard was me (I am sad but compelled, as part of my therapy, to admit that)!  And it wasn’t actually random barking; it was my Asta imitation, the same one that won me a $10 gift certificate at the Abraham & Strauss Employee Talent Show in 1959! But a quick visit to Carrie Fisher Center for the Treatment of Percodan Addiction seems to have made me at least partially able to participate in (what they CFCTPA call) “life with the normals,” so my nurses have handed me a glass of Clamato, a Zagnut, a legal pad, and a pencil, and instructed me that it would be “good for my therapy” if I got back on the wagon and churned out another column!!!

Well, since I wasn’t exactly out and about this past week (unless you call confinement to a mattress in a 5’ by 7’ windowless room on Swinburne Island “going out”), Mr. Recoverin’ Remarkable is going to have to dig into his archives for this week’s column!  (Oh, by the way, dearest readers, The Carrie Fisher Center is on Swinburne Island, and Swinburne Island, for those who don’t know, is a man-made Island – built in 1873 – in the Lower Bay, not too far from Staten Island; it originally housed the doomed and quarantined sick who were pulled off of Ellis Island. Real estate is cheap there, and the CFCTPA knew a bargain when they saw one, so they snapped it up and put up a few sheds and a Quonset hut, and imported a couple of doctors from, as far as I can tell, the Philippines).

(Oh, by the way, the poor chap pictured below isn’t me, but the unfortunate Leon Czolgosz, who you, dear reader, shall learn a little more about shortly.)

Fortunately, I have a file set aside for precisely these occasions (I last utilized it in 1986, when my depression over the suicide of Queens borough President Donald Manes tipped me into a catatonic state for three weeks).  The file is labeled Remarkable Facts!, and it contains all sorts of Tantalizin’ Tidbits and Insanely Amazin’ Info I’ve collected over the years!  AND IT’S ALL TRUE!!!

  • Researchers at Duke University have determined that 8 out of 10 people will become sleepy if they stare a dog directly in the eye!
  •  In the Netherlands, it is considered exceedingly rude to touch a stranger’s bicycle tire!
  •   The reason we call a prostitutes’ client a “John” is because of a very public scandal involving Indianapolis mayor John O’Dwyer in 1904!
  •   When President Lyndon Johnson was depressed, he would have aides roll him inside a carpet and throw him down a flight of stairs!
  • The original name of IHOP (the International House of Pancakes) was IHOPWESOOT (The International House of People Who Eat Spaghetti Out of Troughs)! In 1955, brothers Jerry and Al Lapin opened two IHOPWESOOTS – one in Siler City, North Carolina, the other in Greeneville, South Carolina.  These eateries were great successes, so the brothers opened a third IHOPWESOOT in 1956 in Greensboro, North Carolina.  Problems with the North Carolina health department forced the two N.C. IHOPWESOOT’s to close in 1958, so in 1959, Jerry and Al reconfigured these two locations around a breakfast and pancake friendly concept, shortened the name, and the rest is history!  Oh, the one remaining IHOPWESOOT (the South Carolina one) changed its’ name in 1962 to Ye Olde Spaghetti Feedbag, and remains open to this day!
  • Jared Folgle – whom the world knows as “the Subway guy” – is the grandson of atomic spies Ethel and Julius Rosenberg!
  •  Before Merv Griffin created Jeopardy!, he created a less-successful game show called That’s No Lady, That’s My Chimp!
  • The Black and Tan, a libatious staple of every Irish pub, was invented in 1916 by a Dublin-based terrorist group working for Irish independence, The Blacken Ten!
  • The actual inventor of the recording process later known as the Edison Disk was Leon Czolgosz!  After Thomas Edison stole Czolgosz’s idea, the inventor descended into madness, culminating with his assassination of President William McKinley in 1901!
  •  Due to the fact that he was born in England, funnyman Bob Hope was briefly interred as a Suspicious Alien by the U.S. Government during the 1938 Cordell Hull Poisoning Crisis!
  • The dog breed name “Pit Bull” originated with legendary British Prime Minister Winston Churchill!  Churchill, who was notoriously cruel to animals, owned four Staffordshire Bull Terriers, whom he kept chained in a small cage behind his quarters in the War Office.  The Prime Minister took to feeding the dogs only peach pits, which he claimed kept them “hungry, healthy, and regular as a soldier,” further citing that when he had been a prisoner of war himself in a Boer prison camp, his captors had fed him only on peach pits, and he had “turned out fine.”  Before long, due to their simple and constant diets, people around the War Office began to refer to Churchill’s dogs simply as “Pit Bulls.”

(Mr. Sommer’s opinions and grasp of reality are entirely his own)

Tim Sommer has been employed to varying degrees of gainfulness as a musician, record producer, DJ, VJ, and music industry executive.   He is currently working on Beame!, a musical about New York City’s much maligned elfin Mayor of the same name, and he recently testified before the veterans’ committee of the Baseball Hall of Fame that middle reliever Terry Leach was the best pitcher he ever saw.

 

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