Underappreciated Geniuses, vol. 1: Betty Hutton

I have only seen one Betty Hutton movie, and it's probably the only one in which she doesn't sing. It's Miracle of Morgan Creek, and it's one of Preston Sturges' greats, which makes it one of the best movie comedies ever. This, by the way, is an empirical fact, not an opinion.

Truth be told, I don't remember Hutton's performance all that well. I'm sure she's great, but the movie really belongs to Eddie Bracken. If I'd never stumbled across Hutton's work outside that movie, I probably would never have given her another thought. Fortunately, a local DJ is a huge fan and she plays a lot of Betty Hutton. It wasn't long before I'd joined the fan club.

When she performs her signature material, Betty Hutton is probably the closest approximation ever of a living cartoon character. She is Spike Jones on speed, pure energy, liable to explode at any second. She's completely over the top, but unlike today's frenzied clowns, there's nothing ironic in her performance; she inhabits a refreshingly postmodern-free zone. All she's doing is selling a song like it's a life-or-death matter to get you to smile.

The disc Somebody Loves Me is a great introduction to her music. Not only does it include many of her biggest and best records--"Doctor, Lawyer, Indian Chief," "Murder! He Says," "It's Oh So Quiet" (later covered by Bjork)--but also some really wonderful examples of her serious singing. Check out her version of "It Had to Be You" and tell me this lady couldn't have been one of the best crooners of her time.

A performance is worth a thousand words, right? Check this out.

A Little Knowledge...

I was never any good at science in school. I took the bare minimum number of classes required to graduate high school, then did the same in college. And, I did my best to retain none of what little I was supposed to learn.

Recently this has begun to feel like a shortcoming, which is why I decided to read Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything, a book written for science morons such as myself. I haven't learned much from it, but what I have learned has me wishing I hadn't. In fact, it has me huddled in a fetal position in the corner of my office.

Here's what I've learned: Our solar system consists of one star, along with an ever-changing number of planets, some moons, and a whole bunch of space detritus. It is part of a galaxy called the Milky Way, which consists of somewhere between 200 and 400 billion stars. Billion. That is not a typo. Billion. See? Not a typo.

The Milky Way is one of approximately 140 billion galaxies which, I assume, are more or less the same size as the Milky Way, give or take a few hundred thousand light years. Once again, billion. 140 billion, by the way, is the number of frozen peas it would take to fill Carnegie Hall from floor to ceiling, wall to wall. Just in case you were wondering about that.

What this means is not only are we entirely insignificant in the Grand Scheme of Things, but also that our feeble minds are completely incapable of truly comprehending just how insignificant we are.

I'm going to put the book down now and go watch some Spongebob Squarepants.

The Four Stages of a Man

Beatles music is the first music I remember hearing. Meet the Beatles, Something New, and Hard Day's Night all got heavy play in our house when I was just a toddler; it was my musical mother's milk. I remember singing "I Don't Want to Spoil The Party" to myself as I walked to elementary school, entirely oblivious to the song's emotive meaning but deeply in love with the melody, the harmonies, and the guitars. Over the years, Beatle music has remained a constant in my life. Other music climbs up and down the mental hit parade, but there's always a Beatles song running through my head at some time during the day.

When I was a little kid, Ringo--loveable, cute, devil-may-care Ringo--was my favorite. He was always happy, never took things too seriously, just glad to be part of the gang.

Adolescence was all about John, angry and angsty, irreverent and sarcastic, taking the world so damn seriously. There was a time in my life when Plastic Ono Band seemed the pinnacle achievement of Western art. I was a little depressed at the time.

Adulthood is for Paul. Paul is a genius, pure and simple. Even his crap floors me, because it reveals an understanding of music so far beyond anything I could ever hope for for myself. Fabulous singer, brilliant bassist, stellar guitarist (that's him playing the frantic solo on "Taxman"), and seemingly a nice fellow to boot. Someone to admire, and to aspire to.

Dotage will be devoted to George. Quiet, underappreciated, a tad petulant but ultimately at peace with the world--what better way to prepare for checking out? As George reminded us in his masterwork, all things must pass.

As La Rosita Goes, So Goes Morningside Heights

I arrived on Manhattan's Morningside Heights 27 years ago, a Baltimore suburbanite with little experience of urban living. I immediately fell in love with the place, embracing its grunginess with much enthusiasm. And it was grungy. My apartment on 109th and Amsterdam got hot water maybe 2 hours a day; sometimes there was no running water at all. I was mugged three times in my first five years in the city. A drug deal on the corner a few yards from my front door culminated in one fellow shooting another in the face. Reports that yet another landlord had torched a building in order to rid himself of pesky rent-control tenants and rebuild as a condo were met with a shrug more appropriate to a 'dog bites man' news story. I have several friends who lost their apartments in just that way, in fact.

27 years later, the grunge is gone. There are now two Starbucks between 110th and 116th Street on Broadway. Fancy grocery stores and drug emporiums are ubiquitous, as are surprisingly upscale restaurants. Gone is the Mill Luncheonette, where Rene served up breakfast 24/7 and threatened to charge you extra for 'crunchy eggs' if you complained about the bits of shell in your food; Ta-Kome, home of the soggiest hero in creation and sole vendors of Canadian Ace, a beer that came in a gallon jug, cost under $1, and gave you a headache the minute you opened the bottle; the Marlin Bar, where a local alcoholic cleared bottles from tables for an occasional drink and where I first heard the immortal dictum "You don't have to go home, but you can't stay here"; Ben and Ralph's Tobacco and Newsstand, domain of two of the grumpiest old farts who ever lived and the place where I first heard the immortal dictum "Hey! This ain't a library! Buy it or get out!!!"; and the Blue Rose, a firetrap at which my band played every other Thursday (after it closed, we discovered that the entire bar was running off a single extension cord that ran out the back window, up the airshaft, and into the owner's apartment).

So it seemed fitting that my favorite Morningside Heights restaurant shut down during the week I was visiting New York. La Rosita was a Cuban restaurant that started as a hole in the wall, two parallel counters with barely enough space between to wedge yourself into your seat; it later moved a block south and expanded to include tables. It was here I first discovered the delights of café con leche, chicharrones de pollo (bits of chicken deep fried, then rolled in garlic), yellow rice and black beans, sweet plantains, Cubano sandwiches, and salads that consisted of nothing more than shredded lettuce, a slice of tomato, and a wedge of lemon. It was cheap, it was filling, it was damn good, and it was nothing like anything I'd ever eaten growing up in Pikesville, MD.

La Rosita's lease came up at the end of 2006 and the building owner told them the new rent would be $18,000 per month. You have to sell a lot of rice and beans to pay a bill like that. And so La Rosita is no more. La Rosita closed with a series of parties featuring live music; my good buddy Mark Ettinger, his daughter Kate, and I performed a set on the restaurant's penultimate night, several hours after I enjoyed my last La Rosita Cubano Especial with fried plantains and a mango batido. I composed a song especially for the show:

The La Rosita Song

Perdon, senor, no hablo Espanol
Pero quiero una plata de frijol-es
Y arroz amarillo y tostones
Y pollo frito; si, los chicharrones!

Par tres chuletas cantare el heptacordo
Now you know why my friends call me Gordo
And also why they call my wife Gordita
Because we take our meals at La Rosita!

The missus and I finished the night at Le Monde, a spiffy and lovely French restaurant on Broadway and 112th Street. We split a bottle of wine and had some late-night snacks and reminisced about what we miss about NYC, and what we don't, and I looked out the window and tried to remember what Morningside Heights looked like when I was a college kid. I couldn't remember what the Le Monde space used to be--a laundromat? a hardware store?--but it sure didn't look like this place, with its gorgeous wood columns and restored hammered tin ceiling and ultra-thin waiters and waitresses. I felt vaguely uneasy without knowing exactly why. This Morningside Heights certainly fits my current lifestyle better than the one on which I first arrived. I should welcome these changes, right?

When I got back home to Durham, NC, a new issue of the New Yorker was waiting for me. The first Talk of the Town piece nicely articulated the uneasiness I was feeling:

[There's a growing sense that] the city’s recovery has come at the cost of a part of its identity: that New York is safer and richer but less like itself, an old lover who has gone for a face-lift and come out looking like no one in particular. The wrinkles are gone, but so is the face. This transformation is one you see on every street corner in Manhattan, and now in Brooklyn, too, where another local toy store or smoked-fish emporium disappears and another bank branch or mall store opens. For the first time in Manhattan’s history, it has no bohemian frontier. Another bookstore closes, another theatre becomes a condo, another soulful place becomes a sealed residence. These are small things, but they are the small things that the city’s soul clings to.

Another soulful NYC venue has done bit the dust. RIP La Rosita. You guys decide to relocate, we sure could use you here in Durham.
photo shamelessly borrowed from Hugh Siegel

NYC 2.0

The missus and I just returned from a visit to New York City, about which I'll be writing for the next few days. For those who insist on the skinny up front: our trip was great, and we'll be back soon.

It is a trite but true observation that New York is a fabulous city. It's equally obvious that it's a city with a few flaws and that it is much in need of an upgrade. My suggestions for version 2.0 of NYC:

1) Tear out everyone's heating system and start over. There is probably some heat somewhere in NYC that isn't either (a)ridiculously hot or (b)off, but we never encountered it. What we encountered was good old 19th-century radiator heat, the type you might appreciate in a sauna but not in, say, a fancy restaurant, or your bedroom. Our visit was all about dry sinuses and stinky pits, with occasional bouts of the shivers at 3 AM, when we would awake to realize that the oppressive heat had disappeared and an Arctic chill had taken its place.

2) Build more bathrooms. Yes, I know this situation is much better now than it was 20 years ago, because now there's a Barnes & Nobles or Starbucks every ten feet. Still, the ratio of toilets to people in the city is unnatural and unhealthy. By necessity, lots of people are walking around needing to go, but with no place to go in. It is my current working theory that this is why many New Yorkers are so cranky. There is an especial need for more toilets in apartments; where we stayed, 6 people shared a single toilet. I believe this is a felony violation of the building codes in North Carolina.

3) Since suggestion 2 is a pipedream, at least add something to the water that makes pee smell better. Even in this post-Giuliani, suddenly tenament-less, very upscale city, people apparently pee everywhere. You never see them doing it, but you sure know where they did it later, because NYC smells of baked whizz. Even in the wintertime, amazingly. This is probably a function of the paucity of toilets. If adding something to the water is impractical, perhaps the city could rebuild its sidewalks from the material used to make urinal cakes.

And that's about it. Otherwise, New York City's perfect just as it is.