“Sick Week”
I picked up a virus this week that shut me down for several days. The symptoms were shortness of breath, bad cough, and high blood pressure. It started to break on Thursday and I feel good now. Whew! Several friends report having similar symptoms – seems to be going around.
My oldest son turned thirty-six on Thursday, reinforcing how old I’m getting. I asked him what he was doing for his birthday and came away exhausted – are you ready for it? Here you go:
“I am going to get a shoulder workout in this morning and haircut, then take Ollie up to his groomer in South SF and go to my favorite sandwich shop Deli Board that won top #10 sandwiches in the nation! Then home for some meetings and then back to the gym again for a back and bicep lift before dinner with a big friend crew at Doppio Zero in San Carlos (certified Neapolitan pizza like Terun).”
I like to relax and not do too much on my birthday – apparently not passed on to the next generation.
It wasn’t until Friday that I started to feel like a human again. Let’s try and put a Happy Hour together. We had read in the paper that the new Saint John location had a “generous” Happy Hour.
The drinks and food were indeed generous for the price. We worked our way through several, with the help of Thom and Kenny. It took Thom a little bit of time to relax after the trauma of election day – much of his infectious disease research at Tulane is funded by government grants.
After Saint John, Thom drove us over to the Milan Lounge for a Jeopardy session, we didn’t keep official score but I think I won handily.
Kenny, Kara, Greg, Tyler and Oliver met us for the Laurel Street music on Saturday afternoon. These neighbors do such a good job of presenting excellent music. This time was the New Orleans Nightcrawlers (one of my favourites) and Peter Harris and the Allstars doing the music of James Black.
These concerts started during the pandemic to provide musicians with a place to play and have continued since. Always excellent.
Here’s a snippet of the Nightcrawlers:
The Allstars were amazing – David Torkanowsky on piano, who I think is the best piano player in a city with many amazing pianists:
There was a new feature as the bands swapped out – a magician and juggler:
That guy was great and the kids of all ages were well entertained. Here’s Greg’s grandson, Oliver, with some balloon art:
On the drive back home, we passed La Cocinita, a restaurant scheduled to open soon with arepas and empanadas (two of my go to foods). “Slow down so I can see when it opens.” “It just opened a few minutes ago – let’s go.” “Sure!”
The food was excellent, particularly for a first night. Diana had the Venezuelan sampler and I had an empanada and arepas – everything very tasty. A great addition to the Prytania strip, that should do very well given the constant stream of customers on Saturday night.
Kenny and Kara invited us to experience the Prospect 6 art festival on Sunday. We picked them up around 11am and set off for parts unknown.
Kenny took an interesting route across town to avoid the Saints game traffic. We found ourselves by St Roch market and decided to stop in for a snack. This is a converted old fish market that has about a dozen different food stalls. We enjoyed some loaded hummus (very good) and a drink.
Next stop was an old Ford factory that housed several interesting exhibits.
Sometimes the descriptions of the art are as entertaining as the exhibit. This one of a moving luggage carousel represented various aspects of human migration:
That was followed by an office chair chandelier:
Upstairs there were some interesting sculpture pieces – basketball goals?
Then there was the long tube of shipping barrels with chairs to talk from. It was really amazing how much the tube amplified speech. Kenny serenaded Kara:
We’re running a caption contest for this one:
We had a pleasant lunch at the Sneaky Pickle and then drove by a couple of outdoor exhibits on the way back home.
The Cowboys are currently losing badly to the Eagles, as could have been predicted.
My book this week was “Sonny Boy”, autobiography of Al Pacino. The writing wasn’t great but the story was excellent. How does a poor kid from the South Bronx get so addicted to the theater and literature, and then become such a massive movie star. Just a great journey.
Here he talks about his early influences:
“It had started with Brando. He was the influence. The force. The originator. What he had created, together with collaborators like Tennessee Williams and Elia Kazan, was more visceral. It was threatening. Brando had become part of a triumvirate of actors, along with Montgomery Clift and James Dean. Clift had the beauty and the soul, the vulnerability. Dean was like a sonnet, compact and economical, able to do so much with the merest gesture or nuance. And if Dean was a sonnet, then Brando was an epic poem. He had the looks. He had the charisma. He had the talent.”
And about his admiration for Hoffman:
“And then Mike Nichols got hold of him, all of him, for The Graduate. The Graduate was contemporary and of the moment, a commentary on the world we were living in, and it fit him perfectly. It came along at the right time, right when we were ready for it. And its success made Dustin a movie star supreme. I was working up in Boston when The Graduate opened, and I said, this is it, man—it’s over. He’s broken the sound barrier. The excitement for me was in seeing an artist doing something so well, something original, that you recognized had never been done before.”
How it all started with Coppola:
“My relationship with the director who would change my life began oddly. Francis Ford Coppola had seen me onstage, when I did Does a Tiger Wear a Necktie? on Broadway, but I didn’t meet him at the time. He was a young up-and-comer who had already directed a couple of films. Out of the blue, he sent me an original script that he had written, a wonderful love story about a young college professor with a wife and children who has a love affair with one of his students. It was mythical and a bit surreal but beautifully written. Francis wanted to meet with me about playing the role of the professor. That meant I had to get on a plane and go to San Francisco, which is something I would have difficulty doing. I didn’t like to fly. I thought, Is there any other way to get there?”
His thoughts on the next generation of film directors:
“I thought Francis had been touched by genius. He had this excitement in him. He was a leader, a doer, and a risk-taker. He brought me to his company, American Zoetrope, in a big building—basically an above-ground bunker where he worked surrounded by a mixed crowd. If my memory is correct, I think I saw George Lucas and Steven Spielberg there. Martin Scorsese and Brian De Palma were also part of the group. I had no idea who they were at the time, but I knew they weren’t actors. They were a band of young radicals who came from the sixties and were about to bring moviemaking into the seventies. They were alive to bigger changes in the film culture.”
A few passages about Pacino’s life changing movie – “The Godfather”:
“First he told me he was going to be directing The Godfather. I thought he might be fantasizing. What was he talking about? How did they give him The Godfather? I had read Mario Puzo’s novel, which had become a big hit; it was a huge deal for anyone to be involved with it. But when you’re a young actor you don’t even put your eyes on those things. Just getting any part in a film is a miracle. Opportunities like those don’t exist for you. It just seemed so outrageous. And then I thought, Hey—maybe this is possible. I had spent time with Francis. I saw that he carried himself with confidence, and that gave me faith in him.”
“Paramount didn’t want me to play Michael Corleone. They wanted Jack Nicholson. They wanted Robert Redford. They wanted Warren Beatty or Ryan O’Neal. In the book, Puzo had Michael calling himself “the sissy of the Corleone family.” He was supposed to be small, dark-haired, handsome in a delicate way, no visible threat to anybody. That didn’t sound like the guys that the studio wanted. But that didn’t mean it had to be me.”
“But here’s the secret: Francis wanted me. He wanted me and I knew that. And there’s nothing like when a director wants you. It’s the best thing an actor could have, really. He also gave me a gift in the form of Diane Keaton. He had a few actresses he was auditioning for the role of Kay, but the fact that he wanted to pair me up with Diane suggested she had an edge in the process. I knew she was doing well in her career and had been appearing on Broadway in shows like Hair, and Play It Again, Sam with Woody Allen. A few days before the screen test, I met Diane in Lincoln Center at a bar, and we just hit it off. She was easy to talk to and funny, and she thought I was funny too. I felt like I had a friend and an ally right away.”
I enjoyed this story of the classic phrase from “Scent of a Woman”:
“When I was preparing for the role, I would sometimes get handed these gifts as an actor, and I knew that I had to make use of them. This was one: A military officer was teaching me how to disassemble and reassemble a .45 while blind, the way a person without sight would do it. Try it sometime. I kept doing it, over and over, and on those rare occasions when I’d do it well, when I’d finally get all those pieces to fit together just right, he’d go, “Hoooooo-ah.” And I looked at him and said, “What’s that?” He said, “Oh, when the troops do something that works, we give it a little hoooooo-ah.” It was like a bit of punctuation. I said to myself, That’s going into the picture. It was like Attica all over again.”
Finally, here’s the online summary:
“To the wider world, Al Pacino exploded onto the scene like a supernova. He landed his first leading role, in The Panic in Needle Park, in 1971, and by 1975, he had starred in four movies—The Godfather and The Godfather Part II, Serpico, and Dog Day Afternoon—that were not just successes but landmarks in the history of film. Those performances became legendary and changed his life forever. Not since Marlon Brando and James Dean in the late 1950s had an actor landed in the culture with such force.
But Pacino was in his midthirties by then, and had already lived several lives. A fixture of avant-garde theater in New York, he had led a bohemian existence, working odd jobs to support his craft. He was raised by a fiercely loving but mentally unwell mother and her parents after his father left them when he was young, but in a real sense he was raised by the streets of the South Bronx, and by the troop of buccaneering young friends he ran with, whose spirits never left him. After a teacher recognized his acting promise and pushed him toward New York’s fabled High School of Performing Arts, the die was cast. In good times and bad, in poverty and in wealth and in poverty again, through pain and joy, acting was his lifeline, its community his tribe.
Sonny Boy is the memoir of a man who has nothing left to fear and nothing left to hide. All the great roles, the essential collaborations, and the important relationships are given their full due, as is the vexed marriage between creativity and commerce at the highest levels. The book’s golden thread, however, is the spirit of love and purpose. Love can fail you, and you can be defeated in your ambitions—the same lights that shine bright can also dim. But Al Pacino was lucky enough to fall deeply in love with a craft before he had the foggiest idea of any of its earthly rewards, and he never fell out of love. That has made all the difference.”
The touch and feel of Brad Mehldau on the piano are second to none. Here are a couple of songs that I enjoyed this week:
There’s a new Tears for Fears album out, with all the usual perfect musicianship and wonderful melodies:
Sneaking in a little bit of classic New Orleans funk:
Midge Ure, of Ultravox fame, picked his five favourite albums this week and it was like a trip back to high school for me:
https://www.spin.com/2024/11/5-albums-i-cant-live-without-midge-ure-of-ultravox-visage/
Some great albums in those top five!
Here’s one of Midge’s big hits live from the Albert Hall:
And finally, after a long music section (that’s what happens when I’m sick with nothing else to do), here’s a really interesting version of the Emperor concerto. Much slower than usual but I find it quite compelling:
Coexist peacefully, with kindness and patience for all!