iJamming.net

I couldn’t compete in the Escarpment Trail Run this year, my injury not having healed in time to get the training in, but I had so much fun last year (yes, fun!) and have gotten to know so many of the local runners round these parts, that I spent this past Sunday at North South Lake, helping register the finish times.

There are no digital clocks at the end of 30km, six mountain, 10,000-foot-total-elevation trail race through the Catskills, and no electronic tags or computerized mats. A stopwatch brought by road from the start line serves as official time-keeper, and a scratched mark in the earth serves as the official finish line. After the race, though there is plenty food and drink for the malnourished, dehydrated runners, there are no ceremonies held nor medals distributed; there’s not even a lousy souvenir t-shirt. Your bragging rights come from running
the race in the first place.

Ben Nephew, the only competitor to be given a seed, ended a seven-year winning streak to finish behind first-time-runner Nathan Harkins, at right.

In first place for the last seven years was a chap by the name of Ben Nephew, whose dominance of the course had come to seem unassailable. But every streak must come to an end, and first out of the woods to the barbeque area at North Lake last Sunday, around 11:45 am, was a fresh face, in every sense of the word. Nathan Harkins (if I’ve remembered his name correctly, I was only keeping times and numbers) is a 28-year old from Pennsylvania who’d never run the course before, indeed had only run one previous trail race, and yet who came within 1 minute, 20-seconds of Nephew’s course record, completing the up-and-down, rocky, rooty, slippery, slimy course in just 2 hours 46 minutes and 34 seconds. Given that Harkins looked like he’d come just in from a brisk jog, we joked about subjecting him to a doping test (or at least hammering his knees to see if he was bionicle!), but realized we had the real deal on our hands when he later confessed to a Marathon PR of 2 hours, 24 minutes, just two minutes outside of an Olympic Trials spot. I’ve heard that marathoners don’t always do well on the Escarpment, it being a different kind of running, but with Harkins’ phenomenal first run, presumably that adage is now officially put to bed. Ben Nephew finished in second place some 13 minutes later, and if he was disappointed to have given up his crown, then like a proper sportsman, he certainly didn’t show it.

The first woman to cross the finish line

The biggest excitement of the day for those of us at the finish line came a few minutes later when someone came dashing out of the woods announcing that a runner had fallen off a rock face; a couple of volunteer medics went sprinting into the woods and walked back out, bemused, a few minutes later, trailing the runner in question, who had dusted himself off to make it across the line in fifth place! His chest looked badly bruised and we all reckoned he must have cracked a couple of ribs – but without health insurance, he was not going to get an X-Ray to confirm as much, especially as there’s nothing you can do with cracked ribs but rest them.

Yes, these runners are mad. The first 50-something to cross the line, in less than three and a half hours, had an iPod strapped to his arm, having listened to an audiobook through the whole course! Two of my own acquaintances finished under four and a half hours, despite having run a 100-miler in Vermont last weekend (and no, that’s not a typo), while the only person I heard of who retired from the race had a valid excuse, having completed an Ironman Triathlon just seven days ago. My buddy Rich, on his first year, for example, came in at five hours, twelve minutes, a full three minutes ahead of his goal and therefore understandably proud of himself. I would call that a sensible time and, indeed, depending on age and ability, finishing times around the five hour mark can be achieved with a minimum of pain and frustration.

Mike from Detroit carrying one of three growlers full of his home-brewed IPA, which he happily shared at the finish line.

My favorite competitor was Mike from Detroit, who drives the several hundred miles most years with a group of other runners, camps out at North-South Lake, and brings his own home brew to share at the finish line. His IPA was, by his own admission, over-hopped, but there was a muddy, unfiltered, refreshing yet earthy wholesomeness about it that seemed totally in keeping with the spirit of the race. I admire anyone who can come off a five-hour run and head straight for their ‘growler,’ so Mike: cheers!

The race celebrations were tempered by news that the co-founder of the Onteora Running Club, Barry Hopkins, one of 22 runners on 1977’s inaugural Escarpment Trail Run, passed away the same day from a brain tumor. I didn’t know Barry, who was also a painter and teacher and was indeed responsible for marking out the Hudson River School Art Trail, named for the school of painting that was prevalent in these parts in the 19th Century. But a couple of months back, aware of his illness, a group of local runners set off to run that trail, all 27 miles of it, starting out at Frederic Church’s famous estate Olana, crossing the Hudson River via the Rip Van Winkle Bridge, running round Thomas Cole’s former house and ongoing resting place in Catskill, and stopping to take in the scenes of many a famous painting on their lengthy way up – and I do mean up – Route 23A past the Kaaterskill Falls to North-South Lake. Again, I could not join them because of my injury, but I had wanted to do so; it seemed like one of the most beautiful long-distance “training runs” I could imagine. As Hopkins sadly came to learn, running long and hard will unfortunately not prevent you from catching certain life-threatening diseases, but as the runners who completed the Escarpment last Sunday will certainly have discovered, it makes you feel fully alive in the meantime.

CHATEAU PESQUIE VIOGNIER, VIN DE PAYS PORTES DE MÉDITERRANÉE, FRANCE 2006, $12-$15

My ongoing quest for good value Viognier has come up short of late, much as it has with its equally fickle red cousin Pinot Noir. Viognier’s trendiness has meant a mass of new plantings and greater availability in the stores, good news for a wine that was virtually extinct twenty years ago. But too many European bottlings are inevitably from young vines as yet incapable of producing the length, texture and finesse that can make it the most sublime of white wines or, in the case of well-intentioned American producers, especially in California, these characteristic are likewise sacrificed for high alcohol. Just as with Pinot Noir, the more I see an inexpensive bottle on the shelf, the less I feel tempted to try it: these are not wines you can make properly on the cheap.

So when I saw a Viognier by Chateau Pesquie at the Greene Grape store in Fort Greene over July 4 weekend for $15, I snapped it right up. Pesquie is known among us Rhône lovers for almost single-handedly raising the Côtes du Ventoux appellation out of its co-operative-dominated malaise and into some serious competition with its neighboring Côtes du Rhône, while Pesquie’s top red blend, La Quintessence, can hold its own with the best syrah-dominated blends.

Chateau de Pesquie Viognier: yes, it’s a trendy grape; yes, that’s a trendy-looking label; and yes, it’s a bargain nonetheless.

Pesquie’s Viognier hails not from the Ventoux but from the neighboring Portes de Méditerranée, a region I’ve not seen before on American shelves. But that’s not a problem, not when the quality is this high: this was certainly the best Vins de Pays Viognier I’ve tasted in the last few years, and I would love to compare it to a bottle from the grape’s northern Rhône homeland of Condrieu, where the price differential (Condrieus now start at a prohibitive $50) would surely compensate for the likely nuances in quality.

What makes Pesquie’s Viognier so special? It’s fresh, for one thing: all but the finest Condrieus are best drunk young, and this 2006 vintage can’t have been in the bottle more than a few months. It was lively, for another: winemaker Paul Chaudiere both crushes the grape and racks the must at low temperatures, and blocks malolactic fermentation, all the better to emphasize the wine’s limited acidity. It was also pure, having been kept in stainless steel and well away from the dreaded wood. And thus the grape’s unique attributes were allowed to shine through: that exotic perfume like no other wine, the taste of peaches and apricots, the implication of roses and violets, the rich texture and the creamy finish. Best of all, it was well-balanced, its pronounced 13.5% alcohol level being right on the nose for a grape that can taste sharp if much lower, and flabby as all hell if much higher. Put it this way: I polished off two glasses late at night (I’d served as designated driver for a dinner some 40 miles away, and wanted compensation!) and I woke up without the hint of a hangover.

When I started in on this grape, a Vin de Pays Viognier would not have cost more than $10. Blame the weak dollar as much as the wine’s trendiness for its $15 price tag, but don’t complain to the French; this is far better than American Viogniers that start at the same price and work their way higher. Besides, you could live in London where, despite being but a short hop across the tax-free Channel from the wine’s homeland, the Cow Pub on Westbourne Park Road will nonetheless charge you £25 a bottle. Still, if it’s good enough for the Cow, it’s good enough for your local independent retailer. Pester him or her to get this wine on the shelf, and pronto. Otherwise, those of us who know a fine wine at a good price when we taste it may just have finished off the vintage. Cheers.

(PS: The American importer is Eric Solomon, one of the handful of names you can instinctively trust.)

On Friday July 13, Pete Townshend debuted his new rock opera The Boy Who Heard Music “in workshop” at Vassar College’s Powerhouse Theater. Posie and I joined iJamming! Pubber Jimmy ‘B’ and his wife Terri at this presumably prestigious presentation, held in Jimmy’s home-town of Poughkeepsie… And I’ve spent the last ten days wondering what to write about it.

Why? For one thing, I don’t know that I’ve ever previously experienced a workshop debut with which to compare this purposefully understated, no-frills performance. For another, I’ve spent my life switching from devotion to frustration and back again as regards Pete Townshend, whom I will always hold in higher regard than anyone else in popular music, and I’ve never absorbed even his greatest failings with anything but respect for his intent. And for a third thing, I’m wary that, given my own modest contribution to the growing library of Who literature, any less-than-positive review may be taken out of context.

Perhaps it’s best, then, to begin my observations with my conclusion, discussed over our long drive home: that while I personally prefer (most of) Pete Townshend’s music to be delivered in recorded song form, without narration or visuals or movie or stage performance, Townshend himself seems to see the studio album as but a middle step that his song cycles take on their path towards fully-blown stage production. In other words, I could take Endless Wire as a Who studio album and leave it there; Townshend prefers that this album, which started as an online novella The Boy Who Heard Music, end as a Broadway or West End musical by the same name. Our viewpoints are not mutually exclusive, but I can’t help but feel that Endless Wire, a satisfying though not truly classic Who album, does not demand, perhaps does not even merit, the full rock opera treatment.

I then need to acknowledge that while I may “view” Endless Wire as a Who project, the stage musical The Boy Who Heard Music is really a continuation of Townshend’s 1993 solo album Psychoderelict, both being partly narrated and performed by Townshend’s alter ego, the ageing rock star Ray High. Pyschoderelict, should you be among the few who remember it, was a commercial and critical disaster, in part because of its radio play format, though also because of its mediocre material, and so one’s reaction to The Boy Who Heard Music stage show depends on whether one feels the need for him to compensate for that folly or let dead dogs lie. I fall into the latter camp, even as I admire how Townshend has successfully, if belatedly, turned the “aborted” Lifehouse project of 1970-71 into an ongoing creative fictionalization of his own real life and the modern world around him.

Pete Townshend, composer of The Boy Who Heard Music. Photography was strictly forbidden at the Powerhouse Theater.

In this casually-clothed “demo” version of a musical (just three performances, in a 250-seater hall), the Ray High character mostly narrated from off to the side and behind the three key performers, Josh, Gabriel and Leila, a love triangle of kids who conveniently represent each of the major three religions, and who connect to Ray High’s life through Leila’s father. Act 1 was clearly constructed, notably optimistic, and made use not just of the Endless Wire album’s song cycle (‘Pick Up The Peace,’ ‘Trilby’s Piano,’ ‘Unholy Trinity’) but also of ‘God Predicts Marty Robbins,’ ‘Fragments’ and ‘In The Ether,’ along with, quite effectively, ‘Real Good Looking Boy’ and (Townshend’s partner) Rachel Fuller’s song ‘I Can Fly.’ We took our intermission feeling highly positive about it all.

Unfortunately, Act 2 served to confuse us all over again, as it tried to cram the rise and fall of a supersonic, cosmically powerful rock band, replete with aforementioned love triangle, adultery, bastard offspring, power struggles between lyricist and composer, amusingly autobiographical references to alcoholism and internet porn addiction and general decadence (“I like having my arse licked: I’m a rock star, that’s what we like!”) and, as far as we could tell, at least one key member’s death and possible resurrection – not to mention the arrival of the potentially life-altering internet in the shape of ‘The Grid’ or ‘Ether Net’ – into barely 45 minutes. The more Ray High narrated, and the more Josh, Leila and Gabriel swapped stilted dialogue to provide clues, the more disjointed it all felt. By my own limited reckoning, the less conversation that takes place in a musical, the better.

And what of the new Townshend compositions? ‘She Said He Said’ (a reversal of an old Beatles song) was a ballad; ‘Uncertain Girl’ and ‘Heart Condition’ were more up-tempo. In this subdued setting, none set the house ablaze, especially as two were mainly sung by Bree Sharp as Leila, whose hesitant delivery and featureless singing undid all the good work carried out alongside her by Matt McGrath as Gabriel, Jon Patrick Walker as Josh and, especially, the highly experienced John Hickok as Ray High. I wish to sympathize: Sharp was the only female on stage and thus expected to carry a significant amount of artistic weight, but be it workshop, musical or live show, there can be no room for passengers, and I doubt very much that she will have made it past the weekend’s initial performances. In fact, we cringed as the musical reached a crescendo with ‘Mirror Door’ and Sharp flung her hair in Janis Joplin-like moves, the better to hide her face and likely insecurity; in the process, the Gabriel character’s apparent nonchalance at the reformation of their band The Glass Household could easily have been interpreted as actor McGrath’s own hesitancy, and it was left to Hickok to come up front and bring some true stagecraft and vocal prowess to rescue the intended highlight.

To be fair, Sharp was the only – albeit crucial – disappointment, and special mention must be made of pianist and musical director Ted Baker, guitarist Kevin Kuhn and drummer David Van Tieghem, each of whom handled Townshend’s compositional complexities with admirable comfort, especially as they were officially introducing three of his new songs to the world. (Second guitarist John Putnam and bassist Steve Beskrone appeared less burdened but performed with equal ease.) That this performance was pulled off after just eight days of rehearsals may have been evident by the young lead characters’ occasional mistakes but not by the musicians’ professionalism.

The Boy Who Heard Music ended, unsurprisingly, with ‘Tea & Theatre,’ though the company returned for an encore of ‘Mirror Door.’ We left the theater furiously discussing it all, but far from exalted. Where it all goes from here is anyone’s guess; I would love to have a crystal ball show The Boy Who Heard Music transported to Broadway, complete with expensive stage set, simplified storyline, a stronger female lead and perhaps even more new material. But I won’t hold my breath. And in the meantime, I’ll rest in peace that if it all ends tomorrow, the Endless Wire album was a perfectly good way to say goodbye.
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Previously at iJamming!
The Who Re-Viewed (Endless Wire album and Who stage show)
Pete Townshend Jamming! magazine interview manuscript from 1985
Index of Keith Moon/Who posts at iJamming!
Tony Fletcher’s Keith Moon biography

“New York City doesn’t get any better than this, does it?” said New York Dolls guitarist Sylvain Sylvain towards the end of his group’s headlining set at the Village Voice Siren Festival Saturday night. It was intended as a purely rhetorical question, for if you’re a certain type of person – the type who loves the sleaze and trash of New York City as celebrated by this most influential of its bands – then you would have been hard put to disagree. The infamous Coney Island, replete with its freak shows, boardwalk, amusement rides and massive beach, on a sunny but not oppressively hot summer Saturday; a free music festival across two stages featuring groups of a caliber people are mostly willing to pay for; a Cyclones baseball game taking place at the new stadium a few hundred yards away; one of the last places in New York City where drinking beer in public is not only permitted but actively endorsed; and the New York Dolls as headlining act at sunset… truly, what’s not to love?

Coney Island at sunset on a perfect summer Saturday.

I hit up the Siren Festival on a whim and a prayer. Having driven my mother down to Newark Airport mid-Saturday afternoon to conclude her two-week visit, I checked my watch, considered heading back 135 miles for my dinner, posited driving to Prospect Park to grab an early seat for the Hal Wilner Doc Pomus Tribute at Celebrate Brooklyn, and then thought, Sod it: if the rumors are true, and Coney Island as we all know and love it is headed for yet another rapacious developer’s wrecking ball this winter, then what better way to see it out than at the Sixth Annual Village Voice-sponsored Siren Festival? The 20-mile drive from Newark, took almost as long as the drive home would have done, and I had to park a mile away from the action, and I just missed Matt and Kim as I did all the earlier performers like We Are Scientists and Dr. Dog and the Noisettes and the Detroit Cobras, and when I got there and saw the hour-long lines at the Nathan’s stand and found myself stuck 100 yards away from the stage where M.I.A. was performing, I remembered how, after my last experience at Siren, I vowed ‘never again.’ Within moments of arriving, I ran into iJamming! Pubber Chris Benton, who enquired about our new home in the Catskills. “Imagine a scene diametrically opposite to this one,” I said, taking in the crowds, the concrete, the rickety amusement rides, the noise, the trash and did I mention the crowds? “It could not be more different if it tried.”

The Coney Island Boardwalk

But if you like crowds – and you shouldn’t live in NYC if you don’t, and I personally enjoy them in the right environment – then Coney Island is truly one of the greatest places in the world, the very personification of New York City’s infamous multi-cultural energy crammed into a couple of square miles of borderline chaos. Brits may want to think of Brighton or Southend or Blackpool at their mid-summer peak, and then multiply every aspect of those places several times over (minus the violence, which seems forbidden at Coney Island as if by collective unstated agreement). Then imagine it being transplanted to New York F***ing City. Then recognize that they’re still not close to imagining it. And then they’ll be close.

Shoot the Freak: Only in New York, folks.

Saturday afternoon and evening I took in all in with the gentle contentment of a relatively passive observer who’s done all the tourist stuff before. There wasn’t time to join the lines for a ride; I didn’t want to risk a beer on a hot day with a long drive ahead of me; I hadn’t bought my bathing clothes; I wasn’t especially hungry. Instead, I watched kids hoola-hooping to improvised percussion on the boardwalk, I listened to Mexican guitarists busk on the beach, I saw more tattoo’d couples canoodling than is legal in most countries, I laughed at the ‘Shoot the Freak’ attraction even though it looked like a classic New York con, I soaked in the joyous screams of the adults on the Cyclone and the parents calling after their wayward kids, I saw enough sunburn to last a lifetime, and I wondered how a city as great as New York could ever condone redeveloping something that so clearly still draws people in by the tens of thousands and sends them home happy.

The Coney Island beach

Oh, and I caught some music. It’s hard to offer an opinion on M.I.A.’s set based on lack of visibility and the poor sound that’s a necessary evil of the long and narrow Stillwell Avenue; clearly, she drew a massive crowd and it was refreshing that it included a black audience that was probably on the ‘Island’ mainly for the beach. Over at the less hectic 10th Street Stage, I then got to watch most of Voxtrot, who have come on leaps and bounds since last year at South By South West, and whose popularity with the indie kids seems to be rising accordingly. Their energy is infectious and I would love to love them more, but as I was still making note of their penultimate song’s wise chorus, “I need to lose my idols to find my voice,” they broke into ‘The Start of Something,’ possibly the wimpiest imitation of The Smiths since Raymonde broke up. However, the indie kids in front of me broke into collective spams of Moz-like butt-shaking upon this finale, which proves something about fooling many people most of the time, especially those still too young to have ever seen the Smiths for themselves.

Voxtrot get all excited at Siren

There’s a nice segue here about Morrissey instigating the New York Dolls reformation, but I’m not convinced the Voxtrot fans would understand it. The Dolls’ audience was primarily punk, about one part original 1970s breed to one-part 1990s East Village “anarchists” to one final part Brooklyn tattoo’d hipsters. It was also manageable: be it the long sunny day, the reputation of crowded Sirens past or the overfamiliarity of the Dolls themselves, but the crowd dwindled to a comfortable size, and I slid along the side of the Avenue to a great vantage point from the curb, where for the next hour and a half, David Johansen, Sylvain Sylvain, and their reconstituted New York Dolls line-up, including able second guitarist Steve Conte, delivered a take-no-prisoners set that started with ‘Lookin’ For A Kiss’ but then relied heavily on last year’s “comeback” album One Day It Will Please Us To Remember Even This. It’s a surprisingly strong record of which songs like ‘Plenty Of Music,’ ‘We’re All In Love’ and, especially, ‘Dance Like A Monkey’ may not resonate as effectively alongside ‘Pills,’ ‘Jet Boy’ or the unforgettable ‘Trash’ from their eponymous 1973 debut, but which hold up better than almost any of the so-called streetwise rock’n'roll punks who frequently imitate but never emulate the Dolls’ once-pioneering sound. And though a verse-and-chorus of ‘You Can’t Put Your Arms Around A Memory’ was dedicated to dead guitarist Johnny Thunders, this gig was not a tribute to junkies; rather, it was a celebration of personal survival, collective rejuvenation and communal camaraderie. Sylvain was right: New York City doesn’t get much better than this. Message to the developers at Thor Equities: Coney Island ain’t broke. Please don’t try and fix it.

A picture may be worth a thousand words, but this 30-second video truly captures the real feeling of seeing the New York Dolls in the heart of Coney Island. Enjoy.

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Also at iJamming!
The New York Dolls at Little Steven’s International Underground Garage Festival
The Mermaid Parade at Coney Island
Siren Festival at Coney Island 2003
Siren Festival at Coney Island 2004
Las Vegas comes to Coney Island?

Seriously, this story reads like a scene straight out of Irvine Welsh’s return-to-Trainspotting novel, Porno,. except that there appear to be two Begbies committing mayhem. And it’s set in Edinburgh, too. Life imitating um, art? Or art imitating, um, life and death?

“The court heard that Mr Bowie had been in Boyle’s flat for a drink and had been making fun of him about his habit of sniffing gas.

Boyle picked up a tonic wine bottle and repeatedly hit Mr Boyle with it before stamping on his head with his boots.”

And that’s before it got ugly.
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Meantime, the moralist in me can’t help but ask: aren’t you meant to get life imprisonment for murder?