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…And at 6pm on Thanksgiving Eve, for finishing the second draft of All Hopped Up and Ready To Go: Music From The Streets of New York 1927-77. We’ll call that one the rewrite.
Still to come (unfortunately): the massive word reduction It won’t be painless. Hopefully it will be quick.

Happy Thanksgiving to all iJamming! readers.

By the time I could make out the numbers on the race clock at the finish line of the Fair Street 5k yesterday, I had twelve seconds to reach it and break my PR. I was giving it my all at the time, a real home straight sprint, and I was certain I would make it. But somebody must have moved the clock back while I was racing towards it, because I just couldn’t get close enough quickly enough. It took me fourteen seconds to reach it instead, and I was one second off of my PR – which I set last year at the same race. Still, allowing for the fact that we were racing in sub-freezing conditions (even though it was lunchtime in Kingston, almost at sea-level), into a strong headwind, and that we had hosted an Indian cooking class at our house the night before, complete with appropriate wines, I don’t think I’ve anything to complain about. Who knows? This may just be as fast as I can run… Then again, our last Grand Prix race is not until December 21, and that too, is a 5k. I still have a chance to set my PR before the year is out.

I guess the finishing clock was not on wheels, after all.

Running is not just healthy, and good for the spirit. We know that. It’s also a bargain. It’s a sport that requires only a pair of running shoes and the most basic of suitable clothing. You don’t need a team, you can do it anytime. But even when you choose to get in the car and pay to compete, it still seems like a bargain – at least round these parts. (I’ll leave my thoughts on the New York Road Runners Club prices in the past.) For my $12 entry fee yesterday, I came home with a souvenir tee-shirt, and a bag full of home-made pumpkin/oatmeal cookies for placing in my age group. (I finished tenth overall; anytime I can finish top ten in this area I’m thrilled.) We were also all fed after the race, hosted for the last seventeen years in a row by the Fair Street Reformed Church: alongside the hot dogs and chicken soups, someone had cooked a lovely vegetarian split-pea soup and there were plenty brownies and cookies and coffee and oranges to resuscitate us from the cold and any sugar deficiencies. Volunteers, runners, parents and others contributed so home-baked prizes – the majority of them seasonal pumpkin pies, but not exclusively so – that there were some left over even after all the official placements. There were a few kids under the age of 12 completed the whole 5k. There was one woman and a couple of men in their seventies also completed the course. And a bunch of local high-schoolers finished in the top ten. What’s not to love?

The prize table: much more satisfying than plastic medals.

In an ideal season, our local ski mountains open the weekend after Thanksgiving. These last few winters have been less than ideal: two years ago, we didn’t get decent conditions until a Valentine’s Day dump – and given that I almost killed myself on Hunter the very next day, you can safely say that was the worst investment in a season ticket I’ve ever made.

Hunter shoots its load.

So you can’t blame Hunter Mountain for being a little excited about the fact that, for the 08-09 season – it’s 50th Anniversary – it will be opening tomorrow, the weekend before Thanksgiving. If you live around these parts, you’ll know why: starting this past Monday, the temperature dropped below freezing and has but barely poked its head back above in the five days since. (It was 17F – that’s minus 7C – when I took Campbell down to the school bus this morning!) Up on Hunter itself, that means absolutely perfect snow-making conditions, and according to the e-mails I’ve been receiving from them on a daily basis and the pictures at the mountain’s web site, they’ve been pounding the guns round the clock as if to make up for previous lost years.

I won’t be there tomorrow. Apart from the fact I need to work at least 6 days a week right now if I have any hope of my book coming out next year, I’ve been training for the Fair Street 5k in Kingston, typically the last Grand Prix race of the running season and the flattest fastest course you can find in the Catskills. The last two years I’ve scored my 5k PR on this run; it would be nice to make that three in a row. (Although this year it’s not a Grand Prix race; the last of those has been held back until the Sunday before Christmas, as if taunting anyone for thinking of hanging up their running boots for winter.) I’ll tell you what, though, I’m not used to running in a snow storm in mid-November, as I did on Monday, or in serious below-freezing windchills, as per Wednesday, when head-to-toe thermals still failed to fully warm me up; despite making it a speed work-out, I failed to break a sweat, it was so cold, and didn’t even take the usual post-run shower. It’ll be interesting to see what Sunday brings. And Goddmannit, if I can just get the book edited down, I have a so-cheap-you-won’t-believe-it midweek season pass I bought back in the spring that will allow me to get out on Hunter’s snow, man-made or otherwise, during the so-called working week for nothing more than the price of gas.

Snow porn! (Just click here.)

As it turns out, a family friend has just published a book about snow. You may know about it because, when he’s not gallivanting around the world trying to get himself killed in the Arctic or the Alps, Charlie English – a Beverley boy like myself – keeps a desk job at the Guardian, and that newspaper published a 5,000 word excerpt last weekend. (You don’t think they’d do it for just any old writer, do you?) The premise – it’s entitled The Snow Tourist: One Man’s Bracing Quest For The World’s Purest, Deepest Snowfall – seems intriguing enough: boy’s father is avid skier, boy’s father commits suicide, boy becomes avid skier, boy becomes man becomes husband, gets into mid-life crisis, decides to go discover world’s most treacherous snow to test his own mortality and desire for freedom. Can’t say I’d mind writing a book like that myself – especially if the Guardian would promise to publish such a large excerpt.

I’m trying to avoid thinking about skiing, and being sent the link to English’s excerpt hardly helped. But yesterday it got worse. The mail brought me the new issue of Skiing magazine, to which I took a subscription last year to help finance my older, snowboarding son’s field trip to Boston (the one where he discovered Family Guy on the hotel’s cable TV). Let me be blunt about this: Skiing magazine, for a middle-aged person like myself who dreams it more than he lives it, is hard-core pornography. There’s no question. I mean, the magazine is full of pictures of people doing things most of us can barely contemplate – and in front of the cameras, no less! – and the stories (because some of us used to buy Playboy for the features, right?) are all about orgiastic adventures and use words that I’m scared to ask my son the meaning of. Schralp, anyone?

Ski Porn!

The ski season this year could be a long one. The deadline for the book is not. I’ll be at my desk when the mountain open tomorrow – though if I’m a long time in the bathroom, it may just be that I’ve got that copy of Skiing magazine in front of me and I’m fantasizing.

Do any British readers remember the ads the Economist magazine used to place in the tube stations, across from the platforms, about how their writers were trained to live up to the magazine’s title? No extraneous phrases, no unnecessary tangents? Never use five words when one would do? Well, that’s how I feel right now, trying to cut at least a novella’s worth of material out of my book All Hopped Up And Ready To Go: Fifty Years of Music from the Streets of New York, so that it meets the word count my editor keeps reminding me I was contracted for. There’s a phobia here amongst publishers about pushing music books beyond 400 pages, as if readers step into book stores, turn directly to the last page, and if it has a number higher than 399, they put it back on the shelf and pick up something that much lighter. Never mind that a new book about Civil Rights in the North runs to 688 pages, or that the latest biography on Winston Churchill comes in at 845 pages, music fans have short attention spans.

I’m sorry, what was I saying? What do I know? I’ve written books of 35,000 words; I’ve written one that I believe is about 275,000 words, though I lost track when I ran out of split infinitives on which to count. Apparently, my Keith Moon book has finally been translated into German, and the book is now somehow 100 pages longer than it was in English. Presumably, they don’t read the Economist over there. How long is a piece of string? I don’t know unless you cut it to length. Snip, cut, shave. Snip, cut, shave. Do I need to say “invariably” or is it assumed? Do you need to know that “(Vacarro responded by invading Curtis’ apartment and slashing Jackie’s dresses)” or should I just leave it out? Is it relevant that Lenny Kaye and Patti Smith used to dance to old 45s at Village Oldies on Bleecker Street, where Kaye worked, in the early hours of a Sunday morning, or will it suffice if I tell you they were “became friends?” And are you better off learning that Wayne County’s play World – Birth of a Nation “included a scene in which John Wayne gave birth to a baby through his anus” or would your life be better enriched by not reading those words?

….And if I tell you that all these are cuts I just made from the first 1300 words of a 12,000 word chapter that needs to come in at 10,000 words or less, do I get your sympathy? Or do I just accept that I overwrite by habit and this is the price I must pay? Hopefully, you will all be better off when the book comes in at the right length and every sentence is honed and chiseled to Economist length. Now, where’s that red pen…

What with editing down my book, and the climax of the long-distance running season, I have not had much time to much wine of late… But what I have decided to open at home has been damn good – a solid reinforcement of the reasons for storing wine.

For example, you wouldn’t normally think of cellaring a wine from Lirac, an appelation wine on the west of the Rhône river to be generally thought of as just a touch above Côtes du Rhône Villages in quality and price. But then Domaine de La Mordoree is no normal winery (they make one of the best Châteauneuf du Papes), their Cuvee des Reine des Bois is their top Lirac, and especially, 1998 was no normal year but a blockbuster in terms of ripe and fruit and rich tannin. That said, I’ve had a couple of Gigondas from 1998 fail to go the distance, so I was somewhat nervous about opening this bottle a full decade after vintage. Made up of the same grapes as most southern Rhône blends, (i.e. mainly grenache and syrah and then assorted other suspects), it was an absolute beauty, refined to the point of wine royalty. I think it cost me about $18 when I bought it – the best part of a decade ago. When i was in Nimes four years ago, I found three bottles of the Mordoree Châteauneuf du Pape Cuvee des Reine des Bois 2001 for much the same price – and you don’t want to even KNOW what that goes for in the States. If those wines are even as good as the Lirac in a few years I’ll be in for a treat. And so will anybody who’s invited to share the occasion.

And you wouldn’t normally open a Châteauneuf du Pape from Chateau Beaucastel until it had a good fifteen years on it: Beaucastel makes perhaps the longest-lived Châteauneuf du Pape of all. But then 1997 was not a great vintage, and the best wines are to be drunk young. I felt like a decade or so might be the right time to pop the cork on this one, and I was not one. Beaucastel, which has been practicing all-organic methods since decades before it was fashionable, differ from the typical southern Rhône blend, instilling their Châteauneuf du Papes with a solid 30% or so Mourvèdre; they also one of only three producers in the village to use all 13 permissible grapes. The result can be frighteningly rich and funky in its youth, but at a good age – and this was at a perfect age – the result is something sweet and succulent, juicy and tender, milky and silky, an enlightenment of the senses. Beaucastel has gone up enormously in price over the last decade, especially for Americans at the far end of trends and falling dollars, but I try and buy at least one bottle from each vintage. And this is why.

The back of the Masi Campofiorin 1997 says that it can be aged 10-15 years, but I was still not sure about doing so. I’ve yet to read a review of a bottle more than five years old. But again, this proved why some of us take that risk. A blend of indigenous Veronese grapes – primarily Corvina – the Campofiorin is the giant Masi company’s trademarked attempt to make a wine somewhere between youthful, fruity Valpolicella and the grand old high-alcohol Amarones from the same grapes and region. They find that balance by refermenting the grapes from Valpolicella Superiore on the pressed grape skins of the Amarone. (The process, called Ripasso, has also been trademarked by Masi.) My God, but this was beautiful. It was still surprisingly dark and full of life; though the tannins had certainly softened to the point of total integration, it was alive with dark cherries, a cornucopia of herbs and a chocolate-like finish. It was also the kind of wine that you don’t rush because that would be a waste. I don’t know Italian wines as well as I know some other nationalities, but when I get them right, I rate them every bit as highly as anything else out there. This wine, too, was only about $15 on release; it’s hard to put a price on the taste.