A break from the “Conversation Songs” series, in honor of actor Ray Liotta, who died today.
Bob Lanier
I remember when we moved to Allegany, NY in 1981, I started hearing the name “Bob Lanier” a lot. He had been, as far as I could tell, a very good basketball player who had attended St. Bonaventure University, where my father had just started teaching. Even though he’d been gone for ten years by the time we got there, his star was sufficiently bright to still be lighting up local college basketball talk. Lanier led SBU to its only appearance in the NCAA Final Four, and many are convinced to this day that SBU had a very real shot at winning it all that year, until Lanier was injured in the tournament.
[Aside: One of the common clichés of sports opinion is that you can’t, or shouldn’t, blame injuries for your defeats. This is such obvious nonsense that I can’t believe it’s still accepted as true by sports fans and commentators the world over.]
Anyway, Lanier was a huge name in the Southern Tier, and in Western New York in general. I didn’t realize just how big a name he was beyond my local home region, though, until I went to college in 1989. I was in Iowa, a thousand miles (maybe minus a hundred) from home, in a place where if I told people I was constantly explaining that my residence in New York State did not translate to a proximity to New York City. But one night I was at a season-opening dinner for the college orchestra (which also used local musicians from town), and I ended up sitting near an older guy, one of the trombone players, maybe. He asked me where I was from, and I told him, “Near Buffalo, NY.” He asked why I was in small-town Iowa, and I told him it had to do with my father being a professor at St. Bonaventure.
The guy’s face lit up and he said, “Ahhh! Bob Lanier!”
By this time, Lanier’s college days were twenty years in the past and his pro career five, but he was still well-known, that long afterward. Now, sure, Iowa is a state where college basketball is a part of local religion and thus the locals will tend to know their sport a lot better than in other places, but still, that’s impressive.
I’ve read a lot about Lanier’s outreach work after his retirement from the game, and he seems to have been a genuinely good man as well as a gifted athlete. He’s one of Western New York’s better exports out into the world, and I’m sorry to see him go.
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Roger
Sheila O’Malley re-shared her post on the anniversary of Roger Ebert’s passing today, and I thought, why not do the same? Here’s what I posted the day he died. I still miss his writing. There’s something about those Chicago newspaper men….
I was trying to figure out something to write on the passing today of Roger Ebert, but nothing was leaping to mind, so I figured I’d just repost my original thoughts, from January 2012, on his book, Life Itself. I have loved and admired Ebert since I was nine, and his output of thoughtful writing even in the face of debilitating disease the last few years has been truly astonishing. It’s something of the ultimate motivator: When I think “I don’t really wanna write today”, I then thing, “Roger Ebert’s writing today, and that guy’s got some hardcore difficulties. So get in the chair and write.”
When I saw the news today — my first report came via Sheila O’Malley on Facebook, and she is frankly the exact person I would have wanted to hear this from — I commented thusly:
Amazing how something you totally expect and don’t find a surprise can still hit you between the eyes and make the world a little less shiny
Farewell, Mr. Ebert. If there is some realm beyond this one…well, whatever. At least on this side we’ll have your years and years and years of writings. I’ve come to see you as being to film what Carl Sagan was to science, and I mourn and salute you in the same manner. Congratulations on a life well-lived!
I was nine years old, and I wandered into the living room to find my mother watching some show on PBS. It was a show about movies – there would be a clip of a new movie that was out, and these two guys would then talk a bit about whether the movie was any good or not. One of these guys was a thin, lanky guy. The other was a squat, fat guy. The thin guy was named Gene. The fat guy was named Roger.
“What’s this?” I asked.
“It’s called Sneak Previews,” my mother answered. “Those two men are film critics. They tell us if movies are good or not.”
“Oh.”
And I watched the thing. I didn’t know anything about movies, but these two guys were interesting to watch. Another year or two later, their show was off PBS, which struck me as a bummer…but they turned up again, in a syndicated show that was on, like many syndicated shows, at whatever time some station or other felt like putting it on. No matter, it was fun seeing these two guys, Gene and Roger – who worked for newspapers in Chicago – talk about movies.
So I watched Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert for years, off and on, right up until Siskel’s deeply saddening death in 1998. Then I watched Ebert and Richard Roeper (a good enough fellow, but no substitute for Siskel) for a few more years, until we no longer had cable and thus the show was beyond my grasp. And then, a few years after that, Ebert himself started to have health issues, which eventually resulted in unsuccessful surgeries that have famously left him unable to speak or eat (he takes meals through a G-tube, which is something I understand all too well, thanks to Little Quinn).
Siskel and Ebert were, in my view, one of the great duos in the history of anything. Those two had such astonishing chemistry together, that it was a joy to watch them agree positively on a movie, an even bigger joy to see them agree negatively on a movie (seriously, watching the two of them tag-team on a bad movie was always great), and the biggest joy of all when they disagreed. Then you could see some fireworks. I remember Ebert being astonished at Siskel’s thumbs-down review of Scorsese’s Casino; “Thumbs down?!” Ebert yelped. And there was another time – I can’t remember the movie – where Ebert liked it and Siskel did not, and Ebert said something like “I don’t think you wanted to like this movie”, a suggestion that seemed to physically hurt the usually more acerbic Siskel. “I love to like pictures!” he protested.
One time on Late Night with David Letterman, there was a segment that had Mujibur and Sirajul, the two Indian owners of a local store, reporting to Dave from somewhere in the country. And Dave says, “If you two are out there, who’s watching the store? Can we send a cameraman to see who’s in charge at the store?” So a cameraman goes into the store, to reveal a very stern-looking Siskel and Ebert. OK, I guess you had to be there.
Anyway, Ebert has been writing about the movies for decades now, and he is, by nearly any measure, the critic whose work I find the most illuminating and the most evocative. I’ve been reading him nearly almost as long as I’ve been watching him on teevee, and for a number of years, his annual review collections were required book purchasing of mine. Now he has produced a memoir, which he has titled Life Itself.
Ebert’s health struggles in recent years are well-known, and it’s been truly fascinating to watch him take to blogging in the wake of the loss of his physical voice, a medium he had initially viewed with suspicion but which allowed his authorial voice to finally blossom to its greatest strength. Ebert has always been a fine writer, but oddly, his disability-due-to-cancer has, for many, made him even better. Maybe it’s similar to that old saw about how when you lose one sense, the others somehow make substantial gains in acuity.
Reading his blog, I’ve mostly been struck by Ebert’s ongoing zest for life, even when there were occasional posts that took an especially elegiac tone that made me wonder if he was preparing for his own departure from this world. Ebert is still with us, though, and now we have Life Itself.
The book is more a series of vignettes than a straight telling of Ebert’s life. The vignettes are more or less in chronological order, but Ebert seems to be more exploring various themes in his life than the chronology of events. The book is something of a memory album that gives an impression of a life, which seems to me a good way to structure a biography. Sometimes when I read biographies, I get a sense of “plot” that couldn’t possibly be there. Ebert is well aware that life is plotless, and that many of the things that shape the paths of our lives for good or ill are often accidental, a function of our coming into the circle of this person instead of that person, or even something so prosaic as taking this flight instead of that one.
It’s telling that the book gives more of a sense of his development as a writer than as a critic; I suspect that Ebert believes that he would have been a writer no matter what, and it was just an accident of various circumstances that led to him writing about movies for the last forty years. There’s no “Through all my life the cinema has grounded my being” or anything like that; Ebert grew up as a talented kid who liked going to movies with his buddies on Saturdays. I love when he recounts his first reviews of avant garde films; finding himself in confusion as to what the films were about, he took the approach of simply recounting his experience in watching the film. This is an approach that has gone on to inform his entire approach to movie reviewing and film criticism.
Sometimes, in the course of his blogging over the last few years, a tone has crept into Ebert’s writing – that he seems to deny whenever it is pointed out, but it is there – that he is, in long form, saying goodbye to his life. I deeply hope that this is not the case. Ebert is, for me, to film as Carl Sagan is to science, and he’ll be missed by me in equal measure when he is gone.
Here are some excerpts from Life Itself.
On Mike Royko:
At about six p.m. On New Year’s Day of 1967, only two lights on the fourth floor were burning – mine and Mike Royko’s. It was too early for the graveyard shift to come in. Royko walked over to the Sun-Times to see who else was working. A historic snowstorm was beginning. He asked me how I was getting home. I said I’d take the train. He said he had his old man’s Checker car and would drop me at the L station. He had to make a stop at a twenty-four hour drug store right where the L crossed North Avenue.
Royko at thirty-five was already the city’s most famous newspaperman, known for compelx emoitons evoked with unadorned prose in short paragraphs. Growing up as the son of a saloon keeper, he knew how the city worked from the precinct level up, and had first attracted attention while covering city hall. He was ten years older than me and had started at the old City News Bureau, the copperative supported by all the dailies that provided front-line coverage of the police and fire departments. Underpaid and overworked kids worked under the hand of its editor, Arnold Dornfeld, who sat beneath a sign reading: If your mother says she loves you, check it out. When I met him he’d been writing his Daily News column for two years. It was his writing about Mayor Richard J. Daley that took the city hall word clout and made it national. He chainsmoked Pall Malls and spoke in a gravelly poker player’s voice. He drank too much, which to me was an accomplishment.
That snowy night the all-night drugstore was crowded. “Come on, kid,” he said. “Let’s have a drink at the eye-opener place.” He told me what an eye-opener was. “This place opens early. The working guys around here, they stop in for a quick shot on their way to the L.” It was a bar under the tracks so tiny that the bartender could serve everyone without leaving his stool. “Two blackberry brandies and short beers,” he said. He told me, “Blackberry brandy is good for hangovers. You never get charged for a beer chaser.” I sipped the brandy, and a warm glow filled my stomach. It may have been the first straight shot of anything I’d ever tasted. I’d been in Chicago four months and I was sitting under the L tracks with Mike Royko in the eye-opener place. I was a newspaperman. A blackhawks game was playing on WGN radio. The team scored, and again, and again. This at last was life.
“Jeez, they’re scoring like crazy!” I said, after the third goal in less than a minute.
“Where you from, kid?”
“Urbana,” I said.
“Ever seen a hockey game?”
“No.”
“That’s what I thought, you asshole. Those are the game highlights.”
On books:
Chaz [Ebert’s wife] and I have lived for twenty years in a commodious Chicago town house. This house is not empty. Chaz and I have added, I dunno, maybe three or four thousand books, untold numbers of movies and albums, lots of art, rows of photographs, rooms full of comfortable furniture, a Buddha from Thailand, exercise equipment, carved elephants from India, African chairs and statues, and who knows what else. Of course I cannot do without a single one of these possessions, including more or less every book I have owned since I was seven, starting with Huckleberry Finn. I still have all the Penrod books, and every time I look at them, I’m reminded of Tarkington’s inventory of Penrod’s pants pockets. After reading it a third time, as a boy, I jammed my pockets with a pocketknife, a Yo-Yo, marbles, a compass, a stapler, an oddly-shaped rock, a hardball, a ball of rubber bands, and three jawbreakers. These, in an ostensible search for a nickel, I emptied out on the counter of Henry Rusk’s grocery, so that Harry Rusk could see that I was a Real Boy.
My books are a subject of much discussion. They pour from shelves onto tables, chairs, and the floor, and Chaz observes that I haven’t read many of them and I never will. You just never know. One day I may nee to read Finnegans Wake, the Icelandic sagas, Churchill’s history of the Second World War, the complete Tintin in French, forty-seven novels by Simenon, and By Love Possessed. That 1957 bestseller by James Gould Cozzens was eviscerated in a famous essay by Dwight Macdonald, who read through that year’s list of fiction bestsellers and surface with a scowl. I remember reading the novel late into the night when I was fourteen, stirring restlessly with the desire to be possessed by love.
I cannot throw out these books. Some are enchanted because I have personally turned all their pages and read every word. They’re shrines to my past hours. Perhaps half were new when they came to my life, but most were used, and I remember where I found every one. The set of Kipling at the Book Nook on Green Street in Champaign. The scandalous The English Governess in a shady bookstore on the Left Bank in 1965 (two dollars, today ninety-one). The Shaw plays from Cranford’s on Long Street in Cape Twon, where Irving Freeman claimed he had half a million books. Like an alcoholic trying to walk past a bar, you should see me trying to walk past a used bookstore. Other books I can’t throw away because, well, they’re books, and you can’t throw away a book. Not even a cookbook from which we have prepared only a single recipe, for it is a meal preserved, in printed form. The very sight of Quick and Easy Chinese Cooking by Kenneth H.C. Lo quickens my pulse. Its pages are stained by broth, sherry, soy sauce, and chicken fat, and so thoroughly did I master it that I once sought out Ken Lo’s Memories of China on Ebury Street in London and laid eyes on the great man himself, dining alone in a little room near the entrance. A book like that, you’re not gonna throw away.
On his wife:
I sense from the first that Chaz was the woman I would marry, and I know after twenty years that my feelings were true. She had been with me in sickness and in health, certainly far more sickness than we could have anticipated. I will be with her, strengthened by her example. She continues to make my life possible, and her presence fills me with love and a deep security. That’s what a marriage is for. Now I know.
On Siskel:
One of the things I miss about Gene Siskel is that he’s not around to make jokes about my current condition. He would instinctively know that at this point I wouldn’t be sensitive, having accepted and grown comfortable with my maimed appearance. He wouldn’t have started joking too soon. His jokes would have the saving grace of being funny. Here’s one I’m pretty sure he would have come up with: “Well, there’s one good thing about Roger’s surgery. At least he no longer needs a bookmark to find his chin.”
On movies:
I have seen untold numbers of movies and forgotten most of them, I hope, but I remember those worth remembering, and they are all on the same shelf in my mind. There is no such thing as an old film. There is a sense in which old movies are cut free from time. I look at silent movies sometimes and do not feel I am looking at old films; I feel I am looking at a Now that has been captured. Time in a bottle. When I first looked at silent films, the performers seemed quaint and dated. Now they seem more contemporary. The main thing wrong with a movie that is ten years old is that it isn’t thirty years old. After the hairstyles and the costumes stop being dated and start being history, we can tell if the movie itself is timeless.
What kinds of movies do I like the best? If I had to make a generalization, I would say that many of my favorite movies are about Good People. It doesn’t matter if the ending is happy or sad. It doesn’t matter if the characters win or lose. The only true ending is death. Any other movie ending is arbitrary. If a movie ends with a kiss, we’re supposed to be happy. But then if a piano falls on the kissing couple, or a taxi mows them down, we’re supposed to be sad. What difference does it make? The best movies aren’t about what happens to the characters. They’re about the example that they set.
Casablanca is about people who do the right thing. The Third Man is about two people who do the right thing and can never speak to each other as a result. The secret of The Silence of the Lambs is buried so deeply that you may have to give this some thought, but its secret is that Hannibal Lecter is a Good Person. He is the helpless victim of his unspeakable depravities, yes, but to the limited degree that he can act independently of them, he tries to do the right thing.
…
What I miss, though, is the wonder. People my age can remember walking into a movie palace where the ceiling was far overhead, and balconies and mezzanines reached away into the shadows. We remember the sound of a thousand people laughing all at once. And screens the size of billboards, so every seat in the house was a good seat. “I lost it at the movies,” Pauline Kael said, and we all knew just what she meant.
When you go to the movies every day, it sometimes seems as if the movies are more mediocre than ever, more craven and cowardly, more skilfully manufactured to pander to the lowest tastes instead of educating them. Then you see something absolutely miraculous, and on your way out you look distracted, as if you had just experienced some kind of a vision.
May Ebert’s spot in the balcony remain reserved for years to come.
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“I’d rather have fewer spectacular theaters than tons of cheap little multiplexes.” –Douglas Trumbull
Filmmaker and special effects guru Douglas Trumbull died earlier this month. His body of work is not large, but its influence is gigantic. For filmgoers of a certain age and a certain disposition to genre–say, 50ish and inclined to fantasy and science fiction–Trumbull’s work is likely as big an influence on how such stories are visualized as George Lucas’s Industrial Light and Magic.
Trumbull was instrumental in the look and feel of such films as Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Blade Runner, and, probably the granddaddy of them all in terms of lasting influence, 2001: A Space Odyssey. Trumbull also dabbled in directing, with a number of short films and two features, Silent Running (a rather dour environmental allegory that actually makes you care about some robots) and Brainstorm, the infamous sci-fi thriller about a scientist who invents a way to plug memories and images directly into the brain. Brainstorm isn’t a bad film, nor is it a great one, but it certainly deserves better than to be chiefly remembered as the film Natalie Wood was almost done making when she drowned.
Trumbull’s experience on Brainstorm led to him never directing a feature film again, and it’s not hard to see why, given the tragic death of Wood and the subsequent attempts by MGM to kill the production entirely. I can’t assess Trumbull’s directorial skill on the basis of just two movies, but I do know that he was a huge part of the visualization of science fiction at the time I was being shaped most strongly by it. Trumbull’s work tended to be on the less action-oriented side of the genre; he wasn’t much for the “Explodey Spaceshippy Goodness” side of things, but rather he was an excellent visionary at creating futures that were plausible and beautiful. Even in the case of Blade Runner, a noir thriller that takes place in a rain-soaked Los Angeles of seemingly unending darkness, Trumbull infused the bleak cityscape with a type of beauty.
Trumbull’s work on Close Encounters of the Third Kind is particularly legendary, in the way he uses bright bursts of colored light throughout to suggest the UFOs until the film’s climax, when he gives us the Mothership in all its glory:
You can watch this scene here. Remember that none of the actors had any idea what they were reacting to, so it was up to Trumbull to make their reactions worth it. Obviously, he nailed it.
And then there is his now-legendary work on Star Trek: The Motion Picture, a film whose reception was mixed at the time (and remains so to this day), a film whose transition from planned teevee series to feature film was no doubt pushed along by the wild success of Star Wars two years before. But ST:TMP was a different kind of movie than Star Wars, a film in which there’s no “pew pew” action, and in which the main developments are all conceptual. Trumbull’s effects work had to carry a disproportionate amount of the film’s emotional heft, and for me, they rose to the occasion. One sequence that occasionally gets cited as an example of the film’s visual excess is the long fly-by of the Enterprise, but I have never been one of that sequence’s detractors. Here’s a video where Trumbull discusses his approach to that scene, as well as the lighting of the Enterprise itself:
That is fascinating stuff: Trumbull discusses the technical aspects of the shot, but also the thinking that went into it, the nature of the sequence in terms of the film’s storytelling, and he even singles out Jerry Goldsmith’s amazing contribution.
Douglas Trumbull’s innovations and achievements may seem a bit quaint in this day of computers being able to shape just about any scene a human can imagine, but they were innovations. Before 2001: A Space Odyssey, the idea of a film showing a starfield that actually looks like what you see when you go outside on a cloudless night and look up, and then being able to pan across that starfield, was unheard of. Every Star Wars movie’s opening pan across the stars, after the opening crawl, is owed to Douglas Trumbull.
When I started looking up Trumbull’s career information for this post, I remembered his body of work being larger than it was. That shows just how big the man’s influence was. You really can’t tell the story of science fiction and fantasy filmmaking of the last sixty years without giving Douglas Trumbull a big credit for how things look and feel. His reach will endure. I know this because it already does.
Finally, I note that films to which Trumbull was attached, either as director or visual effects supervisor, always seemed to boast great filmscores. I leave with two examples.
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For Mr. Teachout
I’ll take an earnest person over a hip person every day, because hip is short-term. Earnest is long-term.
–Randy Pausch, “The Last Lecture”
Terry Teachout died the other day, at the age of 65.
Mr. Teachout was a critic, playwright, and commentator on the arts, primarily for the Wall Street Journal, but he was also a blogger from the early heyday of the format until his last entry, eight days ago. His blog was a daily read of mine for a long time, but as blogging went from Hot New Thing to Quaint Old Pastime in less than ten years, I regret to say that I lost touch with his work. A few years ago I suddenly remembered him not randomly, but when someone re-tweeted something of his on Twitter. I immediately followed him there and started reading his blog again, and my life was better for it.
Better writers than me have talked about Terry Teachout’s skill and perceptive criticism, and his enthusiasm for the theater and his other interests. Teachout was not the kind of critic to constantly hurl verbal knives and barbs at objects of his disdain. No, he was the kind of person to talk with endless and infectious enthusiasm about the things that moved him, the things that he loved. This is not to say that he loved everything, because he most certainly did not; but Terry Teachout was the kind of critic who even after his many years of doing the job, still seemed to approach each and every new thing he encountered as if it would be the next thing to change his life.
Teachout was also known for keeping a wide view of the theater world. He could have simply focused on the New York theater scene and left it at that; after all, the New York theater scene has riches aplenty for an entire life. Instead, Mr. Teachout would regularly travel and report on what he found in regional theater companies, in other cities, in places beyond the limits of Broadway and its environs. Even though he often wrote about things that I know very little about (if anything at all), his erudition and infectious curiosity and enthusiasm always shone through. His attitude toward the arts were a model for me.
Terry Teachout was devoted, openly so, to his wife, even through terrible health struggles that had her on the lung-transplant list for years. He frequently wrote about how they had to be prepared for them getting “the call” at any moment, at which time they would have to drop everything and rush to the hospital so Mrs. Teachout could get the transplant. This eventually did happen…but there was no happy ending, sadly; Mrs. Teachout died, and still, Terry Teachout soldiered on, taking in art and music and sharing the things that he found to try to keep some form of light in his life. It was the kind of poignant courage that often boggles the mind, even for those of us who have endured very awful things.
But then, just in the last year or so, Terry Teachout found love again. His life was again blossoming, and he wrote with new joy about the partnership he’d just found that was bringing light and love to him again. It really seemed like he was about to find some kind of happiness…
…but instead he died suddenly the other day. Word of his passing hit social media like a bomb, and the outpouring of love for him was astonishing. I am by no means alone in my admiration for Terry Teachout. Here is just one remembrance, from Alex Ross:
Terry had a great deal to do with the fact that I started this blog back in 2005. I saw him seldom in person, but he was a constant presence in my life nonetheless, through his writing and through social media. He was, as Ethan Iverson comments, an uncommonly generous soul who seemed incapable of holding a grudge. His inexhaustible attention to theater across the country was a model for me as a critic.
I like Mr. Ross’s initial point there: I forget it now, but Terry Teachout’s early entry into the blogging world did enormous good in demonstrating in an odd political time that blogs didn’t have to be about politics only. In the early 2000s, blogging was almost exclusively the purview of people arguing the merits of war in Iraq. Terry Teachout did something different, and he enriched the online world immensely in doing so. (Oh, and read the Ethan Iverson piece Mr. Ross links.)
I close, as Mr. Teachout liked to close most nights on Twitter, with a musical offering. I honestly have little idea how he felt about Ralph Vaughan Williams, although this article offers a hint. I’m offering this, anyway, as a reminder of the need to seek out quiet beauty in a world of noise. I think he’d approve. I hope he would, anyway.
Here is The Lark Ascending by Ralph Vaughan Williams; Sir Neville Marriner conducts the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, with Iona Brown as violin soloist.
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Tony and Patsy
Two giants of my early eating and drinking life, Tony Marra and Patsy Collins, died in 2021.
Patsy ran a bar. Tony ran a restaurant.
Patsy’s bar was called The Burton Hotel, or The Burton for short. It’s located on a street corner in Allegany, NY, and it was one of my parents’ favorite watering holes for much of the time they lived down there. I spent quite a lot of time sitting in The Burton with my parents as they quaffed beers and I quaffed grapefruit soda right along with them (at least until I turned 21).
I suppose The Burton was what you would call a “dive bar”, though I confess that I used to think describing a bar as a “dive” meant something disparaging: it indicated a place that was kind of dingy and crappy, dirty and dark and not a very nice place to be.
Not so, obviously. A dive bar is an unpretentious bar, and might be quite a few years–or decades–old. A dive bar is the place frequented by locals, and often you can tell where a dive bar is less by the bar’s sign than by the neon (or, nowadays, LED) beer signs decorating the outside. The clientele of a dive bar tends to be the locals; it’s the kind of place where, well–where everybody knows your name, if you go there with any frequency. It’s not the kind of place where you’ll get the best drinks ever, or where you’ll find cutting-edge mixology where bartenders experiment with smoke and a dozen kinds of bitters and CO2 canisters–but it is the kind of place where the beer is always cold, where there are packages of Beer Nuts for sale, where the game (or a game) is always on teevee.
The Burton is apparently well-known for its burgers–very well-known, as in, “often cited on Best Burger lists” well-known–though I never had one when we were going there. Apparently back then their kitchen was not open very often. Nights at The Burton would often go longer than expected, and there were more than a few educational conversations directed at me on the way home after such nights. It’s a dark underbelly of such places that…well, sometimes bar talk in places that are fairly rural, completely white, and generally conservative can veer into unpleasant areas. I’ll just leave it at that.
But things changed as St Bonaventure University, the local college, stared developing a reputation as a party school. The Burton was–and maybe still is!–the bar closest to campus, and as such at some point it started filling up with college students. Patsy Collins had been running a successful bar up until then, but after that he was running a local institution. The Burton was, first and foremost, a beautiful bar. I mean, look at this bar!
It was hard to find photos of the entire bar, but these give an idea. It’s changed a bit since I was going there with my parents, but…not really a whole lot. I don’t recall any signage listing available beers at the time, when the bar was frequented by locals who knew what they wanted to drink.
And here’s a better look at the Art Deco lights that flank the main body of the bar:
Like all such lights, they’re more effective at night, in the dimmer light of the bar itself, but how bad can a bar be if it has Art Deco tasteful nudes as part of its decor? Not bad at all, that’s how.
The Burton is still chugging along, keeping synapses of the Southern Tier well-lubricated. Patsy Collins’s legacy lives on.
Patsy Collins himself was a kind man who laughed a lot–I remember well his rich baritone laugh, there was always lots of laughter in that bar!–and who by the time we knew him was tending bar less; his son Chuck had taken over the majority of those duties. But Patsy was there a lot, holding forth on various items of interest from one of the stools in his low voice. He did not have a long commute: he lived on the opposite side of the same street, a few doors down. His house was quite lovely, and his wife did a great job of converting it to a virtual “gingerbread house” each Christmas. (If I can find a picture of that online, I’ll post it.)
When Patsy Collins retired, he gave over the Burton to son Chuck and his daughter Crisanne. Just last year (or maybe the year before) Chuck and Crisanne decided it was time for them to get out of the bar game, so they sold The Burton to a couple of investors who are St. Bona alumni. From all reports, they are still running the place true to what it always was.
And I’m still wondering about those burgers.
Then there was Tony Marra, who along with his wife Marilyn ran for many years a bar and restaurant on the same street as The Burton, just a few blocks down. Their place was called The Bird Cage. In retrospect, maybe it was a dive bar too–though it did have a beautiful dining room. We didn’t go in the dining room much, but it was a lovely place, decorated with all manner of avian bric-a-brac in keeping with the place’s name. Marilyn served and ran the bar; Tony did most, if not all, of the cooking.
We ate there pretty much once a week, every week, while we lived in the Southern Tier. We went on Thursday night most weeks, because The Bird Cage ran a special on chicken wings on Thursdays. I don’t remember what the prices were, but we’d get both breaded and Buffalo wings, along with some other deep-fried delight–Tony made “Irish Wings”, which were steak fries tossed in Buffalo wing sauce–and wash it all down with, well, more beer than we probably should have been consuming. (Our beer at the time was an ale called Red Wolf, which was discontinued a few years later, sadly enough. This may have been a good thing, though. Red Wolf certainly wasn’t a great beer, but it was smooth and very drinkable, especially in large quantities with deep-fried bar foods.)
Until we moved away from Allegany in fall 2000, we were weekly (or more than weekly) regulars at The Bird Cage. How regular? Well…The Daughter was born not long after midnight on a Saturday. The very next Thursday? We were at The Bird Cage, with our five-day-old kid along for the ride. This worked out pretty well, as there were plenty of folks among the bar crowd who were willing to hold a baby for a bit.
Before Tony and his wife, Marilyn, opened The Bird Cage, they worked for a restaurant down the way called Antonio’s. Antonio’s was a nice place that I remember fondly, especially its cocktail lounge section with plush leather chairs, low tables, and a sunken bar. Here’s what Antonio’s looked like:
It’s hard to tell in the photo, but those shelves are a massive collection of liquor bottles. I’m a bit fuzzy on the ownership of Antonio’s; I don’t think that Tony Marra actually owned it, but I may be wrong. Eventually Antonio’s changed ownership completely, becoming a place called Pasta Luigi, and Tony and Marilyn took ownership of a bar once called The Village Inn. This became The Bird Cage. The Marra family was once a major family in the Olean region’s restaurant community, but that dwindled until Tony and Marilyn were the last ones running a restaurant. All eras end, sadly.
As for Antonio’s/Pasta Luigi: the latter restaurant eventually closed too, and the building was demolished. Now, from what I can tell, a beverage-redemption place stands on that spot [that’s a store where you can buy beer and redeem all your cans and bottles for $.05 each, thanks to New York’s bottle law]. About a half mile up the road used to stand Olean’s once-beloved Castle Inn, which is also now but a memory.
I know that The Bird Cage actually moved some years after we left the region, shifting into a location across the street, and finally the place had to close entirely when Tony was diagnosed with cancer. This article, from Olean’s newspaper, indicates that Tony and Marilyn were holding out hopes of returning to their restaurant when Tony returned to health, but…it wasn’t to be.
Since we left the Southern Tier more than twenty years ago, we’ve never found a bar/restaurant to fill the same role in our lives that The Bird Cage or The Burton once did. That’s for various reasons: finances, family stuff, and later on, The Wife’s celiac disease. We’re just not “bar people” anymore. But I have a lot of great memories, some sharp and some that are admittedly pretty hazy (remind me not to write about “Pig Roast Weekend” at The Bird Cage any time soon, because let’s just say that if we didn’t manage to convince Annheuser-Busch to keep Red Wolf Ale in production after those three nights of consumption, nobody was going to do so), of the handful of years when we were bar people. Tony and Marilyn Marra also helped send The Wife and I off in the first place: Who else would we have trusted to cater our wedding?
I think that in 2022, though, I’m going to at least try to figure out how to make Irish Wings. I think that would make Tony happy.
(Oh! And Tony was a Seattle Seahawks fan! At least he got to see his team win a Super Bowl!)
Photo credits: The photos of The Burton are from here and here. I found the photo of Antonio’s on a Facebook group called “Olean Memories Back In Time”, which is exactly what it says: a group dedicated to nostalgic remembrances of a once vibrant small city in a region that the world has mostly left behind. I wasn’t able to find any photos online of The Bird Cage in its original incarnation, the one I knew so well before we moved.
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For Carrie
Carrie Fisher, gone five years yesterday.
My friend Jason has some words:
I’ve written a lot of dead-celebrity posts on this blog over the years. Some of them have been quite good, if I say so myself. And they’ve all been from the heart; I always feel genuine emotion about the loss of the people whose work matters to me. But not like Carrie. Not like her. I’m not ashamed to say that when Carrie Fisher died, a big part of me went with her. A part that came from childhood and from adolescence, from my imagination since I was seven years old, and from the reality of the woman I once met and wished I could’ve spent more time with and really gotten to know as a friend. I don’t know how I could’ve loved her anymore if I’d actually known her.
So does the always brilliant Sheila O’Malley:
To Fisher’s credit, she did not show resentment towards the films that made her an icon, although she was not above poking fun at how ridiculous the entire experience could be at times. In a recent interview with CBC News, she scoffed at the idea that the “Star Wars” films were somehow a drag for her or a drag on her career, saying, “I got to be the only girl in an all-boy fantasy, and it’s a great role for women. She’s a very proactive character and gets the job done. So if you’re going to get typecast as something, that might as well be it for me.” Her struggles with mental illness and drug addiction are well-known. One of the funniest stories she tells in “Wishful Drinking” was when she learned that a photograph of her as Princess Leia was on the page opposite the Bipolar diagnosis entry in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology. She said, “So not only am I a Pez Dispenser, but I am also used as an illustration in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology.”
You cannot make this stuff up, and Fisher, a brilliant social critic with a screwball sense of humor and sharp eyes that saw everything, knew it. So, finally, thank goodness, she picked up a pen and started writing it all down. Our lives are the richer for it.
Five years.
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Farewell, Paddy Moloney
Paddy Moloney, the great front-man for the Celtic band The Chieftains, has died. He was 83.
In my musical life, Paddy Moloney ranks very high. Very high. When I list musical figures who shaped my world and the way it sounds in my heart, Paddy Moloney is right up there with John Williams, Hector Berlioz, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Leonard Bernstein, Annie Lennox, and Sam Cooke. I can tell you when I first heard each one of those artists, and I can tell you when I first heard Paddy Moloney and The Chieftains.
I don’t know why I remember this with such clarity, but remember it, I do. It was late in my high school career, maybe my senior year, or it was in my first college year, when I was home. We had taken a day trip like we often did to Erie, PA, and a shopping mall there. After the hours at the mall, there was another store in an outparcel that my parents wanted to visit, but I opted to sit in the car, reading and listening to Erie’s classical music station. At this time, living in Allegany, NY, classical music on the radio was a rare luxury that involved driving an hour in any direction. Before the Internet, before cell phones.
At this point in the day, there wasn’t actual classical music playing on that station. Instead there was a weekly program called Thistle and Shamrock, that featured something called “Celtic” music. I had no idea what this music was. I would later learn that it was a larger genre that included an artist whom I had discovered not long before, a singer named Enya (wait a minute! If this is post-Enya, then this is during my college years, because I remember with equal clarity when I first heard Enya: in the record store in a shopping mall in LaCrosse, WI, where we stopped on a college visiting trip. Thanks, memory!). But it took all of five minutes of listening to Thistle and Shamrock (hosted to this day by Fiona Ritchie) to realize that Celtic music was much, much, much more than the New Age-tinged dreaminess of Enya.
I would later buy a Chieftains CD as part of one of my orders to the BMG Classical CD Club (the less said about my experiences with fiscal insanity that were driven by my several memberships in BMG, the better). The CD was Celtic Wedding, and from that one disc sprang a love of Celtic music that has lasted me in all the days from that to this. This genre ranks just behind classical and film music in my heart, and I often find that a rough mood is soothed by listening to some wonderfully melodic and rhythmic Celtic music. All of this came from hearing The Chieftains, and Paddy Moloney.
Paddy Moloney, and by extension The Chieftains, were extremely versatile and dedicated to exploring every byway of Celtic music they could. Albums were coming out constantly, sometimes more than one a year, and the focus was always something new. There was a holiday album that nevertheless broke new ground, and there were duet albums with the likes of Van Morrison. Moloney and friends were not content to keep to the British Isles, either: they did albums with Canadian artists, and that Celtic Wedding album actually explored the Celtic music of Brittany. They did an album of Celtic-inspired music from the northern regions of Spain, and they did several albums with Country-Western stars, since a lot of the original settlers of the hills of Appalachia were actually descended from Scots and Celtic peoples, meaning that the folk music that eventually became a part of Country music in America sprang originally from older Celtic material. The Chieftains appeared in film scores
Paddy Moloney was a great ambassador for music, a constant force of admirable curiosity and of good cheer, and he was also a fantastic musician in his own right. The music world is poorer for his loss, but immeasurably richer for his having been here at all. As am I.
Thank you, Paddy Moloney. I hope ye were in Heaven a half hour ‘afore the Devil knew ye were dead!
And now, some music.
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Something for Thursday
Last week, Dusty Hill died. He was the bass player for ZZ Top.
ZZ Top is one of those bands that has been a part of the soundtrack of my life pretty much ever since early-adolescence, when I first became aware of rock music. They’re one of those acts that seems like they’ve been around forever, partly owing to their look: famous for their long beards, they cultivated an air of being old when they were still quite young. But there’s also a timeless quality to their music, which plays equally at ease on a classic rock station and an 80s throwback station, and more.
ZZ Top was always known most for its look: black suits and very long beards. They never updated that look at all. ZZ Top was not one of those “chameleon” kinds of acts that shifted with the times; their musical style and their look was always the same. They knew what they wanted to do, who they wanted to be, and the kind of music they wanted to make. And they made a lot of very fine music, too! Maybe they’re not quite at the level of, say, a Bob Seger or Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, but ZZ Top is every bit as essential to knowing the last forty years or so of popular music in America. (ZZ Top’s own history began in 1969, so they’ve been a thing for more than fifty years.)
By never much changing while maintaining a high standard of excellence, ZZ Top managed to seem like they’d been around forever and always will. They always had that air of “grizzled old veterans of rock”, even if they were only in their mid-30s when I first encountered them, with their big hit, “Legs”.
My favorite ZZ Top song is one of their less-known ones, a power ballad from the Afterburner album. “Rough Boy” is really quite a lovely song, with lyrics suggesting a boy trying to impress a girl even though he’s, well, ‘rough’. Those lyrics go well with Billy Gibbons’s raspy tenor, and the verses alternate with some frankly beautiful guitar playing.
Here are three videos: first the song itself as recorded (and later remastered) for the original album, and then a live version in which the band is joined by guitar legend Jeff Beck. And finally there’s an example of one of my favorite new genres, the “reaction” video, in which a listener with an open mind listens to “Rough Boy” for the very first time ever. (The reaction video is great, but her experience is slightly marred by the fact that she’s also watching the song’s official video for MTV, which is, I must admit, one of the weirder videos out there, and it’s a video whose content has almost nothing to do with the song itself. But her enthusiasm is real; I love these reaction videos!)
And Dusty Hill: Thanks for the music. It will live long!
