Wilkommen Bienvenue Welcome!

Welcome to A Vanishing World where we try to have fun and not get too serious. Life is difficult enough. We are interested in lots of things including old buildings, vintage clothes, all kinds of music and fun stuff we find at thrift stores. We miss the great era of American manufacturing and we lament the loss of thousands of jobs sent overseas by avaricious corporate heads laying waste to the greatest workforce of the last century. (The non-serious part didn’t last long, did it?)

Yes, we are full of contradictions here at A Vanishing World so if you want to find them go ahead. This is just the first post. I’m sure there will be many.

So relax, crack open a beer (preferably Miller) and enjoy!

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

The little fat guy wants to sing

On Tuesday night I was participating in a welcome tradition, the Annual Finley Holiday Tree Trimming Party. Bill and Susan Finley are one of those New York couples I have come to rely on in many ways unknown to them I’m sure. They represent for me the quintessence of all that is a certain New York.

Haircut 100 – Ein Haarschnitt mit Feuer

Like most boys, when I was young my parents took me to get my hair cut. I had a bad experience once with a man that cut hair in his backyard. I’m not sure why my parents took me there instead of a barber with his own shop but I imagine the consideration was either financial or parochial since money was tight and our local parish was the center of our lives. Perhaps he was a parishioner; maybe he was just inexpensive. In any event he operated close to our home.

I remember his house was on Garnet Street in Boyle Heights and he did have a real barber chair set up al fresco in his back yard.  I found that both out of place and fascinating.

My friend Daniel went to a fellow named Dan the Barber who had a baby grand piano in his shop on Brooklyn Avenue. Daniel would go in late in the day and Dan the Barber would pour himself a drink and then play the piano. After a while he would stop and cut Daniel’s hair free of charge. East LA was like that back then; part lower middle class neighborhood, part Fellini movie.

Celebrity Past and Present

A note on a friend’s Facebook page (curator Rita Gonzalez) triggered a memory for me and gave me the inspiration to write down the following list. It is not chronological or geographical and is not meant to imply that I ascribe any importance to celebrity in and of itself.

Celebrity is often more accident than accomplishment and it is good to remember that health care workers, waiters and waitresses, drivers and busboys, grocery store clerks and bag boys of both sexes (are there any left?) janitors (like my dad), auto mechanics, animal care workers, maids and house cleaners (like my mom), receptionists, nail girls and shoe shine boys (and girls), school teachers, and of course the most invisible workforce, without whom we would starve to death, field hands and farm workers and all the other un-acknowledged laborers that work hard to make our lives easier, are and will always be, the real celebrities as far as I am concerned.

Coffee Talk

From 1990-1995 my wife and I ran Café Troy, a coffeehouse in downtown Los Angeles. Together with a crew of unlikely cohorts comprised of friends and family we kept this bohemian outpost at the edge of Little Tokyo alive for five years.

When we opened Troy homelessness was at an all time high, due in no small part to the twelve years of Reagan-Bush-economics. Somehow that trickle seemed to stop quite a bit  short in the actual practice of trickle down economics.

Today there are still between 1.5 and 3 million homeless in the United States in any given year. In a country that has one of the highest per capita incomes in the world this seems an unjustifiably high statistic. Identifying a problem is one thing; doing something about it is another. In many ways, large and small, many of us do what we can. Some do more.

A Slice of Life

Whenever my grandson Aubrey from Los Angeles visits, we make an effort to indulge our mutual interest in great pizza. We only have a few places we frequent but we are never disappointed since the places we patronize consistently make the “best of” lists in New York City. I consider it an inexpensive and worthwhile pursuit.

Thinking back to my own youth, my grandfather lived in El Paso, Texas, was about a hundred and two, spoke only in Spanish and wore a hat for so many years that it had altered the shape of his head. I only met him a handful of times and he died when I was still quite young. I can’t remember a single conversation but we always knelt to him for a blessing before leaving and driving back the 800 miles to Los Angeles.

601 Lexington Avenue lobby

Two businessmen talking on the way to the elevator:

She’s got a lot of money and she’s a little bit crazy. Put it this way, she owns two houses right next to each other in Freeport. She lives in one in the summer and the other one in the winter.

The Limousine Diaries

In the late 80′s and early 90′s work as an editor in the industrial film industry, was rarely consistent. During periods when I didn’t have a job I went to work for a company in Burbank, California called Columbus Limousine.

Columbus, as we used to call it, was a limousine and Town Car service that dealt specifically with businesses and corporate accounts in the entertainment industry. Large organizations like Warner Brothers or Paramount Studios would hire our company to drive their executives and talent from the airport to their homes and also to other locations as required by the job.

Vladimir Poutine

I’m not sure that all of the 1950′s Red Scare paranoia with Communists hiding under everyone’s bed isn’t back. But it is not Communists this time it is Canadians! What’s more, we’re not worried at all. In fact we welcome them with with open arms. Thus we have the latest “soon to be” addition to our culinary landscape.

A sign advertising a store called T-Poutine is now at 168 Ludlow on the Lower East Side. I called the number but all I got was a recording. A little net research disclosed that they were cited for faulty plumbing by the Health Department on July 6 of this year. This is typical prior to the opening of a new restaurant. It is fairly routine and when everything is in order I’m sure it will open with great Canadian fanfare.

I must admit I have never had the fabled Poutine but maybe soon and in my own backyard.

MFB: Chin’s Bar Americano

In the southside of Cologne, near an ancient tower ( inscribed in stone: 1238 A.D.) sits a little street called Im Ferkulum. If you get off the Ubierring tram at Chlodwigplatz and walk through the arch of the stone tower past the Turkish restaurants and German hofbraus you will find an unassuming nondescript little building. The front is all glass (the better to see and be seen although regulars say it is to see if someone you are avoiding is already there) and the tables are black and chrome.

The Life Aquatic

Most people grow up knowing how to swim. They learn it naturally like walking and talking or by taking swimming lessons.  Whether one enjoys swimming as recreation or exercise, or it is learned merely to avoid accidental drowning, it is a skill generally acquired early in life.  Somehow, I managed to reach adulthood without learning to swim.

I remember going to a municipal pool once when I was very young. I loved the idea of the pool and longed to be a part of the splishy-splashy group of gleeful children cavorting about with joyful abandon.  All I could muster, however, was a hopeless white-knuckled, desperation, clinging-to-the-pool-edge, filled with terror and dread. As much as I wanted it not to be true, the pool only represented certain death to me.