love and kisses and music

Do you ever get a mild crush on your boyfriend or husband's bestie? There's always that zone of common territory; there are always things all three people respond to in each other. And yet, there's that fascinating otherness. The bestie is somewhat like your partner but also exotically different. I wouldn't say it's something that always happens to me, but it has and does happen. In one case, I was dating a guy and he and his friend and I hung out a lot - these were AA days in the late 80s, when you often hung out with a friend or a few after a meeting. Anyway, the guy I was dating turned out to be a shithead as far as his relations with women, and kind of unceremoniously dumped me (he later claimed that we hadn't actually had a relationship). Meanwhile, I was still talking to his friend, and realized that I had totally picked the wrong guy.

And it actually had been a binary choice: I met both of them one night at the same meeting, both offered me a ride home, and I accepted the ride from the younger, more handsome guy. Actually, when I think about it, I didn't find myself attracted to Joe (older guy) because of some ways that he was like Larry; in this case, it was pretty much only the differences.

But that guy who's sorta like the guy you love...as I said, it's happened, and still does. It's just that little what-if head-scratch, and fortunately, very out-of-sight, out-of-mind. I actually chat with him quite often when he phones here, but when we see each other, there's a little click.

As I may have mentioned, I'm from a generation that hugs and kisses a lot. We're just like that. And like my earlier musings on changing from signing a letter (well, an email) "best regards" to signing "love," there is that certain point with an opposite-sex friend where you move from kissing on the cheek to kissing on the lips. I'm not talking about making out, here, just about kissing hello and goodbye. It's small but also significant. (I actually tried to go the opposite way, at one point, with V., trying to move from kissing on the lips to kissing on the cheek. He would have none of it. It was all non-verbal, but he still made it pretty clear.)

So the last time I saw Bestie, a couple of months back, I decided it was high time to kiss him on the lips. At "hello," he seemed a little surprised, but by "goodbye," he was there. In between, we had a very interesting conversation where it came out that we had both read the Richard Rhodes book on the development of the atomic bomb. Since we rarely talk anything but music, it was a nice surprise for the both of us. (Barry is not at all a reader, so it was kind of extra-nice.)

All of this, of course, happens in plain sight, except what happens in my head and maybe his. And it's coming up now because I saw him tonight. He and Barry had met up to hang out for a bit, and Barry called me just before five to ask if I wanted to meet up with them. I really hadn't thought about the whole thing much, but Bestie planted a good one on me, and a better one when we said goodbye. It's just a little, warm thing.

I haven't really hung out with men friends too much since I stopped hanging out with V. Don't get kissed much outside of the home...which is not to say that I haven't encountered some men a little too willing to kiss me. (One of the perils of reconnecting with old bfs on Facebook is that sometimes they get a little too wishful. It hasn't yet proven tempting.)

Although...there is Chuck. It's really hard to describe Chuck; he's very nutty and silly and hyper, and also incredibly sweet and thoughtful. When he stops mugging, he's quite handsome. He also has some emotional issues and some bad chemicals - he's way too much of a handful to get involved with, though I gave it a try in the early 80s. But we've always retained a lot of affection for each other, and he's a really affectionate guy.

When Barry started going to some blues jams, about a year and a half ago, he started to meet a lot of my friends from the old days (my blues-bar days in the early-mid 80s and then again in the mid-90s), including Chuckie. He found Chuck wacky but lovable, which is how most people see him, except when they all too often start to find him wacky and annoying. Chuck took to Barry, as did my other old friends; Barry is immensely likeable, but I think got some extra points for being married to me.

This is what I figured out about Chuck some years ago: if you're with him one-on-one, he can be quiet, deep, intense, someone you can talk to for hours. But bringing one other person on the scene turns it into Chuck and an audience, and he automatically gets goofy.

So after Chuckie and a couple of other friends asked Barry numerous times to have me come to the jam, I did. It was really nice to see everyone but especially Chuck. I have such a warm spot for him, and he's so open and sweet with me. Now, he behaves very affectionately toward everyone - I mean he hugs and kisses and holds hands with pretty much everyone, including Barry. But with me...we kinda mean it. And in plain sight.

I found a video of him...but it barely relates to any of this. For one thing, he dresses in a lot of black leather and studs, which bears just about zero relationship to his personality. Also, on stage, he projects a lot of sex appeal. He usually acts so wacky that it's hard to notice just how handsome and sexy he is, but in recent years he's less wacky and more sexy on stage.

I also hesitate to post this clip because he's mainly a sax player, but he's singing here. He has a lot of charisma, but not much of a voice.

Having said that...

I don't know who the guitarists or drummer are, but the bass player is Margey Peters and the keyboard player is the extremely talented David Bennett Cohen.

What always kills me about David Bennett Cohen is that he quit Country Joe & the Fish before Woodstock.

For all of you younger and non-American folk...Woodstock was a hugely famous rock festival in 1969, one of the first enormous outdoor rock shows. (No, I wasn't old enough to be there, but I knew about it. And the movie and album, both called Woodstock, are a mainstay of serious rock fans.) Woodstock is a holy-grail sort of thing, and there is something very godly about having played there. (Which David Bennett Cohen didn't.) Country Joe became famous for an anti-Vietnam-War song he performed there. Which is this:

I may have mentioned recently that I ran into Richie Havens near my office. I interviewed Richie in the 90s and he remembered me. Richie not only played Woodstock, he opened the festival. He was the first performer at Woodstock. That's triple godly.Here's what that looked like:

Richie is an amazingly sweet human being.

I had other stuff on my mind, but music stuff leads to other music stuff. (Bestie is a music guy, too, so the ramble really does sort of connect.)

here's what

big & fashionable, loud and bluesy

I found this to be fairly interesting.  Although my weight fluctuates, I've been a size16 or 18 for some years now.  And I hate the fact that I mostly have to shop online; and absolutely do believe that retailers like The Gap only sell plus-sizes online because they don't want plus-sized women in their stores.  I hate the fact that larger sizes tend to vanish first from places like Old Navy.  I hate looking at catalogues or online, being pleased that they carry "XL," only to find that their idea of "XL" is sizes 2-14.  I am pissed that some companies charge more for sizes over 16 than for the same item in a smaller size.  And I was heartbroken when Liz Claiborne did away with their "Elizabeth" line.  (I believe that Claiborne also did away with a line called First Issue, which included all sizes.)

But here's what else I hate:  the assumption that all plus-sized women are built the same way.  If I see plus-sized women described as "curvy" one more time, I'll barf.  The intimation seems to be that the trade-off for being a larger size is that you have big breasts, and that all plus-sized women have an hourglass shape, only wider.  Uh-uh.  Different women carry their weight differently. 

This is why I've started wearing all of this very loose and forgiving (not to mention artsy), Tienda Ho and Mission Canyon stuff.  It's one-size-fits-all, and although the proportions are occasionally now quite right (plus I did have to get one pair of pants hemmed), it all basically works. 

Barry and I went last night to the jam he likes, a blues jam run by Big Ed Sullivan at the Grisly Pear.  (I may have mentioned developing a short-lived crush on a guy I saw there.)  It's interesting, because he started going maybe a year ago and met a bunch of people that I've known for eons, way longer than I've known Barry.  (And not to put too fine a point on it, there were three of my ex-boyfriends/lovers in attendance last night.)  I do enjoy the music, the new people I'm meeting, and reconnecting with some old friends.  I've particularly enjoyed spending some time with a guy I dated 30 years ago (!), who is very sweet and very sentimental, albeit a touch manic.  It's a good thing Barry likes him, because this guy is very physical, and does a lot of hugging.  Well, actually, he hugs everyone a lot, but I think I'm getting a little extra because it's been quite a while since we spent any time together.  Also, Barry's excellent bud, Felix Cabrera, turned up -- he's not around as much now that he lives on Long Island.  Felix is a real sweetheart, funny as hell, and great onstage (harp and vocals) -- he led the band that Barry had playing at my 50th birthday. 

I don't think Barry ever reads this blog -- I'm not secretive about it, he just doesn't like to read that much.  If I tell you all what I'm planning for his 60th birthday in November, do you promise not to tell him?  I have to think about this a little more, because I don't want to ruin the surprise.

some stuff

I just deleted a post I wrote last week...I had a bad crush for about five days, and then got over it.  I have kind of mixed feelings about it.  In some ways it was a good feeling, and in some ways I just felt kind of stupid.  You'd think I'd be done falling for musicians, just because they play beautifully.  Musicians are bad, bad boyfriends.  And this dude wasn't going to be my boyfriend, anyway.

This all started when I went with Barry to a jam session he likes, a blues thing.  I used to go to a lot of blues jams back in the early-mid nineties, when I lived in Manhattan and listened to a lot of blues.  Also, I had a couple of blues musician bad boyfriends back then. 

Barry's been going to this thing for a while, and a lot of the people there are my old friends, who he's gotten to know, and there are some other nice folks he's met (one of whom was the five-day crushee).  So I finally went.  A lot of the old crowd is now in their 50s rather than their 30s, and are far nicer and calmer for it.  I did enjoy talking to one of my old boyfriends, who actually hadn't been a bad boyfriend due to being a musician.  He was in fact a fairly good boyfriend except for being a little nuts, or maybe more than a little.  I know now that a good deal of it was chemical, although some was also emotional.  He's on meds now, but still mildly cracked.  But he's a real sweetheart and it was nice to get caught up.

 

(Wow -- I figured out how to put in YouTube videos again!  Yay for me!)

One of these dudes is the sweet old boyfriend and one is the five-day crush.  If you guess right, you get to read this blog for a year, absolutely free.

Work is still great.  One of my bosses brings in bagels and lox every Friday.  (I can't eat the bagels, of course, but I do eat a bunch of nova and cream cheese.) 

I saw my doctor last week, and the finger thing is not arthritis -- it's actually something called "trigger finger," which is an inflammation of a tendon, sort of like carpel tunnel.  (I remember an older lady, many years ago, complaining, "I have the carpet!)  So I'm going to see another doctor this week, an orthopedist who specializes in hands, to get a shot of steroids in my finger.  Eek.  I don't like needles.  I don't like anything that hurts.  I don't mind getting blood taken any more, because the people in those labs are really good at it.  (In the olden days, the doctor or nurse would do it right in the office, and those folks weren't necessarily blood-taking experts.)  But Barry will come to hold my other hand.

Current faves and earworms:  Teenage Dream by Katy Perry (another one that played incessantly in my office at Dweck).  Forget You by Cee Lo is still on the list.  Weezer recorded an excellent cover of Viva La Vida, the Coldplay song I like so much.  I'm listening to my mp3 player a lot these days.  

Also reading a lot, because that's a subway thing.  A Ticket to the Circus by Norris Church Mailer.  Cancer on $5 a Day by Robert Schimmel.  The Ape House by Sara Gruen.  I'm tempted to reread some old favorites, but there's so much new stuff to read.  I did finally finish the third Stieg Larsson book -- I had a hardcover copy, but didn't get the job done until the Kindle.  How did I ever live without it?  I have around 1100 books on it now, plus another 400 or so in holding on my computer.  I bought four or five of them, many are fee (public domain), and the rest were gleefully bootlegged.  I tell everyone that the Kindle changed my life.  I guess the mp3 player did, too, although the Walkman did long before that.  (I listened to Imperial Bedroom and Graceland endlessly back then.)

Free summer concerts coming up soon, and the best one in Prospect Park, hands-down, is Los Lobos.  Also, the Holmes Brothers are playing free at City Winery in a month or so, and I can't believe I haven't seen them in over ten years.  They were great friends of mine when they were a local NYC group, playing in dives; now they're famous world-wide for about twenty years now.  They play all over the world and are rarely in New York.  I particular look forward to seeing Sherman Holmes, who has been a great pal since the early 80s.  When I got sober in 1986 and disappeared from the bar/club scene, of all the "friends" I had while drinking, Sherman was the only one who picked up a phone and called me to see where and how I was.  I don't mean the only one in that band -- I mean the only only one, from all of the musicians and fellow blues fans and bar rats.  Only Sherman.  I will love him forever for that.

There has been some consideration of a fourth cat in the Levy household.  There is a very nice cat rescue lady who tables across the street from Union Square, and I have fallen very hard for a ten-month-old tortoiseshell.  More to come.

the good used bookstore

I went to the old neighborhood (Midwood/Kings Highway) to see the podiatrist, who took the stitches out of my heel, and pronounced me pretty much OK, I need to wash the cut with soap and water and use Neosporin and a bandaid, and see him again in two weeks. I can walk on it, but with some care.

Afterward, Barry and I got a bite to eat in a diner on Coney Island Avenue, and I realized I was just a half block from one of my favorite used book stores ever. Right now, I don't know of one that could beat it except The Strand. But this one, which is simply called Here's A Bookstore, is probably the closest bookstore to where I live (excluding Judaica stores), and has a pretty wide and deep variety for a smallish store. They have a lot of Judaica themselves, as well as other occult and new age book; a nice section of books about New York; classic and contemporary novels; mysteries, horror, romance, sci-fi and true crime; art, crafts, science, movies; plays and poetry; business and history; pets. What's more, you can find an awful lot of first editions there, though almost always without dustcovers (or possibly tattered dustcovers for books from the 60s on), and sometimes in rough shape. On my last trip there, I bought a first edition of a book called The House That Shadows Built by Will Irwin, a history of the movies written in 1928! No dust cover, and the top of the spine a little chewed, but otherwise in lovely shape for $7.50. I've also bought a couple of good books about Coney Island there, and a few about the space program (I'm a bit of a nut about the Mercury-Gemini-Apollo era of space flight).

This is what I got today:
Bag of Bones by Stephen King, paperback. I thought I hadn't read this but now I think maybe I did.
Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey. because I enjoyed the movie. Trade paperback.
And Never Let Her Go by Ann Rule, hardcover. I have a terrible sweet tooth for true crime, and Ann Rule is hands-down the best.
I Me Mine by George Harrison, hardcover. I've never read it.
A Wolf at the Table by Augustin Burroughs, hardcover. I haven't read this, but it's another memoir by a great memoirist.
Sapphira and the Slave Girl by Willa Cather, hardcover, first edition (1940, no dust cover, mid-spine a little chewed).
The first edition cost me $5.00. The whole lot ran me a bit under $50.

If you're new or newish to this blog, I lost about 95% of my books in The Great Storage Disaster. When we moved in to this too-small apartment, we were forced to stash some 60 cartons or so in storage, which we could really not afford, and we eventually lost. (The storage was something like $130 a month; if we had it, we could have rented a bigger apartment.) I lost most of my books (including most of my cookbooks), all of my journals (about 40 years' worth) and my writing samples and poetry and magazines in which I published, my baseball card collection, my postcard collection, my mother's wedding dress, and of my vinyl and a lot of my CDs and most of my cassettes (the bulk of my bootlegs were on cassette, mostly Elvis Costello).

I've been trying to embrace the paring-down aspect of it, but the truth is that I liked keeping books I had read and often dipped into something over and over. The books I have now are really random because they're mostly freebies from the "take" shelves at Penguin that I accumulated over my time there (I was on staff there for two years, but the year before that I temped there for about nine months). I haven't read most of them, and am not sure if I will. I was always a subway reader, so I had two hours of good reading time five days a week, and since I read fast, I could plow through lots and lots of books. I don't really have a good reading spot here at home, though I always take a book to a doctor's appointment or on a subway or when I go sit on the Boardwalk (I will probably start doing that again very soon). I've actually been reading again this week, a really good book of blues-oriented short stories that I'm reviewing for Blues Revue. Makes we want to build more reading time into the day.

Because of the doctor's appointment and the bookstore, and then shopping up fruit and vegetables on the way home (our amazing produce store closes from Memorial Day to Labor Day, and follows the religious Jews to their summer enclave in Deal, NJ), I didn't really do much other work today (though I did read one of the blues short stories while waiting for the podiatrist). I did make some new Facebook friends from the "Dan Lynch Alumni" list. (Dan Lynch was a ratty old blues bar with some of the best music in the city, from the early 80s until the middle 90s. The Holmes Brothers used to play a lot of Saturday nights there.) And in jewelry world, I gave three pair of earrings and a business card to one of the nurses there, because we determined on my last visit that we both adore Swarovski. That was a freebie, but the freebies are also in part about networking.

What I feel like doing now is playing with my beads for a while. I got some nice vintage beads yesterday that I won on eBay, some twisty opalescent green ones; some "blueberries and cream" ones, also twisty; and some eyepopping channel-set violet Swarovskis with a loop on each side, for earring or bracelet components. One of my jewelry weak spots is wire-wrapping briolettes. Some months back, I won an auction of 100 lots of Swarovski from an eBay seller I was familiar with, each lot being one large bead or maybe half a dozen smaller ones, a mix of new and vintage, and there are quite a few beautiful briolettes in there, so I'm going to knuckle down and work on making some nice earrings with them. (I also have half a dozen beautiful briolettes in imperial topaz -- the good, real stuff -- that I've been sitting on for half a dozen years until I figured out how to use them, or got good enough.

crazy and crazier

The Examiner column has sort of eaten my brain all week. I've put up two posts, and have been networking incessantly, mostly on Facebook, all of the time I haven't been researching or writing the posts. Plus I'm reading a book of blues-oriented short stories that I'm reviewing for Blues Revue. I wish there had been something like Examiner in the mid-90s, when I first wrote for Blues Revue. There was a huge local blues scene, some half a dozen bars that had only blues bands, every night of the week, and low or no covers. These places mostly presented local bands, though some, like Manny's Car Wash, had a mix of local and national. There were other places like The Bottom Line and Tramps that had some national blues acts for a slightly higher price, but still nothing insane. Those clubs also hosted high-end folk and acoustic acts (Bottom Line) and funk and New Orleans (Tramps). I wrote for Blues Revue, but that wasn't really an outlet for deep local New York coverage, which was really my strong suit. About 85% of what I wrote for them was either CD reviews or reviews of live shows (or profiles) of national musicians who came through New York. I got in a few local notes and profiles of local musicians. But I think Examiner is going to be a lot of fun.