I just turned fifty, which means that I am getting mail from the AARP (they put Jon Bon Jovi on the cover of a recent issue of their magazine, which was truly surreal). I have had surgeries on both knees, and had a detached retina in my left eye repaired, which left me with a case of double vision that is corrected (mostly) by prisms in my glasses. My cultural references are getting more and more dated. I was always a bit out of it, never up on the latest thing, a bit of an old soul, but I was pretty surprised when I was talking to a young-ish couple the other day—educated, cultured, Jewish—and discovered that neither of them had heard of Bess Myerson, the only Jewish Miss America ever.
I have lost a few friends and acquaintances, but so far none to diseases of aging: none of my peers has had a heart attack, or developed early onset dementia, for example. One high school was killed in the Iraq war, another was killed when he broke his neck in a diving accident, and there have been a couple suicides. One of those suicides does seem to have been a death by middle-age despair: a college classmate who killed himself when (as it was told to me by a mutual acquaintance who was much closer to the deceased) he simply realized that nothing had worked out for him. His career was stalled, his family relations were strained. In so many ways, he wasn’t where he wanted to be, and he couldn’t take it any more. Is that the full story? I don’t know.
I recently learned that two middle-school acquaintances have died. They weren’t in middle school with me; I attended a school that went from grades 7 to 12, and they were 12th-graders when I was in 7th, which is to say they were both five years older than me. One was mean, a real bully; he threw me in the river that ran through campus. The other was kind, warm, protective. His name was Joe Manuli, and he had been born without legs; he walked on his hands (not upside down, which is what some people envision when I say “he walked on his hands,” but like you or me if our legs were cut off and we dropped to the ground and balanced on our hands). We played chess together, and were on the debate team, and one time, when I was being bullied by a boy named Tommy, Joe shuffled up to him in the hallway, leapt off the ground by one hand, grabbed Tommy by the throat with his other hand, pulled him to the ground, put him in a headlock, and said, “Are you ever going to bother Oppy again?” Tommy cranked out a meek, “No,” and that was that.
This is from an online obituary:
On Saturday, April 20, Joseph Michael Manuli (a.k.a. Joe, Joey Bag of Chips), 56 of Belford NJ sadly passed away with his sisters by his side at Jersey Shore University Medical Center.
Born severely physically handicapped on September 5, 1967 to his loving parents John and Grace [nee Dawson] Manuli in Bronx NY, Joe was never meant to live.
But oh, did he!
Joe never let "disabled" define him. He defied all the odds and overcame many obstacles in his short but full and meaningful life. Physically, he weighed 110 lbs but benched 375 lbs, taking home the Best Lifter Light trophy in the 1992 NJ State Bench Press Championships. Mentally, he mastered chess and was ranked in the top 10% of players nationally, often beating many players above his rating.
Nothing gave Joe more joy than seeing others thrive. Most chess players can play but can't teach well. Joe, a member of the NJ State Chess Federation, was one of the best instructors in NJ for 20 years. He had a natural ability to communicate with all types of people. This allowed him to connect with over 500 students across many schools, including Applegate, Eisenhower, and Dunellen, making a difference in many students’ lives, on and off the chessboard. He proudly led the Middle School Chess teams in Dunellen, NJ to 3 State Championships in a row . . .
Growing up, he bowled competitively, competed in racquetball tournaments, excelled at wrestling, wrote poetry, had a green thumb, and crabbed and fished with his best friend of over 40 years, Rob Fiore. He was fascinated by the Mob, obsessively played GTA [Grand Theft Auto], avidly followed the Yankees, Giants, and Italy's national soccer team, and was a shark at the poker tables. At home, he was inseparable from his fur babies, cats Groucho, then Sasha.
Kind, always offering advice and help, Joe was equally brilliant and witty with a slightly mischievous twinkle in his eye. Joe could be strong-willed, tough, and tenacious, with a stubborn streak, but he was fiercely independent, curious, and never let anything hold him back. He even mastered driving with hand controls! Joe bravely fought many health challenges but was always positive. He was a true inspiration in how to be an overcomer; although he'd never admit he was!
The youngest of three, Joe was a cheerleader and mediator for his two sisters. He was raised in Middletown NJ and attended Middletown South HS.
Horns and guitars
I have been working hard on this magazine, which will relaunch in late September with the new name ARC: Religion, Politics, Et Cetera. And I am still writing a book. Meaning there hasn’t been time for much else. Still, I have written one piece I am proud of, a review of the Bleachers concert at Westville Music Bowl, a short walk from my house, a couple months back. In the review, I offer a short disquisition on the role of horns in rock bands:
Bleachers sounds like Arcade Fire.
No, wait, they sound like Bruce Springsteen.
No, wait, they are the spiritual heirs of Darryl Hall and John Oates.
No, wait, they sound like a band whose sole raison d’être is to conjure the joyous spirit of “You’re a Friend of Mine,” the unimpeachably great 1985 duet between Clarence Clemons and Jackson Browne, a combo so improbable that the song should have won a Grammy just for existing. If you don’t remember that song, I have a treat for you.
If none of this is doing it for you, let me try coming at Bleachers from another angle: There is one central truth of rock ‘n’ roll, which is that every band is either a saxophone band or a fiddle band. No rock band—Dave Matthews Band notwithstanding—can possibly have both those instruments. Fiddle bands take their historical cues from folk, country, and Americana. The Decemberists and the Avett Brothers are fiddle bands, and there are scores more. If you are a band trying to get played on AAA radio, or book a gig at a City Winery location, or draw tired parents grateful for a 7:00 p.m. start time for a show, it helps to have a fiddle in the lineup.
Sax bands nod to an earlier era of rock. The sax, of course, was an original rock instrument, going back to Bill Haley and the Comets; it was important to the sound of the Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, and on and on. But the sax lost its cool along the way, possibly because of its overuse in solo breaks in the 1980s, by acts like Phil Collins (cf. “One More Night”), George Michael (“Careless Whisper”), and Spandau Ballet (“True”). We now recognize that these acts were all profoundly cool, their songs indisputable classics. But every rock-musical action, no matter how brilliant, breeds an opposite reaction. In this case, that meant the sax got banished from 1990 to 2010, give or take. Grunge and seven waves of dance genres killed the sax. Blame Kurt Cobain and Skrillex. In the classic 30 Rock eulogy for “people whose professions are no longer a thing,” “dynamite saxophone solos in rock ’n’ roll songs” were listed along with travel agents and American auto workers.
As a result, there aren’t many true sax bands today. Aspiring rockers got bullied out of sax. In a rumble with the fiddle bands, the very few sax bands would get creamed (although maybe I’m wrong; it’s hard to imagine anyone in the crispy-stoner fiddle-band world throwing a punch—they might just run scared, retire to a home studio, blaze up a doobie, and argue about steel-guitar technique). Among bands that really draw a crowd, practically the only sax band working today is the Revivalists.
What’s more, at various points in the concert, each of these saxophone players did that back-to-back thing perfected by the greatest saxophone band of all time, the E Street Band. You remember Bruce Springsteen and Clarence Clemons doing that back shimmy? Where they crouch low, knees bent, butt to butt, and shred on their respective instruments?
Well, so did Jack Antonoff, with Zem Audu and Evan Smith.
Surfside
Speaking of horns in rock bands, for reasons that will be obvious to anyone who knows me, I recently bought I Don’t Want to Go Home, Nick Corasaniti’s oral history of the Stone Pony rock club in Asbury Park, New Jersey. I haven’t read many oral histories, but the ones I have read, I have liked: a biography-in-quotations of Hunter S. Thompson and the magnificent oral history of the making of Dazed and Confused, by Melissa Maerz, truly one of the great books ever. The general plot of I Don’t Want to Go Home, as told through a panoply of voices, is that after the race riots in Asbury Park in the late 1960s, there were almost no going businesses in town—until this one dude opened a bar, which quickly became a hangout for musicians (mostly white, but some black), and then became the home bar for Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes, who as house band performed several sets a night, three nights a week. Steve Van Zandt was in the Asbury Jukes and, soon, the E Street Band, whose front man, Bruce Springsteen, became a regular at the Stone Pony, too. There were other regular bands in the scene, whose names I already forget, having not picked up the book since two days ago. But the general idea is that somehow they all came together around what is now the iconic bar-band sound, comprising guitars and horns. Even though the bands all had distinctive sounds, they were alike in that they played guitar music that you could dance too (because it had soul—horns).
I’m not particularly interested in this music (aside from Bruce), but I like an evocation of a scene. I’m always having wistful misgivings that I was never part of a “scene,” which I cure myself of by remembering that to be part of a scene you have to hang out with the same people over and over again, those people usually drink a lot, and few people in this scenes have the things I value most, like children at home who love them and want to play catch with them or watch Friends re-runs. Bar scenes, music scenes—they are built for and maintained by single people in their twenties, and my twenties were hardly my glory days. They were sometimes interesting and often sad, and I don’t want to go back, even if I went to a lot of concerts.
Anyway, I guess I am on some sort of Boss kick, because not long ago I read Warren Zanes’s book about the making of the album Nebraska,
which despite being a book about a man sitting in a room alone writing songs has been optioned for a movie, which apparently will star Jeremy Allen White, from The Bear. And it’ll be awesome. You can see it, right?
London calling
Other recent reading: two books by Bob Mortimer. Some of you will remember from a prior issue of this newsletter that Nick Hornby’s newsletter turned me on to the comic Bob Mortimer, ubiquitous in the UK but unknown here. He is famous mostly for his TV work, but he has also written two books, both of which I have now read (making me a Bob Mortimer literary completist! How do you like them apples?). He wrote a novel, The Satsuma Complex, a humorous whodunit that was published in the United States as The Clementine Complex (why the name change? who knows?). He also wrote And Away…, a memoir that proceeds from his triple-bypass surgery in his fifties but reaches back to his childhood and his origins on the comedy scene.
Both books are charmers, but what is even more charming is being reminded yet again that, even though we share a common language, the USA and the UK have radically different cultures. Yes, there is overlap, but there is so much that is different. Entirely by accident, I have fallen for three English writers whom almost nobody over here has heard of: Roger Deakin, Robert Macfarlane, and, now, Bob Mortimer.
I’m not really an Anglophile—it’s not as if I would want to live in the UK—but what with those authors, the “tartan noir” mysteries of Ian Rankin, and my new love, the BBC radio show/podcast Desert Island Discs, I sort of imagine myself inhabiting a Great Britain of the mind. With fewer puddings and pints, and no scones.
Jew know what I mean?
One hates to talk of antisemitism, except that I do talk of it, often in paid speeches. For understandable reasons, people are scared, and Jews, and Gentile allies, want to know more. For the curious, I am proud to remind you that I recently hosted a podcast, produced by R2 Studios at George Mason University, on the history of antisemitism in the United States. It’s called Antisemitism U.S.A., which sounds like a forgotten Sex Pistols album, and it was written and produced by some very smart professors; my main contribution was my voice. Still, it’s a good listen, quite gripping, and is a great introduction to an important topic, available for a long car ride in your future. Download it here.
Calling Sully, Murph, Tippecanoe, and Squeebo, too!
Another daughter starts high school next week, again raising my hopes that she will be nicknamed “Oppy,” like her father, grandfather, and great-grandfather before her (not to mention one rather famous physicist). I should stop getting my hopes up, both because girls are less likely to receive nicknames and because nicknames in general seem to be on the wane. The last president with a nickname was LBJ (did anyone really call Reagan “Dutch”?). We don’t even use diminutives much anymore—a young Robert is as likely to be called “Robert” as “Bob,” and he will never be “Bobby.” I like to think we are bucking this trend by calling our son “Davey”—but what he really needs is to be “Chooch” or “Jag” or “Stinkbomb,” and for the name to stick it has to be applied by friends at school or in the neighborhood, not by his parents. I once chatted with an old Yale alum known as “Tersh,” because he was a third (“III”), and so tertiary. In high school, there was a girl called Topher, because she was Christine, and sometimes a Christopher is a “Topher,” hence she was Topher, by some gender-bending transitive property.
I could go on. The point is, nicknames equal affection, and we need them back. Maybe there is a book in this.
Go Oppy!