The gift of sounds and visions

Scene: A darkened ground floor room in a dusty house at 1133 Shotwell Street in San Francisco on an evening in August 1998. Three young men in their 20s are variously seated and sprawled on sofas and a chair, lit by the light from the adjacent, cluttered kitchen. Bottles rest and lie on the floor, alongside bags of chips and foil burrito wrappers.

Me (sipping from a 40 ouncer): This sounds great. What’s it off?

J: It’s Into The Mystic.

S: It’s from Moondance.

Me: It’s something else. Play it again, will ya?

………….

That was the first time I heard Into The Mystic.

Into the music.

Despite the beer (more than one 40 that night, I’m sure), the passage of time and the thousands of other songs I’ve heard for the first time since, those three minutes on that long-departed evening are still as clear as day, or a Mission summer night, to me.

They bring me back to that room every time.

The song’s one of a few dozen compositions that return me, within four beats, to the time and place that I either listened to or heard them first (I mean, really heard them).

Van Morrison has more of these tunes than most. The opening piano fill on St Dominic’s Preview puts me in Alamo Square Park on a sunny afternoon that same summer.

Beside You brings me to the house I grew up in in the Irish Midlands in the early hours during a late 1990s’ summer; Tupelo Honey to a climb of Carrauntoohil in 2010; Linden Arden Stole The Highlights to the kitchen of W’s home, overlooking the river Shannon, on an evening sometime in the past decade.

In such instances my mind’s-eye vision is such that I can almost step back into the scene, whenever, wherever. The piece of music kicks off a mental movie in my head.

Physiologically this seems to occur because our medial pre-frontal cortexes (the bit of the brain behind our foreheads) respond to both musical chord changes and, separately,  reflective auto-biographical recall. But at times the two functions overlap, it appears.

Why this happens more with Van Morrison (and a small number of other composers) is unknown to me.

‘Together we will float…’

Fast forward 15 years to the last time I heard Into The Mystic, a week ago. There were no 40 ouncers in a dusty room on that occasion. Two good friends of ours, R an P, had chosen it for the first dance at their wedding.

It was a fitting choice – a holistic hymn sung from the deck ahead of a voyage into a wonderful unknown future.

“The song is just about being part of the universe,” Van Morrison once explained.

A universe that stretches through time, space and memory from a long-gone night in San Francisco to an idyllic wedding ceremony on an Irish country estate.

And on, and on, into the music.

Home in the rue Cardinal Lemoine

At 74 Rue Cardinal Lemoine.
Pic: Clare Kleinedler

Ernest Hemingway’s ghost has long since fled the Place Contrescarpe, in the fifth arrondissement of Paris, and is likely easier found now in San Sebastian, Havana or Ketchum.

But Paris being Paris, the building where he lived in the early 1920s, “very poor and very happy” with his wife and newborn son, still stands.

I discovered this on a visit last weekend, when my wife and I walked up the winding Rue Cardinal Lemoine, away from the bustle of the Boulevard Saint-Germain.

There are more famous literary landmarks in the City of Light, and more famous Hemingway ones even.

But, on a pristine Parisian afternoon this small symbol of domesticity, hope, ambition and youth in a life later strewn with great success and personal wreckage was our destination.

The book which brought us there was A Moveable Feast, the collection of vignettes Hemingway wrote in Cuba in his last, declining years, at a remove of almost half a century from “the early days”, as he described them, spent as a journalist and sometimes-starving writer eking out a living in the cafes of Montparnasse.

The work famously contains distilled and stripped portraits of fellow writers, not least Hemingway’s fellow ex-pats Scott Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein (revealing how the latter borrowed her famous ‘lost generation’ comment from a local mechanic, no less). But written into and between these accounts are fascinating small details of the writer’s day-to-day acts of work, love, eating and drinking.

Clare and I had travelled to Paris from Dublin exhausted, pulled taut by stress, sleep-deprived and weary. Hemingway’s accounts of a less-complicated (on the surface only, of course) domestic and working life had appealed to us for sometime. And so we found ourselves outside a chipped blue door, beneath a simple white plaque, stepping aside as a resident returned home with her shopping.

Hemingway in Paris, 1924.
Pic: Ernest Hemingway Collection (JFK Presidential Library and Museum, Boston)

In 1922 Hemingway lived with Hadley Richardson on the third floor at 74 Rue Cardinal Lemoine, “a two-room flat that had no hot water and no inside toilet facilities…With a fine view and a good mattress and springs for a comfortable bed on the floor”.

Lunch there was “little radishes, and a good foie de veau with mashed potatoes and an endive salad. Apple tart”.

Rising early Hemingway walked to work daily, to a garret-room at a nearby hotel on Rue Descartes, where he would attempt to write “one true sentence, and then go on from there”. He later declared: “Work could cure almost anything, I believed then, and I believe now.”

Sitting on the Place Contrescarpe, dry and bright unlike its rain-lashed, impoverished appearance at the opening of A Moveable Feast, Clare and I discussed these simple pleasures and truisms.

Very poor rarely means very happy. And the opposite is not the case, either. So we go on seeking the balance. Some days or hours or nights, we find it.

That evening we returned to our rented apartment and later walked the hill at Montmartre to look on Paris below. Hungry, we went on to Le Comptoir des Belettes on Rue Lamarck, where we ate tartines and characturie and drank rose.

Then we returned home to the night breeze on our balcony, the Basilique du Sacré-Coeur above and the murmur of the streets below.

And we were happy.

Charcuterie plate at Le Comptoir des Belettes, 18e

All quotes in this post are from A Moveable Feast

The aching is the hardest part

Here’s two things all runners hate.

Runners’ little helper.

Anti-inflammatory meds and empty shoes. One of these is bad enough, both means you’ve either overdone it or been unlucky.

And so it’s been for me this week.

What started as a careless impact onto a piece of cracked pavement three weeks ago became, by last weekend, a darting pain in the joint of the big toe of my left foot.

The two weeks in between were where, as they say in the west of Ireland, Aughrim was lost.

I continued to run on the sore toe, and this led to a sore foot, which led to a second sore foot (as one overcompensated for the other), a sore leg and, eventually, (there’s a pattern developing) two sore legs.

There’s a simple question here, of course, that you don’t even need to ask.

But why couldn’t I stop running? Despite the darts of pain, the dull ache afterwards, the stiffness, the interrupted sleep and the frustration of all of the above, I kept it up.

Kicked to the kerb.

So, 120k later and in considerable discomfort I eventually decided to take a week off.

It’s my first week’s break in 21 months, a period which encompassed two Irish winters, one Irish summer (indistinguishable from an Irish winter, for the most part), my wedding and a couple of transatlantic and other trips.

It also covered a couple of weeks of shin splints and sundry bloodied toes.

So I’m probably due a break before I suffer one – at least that’s what I tell myself. But, as most runners know, a short-term injury spells at best boredom, at worst outright frustration.

In my case it’s constantly checking my foot and counting down the days to the end of my time off (having self-diagnosed the injury as a minor toe sprain).

As I’ve waited this week, fidgeting, glancing at my running shoes and thumbing through my albums, I’ve wondered why no-one’s written a suite of songs about sport injuries.

Perhaps they have. I vaguely recall seeing a Tom Petty interview in which he spoke of writing his song The Waiting while he recovered from a broken arm, unable to play his guitar.

Beyond that though there’s no Chariots Of Fire for the hobbled set.

Maybe it’s time to write one.

Or crank up Blood on the Tracks.

The pasta fresca test

On a roll.

You’re Irish? You like to eat pasta?

No you don’t. Not really.

Each Irish person eats a grand total of 1 kg of pasta every year.

That’s less than the hardly-well-known spaghetti-loving nations Guatamala (2kg) and Dominican Republic (4kg).

Needless to say it’s nowhere near the Italians’ incredible 26kg. In fact even the rice-renowned Japanese consume more of the carb than us (1.7kgs, for the record).

Irish consumption equates to about eight platefuls per annum. That’s one measly serving every six weeks.

Part of the reason for our lamentable take-up of one of the world’s most popular food staples may be the longstanding Irish obsession with potatoes. The most recent stat I can find sees us sucking down a staggering 143kg of spuds yearly.  (This is nothing compared to annual consumption of 766kg at the outbreak of the Great Famine in the 1840s, mind you).

It may also be because we prefer pizza. Or fried fast food. Who knows?

None of this occurred to me when I recently entered the kitchen, with An American In Ireland, to make some pasta.

Yes, that’s right – make. For many years pasta was something that, for me, had a five-step prep: snip, empty, boil, simmer, serve. But a successful dip a while back into the world of gnocchi-making convinced me to try making my own.

Cutting dough.

And, after three decades, I’ve also grown bored of the ‘boil, steam, bake or fry’ potato.

So pasta fresca it was. This was my first attempt too, but (as you might have read) I’m recently got hooked on the cucina povera recipes of Carluccio and Contaldo.

If I’m being honest it wasn’t the final taste I was going for (in the end I actually forgot one notable ingredient, a case of cucina idiota), nor the appearance.

What struck me as clever was the way you could mix the dough one-handed on a flat surface, by making a little crater in a mound of flour and dumping two eggs in. This was cuisine refined to a level so simple it didn’t require utensils. It was cooking, alpine style.

Pasta’s not something you should really need an individualised recipe for (at its simplest it’s all of two ingredients), but I used Contaldo’s one for tagliatelle, from his recent book.

This involved using my most versatile kitchen instrument, my right hand, to mix 300 grams of ‘00’ flour (best for pasta because of its high gluten content, food fact fans!) with 100 grams of semolina and two eggs. And pound, stretch, pound, stretch.

Tagliatelle fresca.

I took to all this with such gusto that I neglected to add the fourth ingredient, 125ml of white wine. Luckily Clare had stepped in to add some water to the mix instead, averting a dry dough disaster. Then it was a case of making a big ball of dough (like the mixing, more fun than it sounds written here), wrapping it in clingfilm and leaving it to one side for 30 minutes.

This is the point at which a sane person writes: ‘Then I took out my pasta maker’. In this case the pasta maker was me, and my wife. After some rolling and slicing we managed to cut our tagliatelle on the countertop. Foodies might call this ‘rustic’, I called it improvising.

From there it was simply a victory lap. We boiled the tangled little mounds for three minutes in salted water, and served with a mushroom and white wine we made on the side in that 30 minute window above.

So here it is. One of the eight plates of pasta that statisticians expect me to eat this year. They’ll be wrong.

Tagliatelle al vino bianco con funghi.

The high-bouncing gold-hatted Gatsby?

The veranda of a villa on the island of Capri, October 1924. A man and woman sit side-on to one another, each holding a glass.

‘Another gin?’

‘I am quite drunk. Yes. How about Among Ash-Heaps and Millionaires? It contains both.’

‘No. It requires a title for the ages. No ash-heaps.’

‘On The Road to West Egg?’

‘The road that passes by the ash-heaps? You’re fixated on dust.’

‘I am fixated on the title. It must be good, rather than fair or bad.’

‘I’m sick. I’m in pain. We are supposed to be celebrating. Decide. Please’.

Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald (gin not pictured).
Pic: Kenneth Melvin Wright (Minnesota Historical Society)

‘The High-Bouncing Lover.’

‘This isn’t one of your short stories. It must be magnificent, memorable. Yesterday it was gold hats. Today it’s bouncing.’

‘Something magnificent then. Under the Red, White and Blue. Remember the flag of light-bulbs in Harbor Hill last year?’

‘I’d forgotten. It must be something memorable. Extravagant. Tremendous.’

‘I had a line about the night when the lights fail at his mansion. His career as Trimalchio ends, I wrote. There’s a title: Trimalchio.’

‘You are drunk.’

‘Too obscure, perhaps. Trimalchio in West Egg?’

‘You can place him where you want. No one will be able to pronounce it. It must be something great.’

[Silence]

‘Another gin?’

‘I am quite drunk. Yes.’

Anne’s ghost was all around…before Bieber

Popular music and the tragic history of Nazi Europe collided before Justin Bieber visited the Anne Frank House museum and scribbled a hopeful note in the visitors’ book.

But unless you were tuned in to the US lo-fi scene of the mid-90s you might have missed it.

The Diary of A Young Girl

The connection is an album released in 1998 on the Merge Records label, called In The Aeroplane Over The Sea.

The story of this record began a year or so earlier when 27-year-old songwriter and driving force of Neutral Milk Hotel, Jeff Magnum, picked up a copy of Anne Frank’s published diary. He obsessed over its contents, telling an interviewer: “I would go to bed every night and have dreams about having a time machine and somehow I’d have the ability to move through time and space freely, and save Anne Frank.”

The schoolgirl’s story wasn’t the only subject Magnum composed on, but her life, death and dreamed-of salvation provided a fulcrum for his record. As he sang on the album’s title track: “Anna’s ghost all around/Hear her voice as it’s rolling and ringing through me.”

Holland, 1945. CD single cover art.

The careening ‘Holland, 1945′ is the album’s apex, with Magnum shifting from the tragic to the transcendental: “Then they buried her alive/One evening 1945/With just her sister at her side,
And only weeks before the guns/All came and rained on everyone/Now she’s a little boy in Spain/Playing pianos filled with flames/On empty rings around the sun…”

The album is an opus of seesawing emotions, crashing lows and explosive highs, a mix of guitars, shouted vocals, brass and marching rhythms. Magnum’s music is not indefinable, it’s just better listened to than described.  I doubt Beiber knows much of it but I doubt he’s too down with Anne Frank either.

Turn it up.

Baby Let Me Follow You Down…to a basement in Boston

UNLIKE most of Ireland I have no connection to Boston.

I never had a plumber uncle in Dorchester, cousins in the Boston Police Department or an older brother working as a barman and sometime GAA player.

I didn’t spend summers moving furniture and dossing with a dozen others in a sublet in Quincy, painting mansions on the North Shore or drinking in Southie’s Irish bars.

Growing up if you’d asked me about the place I might have mentioned a tea party, or how I never really watched Cheers, or why I really wanted to visit New York and how far was it to Massachusetts?

At Club Passim, October 2003.

That was until Boston – or rather Cambridge – gave me one of the best nights of my life.

It occurred in the salad days of my time as a (very) occasional singer and guitar player.

I pursued this vice sporadically and anonymously for a period in my 20s, playing in a garage band with friends in Dublin and in open mics wherever.

All of which brought me, one Autumn evening in October 2003, to Boston.

I could have come to the area for the history, the seafood, the city.

But instead my buddy S and I hauled ourselves and our guitar cases out of the Back Bay and to a small basement club, on a tiled alley called Palmer Street, close to Harvard Square in Cambridge.

This was (and is) the site of Club Passim, formerly Club 47, the hub of all things folk in the area since the 1960s.

A local student called Joan Baez got her start there, singing about silver daggers and homicide.

A tyro Bob Dylan played for free just to get onto the stage. Bruce Springsteen didn’t even make it that far – his plea for a spot was turned down.

It was that kind of place and just about everyone who was in anyone in my record collection had stepped up for a set there.

At first glance I wasn’t going to get within 900 Miles of the stage.

But once a month, in the finest folk tradition, the club ran an open mic, showcasing original songwriting. A couple of dollars membership, patience and luck might get you a five minute slot.

On stage at Club Passim, Cambridge, October 2003.

We paid up and took our places that night amidst the coffee-sipping, hummus-nibbling regulars.

Local after local got up and did their stuff. I was sure neither S nor myself, blowin’ in on spec, would get a look in.

But then one after another, and just before they shut down, we got the call. We took the stage together, with a plan to accompany one another on each other’s song (in the end I think we just played solo).

I could try to explain the head-shattering combo of joy, terror and release that I felt facing the room. Alas I was focusing so hard all I can truly recall is the spotlight and the microphone.

And the round of applause the good folkies of Boston gave me. It’s ringing in my ears to this day.

I’ve never been back to Club Passim. It’s still on Palmer Street and it’s flying the flag this week for music, free expression and all that true stuff.

It’s small story, but I’m grateful for what Cambridge laid on for us that night – a welcome, a leap of faith and a brief moment in the folk spotlight.

Starting at The End – How I Became A Journalist

THE first rule of journalism? Find the gravedigger.

Put all that talk about holding the powerful to account, the virtues of the Fourth Estate and Woodward and Bernstein to one side. And find the gravedigger. I’ll explain below.

I work as a journalist for a daily paper and website in Dublin, Ireland. I edit a lot and write a little. Like Mencken I’ve had more fun doing it than any other enterprise. I started my career 18 years ago, not by chasing gravediggers, but in a somewhat-related field: as an obituary writer.

I had joined my local weekly paper from school and must have showed a raw talent for lachrymosity – or an ability to spell a list of names correctly.

The Westmeath Independent’s obituary writer-in-chief, 1998

Because I found myself, every Wednesday and Thursday, scouring the death columns for the names of the locally recently departed.

This was followed by an awkward cold-call to a grieving relative with an offer of writing a piece about their loved one. I was often answered by sobbing husbands or wives, sons or daughters.  More than once I was asked: “Is this going to cost me?”

But, almost without fail, people recounted anecdotes about their loved ones and produced the necessary Sunday best picture.

These were the lives of ordinary people in a small Irish Midlands town at the latter end of a busy century. There were farmers who had rarely stepped away from their few acres, nurses who worked for 50 years before becoming old spinsters, barmen and brickies born in Athlone who’d lived and died in Brooklyn and Birmingham.

Occasionally you’d get a local worthy, a politician or priest, but most of my hours were spent distilling the lives of very ordinary people.

Each article was a life lived, some better or worse than others. And most had at least one nugget, a well-worn story or family legend that made the piece worth writing and, I hoped, reading.

Later I went to college where, for years, I was taught to ignore the gravedigger and focus on the Bigger Issues. But Gods make their own importance.

I doubt many of the articles I wrote in subsequent years – acres of crime writing, accounts from All-Ireland winning dressing rooms, op-eds on Miss World – were read as closely as those obituaries.

How does this relate to the gravedigger then?

The link comes by way of a legendary 1963 article written by the New York Daily News journalist Jimmy Breslin.

It’s an account of JFK’s funeral. Avoiding the usual roll-call of names and solemn prose it’s instead a story told from the point of view of the “$3.01 an hour” cemetery worker who prepares JFK‘s grave.

The burial of JFK at Arlington Cemetery.
Pic: USNPS

It’s an Ordinary Joe’s account of an extraordinary day, a piece which puts a regular guy to the front of history’s parade. Reading it this week it put me in mind of my formative days in the trade and dozens of people whose everyday lives, like Breslin and Clifton Pollard, I briefly did my best to bring front centre.

My reports weren’t in the same field as Breslin’s tribute to the common man but the ground rule was, and is, always the same. Find the gravedigger.

Can you hear me gnocching?

SIX months ago I sat, espresso in hand, reading John Cheever on a hillside balcony overlooking the Tyrrhenian Sea, as the sun set on a centuries-old Italian fishing village below.

Villa Frescura, Praiano, October 2012.

Six days ago I waded through horizontal rain and sub-zero Siberian easterlies to commute to a storm-lashed Dublin city centre. Needless to say the two days couldn’t have been further apart. At the outset at least.

Last week witnessed the start of a cold snap which lashed Ireland towards Easter in flurries of snow and icy winds. With a Friday off I had planned to hit Wicklow Mountains, a sub-1000m chain located near Dublin, for a day hike.

I’ve spent enough masochistic days in the Irish hills to know the true worth of the word ‘postpone’, though. So I nixed the trip, only to experience vintage mountain weather on the city streets instead.
After a couple of sodden chores I still had rain-lashed hours of the day ahead to fill and little idea how to do so.

Then it occurred to me. It was time to get back to the Amalfi Coast. After a visit there in the early 1950s John Steinbeck wrote that the area “becomes beckoningly real after you have gone.”

Memory, and how I engage with it, is something I’ll return to in other posts. Put briefly, I’ve found certain senses can bridge the years and return me to a particular time and place. In my 20s music did this. So did certain books. On occasion an aroma or fragrance would.

But, until I met my wife, I never really understood how people could recall specific meals, even dishes, and link these to the people they ate with, their lives at that time, their emotions, who they were.

I could have come home, fired up the coffee maker and pulled out ‘Goodbye, My Brother’. And it might have worked.

On a roll. Gnocchi coming together.

But instead I decided to try it with food. I had spent that blissful afternoon six months ago in Praiano, five miles from Minori, the Amalfi Coast hometown of chef Gennaro Contaldo.

An episode of Contaldo’s Two Greedy Italians’ show saw him return to his home town and cook a dish his mother would prepare on the feast day of Saint Andrew, the town’s patron saint.

The dish was simple: ricotta dumplings in a tomato and chilli sauce. Nothing, but nothing, speaks ‘comfort’ like these flour-based gnocchi. No better day for it.

Getting back to Italy took effort – from wading through the wet streets to measuring zero-zero flour gram by gram. This was my first batch of gnocchi and it wasn’t all smooth rolling. But after a brief wobble and a plea for advice from Clare I got the gluten working.

Pretty soon the dumplings were bobbing on the surface, ready to go. But the clincher, and what really returned me to Italy, was the smell of chilli, garlic and tomatoes wafting from the sauce.

Here were three simple and inexpensive ingredients that put me right back tableside at any of the half-dozen great meals we had in Praiano.

Dublin faded out and the setting was half a world away, my wife and I there again, in the villa on the hill above the sea. Thankful for the memory.

An American in Italy, in Ireland. Ricotta dumplings with braesaola salad.

A good night’s sleep? Only in my dreams

I’M not the world’s biggest Beatles’ fan. In fact I’m usually not even the room’s biggest Beatles’ fan. But, 50 years after they erupted onto the 20th Century, they’ve have burrowed deep into parts of my unconsciousness.

Just how deep only emerges at certain half-moments. I’m in the midst of doing something and suddenly, like a catchy genie, Paul McCartney steps into my head and launches, unannounced, into Blackbird.

Of late such cameos have been occurring between 3 and 5am. And the voice has been John Lennon’s, singing a song he wrote while sleepless at an Indian ashram in 1968.

I’ve read that I’m So Tired is either Lennon’s agonised cri die coeur for Yoko Ono, a song which exemplifies his Goons-style humour, or a tortured plea as he battled boredom without booze, drugs or cigarettes.

But to me it’s the simple, desperate appeal of a man who, despite fame, wealth and spiritual enlightenment, just can’t get to sleep.

Lennon’s reasons might be a little different to my own but his ‘I’d give you anything I got for a little piece of mind’ has occurred to me more than once as I’ve engaged in another night of ceiling watching.

Insomnia’s a senseless condition. My day job, working out and just being around in general usually see me exhausted by 10pm. And yet.

Until recently I’ve attributed this sleeplessness to my work. For the past number of years my job has entailed early starts, usually involving a 5am wake-up call, five days a week. I figured this kicked my circadian rhythm out – particularly as it put me in a different timezone to family and friends.

As time passed I’ve found other likely causes. I’ve blamed Dublin’s low-light winter murk for disrupting my sleep-wake rhythms. Alcohol, caffeine, late night food, use of electronic devices, loud noises, bad jokes – all these and more have been possible culprits at stages.

But the truth is I have no idea why I find myself grappling with insomnia. Not wanting to take sleeping meds every night I now resign myself to hoping that one evening it will simply stop.

To tweet, perhaps to dream.

There is a silver lining. I’ve watched any number of documentaries and movies that, if I had a regular sleep schedule, I never would have. The same applies to reading books. And I’m able to time my morning runs so I can watch the day break (if I can see the horizon through the rain).

I’d rather have Lennon’s “little peace of mind” though, in reality and not echoing around my head as I tinker with the dishwasher at 4am.

This week I’ve started new, later, working hours. Perhaps this will have an effect. Here’s hoping.

I’m So Tired. Good song but I never want to hear it again, ever.