Guns, Germs and Real Estate

(note)

My first glimpses of Plum Island, like most people’s, were from afar. I grew up in Wading River, amid cabbage fields and subdivisions, and when we made the 40-minute drive out to the tip of the North Fork, usually on the way to somewhere else, the island had a way of peeking into view.

As a kid in the ’80s, the ospreys’ nests and oyster beds that lined the route to the Cross-Sound Ferry terminal in Orient didn’t have much allure to me. I didn’t know then how precious the pockets of nature, and the moments of quiet, would come to feel as the undeveloped parts of Eastern Long Island got smaller and smaller. The fresh golf courses and the build-to-suit signs didn’t yet feel ominous. 

What never failed to transfix, though, was Plum Island. On school field trips to Boston or Mystic Seaport, we’d crowd up against the ferry railing and squint through the fog of Plum Gut toward the low beige buildings with smokestacks and ventilation pipes lining their roofs. Our knowledge of the island, and the gaps in it, added up to fascination. We knew it was a lab; we knew they experimented on animals; we knew there were diseases there that were best separated from the mainland by a cold, choppy body of water. And when “The Silence of the Lambs” came out when I was 14, we knew it was a place even Hannibal Lecter wouldn’t want to live.

“Anthrax Island,” the cannibal doctor called it, and he wasn’t alone. Real events there – a power outage, multiple disease leaks and an early history of weapons research – mingled in the popular imagination with the Montauk Monster and the stuff of campfire stories. 

“Look at that place,” wrestler/governor Jesse Ventura intoned years later, bobbing in a boat offshore for his conspiracy-theory TV show. “It’s a toxic ticking time-bomb for an outbreak of cataclysmic proportions.” 

How, then, could I pass up a visit?

*

It would have been unthinkable decades ago, but Plum Island today, under the auspices of the Department of Homeland Security, is open for tours. They don’t make it easy – there are background checks and restrictions, and forms to sign with warnings not to visit farms, zoos, stockyards, “various menageries,” or pet stores for days afterward. But by the time I showed my ID to a security guard in Orient and boarded the morning boat to the island on a clear day last spring, I had been preceded by Cub Scout troops, bird-watchers and volunteer firemen. 

I was there as a magazine reporter, a species that the island’s government minders now found surprisingly welcome, in large part because of Plum Island’s uncertain future. With plans to move the lab to Kansas and sell the island weaving through the branches of the federal government, Plum Island was now more than just the site of a secretive animal disease lab – it was real estate. I had an escort from Homeland Security, whose name I had to promise not to print, and two more from the General Services Administration, the branch of government that sells off excess property.

After processing on the island we loaded into a van and rode, past the vine-covered remains of Fort Terry and through a weedy former parade ground, to the East End’s quietest beach. The fort, dating to the Spanish-American War, once housed hundreds of soldiers but was declared surplus after World War II. Now, by the island’s southeastern shore, there were a volleyball court and a horseshoe pit used mostly on the lab’s family day, and a lifeguard chair that lay on its side. Except for scraps of driftwood, a spider crab shell, and a stray thermos and Wiffle Ball washed up from points west, the long stretch of white sand was pristine. And with good reason: Besides environmental protection specialists who pick up trash regularly, security guards on foot patrol do what they can to tidy up.

Cool water lapped at the beach, and crickets chirped in the field nearby. The view to the south, across Gardiners Bay, took in the broad sweep of the Hamptons. To the east was Block Island, and wide open ocean.

“Just watch your step,” my government escort said. “Because sometimes out here, you find little tortoises.”

*

Here is Plum Island’s greatest secret: It’s beautiful. The landscape, wild and untamed, is a taste of what the rest of Long Island must have looked like before all the people came. All it took to preserve it were a few buildings, on a few small lots around the island’s 840 acres, with enough contagious pathogens inside to scare away the world. 

But life abounds. Along the rocky northern shore, where purple beach blossoms line the road, an emergency medical technician out for a walk in the days before my visit came upon an injured red-tailed hawk. Other workers have spotted bald eagles. I saw a seal poke its head out of the water, one of hundreds that stop at the island in cold weather on the way to their breeding grounds. And nature, over the years, has been reclaiming territory. 

At the island’s eastern tip, down a bumpy gravel stretch of road, is a cluster of heavy concrete fortifications that once held gun batteries to defend the east coast from air and sea attack. Now they’re overgrown with weeds and brush. 

Another look at the horizon offered a hint of Plum Island’s possible futures. To one side, Gardiners Island, five privately owned square miles off the coast of East Hampton with their own history of development intrigue.  To another, Fishers Island, a playground for the wealthy with a military background much like Plum Island’s. Finally, in the distance, Little Gull Island, a tiny outcropping that was government-owned for the moment – though the GSA was on the case.

“The lighthouse sits on an acre of land,” one of the GSA guys said. “So we’re going to sell that.”

We stopped at another gun battery, where a brick room once used to house ammunition now held a drum, marked “non-hazardous waste.” Poison ivy lined the path in and out, and when we emerged, we all stopped to pick ticks off our pant legs.

It was the ticks, later, that nagged at me. When you’re on an island rumored to be the birthplace of Lyme disease, little things can unsettle. So can bigger things, like the ghostly block of a structure, near a spot called Pine Point, that once held the island’s biological weapons lab. First built to store mines, it was vacant now, its entrances sealed shut and its cinder-block walls covered in peeling paint and vines. A barbed-wire fence ringed its perimeter. Fifty feet away was the beach, long and empty. We stood on a gun fortification and took it all in.

“This could all be yours,” someone mumbled.

*

A place like Plum Island, though, is not disposed of easily. In the months after my visit, the funding for the Kansas lab dried up and talk of Plum Island’s sale went quiet – though the real estate listings remain. (My magazine story dried up, too; not enough conflict, the editor said.) There were also questions about the island’s real worth. Optimists in the government had floated sums of $100 million. A real estate agent told me he’d guess more like $40 million. Let’s say you build a house there, he said. Would you want your kid digging in the sand?

But maybe the island’s value lies beyond money. Much of Long Island, after all, was empty a century ago. Since then the wide roads and housing grids have spread ever-eastward, over woods and potato fields and most everything else in their path. In Southold, a few miles from Plum Island’s shores, real estate offices tout mansions priced in the millions of dollars and undeveloped lots for almost as much.

In context, 840 acres of wilderness – even 840 acres of wilderness with a carcass incinerator – begin to look precious. 

“Is everything really reduced to the marketplace?” Bob DeLuca, an East End activist, asked me. “Is everything just always for sale? Is everything always at a price that somebody can buy it if they have enough money? Or are there some things that we’re going to step back and say, enough?”

Perhaps Anthrax Island is an odd place to take that stand. But from the shoreline near the old weapons lab, as a breeze blows off the bay and a family of geese edges into the water, it looks like the best place we have left

So anyway ...

Oh, hi.  I've been meaning to post this next piece forever. It's based on reporting that I first did in the late spring of 2011 for a magazine story that never ran. I later rewrote it entirely for a contest I didn't win. It never really found a home, but I still like it -- which is to say, it holds a very special place in my heart and I'm proud of it despite its weird process of coming into being. Fortunately the editor here lets me post whatever I want.

I can no longer vouch for the accuracy of current events, but the sentiments I'll stand behind. Please enjoy.

I can't believe I forgot Carl Bernstein

This was one of the best ones.  I'm actually going to paste this into my earlier post about celebrity writer encounters, but I figured, for people who aren't obsessively reading that post over and over again (and why?), it might be easier to find here.  So:

Carl Bernstein, reporter. April 2007
I was in Sag Harbor to write a story for the Escapes section (R.I.P.) about a rich guy's vacation home. At first I thought it was Bob Weinstein, the movie producer, but then they said no, it's a different Bob Weinstein. As it turns out, this Bob Weinstein probably has much cooler furniture -- not that I'm familiar with the movie producer's furniture, but this Bob made a pastime of scouring antique stores and Manhattan flea markets for mid-century modernist pieces: Eero Saarinen tables and whatnot. So I'm in Sag Harbor to see this house, and we decide to take a walk over to a design store that he particularly likes -- partly so I can get more of a sense of his decorating sensibility and partly, I imagine, so he can get his friend's store in the paper. In the store, a sort of schlubby older guy is browsing the driftwood candle holders or whatever, and I think, "That dude looks familiar." Bob Weinstein apparently had no such thought, but being in a chatty mood said something about the weather. They before you know it, they're hitting it off, going back and forth on the virtues of in-town vs. waterfront property in the Hamptons.  (As I recall, the feeling is that waterfront is nice but then you've got to worry about global warming.) All the while, my mind is locked in on a question: "Hey, is that Carl Bernstein?" I didn't want to interrupt, for some reason, and we're actually about to leave the store, when finally Bob Weinstein introduces himself to the guy. And the guy is like, "Nice to meet you. I'm Carl." I finally can't take it anymore, and say, "Carl Bernstein?" He says yes and I say, Oh hi, I'm a reporter and a big fan -- Watergate, etc. -- and I'm writing a story about this guy's house ... pointing over at Bob, who has kind of a blankish look on his face while he tries to remember who Carl Bernstein is. He eventually caught up, though, and I think we then talked about whether Hillary Clinton was going to get elected president. (Did Bernstein say no? I think he might have said no.)  And then Bob Weinstein, having fully recovered his bearings, invited Carl Bernstein back for a tour of his house. Bernstein -- who if he wasn't wearing flip-flops might as well have been -- said what the heck, and we all trouped over there on some narrow village street, and checked out the work in progress on the pool house. The Hamptons are so weird.

Cool story, bro

Really fascinating reading about this guy's day at the Johan Santana no-hitter. Though maybe next time they might consider giving that precious Sunday-paper real estate to ... someone who likes baseball? ... and cares to explain it to his kids? ... and knows how to read the scoreboard? ... and is AWARE THAT HE'S WATCHING A NO-HITTER? Otherwise, solid stuff.*

The crazy thing is that, just off the top of my head, I can think of another person who was at the game with his kids, who satisfies all of the above criteria, and who happens to be a professional writer and contributor to the Times. But not a staff writer, so probably nobody thought to ask for his impressions. Sigh.

Which reminds me, did I ever mention that I'm in this book?  I had avoided buying it for years, because somehow paying for edited-down versions of my own work, shortly after the section in which that work appeared was eliminated to save the publisher money, didn't seem palatable.  Also, in the introduction Anna Quindlen, who seems nice, made a point of saying that all stories in the book were written by Times staffers. Ha ha ha, I wish, right?

Anyway, I finally caved and bought it recently, and it's a pretty good read and a lovely keepsake.  I'd suggest purchasing it the way I did, by letting Amazon find you a used copy online. It's a fraction of the price, and you know that at least some of your money is going to support a business that really deserves it: A used-book store. They are a dying industry, after all.


* Not really. (Just so as not to be a complete hater, I should acknowledge that the same reporter has written really, really good things in recent months.  Just not this.)

Book Signings I Have Attended (And Other Encounters With Notable Writers)

Seymour Hersh, investigative reporter. October 2004
He had an event in the New Yorker Festival, promoting his book, "Chain of Command," which was great even the revelations in it about the Bush administration didn't end up making much of a difference, politically speaking. He comes across as intense and possibly crazy in a lot of the profiles you read of him, but was really sweet. When I got up to his table I told him that he had spoken at my journalism school commencement a couple of years earlier. He smiled and asked what I was doing now. I actually wasn't doing half bad at the time, but got embarrassed and stammered something about writing very short things in the Times, nothing nearly as important, of course, as what he did. He said, "That's OK -- you just have to get a toehold in the business, do whatever you can do. Stick around and you can write the things you want later."
Inscription: "For Jake -- Thanks for coming. Seymour Hersh, New York, Oct. '04"

Robert Caro, biographer. April 2007
He gave a talk at the journalism school and they invited alumni to attend for free -- which was nice, because Columbia usually tries to wring every last dollar they can out of you, even though you've already paid them $30,000 or so for a degree in a field with no jobs.  Ahem, anyway.  I took the train uptown from Brooklyn on a Wednesday afternoon and there he was in the lecture hall, looking dapper in a tailored suit as always. The hall was, depressingly, about 40 percent full. (J-school kids: The Worst.) I remember he talked about Lyndon Johnson a bit, and the Power Broker a bit. This was during a time when there was a lot of Robert Moses revivalism going on -- "Does New York need another Robert Moses?" and other such silliness. He seemed kind of peeved about it. When somebody asked him about a historian who had disputed one of the facts in the book, he said, "What historians don't understand is that you can call people up on the phone and ask them these things," and he detailed how one of Moses' cronies had been the direct source of the disputed information in a conversation they had. I had previously found a hardcover first edition of the Power Broker at the Strand, and brought it for him to sign. I tried to say something about how important his work was to my life and career but got way flustered and just sort of thrust it at him and robotically told him my name. Meanwhile some undergrad, the editor of the Columbia Spectator or something, asked him if he'd meet their staff for a beer, and he said yes without hesitation.
Inscription: "To Jake, from Robert A Caro"
Bonus inscription, from the book's original owner: "To Maria, Merry Christmas 1974, Your husband with love," with an arrow pointing to a spot in Westchester on the map at the front of the book. Next to it, it says "our house."

David Samuels, magazine writer. Winter/spring 2003 sometime
OK, so it's a step down in famousness, but the guy is great. Check out his piece about Woodstock '99, or about Stevie Wonder playing the Super Bowl halftime show (both available in his book, "Only Love Can Break Your Heart," though not, alas, for free on the internet). He talked to my j-school class about how hard it is to make a living as a magazine writer, recounted having lived in Jersey City with heroin addicts to make ends meet. He's fine now: In Cobble Hill, I think, with equally successful journalist wife. And I didn't ask him to sign anything. But I still think about that story, even though the lesson in it seems to keep changing on me.

Jonathan Mahler, magazine writer. 2005 sometime
Went to hear him read from "Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx is Burning" at the Barnes and Noble in Park Slope. Afterward waited in line to get it signed, hoping to strike up a conversation with him about 1977, the year of my birth and the subject of his book. Thought I might tell him about this story my mom tells, about how she, pregnant, was driving in the city with my young female cousin, and their car broke down, right around the time the Son of Sam was still at large. They were fine, obviously, but it was scary at the time because basically everybody was totally freaking out about everything. I was almost at the front of the line, thinking all this over, when the guy directly in front of me struck up a conversation of his own with Jonathan Mahler. I guess they were neighbors or something. Mahler, still talking to the other guy, reached for my book to sign it without even looking up. For some reason, like it was a really important thing to tell him, I said, "I'm really interested in your book because I was born in 1977." He looked up then, and said, "Oh, in the city?" and I said, "No." He looked at me for a second, confused, and turned back to to his neighbor, handing me my book.  A while later I read it and thought it was just OK, kind of a missed opportunity. A while after that I sold it for a dollar at a stoop sale.
Inscription: unknown.

Tom Vanderbilt, magazine writer. December 2010
He writes about transportation issues for big magazines. It's a good gig, because if some nobody off the street pitches a story about transportation issues to one of these places, that person gets told thanks but no thanks because that stuff is generally regarded as boring as hell. But this guy does it well, and has made a real career out of it, which is great. He wrote a book about traffic. I didn't go to any kind of a signing, though, and in fact haven't read the book, though I keep meaning to. When I met him was when I bought a used office chair from him -- a white mesh knockoff (but a pretty good one) of an Eames "Aluminum Group" management chair. His wife turned out to be Jancee Dunn, also a writer, who I very specifically remembered from when I was obsessed with Rolling Stone as a teenager, and also from when she was an MTV VJ. Got a little starstruck, to be totally honest. They lived in a building I had always wondered about, a converted church I used to walk past, and they actually knew my stuff somehow, and said nice things about it. I mentioned that my wife was pregnant and we talked about babies for a while. I left their place thinking, "Jeez, you really can, theoretically, make a living doing this." The chair is still in good shape.
Side note: Around this same time I also sold our portable dishwasher to Bryce Goggin, a record producer best known, to me, as the guy who played piano on Pavement's song "Range Life." Craigslist is amazing.

David Simon, former journalist and creator of The Wire. March 2007
He talked at the j-school (it was free, too, though I think as alumni we may actually have had to sneak in). Most of what I remember is the incredibly pompous moderator, a student, naturally (j-school kids: Terrible!), who mostly held forth on why, in his opinion, the Wire was important to society. But Simon got to speak too and it was probably good -- though, from what I vaguely remember, pretty ornery at times. I had recently read his first book, "Homicide: A Year On the Killing Streets," which had been the basis for one of my favorite shows in high school, "Homicide: Life On the Street." NBC aired it on Friday nights so basically nobody watched it. But I was a dork and never had plans so I sat home with my mom and caught basically every episode. Anyway, the book was good, and I brought it to the talk. There was no official signing and I was a little bummed, but then afterwards I happened to see Simon on the downtown subway platform at 116th Street. I psyched myself up and went over to him and asked him to sign my book, and he did, and it would have been great if things had ended there. Unfortunately the train came right then, and we ended up getting on next to each other, and standing near each other, awkwardly. For some reason I tried to make conversation by saying something like, "Man, j-school kids -- terrible, huh?" He looked annoyed. I realized, too late, that he couldn't know I was a former j-school kid, and therefore that I was being at least a little bit self-deprecating. He muttered something like, "I thought it was a nice event," and then I didn't know what to say. After a long pause I asked him if his show about New Orleans had gotten a green light, and he said they weren't sure yet. Then he looked at me and I looked at him and I decided to go sit at the other end of the car.
Inscription: "All Best - David Simon 3/26/07"

Dan Barry, New York Times columnist. 2007 sometime
His columns about New York City, when he wrote for the Metro section, were great. (Check this one out for a taste.) They're compiled in a book called "City Lights: Stories About New York," and I went to see him read at a Barnes and Noble, I think, near NYU. At the time I was writing for the City section, and was about to start writing the section's front-page column, and he was somebody I specifically wanted to model my work on. There weren't a ton of people there, and I spotted a few people I recognized from the Times, but there were also some people who were obviously very devoted readers. Afterwards I got in line to get my book signed, and when it was my turn he started asking me all kinds of questions about myself, and acting sincerely interested, too. I didn't even get a chance, until after he had signed the book, to mention that I also wrote for the Times (though as a freelancer, as they were always careful to make sure I understood), and was starting a column. Eventually I got brave and told him, and he was really nice.  There was talk that we'd have coffee sometime and talk more, but it never worked out, for boring scheduling reasons. I still make a point of looking for his stuff, though.
Inscription: "To Jake -- From Long Island, now in Brooklyn -- like me. Dan Barry"

Carl Bernstein, reporter. April 2007
I was in Sag Harbor to write a story for the Escapes section (R.I.P.) about a rich guy's vacation home. At first I thought it was Bob Weinstein, the movie producer, but then they said no, it's a different Bob Weinstein. As it turns out, this Bob Weinstein probably has much cooler furniture -- not that I'm familiar with the movie producer's furniture, but this Bob made a pastime of scouring antique stores and Manhattan flea markets for mid-century modernist pieces: Eero Saarinen tables and whatnot. So I'm in Sag Harbor to see this house, and we decide to take a walk over to a design store that he particularly likes -- partly so I can get more of a sense of his decorating sensibility and partly, I imagine, so he can get his friend's store in the paper. In the store, a sort of schlubby older guy is browsing the driftwood candle holders or whatever, and I think, "That dude looks familiar." Bob Weinstein apparently had no such thought, but being in a chatty mood said something about the weather. They before you know it, they're hitting it off, going back and forth on the virtues of in-town vs. waterfront property in the Hamptons.  (As I recall, the feeling was that waterfront is nice but then you've got to worry about global warming.) All the while, my mind is locked in on a question: "Hey, is that Carl Bernstein?" I didn't want to interrupt, for some reason, and we were actually about to leave the store, when finally Bob Weinstein introduced himself to the guy. And the guy was like, "Nice to meet you. I'm Carl." I finally couldn't take it anymore, and said, "Carl Bernstein?" He said yes and I said, Oh hi, I'm a reporter and a big fan -- Watergate, etc. -- and I'm writing a story about this guy's house ... pointing over at Bob, who has kind of a blankish look on his face while he tries to remember who Carl Bernstein is. He caught up, though, and I think we then talked about whether Hillary Clinton was going to run for president. (Did he say no? I think he might have said no.)  And then Bob Weinstein, having fully recovered his bearings, invited Carl Bernstein back for a tour of his house. Bernstein -- who if he wasn't wearing flip-flops might as well have been -- said what the heck, and we all trouped over there on some narrow village street, and checked out the work in progress on the pool house. The Hamptons are so weird.

Pete Hamill, famous writer. March 2008
My friend and fellow reporter Jeff and I went to see a panel on column-writing that the Times put on. It was a thing they sold tickets to, to the public, but I somehow wrangled free ones, on account of being a freelancer with a column myself. Not that getting the tickets was easy for a person in that position, but they did materialize. Dan Barry was there and Jimmy Breslin, who was pretty cool, and Pete Hamill and some others. My dad is a big Pete Hamill fan, so I had tracked down this memoir he wrote about how he gave up drinking (I'm fuzzy because I didn't actually read it myself).  It was not super easy to find in my local stores but I got it, and went to the talk, which was good. Afterwards I waited in line to see Hamill, and when I got up to the front, tried to say something about how I always admired his writing and my dad was a big fan, but he just sort of grunted and held his hand out for the book and looked past me at the next person in line. I dunno, I don't want to say he was a jerk. Bad day, maybe? I had planned to borrow the book from my dad and read it, but decided nevermind.
Inscription: unknown.

Jon Lee Anderson, New Yorker writer, biographer, international journalist. September 2005
This guy writes incredibly ballsy stuff from places that most people generally try to avoid going to. I'm thinking of one piece where he hung around with gangsters in Rio, basically risking his life. Also Iraq, Egypt during their uprising, etc. And it should be said that this is not a young guy, or one who especially needs the money.  He was doing a talk at the Union Square Barnes and Noble, I think about his Iraq book, and we really wanted to go. Laura, having read him more, especially wanted to go. Anyway, we missed it for some reason, but went to the Barnes and Noble anyway and were hanging around and happened to spot Jon Lee Anderson, alone, sort of packing up his things to go home. Laura didn't want to bother him, but I, being generally the pushy one in the relationship, said I'd go over. I grabbed a copy of his Che Guevara biography off the shelf and walked up to him and said, "Excuse me, are you Jon Lee Anderson?" He said yes and I explained that it was almost my wife's birthday and we were big fans, even though we had missed his talk for whatever reason. He signed the Che book, and was really nice!
Inscription: "For Laura, With my best, on your birthday. Jon Lee Anderson, NYC 9/25/05"

Saki Knafo, Caroline Dworin, Greg Beyer, Katie Bindley, me. November 2010
We were all in a compilation of stories from the City section, which I think it's fair to say we all loved working for and missed a lot at that point. And still do, though I guess if you said some of us (me) need to move on, I'd concede your point.We all read our stories (and Helen Benedict, too, who is a way bigger deal than us but was totally gracious about that), and then afterwards there was a stack of books for us to sign. I remember a moment, when I was writing, "Thanks for reading! -- Jake Mooney" in book after book, when I thought to myself, "How is this not vandalism?" Though of course now, those guys are basically all legit famous, with hundreds of Twitter followers and whatnot, and I'm Pete Best or something. Still, I'm just saying that writing your name in a stranger's book is weird, and I wonder if it ever stops feeling that way.

Robert Caro, biographer. May 2012
He was at Barnes and Noble (who I swear is not paying me a fee for mentioning them so many times in here). I got there at the last minute and sat in the literal back row, about 50 yards away from him, before deciding to stand up, in an area behind that. The guy next to me let me borrow his binoculars, and later leaned over to say that he had been a teenage volunteer, in West Virginia, on some of Lyndon Johnson's anti-poverty programs. Caro's talk was great as always, and actually made me a little teary-eyed when he talked about the poverty Johnson came from and how, consequently, he hated injustice for the rest of his life. (Not that he, Johnson, wasn't a complete dick a lot of time too, which Caro also chronicles in detail.) At the end of the talk they let people up to get their books signed, row by row, which meant that I was one of the last people to go up, out of hundreds. I decided it would be cool if my friend Wolfgang could take a picture of me with Caro, and gave him my camera. I got up to the podium, which was when I realized just how fast Caro was signing these books -- really fast, faster than you might think possible. It was a whole system: One of his assistants took the book from you and opened it to the proper page, then lined it up on the table next to all the other people's books, sliding the whole row down every couple of seconds as he wrote. Then a different assistant whisked each signed book away from him and handed it back to you. Maybe because it was getting late, I was getting serious Santa-Claus-in-A-Christmas-Story vibes. With the angry elves (though in this case, with degrees from Brown or wherever) herding everybody along. So I put my book down for the one assistant, took a deep breath, and said, in my friendliest voice, "Mr. Caro, could I take a picture with you?" He smiled and said, "Sure," and I said, "Well, my friend is right over ..." at which point both of the assistants, and I think maybe some other people too, started whisper-shouting, "He can't pose for pictures! He can't pose for pictures!" Before I knew it my book was signed and back in my hands and I was down from the podium, standing next to Wolfgang, who is a great computer programmer but maybe not the quickest photographer (though to be fair, my camera is crap).  Long story short, here's the picture he took:

Inscription: "Robert A Caro"

Some Running Videos

Hey, here are some running videos.  Basically I've been geeking out watching them lately, and I should be in bed right now, but I don't like seeing a two-month-old post at the top of this thing.  So check these out!  I think they're great as drama, even if you're not into running.

They're also a corrective to the tendency that a lot of Americans (myself included, I admit) have to lump all African runners together.  Like, "the Kenyans," or, "the Ethiopians."  There are a lot of colorful personalities on display here if you can get past the hard-to-pronounce names. Especially Sammy Wanjiru, R.I.P.

Oh, and another thing they're a corrective to: people getting obsessed and/or dogmatic about form. Don't get me wrong -- form is important and I think about it all the time.  But in this class I coach I was lecturing people about not holding your arms too high, not swinging them side to side, etc. etc. And some of these guys break a whole bunch of "rules" (even sometimes heel-striking ... the horror ... the horror), all while running 4:30 miles for two hours straight.  So hey, whatever.  To an extent, I think you run how you run.  But, you know, first world problems.

Anyway, without further ado. The first one is my favorite but the second one is pretty badass too.

In Honor of the Grammys

Not really, actually. It's just a coincidence that I wanted to do a music post this week. I was driving around listening to the radio the other day -- I think it was WFMU -- and heard some good stuff that surprised me, and it reminded me of some other good stuff that I had weirdly always dismissed but had just recently found myself liking. And since the Grammys are about nothing if not ignoring and dismissing good music, it seemed like a worthwhile tie-in.

So yeah, I was driving around, scanning through the preset stations on my incredibly crappy car's even crappier stereo, when this came on:

Now I had heard this song lots of times, of course. I listened to a ton of "oldies" radio as a kid, because that's what my mom always had on the car stereo. But somehow I never really registered the, I don't know, vehemence, of way this guy, Levi Stubbs, sings this. I somehow did not remember the Four Tops having this much soul.  Silly me. (There's going to be a lot of that in this post.)

Also, you don't totally get it in that live clip, but hearing the studio version through my car's speakers, I was struck by the robustness, the fatness, of the orchestration behind them. I've heard a bunch of times that a lot of Motown songs were produced in a way that basically optimized them for car stereo speakers. The consequence being that they sound perfect in a car, which is where the producers figured most people were going to hear them in those days, whereas they actually sound kind of crappy through a much more expensive high-end stereo. There must be something to this, because this song sounded great.

A short time after it was over -- maybe immediately after, which is the beauty of WFMU -- this came on:

When it first started, I didn't even recognize it as a Bob Dylan song, which is kind of something, because I'm a pretty big Bob Dylan fan. Not a going-through-his-trash kind of big fan, necessarily, but the kind of big fan who at least knows the name of the guy who went through his trash.  At the very least, I thought I knew all of his good songs.  But this, obviously, is a good song, and I didn't know it.

The thing that really gets me is that I got most of my early exposure to Dylan by playing my dad's old records when I was a kid/teenager.  And my dad definitely has this record, which I remember specifically because I played it -- once.  I must have been going through a period in which I was obsessed with a different era of Dylan, most likely the mid-60s electric rock stuff that's still my favorite. Because all I remember is that I put it on, listened to maybe one side, though more likely just a song or two, and was like, "This sucks."  And then didn't revise that opinion again for something approaching 20 years.  So, oops.  One annoying consequence of that chain of events is that I don't even have the record on vinyl -- and I've got my share of minor and kind of shitty Dylan records. (Like, I dunno, Knocked Out Loaded, the totally excellent Brownsville Girl notwithstanding.)

What I'm saying is, if anybody wants to give me a copy of New Morning, I'd take it.

A much less youthful error in judgment, I was thinking the other night, involves Fugazi. These guys have never done it for me, which has always been vaguely embarrassing, because you hate to be the wimp who doesn't like punk rock or whatever.  I'm honestly not even sure if I was adequately differentiating between them and other punk, or hardcore, or whatever they are. (Are Fugazi hardcore? God, this is making me feel lame.) I just knew they were kind of shouty and I wasn't into it. Well, long story short, I fell down a Youtube hole the other day and am, if not a hundred percent rehabilitated, then at least feeling a lot more open-minded.

I think what I had been missing, to my discredit, was the percentage of their sound that comes from reggae -- the jumpy rhythms that make them kind of danceable in ways that don't involve punching people in the face. (Not that Fugazi would condone such violence, of course.) Their danceability is on infectious display here:

I think if I could be one guy in Fugazi it'd have to be the guy who could dance like that ... even if he was also sort of responsible for emo.  I'd want to borrow Ian's guitar, though.

Last on my list of weirdly overlooked stuff is Husker Du, another band that I also got obsessed with on Youtube the other night, and that I have no real excuse for not being into before. I like the Replacements, who were from the same time and place and engaged in similar substance abuse and let it affect them similarly. And a bunch of years ago a friend gave me a burned CD of "New Day Rising," probably their best-known record. I don't know what to say; something about it just put me off.  I think it was actually Bob Mould's guitar tone. That might sound a little crazy, but if anybody's guitar tone can be polarizing, it's Bob Mould's.  And I like loud guitars, too. This just, at the time, seemed to cross too far into abrasive territory.

So, maybe I've changed or maybe I just wasn't listening very well then, but what I missed, in Husker Du's case, were the strong melodies behind all that blaring and scraping. This isn't their song, but it's too good not to link (and I went with the audio-only clip because of sound quality) :

They have lots of great songs that they wrote, too, obviously. Let's just call that homework, for all of us.

So there you have them, my lapses in taste, laid to rest at long last. Everybody's got blind spots, though, and that's what brings me to these last two clips. Both came to me, in a sense, by way of a book I read recently called Pulphead, by John Jeremiah Sullivan. It's a compilation of essays and magazine stories by a guy who writes for GQ, the Paris Review, and basically, lately, wherever the hell he wants. As a writer I'm pretty jealous of him, because he's really good.

Anyway, he's got a piece about Axl Rose that is certainly the best thing I've read about him. (It's here, though the longer unabridged version in the book is well worth seeking out.) I was talking to somebody the other day who liked the story a lot but was still unconvinced about Guns N' Roses -- he's basically Axl's age, and I gather that a contemporary, and one who was making music at the same time on top of that, probably viewed Axl differently than my goofy idol-worshipping adolescent self did. Which is fine. But a point that Sullivan makes, and one that I realize I agree with, is that, considering the era and the scene that GnR came up through, and who a lot of their contemporaries were ... they were really quite punk in a way.  I don't want to take it too far.  They were no Husker Du, or Replacements, even if Axl did later manage to steal the latter band's bassist for one of the depressing GnR cover bands he wound up touring with. But I do subscribe to the idea that they represented some transition between, say, Motley Crue and Nirvana. (Kurt Cobain would have hated that sentence, but then he was no fun anyway -- and whatever you want to say about Axl, at least he never married Courtney Love.)

Regardless, Axl in those days was just transfixing to watch. So if you just think of him at this point as a fat weird paranoid Alien-with-a-facelift-looking dude, maybe just check this out. Give it a chance, because things really start to get nuts a little past the five-minute mark:

Anyway, I think it's great, and if that doesn't convince you then probably nothing will.

I don't have much of a segue for this next one -- I've now stayed up too late dorking out about this stuff, considering that my daughter is like a malfunctioning alarm clock that goes off on time but also goes off at random other times too. But the Sullivan book also has a story about Bunny Wailer, one of the original members of the Wailers, Bob Marley's band. It, again, is really good -- maybe infuriatingly so if you write for a living. (I have a sense of how the other blues musicians felt after Robert Johnson sold his soul for guitar skills.)

Anyway, anyway.  If you're like me, you probably listened to the Bob Marley greatest-hits record, Legend, more times than was healthy during a relatively narrow period around the end of high school or beginning of college. It's basically impossible, if you've done that, to appreciate his music afresh.  I've basically ruined him for myself, as I did Jimi Hendrix, during the same period. (Somehow Dylan made it through my solitary obsessiveness unscathed, thank God.)

But then there are clips like this:

Just so much coolness.

Long story short, I'm going to really focus, and as soon as I can sing like Levi Stubbs, dance like Guy Picciotto and wear a pair of sunglasses like Peter Tosh, I shall launch a late-in-life second career and rule the world. Please join me. It'll be great.