Start Spreading The News

The view at dawn Wednesday morning from our hotel in midtown, looking south along 3rd Ave. We arrived on the redeye from LAX -- a homecoming for Bronx-born Kathy and for me, too, since we both worked in New York for former President Nixon for many years. Both my daughters were born in Manhattan.

Kathy's superior instincts told her that we'd find a diner on 2nd Ave. We bought the papers -- actual printed newspapers, the Times, the Daily News -- and had eggs and coffee and juice. Then Kathy went to St. Patrick's Cathedral and I went looking for a Village Voice, which, I was distressed to find, is now just a flimsy giveaway like its sister paper OC Weekly and no longer the two-section authoritative cultural and political source book that I left behind in 1990. It still carries Michael Musto's column, though. This week he interviewed Joan and Melissa Rivers. He asked Joan about Golden Globe fashions. She said, "Meryl Streep is the best actress alive, but she looked like was wearing the Temple Grandin collection. Meryl, call me."

One Size Serves All The People

OC Weekly's web site is clunky and confusing, and it's not the only one. It was evidently designed by someone at parental unit company Village Voice Media, since the New Times site in Phoenix (a sister paper to the Weekly that broke Sheriff Joe Arpaio's endorsement of Richard Nixon) uses the same template. Reminds me of MLB teams sharing the same basic web design, which is also appalling. You'd expect lefties, at least, to struggle against corporate conformity.

Among the early editors of the Valley of the Sun's venerable alternative rag was a family friend named Daniel Ben-Horin (shown here), referred to in a comment under this 2007 post. Ben-Horin and my mother, Jean Sharley Taylor, worked together at the Arizona Republic in the late 1960s until conservative publisher Eugene Pulliam, Dan Quayle's celebrated relation, pitched a series of fits over the paper's centerward drift during the Nixon era. Daniel was fired, and my mother quit when Pulliam fired her editor, J. Edward Murray, who'd balked when Pulliam requisitioned the front page for a pro-Nixon editorial.

Daniel later founded CompuMentor, a Bay Area organization that distributes software to non-profits. My mother and I moved to LA, where she went to work for the LA Times -- and I ended up going to work for Richard Nixon in San Clemente.

Groovin' Up Slowly

Whenever I hear two songs in a row on the radio by the same artist, I still wonder if somebody died. On the evening of Dec. 8, 1980, WNEW-FM, then New York City's flagship rock station, played a long John Lennon block. Then the DJ (had they brought in the legendary Scott Muni that dark night? I can't quite recall) said that Lennon had been murdered outside his and Yoko Ono's apartment building at 72nd St. and Central Park West.

By then, I'd been working for former President Nixon for three months in his office in 26 Federal Plaza. The next day I typed out a few pages saying that Lennon and the 37th president, as prophets of peace, had been toiling in different sections of the same vineyard. Yes, it was impossibly callow. Among other things, my essay overlooked the FBI's surveillance of Lennon during the Vietnam war, though I probably got in a lick or two about the naivete of Lennon's facile if heartfelt peace talk.

Two of Nixon's more senior aides, Paul Bateman and Ray Price, wisely induced me not to submit it to the Village Voice, which had been my plan. But when someone else wrote to the Voice saying that if a Beatle had to get shot, too bad it wasn't Paul McCartney, I did submit a letter taking umbrage, which, as I recall, was published. Another letter to the Voice around the same time said in its entirety: "Imagine John Lennon with no possessions," which seemed churlish then and even more so now.

At Strawberry Fields, in Central Park right across from the Dakota, sitting crossed-legged and flashing the two-fisted peace sign appears to be de rigueur. Maybe there was something to the Nixon comparison, since tourists standing in the doorway of his chopper at the Nixon library do pretty much the same thing. When Kathy and I visited the Lennon memorial on Friday, it was more moving than ever. To have just recorded tunes as sweet as "Woman" and "Watching the Wheels," to have been so contentedly in love, to have one of the greatest rock and roll voices ever (think "Twist and Shout" and "Yer Blues"), and to die at 40. You get to be my age, and the poignancy and tragedy definitely creep up on you. Come together, right now!

I first posted this on September 26, 2009.

If Movie Critics Ruled The World

Village Voice film editor Allison Benedikt:

[I]f you knew Roman Polanski like we know Roman Polanski, you would surely understand how artistically narrow-minded it is to treat him like a rapist just because he raped someone.

Hat tip to 3quarksdaily.com

Groovin' Up Slowly

Whenever I hear two songs in a row on the radio by the same artist, I still wonder if somebody died. On the evening of Dec. 8, 1980, WNEW-FM, then New York City's flagship rock station, played a long John Lennon block. Then the DJ (had they brought in the legendary Scott Muni that dark night? I can't quite recall) said that Lennon had been murdered outside his and Yoko Ono's apartment building at 72nd St. and Central Park West.

By then, I'd been working for former President Nixon for three months in his office in 26 Federal Plaza. The next day I typed out a few pages saying that Lennon and the 37th President, as prophets of peace, had been toiling in different sections of the same vineyard. Yes, it was impossibly callow. Among other things, my essay overlooked the FBI's surveillance of Lennon during the Vietnam war, though I probably got in a lick or two about the naivete of Lennon's facile if heartfelt peace talk.

Two of RN's more senior aides, Paul Bateman and the legendary Ray Price, wisely induced me not to submit it to the Village Voice, which had been my plan. But when someone else wrote to the Voice saying that if a Beatle had to get shot, too bad it wasn't Paul McCartney, I did submit a letter taking umbrage, which, as I recall, was published. Another letter to the Voice around the same time said in its entirety: "Imagine John Lennon with no possessions," which seemed churlish then and even more so now.

At Strawberry Fields, in Central Park right across from the Dakota, sitting crossed-legged and flashing the two-fisted peace sign appears to be de rigueur. Maybe there was something to the Nixon comparison, since tourists standing in the doorway of RN's chopper at the Nixon Library do pretty much the same thing. When Kathy and I visited the Lennon memorial on Friday, it was more moving than ever. To have just recorded tunes as sweet as "Woman" and "Watching the Wheels," to have been so contentedly in love, to have one of the greatest rock and roll voices ever (think "Twist and Shout" and "Yer Blues"), and to die at 40. You get to be my age, and the poignancy and tragedy definitely creep up on you. Come together, right now!

And Chase Bank Is Now Using One Of His Songs

Those running the Anglican cathedral in Liverpool are raising eyebrows by playing John Lennon's "Imagine" on the carillon, even though the lyrics sound anti-religious. Reminds me of a brief letter to the editor in the Village Voice in 1980, before he was killed: "Imagine John Lennon with no possessions."