Year Five: Reflections

 

Five years a blogger.

As is tradition, I reflect on the year of blogging on this the anniversary of Dislocations.

I apologize for the typos, I can’t afford a copy editor. I also appreciate the kind words, encouragement and compliments I’ve gotten in person and by email. I’m not sure exactly what service Dislocations actually provides, but it’s good to receive genuine appreciation. Originality and depth is something I strive towards and it’s nice to both have that acknowledged and to know that many appreciate such aspirations. Last year I passed 100,000 vistors or readers or however the blog-stats are interpreted.

God Bless you all

This may be the last one, by the way.

THE FINAL DISLOCATIONS!

I do not want to make such a grand statement – because, really, who knows how one will feel come any given morning – and it’s not that any hiatus is being planned – but the fact of the matter is that that each year I’ve written fewer blogs posts. This feeling has been nagging me, that maybe I’ve to the end of the blog format. Things I feel like writing about now, ideas that are coming, do not lend themselves to Dislocations posts.

Maybe blog notions will come again. Maybe I’ll just do pictures with funny captions, or maybe start another blog with a different mission than Dislocations. People have said to me, I love your blog about Jersey City. I thank them, but this blog was never really about our isthmus, it’s just mainly set in Jersey City. Ultimately, my statement is about the human condition, our experience of mortality, how we reconcile the need for community with our limited ability of understanding – we really can know nothing other than the self. Indirectly though, maybe it is about Jersey City, and maybe I do not have much else to say, especially about what fascinates me the most, ordinary life. Noticing anew things we experience every day. It’s those moments, the ones we hold in common, that I fnd the most revelatory. That keeps me going, gets me through.

I’m done. Okay, I’m not saying I’m done. Just kinda done. Maybe. 

Maybe I no longer feel the same Dislocation that inspired me five years ago to launch this endeavor.

For more traditional forms of poetry, fiction, and memoir, go visit my website, Timhrklit.

 

Without a doubt, the most fateful blog (s) was a pair I wrote about White Eagle Hall. Turns out, they were so well-received by the principals have asked me to work for Jersey City Theater Center, the organization creating a Theater & Arts complex in this neck of Newark Avenue. It’s very exciting and I’ve become their quasi-chronicler as well as publicist and general writer.

Basically though, I had been passing the four heads on this building near-daily for so long I had to find out who they were. The research was fun and included input from the Association of American Polish Historians, and the blogs formed the basis of an academic article available here.

A great place that serves both great tea and is a great drink that great tea opened, but this blog was a reason to write a memoir pieceabout why I never drink coffee, thus have devoted my hot (and sometimes iced) caffeinated beverage life to the leaf.

Always a favorite,  myfavorite reads, the best books of 2013, the most subjective reading list ever-committed to the internet.

A bad fire on Grove Street led to these empty lots and some memorable ponderings.

 

Jersey City got a new mayor this year, don’t you know. Steve Fulop, nice guy, fast talker, one of the leading young democratic politicians who are exemplifying that generation X is now taking the reigns of power. His inauguration was a city-wide block party, and his man of the people rhetoric struck a chord, and a pre-GWB-Gate Christie showed why his appeal is wider in person than on TV or YouTube. Is Fulop Bloomberg or DiBlasio or is it enough for the majority of the newly arrived that he isn’t Healy? But Fulop already performed a historical task no other media outlet deemed fit to acknowledge – Jersey City’s firstJewish Mayor – his family are Holocaust Survivors – lit the city Menorah. In the 1990s, Jersey City became the test case that led to permitting municipal governments to exhibit holiday decorations.  Nobody else appreciated the multi-layered irony of this moment. 

Murals have become the cornerstone of the art scene in Jersey City and some special city funding implemented a mural project, here are two examples, here and here, of some of the most compelling.

Paint the Car was this interactive art event at the regular interactive art event known as Creative Grove, a sort of artsy flea market that survives in town despite of its misguided detractors. The point, paint art and graffati on a car. FIGHT CONFORMITY NOW!!!

One of the greatest record stores in the history of record stores closed, JR Music, which is by the World Trade Center, downsized last year and will probably close this year. I happen to go to the old, two-level location on Record Store Day last year, the last Record Store Day of the oldlocation, whoo hoo! JR is a series of stores that sells appliances, electronic equipment, computers and CDs, but now that series has been consolidated into one brick and mortar store. I bought a couple of CD players there, recently a computer monitor. But they too are moving their selection online. Kind of sucks if your mouse decides to go kaput and you’re on deadline; I remember going there and finding a dozen different types of mouse to purchase. Now there’s one. Used to go to the record store, buy some CDs – they had a deep inventory and were really cheap –I got a Roy Acuff for $4.95! – but now everything is one location, they phased out the jazz selection. I get the feeling they are selling off the rest of the stock and that will be day. A way of life gone forever. This blog was not intended to be but turned out as both tribute and obituary.

 I love writing about Shakespeare and I caught some really fantastic summer productions, a really great King Lear up in Inwood, so far up the isle of Manhatto that my nose bled. A good buddy, Bob Armstrong, played the titular role of the man who usurped his life. On the Jersey Side, the Hudson Shakespeare Company presented the rarely performed Henry VIII – not the Bard’s best history, but this production made me realize how it is a significant footnote to the Henriad and its two Richard bookends. The same group later presented a remarkable interpretation of Macbeth and in October, presented Titus Andronicus in a cemetery production. I love Titus, and while I quibble with the black-comic interpretation, this was a very satisfying Titus.

 

My music obituaries are part-memoir. Musical tastes – what makes up our own personal soundtrack and how that soundtrack changes as we follow our journey through life – is an area of interest for me. Why we listen being as important as what we listen to is an idea I keep coming back to even. RayManzerak and Lou Reed provoked a reverie and Pete Seeger’s passing invoked a memory of my interviewing this friendly great man when I was in College, and I was writing it up, I had insight into his momentary bizarre behavior, something about Phil Ochs.  

He may not have died this year, but the Cohen Brothers released that film based on his life and his being in the news sparked a memoryof Dave Von Ronk.

Local singer songwriter Kelly Saint Patrick performed a splendid set at Groove on Grove, probably the best show of that summer series.

At the Exchange Place Starbucks, I witnessed a guy proposingto a gal. It was sweet and romantic and she said yes.

Dislocations revived my interest in photography as a hobby. I take pictures and think of funny or interesting at least, captions. A puddleforms in this lot after every rain. When the light is right, the puddle reflects our world back to us. This lot was paved over a few months later. The grass is gone, but the puddle still forms and the reflection return.  

Another down time there by the dock, got a good shot of aguy catching a flounder.

The place to be come mid-August is Sixth Street for The Feast. This year I “covered” some of the processions and other events as well as the evening bacchanals.

Winter. We just got through a doozy. I happen to be in the New Jersey Room at the main branch of our public library on a day of a real bad snow storm and a great shot of Van Vorst Park. Then I walked through the unblemished snow of the park, wondering about the illusion of infinite, icywhiteness.

Tachair Book Shoppe held its first annual theater festival, some really compelling performance.  Dare I say surprisingly fantastic.

Local artist, Kayt Hester, works in tape and celebrated the 7-year-return of the Cicada at a special show. A few months later, she had agallery show in NYC, but this space had large glass walls that Kayt had some fun with, messing with our perception of what is 3-D.

Living in Jersey City, warm-weather festivals are a way of life. You see family and friends and neighbors and have some fun and eat food you only eat once a year. The Santa Cruzan festival, a Filipino party, at the end of May, kicks off the season. The 2014 edition – the 35^th – was really fun. Jersey City has one of the largest populations of Filipino Americans in the country. What a blessing. What a fine bunch of folks.

I’m a film-buff. A cineaste. I’ve been seriously studyingthe western – by which I mean, I’ve  seen a ton of them and watch many several times. The genre’s best decade is the 1950s, and here’s a list of some more obscure Westerns that are noteworthy. If you haven’t seen The Searchers or Seven Men From Now, watch those agreed upon classics first and then you’ll be ready to appreciate the greatness of the american film-making these 10 films achieve.  

Here’s another piece of news, about newspapers, you will only find out about on Dislocations. The Jersey Journal moved their offices to Secaucus, and bequeathed more than a dozen metal filing cabinets of a meticulously kept clip file to the Jersey Room at the Main Branch of the Jersey City Library. You want to see the history of Hudson County, get a feel of what was important in the daily life, thus get an authentic peak into an area, spend some time with these unique files. 

Stephanie Riggi’s work I’ve seen around but I never had the pleasure of meeting this artist until last year.  Her illustrations are vivid and twisted, and she possesses one of the brightest pallets in town

Luca Casulito is a real go-getter in Jersey City, involved with the arts and her own business. But she also happened upon this process of creating this somewhat bizarre, but very moody and provocative abstract pieces, art objects. She’s always interesting to talk to, but talking about her art is a rarity. There’s a freshness and originally in her abstractions worth noting.

The 313 Gallery is a permanent gallery, meaning they are not a bar and have regular hours – albeit only on weekends – and that is rare and perhaps a first. Also it’s a really interesting space, whose history you can only read about here, and this show featured Bunny Pearlman, whose diverse array included water colors and found art.

Eva – this a German pop artist – had a wonderful show at the now defunct, gone but not forgotten, Fish with Braids gallery.

Art Activates is a mural project for alleys. This was fun to write. I not only wanted to report on this unique, urban beautification project as well as the really fantastic art that has been erected on these rarely seen surfaces, but I tried to convey the experience of seeing this art unfold as you stroll through the alley.

Here’s some wonderful religious statuary I saw in Clifton.

 

Some thoughts about missing cigarettes.

Saint Jude Thaddeus Pray For us.

 

Thanks Everybody. See Ya on down the line,

 

Teanj (& Tea & I)

 

Teanj has been opened a month. I’ve been going there at least five days a week.

I rarely write so directly about local businesses. Dislocations is not a commercial blog, it is more interested in ideas, observations and art than what you can buy in where most posts are set, Jersey City. I’m not into making recommendations.

But I am making a rare exception here. I love tea. I know tea. I drink tea. Teanj is a place worth writing about. In fact, I’ve been thinking of writing about my love affair with tea drinking for a while now, and the opening of Teanj served as catalyst to pour forth on ideas that have been steeping for a while now (yes, I know, smirk or wince).

 

Teanj sells tea as good, and in many cases, better, than any place in New York.

I am well qualified to judge. I’m a total tea head. On a weekly basis, I go to those New York establishments to get the loose-leaf tea I drink from dawn to dusk.

 

Now that tea purchase can be made here on the Jersey side.

Tea NJ is a warm and inviting. You can get coffee there too, and the food –it doubles as a lunch joint, with healthy sandwiches and salads – is really good and affordable. Two Vegan friends of mine unbeknownst to each other swear by the black bean burger and another vegan I do not know
came in when I was there and was getting a beverage but was praising the very same dish.

Teanj was founded about two years ago in Union City. The owner had been visiting downtown Jersey City for a while and when this spot on Newark Avenue opened, he seized the opportunity to access the local vegan hipster set.

William Toledo, the owner, runs the place with his son of the same name. Conner and Jen are also on the wait staff. They are all engaging conversationalists.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The atmosphere is comfy and inviting. Punk rock from multiple eras at a muted volume fills the space with an amiable and subdued energy. The chairs and tables are wood. A large square of ceramic tiles cover the slats of table tops. Teanj has a veranda feel, like you’ve discovered some hole in the wall café on the outskirts of a post colonial village.

Tasteful knick-knacks – selected by William’s wife – give Teanj an air of personal hospitality, but also echo an amiable obsession with tea drinking and tea accruements. A plant grows from a huge tea cup, dainty tea sets – pot and cups are on shelves. Hand-made statuettes of an angel, a water nymph strums a lute, a scare-crow plays a fife. Carved toy trucks and buses are in the wooden case where the sugar and stirrers are kept. The ornaments would not be out of place in the children’s playroom of a large estate, or a breakfast nook where the family was served breakfast. But the revolution is over and our oppressors have fled. Now we drink our tea in their abandoned parlors.

The space actually is a former barbershop – perhaps that accounts for the tangible neighborliness that seems instantaneously noticeable upon entering – and the barber reopened on the same block. One sign that is unmistakably Jersey City –art – available for sale – is on parts of the walls. Every other business here is a part-time gallery. Teanj has been opened a month, and the self-curated mini-exhibit just experienced its first rotation.

 

On the wall of the hall in the back that leads to the kitchen and rest room are some family pictures, drawings by William’s nine year old daughter. This further enhances the homey feel, emphasizing the family atmosphere that greets you yet they seem seamlessly interwoven with the other objects creating an ambiance of nonjudgmental comfort

Tiny details catch the eye. Clever and amusing, along with the tea encourages contemplation. A gentle and soft oasis; and however brief, Teanj makes worries fade and hectic Newark Avenue a memory.

A dorm-room refrigerator size glass case of cakes and other sweets is near the counter, on with displays of vegan cakes and cupcakes and granola bars. A steamer system is on the caddy corner wall behind the counter, on the wall directly behind the counter is the library of teas – about 40 and growing– with numbers and you look at a menu and pick a number – e.g. Almond Cookie # 7 – the counter ordering process is fun. The cans instill the impression of being in a friend’s pantry.

 

A rumor is circulating that Teanj is owned by the musician, Moby, the electronica DJ of whom I know next to nothing. One time, while enjoying a cuppa at Teanj, this woman, walking her dog, stepped up from the sidewalk, opened the door and stuck her head in, asking “are you owned by Moby?”

Several years ago, Moby founded Teany, a tea shop with vegan food, located in the lower east side. William, an IT manager at a Secaucus company, would hang out there with his wife and eventually worked part time there. A few years later he was inspired to leave the corporate world and open up Teanj in Union City – the name wasn’t licensed; Moby lost the shop to his now ex-wife in their divorce agreement. She eventually sold the lower east side shop and Teany is under new ownership. Teanj is not an extension or new location of a chain, but Moby’s shop bred the conceptual impetus.

Teanj offers dozens of flavors, the majority custom-blended by William. Herbal and non-caffeinated tea are rare beverages for me. Black tea– that is definitely my thing. I love black tea.

Two other downtown establishments – Basic Café on Erie and the Warehouse Café on Bay – have great ambience, reasonable prices, wonderful food and a quality, respectable cup of tea. But selection is limited to two or three flavors of black tea. Star Bucks offers the same number of options. Like Star Bucks, Basic Café and Warehouse Café makes a sincere effort and offer an atmosphere conducive to solitude or conversation, but their tea takes a back seat to their coffee.

Teanj, like newcomers David’s Tea and Argo Tea offers original blends of the leaf combined with other flavors. Teavina does the same thing, except there’s no place for seating at that establishment.

Teanj is the least expensive of those competitors, offers as good – in some cases slightly better and I say slightly because the tea product offered is high quality from the other providers – a tea.

I both hang out there to sip tea and buy their blends –mainly their Vanilla and Chocolate chai and their roasted Matte – to keep at home for daily consumption . An almond flavored infused tea – Almond Cookie –is rich, a desert-like flavor, a perfect afternoon blend. A Ceylon with dried lime is an innovation I have not seen elsewhere, as is a chai with lemon grass and coconut, a more delicate balance but genuinely thirst quenching.

I know my tea.

 

I had my first and last cup of coffee at five years old

I’ve been a committed tea drinker ever since.

My parents and family are serious coffee drinkers. Hot coffee was always either available or being made in our home. The brewing process was a percolator, which would hiss and clatter. An electrical contraption, a metal pitcher plugged into an outlet on the kitchen counter, a clear plastic knob on top of the lid where spurts of coffee would spit up and flow back down into the pot.

Inside was this metal cylindrical filter device connected to a long stem, which held the coffee. I remember mostly cans of Maxwell House. Nobody ground their own coffee back then. A tiny bag for kitchen scraps was kept in its small stand by the sink; alongside peels from onions and carrots and other vegetables was always a lump of soggy coffee grounds.

My father got up early to catch the train to Wall Street and he would prepare the coffee the night before, ready to be plugged in, minutes after waking but before taking the shower. He got up before us kids, my mother drove him to the train station and then got us out of bed and off to school. Any coffee she didn’t’ drink, she put in a glass with ice and the glass in the refrigerator so Dad could have ice coffee when he got home. My mother worked as a sectary at our parochial grammar school and she would drink coffee at home before she went to pick up my father at the Oradell train station. A fresh pot would percolate during dinner, after which coffee was always served. Holidays there was always this long drawn out lull between main course and desert as we waited for the percolator to work its magic.

That machine fascinated me as a child, it would shake and make noise, a simple machine, no on/off switch, you turned it on by plugging it in, when the coffee was ready, you unplugged it. At some point, my parents switched to the dripping philosophy of a Mr. Coffee-like device, but not until I was in college I think. I remember most that tin metal pot with the clear knob on top where mini-geysers of coffee periodically erupted as it clicked and murmured. The coffee aroma thickened in the kitchen and spread throughout the house.

I was fascinated by the percolator, an R2D2 unit that seemed from another era even during my analog era Wonder Bread years. Once plugged in, invisible fumes of coffee filled the air, but the beverages inside were forbidden to children. My teenager older siblings were allowed coffee, which they drank in the morning and after dinner, but not I. The smell of coffee permeated life in our house, from dawn to after dusk, the source of that lush aroma – which I still love – was my childhood tree of knowledge of whose fruit could be indulged in by everyone but me (and my littler sister).

I kept nagging my father, let me try it, let me drink some coffee.

Now, Kimball’s Coffee (Kimball was my father’s first name) was renowned by the family as being thick as mud with a flavor akin to brimstone. It was the kind of coffee they drank in the Marine Corps, he would say. The aunts on holidays insisted on making the coffee to accompany holiday pies and cake. Even among coffee drinkers, Kimball’s Coffee was an acquired taste few acquired.

Finally he gave into my nagging, made me a cup with milk and sugar. It was awful. I can still remember gagging, involuntary spewing it from my mouth. I then vomited (or least as I remember). The revulsion was total, racing through my entire body. My father laughed at my reaction. It was the last cup of coffee I ever had. Even when I tried something coffee-flavored, like coffee ice cream, that sense memory surges back. Ironically, I make a great cup of coffee – during the live-in relationships, since I usually woke up first, I made the coffee – but I have never been able to overcome my reaction to Kimball’s Coffee. Coffee was ruined for me forever.

Instead, it was tea for me. In high school, I remember earl gray and Lipton. Early Grey was the only tea other than Orange Pekoe (Lipton, Red Rose, Tetley, etc.) that was sold, soon maybe Darjeeling. I had a tea pot during college, and I would brew pots and pots of tea while writing papers and studying for exams. When I went to England I was fascinated they actually served tea without a bag. Before then, I never even conceived how that could be possible.

It would be decades before loose leaf brewing would become the staple of my life it now is.

By the late 90s, the world of tea started changing. Tea began a universe-wide upgrade. Before then, there was Lipton, Tetley and Red Rose and the basic orange pekoe.

 

PAUSE

You want to read about why varieties of different teas exist or the hokum about how the tannic acid enhances your tantric Tao, go to a more insipid blog. I have little patience for tea mythos. I do not really like green or herbal teas, I love caffeine and the main purpose of tea is as caffeine delivery system.

 

Herbal teas began to proliferate in the 1970s and 1980s, with the company Celestial Seasonings. Health Food Stores cornered that market, but as the forces of capitalism always have it, supermarkets expanded their selections to compete against independent stores. For black tea, there was Bigelow and Twinning, with their Constant Comment, Early Grey, Darjeeling’s –these were around when I was a kid and became more prominent in the subsequent decades.

But it really wasn’t until the 1990s when you started seeing English Breakfast with its hardy flavor and instantly noticable higher caffeine level. With my suasage and egg on a roll at the bodega before work I could now get an English breakfast tea. More brands began to appear.

That’s the funny thing about being a tea drinker. Tea was limited to a Lipton or Lipton copycat brand for years. Waiters would ignore my request for tea instead of coffee, or bring me coffee than give off attitude because I was different. Sometimes the water was tepid not hot. Mediocre tea was the rule.

We no longer live in that Tea-verse. Unlike so many things –like music or movies! – tea has gotten better as the 20^th century ended and the 21^st century dawned.

First Starbucks came. I loved – and love – Starbucks. Soon after they began to appear around these parts, 1995 or so – the one at Pavonia Newport was the first in Jersey City – it was announced they acquired Teazo, the first tea brand that pointed to a world of tea flavor well beyond Twinning.

Star Bucks was where I had my first Chai Latte – my first introduction to the land of chai, that spicy mix of Assam tea leaves, cinnamon, nutmeg and spices with steamed milk. I never had steamed milk before. I would always be served some limp Tetley while my companions gleefully quaffed their cappuccinos. I was obsessed with the chai latte for a while, overdosing on them to such an extent that I took a break for years. Teanj makes a great latte – they use dried ingredients, not a syrup, and they dry them into a powder themselves. I recommend the Vanilla Chai latte.

But the tea bags of chai or Awake, a high-quality English Breakfast tea, served at Starbucks would give a me reason to meet friends there or read, enjoying their unique atmosphere that combines rustic coziness –echoing Seattle, the northwest port city where it was founded – and impersonal on the go service efficiency of a corporate restaurant chain. The premium brand market expanded as did the price points.

Then, sometime towards the end of the first or beginning years of the second decade of the 21^st century the tea boom bomb was detonated. Bush II might have ruined most aspects of America, Tbut ea was the exception. New brands and flavors abounded. Chocolate tea appeared. Then I discovered loose tea, to serve at home. Somebody had given me a coffee of the month gift for Christmas from Zabars, and I called them up, and using a white lie to strengthen my request, explained my doctor forbids me to drink coffee can you change this to tea. They were very nice, sent me a new bag of loose tea and a new bag every month. English Breakfast or a decaffeinated herbal they asked.

English Breakfast of course – they and a very limited selection of flavors then – I wonder of that has changed. I went to the Zabars location and bought a tea scoop, which measures out a typical per serving portion and a tea ball, where I could put the leaves into for steeping. I haven’t gone back to store-bought bags since.

But as the Coffee now Tea of the month program ended – and it took more than a month to go through the entire pound of loose leaf tea I was sent – I discovered Tea & Sympathy, this emporium of British food stuffs in Greenwich village. Tea & Sympathy is a British Store and adjacent British restaurant, which has great tea by the pot, served in the overly fussy British style of clever pots and dainty cups, but you have to order the high cholesterol bad food, like Bangers & Mash or Bangers & Baked Beans (bangers are serious, incredibly delish and artery hardening sausage). I once had their custard cake, a pound cake stuck in a bowl of custard like a dying mastodon in a tar pit. I immediately went home to lay down and sleep off the diabetic shock.

The store though, besides these selection of digestives –which are cookies or crackers or some British delicacies – and Cadbury chocolates unavailable elsewhere in the states. Tea & Sympathy is a paradise for anglophiles and a way for ex-pat Brits to indulge their munchies and fight off homesickness. But they also had great loose leaf – a golden tea I pick up once in a while, still – and quality black and chias. You can also get a cuppa to go, there’s a park nearby and when the weather is nice and I am in the neighborhood and have some time, Tea & Sympathy fits the bill. Even though I have now bought my loose leaf home stash elsewhere for a good three years at least, I still go to this tory outpost for to get the best tea balls in the tea-verse.

I use bags in the travel mug – sachets is a popular, $10 word for them – but for the home drinking, like the mug I am working on now as I type – it’s the tea ball, a kind of miniature tin colander attached to a thin chain, so you can lift it out of the mug. At Tea & Sympathy – and I do not know of another store that offers these made in England steeping devices – the tea balls have a small ceramic ornament – a tulip or rose, I’ve seen a red London phone booth and a friend who lives nearby gave me a ball with a holiday-themed, ceramic holly leaf. The ornament is a counter-balance to the ball filled with tea, dangles over the lip of the mug, enabling lifting out ball and making it easier to move the ball up and down, as one does a tea bag that has a string attached. I am positive this does nothing to advance steeping, but this mindless gesture enhances contemplation.

Sometimes you need to let the mind wander. Tea encourages reflection and contemplation and this slight hand movement of dipping the ball or bag is often part of that experience. Why tea balls are still made without the counter-balance ornament baffles me, the fact the concept has not been widely accepted by other tea ball manufacturers is criminal. With the counter-balance, the chain falls into the tea, then you have to go fishing with a spoon. Focusing on the tea and mug momentarily shatters any chance at reverie. Tea should be more about the tea drinker than the tea. Tea & Sympathy is a fun store, the brits very nice so at least I’m glad I have an excuse to visit and tarry.

I found other places in New York that sold loose-leaf tea. They sold coffee too. Nothing that made me want to become a regular, no way to taste the teas and were basically limited in their offerings. You couldn’t sit down and linger over a cup. Also, the shops were off my beaten paths.

Argo Tea came into town around 2011 or so. It’s a Star Bucks for Tea and they sell loose tea. The tea is excellent and their black tea is a morning staple for me – it is called Nelegri and grown in Africa – going to their Union Square location is just about a weekly occurrence for me – I am in that neighborhood very often – I can always find a seat. The staff is usually friendly with some notable exceptions. For the loose tea, you self-serve, like the bulk sales of dates or nuts at a health food store. You fill up these paper bags, but then you bring the bags to the cashier and they turn on the scale. They keep the tip jar on the scale and remove the tip jar. Anyone with any experience with scales knows how delicate the mechanisms are, even the most digitized models and every other week there is a problem with getting the right weight or price – there is a system of codes and the cashier has to enter the codes into the register. The turnover of employees is high at Argo, the scale training is not a priority. The system is tragically inefficient, sometimes it is accurate, other times they round it up. I always feel I a little ripped off. Argo has an entire wall of these clear, cylindrical loose leaf teas – inviting all to self-serve and then when you get to the cash register, nobody knows how to use the scale, the manager is called over, the system of codes is explained– it is probably easier to launch a missile attack than it is to get 1.5 ounces of hazelnut chai at Argo.

But they have a loyalty card, you get free cups the more you spend and the tea is pretty superb. The ambiance is similar to Star Bucks, I keep going back. They steep the teas before they are served. I love the black tea tea-paccino with two percent milk and a shot of vanilla flavor, but the inanity of some 20 year old kid saying it will be $13 for my loose leaf tea when I know it’s about four dollars since I buy it every week and the manager, who now knows me, has to cancel the order, re-weigh the tea then re-enter the secret ARGO tea codes gets really annoying. I’ve been at the register 20 minutes some times talking some friendly but ineptly trained front line worker through the complex tea weighing process, not exactly the optimum prelude to drinking of a cup of tea. I love the tea and enjoy the place, but this part of the Argo concept seriously needs re-evaluation.

David’s Tea is down on Bleeker Street. The atmosphere is like an aggressively friendly medical marijuana dispensary. It is cleaner than Argo, bordering on antiseptic. Enthusiasm overflows from the staff, who show you the teas – the tears are kept in large canisters, which they bring out for you to smell. The CFO was once at the Bleeker location and he and I got into a tea chat – as this blog indicates, when prompted I can rattle on about tea – he said Argo is in the restaurant business, David’s Tea is in the tea business and the Bleeker Street location is the rare one where there is a place to sit and drink the tea. The lights are bright, but it is a little sterile and the tea is treated a little too much like a quasi-pharmaceutical. They give you no reason to linger. The staff, many of them are struggling actors and performers, are extreme extroverts. Their intensely bright cheerfulness takes some getting used to. But I love going there and the have some great teas. I they have some chocolate yerba mattes that are unique and some chai teas worth noting. I will often have a cup of their citron oolong – I never make oolong at home, it is an afternoon tea I only drink out – and they have a gurana chai, which I mix with other chais, that will push you from zero to sixty, with a nice peaty accent that can be nice note to the spicy symphony chai exudes.

Teavina opened a location in Jersey City. The tea is quality, Morning Matte was given to me as a gift, long before Teavina came to the Newport Mall, and that got me to include a matte in my morning repertoire. I had never been in one before the Newport shop opened. The atmosphere is high-priced, luxury store – a Harry & David’s – and it is way over the top in that regard. Their canisters are large and instead of opening them and holding them up to you sniff, they wave the lid over the canister pushing the aroma towards you. Teavina is the most pretentious tea store in the tea-verse. They sell the teas in two ounces, not one, allotments, but the prices are for one ounce on the cans and they constantly push their canisters, so whatever is on the canister is double at the register. I’m sorry, I’m not going to buy $50 dollars worth of one tea just to have a metal contained with your company’s logo in my kitchen. Teavina sales practices is needlessly confusing, a bait and switch. If you care how much you spend for tea Teaavina is not the place to shop. It’s for really not for people who like tea but for people who like buying luxury items but cannot afford a new Porsche. It is really not for the serious – i.e., obsessive like me – tea drinker. You can buy cups of tea here, and they make a big deal of using a pure rock sugar – and they make a big deal of steep time and the temperature of the water – boiling hot is not good enough– what pretentious nonsense. But apparently Jersey City health laws prohibit serving milk, so they put in creamora. A cup of tea can cost $4.99 there and you can’t even get it with milk.

Last time I was there, they were out of the teas that I wanted, I got a cup of tea that was terrible and they were out of the sugar and the creamora. Go to the Starbucks, they own us now, I was told. It was just an escalator ride away, but I tried this new tea but it had a fruity flavor, which I did not know by the name and I don’t like fruity teas. A waste of money and time. I’m not saying I’ll never go back, but I haven’t since.

 

Enter Teanj in 2014, not just a small but noteworthy improvement over the current phase of the tea-verse, but competitively priced and with a tea that is equal to others, superior to most. Did I mention, it’s about a five minute walk from the apartment.

That’s the other thing I cannot quite believe. Not only is the dark ages of tea over – uninspired flavors and mass-produced brands – but now the best tea place in the known teaverse is right in my neighborhood.

 

 

Pete Seeger Lives

When I was in college, I interviewed Pete Seeger. He was a genuinely nice man, tolerant of an inexperienced upstart.

 It was one of the very first times EVER I asked somebody questions, wrote down what they say, put quotes together in an article and had it published in the school paper (I had mostly wrote reviews and poems).

Pete Seeger was coming to play at the school – they had just built a new arts center – and the interview was part of a review of his concert. He seemed old then, older than my parents, even though they were the same age. You think everyone your parents age are the same and it was a revelation to find out that members of the generation protested the war, supported environmental movements too.

We talked a good while. I asked him about song writers and public affairs. I remember most him being just so warm and friendly. I must have told him I had seen him in concert. Ronald Reagan had entered office and I do remember one joke, what he thought of the new president – “he’s a good cowboy actor.”

I was a punk-er by then, but being a Dylan freak I was knowledgeable about folk music, etc. I had some good questions. I remember I had to get permission for the interview, and could not tape it. The concert was a good show – the school was very left-leaning, the majority of the faculty had been in the movement – and they loved singing along to those old folk songs.

I worked all night on that thing, the process was new to me and did not come easy. Also, it was on a typewriter, manual Smith Corona, onion skin paper.  My philosophy professor and a student-advisor said to me after he read the article in the paper –– “hey Herrick, maybe you actually can write.”

A few years earlier – when I was 15 – me and buddies Danny and Tony – saw a Tribute to Leadbelly concert, with Seeger and Arlo Guthrie – also Sweet Honey in the Rock and Sonny Terry and Brownie McGee. How we ever heard about this concert or got tickets is lost to the mysteries of time. We loved the show, I remember liking it a lot but what I remember most is that Danny’s mother drove us, went out to dinner, then picked us up. In college, this had become a favorite teenage memory. The concert was released on CD a few years ago, but I never picked it up. I preferred the memory.

My buddy Danny has a story about meeting Arlo Guthrie in the early 90s and how he was astounded he had gone to the Leadbelly Tribute.

 I’ve been a folk music fan since I was a kid. It has to do with being a Bod Dylan freak, which happened like at 13. See, that’s the evolution. Within two years of getting really into – in the parlance of the times – you’re off to the big city to see Pete Seeger sing songs that even then were at least a half-century old. Seeger pre-dated Dylan by about 30 years, although was also a contemporary a solo-artist – he was signed to Columbia also – and if you think of some of the other contemporaries, Seeger outlasted them and was still relevant 15 years or so when my musical tastes were in formation.

Me and the guys did not ask our mom to drive us to see Tom Paxton or the Kingston Trio, not to mention the Highwaymen. We probably had little to no idea who they were anyway.  

Some artist linger past their time and some do not and Pete Seeger is somebody whose music lingered because of its authenticity. His recordings are really not that good, they certainly disdain any kind of polish. The studio was not his forte and his live recordings are more documentations of folk music as opposed to a preservation of a performance.

Seeger connects us to how songs were sung before recorded music. That is, together. His father was a academic folk musicologist, and Seeger had not just an library-sized memory for songs, if you listen to his interviews (there’s a swell one available for free at archive.org with the great Studs Terkel), he studied the evolution of these songs – a recent old song I’ve discovered – the Golden Vanity, a mournful ditty about a sailor who sabotages a ship, goes back to Elizabethan age, according to Seeger. He encourages us to sing along – I remember my philosophy rhapsodizing about how he loves singing along in groups with Pete, a main focus of the concert he performed and I can still recall – but he also engages us with the history of the songs. He was a scholar, but never in an ivory tower and made the scholarship – the backstory of a song – listen to Guantanamera, one of the few distinctively famous recordings of his long career –part of the experience. A.P. Carter collected songs from hither and yon, but he made them all into Carter Family songs and while Seeger was inspired by the Carter Family too, his ethnographic tendencies acknowledged lineages more than A.P. ever cared to, opening up a collective history to all the listeners. In contrast, the Carter Family seems to fabricate some Southern agrarian ideal that may be deeply involved with a grand mythology, yet is weirdly ahistorical. It’s a past without memory.

The context Seeger provides enhanced the song, often distracting from his musical gifts. He had a warm tenor, robust in his youth but as it became frayed and withered, it gained more gravitas without loosing warmth (a quality that eludes Dylan, for example). He was instantly familiar. He sounded like the neighbor you always wave hello to. Eternally optimistic, but convincing and credible.

Totally under-rated banjo player too, as good a picker as any but he wasn’t into showing off. His folk didn’t have a bluegrass flash. He was good as Ralph Stanley or Earl Scruggs, his contemporaries and peers. Musically, critics never gave him his due, but that started to change with reissues and box sets and of course the Seeger Sessions, where Bruce explored the music contained in Seeger’s song. I have both the studio and the 2-CD Dublin Live set. Bruce really performs a kind of exegeses on the music. Seeger sessions is not well regarded by Bruce fanatics – there’s no E-Street or Bruce songs and the lack of starkness that made his first foray into folk music – the Nebraska masterpiece – but it is one of his most rousing records. He has having so much. More importantly, he got me listening to Seeger again. I have a civil rights era Seeger recording of We Shall Overcome, and it is Pete with a crowd infusing a hymn with emotion and an unmistakable insistence on justice. With his Seeger Sessions large jug band, Springsteen opens the musicality of that song – what Seeger could do with a crowd and his sole tenor and 12-string guitar strumming, Bruce needs strings and horns. Bruce’s gifts as an arranger are under-recognized, and this arrangement showcases those powers at their height. We think of this as a simple song, but Bruce shows how much complexity there is that makes a song sound simple.  Bruce moved on from the Seeger Sessions, but as we heard on Wrecking Ball, the influence of Peter Seeger has never left this latter-phase of his art.  

 Pete showed us that music was not just about technique or perfect notes, it was the sound of our collective humanity. His recordings go back to the 1940s, but he was taught by people who did not learn how to play instruments or use their vocal skills by records. Songs were passed down, from generation to generation,  from field to porch.  The musician is just a vessel, creating the means we share our humanity. Dancing at a rave, or joining in a chorus when the band does the hit you loved in high school for their encore – is that really so far removed from singing We Shall Overcome as the cops with dogs and night sticks block the Birmingham Bridge – or expel kids from Zuccotti Park?

 Two weeks ago, I downloaded newly discovered Almanac Singers songs, his pre-Weaver band with Woody Guthrie. The album is State of Arkansas. I don’t really like The Weavers, but loved what I had of the Almanac Singers. The Weavers sound too commercial, over-produced and syrupy. The authenticity of Seeger’s solo work is absent.

Some of the songs were repeats I have on other Smithsonian Folkways collection, they didn’t make a lot of recordings this New Deal era ultra-lefties. The story on them is that they were pro-union and pro-workers, but also isolationist in the pre-Pearl Harbor United States – a total anomaly, because the isolationists were almost all 0—all except for the Almanac Singers – Republicans, anti-Roosevelt folks and committed anti-Semites/pro-Nazis. When World War II happened, the Almanac Singers changed their tune and supported the war. As they became popular, their isolationist past came out and could not find places to gig and broke up. Same thing would happen with The Weavers, who had actual number one hits, but because of Pete’s wobbly past, were blacklisted.

State of Arkansas is really a revealing folk album, shedding light on how even at this embryonic stage, topical songs were interwoven with folklore discoveries. Woody Guthrie and Cisco Houston (we desperately need a revival of Cisco Houston, a near-forgotten genesis of a folk singer) were in the band and their repertoire includes some deep folk songs, for instance – Blow The Man Down – yes, the sea chantey I think I remember first in in Popeye cartoons. A revealing recording, they are singing with a serious intent, that whoever in that band first found this song first found it in its orginal authentic setting. Twenty some odd years later, when college kids at Newport were collecting folkways Sea Chantey collections, these songs were not being sang by sailors on the seven seas. When the Almanac laid down that track – which is very strange and its goofiness only makes it stranger.

In the past decade and a half, one of musical revelations is that country music is folk music (duh.) I love Roy Acuff, the Louvin Brothers, the Carter Family – all the stuff that George Jones, Johnny Cash and even Hank Williams learned. A lot of the songs were on records by the Grateful Dead, the Byrds, even Dylan but done in what were unmistakably folkie arrangements, to my uneducated and inexperienced ears. Hell, they were mainly acoustic instruments.

But the songs also sounded like the Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger songs I got into soon after being stuck with terminal Dylan-Freak-itis at 13.

But listening to that old timey stuff, barely political at all – unlike acoustic blues of the same  era, like Robert Johnson or Blind Lemmon Jefferson or even good ole Leadbelly – who seem to at least imply that the hard times is due in part to society. Woody and Seeger, radical leftist platitudes. But they are set to the same melodies and chords. It’s wild. Union Train is the Wabash Cannonball.

In one of their anti-war ditties, well anti-draft – is C for – the song is a note for note rip off of T for Texas, by Jimmy Rogers. What weirdness, on so many levels. Hearing antiwar song from the World War II era is shocking. Seeger was so far left he didn’t like FDR? Now, that’s radical, but the naiveté both appalls and appeals.

But the other level is how does such a blatant rip-off happen. Were they’re royalties involved. Was it a rip off or a kind of parody? Did they cop the melody knowing it would spark a recognition in the audience, be a crowd pleaser or were thing so dispersed back then, radio so segmented and sporadic, that they could pretend it was theirs?

As tides changed, they became anti-Hitler (This Guitar Fights Fascists was written on Pete’s guitar, or was it Woody’s?) and there’s a great breakdown Rally Round Hitler’s Grave, not a deep song at all, just threats about boiling Hitler in oil kind of thing. It really rocks Great Seeger Banjo licks, fast as Earl Scruggs. This is up-tempo Appalachia and Seeger has an authentic claim to Appalachia, except the northern part of the range.

Too bad, Seeger never played with the Hillbillies, a duet album with Ralph Stanley. The old weird America, the Invisible Republic. Seeger was as much a part of that world as Roy Acuff or the Stanley Brothers or the Elmore Brothers or the Louvins. They were all doing the same melodies, all playing acoustic instruments, yet there was no over cross-pollination. Regional differences, politics, the secular verses sacred or just that the music business was so segmented then. By the time of the 1960s, the folk movement came along and that mountain music was relegated to the New Lost City Rambler re-creations and protest seemed to dominate what people thought of as this acoustic music of the people and it wasn’t until the 1970s with Will The Circle Be Unbroken  by the Nitty Gritty Dirt band did the rediscovery of that pre-honky tonk country music. Seeger wasn’t invited to jam with them either. As a listener, the music relates more than the musicians or the record companies would let it. Maybe if A.P. recorded Union Maid the right to work movement that holds down southern wages could be squelched.

A guy can dream can’t he?

Seeger is a hero whether you agree with his politics or not. He was always for the working man Die hard leftist and environmentalist, supporting civil rights, worker rights and our right to clean air and water long before those movements were popular and when doing so landed you in jail or blacklisted, which it did for Seeger many times.

A friend of mine pointed out that if it wasn’t for his Clearwater activities, the Hudson River would still be unflushed toilet bowl. People can swim in it now, eat its fish.  That is thanks to Seeger and his banjo. His wife of like 70 years died in July, but he greeted canoers during an anti-fracking demonstration on the Hudson, playing his banjo on the shore.

What an amazing link to the past, playing for dustbowl refuges, union strikers, civil rights demonstrations, anti-war and Occupy Wall Street. I can't think of a another example of dedication to idealism and utter absence of cynicism combined with the longevity commitment. He did it when it was cool, when it was not cool. In the news or ignored by all but a handful, Pete and his banjo were found. He’s a hero. A true American hero.

 

And because he was New York –based, he was often in the news, part of our own firmament for as long my memory goes back. His death is strange. Not unexpected, he was 94 but it’s not like another celebrity of advanced years, when you hear he died you are not prompted to say, I thought he was already dead. We knew Pete was alive and with us and our side.

It’s like hearing a mountain or a river is dead. How can that be? But the mountains and the rivers, they’re not gone and neither is Pete Seeger or the songs or the human truths only music adequately expresses.

 

I found out something new about Pete Seeger and Phil Ochs that jarred another memory about my encounter with him.

What sparked this insight into the recollection was this article about Farm Aid this year, the last public appearance by Seeger.

Here’s a link

But here’s a snapshot.

Neil Young, one of the show’s longtime headliners, had stopped in to pay his respects, and the conversation soon turned to the night in 1976 when Phil Ochs hanged himself… Ochs, a good friend and fellow folk singer, was in trouble. He’d been depressed and drinking for a long time, and he reached out to Pete… “Phil really wanted to talk,” Mr. Young recalled. Pete had to choose between staying in the city another night or getting home. He chose the train. “Pete remembered shaking hands with him, and when he said goodbye to him for the last time,” Mr. Young said. “He regretted not talking to him.” For 37 years, the decision to leave that night ate at Pete. “ ‘I wish I’d done something more to stop that from happening,’ ” Mr. Young recalled him saying shortly before he took the stage.

 The way my long ago interview with Pete ended was sort of odd, he just stopped talking and his manager, Harold Leventhal (I know because he is interviewed in No Direction Home and he was a memorable man, when I saw him in the documentary I instantly recognized him).

The questions were going good but he just sort started mumbling and shut down.

I remember asking him about Phil Ochs, not about the suicide or anything like that. I recall asking him about newer song writers and mentioned Phil Ochs – Pete Seeger had a semi-hit, one of his last somewhat commercial cuts with Draft Dodger Rag. Seeger wasn’t known for interpreting new songs and even that one was 15 years ago. By the 80s, Seeger wasn’t putting out records much anymore.

I swear this is true.

What I remember is him just getting quiet, ending the interview. I was asking him questions before he went on stage, hanging out. I had to get permission and stuff. It was a big deal. The article was the interview and the concert. I have done tens of thousands of interviews since then, but like I said, this was my first, and so it is still sort of vivid and it’s been a favorite story. I’ve told it many times through the decades, a short anecdote. In retrospect, I just assumed he was just sick of answering questions and wanted to end the interview. Celebrities, I’ve read, will just shut you out when they don’t want to talk anymore. I assumed that’s probably what happened.

It was very odd though and now I think I have the explanation. This was about five years since Ochs hung himself by a belt from the door of his sister’s bathroom, an apartment in Queens.  

Could just mentioning Ochs have shut him down? The manager was all over me, not in a mean way, but was sudden. It was not like I asked an obnoxious question – shoot, I was too nervous to be proactive or confrontational – and I had been talking him to for a good while, he gave me good stuff. But I did ask him a question with Phil Ochs in that question and he did stop talking, the rapport abruptly ending, and the manager, who was in the same room and listening I am sure to me and Seeger – he was the star and center of attention after all.

I’ve always been a little bewildered about that moment. I have also read a few Phil Ochs biographies, the New York times piece that appeared after his death was the first time that piece of news was released to the public. It was not in the Phil Ochs film, for which Seeger was interviewed.

I know that must sound a little bit out there, but I am telling you this happened. I am sure that’s why the manager cut me off, he probably knew this history – I think he managed Ochs for a while too, he published Sing Out I believe. He was a luminary in that circle, although I had no idea of that either.

Anyway, I read that thing about Ochs after I posted a FB post on the day Pete died from which I have expanded here.

I feel weird about it, I swear it’s true though. I didn’t mean to offend him and I know I didn’t, it was just inadvertent. He’s talking to some college kid who accidently sparks a regret. He was still friendly and polite and warm but the way that interview ended was perculiar. The gregariousness disappeared. 

Sorry Pete.