Slavery, Death, And The Beatles

“Beneath the blue suburban skies” in Penny Lane.

We visited London over the long Thanksgiving weekend and took a “day tripper” pilgrimage to Liverpool, where neither of us had ever been. Of course it was for the Fabs. I was standing in Penny Lane when our tour guide said, “look up.” The weather gods had bestowed “blue suburban skies,” and I took the above photo. Delighted, I later posted it on Facebook, both to travel-brag and because the day happened to illustrate Paul McCartney’s lyric so ridiculously well.

Among the responses was one from my longtime friend Robert Harland, who reminded me that Penny Lane’s namesake, thought to be one James Penny, had been a Liverpool slave trader. And he wasn’t alone, for Liverpool was a major slaving port. Its ships and merchants dominated the transatlantic slave market in the latter half of the 18th century. Probably three-quarters of all European slaving ships in this period left from Liverpool. It was Liverpool ships which transported fully half of the 3 million Africans carried across the Atlantic by British slavers. 

Our tour guide had already told us all this. To its credit, Liverpool seems to be owning its sordid past and coming to terms with its historic role in a cultural atrocity. There’s no effort to whitewash the record; on the contrary, the International Slavery Museum which opened in 2007 provides a frank, visceral look at a time when buyers and sellers of human beings were men of respect, like James Penny — not just in Liverpool, but all over the world. (America is dutifully represented too.)

Robert suggested that were it not for the Beatles song, the street name would probably have been changed by now, but it’s not that simple. “Penny Lane” is a kaleidoscopic trip through McCartney’s memories; they’re “beneath the blue suburban skies,” yet it’s “pouring rain (very strange).” The barber, the banker, the fireman, the “shelter in the middle of the roundabout” — none of these are actually located on Penny Lane the street. Locals refer to the whole area as “Penny Lane.“ So even if the city fathers amended the street name, Liverpudlians would almost certainly continue to use “Penny Lane,” song or no song. After all, nobody calls Sixth Avenue “Avenue of the Americas” except for the postman. 

Inside the International Slavery Museum, some Liverpool place names that found their way to Jamaica.

Once you understand Penny Lane’s etymology, it becomes harder to true up Paul’s joyous, carefree nostalgia, but the song is so redolent with play and innocence (there is one naughty bit) and humanity that it wins. We have the ability to overlook overt racism when it becomes so commonplace that it sounds correct: for example, the Washington Redskins. (Why don’t they just call themselves the Washington Rednecks and be done with it?) Liverpudlian place names — including Penny Lane — traveled across the Atlantic as well, some surviving in Jamaica, one of the trade’s major ports of call, where the sugar business was built on the backs of slaves.

Of course, slavery had long since been abolished when the four lads were traipsing around their hometown, and they were “woke” enough as The Beatles to refuse to play before segregated audiences in America. We visited their childhood homes and imagined them discovering each other, and followed their tracks in places of note all over town. And then we came upon the grave of Eleanor Rigby. 

It was discovered in the Eighties in the small cemetery of St. Peter’s Parish Church, Woolton, Merseyside. Across the street is the church hall where John Lennon’s band the Quarrymen were playing on July 6, 1957, the day Paul McCartney walked in. Paul has often been coy about the origin of Eleanor Rigby’s name, but he and John almost certainly strolled through this graveyard more than once. Paul may even have genuinely forgotten where the name came from, but when shown this headstone, he conceded that the name might have lodged somewhere in “me subconscious.”

The Beatles have probably been overthought more than any other pop music act, but here are some tantalizing details. It was the custom for a deceased wife to take her husband’s name for the memorial stone, and as you can see, Eleanor Rigby was Mrs. Woods. But almost uniquely in this setting, Eleanor was “buried along with her name” — her maiden name of Rigby. Also, a few stones down lies the body of John McKenzie, who died at 73 in 1915. Just under his name is that of his daughter Rachel, listed more traditionally. Could Paul have seen this stone too? Was the real-life inspiration for “Father McKenzie” not a priest at all, but a proud father in the familial sense? At any rate, however these snippets of real death did or did not inform the composer, what emerged was a melancholy McCartney masterpiece.

How much emptier our lives would have been without the series of coincidences that flung these four lads together. That’s also the subtext of Danny Boyle’s very entertaining new movie, YESTERDAY, which I highly recommend. I want to remember them the way sculptor Andy Edwards does. His bronze statues were unveiled in 2015 at Pier Head on the Liverpool waterfront, where they stand surveying the Mersey today. 

10/20/21: Quasi-confirmation from Sir Paul, from a New Yorker article on the writing of “Eleanor Rigby”: It’s like the story of the name Eleanor Rigby on a marker in the graveyard at St. Peter’s Church in Woolton, which John and I certainly wandered around, endlessly talking about our future. I don’t remember seeing the grave there, but I suppose I might have registered it subliminally. Now I feel better about my Rigby fantasia in Woolton.

I Saw This In Liverpool (It’s Fab)

I Saw This In Brussels (It’s Scatological)

Mex Without Tex

In Oaxaca I wanted to make sure to do two things: eat grasshoppers and drink mezcal. Nailed em both. 

The tiniest hoppers taste and chew like very salty sunflower seeds. They’re a great source of protein and may become one of the precious few remaining if Exxon & pals manage to ravage the rest of the biosphere. Get used to it. I did.

As I learned, mezcal — the speciality of the state of Oaxaca — is not tequila, though both come from the same agave plant (and the part you need is buried underground, it looks like a huge pineapple when uncovered). But the place we visited treated its wares more like wine: we had a tasting of five or six different pours, each of which came from a different strain of agave, and we could really tell the difference! (No worms in the bottle, but if you insist, you can enjoy chopped agave worms at any decent restaurant.)

We went to the woodcarving shop where Miguel’s mom from COCO actually works! Well, the model on which Pixar’s pixies based the character. (They spent four years in Oaxaca researching the movie.) But shoot, she was off that day. 

I did learn that my spiritual animal is the coyote. Each visitor was assigned their animal based on the day and date of birth. Exit thru the gift shop — but, si, it worked, there is a tiny carved coyote in my home today. And at a magnificent pottery studio I saw a Day Of The Dead skull which I took home too.

There are many more artisans in and around Oaxaca City, including some of the finest weavers you will ever behold. And the Mexican food is astonishing because everything is pure and fresh. (Still, you have to be careful with the tap water.) 

One year ago we were watching COCO at one of those Barfalounger theaters in La Jolla. I think that affected our decision to visit the source. I was delighted by our found wisdom. 

Unlike all the other photos, this one was shot in my home in New York. ¡Viva Oaxaca!

H & H UK

My Number One takeaway from my most recent trip to London was an amazing one I’d never known before: George Frideric Handel and Jimi Hendrix were next-door neighbors.

Oh, sure, two centuries separated them. But G. F. Handel spent 36 years at No. 25 Brook St. in Westminster, composing, rehearsing, performing and teaching. When Jimi moved into an adjoining flat at No. 23 in 1968, there was a plaque outside celebrating the famous Handel House. “God’s honest truth,” he said, “I haven’t heard much of the fella’s stuff. But I dig a bit of Bach now and again.” 

Now they’ve joined the two and turned it into a tourable destination called “Handel & Hendrix in London.” The feeling of cosmic confluence was, for me, a source of unending joy. I loved being there.

Mind, the Handel House is far more authentic, with relics which were actually in the maestro’s possession. Jimi’s flat — particularly his bedroom — has been basically restored and replicated from contemporary photo shoots and the memories of his then-girlfriend and de facto hostess, Kathy Etchingham. But seeing them together makes you sense the presence of a real euphonic muse, as when you consider the gifts of Tim Buckley and his son Jeff, who barely knew each other but definitely shared something mysterious and ineffable. 

Jimi went out and bought a couple of Handel albums after he moved in — you can take away a list of his entire record collection — and is it really inconceivable that if the situation had been reversed, G. F. might have done the same? I don’t know, but that’s the kind of idle thought this place provokes. I didn’t expect to be surprised by London. But she has a wealth of tricks up her sleeve, and this one is a real gobsmacker.

I Saw This In Lisbon (It’s Lynchian)

10 Things I Learned About London Theatre In 3 Days

1. In England, Roald Dahl gets a possessory credit above the title (like the one John Carpenter takes) for CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY.
2. They charge four pounds for a Playbill in London. But it’s bigger than the free US ones, each particular edition has some editorial material about the specific show you’re seeing, and, anyhow, somebody in front of me was somehow able to run down the cast (“Who’s Who”…) on his smartphone.
3.  Slapstick works everywhere. THE PLAY THAT GOES WRONG, which is basically the disaster act of NOISES OFF quadrupled, or maybe a live version of THE ART OF COARSE ACTING, should come with complimentary Pampers. Sometimes you can’t even breathe.
4. When the manager of THE COMMITMENTS yells just before the fourth-wall-breaking encore set, “Is there anybody here from Ireland?”, a London audience can give him a huge response.
5. There are theater-busting assholes everywhere. Just to the right of me at THE COMMITMENTS, two biddies talked to each other using normal conversational tones during the entire show, as if they were home watching telly. Fortunately, whenever the soul band played, you couldn’t hear them any more. They did their best to ruin the show but failed.
6. You can order “interval” (intermission) drinks before the show. When you get to the bar at halftime, they’re already waiting for you. The interval order taker is the most popular guy as the audience is filing in.
7. Ice cream is a huge interval favorite, but can be queued for and consumed in the auditorium itself. No biggie. A member of staff will be by just before curtain with a big rubbish bag.
8. They don’t tell you to turn off your phone or don’t take pictures or don’t bring anything into the theater. People just take all the pre-show pictures they like but know enough to turn everything off when they should. I never heard a cell phone ring or even saw anyone surreptitiously consulting one during the actual performance. The transgressive biddies were, sadly, non-electronic.
9. Those oompa loompas (five or six different sly costume-&-lighting gags to make an average-sized person appear to be half hisser actual height) are amazing and worth the CHARLIE ticket alone. The bad news: they don’t appear until Act II.
10. Understudies and overstudies come out on stage for the final performance. The lead COMMITMENTS role — the asshole singer — was being played by the Sunday man, but his rest-of-the-week counterpart, and all other fill-ins, showed up on stage for the finale of the show’s West End run. Is the musical — book, in the musical theater sense, by Roddy Doyle — any good? Look: all they promise is that you’ll get to see the soul revue known as the Commitments throw down live on stage, and once they kicked the show proper away for a joyous out-of-character series of encores, they bloody blew the roof off the bloody dump. So no, and bloody YES.

10 Things I Learned In Argentina (With A Bonus!)

1) You know you want a slab of lean Argentine beef, right? Order the sirloin, called in most restaurants the “Bife De Chorizo.” They also have ribeye, filet, even succulent tenderloin, but this New-York-strip-steakish cut is not only cheaper, it’s also exactly what you want and is their best expression of mid-day, siesta-inducing beef. Tell them to cook it however they would enjoy it best themselves. Get the steak frites.

This is it.

2) The famous Malbec grape, star of the Mendoza wine region, is more versatile than you may have imagined, especially in blends with Cabernet and Franc or yummy Tempranillo. The stuff we get in the States is generally the mass-produced dregs, hence the low regard. It’s like being in the Duoro Valley: these really beautiful wines are so good that the locals drink them all up! But this could be changing as French winemakers move into the region and marry two styles, with international sales in mind. There are now pure Malbec bottles that can make your hair stand up, but the blends are still the absolute grooviest.

The tank room at Bodega (winery) Alta Vista near Mendoza.

3) Eva Peron is tucked away in her famous cemetery, La Recoleta in Buenos Aires; it takes some footwork to find the memorial to her mortal remains. Fortunately, Airbnb led us to a great place in the charming Recoleta neighborhood, so we felt like we had plenty of time to wander around.

Evita and family.

4) If you want to go to Uruguay, it’s a simple ferry ride, which we took, to Colonia del Sacramento. Some people on both sides take this ride for visa reasons: you have to leave the country every few months, etc. We were thrilled to be in another country. It looks like Cuba b/c of all the antique American cars passionately (and otherwise) maintained.

5) US$ are more prized than AR pesos. This is because there is an official exchange rate and a “blue market” exchange rate. “Blue” instead of “black” because airbody knows about it, and individual stores will even offer the “blue” rate to your face if you’ll only pay in US$.

6) Mendoza is primed to explode. It’s like Napa a generation ago. They’re even selling plots wherever you go. The main problem is WATER. Don’t buy a plot unless you know you have this problem nicely solved, but if so, you’re betting on one of the world’s next trendy wine regions, so the dice would seem to be loaded in your favor.

This is the cellar at O. Fournier in the soon-to-be-trendy Uco Valley. You may peg it as a sanctuary. You would be correct.

7) The Vines Of Mendoza is a great place to settle down and taste. They know what they’re doing there, and although they’re obviously promoting, they listen to you too.

First thing you wanna do in Mendoza is head down to Vines Of. They are great.

8) The non-tourist-serving Argentine people know just enough English: maybe a tad less than Europeans, but they make up for it in friendliness. You can communicate in a pinch with flailing hands and pointing fingers. Waiters and such are by and large fine: they have menus in English so all you have to do is point. A typical taxi driver may speak just a few English words, which matches my Spanish precisely. I made a couple of ’em laugh with my pitiful attempts. Write down your destination ahead of time and you’re bueno.

The first few days of fall were just perfect for al fresco steak snarfing.

9) The stars are all different in the Southern Hemisphere. I should have noted this in Australia twenty years ago. We stayed in a top-floor place in B.A., but I never got a really close look at them. I imagined seeing the Southern Cross — or maybe I actually did! — and took a swig of Malbec. It was as if I had, so I was happy.

10) I turned on my pad and saw a Google Doodle made up of gourds: squash, pumpkin, etc. Curious, I clicked to get the significance, and — in Spanish — found it was the First Day Of Autumn. In other words, Sergei and Larry and Eric, along with the entire Apple staff, knew exactly where I was.

That is molto creepando, but I still owe a hearty muchas gracias to Ricardo (Mendoza Wine Tours), Andreas (The Vines of Mendoza), Alejandro (at our B.A. apartment), and all the other terrific people who made us feel right at home. Note to self: quit falling in love with these places. The return list is getting too long!

The actual second course (of seven) at our i Latina dinner. Don’t miss it.

BONUS TIP: Before you go to Buenos Aires, check out http://www.ilatinabuenosaires.com. This was the best place we ate in the entire Southern Hemisphere. Go all out for the wine tasting menu.

Cuba, Si! Castro, Meh.

It’s amazing, the things you can do when you no longer have to be concerned about winning elections in Florida. President Obama’s efforts to normalize relations between the United States and Cuba are historic not because they’re so surprising, but because the only guy who can get the ball rolling is a lame duck who will never have to run again.

In most of the country, all but the most virulent knee-jerk Commie-haters (or black-President haters) understand that our fifty-year trade embargo has done nothing to harm the Castro regime — it’s still there, after all — and everything to isolate innocent working-class people by denying them access to the world’s richest market, and, perhaps significantly, vice versa. The overwhelming view is that the embargo is a failed Cold War relic whose time has long past.

That’s most of the country. It’s different in South Florida.

This region is stocked with refugees old enough to vividly remember the brutality of Fidel Castro’s “revolution,” who consider it treasonous even to recognize the regime which split proud families into resentful diaspora, much less do business with it. They are a shrinking minority, but they are vocal and potent beyond their numbers. Younger Cuban-Americans tend to agree that the embargo has outlived its usefulness, but their parents and especially their grandparents are far more fervent and thus far more likely to vote. It is political dynamite for a Florida politician to suggest any relaxation of our rust-covered Cuba policy, which is why Presidential prospects like Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush are leading the outcries against the president (along with usual-suspect Obamaphobes like Lindsey Graham, that Ebola-shrieker who still yells “Benghazi!” whenever he can).

Some right-wing babblers have found themselves twisted into knots, praising the release of detained U.S. aid contractor Alan Gross, then denouncing the President in the same sentence. But the general response to President Obama’s action — he was covertly assisted by Canada and the Pope! — has been sensible and supportive. Talk of withholding funds for creating a U.S. embassy in Havana is just that: talk. Here’s one thing nearly everybody can agree on, like the fact that our gun laws are too lax and our military budget is too bloated. But to actually propose a solution? After you, Senator.

So American tourists will be able to legally bring back some of those ass-kicking Cohibas (Cuban cigars are strong, mate — uh, I mean, that’s what I’ve heard), unless those rumors are true and Fidel’s so mean that he plans to flood the U.S. market with cheap counterfeits once we normalize. (Gang, Raul‘s in charge.) This Cuba deal’s such a no-brainer that it might actually get done. And as a new tourist spot for Caribbean-bound Americans, this beautiful island’s image might finally change. Imagine the marketing possibilities: “Cuba. It’s not just for torture anymore.”

Tom, Cruise

Over the years we’ve gone on four or five cruise-ship vacations, beginning with Linda’s attagirl sail as one of the year’s best-performing employees of the Stroh Brewery Company. It was a Caribbean jaunt on which the Stroh contingent – which, as you may have already guessed, brought along some of its own refreshments – seriously lowered the passenger median age. We would never have gone if it hadn’t been a freebie congratulatory occasion. We imagined stereotypical snoozing on chaise lounges, cocooned in blankets, as the ship poked its way through a dense black-and-white Thirties-movie fog.

While there certainly are many retirees who enjoy traveling this way, they have a perfectly good reason. The crucial advantage of being on a cruise ship is that you have to unpack only once: your hotel does the moving around. The trip is all about the destinations, as are most landlubbing vacations, but a driving-free mobile home base makes it all amazingly convenient and de-stressful, even in places where the language and customs may be unfamiliar. If you’re lucky, you share the experience with nice folks you meet on the spot or, as with the 2001 Alaskan cruise on which we hosted our parents, you live inside a Dickens novel for a week.

A Viking longboat on the job.

We have just returned from a different kind of trip. My sister-in-law and her husband are old pros at this (maybe twenty cruises in all) and we’ve been idly trying to put a vacation together since Alaska, only this time just us four. Maybe it was only after dozens of DOWNTON ABBEYs or PBS NEWS HOURs, but we finally succumbed to an outfit called Viking River Cruises and booked a week on the “romantic Danube,” upriver from Budapest to Nuremberg, with stops in Vienna, Melk, Passau, and Regensburg. A great trip, but apart from the destinations, it was the cruise line that made it great. This was the first river cruise (as opposed to oceangoing) for any of us, but trust me on this: not only are river cruises da bomb, but Viking is also now my favorite cruise line ever.

Heading into a lock.

Let’s answer your first question first. Big seagoing vessels these days have honking stabilizers, so you rarely need “sea legs” under normal conditions; storms on the ocean can cause some commotion, but man up, hoss, it’s not like you’re in THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE. However, a river cruise on a “Viking Longboat”? Nothing at all, mate. We had returned to the ship after an arrival-day visit to Budapest and were standing in a buffet line when somebody noticed we were moving – by looking out the window. There was no other way to tell: no rocking, no engine sound, no vibration, nothing. The sole and single exception may come when the ship is navigating one of the 26 locks that lift or lower it on the week-long leg. The fit is so snug that the ship may actually brush against the side of the lock with a hardly noticeable tremor (once, for us, a mild jolt as if we’d bumped a small log in the river) and a slight horizontal motion. You can hear the engines gun when the ship is headed toward a higher elevation just downstream of the mighty Inn River, which has flooded the town of Passau several times on its way to the Danube, the second worst flood in centuries occurring only last year. Beyond the Inn, the Danube is like glass (it’s not blue, mein Freund, that’s just poetic license) and the ship floats upriver again as if on air.

Our space-age lighting center.

Our ship, the Viking Kara, was only six weeks old when we boarded her. Though we have never ponied up for the grand luxurious staterooms that you can have if money is no object (think upstairs on the Titanic), we’ve thus found ourselves in cramped quarters with nothing but a porthole to see out of. In fairness, you don’t go on a cruise to stay in your room, which is basically just for sleeping and hygiene. This time, however, while our cabin was still rather cozy, it featured the best accommodations I’ve ever had on a ship. Lighting, plumbing, power, everything was brand new. Your key card inserted in a door-side slot turned on all the lights instantly. Shower doors swung both inward and outward to effectively make the bathroom a little larger; its permanent night-light saved us from unnecessary toe-stubbing. Whenever you slid open the large riverside picture window (we did spring for the “French balcony,” one step up from “Standard” but a long way from “Explorer Suite”), the heating/AC automatically cut off until you shut and locked the door again. You could recharge every electronic thing you had without a converter. The shipboard wi-fi worked nearly as well as my router does here at home, just a little slower because of the massive simultaneous bandwidth drain. A 40-inch hi-def monitor displayed trip news, weather, and even some entertainment (THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL, we gathered from several dinner companions, was quite popular, but we never watched any tv). Brand new, I tell you! The first day on the river, I went up into the Kara’s “wheelhouse,” where there is no actual wheel, only an electronic array that would make Mr. Sulu nod in admiration.

Die Braut und der Bier! (Did I even get close?)

Oceangoing cruise ships have become so mammoth that their capacity is itself a point of interest: “we wash blah-blah towels every day,” etc. The biggest ones, like the ships that dock every week near our villa in Jamaica, look like skyscrapers with smokestacks. It is kind of perversely amusing that you can take so many people – maybe not entire cities, but certainly enough humans to fill many Stateside county seats – anywhere the winds can blow them. These ships have full casinos, lavish entertainment, even some abbreviated Broadway musicals – Vegas at sea. Our little Kara, long and low, could not compete with a nautical Rat Pack, but there was a sun deck up top (particularly nice for sailing through Wachau Valley, Austria’s gorgeous terraced wine country), an exercise track, miniature golf, shuffleboard, you know. Viking longships can dock alongside each other; passengers just walk straight through to go ashore.

Woh.

The Viking River Cruises model is, simply stated, less is more. There were fewer than 200 passengers on our upriver Kara run (a big cruise ship can serve thousands), and the staff were also comparably fewer but thus more personable. The big ships sometimes shunt you onto a permanent dinner table where you can get to know your fellow diners and compare walking-tour notes (we have met some lovely people this way), but here you just sit down wherever you choose and make friends spontaneously. It gets to the point where you barely even need the tour guide’s “lollipop” (the circular sign s/he holds up in the town square to make sure everybody’s in the right place). You just look for familiar faces who you know are on the same tour; that’s “33-B.” Viking is about to launch some oceangoing ships itself, but they’ll be much smaller than the competition’s: the passenger capacity will only be in the 900s, which should preserve the line’s close-in experience.

Linda, her sister Roslyn, and her husband Cal waiting to dig some Mozart, Haydn and Strauss in Vienna.

On a Viking cruise all meals are included in the booking price, as are the accompanying beer or wine. (You run a bar tab when not at table.) Also included are walking tours of every port of call, led by carefully screened local guides (ours were all terrific). There are optional extra excursions available for a price: for example, we attended a concert in Vienna, toured the BMW plant in Regensburg, and saw Nuremberg through a World War II filter, including the infamous Zeppelin Field where Albert Speer staged giant Nazi rallies and the courthouse building where he was a defendant in the world’s first international war crimes trial. But we could have just as easily chosen to hang out in the town square, chomp sausages, and hoist steins of foaming Bavarian beer.

There’s a program director on board who has everything organized and is the go-to person for all kinds of questions; ours was a delightful six-foot Nordic beauty named Chantal who spent six years as a casino dealer until she got tired of making people sad. We saw her change plans on a dime when a couple of the locks had some mechanical trouble, pushing us slightly off schedule. Her problem, not ours. Because of our flights back home, we happened to be the very last previous passengers to walk off the Kara while the staff were trying to prepare it for the new sail, yet they still treated us like honored guests unto the final moment. “Are you relieved?” I asked Chantal. “Not the right word,” she replied. “Weird.”

Chantal.

The ocean cruises definitely have their own charms, and different people expect different things from them. While my in-laws were indeed impressed with the Viking experience, they said they did miss “sea days” when you’re just en route and you can relax on that trusty chaise. Also, cheesy seaborne entertainment can be fun to watch. But if you’re mainly there for the travel, this gang operates from the Rhine to the Nile, from the Mekong to the Yangtze, and I even heard a rumor that they’re working on their first American cruise, on the Mississippi. I’ve already seen plenty enough of that river in my life, but on a Viking longboat? Wow, I just might check it out anyway.

Y’know, it IS kinda romantic on the Danube.