Hot fun in the summertime

* It’s always nice when I’m on my way to the gym and I get stopped in my tracks by some fine fine music. Couple weeks back, at this very spot at the west side of the Fulton Street Mall. I heard some very nice Bach played by a young music stu­dent on one of those pub­lic pianos placed all over the city recently (you can see that very same key­board behind the drum­mer in the above shot). And last week it was the lovely blast of this quin­tet stretch­ing out on Herbie Hancock’s “Maiden Voyage.” The first thing that hit me com­ing round the corner from Jay Street was the dis­tor­tion on that elec­tron­ic key­board, a Casio Privia that seemed set to sim­u­late elec­tric piano rather than grand. Don’t get me wrong, I com­pletely loved the dirti­ness of the sound, which I’m reas­on­ably sure was an amp­li­fic­a­tion arti­fact; it’s a refresh­ing con­trast to the pristine, crys­tal­ized effect most elec­tric pianos aspire to. The second thing that hit me was the Roy-Haynes-style attack of the drum­mer. But most impress­ive of all, finally, was the lead­er, a ten­or sax­man named Jeff King; like the song says, he ain’t no joke. An elo­quent soloist with a very healthy tone and a pen­chant for Coltrane-esque sheets of sounds and Shorter-like voicings, someone I could listen to all day. I threw ten bucks in his bas­ket for a copy of his CD, Live At Solomon’s Porch, on which he leads a ten-man band that fea­tures, among oth­ers, the stal­wart trom­bon­ist Curtis Folkes. The record­ing’s maybe a bit more audio-verité than it need be—one hears the clat­ter or res­taur­ant sil­ver­ware under the begin­ning of one number—but it’s bet­ter than sol­id stuff, and the rep­er­toire, fea­tur­ing King ori­gin­als and good, not-particularly-obvious choices from Pharaoh Sanders, Chick Corea, McCoy Tyner, and Johnny Griffin, provides a con­cise pré­cis of where the man is com­ing from. His web­site is a bit of a mess, but I’m gonna con­tin­ue check­ing it out, as I wanna find out when/where he’s play­ing next, so I can hear him again. 

* In the sub­way the oth­er day, I noticed that for some reas­on Foot Locker, or, more to the point, Foot Locker’s ad agency, has become inter­ested in mar­ket­ing the wares it car­ries to pasty white Brooklyn hip­sters. How else to explain this pecu­li­ar ad? The pasty white ostens­ible Brooklyn hip­ster in the ad itself is a rep­res­ent­at­ive of its tar­get audi­ence; his place­ment in the photo makes it obvi­ous that the Asian fel­low on the right is merely meant as his cohort. What I love is how the white mod­el is fit, but not too fit; were he actu­ally ripped rather than neut­rally trim, he would­n’t be a hip­ster, then, would he? I also very much enjoy the “what the fuck ever, you’re prob­ably a cor­por­ate tool any­way” look on his kiss­er. Your facial expres­sion is cer­tainly writ­ing checks your fore­arms can­’t cash there, son; good thing you’re on that bike. By the way, the longitude/latitude coordin­ates place this charm­ing couple some­where in the vicin­ity of East Flatbush Ave. and King’s Highway, which means they must be lost. I also enjoy the all-your-baseness of Under Armour’s stu­pid fuck­ing taglines: “Protect This House/I Will.” Sold!

* Over at the Red Hook Recreation Center the oth­er day, I thought I spied a per­fect can­did­ate for a sub­mis­sion to The Blog of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks. But then I remembered that in Red Hook, noth­ing is unne­ces­sary, and everything is there for a reas­on; and that in this case, what one may mis­take for unne­ces­sary quo­ta­tion marks are actu­ally tokens of the gen­er­os­ity of spir­it and intent on the part of the man­agers of the Red Hook Recreation Center, telling its pat­rons that it does­n’t have to be an actu­al tow­el that they bring into the weight room but some piece of fab­ric that can serve the func­tion of a tow­el. This is very nice, don’t you think? 

* So. I bought a bas­ket­ball a couple of weeks ago. Because I figured, aside from my gym regi­men, my quest for heightened fit­ness might be enhanced by my tak­ing part in some­thing like actu­al sports activ­it­ies in the out­doors. And bas­ket­ball is really the only sport that I ever evinced any­thing like even any poten­tial to maybe be bor­der­line com­pet­ent at. This was the res­ult, indir­ectly, of a growth spurt that shot me up to about six feet four inches back when I was about thir­teen. For me, the imme­di­ate advant­age of my height was that it made me look old enough that I was nev­er again asked to pro­duce an “adult” guard­i­an whenev­er I wanted to see an R‑rated motion pic­ture. For my fath­er, my height rep­res­en­ted a dif­fer­ent oppor­tun­ity. An oppor­tun­ity to shape me up to the extent that maybe my peers would stop call­ing me “fag” all the time. So he taught me quite a few b‑ball tech­niques. Although way short­er than me, he was a pretty fierce one-on-one play­er with an excep­tion­al hook shot, and under his tutel­age I became a pretty con­sist­ent, erm, swish­er myself. His strategy worked to a cer­tain extent: “Yeah, Kenny’s still a fag, but he is tall, and he can sink it from the foul line pretty con­sist­ently,” but, you know, it’s all about the effort. But. Anyway.

So I bought a bas­ket­ball and a pump and one Sunday a couple of weeks ago I put on my bas­ket­ball shorts and a t‑shirt and dribbled over to Carroll Park and on to a court and star­ted shoot­ing. And boy, was I com­ing up short. At the next court eight loc­als were play­ing a pretty furi­ous four-on-four, nobody both­er­ing any­body. And I’m shoot­ing from the line, and miss­ing, and run­ning to retrieve the ball from where it bounces, and all of a sud­den a middle-aged woman push­ing a baby car­riage slowly crosses, in a per­fect diag­on­al, across the key of the court where I’m shoot­ing, entirely obli­vi­ous to my pres­ence and my activ­ity. Ball newly in hand after chas­ing it behind the foul line, I said, “Excuse me, Ma’am. You might not want to cross dir­ectly in front of the bas­ket while someone’s using the court here.”

She stopped, looked at me, and respon­ded. She had a thick Caribbean accent. “This isn’t your house. This is a pub­lic place. I can walk wherever I want.”

“Okay.” I’m now in my eye-rolling, why-are-you-being-an-idiot mode. “But, you know, what if the ball comes off the back­board and hits you? Or it busts up the stroller there? You see what I’m saying?”

“Are you call­ing me a bastard?”

Oh shit.

At this point, one of the fel­lows involved in the four-on-four game, a shirt­less wiry guy, a little older than the young adults he’s play­ing with, comes over, drip­ping with sweat and look­ing irrit­ated.  He wants to know what’s going on. He does­n’t like my tone. He does­n’t think I should talk to a lady like that. He wants me to go to the third court, the one all the way on the oth­er side of the field. I sput­ter, I hem and haw, I fold, but I stay at the court where I’m at. The nanny and her infant charge are on their way to the playground.

The four-on-four game resumes, not before sev­en oth­er guys glare at me a bit. I go back to shoot­ing. But it’s hard to con­cen­trate. This is the first time I’ve had a bas­ket­ball in my hands in about fif­teen years. More to the point, it’s the first time I’ve tried to shoot hoops in Carroll Park since I moved here almost twenty years ago. And with­in ten minutes, I have estab­lished myself in the eyes of the loc­al reg­u­lars as King Asshole. This won’t do.

There’s a break in the game. The wiry shirt­less guy’s over by the water foun­tain smoking a cigar­ette. I approach him, he puts his hands up like he does­n’t wanna hear it. I’m all like, look, I’m new to this court, I under­stand that any explan­a­tion I’m gonna try and feed you is gonna sound like a ration­al­iz­a­tion, but I don’t wanna come here an be unwel­come just like that, so long story short, I just wanna make the situ­ation right, tell me what to do to make the situ­ation right. And so he launches into what seems like his stump speech on the sanc­tity of woman­hood and moth­er­hood (“You and I came out of her”) and his pos­i­tion in the neigh­bor­hood (“I could whistle and have 800 guys down here”…you get the idea) and such, and he winds up with, “You go find that lady and you apo­lo­gize to her, and then I will shake your hand.”

Fine, then. I walk over to the kid’s play­ground sec­tion of the park, and I find the nanny, among a slew of oth­er nan­nies, and moms, and infants and tod­dlers. He charge on a swing, the woman’s on a cell phone. I give her a meek little wave. She con­cludes her call and comes up to the fence—I can­’t quite fig­ure out, let alone phys­ic­ally nego­ti­ate, the net­work of fences that actu­ally leads into the swing set are of the play­ground prop­er, and it’s likely just as well—and I say, “Ma’am, I wanted to apo­lo­gize. I did not mean to offend you with my com­ments to you before. They were out of con­cern for your safety and the child’s safety but I’m afraid I did not express them in the most respons­ible way. So I wanted to tell you I was sorry.” She nod­ded, smiled, and we shook hands, and I turned and star­ted walk­ing back toward the court. Two young women car­ry­ing babies were walk­ing beside me; they had heard the exchange. “That was really brave of you,” one said. 

I shrugged. “Seemed like it might have been the right thing to do.”

“No, but that took a lot of cour­age,” said the oth­er woman. Sorry girls, he’s married!

“So?” asked the wiry shirt­less fel­low as I returned. 

“I found her—she’s over there—I apo­lo­gized, it’s all good.”

We shook hands and exchanged names. I have been back once since, without incid­ent, well, without that kind of incid­ent. Instead, I wound up help­ing two little boys, about two and four respect­ively, “make” bas­kets by lift­ing them up and doing rebound assists as their moms gladly watched. At one point, while I was help­ing the older of the two, the little one rifled through my bag nearby and pulled out my iPod. I’m won­der­ing maybe if I should prac­tice shoot­ing very, very early in the morning. 

What do you call the daugh­ter of your niece? Your great-niece? Your grand-niece? Anyway, meet seven-month-old Annabella Lynne, the young­un of my niece Amanda and her mate Philip. And yes, I know at least one of you might wanna cap­tion this shot “The man who loved chil­dren” so, there, I beat you to it.