Good Times

Even this old white guy recognized Jimmie Walker although I never watched his Norman Lear sit com.  But who knew that Ernie Barnes created this and other art used in the production of Good Times?   That would make an excellent "playlist" for a museum exhibit: paintings created specifically for television or film.  I'll bet there wouldn't be many as good as these.

"Portrait of JJ" (1974)

When reading a New York Times review of "In Rapture," his terrific solo show at Ortuzar Projects,  I mistook Barnes's work for that of Archibald John Motley, Jr. whose painting is just as crowded, colorful and sinuous, although maybe not quite so joyful.  Barnes--who also played for the National Football League and dabbled in acting, too--really celebrates Black life.  His subjects dance as if everyone's looking.

"Full Boogie" (1978)

“The Rapture” (2000)

Even in church

"Friendly Friendship Baptist Church" (1994)

. . . and at home.

"Room Ful 'A Sistuhs" (1994)

You can hear the music in his work, too.

"Street Song" (1971)

After seeing “Sugar Shack,” perhaps Barnes’s most famous work, run with the end credits of Good Times, Marvin Gaye asked the artist if he could use it on a 1972 recording. Barnes, who also illustrated album covers for The Crusaders, B.B. King and Curtis Mayfield, even adapted the banners to include relevant text. No prima donna he--Barnes's utter lack of pretension and commercial licensing of his work probably did not do much for his long overdue credibility in the art world.

Apparently Barnes didn't care much for playing ball. A Denver Broncos coach once fined him for sketching during a game. He used his time well, doing for arm and leg muscles what Tom of Finland, another marginalized artist, did for penises and pecs: exaggeration as eroticism.

"Fumble in the Line" (1990)

Exaggeration is even more evident in his depictions of basketball, this time in service of elasticity.  Without knowing that Barnes produced an exhibition in the '70s called "The Beauty of the Ghetto," I could feel the sense of Black pride that permeates his work.

"Shootin' the Breeze" (1974)

"Protect the Rim" (1976)

This paddle-ball playing young woman has attitude--and legs--to spare.

 

"Juba Dis an Juba Dat" (1976)

I usually crop out frames in art photos but this one tells a story.  Barnes, who died in 2002 at the age of 70,  often used distressed wood in honor of his father, an uneducated man who worked as a shipping clerk for a tobacco company in Durham, NC.  Ernest Barnes, Sr. meticulously maintained the white picket fence around the family home until he became sick and died around the time his son first exhibited his work.  Ernie, Jr. propped one of his paintings against the fence and discovered how the art and the wood complemented each other, thus beginning a tradition.  Although this work isn't a self-portrait it's hard not to see Ernie headed for good times in "The Graduate" (1972), framed by the love for his father.

Merrily We Roll Along 5+*

 

The man even older than I in the row ahead at the Hudson Theater announced he had seen the original Merrily We Roll Along in 1982.  He didn't fall asleep this time.  Director Maria Friedman and perfect casting has slain the ghost of Hal Prince in the Tony-nominated production for Best Revival and brought Merrily back to heartbreaking life.  

Merrily's flop pretty much ended one of Broadway's most creative partnerships but Stephen Sondheim acolytes have known from the beginning that the composer's extremely hummable score never was the problem, although it took me decades to realize it.  Like everyone else I'd been blown away by the sheer audacity of Sweeney Todd, their previous show, but my familiarity with Merrily didn't begin until Barnet and I had a falling out in the 90s.  We made up by each recording one side of a cassette tape with our favorite songs about friendship.  Both included one called "Old Friends," his by Sondheim, mine by Paul Simon.

Then, a decade ago, I got a glimpse of the show's potential when Dan scored tickets to a one-night only filmed-live West End production, also directed by Ms. Friedman.  It turned me on to "Our Time," surely the most beautiful song ever written about talented people coming of age:

We're what's happening
Don't you know, we're the movers and we're the shapers
We're the names in tomorrow's papers
Up to us man, to show 'em
It's our time

I don't remember much else about the production, except that I nodded off, perhaps because it lacked star power and the backwards-in-time story made it difficult to follow for a first-timer.

Now, thanks to doing my homework enhanced by relatively new technology, which included following the lyrics while listening to the original cast recording on my phone and reading the Wikipedia plot synopsis, I rank it among my favorite Sondheim shows ever, due in no small part to stars Jonathan Groff and Daniel Radcliffe, and a talented supporting cast that makes it easy to distinguish among the key secondary players who in the filmed version had coalesced like the "blob" of hangers on.  Lindsay Mendez, while also fine, has little to do other than deliver hugs or takedowns; her characterization is the most dated thing about the show.

Ultimately, Merrily is less about friendship than the very different places time has taken Frank, Charlie and Mary.  Friedman focuses on Frank, the talented composer and charming go-getter, who at the beginning has "gone Hollywood," compromising the values he may--or may not--have once shared with Charlie, an acerbic, left-wing Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist who shuns the limelight and Mary, a book critic whose love for Frank has curdled into alcoholism.  I can't help but think Sondheim's own experience with Hollywood--he co-wrote the screenplay for The Last of Sheila, a well-reviewed whodunit with an all-star cast that didn't make much money--probably informed both his distaste for the scene and how seductive it could be.  Instead, he took Charlie's route by returning to New York and composing the brilliant music and lyrics for some of Broadway's most sophistical and memorable shows.

Merrily earns its acclaim by tunefully reminding audiences how difficult idealism and friendships are to maintain over decades, and how we romanticize our youth (for a less sentimental exposition of young creatives a generation later, see Stereophonic) to such an extent that the volume of tears you weep at the show's end are in direct proportion to how many years you've lived.  Does anybody ever really end up where they think they're going to be when they're in their early 20s?  The best we can hope for is enjoying the ride.

Discovering Beantown

Boston never has been among my favorite cities--too cold and America's colonial history is my least favorite chapter--but a warm spring day of exploration helped me appreciate Beantown much more.  Puritans, who didn't cook on the Sabbath, gave it the nickname because the odor from the pots of baked beans they kept warm from Saturday wafted through the streets on weekends.

Paul Revere Statue, North Boston

Like New York, it's definitely a place of architectural contrasts.  My walk from North Station to the Freedom Trail took me past the new(ish) buildings first.

Edward W. Brooke Courthouse

I'd last visited Faneuil Hall, a marketplace built before the American revolution, with David in 1982 shortly after it was re-developed by the Rouse Corporation and became one of the country's most visited tourist attractions.

The Custom House Tower, now a Marriott Hotel, was built upon landfill and opened in 1847. Once topped with a dome, the clock tower was added in 1915.  It's visible throughout the Financial District.

A one-bedroom apartment in this old cast-iron gem--built in 1859 but designated a landmark building only last year--rents for $3640.

By the time Thomas Crafts declaimed the Declaration of Independence from the balcony of the Old State House for the first time on July 18, 1776, American revolutionaries had pulled down and burned the decorative figures on the building's top corners.  

But the lion and the unicorn had long been replaced when Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip waved from the balcony when visiting during America's Bicentennial.  The animals represent England and Scotland, respectively.  They're what lured me inside.

Photo by David L. Ryan, Boston Globe (1976)

When the building was the seat of British colonial government in Massachusetts, the Boston Massacre was visible from the same balcony.  In an odd coincidence, I recently saw a more contemporary but whitewashed illustration of the same event at the New York Public Library. In this version, printed on the eve of the Civil War, there's no mistaking the color of  Crispus Attucks, often called the first casualty of the American revolution.  

History, like everything else, changes with the times.  That's what I told Allen, the enthusiastic kid who briefed me in the Council Chamber, hung with portraits of kings, where colonists with money and property--around 35% of the population and, you guessed it, mostly old white men--once petitioned the British officials they had elected.  You even could earn the right to vote by killing members of the local Penobscot tribe.  Two scalps of men, women or children would do the trick.  Call it savage suffrage.

After the revolution, in the same room, a newly minted American petitioned the nascent Massachusetts government to claim the property left behind by her loyalist husband who had fled the country.  The state declared him dead, granting his wife the right to inherit.

Apparently this is where the chamber's redcoats enjoyed a cuppa.  

A tea "caddy" is prominently displayed for obvious reasons.

Props to the curators of "Impassioned Destruction:  Politics, Vandalism and the Boston Tea Party," an exhibit that examines other American traumas through the lens of the 1773 event which children of my generation were taught to cheer as our country's first step towards independence.  But if history changes with the times, so does your perspective. 

Take this dignified, intelligent-looking fellow for example:  Thomas Hutchinson, a Harvard graduate who, as governor of the colony at the time, was responsible for dealing with the local rebellion.  The mob protesting more "taxation without representation" burned down his home even though he questioned the legality of the Stamp Act, a later decree of the British Parliament that had incited the arson.  I never thought much about the fate of loyalists until I learned more about him.  After the revolution, Hutchinson spent his life in miserable exile, homesick for his native Massachusetts, because he had chosen the wrong side of history.

Viewers of the exhibit--which also included accounts of the Ursuline convent riots in 1834 and the Gulf Tower bombing in 1974, both unfamiliar to me--are given the opportunity to vote whether or not each event was justified by adding a (free) penny to one side of a scale labelled "yes" or "no."  Given the fact that Massachusetts is among the most liberal of states, I was just as shocked to see the scale almost evenly balanced as I was to find that the curators ended the exhibit with the 2021 attack on the Capitol.  It took me a minute to deduce that tourists likely visit the museum in greater numbers than residents, and that those visitors may betray a "tea party" bias. 

Thoughts highly (and enjoyably!) provoked, I spent the remainder of my time in Boston wandering.  The lunchtime crowd in Norman B. Leventhal Park demonstrated the socializing opportunities that the slow-building "return to office" trend offers employees.

It seems as if they're biking back, too.  There wasn't a slot to spare at this tower.

The glorious Art Deco entrance to the main post office reminded me of the tour Thom and I took last summer in Los Angeles.

Do you suppose this glass structure will be around in a century?  

During my brief visit to North Andover, Tom and I discussed his Hungarian heritage, which includes requesting locker number 56 when he uses the gym.  Who knew there was a rather ungainly memorial to the Hungarian Revolution downtown? 

The magnificent terra cotta edifice of the Chadwick Leadworks building reminds passersby that heavy manufacturing once employed most of Boston's worker bees.

A trade route map displayed at the Old State House indicates how much the Wharf District has changed, too.  Tall ships once loaded with timber, livestock, whale oil and yes, enslaved Africans (until the end of the 18th century) sailed in and out of Boston's harbor.  Today's traffic is largely local pleasure craft.  

The Greenway connects North and South Boston.

Boxer Tony DeMarco welcomes visitors to the heavily Italian North End.  The phrase "Boston strong" always has struck me as slightly pugilistic.

The combination of my t-shirt and the Old North Church reminded me of an unforgettable lyric from "Five Years," Bowie's most apocalyptic song, even though its worshippers have been Protestant since 1723.

A cop knelt and kissed the feet of a priest

And a queer threw up at the sight of that

On my way to Paul Revere's house, I stumbled upon Monica's Mercato & Salumeria where, for $20, I purchased an enormous buratta caprese sub (worth every penny after amortized over three lunches, although it did require some rearranging of my backpack).

I didn't have time to go inside either the Old North Church or Paul Revere's house.  Can I still check them off my "been there, done that" list?

By now the temperature had reached 80 degrees and a few lucky families were sunning and cooling off in a way that would have shocked their Puritan ancestors.

I must admit I was a little shocked, too, as I picnicked on half my sub sandwich just across the street from South Station, truly a transit hell hole.  Other than the child depicted on this mural, I couldn't recall seeing many African Americans during my visit.  Boston, which got a national black eye from its hostile reaction to busing in the 1970s, remains highly segregated.

Septuagenerian Good Samaritans

Tom and I hiked from the shore of Lake Cochichewick to the summit of Osgood Hill where we took in the lovely view from a couple of Adirondack chairs.

 

En route, we met Lila, a recent transplant from New York City who was struggling to get her stroller from a blocked lower path to a higher one.  We carried it uphill--minus young Victoria--through the brush.  Chill Duke stayed on his leash unlike the bluetick coon hound we encountered later.

Look carefully and you can see all three after we sent them on their way through the Massachusetts savannah.  Our chivalry counted as a local great adventure, worth texting about.

Can you believe the size of beech tree in Tom's and Audrey's driveway after a "gentle pruning?"  It's almost as big as their house.

I stayed with them a couple of nights after attending their son-in-law's 40th birthday at a neighborhood bar in South Boston.

Forty seems so very long ago!  See for yourself.

Dagny brought a soccer balloon on a string to the party.  Uncle Jeff used it to teach her how to play tetherball with her cousin Wild.  She's very competitive, just like her mom.

Dagny's artistic skills (and Della's too!) are really maturing.  Their latest works hang in the North Andover Gallery of D-Girl Art.  

Let's hope that unicorn (named Magda?) is drinking a mocktail!