Nov 25 2008
The writerly community in Pittsburgh is full of surprises. Not only do we read, write, criticize and smooze, we can also cook. The other night, I joined forces with Sherrie Flick, doyen of Gist Street Reading Series and fine fiction writer, to feed our homemade pizza to a crowd at Diane and Chuck Kinder's sumptuously renovated kitchen on Wightman Street.
Sherrie, being more of a "Moosewood Cookbook" baker, favors the hearty whole-wheat crust and curious toppings including crushed pistachios and pomegranate.
On the other hand, I as a follower of Marcella Hazan, go for the Napoli style of thin, thin crust, fresh marina and fresh mozzerella. (My secret: Doppio Zero flour, direct from Italia via Pennsylvania Macaroni).
The combination was perfecto -- hearty, healthy on one hand, light and airy on the other. Expertly using the two-oven Kinder kitchen, Sherrie and I, with baking stones, pizza peel and lots of vino, kept the pizzas coming. Thanks to Sherrie's hubby, Rick, for the photos
. Thanks to Chuck and Diane for the hospitality and, as always, generous spirit.
Nov 24 2008
The filmmakers snuck "The Mysteries of Pittsburgh" into town Nov. 23, then fled with it after one showing. It might never surface again (for good reason, says PG film critic Barbara Vancheri) – just like another Mystery of Pittsburgh.
The story is widely known. A World War II vintage bomber, the twin-engine Mitchell B-25, on an Air Force mission from Las Vegas to Harrisburg, ditched in the Monongahela River Jan. 31, 1956 at 4:20 p.m. between the Homestead Grays (then Homestead High Level) and the Glenwood bridges. As the old plane floated downstream toward the South Side in the winter gloom, it sank. Four passengers were rescued and two drowned. The air temperature was 26 degrees, the current swift and the river, then a chemically polluted open sewer, carrying its share of debris.
The bodies washed up months later, one at the parking wharf at Wood Street in May, the other in April near the site of the old Brady Street Bridge, South Side end.
Despite river searches, the B-25 was never found and, officially, stays in the Mon mud forever. Even a diving team of experts came up empty in a search of the Mon site in October. The B-25 Recovery Team thought it found some debris, but nothing from a plane. The river water was cloudy with silt and the bottom a junkyard of, well, junk. Good reasons why it is lost and probably will never be found.
Little remembered is that a DC-3 airliner with G.I.s going home for Christmas splashed down in the Mon near Glassport Dec. 22, 1954, also running out of gas. Ten men died. Yet the plane, another WWII-era two-engine craft about the same size as a B-25, was found soon after sinking and recovered from the river.
Now, an interesting little book published by a husband-wife team in Apollo calling itself Closson Press, has published "The Incident That Could Have Killed Pittsburgh" by the late Robert H. Johns, shown here in a 1981 photo taken at the old Pittsburgh Press during an interview. He died on Dec. 22, 1991.
Editing the book is Robert E. Cole. Johns' widow told the Post-Gazette that Investigating the crash became his preoccupation starting in 1976. The Natrona Heights man wrote a manuscript about his hunt – and conspiracy theories that Cole put together for Closson.
"They said he had emphysema, but that's not what it was," Johns' wife said. "He was under a lot of stress." Karen Johns said her husband received many late-night phone calls from people who claimed they witnessed the government spiriting the plane away and occasionally speculated that he might fall victim to an official silencing. "Someone stole our garbage for years. We didn't have to have trash collection," she said.
Get the picture? The conspiracy buffs believe something bad was aboard the B-25 when it ran out of gas, inexplicably. Later the government retrieved the plane secretly and spirited it away. Johns' theory: Two H-bombs were loaded aboard in Detroit en route to Olmstead air base near Harrisburg, but not enough fuel was added to make up for the extra weight.
Although the B-25 was closing in on Johnstown airport, a "mystery man" aboard ordered the pilot to turn back toward Pittsburgh so they could land at a military base. The fact that there were two airports near the city confused the crew, screwing up the flight path, dooming the plane to the murky Mon.
Quickly, say the buffs, the CIA was called in, salvaged the plane and bombs and then removed the evidence.
Carol Long was the captain of the Expeditor tugboat near the floating plane and aided in the rescue effort. He died in November of last year at 97. His daughter, Cheryl Haberstock, told the Post-Gazette in his obituary her father "saw some wreckage being carted away on barges. But he wouldn't elaborate on the particulars after he received threatening phone calls warning him not to talk about what he had seen.
‘He wouldn't talk to anybody about it,’ she said. ‘He was too scared.’ Mrs. Haberstock doesn't believe he was holding back some dark secret. Rather, she said, her father was a simple man who didn't want to become part of a controversy or conflict."
Johns writes how he searched the "morgues" or picture files of the Pittsburgh Press and the Post-Gazette for copies of its photos on the event, extensively covered by the city’s three papers, and found nothing. To test his claim, I sneezed and coughed my way through the dusty folders and found – nothing. All photos are missing! It turns out, all clippings are gone, too! When I tried the microfilms of newspapers from the time, the film was wound backwards! Remember that when the PG acquired the Press in 1992, it got the backfiles and photos of the defunct paper. Now, the archives of both are oddly empty of B-25 materials. What’s going on?
Further inquiries will be made.
Nov 24 2008
"Since then, the rumor has been spreading. People I run into on the street say, 'I hear you're leaving Pittsburgh.' Or mutual friends and relatives say to one another, 'Lee is leaving town.' "
From Lee Gutkind's blog Nov. 5.
Yes, shocking, but true. With the world economy in free fall, election of the first African-American as president making history and even the closing of the Penn Brewery causing a stir, the whole town is coping instead with the loss of Lee Gutlkind as a faculty member at the University of Pittsburgh and Starbuck's is trying to accommodate the considerable loss of his business. Read Gutkind's blog post here:Creative Nonfiction.
Nov 21 2008
The reporters and critics who cover the glam arts -- movies, TV and Broadway -- are treated ever year to the luxurious award shows. Book people, on the other hand, have learned to be content with modest, yet still self-congratulatory prize ceremonies like the PEN/Faulkner and the National Book Awards, until this year, apparently.
The New York Observer covered the book awards' black-tie affair Nov. 19, moved downtown to posh Cipriani's Wall Street after years at the Marriott Marquis in Times Square. For good measure, an after-party on the far West Side catapulted the NBA night from literati to glitterati. Upper-tier names like Anna Winocur and Candace Bushnell were brought in to tart things up among the usual stuffed shirts of the publishing biz.
Times have moved on for the award since my first ceremony in 1993. While the address was haute enough -- the Plaza Hotel -- the hotel ballroom then was rundown, with tattered drapes and a threadbare carpet. The $500 a plate dinner guests fed on lamb while the stinkin' media were assigned to shaky chairs jammed into a balcony overlooking the privileged. We were offered cold cuts, white bread and warm soft drinks.
After the ceremony, we were herded into the hotel kitchen -- I'm not making this up -- to interview the winners among the dirty pots and pans. Luckily, there were not too many of us in those days. One of my "colleagues" was a woman who said she dated a Pittsburgh Steeler in the 1960s. That name shall go unmentioned.
Later, the characterless Marriott was the venue, still a major upgrade for both the guests and the reporters. There was even ice for the drinks. I was fortunate to attend a handful of NBA ceremonies which include a free reading the night before by the nominees at the New School. This year, it was a full house.
I guess I'm not sorry to have skipped this year's festivities. I would have felt like a pair of brown shoes among all the tuxes. Sounded like a faster crowd than say, a Seen event.
Nov 20 2008
The Post-Gazette book review section was hitting and missing on National Book Award winners. Here are links to our reviews of a winner and finalists:
"The Hemingses of Monticello" by Annette Gordon Reed; "Fire to Fire" by Mark Doty;
Watching the Spring Festival by Frank Bidart; "Home" by Marilynne Robinson.
What's distinctive about this list is that the latter three were reviewed by Frank Wilson, late of the Philadephia Inquirer book desk who still directs the fine literary blog called Books, Ink.
Nov 19 2008
My thanks to the late Clive Barnes, the dance-theater critic at the New York Post for this observation that can apply to all of us newspaper reviewers:
"The job's impossible and one must pray that one will be only moderately incompetent."
It's Happy Birthday to the Works Progress Administration, 75 years old in 2008. The WPA, once a relic of the New Deal of the 1930s is appearing more relevant in these days as the feds rush a patchwork of bailouts and handouts to shore up the banking system, now imitating its 1929 ancestors.
Anniversaries are great excuses to write books, so here's a few to consider.
Straight-forward history is the aim of "American-Made: The Enduring Legacy of the WPA When FDR Put The Nation to Work" by Nick Taylor (Bantam, $27). No real political cant, but a chronicle of the Roosevelt administration's efforts to fight old man Depression.
"The Woman Behind the New Deal" by Krisin Downey (Nan Talese/Doubleday, $35). Subtitled "The Life of Frances Perkins, FDR's Secretary of Labor and His Moral Conscience," Downey's book follows Perkins as she helped to create Social Security. Another positive take on Roosevelt's efforts. It will be published in March.
Not the case with one Burton Folsom Jr., author of "New Deal or Raw Deal: How FDR's Economic Legacy Has Damaged America" (Threshold Editions, $27).
The imprint is evidence enough that this is just another selection from the long-playing broken record made by the Neanderthal division of the American right, rendered apoplectic since FDR was elected in 1932.
The other proof is Folsom's employer, Hillsdale College, an outpost of 17th-century ossified political thinking and reactionary social views in Michigan. It makes Geneva College look like the Sorbonne.
Several years ago, the American publishing industry tapped into what seemed to be the lucrative market of right-wing readers who happily bought books heralding the glories of deregulation and ethics of Tom Delay.
Simon & Schuster came up with Threshold and named Republican political hack Mary Matalin titular "editor." She's married to Democratic political hack James Carville.
Matalin's accomplishment was standing by as S & S recklessly produced "Obamanation" by the thoroughly discredited Jerome Corsi, of "Swiftboat" fame. "The goal (in writing the book) is to defeat Obama," he told the New York Times. "I don't want Obama to be in office."
Gee, that worked out well.
Matalin explained her "role" at Threshold to Timothy Noah of Slate:
"My title is somewhat misleading, but it is the one the publishing industry uses. I do not deal with any mechanics (like print runs, reprints, financial relationship with authors), or for that matter, editing of the Threshold books. I am more akin to a consultant relative to the issue of potential interest among political readers."
Whew. Glad we cleared that up. Matalin's responsible for nothing.
As Noah observes:
"The conservative movement has won the publishing houses' attention but not their respect. Does it even care?"
For another view of the New Deal from a conservative, yet less rabid politically, try "The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression" by Amity Shlaes, now in paperback
Another imprint is Crown Forum, publisher of that deep political thinker and former film critic Michael Medved and his new one, "The 10 Big Lies About America: Combating Destructive Distortions About Our Nation."
The only conclusion to be drawn from this book: 10 big reasons why Michael Medved should resume his movie reviewing career.
The question now is, Do the sweeping victories of Democrats across the country herald the end to these efforts to publish out-of-touch rightwing ax grinders or will the Obama presidency energize the reactionaries?
One small peep has already been heard. the redundantly titled "How to Survive Obama: The Emergency Survival Guide to Surviving the Obama Presidency" has been made ready by Richard Levine and Fredric Marks, creators of the HowtosurviveObama.com Website.
Some original tips include saving money, paying off debt, depositing cash in FDIC-insured banks and stock up on emergency food. Maybe the authors weren't taking those steps while the economy prospered. We'll be collecting bags of lentils to send them for their food pantry.
Sarah Palin fans, watch out. The Clown Prince of the Republican Party, the Rev. Mr. Mike Huckabee is planning to throw his straw hat into the 2012 presidential sweeptakes with this book, "Do The Right Thing" (get it?). Penguin's conservative imprint, Sentinel, is publishing it for $24.95.