My Pop Life #267 : Like A Rolling Stone – Spirit

my favourite picture is this : Vista by Andrew McAttee

What should I have said to Patsy Pollock back then when I read for In The Name Of The Father? Who are you Ralph? We’ve seen all these characters and roles you’ve done, but who are you? I could’ve said “I don’t know“. After all, I didn’t. Still don’t really…who does? I should’ve told them I had a law degree, because the character I was reading for was a barrister, the ghost career that I abandoned to become an actor. Might’ve got the gig but it wouldn’t have answered the question. I’m all of the characters I’ve played, and none of them. There’s a part of me in each one otherwise I couldn’t do it. But it is a small part which gets exaggerated. They all look like me – I haven’t played a creature or a space alien. The closest I got was in 1997 reading for Star Wars : The Phantom Menace. I was reading for three different cartoon-face creatures from that universe, wouldn’t it be great if I could remember which ones? Plo Koon? Bib Fortuna? I doubt if even Robin Gurland the casting director can remember. We met at Leavesden and I read a bunch of pages in different accents, loved doing it, showing off really. This is Welsh and this is Belfast. Blow me down if I didn’t get offered another role with no make-up or accent – the Queen’s pilot Ric Olie.

It was exciting to be in a Star Wars film, even though some of the stardust had worn a little thin even by then, it was still a massive franchise. { The money was miserable though, with a full buyout – no residuals which we could all have retired on. I was reminded that there were 40 people behind me waiting for that part. } And I accepted. I stayed at Jenny’s ma and pa’s house in Wembley for the gig and every morning David drew up outside the house in his black Mercedes and I got driven in to Leavesden which was an old airfield near Watford converted into a studio.

The first hint of a problem for me was when my dressing room turned out to be a container on the floor of the studio. It was very noisy and clanged if you tapped the wall, had no air, and the studio was outside with all the construction and machinery. I had lines to learn and an American accent to rehearse and these were not good working conditions. I was Bravo Leader and met the other pilots : Clarence Smith and my darling Celia Imrie who’d been my wife in the film Say Hello To The Real Dr Snide, directed by Peter Cattaneo when we were all children. Celia had a dressing room away from the studio floor so I went on a queenie flounce and got transferred up there. And then we started shooting.

near Watford

who is this? how did he get in here?

It became immediately apparent that George Lucas wasn’t that interested in directing the actors. His classic note was “one more : faster, more intense.” It became monotonous fairly quickly, exactly how you imagined a franchise film would feel like. One afternoon we were doing spaceship interiors in the vast studio and we had ten minutes to wait for a light to be altered, not enough time to walk half a mile for a cigarette so we all hung out a bit. I was next to Lucas so we did small talk then I asked him if someone couldn’t refer to me by name – Ric Olie – so that the audience would know who I was. George said “Ralph, there will be websites dedicated to your character. Everyone will know who you are.” I’ve never actually found one of these websites, but I haven’t looked very hard to be fair.

Later that day at lunch in the large canteen, we had to wait on line and choose something from the menu, get a tray, knives and forks, a drink – very like school dinners to be fair, then go sit where you like. I had shepherd’s pie and veg with vanilla ice cream greediness for pudding and whoops there is Samuel L. Jackson coming to sit at the table where I was eating and it quickly filled up. There were about 12 seats, and he was being friendly and connective, bright-eyed and somewhat bushy-tailed. I told him that I’d seen an interview with Lawrence Fishburne on TV the previous night when Larry had looked directly into the camera at one point and said “If George Lucas wants to cast me in Star Wars he can just pick up the phone“. The table was by now reasonably full of people collecting ‘I had lunch with Sam Jackson’ anecdotes. “Well,” said Sam, “You got to put it out there.”

It’s true of course. You do have to put it out there. I’m not sure that I ever have, or that I have ever used enough charm when doing so. Charm to me always felt like lying, ass-licking, play-acting. I’m not good at greasing the wheels. More clues.

And there was Hugh Quarshie / Captain Panaka whom I had worked with the previous month on A Respectable Trade, now a friend. Later I met Ahmed Best playing Jar-Jar Binks, a cartoon-face creature and Liam Neeson (Qi Jon) and Ewan MacGregor (Obi-Wan Kenobi), playing themselves more or less as Jedi Knights. Natalie Portman was a young but very bright-eyed and gracious Queen Amidala – and I was her pilot. We stood in the ferns under the greenwood trees in the local woods with all the crew and make-up and wardrobe, sound and camera crew, props and special effects wizards. Back at Leavesden we stood on a plastic and wooden spaceship set hammered together by British carpenters and spray-painted with metallic greys and silver blues in front of a giant blue screen which would become Space. We had to look at it and see it. How many ears has Captain Kirk, I thought to myself. Answer : Three : a left ear, a right ear and SPACE – the final frontier. My favourite TV show ever. The glorious racially mixed future. The Federation. And here were Liam and Ewan moaning about the stupid lines they had to say.

We’re losing droids fast!

Unless we repair the shield generator we’re sitting ducks!

Had they never heard of dilithium crystals? I relished all my sci-fi dialogue. Just be deadly serious and mean it guys. I taught Jake Lloyd how to fly a spaceship. He would grow up to be Darth Vader. One more, faster more intense.

The following week the pilots took turns to sit in a full-size mounted N-1 royal Naboo starfighter which tilted up down, left and right and they filmed us against bluescreen flying through space, swerving and talking about deflector shields and stuff. I climbed up a ladder to get into the cockpit, and there was R2D2 in the jump seat. The shoot, including the dialogue “Fighters straight ahead” & “Roger Bravo Leader” etcetera took about four hours, someone brought me a cup of tea at one point, then half an hour after that I had to take a piss. Reminds me of shooting a vast exterior scene somewhere, in something, there were loads of us and it was a hot day. “Stop giving the bloody actors water!” said the 1st AD within earshot of me, “they’re taking the epic piss and holding up the shoot “

I climbed down from the starfighter – and said to George as I removed my goggles and helmet “Well, that was great fun, thank you” and it was. He smiled at me and said “Wait til you see how fast it goes!” Celia still calls me Bravo Leader to this day.

Ric Olie & R2D2 in an N-1 starfighter

Ahmed Best had a birthday and booked a restaurant in Covent Garden for the party on Saturday night. Loads of people came, including George Lucas. I met a group – two couples – who ran Stomp the percussion ensemble where Ahmed had worked in a previous life – Luke Cresswell & Steve McNicholas and their wives Jo Cresswell and Loretta Sacco. We’d moved to Brighton the previous year – and these folk actually lived in Brighton. Remember this is 1997 before the great DFL invasion (Down From London). At that point I was driving a Jaguar – a blue Sovereign – and I gave them all a ride home down the M23 at 2am. They are still our close friends.

Then on the final few days we were shooting the scenes of triumph, the hooray scenes, the great parade of yea unto us and Ewan McGregor and I ducked behind the palace walls at one point to smoke a doob and have a giggle. Yea unto us, in fact.

It was 1999 when The Phantom Menace premiered at the Odeon Leicester Square. I wasn’t invited. Neither was Hugh Quarshie. We were gobsmacked. The premiere is the completion of the film, the final act in the process, really, truly, what it’s all been for. Without a public screening a film is just a concept. Various minor celebrities got tickets, actors from Brookside or EastEnders. Not us.

So rude. Along with the lack of residuals this really burned me. To the extent that when I took my film New Year’s Day to Sundance two whole years later in February 2001, a journalist asking me about what I’d been doing in the last few years got the full tirade : “George Lucas has no common human decency.” Wow I was still screwing and had clearly lost a great deal of respect for the film industry so was practising self-sabotage.. He may not have written the invitations but it is his universe and there the buck stoppeth. A week later a piece in the New York Times quoted me and named me verbatim and I didn’t get to fly to New Zealand or pilot another spacecraft. I wasn’t surprised. And I didn’t care.

I was more surprised when I got invited to Celebration III, a giant Star Wars convention in Indianapolis in 2002, Jenny and I were both flown out and I had the opportunity to sell my autograph on a photograph supplied by The Empire for a piece of dollar. Four days of this. We met some wonderful people who’d just filmed the next one, and promised we’d visit them in South Island NZ – in particular two Maori actors from the film Once Were Warriors, Rena Owen and Temuara Morrison.

Indianapolis : us with Rena Owen and others I simply cannot remember forgive me – except Jenny is at far right)

I’ve done a few conventions. Personal highlight was meeting Nichelle Nichols (Lt. Uhuru from Star Trek) who signed a picture for Jen and I. I’ve been grumpy and I’ve been charming, but they’re not hugely enjoyable for me. The people who come by and want a picture or an autograph are inevitably warm, chatty, genuine fans, scared that I might bite their head off, or trying to ask something no one else has thought of, or opening with “you must be really tired of hearing this…” but in general just happy to get five minutes with an actual actor. It’s just love at the end of the day. They’re giving me love. So why don’t I want it ?

Ralph & Jenny in Indianapolis (auto-mania)

So sick and tired of all these pictures of me – Elliott Smith

Just when I think I’m King – I just begin – Kate Bush

When you’re at the top is when the devil shows his face – Denzel Washington to Will Smith

Does your chewing gum lose its flavour on the bedpost overnight? – Lonnie Donegan

I’ve just finished reading a wonderful book called The Body Keeps The Score by Bessel Van Der Kolk about hidden trauma, how it manifests, and how we can heal. It resonated with me, every page. It was about me, my mum, my brothers, my wife, everyone I’ve ever met, everyone. Trauma is war or rape or car accidents or murders. It also includes witnessing domestic violence, having “mental illness” in your family, being fostered out to other homes. Tick, tick tick. I write “mental illness” in quotes because some people are starting to try and redefine it as “feelings”. Feelings that we all have especially after something bad happens. Or during something bad happening over time, weeks, months, years. And the body remembers even when the mind freezes and blanks it out.

I’ve been doing therapy for a few months now trying to understand why I had a seizure in September 2021. A non-epileptic psychogenic seizure. The body wants to let go of stress, and it does this in a variety of ways. Exercise. Gym work and running, cycling. Drugs both prescribed and illegal. Alcohol. Violence. Shouting at people. Crying. Cutting yourself. Thoughts and feelings of low self-esteem that can’t be waved away. Seizures. Migraines. Obesity. Anorexia.

I’m also reading about the huge variety of ways that have been tried to relieve these feelings, from talk therapy to chemistry, to ECG – (induced seizures (!) via Electro-Convulsive Therapy which my mum had in 1965!!) to EMDR – eye movement desensitization and reprocessing – and yoga, to singing and dancing and yes acting.

And thus it is finally confirmed that all my professional career I have been escaping from my trauma by becoming other people. The further away from myself the better. Wigs, tattoos, funny beards, voices, prosthetics, what have you got? And at the same time, receiving love in exchange. Custom-made for non-interference trauma. Not dealing with the trauma, just the symptoms of it, which is also to say I don’t actually love myself, I need others to supply that element.

Going back to Help! by The Beatles when my Mum first entered a psychiatric institution, I talked about building a wall around my heart made from the mud of Selmeston village. It was a child’s version of emotional survival – don’t show pain and hurt, survive, be strong and be successful. I added battlements and other structures to this wall as I grew older and didn’t it work well? But where is the love Roberta Flack? I forgot to add the love inside. So my prime focus was making sure I had love – safety – a home where I felt safe – and a home where I felt loved.

The various foster homes I lived in during my childhood did all these things, and especially the mothers in those dwellings, but they were all, eventually, dysfunctional. The fathers were absent or left. And I went from hating marriage as a concept – “I’ve been to four of my parent’s weddings…” I would boast as a shock stat – to only wanting one marriage because it was divorce I hated, not marriage.

So my romantic associations have always instinctively, correctly, been prime target agenda. I couldn’t actually function without love. Then the love of friends and from work keeps the charade going and I don’t have to love myself much. Except that I actually started unravelling all this over fifteen years ago. I’m not stupid, I knew that I needed to unwrap the cocoon, open the gates, become gently more vulnerable and let the feelings out, name them, notice when they come, let them become a manageable part of my personality rather than a trapdoor ever ready to open. And yet even with this gentle unwinding of the armoured defence unit, I still had the seizure.

My therapist indentifies a great well of sadness inside me. Sounds about right. She wonders why I don’t express it more. I think she means crying. I have cried a lot since last September, in the theatre (Caroline or Change) listening to Nanci Griffith on the day she died (Love At The Five & Dime), or just connecting with the sadness as I cook something for myself while Jenny is at work on Broadway. But somehow this isn’t enough to stop the feeling of sadness that clouds the vast majority of my mornings. Is it unemployment, old age, buried family trauma, years of holding it down or just waiting for the sun? Probably all of it.

Star Wars is part of the sadness yes. But looking back I can see that it was just another disappointment that didn’t kill me. And c’mon, it is a good credit and I am a part of that huge film franchise – I may not have been cast in the Harry Potter film series, or Star Trek, but I’m in this one (and Alien) and look, I got a little figure which looks remarkably like me.

I do have one of these, yes. No residuals though!

Chin and nose spot on, but I didn’t have a gun in the film…

And I know that George wasn’t really to blame for the Premiere fiasco, of course he wasn’t. And he cast me and I am grateful for that, so I forgive him for for all his trespasses, indeed I bless him and move on, again. And now on my tableI have 2000 cards to sign for $12000. The residuals I never got. So neither a triumph nor a disaster then, just another gig, so what is this stress I am under all the time which causes seizures? And who am i ?

A couple of things seem clear to me. My career as an actor has been at least partly about seeking that lost parental affection from outside sources. I need love. Allied to this is the number of times I feel depressed or hopeless and look to my wife for solace and love. It feels as if I haven’t really grown up emotionally since I was seven years old. Now it feels like all these factors are crashing into one another as I resist the very concept of retirement, and refuse to accept that anything must change or fade away. Every day feels like a tightrope walk, but more than usual because now my whole soul is on the line wobbling away, still pleading for love and attention, still writing a book, still feeling incapable of loving myself.

It all comes back to my plea to Tony Armatrading in 2021 after his cancer diagnosis. I said Tony, I want you to love yourself, that is all. He said with tears in his eyes, yes, but it’s so hard.

So hard.

Why is it that I always yearned for success but avoided fame? Chose to disguise myself where possible to avoid attention, while realising that it wasn’t a great move in the game. It’s weird being defined by your work, it being a strong part of my identity, when that work is an actual escape from myself. When I’m doing an audition and using my own voice it always sounds wrong. Always. Another clue…

But imagine. The notion that as my career idles to a gentle stop, nurturing the fantasy that anyone will be vaguely interested in this book, and sitting down to write it. Optimistic. Entitled. Delusional. But what else is there to do?

I find it considerably less painful to look back over these chapters than to watch myself on celluloid. I am comfortable with the person I read about, it feels like me. Not the characters, they’re all diversions, camoflauge, escape. I think with this book I’ve come back round to myself as I really am. Maybe less of the reaching out, more of the reaching in. Learning to be. And I reckon that on the whole, that he’s all right.

I’m all right.

My Pop Life #267 : Legend Of A Mind – The Moody Blues

Legend Of A Mind – The Moody Blues

He’ll take you up, he’ll bring you down
He’ll plant your feet back firmly on the ground
He flies so high, he swoops so low
He knows exactly which way he’s gonna go
Timothy Leary

*

This blog will appear in my forthcoming book ‘Camberwell Carrot Juice’. Check back for details!

RB

My Pop Life #266 : All In Love Is Fair – Stevie Wonder

All of fate’s a chance
It’s either good or bad
I tossed my coin to say
In love with me you’d stay
But all in war is so cold
You either win or lose
When all is put away
The losing side I’ll play

A version of this blog will be appearing in my forthcoming book Camberwell Carrot Juice. Check back for more details.

RB

My Pop Life #265 : Jacky – Marc Almond

Jacky – Marc Almond

And if one day I should become
A singer with a Spanish bum
Who sings for women of great virtue
I’d sing to them with a guitar
I borrowed from a coffee bar
Well, what you don’t know doesn’t hurt you
My name would be Antonio
And all my bridges I would burn
And when I gave them some they’d know
I’d expect something in return
I’d have to get drunk every night
And talk about virility
With some old grandmother
That might be decked out like a Christmas tree

*

A version of this blog will appear in my forthcoming book Camberwell Carrot Juice. Check back here for details!

RB

My Pop Life #264 : Native New Yorker – Odyssey

Native New Yorker – Odyssey

New York girl, ooh, ooh, ooh
Runnin’ pretty, New York City girl
25, 35, hello, baby
New York City girl….
You grew up ridin’ the subways, running with people
Up in Harlem, down on Broadway
You’re no tramp but you’re no lady
Talkin’ that street talk
You’re the heart and soul of New York City

That’s Meisha I’m talmbout there, my Meisha Brown, my cousin, my angel, my gigbuddy, my vinylpurchasing beautiful wonderful kind sweet friend.

She’s moving to California on Wednesday. Today. Talked about it a lot, started flying out there for work meetings, fell in love with Santa Barbara (I remember it well!) the vibes, the weather, the SMELL OF IT. And now she’s off. I can’t stand it. I want to eat her and punch her at the same time. She came out Monday night for Jenny’s birthday outing to Evalina and I got told off for celebrating her without including everyone else. But that was our last night out together as New Yorkers – us as immigrants, her as a native noo yawker.

Born in New Jersey with a parent in Westchester County just above the Bronx she really did grow up riding the subway, up in Harlem, down on Broadway. She is Maureen Hibbert’s cousin, Mo who sang me Ne Me Quitte Pas at my 60th birthday. Special links. Meisha’s parents are Jamaican and she buys me vinyl without warning and I return the favour when I can. Yesterday I got Los Grandes Exitos De Aretha Franklin and three Jamaican 12-inch singles including Murder She Wrote by Chaka Demus & Pliers which Robbie Shakespeare played bass on – one of the thousands of tunes he played on and whom we mourn this week since he passed away last Wednesday December 8th 2021 aged 68. A giant has passed, a musical giant.

We bonded with Meisha very early on – in 2014 we travelled to Brazil for a World Cup holiday taking in Sao Paulo, Manaus and Rio de Janeiro which was our base. Maureen came over to New York to cat-sit for us and she and Meisha hung out a lot. Meisha got to know the two cats Boy and Roxy and before long became our resident Native New Yorker catsitter whenever we both went away – not very often, maybe once a year, sometimes not even then. She wasn’t really a catperson when she started and wasn’t sure how to handle these two sophisticats who probably wrapped her round their little paws and claws and/or ignored her deliberately. So when we went to Costa Rica early in 2020 she was here for the 4th or 5th time with the furry babies. Boy was doing the slow-eye blink on her but I hadn’t explained what that meant – (the slower I close my eyes the more I trust you because I’m vulnerable when my eyes are closed) – a truth common to all animals. Try it!

Meisha was here when Jenny a week off from Harry Potter and flew back to England for her sister Dee’s funeral in Harlow early October 2019. I was already there fixing up the house. Meisha is what I call rocksteady. A Jamaican word, appropriately enough, for the music between ska and reggae, the late 1960s beautiful sounds from John Holt & The Paragons, Ken Boothe, The Techniques with Pat Kelly, The Heptones. Music you can rely on rhythmically. What a great word. What a great woman she is.

We’ve been to some great gigs together in New York – Sam Smith when Lucy was singing with him, Stevie Wonder in the park, Charles Mingus Big Band in the East Village, we’re finally going to see Billie Eilish at MSG in February 2022 after the 2020 show was cancelled because of covid-19. Which means she’ll fly back here from Ventura. We bonded over Frank Ocean in the early days and we often compare notes on new songs, new artists, she is a fan of SZA, Kendrick Lamarr, Travis Scott, Solange, Childish Gambino many many others of course. Who’d I miss?

At Dumbo House, 2018

It’s the bridge of the song Native New Yorker that really gets me, every time it comes in, the melody, the key change, the lyrics, the arrangement – especially the piano the second time around (after the key change!) on

Where did all those yesterdays go?
When you still believed
Love could really be like a Broadway show

Because of course, sadly – and this is the bridge the first time around :

And love
Love is just a passing word
It’s the thought that you had
In a taxicab that got left on the curb
When he dropped you off at East 83rd

Absolutely brilliant triple rhyme. My favourite Odyssey song and I love this band – see My Pop Life 212 Use It Up, Wear It Out – and one of my top five DISCO singles ooh don’t ask for the other four we’ll be here all night. I think Rita might live near East 83rd – Meisha lives in Hamilton Heights and has been in West Harlem for years. But not after today. Damn. Here’s a shot of the gang on the Hudson River :

Meisha, Me, Tanya, Maureen, Gabby

Gabby far right above is Meisha’s best buddy, and phew – at least she is staying in the City. She was an assistant to a fashion designer when we met her seven years ago – a couple of weeks back she had her first show as a designer. That’s fast, and we’re very proud of her indeed. But ever since I met Meisha she has been talking about leaving New York, every time she goes to England on holiday she berates her mother for not emigrating there instead of the US. Now she has made her move – at dawn this morning – and I will miss her. Fair thee well dear Meisha Brown – I’ll see you at Madison Square Garden in February and in California when I go for Stevie’s 80th birthday in January – the very best of luck to you, I think this will be a major life-changing event. We love you! Never forget though : you’re the heart and soul of New York City…

What you waitin’ for?
No one opens the door
You’re a native New Yorker…

Gabby & Meisha : at my 61st birthday party

Odyssey were Lillian and Louise Lopez plus Tony Reynolds when this song was released in 1977 – the Lopez sisters from a Virgin Islands background and Reynolds from Manila. Their first LP was being produced by Sandy Linzer who’d co-written the song with Denny Randell for The Four Seasons who had a minor hit with it. But Lillian Lopez had a natural graceful compassionate take on the lead vocal which propelled it, (along with the disco production by Charlie Calello, the piano of Richard Tee, the extraordinary falsetto of David Lasley on backing vocals and the saxophone of Michael Brecker), to the dance floors of Studio 54 in New York and to the top of the charts. It gives me great joy to hear the song every time it comes onto the playlist, and it gives me even greater happiness to dedicate it today to my dear friend Meisha Brown.

Maybe I should have chosen Odyssey’s other sublime hit “If You’re Looking For A Way Out“

(I won’t stand in your way)

Happy trails my love xxxx

My Pop Life #263 : Jesamine – The Casuals

Jesamine – The Casuals

What am I supposed to do with a girl like Jesamine?

*

One of a clutch of Mum’s Sacred Singles, almost all from 1968, which have lodged ever since in my cortex and achieved mythical status as soundtracks to a country childhood with a single parent. Perhaps the poppiest of the clutch with an undeniable Beatlesque appearance, a gentle ballad with vocal harmonies, orchestrated emotional pop music. I was eleven years old when I first heard it, in the summer of 1968 on Radio One. Mum bought it soon afterwards in Eastbourne and we then had the shiny grooved seven-inch disc in its paper sleeve in the house.

Every morning I would wake up, go to the bathroom and wash and brush my teeth, dress, go downstairs, eat breakfast, grab my schoolbag and blazer and walk up the village road to the bus-stop. Catch a bus into Lewes and walk to school with hundreds of other kids. Reach the classroom, open the door and see Mr Knight and a group of kids pointing at me and laughing. Looking down I realised that I had forgotten to put my trousers on. Then I woke up.

This happened quite regularly.

I think I had already designed The Survivor – the child who would Be OK – myself, using shutdown techniques which came instinctively, built over the years of domestic arguments and fighting between my parents, solidified when Mum was admitted to hospital with a nervous breakdown in 1965, and confirmed, plastered and painted when Dad moved out and they divorced in 1966/7. I remember little of those years, and tend to be repetitive when writing about that time. A set of memories, moments, faces, feelings not so much.

We lived opposite a farm, and one day Mum decided to get six hens from Mr Dennis the farmer. We built a rudimentary pen for them to scratch around it and fed them some kind of cornmeal and then one morning I went out and there was an egg. A large egg, but when I went to pick it up it wobbled. There was no shell. It had the membrane keeping it intact so I picked it up gently and carried it into the kitchen. “No shell” said Mum, “well I expect it tastes the same“. And she made scrambled eggs on toast for breakfast, and it tasted better than the shop eggs all right. The next morning the same thing – one egg, no shell, the next morning two eggs, no shells. They were all delicious but Mum went across the road to Mr Dennis and asked him what was going on. He told her to feed them grit. Gave her a bag to start her off. I remember throwing this grit – small sharp stones like the ones on the road – into the pen. The chickens eyed the ground and started scraping with their feet then – yes started to eat the grit. Extraordinary. The next morning we had an egg with a shell.

And I must have been eating a little bit of grit as well don’t you think? Creating The Survivor. The one who wouldn’t have a nervous breakdown. All sensitivity to be locked away behind a shell. We camped in the garden one night, made a tent from throwing a blanket over the tree branch. Pillows, blankets everything went in there. Paul and I bedded down around 9pm and came inside at midnight I think.

One day Mum made a cake for Mrs Dennis the farmer’s wife. One of Mum’s famous anecdotes which she repeated on a regular basis and which forms part of my own Personal Picture Of England. Mum carried the cake over, probably on a plate with a tea towel draped over it, it may have been a fruit cake – Mum made a good one, or possibly a sponge, these were regular joys in our house. Mum apologises as she offers the baked gift to Mrs Dennis – “I’m sorry the cake is a bit soggy“. Mrs Dennis doesn’t waste a second : “Moist, Heather, the cake may be a little moist“. Mum felt put down in the same kind of way when Dad would correct her English – a sore point in other words – and that was why she repeated the story, with a smile on her face. Mum told me recently that when we left the village “everything fell apart” and one of the things she produced as evidence of this was Mrs Dennis having an affair with Ben Walker, and other village shenanigans, but mainly the fact that disciples of ceremonial magick practitioner and occultist Alistair Crowley moved in to our cottage and performed diabolic rites in that same garden where we’d fed the chickens grit. Caused quite a stir they did. By then I was a child of Lewes, those cobbled streets which came with flaming torches once a year on November 5th where the figure atop the bonfire was the Pope. The years of drugs and the occult were ahead of me, but I never did study Alistair Crowley properly and there is still time I think.

This song appeared at the same time as Dream A Little Dream by The Mamas & The Papas and Hey Jude by The Beatles, Gotta Get A Message To You by The Bee Gees and Those Were The Days by Mary Hopkin. Do It Again by The Beach Boys.

Happy days.

The Casuals : John Ebb singing the lead vocal, were from Lincolnshire

Paul Weller‘s favourite song apparently, and he’d heard that great session drummer Clem Cattini had been on the kit and so used him on a solo LP. The truth is Clem can’t remember half of the sessions he’s done but was happy to work, and was always a great drummer. He’s played on 42 Number One Hit Singles and hundreds of others.

My Pop Life #262 : America – West Side Story Cast (1961)

America – West Side Story Cast (1961)

Puerto Rico
My heart’s devotion
Let it sink back in the ocean
Always the hurricanes blowing
Always the population growing
And the money owing
And the sunlight streaming
And the natives steaming
I like the island Manhattan (I know you do!)
Smoke on your pipe
And put that in!

Stephen Sondheim passed away 5 days ago and the nation went into mourning. The gay jewish bit did anyway, the artists writers singers and actors, dancers directors and stage managers. Being the bloody-minded twerp that I am though, I was silent for three days and then walked around telling anyone who would listen that I wasn’t really a fan of musical theatre, with the exceptions of Wizard of Oz, Singin’ In The Rain and West Side Story, there was something about the form that didn’t vibe with my spirit. My brother Andrew offered Andrew Lloyd Webber as having ruined the musical for him. Then at Thanksgiving last Thursday at Aaron & Cathy Nottage‘s house up in White Plains, Tony Gerber invited me to the DGA to see Spielberg‘s loving remix of Bernstein and Sondheim (and Arthur Laurents & Jerome Robbins‘) masterpiece. We went last night.

I like to be in America, Okay by me in America, Everything free in America

For a small fee in America

After the seizure in September (see My Pop Life #261 Titanium) everything went weird. Doctors, pain, Aleve, acupuncture (amazing), getting Jenny onto her feet to go back onto Broadway (priority), trying to wake up and unfold before Jenny tells me to straighten up, then suddenly going to the theatre three times a week to see shows that my friends had written (Clyde’s, MJ) directed (Trouble In Mind) or were acting in (The Michaels In Europe, Caroline or Change, Harry Potter & The Cursed Child). And then studying for my citizenship exam which was face-to-face in the Homeland Security Building downtown opposite City Hall. Went through the metal detectors and up the elevator and stood in line and waited and then went into an office with a plastic shield I sat behind and was asked various questions by a tall young probably gay latin fella in uniform. Had I ever sold weapons to a terrorist? Had I ever participated in a revolution? Would I be prepared to fight in the US Military if called upon to do so?

At this last question I said “You do realise I will be 65 on my next birthday don’t you?” To his credit he laughed and said yes sir, but would you be. I said sure but I didn’t mean it. He carried on asking me these Homeland Security-style questions and I answered No to all of them, which soon became No Sir then gradually morphed into an American accent No Sir and by the end of the questions I had quite simply become American. No shit. Then we got into the exam itself. They had set 100 questions which are not secret and I simply learned the answers, which is what you’re supposed to do. I would be asked ten of them, six of which I had to get correct. Question One was

General Eisenhower fought in which War before becoming President?

(I knew it) The Second World War

Where is the Statue of Liberty ?

(are you kidding me?) New York Harbour

What is the capital of the United States?

(ummmmm…) Washington D.C.

The law of the USA is based on what?

(genuinely tricky) The Constitution

Who is The President of The United States?

(this is the same question that the paramedics asked me on the morning of my seizure. I didn’t know that day.)

Joseph Robernick Biden

I don’t remember the sixth question but I gave a correct answer. I know that because he didn’t ask me any more questions. No need. I’d answered them all correctly. I think they get a random selection from the 100 possible questions but I did hit on three of the very easiest ones didn’t I?

And then four weeks later I was invited back to the same building for my Naturalization (with a z) and Oath Ceremony. The September seizure was part of a pattern of my brain becoming perhaps a little undependable – for example one night in August I took Luke Cresswell – here to rehearse Stomp back onto the stage – to see Eddie Palmieri at the Blue Note in the Village and : we were four weeks late. Oh how he laughed, fair dinkum, we got drunk – I was embarrassed and shamed to be frank, but what can you do? Palmieri is 81 and who knows if I’ll get that opportunity again. So then I turned up for my Citizenship Ceremony a day early too.

I was through the metal detector, up the elevator, stood in line reached the desk. Give us your Green Card. What’s your name? Couldn’t find me. Consternation. Some bright spark suggested checking the date. It’s tomorrow sir. Then I went back home.

That night Jenny and I went out. It was the opening night of Caroline, or Change starring our friend Sharon D. Clarke in her Broadway debut, playing the lead role of the maid in 1960s Louisiana. She’d been doing the part for years in the UK and won the Olivier award for it – then last March 2020 they got as far as a Broadway dress rehearsal before the pandemic shut the production down. This was a night delayed by eighteen long months and was all the more emotional for it. A magnificent score by Jeanine Tesori and wonderful words by Tony Kushner. They were both present. I don’t think I’ve ever wept like that in a theatre – behind a mask like everyone else – tears rolling down my face. I think I was crying for myself as much as Caroline, and Sharon. Why? I don’t really know to be honest. We went back to her apartment perched over 8th Avenue overlooking the theatre district and the Hudson River and drank gin for a couple of hours with Susie McKenna Sharon’s wife, our friends Heidi Griffiths & Edna Benitez and – familiar folk kept arriving – sweet Ann Yee the choreographer (that Jenny had also worked with on Julius Caesar, the show that took us to New York), Michael Longhurst the show’s director, whose partner Des Kennedy directed Jenny in Harry Potter and who was helping remount the show again. It felt so familiar to be having a first night party, and yet so rare, so precious, so very missed. Most triumphs appear to be about deferred gratification and it was a memorable night. And by the way, everybody congratulated me on becoming an American. I can write that line without feeling anything but it doesn’t seem real to me at all.

The following morning, keeping the hangover at bay with milkthistle, I take the 4 train to City Hall, walk through the metal detector, travel up the elevator, wait on a chair opposite a guy from Guyana and a guy from Kosovo then wait on line and finally get called back to that familiar window from the day before and pow ! I receive a small flag called the Stars and Stripes, and a copy of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States. I took an oath of allegiance, and denied my (non-existent) allegiance to the UK, although I will never abandon the England football team. Don’t test me. I handed in my Green Card. Bye bye Green Card. In return I received a certificate of Citizenship which I had to send away when I applied for a passport earlier this week. Then in eight weeks I’ll get an American Passport. I’ll get to keep my British Passport. I’ll have dual nationality. It means I can travel with freedom back and forth without being asked at JFK or LAX “How long have you been away sir?”

Buying on credit is so nice,

[One look at us and they charge twice]

I have my own washing machine

[What will you have though to keep clean?]

I registered to vote straightaway. I didn’t tick the Democratic box though, stayed independent. I’m allowed to run for office too. If I seriously decide to do that, (you never know) it will have to be on a Democratic ticket, because I guess it’s really hard without some organisation behind you. Jury Service suddenly becomes compulsory. I feel slightly less foreign. I can join the fast track in customs. Hooray. Not that grateful though. I still have my white European entitlement in other words. Hard to tell what everyone else was feeling, truly, in that room.

But my life goes on pretty much as it always did. Kind of. Tony and I go to movies, go to gigs – Angelique Kidjo at Carnegie Hall – she’s an interesting cat by the way. She opened at 8pm singing McCartney’s Mother Nature’s Son accompanied by acoustic guitar, and later sang with guests Phillip Glass, Josh Groban, Andra Day and Cyndi Lauper. Afterwards we walked down to 52nd Street and Tony introduced me to The Vodka Bar where there’s a piano in the corner and folk sing Russian comic songs or Piaf and we sampled the vodka menu. And of course Tony has just produced Takeover – a documentary about the Young Lords, a Nuyorican civil rights group who occupied a hospital in the Bronx for 24 hours in 1969. The doc is getting an Oscar push and will be a drama at some point too. I wrote about it in My Pop Life #260 Pa’lante when we went to see it this summer in Soundview Park in the Bronx. Meanwhile I’ve started a course of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy in Ditmas Park about 40 minutes away. I’m at the beginning of The Reckoning. Which started with the pandemic – same as everyone else – then was punctuated severely by the seizure. A wake-up call, literally, as I was waking up, which I don’t remember. Undiagnosed. But stress is the cause. Who knows if I can find out where that came from.

Skyscrapers bloom in America
Cadillacs zoom in America
Industry boom in America
Twelve in a room in America

The immigrant experience is the American experience of course. At Thanksgiving Dinner Lynn wanted to read an acknowledgement of the previous incumbents, the Lenape tribe who lived in this area before Europeans started to seek “Freedom”. And the racism of Old Europe is alive and well in the New World, built by slaves from Africa and serviced by the Spanish-speaking descendants of Cortez the Killer.

West Side Story is based on Romeo & Juliet but at its heart is racism, voiced in this song, and in the story. The four original auteurs – the four gay jews (as Kushner called them last night) wanted a jewish Tony and a Catholic Maria, and it was set on the East Side before the switch to what we know now. Stephen Spielberg and Tony Kushner have lifted this angle up and spotlit it for 2021. The Puerto Ricans speak Spanish to each other except when Anita – the amazing Ariana Debose – shouts “Speak English!” because they need to practice

ANITA
Lots of new housing with more space

BERNARDO
Lots of doors slamming in our face

ANITA
I’ll get a terrace apartment

BERNARDO
Better get rid of your accent

But in Spielberg’s re-examination of New York in 1957 (the year of my birth) the Spanish is not subtitled. This is a radical decision and places the Spanish language on the same level as English. Tony – played beautifully by Ansel Elgort – asks his ‘aunty’ Valentina played by Rita Moreno (lovely touch since she played Anita in the 1961 film) – how to say “forever” as he prepares for his date with Maria (Rachel Zegler). “I want to be with you forever”. She looks at him quizzically : “Don’t you want to start with “Shall we go for a coffee somewhere?” then gives him the word he wants – siempre – ‘always‘. Forever. And everyone who sees the movie will know how to say siempre afterwards. Babysteps. I am relearning Spanish and Jenny is joining me. We’ve been to Costa Rica for a week’s break just before the pandemic, seen monkeys on the telephone wires and spoken bad Spanish. The fellas who work for the landlady are from Panama and Ecuador. We’re surrounded by the language in New York – there are over a million Puerto Ricans here for a start – salsa was born here in the 1960s – and West Side Story was very much ahead of its time in this respect and in others.

ANITA
Life can be bright in America

BOYS
If you can fight in America

GIRLS
Life is all right in America

BOYS
If you’re all white in America

It is my favourite song from the show, from the film, I’ve always loved it. It’s not Puerto Rican music, there was no salsa beat in 1957, but there was plena and bomba then and the Cuban music on which much Puerto Rican music is based such as son and bolero, and the country music called jibaro. But there’s little of that. Leonard Bernstein has written a kind of hybrid of Spanish tropes and Mexican ritmo which is completely fantastical and which I find totally irresistible, catchy and thrilling in its rhythmical construction and rhyming couplets – a total dose of energy and an affirmation of life. When the song started last night at the Director’s Guild with the three-two clave beat a shiver went down my neck, then when the girls started singing, pins & needles tingled down my head to my spine, a completely physical reaction. By the end of the song I was weeping.

GIRLS
Here you are free and you have pride

BOYS
Long as you stay on your own side

GIRLS
Free to be anything you choose

BOYS
Free to wait tables and shine shoes

This is still very much the case. Of course there are middle-class latin families and businesses, but the majority are service workers who live an hour out from Manhattan where they can afford it. Our cleaner Claudia is from Guatemala. Taxi drivers, delivery workers in vans or on bikes, construction are almost all latino.

Of the white characters in the film, apart from Tony (a Polack) played by Elgort, and The Jets who are largely racist and open the film throwing paint at a Puerto Rico flag graffiti on a wall, we have the NYPD played by Corey Stoll and others and Officer Krupke played by Brian D’Arcy James who played Quinn Carney in The Ferryman with me on Broadway in 2019 and is here doing sterling work. The cast are actually fantastic, most of them singing, dancing AND acting. Triple threats. The choreography is thrilling as it must be. After the film and the Q&A we walked down to The Vodka Room again. It was calling us.

BERNARDO
Everywhere grime in America
Organized crime in America
Terrible time in America

ANITA
You forget I’m in America

Jenny was in England when I applied for Citizenship, and I couldn’t apply for her. So she’ll go through the system just like I did in a few month’s time. And then we’ll go on holiday to Puerto Rico. Which is part of the United States. Don’t actually need a passport. It just isn’t a State. One day though, it will be.

BERNARDO
I think I’ll go back to San Juan

ANITA
I know a boat you can get on (Bye Bye!)

BERNARDO
Everyone there will give big cheer!

ANITA
Everyone there will have moved here

*

America from West Side Story (1961) :

Trailer for the new film :

My Pop Life #261 : Titanium – David Guetta ft. Sia

Titanium – David Guetta ft. Sia

You shoot me down but I won’t fall, I am titanium

This blog will appear in my forthcoming book ‘Camberwell Carrot Juice’. Check back for details!

RB

My Pop Life #260 : Pa’lante – Hurray For The Riff Raff

Pa’lante – Hurray For The Riff Raff

From el barrio to Arecibo, ¡Pa’lante!
From Marble Hill to the ghost of Emmett Till, ¡Pa’lante!

*

It was an exciting day, for a number of very good reasons. First we were to see our New York family, Tony Gerber and Lynn Nottage. This used to be a regular occurrence but since the covid-19 pandemic became rare. We hardly saw anyone last year in fact. We haven’t had anyone in our apartment for 15 months except for the landlady’s workers, and they always wear masks and usually come up the garden stairs from the basement apartment, working on the decking. Once ! We went to Lynn & Tony’s for some wine and sat around the fire at their new fireplace. We were all determined to be sociable because everything had become simply too weird, we were all too isolated. New York has behaved itself during the pandemic – 90% of people outside, probably more, are wearing masks, and the sense of a community under siege is immense, everyone pulling together, everyone being sensible. Quite a relief in fact. I think we went to Manhattan maybe four times after lockdown on March 12th. We’ve been huddled at home like millions of others, and we kind of got used to it. Online, on the TV, doing pilates to a disco soundtrack, face-timing family and going out to do shopping, and apart from Black Lives Matter last summer, not really going out for anything much. A day watching Kevin directing his first short film. An evening drinking in the bar where he works with Heidi & Edna and Charmaine. We went to Los Angeles three times this year for the ailing Tony Armatrading who had cancer and passed away on May 10th. Jenny went to England twice this year. But I’ve been here. And like perhaps millions of others, I quite liked going slowly bonkers in my own space, not eating out, not ordering takeaway or delivery, not having visitors, not visiting, not going to the cinema, the theatre, to see live music, go to a gallery, take a subway train. Doing nothing is pretty good it turns out.

But we’re both double-vaccinated, and masks are no longer compulsory outside in NYC. And we were in the astrological sign of Gemini…and we miss our friends !

And there’s a film screening today in The Bronx…a film they produced about The Young Lords, a radical NY Puerto Rican group from the late 1960s. We are going to support it.

But first.

Let me tell you a secret. Put it in your heart you can keep it. Jenny and I are proper sport nerds. We love to sit on the sofa with two cats watching some gladiatorial contest of skill and determination and fitness on the television. We like to go and see things live too, particularly World Cup competitions wheresoever they may be. But this Sunday morning started with football, live from Wembley at 9.00am England v Croatia in Euro 2020. It was June 13th 2021 and the competition was one year late thanks to covid-19. We had tea, porridge, toast and sport. Raheem Sterling converted a beautiful through ball from MoM Kalvin Phillips – and England had won the game. It was 11.00am and now we had an hour to get ready for the day, (after setting the TV to record the French Open tennis final at Roland Garros: Djokovic v Tsitsipas). First up – Facetime with the rentals – the parentals – my dad and his wife Beryl calling in from West Yorkshire. Lovely to see them as always. We had news, they had news, we shared news and the highlight was certainly that Anna, Beryl’s grand-daughter, had beaten a pack of hopefuls to a rather exciting strategic re-wilding eco-post in Melton Mowbray. A remote job and a part-time and probationary one for now, but we all knew in our hearts that she will sail forth from this moment into her chosen field. We sent love, and then we FaceTimed High Wycombe. The other rentals, Jenny’s parents plus Mandy & Lucy, had the clan round.

Pete, Mollie, Mama, Lua, Skye, Mandy, Lucy, Scarlett, Tom, Jamie with Rae, Jordan Grandad, Kimberley and Tia with Robert, Dominique and Khadija at the front

The Jules fam was gathered to see Jordan off on an all-summer long cruise of the Caribbean with his best dancing shoes (he’s a dancer) and we received this wonderful photograph of everyone. It was clearly one of those days. Special guest was the newest and youngest Khadija (Kim’s daughter) who cried throughout the picture moment like babies are supposed to. Then we ate our lunch – a Jenny creation via Jo Thornhill – persian fish curry in tamarind with mashed potato because I had a tooth extracted on Thursday and I can’t eat anything remotely solid for a week.

And so to the intrepid journey north. Tony and Lynn’s film TAKEOVER was screening in a park in The Bronx at 4pm at the Tribeca Film Festival and we’d agreed to come and support. Research suggested that the best way to get there (17 miles away) was the direct route – the NYC Ferry. A new stop had been added near us in Brooklyn Navy Yard, so just after 2pm we headed out and found it. Within minutes we were boarding our ferry north up the East River. As we did I marvelled and championed us – for despite living in Brooklyn for over seven years, this was my first time inside the Navy Yard – it’s a tricky place, and you can’t just wander in – trust me, I’ve tried. It is full of rusting cranes and industrial storage and gentrified office blocks, and includes the Steiner Studios where Boardwalk Empire was filmed among others. It was an auspicious moment of triumph.

We were both carrying a folding chair because the screening was on the grass in SoundView Park. The first stop was E34th St in Manhattan by the United Nations. We had to step down and catch a new boat north, way north. Neither of us had spent much time in The Bronx let’s be honest. Last year we’d been invited to the Botanic Gardens on Meisha’s birthday – really outstanding place – and in February 2020 I’d joined Josh and buddies from Brighton to see a tremendous Graffitti Exhibition at the Bronx Museum of The Arts on E165th St, concentrating on the decorated subways trains of the 1980s, and a collection of now-famous photographs by Henry Chalfant. Now sold in Fine Art Dealers, the words of the prophets are written on the subway walls n’est-ce pas?

We’d also taken the Soundview Ferry before, in the first week it was added to the transit system. You see the Ferry is part of the subway/bus/ferry Metropolitan Transit Authority, the massively under-funded way New Yorkers get around their city cheaply. You can ride the subway from Brooklyn up to Harlem and beyond to the top of the Bronx for $2.75. That’s right. And the Ferry to Soundview from Navy Yard was $2.75 each. Even though we had to change at E34th St, the same ticket was valid. Hooray. Reasons to be cheerful one two three. As we boarded the second ferry it was already 3pm but that would get us there in time we calculated.

Or would it? We passed beneath the Queensboro Bridge, which I have cycled over three times doing the 5-Boro Bike Ride. It’s a beautiful old metal structure which transverses Roosevelt Island but doesn’t offer a way down there – it simply connects Manhattan & Queens. To get to Roosevelt Island you can get the brand-new ferry service – whoop! – or get on the famous cable car from E60th and 2nd Ave : We took this once when we were ticking off the Things To Do In New York. It certainly is a spectacular way to see Queensboro Bridge – it is right alongside it.

Further up Manhattan we stopped at E90th street in East Harlem, then carried on up past Randall’s Island, the old HQ of power broker Robert Moses, star of the best book I’ve ever read about New York City* and criss-crossed by highways, we dipped under some rail and road bridges and forged into Long Island Sound, past La Guardia Airport and Riker’s Island, a prison with such a bad reputation for its treatment of offenders that it is soon to be shut down. And then we were at Clason Point just before the Whitestone Bridge, and off we got. The end of the line for the Ferry, and there were dozens of folk waiting to get on to travel south into Harlem or Midtown and beyond. It wasn’t quite 3.30pm and we had done well, despite a fine dusting of rain as we crossed the water causing Jenny to wrap her new haircut.

*The Power Broker by Robert Caro

And then, suddenly, nothing happened. We tried to call a Lyft/Uber and there were none available. A bus turned up but it wasn’t going anywhere near the venue. It was way too far to walk, miles. Carrying chairs. No. Some other folk were waiting for a car and we discussed sharing since they were going to the Film Screening too but these car Apps don’t carry five people. They were three. We started to text Tony and Lynn. They were in traffic, stuck, lost. I announced that it was winter where we were because it suddenly became unseasonably cold. We were not quite surrounded by entirely amiable people riding on mobilettes, scooters, bikes, cars with balloons, lots of balloons doubtless celebrating a graduation, barbecues smoking and music pumping but not obnoxiously so, it was Sunday afternoon by the water in the Bronx and there were no taxis, we were going to miss our friend’s film and it was raining.

Then Jenny found a car. And Tony texted to say that there was a short film before theirs. And then the taxi arrived and we put our folding chairs in the back and got in. And then we got to the actual park. And our actual names were actually on the door of the screening area, which was actually outside and roped off, and thanks to Laura (and Willa!!) were were ushered gently to two very small chairs reserved in the grass whereupon we opened our garden chairs, checking to see if we were blocking anyone’s view, no, and sat down. Somebody kindly arrived with a large bag full of picnic food and drinks and a tablecloth. It was 4.05pm and the short film was playing. We’d made it. Within two minutes Lynn and Tony had arrived. They sat on the small black chairs, Melkamu was with them, and Sallie’s daughter Willa who had greeted us at the gate, masked and unrecognised by me (shame) I knew I’d met her before but thought because of the surroundings it was at Tony’s company Market Road Films. Willa is interning there now in fact…

“at the front”

Tony Gerber came to hug us and brought cold cans of IPA with him. Gotta love this guy. He introduced us to Felipe’s son who sat with us for a bit. Lynn Nottage came for a hug and we shared fascinating transport tales, as I just did above. And before long, the film started. Just after that Lynn’s brother Aaron arrived with his wife Cathy and their kids Elijah, Sasha and Malik and went to sit behind us. They actually live in Westchester which is just up the road ! Typical right.

And so to the film. Produced by Tony, exec-produced by Lynn, directed by Emma Francis-Snyder it is called TAKEOVER and is a documentary about Bronx group the Young Lords taking over the under-funded and run-down Lincoln Hospital in the South Bronx for twelve hours on July 14th 1970.

“NARRATOR: This is a story from New York, not the New York of Manhattan’s Broadway, but for perhaps the toughest square mile in the city, in the South Bronx.

CARLITO ROVIRA: I was 14 years old when I joined the Young Lords. The Young Lords were a street gang that became politicized by the Black Panther Party.

We became visible as servants of the people.

One of our targets was Lincoln Hospital.

IRIS MORALES: That building was condemned 25 years ago. Condemned. Condemned for rich people and opened for poor people.

UNIDENTIFIED: It was a place that you went to to die.

UNIDENTIFIED: Lincoln was called the “butcher shop.”

MIGUEL ”MICKEY” MELENDEZ: Bloodstains on the walls. Bloodstains on the floors.

UNIDENTIFIED: And there was a rat in the emergency room.

DR. LEWIS FRAAD: We have seen children get lead poisoning while hospitalized at Lincoln Hospital.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: We felt now was the time for us to say exactly how we’re going to respond to the killings of our people.

CARLITO ROVIRA: Our plan was to take over Lincoln Hospital.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: We have to begin to stand up for the people, the Puerto Rican people, and say, “That’s enough. That’s enough.”

CLEO SILVERS: We have been asking for changes to take place. And you’ve paid no attention to us. You’ve thrown us out of your offices, and you’ve called the cops on us. And now we’re putting you out. We’ve taken over the hospital. We’re going to run it. You’re out. And I will walk you to your car.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: We immediately announced that we were not leaving until the city made a firm commitment to build a new hospital.

About a thousand police were on roofs with high-powered rifles. They had vans all over the place.

If the police came in, it was going to be a bloodbath, because the police hated the Young Lords.

CLEO SILVERS: We were terrified.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: “Power to the people” means including people, to gain control of their destiny.

The Young Lords were ahead of our time in terms of recognizing that healthcare is a right.

DENISE OLIVER-VELEZ: We wanted a revolutionary change to the health system in this country. And we still do.

CARLITO ROVIRA: Because no oppressor is invincible.”

The Young Lords are a Puerto Rican social revolutionary group modelled on The Black Panther Party, and this direct action took place just six months after Chairman of the Panthers Fred Hampton was murdered in his bed by Chicago police, dramatised in the film Judas & The Black Messiah. The Young Lords knew that their peaceful direct action occupying a working hospital and sending the administrators and security guards home would possibly lead to bloodshed – their own. After a number of statements to the media and a long negotiation with the Mayor, plus a promise to upgrade the hospital, they all escaped via a back exit dressed as health workers, twelve hours after occupying the building. It was a very moving screening because the audience kept applauding various moments or raising their fists in solidarity with the action. And it turned out that many of those who participated were there, in their 70s, watching themselves in a movie about a group of radical Puerto Ricans taking direct action in 1970 in a Bronx park in 2021 full of Puerto Ricans playing baseball and hanging out with their families. Totally inspiring in other words.

Alynda Segarra

The song which played over the credits was called Pa’lante – I knew it, it was a song of the struggle and been covered by a few people. I thought I had it in my music library somewhere but I couldn’t identify the singer – turns out it was Alynda Segarra who is from the Bronx originally (now from New Orleans)and goes out under the name Hurray For The Riff Raff. Pa’lante is partly her own work, partly a famous poem by Pedro Pietri called Dead Puerto Ricans and partly the song itself Pa’lante which is a Spanish contraction of the phrase ‘straight ahead‘ in English, or “para adelante” – FORWARD ! Or in the Queen’s colloquial English : “Up The Workers!” She is quite an extraordinary artist having hopped freight trains as a teenager and collected americana genre songs before widening the genre to include Puerto Rican – or boriquen – music, which is her own heritage. It feels like a song that has been around forever but it is also possible that the first time I heard it was Sunday afternoon.

If I riff briefly about Puerto Rico you’ll learn that the original Taino people (who called the island Borinquen) were visited by Chris Columbus in 1493 and centuries of slavery and immigration from the Canaries & Spain later, Puerto Rico was born. It became a US territory in 1898 and Puerto Ricans had the right to travel to the USA mainland in 1917. However they cannot vote and they do not pay federal tax, and Puerto Rico is neither independent nor a State of the US. Over 80% of the latins of New York City are from Puerto Rico and they have contributed hugely to the city in the area of music particularly : Tito Puente, Willie Colon, Eddie Palmieri, Ricky Martin, Ray Barreto, Marc Anthony, Luis Fonsi and Hector Lavoe are some of the Nuyorican stars of the diaspora from the 1960s to now. Salsa is a Puerto Rican New York music. Rafael Hernandez‘ name comes up a lot, the songwriter who composed the great tune El Cumbanchero covered by many (I have a reggae version by Sly & Robbie that kicks ass), and the wonderful boleros Silencio (see My Pop Life #88), Lamento Borincano and Preciosa. Our sole Puerto Rican friend is darling Edna Benitez who lives in the Lower East Side with Heidi Griffiths, we watch football matches together and go for walks and see theatre shows. She was raising money for months for the victims of Hurricane Maria which swept through the buildings and infrastructure of the island in 2017. No one knows how many died, and Trump threw a few paper towels around but gave the island next to nothing. The Young Lords certainly have something to kick against, historically and now. They are the workers of New York often on less than minimum wages. The island itself lies between the Virgin Islands and the Dominican Republic in the Caribbean and although I have passed through San Juan airport I have never stayed a night on the island, and thus in my RB spectrum analysis I have not been there. An oversight methinks! Maybe we should retire there…

We had to leave the Tribeca area after the Q&A with the director Emma Francis Snyder and Young Lord Felipe Luciano, pictured right and now 70 and a pastor, so he’s not taking questions, just delivering a potent sermon about self-esteem and reminding us that South Bronx is still the poorest and worst-served neighbourhood in the United States. Jenny met one of the women, Cleo Silvers and we both talked to Felipe Luciano and gathered just outside of the screening area to celebrate, talk and drink wine. The atmosphere was electric I have to say, what the film was saying and how it was made, and where we were watching it. But also why it was made. I talked to Emma the director and needed to know where the idea had come from, going back seven, eight years she had been looking for examples of non-violent direct action for a college thesis, and found this historic moment and then decided to start gathering witnesses and some years later approached Tony and Market Road Films. Astonishingly much of the documentary is made up of re-creations and re-enactments using actors – but so hand-held and grainy that it matches the old footage from 1970, the TV coverage and the still photos. It brilliantly brings a moment in history to life, and for me opens out the idea of a documentary to an exciting new place. I know it’s not the first time re-creations have been utilised, but the idea of making a moment come back to life where there’s no footage found or otherwise is itself revolutionary.

By now the drink was sliding into my moments and we were bonding merrily – for example Malik, the youngest of the Aaron/Cathy family is now at 15 years old the tallest, and is super-proud of this fact. He’s also the only one not fully vaccinated and he’s super-paranoid about that. Aaron was accusing him of going on tiptoe for photographs so I took a few to test the theory.

Malik, Elijah and their dad Aaron seem to all be the same height?

I told them the terrible story of going to my new doctor on Thursday – straight after my molar extraction, and being weighed (can’t remember) and measured….ohhh this is So Traumatic…I was 5 ft 9 inches. Dear reader, I have been six feet tall my entire life. I’ve lost three inches !!!! Are You Fucking Kidding ME Star??? I mean I know that I am scheduled to shrink a little but already?? Three Inches??? Fuck’s sake where’s it all gone? And when I straighten up and pull my stomach in I’m still 5’9”. They laughed. They told Jenny they thought I was brave to tell them. Later Malik was still talking about height – so I told him he was heightist.

Going home we took the blue line from Soundview to E34 then the red line to Brooklyn Navy Yard

The journey home was another taxi to Clason Point where true to form a Ferry was standing by to take us south – only three people on it this time. It was a sunset steam back to East 34th Street and rather stunning. I was drunk remember and we had snacks.

We got back to midtown and disembarked. The next ferry was 25 minutes away so we opened our garden chairs and sat on the quayside. At that moment the last rays of the setting sun hit the skyscrapers of Long Island City across the East River.

It is fantastic to me that we can experience huge areas of New York City from the water. Tony and Lynn & Mel and Willa drove back from The Bronx to Brooklyn, down FDR Drive I’m assuming, three lanes each way, no traffic lights. Tony texted me when they got home, we were still sitting on our chairs. The final ferry ride found us sitting inside for once watching Williamsburg slide past on the left until we docked at the Navy Yard.

“The best way to travel in New York” I said to the ferryman as we left the boat. He smiled at us. “I agree – that’s why I work here!” he said.

Brooklyn Navy Yard

And I couldn’t get the song out of my head. Or the film. Or the people I’d travelled two hours on a boat to see. Inspiration isn’t the word. I feel fired up. Truly. I woke up the next morning still humming from the day before, full of plans for the rest of my life, to stop wasting time faffing about, thinking about myself and my 1st world problems, and to start to try and inspire the youth. We have to inspire the ones who come behind us. What else are we here for after all?

Postscript – I measured myself with Jenny’s help last night and I can confirm that I am 5 feet 10 and a half inches high. So yes, I am slowly being sucked into the centre of the earth by the forces of gravity, and thus being compressed down into my sacral area, but not that fast….

The video was shot on the island after Hurricane Maria in 2017

My Pop Life #259 : A Change Is Gonna Come – Otis Redding

A Change Is Gonna Come – Otis Redding

There was a time I would go to my brother
I asked my brother, “Will you help me please?”
He turned me down and then I ask my dear mother, (my dear mother)
I said “Mother!”
I said “Mother! I’m down on my knees”

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This is about the soul man

This blog will appear in my forthcoming book ‘Camberwell Carrot Juice’. Check back for details!

RB