Jim Liska

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The envelope please…

The envelope please…

In its solemn duty to provide daring and courageous coverage of all-things-Oscar, ABC-TV, with fashion model/anchorman David Muir at the helm, will be offering any minute now an “in-depth, insightful,” and not-to-forget “exclusive” interview of an immigrant kitchen worker who is “inspiring America” as he makes pot stickers of edamame and black truffles for tonight’s Academy Awards dinner to which I was not invited.

This might have something to do with my having once suggested to Wolfgang Puck that lima beans and button mushrooms work just as well at four-percent of the cost. His knowing giggle told the story I can’t repeat.

Have I mentioned that I covered—on-site—three Academy Award extravaganzas?

My first assigned coverage of the annual event in which hundreds of movies stars leave their palatial mansions in rented limousines to air kiss, pat each other on the back (unless Harvey Weinstein is in the room), and feign excitement about the “honor of just being nominated” was in 1980. Puck was still on the line at Ma Maison, a wonderful French restaurant favored by music executives with expense accounts. By the time I returned to the Oscar trenches in the mid-eighties, Puck had sold his stake in Ma Maison, met Barbara Lazaroff (behind every celebrity chef is an aggressively adoring publicist) and opened Spago, a pizza joint that specialized in putting stuff on pizzas that no self-respecting pizzaiolo would ever even think of doing.

Actually, Spago specialized in making people feel unwelcome and impoverished.

I like movies, especially those I can watch at home where popcorn doesn’t cost the same as a cab ride from mid-town Manhattan to LaGuardia. Movies are one of the many interests Geri and I share, although we don’t go to them much anymore. Rather, when we see that Wheel of Fortune is a rerun, we pop in Sleepless in Seattle, which we’ve seen in the neighborhood of 278 times, but only the first 30 minutes. And when it comes to the Oscars, Geri likes the Red Carpet stuff and is excited for this afternoon’s figure skating exhibition that will feature Johnny Weir and Tara Lipinski skating outside the Dolby Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard as they critique designer gowns we will thankfully never see again.

I plan on being at the Bozeman Symphony concert during all of that and will mercifully be spared the spectacle. Unless it snows. Later, I’m hoping to stay awake long enough to see if Knife Skills wins for Best Documentary Short Subject. It is the only nominated picture I’ve seen this year, which is one more than Geri.

Roger Ebert, the film critic who I once engaged in conversation at a social gathering at the University of Illinois (he was an alum; I was still a student), let me know that my taste in movies would benefit greatly from some kind of knowledge of the form. Apparently it wasn’t enough that we both admired The Godfather, my favorite movie. My assessment of the film as a historical document—albeit fictionalized, sort of—that depicted an era and its situational morality informed by an immigrant mentality in response to ignorance and prejudice paled in comparison to his being able to name the film’s Key Grip.

He seemed only mildly impressed when, in my best Brooklyn accent, I quoted chef, procurer of mattresses and hit man Peter “Fat” Clemenza: “Leave the gun. Take the cannoli.”

I then asked if he had a preference for Jujubes or Milk Duds.

I followed Ebert’s advice and procured a copy of Understanding Movies (Prentice-Hall, 1972). I had read more interesting books, by the way, and stopped reading (and high-lighting significant passages of the book in that yellow high-lighting stuff that I’m not sure is really ink) when I got to the section on “cross-cutting” in D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation.

I resigned myself to merely appreciating those movies I happen to like for reasons I cannot begin to fathom. My Austrian therapist finds something troubling about some of my emotional attachments to certain films, wondering aloud what it is that leads me to include both Luis Buñuel’s 1929 silent classic, Un Chien Andalou, and Happy Gilmore on my Top-Ten list. However, Dr. Von Schvink and I share in common an undying admiration for John Waters’s Pink Flamingos, the 1972 transgressive comedy that defines the very concept of tasteless depravity.

THERE WERE TOO MANY celebrity-packed limousines around the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion at the 1980 edition of the Academy Awards for me to get my powder-blue Ford Pinto station wagon anywhere close, so I parked a few blocks away in a seedy part of downtown Los Angeles where cars like mine were sneered at by the resident car thieves. I made my tuxedoed way to the Red Carpet on foot where my first observation as an entertainment journalist was to note that Bo Derek, who surprisingly hadn’t been nominated for her role in 10, appeared to be about four-feet, eight-inches tall and have a waist that measured maybe seventeen inches, which only seemed to exaggerate her other vital statistics. Having barely recovered from that first observation, I made my way through a labyrinth of the almost-recognizable to a press room unlike any I had yet to see in my journeyman years.

In the world of crime and politics (note how I make no differentiation?) barely tepid coffee was served in waxed cardboard cups to the press, whose collective dress would seem amusing even to the color-blind. At the Academy Awards we all wore tuxedos. We were required to. Although my rented tuxedo was suitably well-tailored, its sartorial effect was somewhat diminished by the dozens of plastic-coated credentials hanging from stretchy lanyards around my neck. Whatever.

Once inside the press room I looked at the gently arced rows of tables, a typewriter and telephone in front of each of the plush armchairs lining each row. Huge television screens hung from the room’s walls like so many grandiose, albeit flickering, paintings. There was a buffet table whose inviting offerings would have rivaled most hotel wedding receptions and the gratis bar was stocked with top-shelf brands.

Johnny Walker Red on the rocks sloshed gently against the sides of my Oscar-etched glass as I scanned the room and noticed Irv Kupcinet sitting quietly by himself in the middle of this fabricated Wonderland that would serve as a “news” room for a few hours.

Irv Kupcinet chronicled the comings and goings of the rich, the famous and the infamous for the Chicago Sun-Times. Unlike today’s journalistic preoccupation with celebrity, his columns told brief stories that seemed to have some depth beyond their inherent lack of substance. (What is it that makes me want to say something about the Kardashians here?) Anyway, there weren’t as many stars during his pre-reality entertainment era as there are today and those fewer stars seemed to have burned more brightly and for much longer. Publicists, whose jobs required them to do whatever was necessary to ensure their clients’ immortality, were called press agents back then and the bad behavior of their clients provided pretty tame fodder by today’s standards: Sinatra is seen with dark-suited Italians; Sinatra has drinks with a busty starlet; Sinatra punches somebody; Sinatra does more of whatever Sinatra did. All of it was pretty genteel. I grew up listening to my mother read “Kup’s Column” to the family over breakfast. This was TMZ for the timid, the tame, the literate, as there were no photos or illustrations, save for the occasional black-and-white head shot. When Kup wrote of a low-cut gown, one had to imagine both it and the starlet who was wearing it.

Kup led a pretty glamorous life (I don’t recall his reportage ever taking place at a diner in a bad part of town; his well-tailored tuxedo was not rented) and we, my family, although perhaps not as a family unit, aspired to sit at the best tables he regularly occupied at the best restaurants, clubs and showrooms in the Windy City—the Empire Room, the Ambassador East, the Chez Paree, the Scotch Mist.

I was mere moments away from learning that Irv Kupcinet was not the friendliest guy I would ever meet, but then again, I was young. It’s not that he was mean or anything; he just didn’t seem to have the time nor the interest to make small talk with some kid, by now camped next to him, who was somewhat in awe of his new-found surroundings. He didn’t mind my refreshing his drinks, however, and he became friendlier as I became more jaded. And we both grew more cynical as the night wore on and on and the liquor wore heavier, and we were sharing guffaws at the crap we were filing about stuff that didn’t matter. (I saved the Bo Derek item for here, by the way. Thirty-eight years I should wait.)

By then, I was on a one-third-of-his-last-name basis with him.

“What does matter then, Kup?” I slurred, perhaps seeking some secret insight to the human condition that might be revealed in the context of an awards show.

“How the hell would I know?”

He raised his glass.

“Here’s looking at you, kid.”

I had yet to see Casablanca. I had no idea what he meant.

Cannoli

There are countless recipes on-line for cannoli shells and if you’re interested in the rather arduous process of making your own, go for it. Commercially made shells are just fine and are generally available in better grocery stores.

The filling is what matters and this is the simple recipe I’ve been using for longer than I can remember.

Slowly mix one pound of drained ricotta cheese with 1/2 cup of baker’s sugar (superfine) until the sugar is dissolved. Add 1 tablespoon of vanilla extract, the zest of one orange, and 1/4 cup mini chocolate chips. Blend together and fill a pastry bag with the mix. Fill cannoli shells. Sprinkle with confectioner’s sugar. Buon appetito!

Photography by Courtney A. Liska

It Might As Well Be Spring

It Might As Well Be Spring

To many of us the surest, most welcome harbinger of spring is that day when baseball’s pitchers and catchers report to their teams’ spring training camps and that day is Tuesday. Weather be damned wherever the rest of us might live, the Arizona desert and the Florida citrus groves that host the Cactus and Grapefruit leagues of Major League Baseball are sunny, warm and ready for the unmistakable thwack! of ball hitting mitt.

And just forty-four days later, home-plate umpires at fifteen ballparks will yell “Play ball!” and the long winter will ease its frozen grip and our discontent will turn to glorious revelry in the summer sun as some of us find a certain solace in a sport we once played and now are content to watch. Opening Day is more than the mere beginning of a new season of sport—it is a wondrously mystical symbol of re-birth rivaling that of any other in the Judeo-Christian repertoire.

Apparently not enough of us relish the game, however.

Like the parents who regularly disturb Little League contests with their whiny complaints about how their little Johnny should be afforded more opportunities on the field, the front office of MLB, which represents the leagues’ thirty owners and negotiates to keep the players’ union at bay, is whining loudly as it tries desperately to attract new fans by offering improvements upon a game that was perfect from its inception.

“Pace of game” is the phrase that Commissioner Rob Manfred tosses about with reckless abandon to describe an issue that most true baseball fans don’t believe even is one. (It’s an unrefined phrase as well. “Pace of play” would have at least offered an alliterative quality.)

In a nutshell, Manfred thinks that the average time of a nine-inning baseball game is about ten minutes too long, which is a clear sign that Manfred is not a baseball fan. How sad is that? Last year’s average nine-inning game lasted 3:05 hours and if that average time doesn’t drop to 2:55 hours over the course of this season he’s going to impose an 18-second pitch clock, 20 seconds if there are any runners on base. (There are variations on the pitch-clock theme that have to do with union negotiations, blah, blah, blah…)

Allow me to frank. Rob Manfred is an idiot—an idiot who is paid somewhere in the neighborhood of $18 million annually to kowtow to the wishes of his thirty bosses who apparently can’t fire him. (How do people find these jobs?)

Baseball is the only sport that is played without a clock—either in its execution or its final result. In fact, the game is so averse to time that the action on the bases runs counter-clockwise, thereby actually reversing time over the course of nine innings. OK, that’s kind of borderline metaphysical, but you get my drift.

For all I know, baseball might have more fans today than it ever has but clearly the owners want even more fans. They want more seats filled, more hot dogs and glasses of beer sold, more revenues from television, radio and internet streaming services. They are a greedy bunch that, led by their moronic Commissioner, believe if they could trim just ten minutes from the length of the game, thousands more will flock to the ballparks to watch 25-year-old athletically gifted multi-millionaires toss a ball around.

“Dude. Ya wanna go catch a game and have some brews and a dog?”

“Not ’til they improve the pace of game and cut the time by ten minutes, man. Maybe next year.”

Oddly enough, classical music has faced this same challenge over the years. Yo-Yo Ma’s performance of the Bach Cello Suite No. 1 in G Major takes about 18 minutes. If he could shorten it by about three minutes—perhaps by omitting Minuet II and picking up the pace of the Gigue—he’d likely draw bigger audiences to his concerts. Oh, wait a minute (or three), his concerts are always SRO. And that might have more to do with his virtuosic abilities than how long the damn song might be.

The last thing I want when I go to the symphony or the ballpark is for it to end. Both of those diversionary activities can be fun and soul-nourishing and gratifying. In the concert hall we are given the opportunity to hear genius interpreted; on the field we can marvel at how sports serve our society by providing inspired examples of excellence and achievement. Both put on public display the results of hard work and concerted effort, and both afford us opportunities to suspend the harsh reality of our daily lives—if only for three hours and five minutes.

Personally, I neither need nor want to get back to the grind ten minutes early.

A love of baseball is almost as difficult to explain as its opposite is to comprehend. How, I’ve wondered over the years when confronted with the question, can somebody not love this game? Why, I wonder as I walk our dog around the baseball complex in our little town, are there rarely any kids playing in the park’s six fields unless it’s a scheduled practice or game as an organized event? The latter question might play to the ubiquitous electronic media and its addictive offerings, and may be a contributing factor to an epidemic of juvenile obesity.

I grew up in Chicago and when at last the grass emerged from under the soot-blackened snows of winter, the glove went on and didn’t come off—except for drum or piano practice and meals—until the snow flew again by Thanksgiving. The glove sat next to me on the needlepoint piano bench and under my leg on the vinyl kitchen chair; I tucked it under my pillow at night and drifted off with the comforting smells of leather, dirt and neatsfoot oil. The kids in my first neighborhood played in alleys, backyards and vacant lots, inventing new versions of the national pastime to fit the number of players we had on any given day.

I grew up with baseball.

My childhood summers on the city’s West Side pretty much started with my leaving the house in the morning and returning home in time for dinner. With financing secured from my business of redeeming for pennies the soda bottles I found in the neighborhood alleys (that venture might well have been the most successful I have ever been in business), I would spend some of those halcyon days outside the friendly confines of Wrigley Field. I would take the green-and-white bus that ran along Roosevelt Road and turned onto Harlem Avenue to Oak Park. From there, I’d take the Blue Line El to the Loop and transfer to the Red Line to Addison Street and spend the afternoons alternating my location behind the outfield walls of Sheffield Avenue and Waveland Avenue, depending on who was at bat (we could hear the stadium announcer and of course we knew the lineup and who batted left or right). I played catch with kids I didn’t know, forever hoping a home run ball would leave the friendly confines of Wrigley Field and find its way into my glove.

And when one did, after bouncing off the concrete pavement, I played with it, scuffed it up. It never would have occurred to me to get it autographed.

Sometimes, if the bleachers weren’t filled, a door on Waveland would open and a bunch of us kids would get to scramble into the seats for the last inning or two. It was like winning the lottery.

On the days when I didn’t travel to Wrigley, I’d listen to the ball game on our Bakelite radio while sitting at the kitchen table, a pink Formica-topped table for four with a pattern of tiny, overlapping boomerang designs in white and gray, and a ribbed chrome skirting. WGN, which was owned by the Chicago Tribune and whose call letters stood for World’s Greatest Newspaper (clearly an arguable point then, as now), broadcast the games. Jack Brickhouse, whose mind and commentary frequently wandered far afield from baseball, was the announcer. My mother would interrupt the game at 2:00 p.m. to listen to a fifteen-minute daily broadcast by Liberace on another station. I hated that. I just wanted to listen to Ernie Banks and the Cubs play baseball.

DANIEL AND I SHARE A LOVE for baseball and when he turned thirteen we embarked on a baseball trip of major league parks that would be a substitute for both Hebrew lessons and his bar mitzvah, neither of which were conveniently available in Montana at the end of the last century.

As we traveled the country by train and rental car we would discuss and marvel at various aspects of the game: The genius and daring of the suicide squeeze, the swift poetry of the double-play, the balletic (unless the outfield wall is involved) snatching of the long fly ball, the sublime strategy behind the intentional walk, the seemingly bizarre superstitions and time-honored traditions, and how the DH has contributed to rendering the American League to second-class status in the world of competitive sports since its adoption in 1973.

The Pentateuch would provide allegorical discovery and analysis of both life and baseball.

Genesis would detail the names and lineage of the game’s players and legends; Exodus, the advent of the escape from slavery and segregation; Leviticus, the basic rules established to play (no mention of the DH, by the way); Numbers, the importance of faithfulness and trust, i.e., pick a team; and, finally, Deuteronomy, a finely detailed laundry list of by-now antiquated rules about a myriad of acceptable behaviors (augmented, of course, by the Talmud) along with acceptable foodstuffs that would never suggest which condiments belong on an all-beef hot dog, although a careful reading might reveal that ketchup on any hot dog is biblically unacceptable and perhaps not kosher.

I have long maintained that had Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (1835) been written after the founding of Major League Baseball in 1869, he no doubt would have shared the view of other scholars who have noted that to know America is to know baseball. Conversely, to know baseball is to know America.

I fear that might be changing and I hope that I’m wrong.

Photography by Courtney A. Liska

Super Bowl Redux

Super Bowl Redux

It was just 38 years ago that I had my first Super Bowl experience of any consequence.

It was Super Bowl XIV at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California, where the Pittsburgh Steelers (12-4) met the Los Angeles Rams (9-7). I was not among the 103,985 people who attended that game to watch the Steelers prevail 31-19.

That meant, of course, that I also did not have to endure the 12-minute halftime performance of 430 incessantly smiling Up With People folks dressed like Perry Como as the performed their tribute to Sixties music. It should be noted that the show had to have been better than at the very first Super Bowl, where the halftime entertainment was a polka band with sixteen Miss Wisconsin contestants churning butter on the back of a hay wagon.

But in the weeks of manic lead-up to the Big Game I attended many events as a newspaper color commentator of stuff only football wives appreciate.

While I’ll admit that that might sound sexist, it didn’t at the time. Today, I’ll bow to the pressures I place upon myself to be oh-so-PC (yeah, right) and amend the comment to “stuff nobody appreciates” and add, “or even cares about.”

My colleagues in the sports department of the Los Angeles Daily News—where I wrote about jazz music and interviewed two-headed turtles and other anomalies—got to interview great players with names like Terry Bradshaw, Franco Harris and Lynn Swann of the Chuck Noll-led Steelers. They wrote critically analytical stories about Pat Haden, Cullen Bryant, and Elvis Peacock, a first-round draft pick who is best remembered for having the coolest name in all of professional sports history.

They hobnobbed with team owners Art Rooney (Pittsburgh) and Georgia Rosenbloom, a former lounge singer who inherited controlling interest in the Rams after her sixth husband, Carroll, drowned in the Atlantic surf somewhere in Florida just months before. She soon thereafter (perhaps a little too “soon thereafter,” the tabloids whispered) made an accordion-playing Hollywood music bigwig named Dominic Frontiere her seventh husband. No less a publication than the National Enquirer suggested that Georgia might have been in Florida at the time of Carroll’s drowning, as did one of the Rosenbloom sons with whom Geri and I threw darts in a Redondo Beach bar one night.

The circumstances of Carroll Rosenbloom’s death remain a nagging question, but no more nagging than this one: “Why were Geri and I at a bar in Redondo Beach throwing darts?”

In the middle of all of this, Dominic Frontiere, whose accordion prowess eclipsed that of Lawrence Welk’s, was busy scalping as many as 16,000 tickets to the 1980 Super Bowl, raking in a cool half-million dollars for his efforts.

For the record, the accordion player served nine months in a minimum-security federal prison that may or may not have had tennis courts and room service. He was fined $15,000 by the IRS for failing to report his take as income. There was no restitution provision. Do the math. Dominic netted $485,000, which works out to $59K per month for time served. (I’d like that deal now.) He basically disproved the adage that crime doesn’t pay but lent some credibility to the spirit behind the meaning of one of my favorite bumper stickers that I just happened to have mentioned last week: USE AN ACCORDION/GO TO JAIL.

In the great lead-up to that XIVth Super Bowl I got to go to the Rose Bowl and observe scores of technicians from CBS television run cables and wires and cords all over the place and then pass on to my eager-to-know readers that it takes as many miles of television cables to broadcast a Super Bowl as there are miles of highway between Pasadena and Poughkeepsie. (I forget the actual number, but, oh well…I trust that you get the point.)

I had done a similar story about the multiple miles of telephone lines the Secret Service had installed when President Gerald Ford wanted to have lunch with a farm family near Champaign, Illinois, during the 1976 primary campaign. Little did I know that this kind of reportage would become something of a specialty for me. Sharing that information about the telephone lines with Hunter S. Thompson on the press bus might have been what kept us from becoming close friends on the campaign trail.

PACOIMA, A NOT-SO-TIDY COMMUNITY tucked into the northeast corner of the San Fernando Valley, seemed an unlikely place to tend to pre-Super Bowl business, but that’s where I found myself one January afternoon.

I had actually been to Pacoima once before to interview a kindergarten teacher who moonlighted as a stripper. I thought this might be an interesting story just because my kindergarten teacher happened not to be a stripper—and for many a good reason. I was wrong about the Pacoima stripper being a good story. I did, however, find it mildly amusing that the strip club where she worked nights was in a strip mall replete with a Thai restaurant (the best Thai restaurants are always in strip malls, by the way), a tire store, and a beauty salon called Curl Up and Dye. I made that last part up or maybe I borrowed it. There was no beauty shop, but isn’t that a great name for one?

Anyway, it was in a nondescript bar on Van Nuys Boulevard in Pacoima that I met this Pittsburgh Steelers Super Fan whose name I’ve long since forgotten. He was about seven feet tall and weighed—soaking wet—about 108 pounds. He wore a tuxedo and danced at Steelers’s games in a style reminiscent of a spasmodic Tommy Tune, or perhaps a Marionette with a couple of strings missing. He flailed his arms like he was battling killer bees. He was the antithesis of your typical cheerleader and the reason I was sent to interview him was because—basically—he was an alcoholic football fan who ate glass and had a press agent.

He wanted the fifteen minutes of fame that Andy Warhol had promised.

For two or three hours I sat in this seedy little bar watching a tuxedo-clad moron throw back shots of cheap Canadian whiskey and then eat the shot glasses (I am not making this up), washing down the shards of well-chewed glass with squat brown bottles of Lucky Lager, famous for being the worst beer brewed since those produced in 11,000 BC Sumeria. Between really disturbing bites of glass he spoke of the Steelers as if they alone knew the dark secrets of the universe.

Outside of the political arena I have yet to meet a bigger idiot. Just to be on the safe side, I never made a return trip to Pacoima.

The Super Bowl Party was the biggest ticket in town. Passes to the Grammys, Oscars, Emmys and the Big Game itself, were easy to get, comparatively.

But I had been assigned to cover the party and I could not get a ticket, a frustrating situation that led to my learning an important lesson that journalism school hadn’t taught.

“I’ll just write a story about how hard it is to get a ticket,” I told one of the sportswriters who had a ticket and planned on using it only to get drunk and talk to people off the record.

I was channeling my inner Hunter S. Thompson.

“They know how hard it is to get a ticket,” he scowled, looking at me as if at that very moment I was eating a shot glass. “Reading about it is as close as they’re going to get. They don’t care about your problems.”

He was right, of course. To brace myself, I threw back a shot or two (or was it three?) of Wild Turkey. I scrambled, I begged, I what-evered. I was probably slurring. I finally got a ticket. I went to the party, saw the glass-eating imbecile in a distant corner, and wrote about the open bars and a table laden with shrimp that reached from Pasadena to Poughkeepsie.

For the record, the Grammys, the Oscars and the Emmys were much better.

As for the Big Game? I just go for the food.

Super Bowl LII Menu

For today’s big game it’s chili (see “Don’t Mess With Texas” for my recipe) and East L.A. Nachos (see “Double Dribble” for Courtney’s recipe).

If you’re an Eagles fan then salted soft pretzels with mustard, Rolling Rock beer, and Philly Cheesesteaks Whiz Wit are a must. For the cheesesteaks, saute six ounces of Steak-umm Sliced Steaks; stuff into soft hoagie rolls and smother with tons of sauteed onions and huge dollops of Cheez Whiz.

You will jinx the game if you use provolone cheese or peppers. Ketchup is OK.

If you’re a Patriots fan, lobster rolls, clam dip with pita chips, and Samuel Adams Boston Lager should fill the bill. For four lobster rolls, combine 1-1/2 pounds of chopped cooked lobster, with 1/2-cup Hellman’s mayonnaise, 3 Tbs. fresh lemon juice, 2 chopped stalks of celery and 2 Tbs. chopped fresh parsley. Stuff the mixture into soft hoagie rolls. In the New England tradition, you can cheat and substitute the lobster meat with crab meat.

Open the Sam Adams early in the day to make sure it’s flat by game time.

Photography by Courtney A. Liska

Jazz Notes: Remembering Donte’s

Jazz Notes: Remembering Donte’s

After seventeen years of playing drums professionally in a variety of musical settings, I decided that I could best serve jazz—my first love—by writing about it.

I played my final gig in Rantoul, Illinois, on the same day as I had taken my final college final. There was more than a mere hint of finality that June day in 1976. I was about to turn 25, I had earned a degree in journalism from the University of Illinois, and I didn’t have a clue about how to become a jazz writer.

I found myself in Los Angeles later that summer and got a job as a reporter with the Valley News & Green Sheet, a controlled-distribution, i.e., free, four-day daily newspaper based in Van Nuys. The paper recently had been purchased by the Chicago Tribune Company, which had sent a trio of wunderkind executives to overhaul the paper by improving its standing in the profession, expanding its print schedule to seven days, and charging for it.

The changes were accomplished quickly and deftly and it was exciting to be part of a growing concern. (The name-change to the Los Angeles Daily News was accomplished by a voice vote in the editorial department, the only holdout being from our lead political reporter, the curmudgeonly John Marelius.) The newsroom was packed with enterprising young reporters and seasoned veterans, most of who drank too much.

I was made a consumer reporter, my job being to find unhappy consumers and expose the unscrupulous people who made them unhappy. I was eager to finagle a way to cover jazz for the paper.

It didn’t take long for me to become friends with Rick Sherwood, a contemporary who worked in the Features section of the paper. I told Rick (aka Bingo), who would become my son’s godfather and provide the financial security for our restaurant venture many years later, of my desire to write about jazz. He thought it was a good idea and within a few days I was contributing album reviews. I soon had a weekly column about jazz and I was spending my evenings covering jazz at the Lighthouse, the Parisian Room (so new was I to Los Angeles that in a mostly negative review of the pianist Gene Harris I had written that the club was in Santa Monica, rather than in a world away in the Crenshaw District), Concerts-by-the-Sea and the Baked Potato. At the Money Tree in Toluca Lake I first heard the magnificent jazz singer Mike Campbell, who became a lifelong friend, and the house bassist, Eugene “Senator” Wright, who had retired from the Dave Brubeck Quartet.

But it was at Donte’s, a world-class jazz club on Lankershim Boulevard in North Hollywood, that I found my second home.

In the late fall of 1976 I introduced myself to the club’s owner, Carey Leverette, as the Valley News jazz critic.

I don’t think the gray-bearded Leverette—a film choreographer whose Manhattan rearing, Fordham University education and Guadalcanal war experiences as a U.S. Marine had never included anything approaching jazz, let alone running a nightclub—ever had heard of the Valley News, but he was gracious, seated me at the end of the long, red-leather banquette that faced the stage and sent a waitress, B.J., to take my order. I had a Johnny Walker Red on the rocks, ordered the New York strip steak, which happened to be the best steak I had ever had, and listened to the extraordinary guitarist Joe Pass.

It’s been my experience that nightclubs are generally bad places to eat. The focus is clearly on the entertainment and the alcohol sales, and not necessarily in that order. Donte’s was unusual in that everything that came out of the impossibly tiny kitchen was outstanding.

It was a short, simple menu of steaks, chops and seafood that was handled by a single cook.

From its opening in 1966 to its closing in 1988, it was the premiere place to play in Los Angeles. Donte’s was a small club that made every performance an intimate experience that both musicians and audiences loved.

I could fill countless pages with the names of the musicians I heard over my twelve-year span of attendance there, but suffice it to say that any traveling jazz musician who worked nightclubs worked at Donte’s in those days. It was also a haven for comics. Mort Sahl, a jazz comic if ever there was one, was a regular performer there. Redd Foxx worked the room. And the likes of Clint Eastwood, Mel Brooks and Anne Bancroft, Shari Lewis, Jack Riley, Johnny Carson, Frank Sinatra and Steve Allen were audience regulars–if you loved jazz, you went to Donte’s. And New Year’s Eve just wasn’t the same after Art Pepper died in 1982.

Carey and I became great friends. Early on I had a crush on his daughter, Heidi, and I became an admirer of her husband, the alto saxophonist Dick Spencer. Carey never questioned any of my critical opinions and only once offered any advice: “Just spell the names right.”

Every year on Donte’s anniversary, Carey would have the critics, radio DJs and a few of the stars work as waiters and bartenders for the night. It was great fun and the musicians took their turns at giving the critics and jocks as hard a time as possible. (I’m probably one of the very few who can say I waited tables with Al Jarreau.)

Carey and I would frequently go to restaurants together. He’d have heard of the opening of a new one and off we’d go, usually accompanied by his longtime cook, José, a burly Latino who would pluck clams out of the steamer with his bare, calloused fingers. I spent some time in the kitchen over those years.

My routine would be to listen intently to the first set of a show, take my notes, speak to the musicians during the break and leave as the second set would be starting. Frequently I’d hang out for another set (and sometimes yet another), but officially I was done listening too critically after the first set. I could tell when the kitchen was getting backed up and I’d sidle in to ask if I could help. I’d plate linguine and clams for José (I used tongs) and wash dishes or scrub pots, and take out the garbage. It was fun.

Freddie Hubbard, the great trumpet player, used to get food from Donte’s all the time—to go. One night I got to the club and Carey said, “Let’s go up to Freddie’s house.” Driving the few miles up into the Hollywood Hills I asked Carey the purpose of the trip. “I’m out of god-damned plates…they’re all at Freddie’s.”

We retrieved the plates, loaded them into the kitchen and started washing. Carey suggested we reward ourselves with steak dinners. The New York is what I almost always had and I asked how he did them.

“First, you buy the best steak that’s available,” he said, adding that he bought Prime grade beef. “Then you do as little as possible to it.”

With that, Carey liberally seasoned two, inch-and-a-half-thick steaks with salt and pepper. He placed them on a scorching hot grill, turned them after about two minutes, seared the other side for another two minutes and placed them into a large, cast-iron frying pan. He added a knob of butter on each and splashed them with port wine. Into the 500-degree oven they went. Five or six minutes later, they were resting on plates, perfectly rare and perfectly delicious.

It might be difficult to image a dark-and-smoky nightclub as being a “family” place, but in its own way Donte’s certainly was. Players and others would meet there for a taste, some jokes, gossip and conversation, and Bob Powell, the bartender, would play LPs from the vast collection. The sense of compassion and genuine concern for each other was quite real in the jazz community and for several years Donte’s played host to it.

I had become a regular at Donte’s before I met Geri and many of our first dates were there. Carey adored her and the friends in the jazz world that I had made were quick to embrace her as well. She felt as much at home there as I did.

Our daughter, Courtney, was born with a serious heart defect and the Los Angeles jazz community rallied around her (us), hosting a benefit for her* at the Hollywood Palladium (Doc Severinsen and the Tonight Show band, Jack Lemmon, Edie Adams, Don Menza, Steve Allen and Rosemary Clooney headlined) and offering tremendous financial and emotional support. The bandleader and trumpeter Bill Berry was also on the bill and he and his wife, Betty, even arranged for us to stay at Dizzy Gillespie’s suite at the Copley Hotel in Boston while Courtney was at Children’s Hospital. Dizzy’s “manager,” Charlie the Whale, was our chauffeur, driving us around Boston in his oddly decorated ’67 Chevy Impala.

It had all started with the friends we had made at Donte’s.

Every year around Christmas, Carey hosted a party for forty or so people. It was always on a Sunday and the tables would be pushed together. The food was pretty typical holiday fare, served family style, and everybody brought something to share.

Courtney was not quite two when we went to one year’s gathering. I was sitting next to my friend and mentor, the jazz critic Leonard Feather, with Courtney sitting between me and Geri. Being age two meant being antsy and Courtney left the table, only to crawl onto the stage and onto the bench in front of the piano. The next thing, Courtney was pounding on the piano as only a two-year-old could.

I was mortified. Teddy Wilson, the great pianist who had been part of the Benny Goodman Quartet with Lionel Hampton and Gene Krupa, had played on that very Steinway the night before and there was Courtney pounding away with complete abandon. I thought it was some form of sacrilege. Leonard told me to relax. Conversation stopped and a roomful of some of the world’s most famous jazz musicians, including Teddy Wilson, sat and listened.

The recital lasted a minute or two—to me, it seemed like a bad forty-minute set—and the applause was thunderous. Her debut complete, this Donte’s family finished dinner.

*That benefit concert at the Hollywood Palladium was held on October 30, 1983. It also benefited Jason Rosolino, whose father, the trombonist Frank Rosolino, shot both of his sons before taking his own life on November 26, 1978. Justin, age nine, died. Jason, age seven, was left blinded.

Photography and staging by Courtney A. Liska

Over-Thinking Chicken Flingers

Over-Thinking Chicken Flingers

A recent trip to the hardware store was typical. I needed an item to perform what I hoped would be a simple home repair. Although I knew what the item was, I had no idea of its proper name or its whereabouts in the store. The fact that this item might appear in any number of sections of the store did not help matters. After several minutes of wandering up and down the store’s aisles, a young sales clerk asked if I needed help.

“Oh, no thank you,” I said, “I’m just looking.” Pride goeth before a fall.

I had the same exchange with another young clerk, and then another. I finally relented and within minutes the three store employees and I were engaged in a spirited conversation concerning whatever it was I was looking for. Nobody had a clue. I wrote off their incompetence to youth; they wrote off mine to dotage, a word they had recently learned from Kim Jong-un.

I thanked the clerks for their efforts and retired to the paint section, where I spent several minutes marveling at not only the cost of paint but the seemingly endless choice of colors. I’m not sure that a healthy nation needs that many paint choices. Furthermore, is avocado the right color for any exterior structure? I vaguely remember a few people having that color refrigerator back in the Fifties. Of course, Midwesterners wouldn’t have known about avocados back then; we just thought it was a weird shade of green.

I moved on.

I found a couple of packages of Chicken Flingers and took them to the check-out counter. Chicken Flingers are perhaps the most intriguing product I’ve found in the last eleven years. Maybe longer, but eleven is a notoriously funny number. It wouldn’t be if there was a number outside of the metric system that began with “k,” but there isn’t and so eleven wins by default. Anyway, Chicken Flingers are little rubber chicken-like toys with hollowed-out thoraxes. You place your index finger inside the thorax, aim its beak at a target, pull the rubber tail feather and let go. Sometimes it flies across a room and sticks to a wall, which is very funny and people laugh; other times, it drops limply a few inches in front of you, with is also very funny and people laugh. Every now and then it will hit your boss on the forehead, which is particularly funny but doesn’t look good at your annual performance review.

We keep a supply of Chicken Flingers on hand to offer as special-occasion gifts to our friends. At a certain point in life, one wants to get rid of stuff, not accumulate more. We’ve reached that point, as have most of our friends. Chicken Flingers, we have found, are the perfect gift—that special something they would never have bought for themselves and don’t mind losing.

All of which leads to the topic at hand: Whatever happened to free hats?

There was a time not too long ago when you could walk into a farm implement store, ask some pointed questions about combine harvesters and walk out with a free hat as well as a reprint of an article from Yesterday’s Farmer about winnowing-fans in ancient Greece.

Sadly, those days are gone forever. The “gimme” cap has gone the way of other things one doesn’t see anymore, like ancient Greece, flat wooden ice cream spoons, telephone booths and politicians dedicated to public service.

At the hardware store they were selling baseball-style caps for $14.99. These weren’t just any baseball caps mind you, these were caps emblazoned with the logo of a company that makes chainsaws. While those chainsaws are probably a fine product made somewhere in China (the hats are made there in the factory next door), I’m not sure that I want to be that company’s walking billboard and pay $14.99 for the privilege.

Think about it. The millionaire professional golfers whose every putt is deemed “dangerous” by whispering television announcers, have products advertised on their caps, shirt sleeves, breast pocket, bag, gloves, pants and shoes. They don’t buy those patches or the articles on which they’re sewn or appliqued. They get them for free, along with six- and seven-figure checks.

The same is true of professional left-turn-only drivers. The STP decal is not on any racing car’s hood because it’s cool. STP, along with about a thousand other sponsors—per car—pays big bucks for that showcase.

Curiously, there’s little crossover sponsorship between NASCAR and the PGA except for Viagra. What does this tell us? What does this say about our society? Perhaps we have too many paint choices.

Back when I made a good portion of my annual income writing about the two-headed turtles I had interviewed, I was assigned to go Christmas shopping on Rodeo Drive to show the vast majority of my newspaper’s readership that they couldn’t afford to park in Beverly Hills, let alone shop there. The editors figured that this kind of story not only embodied the true spirit of the season but also helped plunge many of our readers into that depression so unique to the holidays.

Back then, many of the stores on Rodeo Drive were so exclusive that they kept their doors locked during business hours, which is mostly illegal. It was like trying to get into Studio 54 if you hadn’t appeared in a Warhol movie or slept with Warren Beatty. Anyway, a couple of stores wouldn’t let me in and those that did treated me like…well, I’m sure you get the picture.

Thirty-five years ago, clerks at Rodeo Drive stores attended six weeks of intensive training to learn how to look down their noses at their fellow human beings and to develop vocal accents that had no discernible place of origin. While this might seem an odd approach to customer service to most of us, it is well appreciated by those willing and able to spend $30,000 for a wristwatch.

Most of the stores on Rodeo Drive were named for a single celebrity designer and at one of them I feigned interest in a belt with the designer’s three initials burned onto the belt and etched into the brass buckle. I thought that $300 was a lot of money for a belt with somebody else’s initials. I suggested that perhaps they pay me $300 to wear the belt. That way, I’d be advertising the designer’s product and keeping my trousers up with great style.

I could tell from the way she looked down her nose at me that the clerk didn’t like my attitude. I asked her if Yves might have a gimme cap I could have. She asked me, in an accent I couldn’t quite place, to leave.

ROAST CHICKEN

Whoever devised Chicken Flingers did not over-think the concept. It is simple and pure and that is why it’s successful. I’ve found over the years that if ever there’s a problem with roast chicken it stems from the cook’s over-thinking the concept and then over-cooking the chicken. Roast chicken is the protein foundation for what I consider to be a nearly perfect meal, even if it is one without pasta.

Buy as good a chicken as your budget will allow—one that weighs about three pounds. (If it still has feet and they happen to be blue, you are in France with a bird called a Bresse Gauloise and you should find somebody there to make your dinner while you savor a bottle or two of Chateauneuf du Pape.) Wipe the bird dry with paper towels and season it generously, inside and out, with salt and pepper. Stab a whole lemon with the tines of a fork several times and stick it into the bird’s cavity. Add a sprig of fresh rosemary or some thyme, maybe a clove or two of crushed garlic. Truss the bird (optional) and place into a cast iron pan that has been lightly coated with olive oil. Roast the chicken in an oven pre-heated to 425º until the juices run clear from the thigh (40-50 minutes). Let rest, covered, while you make a sauce by sautéing a tablespoon or so of shallots in the pan drippings. Add some white wine (cognac or Madeira works nicely as well) and reduce. Whisk in some Dijon mustard, some chicken stock and, finally, cream. Simmer until thickened. Finish with a little butter.

I like this meal with either roasted red potatoes and carrots, or mashed potatoes and broccoli rabe quickly sautéed in olive oil and seasoned with red pepper flakes.

Photography by Courtney A. Liska

Boo! Really Scary Food

Boo! Really Scary Food

Good Sunday to you this fine morning. We’re only two days away from Halloween and by now you’ve probably got everything you need to celebrate what’s barely a holiday: tons of candy, fake cob webs, tissue-paper ghosts in the trees, and a scarecrow that sits on the front porch and scares nobody. Although it has all kind of history and tradition in paganism and the lesser religions, Halloween in America today is but an exercise in readiness for an economic future that might demand door-to-door begging as a survival tool for our children.

To Halloween I say, “Bah, humbug,” knowing that I’ve borrowed that Dickensian phrase from another holiday with pagan roots.

In addition to the de rigueur Blood Punch, Slime Green Jello, Cauliflower Brains, Angel Hair Tapeworms and Lady Fingers (usually sculpted from actual food, but if you have access to the real thing…go for it!), there is Head Cheese, a real food available in most grocery stores without regard to the October holiday, but that nobody but the French will eat.

There is also a Halloween favorite from Mssr. M and Mlle. H for Throat Roast, a fresh elk throat stuffed with wild field grasses, Rocky Mountain oysters, sourdough bread, turnips and local honey. It is typically sauced with ranch dressing. For many years I’ve resisted tasting it for any number of reasons, the least of which being that I’m afraid of offending my taste buds to the point that they might no longer recognize foie gras, trout meunière amandine or Cheerios.

I am not one willing to traumatize my taste buds, although they seemed to have survived the yam-and-marshmallow casserole last Thanksgiving.

But if we’re talking about really scary foods we need look no further than today’s Top Ten list of alleged food-like items that have found their ways into our diets.

#10: Sunny D It touts itself as being orange juice, but it’s orange juice in the way that transmission fluid is vodka. It appears to be orange because of the beta-Carotine that apparently might turn some consumers as orange as the drink itself. From what I can best determine from the mix of Latin and pharmaceutical English on its rather fantastical label, it is basically premixed Tang with added sugar and high fructose corn syrup. The fact that it doesn’t have to be refrigerated until opened should be warning enough of its inherent scariness.

#9 Miracle Whip The mayonnaise for people afraid of mayonnaise, Miracle Whip is both vinegary and sweet, but mostly repulsive. People in southern Indiana consider it a dietary staple and Mike Pence insists eating it by the spoonful at every meal even if his wife isn’t with him. I’ve read that you can make cakes with this hideously awful stuff and I can only imagine that such a creation would give new meaning to the word vile. Its ingredients include high fructose corn syrup, sugar, corn starch, dried eggs, mustard flour, paprika, soybean oil, vinegar, and egg yolk. In 2010 Lady Gaga, whose net worth is estimated to be $275 million, was paid to claim she liked it.

#8 White Bread Whether a Sweetheart loaf, a Ball Park bun or any other commercially made white bread, you’re looking at a product that will not die. And that’s because mass-produced American white breads, through the miracles of chemistry, are assured an unnatural lifespan. Bread, properly made with flour, yeast and water, is supposed to become stale after a couple of days; on the third or fourth day its mold suggests a connect to life-saving drugs like penicillin. Today’s white bread—a modern Wonder—goes from fresh to moldy in about two months. I’m more comfortable with bread that quickly ages than bread that contains calcium propionate and sodium bisulfite, two chemicals likely used in embalming the dead.

#7 Canned Soup Whether marketed under the labels of celebrity chefs, Campbell’s or any other regional brand, canned soups are salty enough to kill you. The low-sodium ones could use some salt. Enough said.

#6-4 Ethnic Fish What Ashkenazy Jews, Italians and Norwegians have in common are disgusting fish dishes that are so ingrained into their (our) ethnic imagination and traditions that they (we) continue to eat them despite their, well, horribleness.

From the Italians we get a salt cod called baccalà. I’m still not convinced that any food that needs to soak in one brine to get rid of the flavor of its first brine is worth eating. The Italians have no fewer than 137 ways to make this food barely palatable.

Lutefisk—Norwegian for “fish of the lute”—is nailed to a board and cured in lye, a chemical used to remove Viking blood stains from Scandinavian obelisks. Traditionally, the fish is tossed into the garbage and the Norwegians then eat the board, along with mashed potatoes drowned in butter.

Eastern European Jews–my people–offer gefilte fish as an appetizer to dinner guests only if they forgot to cook the brisket. That act will ensure that the guests leave before dinner was expected to be served. There might be something about gefilte fish in the Torah but I’ll be damned if I can find it. This “delicacy” is a blend of whatever whitish fish happens to be found around the kitchen with eggs and matzo and onion. This mixture is then formed into dumpling-like oval shapes, boiled for a month or two, and jarred in a heavily salted brine that makes the patties grow tiny octopus-like suction cups around the edges. It is not for the faint of heart or palate.

#3 Spam/Scrapple Here we have two disgusting amalgams of gelatinous pork products that only Hawaiians and Pennsylvanians like. I fail to see the connection but, as they say, whatever. I also fail to see much of a difference between the two products. Spam comes in a can and has enough salt to salinize a small inland lake. Scrapple is available frozen, except in Pennsylvania where it is available as arguably fresh, and it too has enough salt to salinize a small inland lake. Presumably, both products contain pig from snout to tail…everything but the “oink” as the trend-driven foodie-hip like to say. One difference between these products that I have been able to determine is that Scrapple, by law, may not include the pig’s lung.

It is interesting to note at this point of the discussion that the legendary bebop saxophonist Charlie “Bird” Parker composed a song in 1947 that he titled “Scrapple from the Apple.” The fact that it was written in F Major is, perhaps, significant, but I doubt it.

#2 Haggis This traditional Scottish dish is unspeakably scary, so much so, in fact, that the commercially made varieties are banned from import to America, which explains why they are so hard to find at the A&P. Haggis is made of a mixture of lamb’s offal (heart, liver, lung), oatmeal, suet and onions and stuffed in a lamb’s stomach and cooked until who-really-cares. It was bad enough that the Scots created bagpipes out of lamb’s lungs, then they had to go and do this. Anyway, haggis was immortalized in a poem by Robert Burns in 1787. I’ve read the poem. As poems go, it’s better than haggis.

#1 Cheez Whiz This cheese-type foodstuff comes in a jar that has no expiration date which, apparently, means that it will not rot. Ever. In the real-food world, that’s not a good sign and it puts it in a class with Twinkies, anything obtained from drive-thru windows, and Keith Richards. Technically, Cheez Whiz is a Frankenstein cheese that might be petroleum-based. Nobody knows for sure. It makes Velveeta seem like an exotic import. It is a close relative to canned cheese and Silly String.

But here’s the catch: You cannot have an authentic Philly Cheesesteak sandwich without Cheez Whiz and a great Philly Cheesesteak (with onions) offers hope for the future of mankind.