"Pick Yourself Up" Diana Krall-Live in Paris

I've been frequenting The Carlyle since I was twenty years old, when Bobby Short played two gigs a night, when the air was filled thick with sophistication so thick one could watch it inhaled into your nasal passage and instantly straightening your tie and fluffing your pocket square as your name was engraved into the social registry. On Mondays Woody Allen would play clarinet to a crowd who was there to hear jazz and not take pictures of the Hollywood legend. When Tony didn't have to ask people to stop taking pictures, before Rosewood purchased the property and imposed draconian cover charges simply to sit at the bar.

For a while I had enough status to sit down and not be charged with said cover as I was a regular who thwarted the advances of the professionals from Eastern Europe, and was always properly dressed, even if it was in ripped jeans and an old ripped up Oxford from Prep school. Before I lived in Manhattan it was my home in town and many magical nights transpired within its walls surrounded by a pleasant staff trained in the utmost values of class and confidentiality.

Somewhere in recent times that changed. The lobby was still pure black and white marble, the staff in white gloves and starched white captain's dress but I sat down one night and there was a twenty five dollar cover on my tab. A tab which consisted of five drinks at twenty dollars a piece. And with that I boycotted the place never to return again.

Except for every Sunday in May when Hilary Kole (pictured)came to Bemelmen's. She was perfect, sultry standing by the piano in a tight black dress and Louboutin heels, the bottoms dripping red, engorged with blood pumping through her veins rubbing off on my own. Her singing follows her sex appeal while silent and there are not many who sing traditional standards with such panache.

One empty night with myself being one of three people in the room she asked for requests, walked over to my table, leaned over, her mid waist hair falling and flowing over my shoulder showing me an ear fractions of an inch away from my lips. With such an open proposition I whispered "Pick Yourself Up" of which Diana Krall first introduced me to many years ago. She pulled away and smiled, grazed my right shoulder with her thin, petite hands which sadly housed a wedding ring and uttered she would love to do such a great song.

As a man maybe I am always thinking about sex but there is a tension in this song that makes it so seductive. Maybe it reaches back to a time when women required a man who could be their provider and savior, possibly it is the want and need to have a woman behind you who will let you fail and provide the confidence to Phoenix-ily rise from the ashes to greater horizons.

I can't really figure it out and while the track I list is not Hilary's, Diana is a terribly close second. Uplifting, whether it is from the goove, the lyrics or Hilary's sultry body grazing against combinations of Maple and Hornbeam, Beech and Spruce I may never know. But there are two weeks left and if you are looking for me on a Sunday night just know nothing is going to pick me up from table seven.

Mystery Line

Today I was listening to a song from a favorite album of mine and a line hit me. It hits me every time I hear it and then after a few days the line and the song slips back into the ether of forgottenness while life transpires around me. The entire song of which this line is constructed around is an excercise in craftsmanship, the seams of a shirt compiling an entire garment with this line being the finishing touch on the cuff, the final quarter panel on a Ferrari and the case back to a Patek Philippe.

When this song first hit me I was sitting at a bar in Jacksonville with a very good friend lamenting the loss of a woman and speaking of her. He was sympathetic, kind and caring as he could only be, but then for some reason he unconsciously uttered one of the cruelest things anyone had ever said to me, "What would you do if she walked into this place right now?" My heart dropped and I pictured her shyly stepping through the open door frames, somewhat unsure of herself as she usually was, self conscious and looking around the room with pure blue eyes scanning the room in faded jeans and rinsed out t-shirt.

I didn't know how to answer the question at first, not because I didn't know how but rather I simply couldn't tell him the answer without breaking down in front of him and the other patrons. After a few seconds, while resisting reaching for a sip of the seventh martini of which I was on I uttered "Well I really wish she would and make me happy again." And then I reached for the strength that rested on the bar in that clear V shaped glass.

It's funny that to this day he probably doesn't know how much that hurt, and ironically how he was the man that turned me on to this song that broke my heart for so long and the line that echoed through my mind every night until I had to kill it, to stop it from thinking with booze and stupid acts of masochism and unequivocal whore fucking.

A simple Google search will provide you with the song and the beautiful tear stained tapesty of which this artist created years ago when he was surely in a similar situation. The skeptic prick may say that dredging up such emotions is a not an economical utilization of one's time, however the song, like the emotions itself are ingrained for eternity, whether it be on vinyl, mp4 or in the synapses of the mind. I like to think this line was always there but the unspoken artist was the first one who ever harnessed its power, I would like to know his muse but then again I know who it was written for, the one who never walked through that door.

"I could find her in a thunderstorm just by the way that the rain would fall"

"Seven Stars" Peter Green-In The Skies

A few nights ago I was at Rose Bar in the early evening. It is the best time to head out there before the "crowd" gets there and ruins the vibe, crowds the fireplace and enforces the Manhattan club scene of too hip and far too cool to even be there aura. There's no sleek blond with sunglasses on who tells everyone she is a model but in reality is a waitress from Ohio who failed and now gives herself up late in the night for rent in her LES 300 square foot apartment. At that time there is also few boys who claim to be Managing Directors at Goldman or the washed up drugged up douche bags who keep telling said blond that they are designers working on their new line and "of course beautiful I may be able to get you on the runway, Richie Rich is a close personal friend of mine and last week I was out at Schnabel's place in Montauk." Earlier in the night there is none of that bullshit, which is the way I like it.

For a while I was caught up in that bullshit, waist high with porous waiders trying pretend that it was the place I needed to be, for of course this was the town and there was primo trim hanging around regardless of how high it piled, it was worth it in the end. Somewhere along the line I stopped caring and when that waif Ohio slut started telling me about her next gig I decided to call bullshit on it, walk home and take care of myself without the hassle of dealing with her and her ego which I would be hard pressed to fit into my apartment.

So on that early night I was lubed up and feeling high, sitting at the bar with an an acquaintance flapping about various things. Facing the bar on the right in that back corner was the DJ who was straight off the J and Q line via fixed gear bike, thick black rimmed fake glasses, flannel shirt and black skin tight jeans with headphones the size of stage monitors around his head grooving to whatever the fuck it was he though fit the mood.

When all hope was lost I heard an A minor come through the speakers, it oozed blues corrupted by acid fueled days of schizophrenia and electroconvulsive therapy, shearing vibrato and ten second sustains. I knew the song within an instant even though I couldn't place the name. It reeked of Clapton without the ego and hearkened back to the days of Mike Bloomfield and John Mayall, the Bluesbreakers, and a faithful Les Paul doing the dirty work.

Peter Green was the one of the founders of the epic fuck-each other literally-band Fleetwood Mac. Back when he was at the helm it was significantly more blues inspired, before Stevie's flowing scarves and while great, such indulgent songs as Landslide and Lindsey Buckingham's beautiful fingerpicking.

In truth it made me want to leave Rose Bar and hole up in my place, burn some incense, spark a spliff and eventually take a few tabs while I watched the walls melt around me in a chromatic haze of melody worms burrowing into my brain. To sit there incapacitated, shirtless in baggy jeans while a different, skinner blond with iron pressed hair in a headband reeking of patruli and unshaven armpits dosing on E grabbed and groped as I laid there motionless entranced in the experience.

There's something about this groove that is so perfectly fit for nights such as those, while they are far behind in my past I can recall those days, days in which that hipster spinning off in the corner has no knowledge or experience of, I still can't even fathom how he knew of this song to begin with and I must say the fact that he put it on in such a false atmosphere detracts from the work somewhat, cheapens it and makes me want to take it out of my vinyl collection.

But then again I come home and put it on in the long hours and think of those days, Peter isn't the one who sold it out, the world has sold out around him and because of that our children will never know such debaucherous, hedonistic bliss in its purest form such as I have, rather it will be a constant reaching, imitation of a past time when musicians had the balls to take their own progressions and creations to the level they envisioned in such narcotic inspired hazes.