Nancy Rommelmann

Sunday Great Book: Jan Yoors, "Crossing"

I found the book Crossing: A journal of survival and resistance in World War II among my mother's books, when I was about age seventeen. I see, now, that it is inscribed to her ("Kathy... to continue the dialogue. Affectionately - Jan Yoors, July 1971"). At the time, the book meant a great deal to me, both because of the work itself and for personal reasons.

Yoors, born in Belguim in 1922, was the son of artists. At age 12, he left home, with his parents' consent, to live and travel with a band of Romany, or gypsies. (More about this I would learn when I read Yoors' 1967 book, The Gypsies.) Crossing dealt chiefly with his and his tribe's surviving Nazi-occupied Europe; how they were hunted down by the Gestapo; how Yoors persuaded many in the tribe to join the resistance, and how -- and this I will never forget -- the Romany would sometimes sneak into concentration camps in order to sabotage from within. To say the story was gripping is very much an understatement.

There were other reasons, however, that I was so taken with Yoors and the gypsies. I had recently left one life I had been leading, and was trying to be reabsorbed into the life I had originally left. It wasn't working. I felt the perenial outsider, comfortable no place. I wanted very much no home to go to, I stayed outside all the time, walking, wandering. I wanted to be a gypsy, probably not an unusual fantasy for a teenager. I thought, however, I had some claim: I learned, from Yoors's books, that the gypsies adopted certain surnames, Cooper and Smith (which makes sense for traveling people, to work on metal pots and with horses), Evans, Luda or Louda... my great-grandmother's last name was Luda, sometimes spelled Louda. She'd come from Bohemia. There was also the root of my own last name. Let me tell you, these were enough for me.

I wanted to be brave, as brave as Yoors had described himself and his tribe being. I wanted to need nobody. I spent a few months trying to learn Romany, and have just now found tucked into the pages of Crossing notes that I wrote, translated phrases useful (Zhan le Devlasa tai sastismasa - "Go with God and in good health") and less useful (Te avel angla I Mule - "In honor of the ancestral spirit, the Mule."). I held on to the idea that I was part gypsy for the better part of a decade. If there is any truth to it, it is lost to time.

That said, the photo below is of a gypsy girl, and I must say, I think our faces near identical.

Defiance: A Benefit to Rebuild Red Hook, Brooklyn

Please join us for an important fundraiser to help the devastated community of Red Hook, Brooklyn! 

poster by PNCA student Amanda MacKenzie-Noise

The Portland Brooklyn Project and Tin House present:

“DEFIANCE: A BENEFIT TO REBUILD RED HOOK, BROOKLYN”

This Sunday, December 2, 2012

Disjecta

8371 North Interstate Avenue, Portland

Show 5:30-7:30

Doors open at 5PM

Tickets and/or raffle tickets HERE

Advanced $20 / $30 with raffle ticket

Door: $25 / $35 with raffle ticket

A fundraiser to benefit one of the to benefit one of New York's

communities most devastated by Hurricane Sandy: Red Hook, Brooklyn

All proceeds will be given to RED HOOK INITIATIVE which provides residents with emergency clothing and food,

 and RESTORE RED HOOK, a group that is helping to restore Red Hook’s small businesses.

The benefit will be held at DISJECTA a Contemporary Arts Center in North Portland.

The authors scheduled to appear include JON RAYMOND, KAREN KARBO, NANCY ROMMELMANN, COURTENAY HAMEISTER AND PETER CARLIN.

Former Brooklynites CASEY NEILL and TIM DUROCHE will perform.  Casey -

solo and Tim with the Kin Trio and special guest Noah Bernstein.

SUPER RAFFLE TICKETS are $10/each: 1 TICKET = 4 CHANCES TO WIN!

Raffle includes 4 packages with gift certificates from some of Portland’s hottest restaurants  

(LE PIGEON, POK POK, LINCOLN, TASTY NSONS, MOTHER'S BISTRO, TORO BRAVO, SUNSHINE TAVERN, etc)

Ristretto Coffee, Stumptown, a Kindle w/ Dymaxicon titles loaded, fine art from Molly Cliff Hilts and Amanda MacKenzie-Noice 

Moby-Dick in Pictures—a full color art book by Matt Kish, Tin House subscriptions, and more

Hurricane Sandy Relief Day at Ristretto Roasters - Friday November 9

THIS FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 9, A PORTION OF ALL SALES AT ALL RISTRETTO LOCATIONS WILL BE SENT TO BROOKLYN, TO HELP WITH RELIEF EFFORTS IN THE ROCKAWAYS, RED HOOK AND OTHER AREAS HARD HIT BY THE HURRICANE.

WE WILL ALSO HAVE A DONATION BOX ON THE COUNTER, SHOULD YOU WANT TO DONATE ADDITIONALLY. WE WILL MAKE SURE IT GETS SENT ON SATURDAY.

I AM FROM BROOKLYN, MY WHOLE FAMILY IS THERE, MY DAUGHTER AND BROTHER ARE DAILY INVOLVED IN THE DIGGING OUT AND DISTRIBUTION, OF FOOD, BLANKETS, MEDICINE AND INFORMATION.

MY HUSBAND, RR OWNER DIN JOHNSON, AND I THANK YOU –

Nancy Rommelmann

Our daughter Tafv, in Rockaway on Sunday: She pitched in as needed: passing out blankets, water, helping with clean-up. “There were a lot of volunteers who brought their kids,” she said. “My friend and I watched the kids on a basketball court outside. I had a group of 9 year-old boys playing basketball for two hours. It was good.”

 

 

Tafv and Taylor's Rockaway Relief Album

Giving away food, blankets, passing out updated flyers as to where to get help and, for two hours, watching the kids of other relief workers on an outdoor basketball court. "I had a team of 9 year-old boys," she said. Tomorrow, they hit Red Hook.

 

No New York: Adventures in the Town of Empty

Go pledge. Adele's the bomb.

 

No New York: Adventures in the Town of Empty

Go pledge. Adele's the bomb.

 

The Queens of Montague Street

The Queens of Montague Street is available on Amazon. A clip from Longreads, below.

Memories of a truant teenager's life in 1970s Brooklyn Heights—fights, school and family trouble, and a brief cameo (at a Baskin-Robbins) by Spike Lee:

"Still, things weren’t exactly cozy at home. There had always been new boys coming into the Heights, and that was cool, but the latest crews weren’t really boys, more on the verge of being men. Unlike the kids we’d been hanging with for a year, we didn’t have history with these guys; we didn’t really trust them, didn’t want to be rude but didn’t really want them in our houses. This became hard to keep under control, as members of the home crew vouched for the new guys, and all of a sudden, there are people you’ve never seen in the living-room, rummaging through the liquor cabinets, some big, stoned, zombie-looking dude is in the kitchen, and the next day, you can’t find the paring knife. There was Chavo, a scrawny cat with pointy teeth who was reputed to do heroin; the first time I saw a gun, it was sitting on the cardboard box he used for a table in the room he rented half a block from my mom’s house. Dave borrowed my bicycle one afternoon, and later told me that Chavo had been riding it and had been hit by a bus; that the bike was totaled. I was 15, and didn’t want to think a guy I still pined for had let a junkie sell my bike. I started seeing E., who fell into days-long silent funks and flew into rages and who, one sunny afternoon, kicked me in the face and gave me two black eyes."

Download the whole thing - it's 99-cents!

 

Tafv in Screen Shot from Movie Her Roommate Seb is Making

1940s Paree in 2011 Brooklyn

Last week, with Tavie, taken by my best friend Sarah Knowles, in Bar Tabac

 

Jim Carroll and "The Petting Zoo", with Video

My review of Jim Carroll's posthumously published novel, "The Petting Zoo," from the Sunday Oregonian. Instead of a snip (you can just go read it), I give you what's below, a piece I referenced in the review.

 

 

What Went Down in New York

 
Tavie in my mom's kitchen

 
Morning of September 11

 
Anne Breza, my brother Chris's girlfriend, and Chris, just before he did a swim across the East River

 
Chris, who later said of the swim, "It was fun and easy."

 
Din walking the Brooklyn Bridge

 
John's Pizza, midnight

 
Gelato on Bleeker Street, 12:45

 
View from penthouse of Gansevoort Hotel, wrap party for "Arthur"

 
Tavie and star of "Arthur" Russell Brand. He is telling her, "You make me feel very unusual."

 
Bon voyage cheese blintzes at Teresa's

Look Where Tafv Is!

Working a pre-production photo shoot atop the Pierre Hotel  xx

 

Do You Read the Newspaper Online?

At the risk of sounding like dodo brain #92/asking a question that's been posed for a decade: do you read a daily paper online? I read plenty/link plenty. But we still get a daily paper (The Oregonian) delivered, and I still try to read the New York Times every day, in its paper form, "try" because I no longer have it delivered at home, but a copy to each of the shops. This latter is an imperfect system, in that people often steal the paper (if I catch the person who keeps taking the Sunday Magazine, I am going to give them a giant tongue lashing), or I don't feel I have the time to linger and read.

I've been traveling a lot this year, to bigger cities, NY and SF and LA. When I was in NY last week, I felt great. I felt like myself, with an endless number of museums and restaurants and places and people to interface with, if I so chose. This is another reason why Matt Davis's goodbye, Portland post resonated with me. One of Matt's commenters astutely wrote, Matt is going where there stories are, to New Orleans. (He will make his bones there, as I made mine in LA.) Portland is not a big enough city, there is too little cultural collision and too many people with thin skins here to really sink your teeth in and do serious journalism (to say nothing of local places willing to publish it). A recent example: a little nothing piece I wrote for the O, in which I quoted a local PR person, who in several emails to me had a quasi-nervous breakdown because she thought the piece did not show her in the best possible light. I did my best to explain, the piece was not about her. A long-ago example: the editor of a paper I was writing criticism for musing aloud at a staff meeting that if the paper were to run anything negative about a venue, perhaps the paper should call the night before and alert them, a suggestion that made the editor I worked directly beneath bust a nut.

Anyway, two things happened this morning: I took the time to read much of the New York Times while standing at the new stand-up bar at Ristretto Beaumont, and drove home with two thoughts: one, I want to make a bunch of money soon and buy a place in New York, where I can spend more time and where, perhaps, Tafv can live. And two, I might start reading the Times online, on a daily basis -- something, by the way, I am willing to pay for. Politically, I realize we are all supposed to stand up and screech that the web is meant to be free, god dammit, and going behind a pay-wall -- which the Times plans to do later this year -- is as antediluvian and anti-progress as it comes. But here's the thing: as a journalist, I know first-hand how decimating not having any money to support a publication is; I had four -- four! -- of my editors (at the LA Weekly, Wired, Bon Appetit and City Arts) downsized out of jobs last year in a four-month period. That's a lot of freakin' cake not coming my way, kids. Also, I don't expect to get everything I want for free. I will be on the frontlines shouting, "Huzzah!" when the web is better monetized for writing and writers, and certainly, there are individuals and larger sites that have figured out how to make the finances work through traditional channels, i.e., ads and backers. I am also in the fortunate position to still have work. But the money? Do we really want to have this conversation first thing in the morning?

While I enjoy the range afforded by reading the paper online -- the skipping, the photos, the videos -- I also know I blow off more than when I read the paper in hand, and am divided about the idea of defaulting always to My News, divided because I see this as a good thing (deeper knowledge about fewer issues) and bad (where is Pakistan, again?).So: do you read the Times or a comparable paper online, and if so, what have you gained, what have you lost? And, any tips for me?

NB: Yes, I aware there will almost certainly be no print papers within the decade.

NB: And yes, I am aware that the medium that is slowly killing journalism as we've known it has created  the opportunity to have this conversation here, for which I am most grateful and which I find both fulfilling and full of infinite possibilities, yes.

Reason Number 4062 We Love These Kids

My daughter Tafv is living in New York.

We bought her an iPhone, with which she takes many photos, many of which she sends to me.

Most of them are of food. I told her, she should publish a book called, "Brunch."

Yesterday, she told me she and her friend were off for a picnic in Central Park.

She sent me a photo of herself, ready to roll.

 

Then she sent the one below, with the subject line, "We brought the wrong sheet." I hope you enjoy it as much as I did

 

Grand Central

Taken yesterday, by the inestimable Jackie Danicki, after we spent 45 minutes leaning against a marble wall in the terminal, drinking iced coffee and talking, mentioning,  more than once, how grateful we are for our work and our lives and the wonderful people we share them with. 

Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings "Tell Me"

Do it

Grieving at Tiffany's

I wrote what's below this morning, to The Foodinista, adding that, I thought sad. She, worthier and wittier than I, wrote back:

Sad, but also sort of marvelous. I love this! Were Truman Capote alive today, he would approve and he would agree. How is it that you dream as beautifully as you write? Flattered to have been a part of the dream, and rubbing elbows with Martha and Michelle. We do get around, don't we?

I dreamt this morning that you and I were on a business trip to DC. It was some sort of Easter celebration; we were touring this very grand old estate, where people were serving very elegant foods; outside, there was Martha Stewart (who complimented the coat I was wearing!) with a table full of very festive and Easter-egg hued desserts, which we were sampling; you particularly liked something with lemon. Then, it was off to a receiving line in a casual living room of sorts in the White House; we said our goodbyes, including to Michelle Obama (who gave me a hug!); you'd be staying in DC, for a White House meal the next day, but I was was going to try to catch an evening flight back to Portland. We walked outside...
Where we were now (of course) on the corner of 57th and Fifth in NY, right outside Tiffany's.
"I love Tiffany's," I said.
"Me, too," you said, and we headed inside, through the heavy glass doors, my telling you that there was a particular ring Din was trying to find for me (which is true) but which had been discontinued, but maybe they had it.
Once inside, we were immediately approached by a tall, sort of oily Puerto Rican guy trying to soft-sell us. I told him what I was looking for, and he led us to a counter. But everything was wrong: Tiffany's was about a quarter of its size, the ceilings had been dropped; there was a bad white paint job and on the walls were hanging little plastic packs of earrings and geegaws; it looked like a bad airport jewelry shop.
We came to the counter where the ring was supposed to be. Behind it were two slovenly men and a skinny Puerto Rican gal chewing gum. I asked about the ring. They pulled out a box with a few things thrown in chockablock; what I wanted wasn't there; I began to explain, the ring I wanted had been discontinued...
"They don't teach us how to repair anything or nothing," said the gal; she was bitter about her job and wanted it to be known. The men sort of nodded. You'd moved down to the end of the counter, and as I passed you, I whispered, "This is a disaster."
"It is," you said.
I walked around, I looked; I thought, why did they do this? I knew it had something to do with real estate; the building had been bought and Tiffany's was forced to downsize. But it was so ugly, and there was nothing of what it had been left, and as I stood by one wall of cheap stuff, I actually started to cry. I thought, Heather and I, we grew up with this as an ideal, this sparkling if girly but so lovely dream, of being able to buy something at Tiffany's, and now that we might actually afford it, it's gone.
I looked up. There was a long zinc bar in Tiffany's, you were at the end, ordering a Cinzano. I went and sat next to you, and told the bartender, "I'll take one, too."

Manhattan, Woody Allen, Sex and Beauty

The lovely, charming and talented Foodinista asked me to guest blog, and so I have.