Robert Rosen

 

Permit me to take a week off from analyzing conspiracy theories so I can celebrate Halloween, which is impossible to ignore in my neighborhood. New York's Halloween parade goes right by my building. It's big, loud, and long, and I'm expecting to see lots of Kamalas and Trumps. If you're unfamiliar with the Halloween parade, give this Lou Reed song a listen. It's called "Halloween Parade."

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All my books are available on Amazon, all other online bookstores, and at your local brick-and-mortar bookstore.

 

I invite you to join me on Facebook or follow me on X, Instagram, or Threads.

For the better part of the past 12 years I've been excavating my memory for material. A Brooklyn Memoir, set in Flatbush when I was a child, is one result of this excavation. I began writing the book with only an image in my head of my father in his candy store, in 1961, and a germ of an idea: Something interesting was happening at this time and in this place, and it was worth exploring. What I learned over the many years I worked on the book is that if you think about something every day for an extended period of time, you're going to remember things you thought were long forgotten, and the more you remember the more you remember.

 

I bring this up now because of my debate with a conspiracy theorist about the murder of John Lennon that will go live on Robert Rodriguez's podcast, Something About the Beatles, sometime in December. As misguided as I find David Whelan and his theories about who really killed Lennon, and as sloppy and ill-informed as some of his research is (I discuss it here and here), I give him credit for getting me to consider certain things I haven't thought about in the 25 years since I wrote the Mark David Chapman section of Nowhere Man. For example, there's a scene where Lennon, the afternoon before the murder, signs Chapman's copy of Double Fantasy. I wrote that Chapman asked him for a job. Whelan says that I'm the only one who reported this and demanded to know where I got the information. I told him I got it from Lennon's assistant Fred Seaman.

 

Whelan says that Seaman wasn't there to witness the exchange. According to Seaman's memoir, The Last Days of John Lennon, he was there.* A former Lenono Music employee reminded me who was also there to witness it. Paul Goresh, who died in 2018, is the photographer who took the picture of Lennon signing Chapman's album.

 

The week of December 8, 1980, Seaman came to my apartment. It was the first time I'd seen him since Lennon was killed. One of the things we talked about was Chapman asking John for a job. And now that I think about it, I can almost hear him say that he heard the story from Goresh. Can this detail of a 44-year-old memory be trusted? I don't know. But if he did hear about it from Goresh, it would make sense. Seaman and Goresh knew each other, they did talk on occasion, and it seems likely that they would have discussed the photo.

 

Whelan also got me thinking about the conversation I had with the publisher of Soft Skull Press when he asked me to write about Chapman. What I'd forgotten was that he'd originally wanted me to write that Chapman was part of a conspiracy. I refused. I told him I didn't believe it. At the time, I'd given little thought to the idea of a conspiracy—it would be several months before an insane conspiracy theorist would say I was a CIA archivist who was somehow involved in the plot to eliminate Lennon. (Several years later, an even crazier conspiracy theorist would say I was a CIA spymaster who plotted with Ronald Reagan and Edward Teller, the father of the H-bomb, to assassinate the ex-Beatle.)

 

I told the publisher I could write a better story if I wrote what felt true: Chapman, suffering from severe mental illness, acted alone.

 

My only purpose in writing the Chapman section of Nowhere Man was to tell a compelling story that would give people some understanding of a seemingly inexplicable act. I wrote it as a thriller. I got inside Chapman's head just as I'd gotten inside Lennon's head. And to write about Chapman was liberating after feeling that Yoko Ono and her attorneys were looking over my shoulder as I was making the final corrections on the main Lennon section of the manuscript. I think it's this combination of style and information that has kept people reading Nowhere Man for a quarter of a century.

 

A critic for the British music magazine Mojo noticed. "Rather like reading a favorite detective story," he wrote. "Though you know how the story's going to end, you still wind up willing the events to unfold differently."

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*During the Whelan debate, I'd forgotten that Seaman had written in his memoir that he was there when Lennon signed Chapman's album. In the unlikely event that Whelan was able to interview Seaman, as he said he was going to do, I'd like to know if Seaman contradicted his memoir. So numerous are Whelan's misstatements, I'm now also wondering if it's true, as he claimed during the debate, that Chapman's statement, "I feel like a bloodied prizefighter in the 27th round," is not in the court transcript. (See my previous post, "The 27th Round.")

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All my books are available on Amazon, all other online bookstores, and at your local brick-and-mortar bookstore.

 

I invite you to join me on Facebook or follow me on X, Instagram, or my recently launched Threads.

Last week, in a post titled "The 27th Round," I wrote about David Whelan, a conspiracy theorist whom I sort of debated—Whelan mostly talks, interrupts, and talks some more—on an episode of Robert Rodriguez's podcast, Something About the Beatles, scheduled to go live sometime in December. Whelan believes that a mysterious right-wing cabal programmed Mark David Chapman, the man currently in prison for the murder of John Lennon, to be a Manchurian patsy who didn't shoot the ex-Beatle—the real killer is a professional assassin who got away.

 

I, in short, don't believe it.

 

Whelan went into his investigation with the preconceived notion that Lennon was the victim of a conspiracy. Consequently, everything looks to him like a clue pointing in the direction of conspiracy and nobody is above suspicion, with the possible exceptions of Yoko Ono and Sean Lennon, who was five at the time of the murder (but now, Whelan says, knows more than he's letting on).

 

In an episode of SATB released October 10, after the debate was recorded, Rodriguez interviewed Whelan again. Whelan, who wrote a conspiracy-theory book, Mind Games, and shares his theories on Substack and in many interviews, says that much of what I say about Chapman in Nowhere Man: The Final Days of John Lennon is "laughable." This is an unsurprising response from somebody I've called a "conspiracy hustler" because he misrepresented himself to Lennon's assistant Michael "Tree" Medeiros in order to get him to agree to an interview. Whelan denies he did this.

 

"I gave the producers of the UK documentary John Lennon: Murder Without a Trial extensive video interviews, which were never used in the final cut," Medeiros says. "A few days after those interviews, I got a phone call from David Whelan, who said he called to check my quotes for the doc. This turned out to be untrue. I believe he was fishing for additional info for his crazy conspiracy theory book."

 

It would be an exercise in tedium if I were to refute all of Whelan's misstatements in our debate, in his recent SABT interview, on his blog, and in his book, which I've made a point of not reading because it's clear what he thinks from reading his blog and listening to his interviews. But I do want to point out two of his misstatements in the October 10 SATB interview.

 

Whelan says that in Nowhere Man, I called Chapman "an art dealer," and that it's "laughable" that I say he raised the money to travel from Hawaii to New York City by selling a few pieces of art.

 

This is what I say in Nowhere Man:

 

Chapman fancies himself an art aficionado. For years he's been acquiring paintings, lithographs, objets d'art. First he sells a $5,000 Salvador Dali gold plaque, originally purchased with a loan from his father-in-law. Then, with a $2,500 loan from his mother, he purchases a Norman Rockwell print titled "Triple Self Portrait." Shrewdly, he's able to sell it to a collector for a good profit.

 

I based this paragraph on details I found in the Chapman bio Let Me Take You Down, by Jack Jones, who interviewed Chapman in prison. The book was the definitive source of information about Chapman's life when I wrote about him in Nowhere Man in 1999. Whelan thinks Let Me Take You Down is worthless and questions if Jones is really a journalist. (He was a reporter and columnist on The Rochester Democrat and Chronicle.)

 

It's the same book I cited in my "27th Round" post. Whelan, in the debate, said that I'm the only writer who quoted Chapman at his sentencing hearing saying, "I feel like a bloodied prizefighter in the 27th round." (Whelan questions if I really attended the hearing—yes, I did.) And he said that no information exists indicating that, as I wrote in Nowhere Man, this is what Chapman told a psychiatrist after a suicide attempt. I directed Whelan to the page in Let Me Take You Down that has this information. Let Me Take You Down, apparently, is impervious to Whelan's research techniques. (Pro tip: Look in the index.)

 

Whelan gave me a sense of what his research techniques might be during the debate. He said that I was the only one who reported that Chapman asked Lennon for a job when John signed his copy of Double Fantasy outside the Dakota the afternoon before the murder. He asked me where I heard this. I said that Lennon's assistant Fred Seaman told me about it several days after the murder. If Seaman was not there to witness this, as Whelan claims, then somebody who was there must have told him about it. I saw no reason why Seaman would lie about this particular detail. So I took his statement at face value and included it in Nowhere Man.

 

"I'm going to ask Seaman," Whelan said.

 

Will Seaman remember what he told me in passing 44 years ago? Unlikely, but who knows? And even if Seaman remembers, would he deny it? Possibly. But let's stick to the most likely scenario of this imagined interview: Seaman doesn't remember, which gives Whelan what he wants—a contradiction that raises suspicions of... something.

 

Whelan's other misstatement in the October 10 podcast involves Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA employee in charge of their MK-ULTRA mind-control program, the agency's attempt to create programmed assassins (or patsies, as the case may be) with a combination of drugs and hypnosis. Whelan says it's "laughable" that I take Gottlieb at his word that MK-ULTRA was a failure. It's not that I take Gottlieb at his word, though he would have known more about the program than anybody, and the possibility exists that he could have been telling the truth. My point was that there's no credible evidence to prove that MK-ULTRA was successful. Of course, there's no credible evidence to prove that it was a failure, either. The CIA destroyed their MK-ULTRA files in the 1970s. It's this lack of evidence that conspiracy theorists use as proof that it's possible to create programmed assassins who will commit murder at a specific time, in a specific place, in a specific way, and the CIA as well as some mysterious right-wing entities have, indeed, created such assassins (and patsies).

 

I have no doubt that it's possible to use MK-ULTRA techniques to get certain people predisposed to violence to commit mayhem. What I don't believe is that it's possible to control somebody for weeks and months at a time, as if they're a robot, before the command is given to commit mayhem—or to induce somebody to believe they're committing mayhem, as would have been the case with Chapman.

 

Like virtually all conspiracy theories, this one will never be proven or disproven. Without certainty, what's left is common sense and Occam's Razor, a philosophical concept that says if you have two or more theories to explain an event, the simpler, more straightforward one is usually correct.

 

And I do wonder: If a number of Whelan's statements about me are false, which he should have known from basic research, what else is wrong with the "facts" he uses to attempt to show that a mysterious right-wing cabal programmed Chapman to be a Manchurian patsy who did not kill Lennon?

 

I'll leave it to a more dedicated researcher to pick apart Whelan's thesis, line by tedious line.

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All my books are available on Amazon, all other online bookstores, and at your local brick-and-mortar bookstore.

 

I invite you to join me on Facebook or follow me on X, Instagram, or my recently launched Threads.

My book Nowhere Man: The Final Days of John Lennon has been under scrutiny for 25 years. Since early 2000, when the publisher first distributed advance reader copies, I've done somewhere in the neighborhood of 500 interviews. I often think I've been asked and have answered every possible question. But sometimes I'm surprised.

 

Last week I participated in a… let's call it a panel discussion though it was probably more of a debate, on Robert Rodriquez's podcast, Something About the Beatles, broadcast date TBA. Rodriguez and Carole Kirstein-Chase, an attorney, acted as moderators. The other panelist was David Whelan, author of Mind Games, a book that suggests a mysterious right-wing cabal programmed Mark David Chapman to be a Manchurian patsy, that he did not shoot Lennon, and that there was a second shooter who got away.

 

My contention is that similar conspiracy theories have been circulating for 44 years, none of them have come to anything, and Chapman did it.

 

Nowhere Man's "Chapter 27," named after the so-called missing chapter of J.D. Salinger's novel The Catcher in the Rye, is about Chapman's sentencing hearing, which I attended. (Whelan disputes that I was there.) In the chapter, I quote Chapman saying, "I feel like a bloodied prizefighter in the 27th round." I also say that this is what he told a psychiatrist after a suicide attempt.

 

Whelan asked me three questions about this quote that I'd never been asked: Why isn't it in the court transcript? Why did nobody else report it? Why is there no mention anywhere else of him saying this to a psychiatrist?

 

I didn't know, and I told the story behind the Chapman section of Nowhere Man: When Soft Skull Press accepted the book, in 1999, it was about Lennon's final years and ended when John was alive. There was no Chapman section. Soft Skull's publisher asked me to write one. I didn't want to. He insisted. I thought about it and decided that because I'd attended the sentencing hearing I could write something original and worthwhile.

 

In late 1999, I wrote Part IV of the book, "The Coda," about Chapman. It's based on my memory, accounts in newspapers and other books, and notes I took in August 1981 at the sentencing hearing.

 

In "Chapter 27" I say that Chapman said what he did about the bloodied prizefighter immediately after he read from The Catcher in the Rye but before the judge sentenced him to 20 years to life.

 

I suppose it's possible that the court reporter simply didn't hear Chapman say that.

 

But after thinking about it for a couple of days it occurred to me that maybe I had the events slightly out of sequence. Maybe Chapman said it after the judge sentenced him, the hearing was over, and the court reporter had stopped transcribing.

 

I flashed on a scene from 43 years ago: The judge pounds his gavel, dismisses the court, and Chapman, handcuffed, standing by his chair, facing sideways towards me, a cop on each arm, is about to be led out of the courtroom. That's when he says, "I feel like a bloodied prizefighter in the 27th round." But nobody's paying attention. The reporters have their stories, they're on deadline, and they're clamoring to get out. And that's when I write of Chapman, "He walks fearlessly out of the courtroom, holding his head high, veritably glowing with pride. He's done what he came to do."

 

Whelan questions if this description of Chapman is accurate because nobody else reported it.

 

Maybe I was the only reporter there who knew that the story wasn't over, and there was one more thing to see and hear.

 

And by the way, the following quote can be found on page 145 of the Chapman bio Let Me Take You Down, by Jack Jones. This is Chapman speaking to a psychiatrist in Hawaii: "I think of myself as a boxer in the twenty-seventh round with my face all bloody, my teeth knocked out and my body all bruised."

 

Note to Whelan: Go to Let Me Take You Down in Google books and search for "twenty-seventh round." Comes right up.

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All my books are available on Amazon, all other online bookstores, and at your local brick-and-mortar bookstore.

 

I invite you to join me on Facebook or follow me on X, Instagram, or my recently launched Threads.

 

With election day little more than a month away, this seems like a good time to revisit the age-old question, "Are you better off than you were four years ago?"

 

Four years ago my wife and I were holed up in our Manhattan apartment, afraid to so much as go to a supermarket because the Covid pandemic was ravaging the world. All too recently it had been killing a thousand people a day in New York City, where mobile morgues were parked outside every hospital to handle the overflow of dead bodies. As I recall, we had a president who was telling people to inject bleach; take ivermectin, a medication used to treat parasitic worms in animals and humans; and shine a strong light up your ass.

 

The people dying around me—relatives and acquaintances—trivialized whatever economic pain I might have felt from the cancellation of a promo tour for my book Bobby in Naziland (since re-released as A Brooklyn Memoir) published a few months before the pandemic began.

 

So, yes, things are a hell of a lot better now than they were four years ago, and you can probably guess who I'm voting for. (Spoiler alert: Kamala Harris.)

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All my books are available on Amazon, all other online bookstores, and at your local brick-and-mortar bookstore.

 

I invite you to join me on Facebook or follow me on X or my eternally embryonic Instagram or my recently launched Threads.

 

In celebration of the upcoming Jewish new year, Rosh Hashanah, 5785, on October 2, I present John Lennon singing "Hava Nagila" at the Amsterdam Hilton. This took place March 1969 during John and Yoko Ono's Bed-In for peace while they were being interviewed by Israeli journalist Akiva Nof, a correspondent for the Voice Of Israel.

 

Nof had written a Hebrew song about Jerusalem and persuaded John to sing that, too. You can also hear John playing "I Want You (She's So Heavy)," which he says is "from the new Beatles album that was not released yet," meaning Abbey Road.

 

Muchas gracias to Mexican journalist Esteban Cisneros for bringing this video to my attention. And happy new year to one and all!

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All my books are available on Amazon, all other online bookstores, and at your local brick-and-mortar bookstore.

 

I invite you to join me on Facebook or follow me on X or my eternally embryonic Instagram or my recently launched Threads.

 

In the final weeks of her life, Sonja Wagner told her friends to go to her loft and take whatever pieces of art they wanted. There was much to choose from among the paintings, photographs, metal sculptures, and assemblages. Sonja, who passed away last year at age 85, was a prolific artist. My wife, Mary Lyn Maiscott, and I simply didn't have enough wall or storage space to take everything we loved.

 

As I was browsing the collection, I came across a framed photograph that Sonja had manipulated to look like a painting—that was one of her specialties. It was a gorgeous shot of pennants flying above a street in a Spanish city. One of the pennants said "Tio Pepe," a type of sherry.

 

"We need to take this one," I said to Mary Lyn.

 

Our friends Rocio and Jimmy Sanz own Tio Pepe, a Spanish restaurant that's been on West 4th Street, in Greenwich Village, for more than 50 years.

 

The other week, I brought the photo to Tio Pepe and told the manager, Leana Zittlau, about Sonja. She hung it on the wall in a conspicuous spot next to a Spanish flag, off to the left as you walk in. Leana then shot me standing next to the photo and posted it on Tio Pepe's Instagram.

 

The plan now is for Sonja's friends to gather by her photo for a meal at what I now call The Tio Pepe Museum of Fine Art and once again celebrate her extraordinary life.

 

You can see more of Sonja's artwork and read about her life in an article I wrote for The Village Voice.

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All my books are available on Amazon, all other online bookstores, and at your local brick-and-mortar bookstore.

 

I invite you to join me on Facebook or follow me on X or my eternally embryonic Instagram or my recently launched Threads.

If you've been following this blog then you probably know that I've been working on a book about the 1970s, set at a radical student newspaper, Observation Post (OP), at the City College of New York. Below is an outtake from that book—a section I like because it captures a certain vibe. But it slows down the pacing too much at that particular point, so it had to go. (I hope I can find a place where it does work, maybe in a slightly different form.)

 

It's a description of everything I didn't read on March 10, 1974, in the 400-page, ad-laden Sunday edition of The New York Times as I searched the paper for an article about a cartoon that ran in OP and pissed off a lot of powerful people.

 

There's so much in here I don't want to read, like a story about a mortar shell that killed 23 South Vietnamese children playing in a schoolyard—no, the war isn't over, not even close—and a story about an exhibit in the Soviet Union about life in America, where a brainwashed Russian visitor asks the guide if Black Americans are allowed to own cars. And I have no interest in the price of copper, though a photo of a man wearing only tennis sneakers, shot in dick-obscuring profile, "streaking" across the Memphis State University campus, America's No. 1 streaking school, catches my eye, but just for a second. And I don't want to know about cops killing Black people in Queens bars or Aretha Franklin opening at the Apollo or straight white people getting married or the ongoing gas crisis or what's playing on Broadway or Off-Broadway or what rock bands are performing at Carnegie Hall, Avery Fisher Hall, the Academy of Music, the Capitol Theatre or what movies are now showing at local theatres, I mean who but a fulltime culture vulture can come close to keeping up with half the shit that's going on in New York? And I absolutely don't want to read about high inflation, the Dow Jones industrial average, the bear market, or the cost of cable TV, which nobody I know has. I'm not looking for a job, so fuck the help wanted ads. Do I care that Francisco Franco is no longer in charge in Spain or Spiro Agnew has been spending his weekends at Frank Sinatra's Palm Springs estate? No I don't. And I already know that Nixon's a criminal undermining the rule of law, and Jesus Freakin' Christ, is there anything more boring than the oh-so-respectable op-eds about foreign affairs? (Though I don't know what I'm missing with Russell Baker's Sunday Observer column, in which he suggests the Watergate conspirators shouldn't be sent to prison but be made to suffer in ways that are "crueler and more exquisitely retributive," like a 10-year stretch in high school.) Spare me the letters to the editor, too, 'cause I don't want to know about the Nassau-Suffolk Regional Planning Board, Norman Podhoretz, or instant Zionism (whatever that is), and I already know that homosexuals exist. And screw the sports section because I know the world champion Knicks beat Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's Milwaukee Bucks, and I have no interest in ads selling new and used Renaults, Dodge Darts, Chevy Vegas, Saabs, Audis, BMWs, or Mercedeses no matter how cheap they are. And forget the whole magazine section, though my mother, when she gets her hands on it, will knock off the crossword puzzle in an hour, and there will be (as there always is) the perpetual ad for a summer camp, Olympus, which will neglect to mention the possibility of kangaroo courts and having a tube of Ben Gay rubbed into your balls as punishment for a guilty verdict. I've looked at the magazine enough to know their formula: Start with an interesting anecdote to grab your attention, then spin off into an endless web of facts and figures, until a blizzard of detail that goes on for thousands of words numbs your mind and you realize you're not reading anymore, as if the editors labor under the impression that if an article's too interesting or too much fun to read then it's not serious enough, and it's only endless data that gives it value, a point, a reason to be published—that an article consisting of nothing but interesting stories and ideas is pointless. Though an ad for those good-looking Adler electric typewriters makes me want one, and another ad in the Book Review for Quality Paperback Books reminds me how I ripped them off Abbie Hoffman–style for their free introductory books, ignoring their threatening letters when I didn't buy the full-priced books I'd agreed to buy. Though perhaps I should have read the article about how some book publishers are receiving 10,000 unsolicited manuscripts each year and are no longer accepting them.

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All my books are available on Amazon, all other online bookstores, and at your local brick-and-mortar bookstore.

 

I invite you to join me on Facebook or follow me on X or my eternally embryonic Instagram or my recently launched Threads.

 

Last week, in a post about "The Chaos of my Bookshelves," I wrote about Tropic of Cancer, by Henry Miller. I said I'd read it about 10 times and that Miller was a huge influence on my writing.

 

A couple of days later I found a box outside my door, from my brother, Jerry, who was vacationing in California. He'd gone to Big Sur, where Miller used to live, and visited the Henry Miller Memorial Library. The box contained T-shirts, a tote bag, and a photo of Miller, signed by Erica Jong, who wrote a book about him, The Devil at Large.

 

In the above photo I'm wearing one of those T-shirts, with a quote from Miller's book Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch. It says: "It was here in Big Sur that I first learned to say 'AMEN.'"

 

Should I ever be called on the red carpet, this is what I'll wear. Then I can say, "I'm wearing Henry Miller."

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All my books are available on Amazon, all other online bookstores, and at your local brick-and-mortar bookstore.

 

I invite you to join me on Facebook or follow me on X or my eternally embryonic Instagram or my recently launched Threads.

 

In last week's post, "My Habitat," I said I might share a photo showing the chaos of my bookshelves. Well here it is. The two shelves in the photo are similar to my other bookshelves—a disorganized collection of books that have come to me randomly. Some of them I have no idea why they're there or where they came from. Others I've read and loved and will comment on a few of them below.

 

Before taking the photo, I removed the artwork and most of the tchotchkes on the bottom shelf so you could read the spines. The top shelf I left as is to give you the true flavor of my library.

 

I'll begin with some of the titles on the bottom shelf.

 

Lying horizontally in the second pile from the left is Tropic of Cancer, by Henry Miller. I've read it at least 10 times and it was a huge influence on my writing. I went through a phase where everything I wrote came out sounding like Miller—that's how taken I was by his voice. He taught me that it's possible to write a great book that's voice-driven rather than plot-driven.

 

On top of the horizontal pile on the far right is The Good Soldier, by Ford Maddox Ford. It's considered a classic, it's been lying around here since the dawn of time, and I finally picked it up about a year ago. It's boring.

 

Below The Good Soldier is On the Road, by Jack Kerouac. It's another book I've read multiple times, beginning in my late teens. Kerouac turned me into a hitchhiking fanatic. Between 1970, when I took my first serious hitchhiking trip, and 1978, when I quit hitchhiking because the vibes on the road had gotten too threatening, I put on about 25,000 miles by thumb, through the U.S., Canada, Europe, and Israel. This summer marks the 50th anniversary of my hitchhiking from New York to San Francisco, more or less following the route Kerouac took in 1947.

 

Among the books standing upright on the bottom shelf is An American Tragedy, by Theodore Dreiser. I haven't read it, but it did remind me that in 1978 I read his earlier novel, Sister Carrie. I remember little about it other than in the early 1900s it was banned for its "sexual immorality," and I enjoyed reading it more than I thought I would.

 

In the middle of the shelf is Household Hints & Handy Tips, a Reader's Digest book. I mention it only because my wife, Mary Lyn Maiscott, did much of the research for it, which means if you're looking for some handy household hints you can trust this book. We do. (Perhaps we should consult it for the proper care of bookshelves.)

 

City on Fire, by Garth Risk Hallberg, is the fattest book on the shelf. Everybody was writing about this tale of New York City in the 1970s when it was published in 2015—because the author received a $2 million advance, the most ever paid for a debut novel. I read it and it was pretty good. But $2 million good? This guy must have some agent.

 

On the top shelf, where all the spines are partially obscured, I'll comment on the artwork, tchotchkes, and other items. 

 

Long before Nowhere Man was published, I was working on a fictional version of the story, which I called Rockjesus. One of my former coworkers, Rita Trieger, designed the dummy cover, and I used it as part of the package I was sending to agents.

 

Other items on the shelf include a toy Space Shuttle; two paintings of trout by my friend the late John Babbs, a fisherman who lived in Oregon and was on the Electric Kool-Aid Acid bus; an antique menorah with a candle holder missing; and a couple of impressions of my teeth.

 

Behind the fish painting on the left is Jude the Obscure, by Thomas Hardy, one of the very few 19th-century novels I enjoyed reading. 

 

Behind the menorah is The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol 2. In college, one of my professors described it as "the crème de la crème" of English literature. It is, and I still refer to it on occasion.

 

Lying horizontally towards the right is a pile of videocassettes. The red one on top is a video of Jeopardy from December 26, 2003, the first time Nowhere Man was a question on the show. The second time was October 18, 2023. So, every 20 years. Cool.

 

Now, if I can only find that copy of Angela's Ashes, by Frank McCourt. I've been meaning to read it for years and it's rumored to be around here somewhere.

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All my books (the ones I wrote) are available on Amazon, all other online bookstores, and at your local brick-and-mortar bookstore.

 

I invite you to join me on Facebook or follow me on X or my eternally embryonic Instagram or my recently launched Threads.

 

Over on Facebook, there's a group called "The Rosen Book Salon," though perhaps a better name might be "The Rosen Book Saloon." I describe it as "A forum to discuss the wide-range of topics I explore in my my writing, especially my three books: Nowhere Man: The Final Days of John Lennon, A Brooklyn Memoir, and Beaver Street: A History of Modern Pornography." The discussions are lively and civil, and if you haven't yet joined the group I'd urge you to do so.

 

Obviously, the Salon (or Saloon) is a virtual room. It's been around for many years, and after all this time I thought you might like to see the real Salon—the actual habitat where I live and write. So here's a photo of the main room of the Manhattan apartment (I can't call it a saloon) I share with my wife, Mary Lyn Maiscott, a singer songwriter who's also my editor, and our cat, Oiseau.

 

We're in Soho. The large windows face MacDougal Street and look east; the smaller window on the left faces north. Look out and you can see the Empire State Building. In the far left corner, between the windows, is the desk where I work. You can also see Mary Lyn's piano, and in the foreground, on the left, the neck of her guitar. There are also a lot of books here, probably more than you can imagine. But they're out of the frame, and they're not well organized. Maybe next time I'll share the chaos of the Rosen Book Salon Library.

 

Until then, I'll see you on Facebook, in The Rosen Book Salon or Saloon if you prefer.

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All my books are available on Amazon, all other online bookstores, and at your local brick-and-mortar bookstore.

 

I invite you to join me on Facebook or follow me on X or my eternally embryonic Instagram or my recently launched Threads.

If there's a better Beatles podcast than Something About the Beatles, I haven't found it. What makes SATB great is its host, Robert Rodriguez. His knowledge of the Fab Four is PhD level and his interviews often explore territory well beyond rock music. For example, in episode 286: Nowhere Man '24 with Robert Rosen, Rodriguez and I got into a discussion of MK-ULTRA, the CIA mind-control experiments. In in the 1950s and 60s, the agency used drugs like LSD and heroin, mostly on unwitting prisoners, in an attempt to create programmed assassins commonly known as "Manchurian Candidates."

 

This subject came up because conspiracy theorists believe that the man who assassinated John Lennon, Mark David Chapman, was either a Manchurian Candidate or a "Manchurian Patsy"—someone who took the fall for the murder when there was really a second gunman who shot Lennon.

 

I don't believe this and I said so on the podcast and in my book Nowhere Man: The Final Days of John Lennon, in the extensive Chapman section and in a chapter titled "A Question of Conspiracy." Rodriguez, though, doesn't discount this possibility. Yet our conversation remained respectful, informative, and factual, both of us presenting our evidence as if in a courtroom, and letting listeners make up their own minds.

 

We also discussed my trip to Spain earlier this year, where Beatlemania lives. At La Tregua nightclub, in Sevilla, I presented the Spanish edition of Nowhere Man, and my wife, Mary Lyn Maiscott, joined Aida Vílchez, Martín León Soto, and the Nowhere Band, to perform Beatles and original songs for a packed and enthusiastic house. You can watch a video of the event here.

 

In addition, we touched on Lennon's friend and gardener Michael "Tree" Medeiros and his memoir, In Lennon's Garden, that Yoko Ono continues to repress; how information in May Pang's documentary, The Lost Weekend: A Love Story, meshes with information in Nowhere Man; and Lennon's fascination with "lucid" or programmed dreams.

 

This was my fourth appearance on SATB. I look forward to a fifth, and after you listen to episode 286 (and perhaps a few others), I hope you'll understand why I think SATB rocks.

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If you read my book Beaver Street: A History of Modern Pornography, you may recall a story about Bill Bottiggi, an editor I used to work with at Swank Publications who was murdered in 1991. 

 

A piece about Bottiggi in The Rialto Report, a website dedicated to the history of the adult entertainment industry, was recently brought to my attention. A number of Bottiggi's close friends were interviewed, and a portrait emerged of a beloved gay man with severe substance abuse issues. I'm referenced in the article as an associate editor who worked under Bill at Stag magazine, which is not quite correct—I was Bill's managing editor. One of his friends is quoted as saying that in Beaver Street I was "mean" to him.

 

In Beaver Street I describe what it was like to work for a boss who was in way over his head in a job he couldn't handle and would show up at the office reeking "like gin is coming out of his pores," as it says in The Rialto Report. I also describe how Bill damaged our working relationship by trying to demote me for making a few proofreading mistakes and hit on me when we went out drinking after work one night, and then got permanently pissed off when I made clear I wasn't interested. If this is being mean to Bill, then so be it.

 

It also says in The Rialto Report that I wrote in Beaver Street that Bill was extorting money from prisoners. This is false. I said he was soliciting correspondence from prisoners, selling their letters to porn magazines, and keeping all the money for himself, which is what I'd heard the police had theorized back in 2009 when I was writing the book. I suggested this might have been the motive for Bill's murder, though it seems more likely now that he was killed by somebody he picked up and took home.

 

I should add that several years ago I got a phone call from a cop who saw what I wrote about Bill in Beaver Street, which is in part why they reopened the case. That's how I found out that the police know who murdered him, they had the suspect in custody, but they let him go because the evidence was tainted.

 

According to The Rialto Report, the police encourage anyone with information about Bill's murder to call 800-577-TIPS.

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The story I posted last week, in memory of Happy Traum (May 9, 1938–July 17, 2024), is about a headline I wrote for a college newspaper that ended up on the cover of Happy and Artie Traum's Hard Times in the Country, released by Rounder Records in 1975. I'd never thought about how, exactly, "Traums At It Again" found its way onto the cover. It just was. But one of the many responses the post garnered on social media was from the man who designed the cover "a lifetime ago," as he said.

 

Pat Alger is a songwriter who collaborated with the Traums and toured with The Everly Brothers. In 1980 he released an LP with Artie, From the Heart. Later moving to Nashville, he wrote hits for Garth Brooks, Hal Ketchum, and Trisha Yearwood. Dolly Parton, Lyle Lovett, and the trio Peter, Paul and Mary are among the musicians who've recorded Alger's songs.

 

Alger explained in his comment how the cover for Hard Times in the Country came to be: "I designed this cover for Happy and Artie because I had designed quite a few of the early Rounder covers. I lived in Woodstock at the time and we were great friends—I sang on the chorus of 'Mississippi John' and 'I Bid You Goodnight.' This was a bulletin board at Happy and [his wife] Jane's house—essentially a collage of great photos and meaningful items to them which Guy Cross photographed and I cropped this way for the cover."

 

When I thanked him for working in my headline, he said, "It was a lucky shot—it was on the bulletin board and I was looking for an interesting slice of it and voila you made it!"

 

Listening note: Michael Mand played a Happy Traum tribute on his OWWR internet radio show, St. James Infirmary. The podcast is available here. It's the fifth set, beginning around 2:21:30.

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In the early 1960s, folk duo Happy and Artie Traum began playing music in Washington Square Park and in the cafés and clubs of Greenwich Village. The brothers were born in the Bronx—Happy went to the High School of Music & Art and NYU, in Manhattan—and are credited with carrying the spirit of the Village folk scene to Woodstock, New York, where they later lived. Happy, a fingerpicking legend, is probably best known for two songs he recorded with Bob Dylan on Greatest Hits, Vol. II: "I Shall Be Released" and "You Ain't Going Nowhere."

 

I found out about the Traums when I was at City College in the 1970s. They were regulars at an on-campus performance space known at various times as Cafe Finley and The Monkey's Paw. You could see them play there for $1.50, which included coffee and donuts. I saw them many times. The student newspaper I edited, Observation Post, often reviewed their shows.

 

In the days before computers, to write a headline that fit in the allotted space, you had to count every letter and punctuation mark. By this calculation, most lowercase letters were 1, most uppercase letters were 1½, and most punctuation marks were ½. The layout artist measured the space with a pica ruler and told an editor the letter count. The editor read the article and wrote a headline that fit, perfectly if possible.

 

This was difficult, especially for complex stories that had to be expressed in four or five words. It was like writing a haiku, and I wrote many awkward headlines I'd prefer to forget. But the headline I wrote for a review of a Happy and Artie show, in the November 28, 1973, issue, popped into my head after reading the piece about their sixth appearance at City College in recent years:

 

Traums At It Again

 

It fit!

 

Flash forward to early 1975. I'm living in Washington Heights with my roommate, a big Happy and Artie fan from the Bronx. He acquires a review copy of their latest LP, Hard Times In The Country, from Rounder Records. I look at the cover, a collage of photos and miscellanea tacked to a bulletin board. And there's my headline, "Traums At It Again," right in the middle, near the top.

 

Artie died on July 20, 2008, at age 65. Happy died last week, July 17, at age 86.

 

I never had a chance to thank them for the thrill of seeing my headline on an album cover.

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It's been hot in New York City. And humid. How hot is it? Nothing like the 120 degrees in Las Vegas or the 130 in Death Valley. But as I stepped off the elevator the other day after taking a walk, my neighbor asked if it was raining.

 

"No, I'm sweating," I said.

 

I'm dedicating this mid-summer post to memories of cooler days. The photo, taken in Washington Square Park the morning of February 13, 2024, was one of those days.

 

It doesn't snow much in New York anymore, not like it did in the 60s and 70s when you could count on three or four good blizzards every winter to shut down the schools. But it snowed that morning, coating the park in a pristine white frosting. By evening, every snowflake had melted.

 

That's just the way it goes these days.

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Larry David on Fridays in an episode from 1980.

 

While dining last week with a group of friends I used to work with at Vanity Fair, the conversation turned to what a miserable town L.A. can be, especially when it comes to dealing with entertainment industry people. They were, it was said, passive-aggressive; they avoid any kind of confrontation; they lie; they don't return phone calls, etc., etc. One person told a joke about how an agent goes to a screenwriter's house, douses his wife and kids with gasoline, sets them on fire, and burns down the house. The screenwriter comes home and the cops tell him what happened. "You mean my agent came to my house?" he says.

 

I told my L.A. story about an unpleasant encounter with Larry David back in 1980. (Has anybody ever had a pleasant encounter with him?) That summer I'd been invited to try out as a writer for Fridays, L.A.'s short-lived version of Saturday Night Live.

 

In the Montecito Hotel, where I was staying, and at the ABC production facility, ideas for cold openings kept popping into my head. I thought they were funny and inspired. So I wrote them on a portable typewriter and handed the finished scripts directly to one of the producers. I was so sure I was going to get the job, it didn't occur to me to keep copies.

 

I waited to hear if I had the job. The producers kept me in limbo, though allowed me to sit in on meetings, rehearsals, and broadcasts. One day at a writers' meeting, Larry David, the head writer and a cast member, asked if they'd hired me.

 

"I don't know," I said. "I'm still waiting to hear."

 

He called security and had me thrown off the lot.

 

A few weeks later, the show's cold opening was security guards throwing a writer off the lot.

 

Maybe I didn't get the job because the producers wanted to see more than cold openings. And maybe the openings were too edgy for network TV. The skit I remember best was Charlie Manson—as popular in L.A. then as Trump is in New York now—doing a song-and-dance number on a conference table for the producers: I can sing!/I can dance!/I can act!/Need a chance!

 

I'd have loved that job; it would have set my career on a different path. And I'd love to have those lost Fridays scripts. But after all was said and done, I didn't have to spend half my life stuck in traffic, possibly in an encroaching wildfire, in a city where the weather never changes. And then the show was canceled.

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Tomorrow is July 4, and I figured I'd take a week off from harsh realities past and present and contemplate a pleasant moment of summer past. And what says summer better than a bunch of cows lazing around a verdant pasture? (Okay, lots of things, but I happen to have a photo of cows.)

 

Mary Lyn Maiscott took this shot in June 2017, just outside the hamlet of Glen, New York. We were visiting Byron Nilsson and his wife, Susan Whiteman, owners of the Jollity Farm Collective. One morning Mary Lyn and I took a walk down Route 110, past the Glen Conservancy, past the old town cemetery, past the Amish farmers working their fields. And we came upon these content-looking cows of summer. So Mary Lyn captured the bucolic moment with my phone, as she'd forgotten to bring hers.

 

On the other hand, if you want a little reality, you can listen to Mary Lyn's protest song, "Fourth of July" which, in light of the events of the past week, now needs an additional verse.

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Fifty years ago, during my final undergraduate semester at City College, I created a new section in the culturally and politically radical newspaper Observation Post (OP). I called the section "Mind Ooze." It was, for the most part, a collaboration with the late Robert Attanasio, an artist whose greatest talent was stirring up outrage with his drawings and cartoons.

 

Attanasio was raised Catholic, and his childhood experiences at the hands of nuns and priests in his Bronx church had traumatized him, perhaps leaving him with a case of PTSD. He drew on these experiences to produce some of his most powerful artwork.

 

One of the set pieces in the book I've been working on involves an Attanasio cartoon published in Mind Ooze that The New York Times, in their inimitable way, described as "a nun using a cross as a sexual object." The Times was writing about Attanasio's art because ultra-conservative New York senator James Buckley was so outraged by the cartoon, which he described as "a vicious and incredibly offensive anti-religious drawing," that he called for the Justice Department and the Department of Health, Education and Welfare to investigate OP for violating federal discrimination statutes, and demanded that City College suspend OP and expel the editors responsible for publishing the nun.

 

OP found itself in the eye of a media firestorm focusing on the First Amendment, free expression, and whether a student newspaper supported by student fees has the right to publish anti-religious material. Many people inside and outside the college came to OP's defense, and as I look back at an issue published March 13, 1974, at the height of the controversy, one story in particular stands out. Leonard Liggio, a Jesuit-educated history department lecturer, provided a scholarly analysis of the social and political implications of Attanasio's nun. That analysis remains as relevant today as it was 50 years ago.

 

Here are the main points of Liggio's essay:

 

· There has been a huge outflux of priests and nuns from the Catholic Church, principally because of their unwillingness to accept celibacy as a condition of remaining in the clergy.

· The nun cartoon is not the cause of the controversy; it's a reflection of an ongoing controversy in a society that was originally defined in Puritan terms.

· As American society attempts to find rational guides to a happy life in the wake of the failure of Puritanism, those still committed to Puritanism refuse to allow others the freedom to seek a happy life.

· Puritanism does not respect the autonomy of each person and his or her free choice. Therefore, it has always opposed tolerance.

· Puritanical politicians like Senator Buckley appeal to special interests and sub-groups. Therefore, they are opposed to tolerance.

· Catholic politicians like Buckley want to force non-Catholics to adhere to the demands of a Puritanical state.

· Catholic politicians would never dare interfere in the affairs of colleges operated by religious orders. Why should they have any say in non-Catholic higher education?

· Every person and newspaper on campus should be free to criticize any newspaper. Mutual exchange of commentary and criticism is an important part of the learning process and contributes to tolerance. No one is forced to read any of the several papers published at City College.

 

Spoiler alert: The First Amendment won. The editors were not expelled, and OP continued to publish for five more years until it finally found a way to push the authorities too far. 

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In early 2005, I was preparing for Nowhere Man events in Mexico and Chile, and I wanted to be able to speak more Spanish than hola, adios, and que será será. So I placed an ad for a Spanish tutor on Craig's List. Julio Malone was one of the people who responded. He offered to teach me Spanish if I'd help him with his English.

 

Julio's a longtime political columnist for Lístin Diario, a newspaper in the Dominican Republic. He also does commentary for NY1 Noticias and Univision 41 Nueva York; teaches journalism at a Bronx middle school; and wrote a book for middle-school students about Sammy Sosa, the steroid-using baseball superstar who twice hit more than 60 home runs in a season. Sosa is from Julio's hometown, San Pedro de Macorís. The Chicago Cubs had traded Sosa to the Baltimore Orioles, and Julio had an idea for a column for The Baltimore Sun. I helped him write it and the Sun published it as "Latin Grit."

 

When the Mexican newsweekly Proceso asked me to review the Broadway musical Lennon, Julio translated the review and the Proceso editors barely changed a word.

 

Thus was born a friendship.

 

I began venturing up to Julio's Bronx apartment in a castle-like building on the Grand Concourse for Spanish lessons. But we'd end up smoking weed, drinking wine, and arguing about politics, while Julio, whom I've urged to open a restaurant in the Dominican Republic, whipped up fabulous seafood dinners. My progress in Spanish was minimal, but I didn't care. I was having too much fun hanging out and eating his food.

 

Nineteen years later Julio and I are still hanging out, though the other night he came down to my place and I did the cooking—as Julio watched with a critical eye. He gave my pasta pesto with sautéed broccoli and garlic high marks (though he did call my non-dairy Parmesan cheese "gringo food"). Then, after consuming sufficient quantities of wine, THC gummies, and weed, we turned to politics and economics. Below, along with my responses, are some of the ideas put forth by a gadfly Dominican journalist who recently became an American citizen and is going to vote for the first time.

 

Julio: Biden is a warmonger in charge of a corrupt system that needs to be torn down.

Me: Do you prefer Trump? Do you want to live under a military dictatorship? Cause that's what he's going to try to do with the Insurrection Act if he's elected. And you're not going to be one of his favored citizens.

 

Julio: Trump would end the war in Ukraine.

Me: No he wouldn't. If he's able to arrange a surrender or ceasefire, and the Russians still occupy parts of Ukraine, it would become a never-ending guerilla war.

 

Julio: There are Russian hypersonic missiles in Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua. This is going to be worse than the Cuban Missile Crisis of '62.

Me: I hope you're wrong.

 

Julio: Electric cars are a scam. It's a way for power companies to make more money. If they wanted to, they could build self-charging electric cars that have a generator on each tire like the little generators they have on bicycles for the headlight. 

Me: I'm sure somebody's thought of that. This is America. If there's money to be made, somebody's going to do it. There must be all kinds of technical and engineering problems to overcome before that would work.

 

Julio: The dollar is going to collapse.

Me: You've been saying that for 19 years.

 

Julio: Recycling is a scam. We wash it, sort it, store it, and bring it down to the basement so a mega-corporation can take it, turn it into something else, and sell it back to us for a profit. We're doing their work for free. They should be paying us.

Me: You might be on to something.

 

Epilogue: After 19 years, I can now read Spanish on the level of one of Julio's middle-school students. Progress.

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...but at least they mention Nowhere Man a lot.

 

I don't know what it is with News Corp, Rupert Murdoch's media empire, but in the course of destroying democracy with lies and propaganda, his various publications and Websites cite my John Lennon biography, Nowhere Man, more than anybody. They've been doing it since the 1980s, when the book was just a germ of an idea that I'd mentioned to a reporter.

 

Since then Murdoch's scribes have written about Nowhere Man in such places as the New York Post, mentioning it in the same breath as The Catcher in the Rye; in The Wall Street Journal; and on Fox News, as they did the other week. The stories aren't always complimentary and they don't always get their facts right, but it doesn't seem to matter. As long as they spell the title correctly it helps keep the book alive.

 

The recent story that popped up on various Fox News sites, as well as on the Argentine site El Cronista, is about a loft in New York's Soho neighborhood, once owned by Lennon and Yoko Ono, that sold for $5.5 million. The article said that according to Nowhere Man, the Lennons bought the property "around 1980." This is false. I don't specify when they bought it. All I say about the loft is that they allowed their tarot card reader, Charlie Swan, to live there rent free as part of a generous compensation package. This would have been an interesting detail to include in the article. But... whatever.

 

Of course I take issue with Murdoch's grotesque right-wing politics. All I'm saying is that it's hard to feel totally negative about something as malignant as News Corp when they've been so... helpful.

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I don't often write about current events because they're too depressing. The unceasing barrage of news about Trump, assorted wars, the corruption of the Supreme Court, and the latest Covid variant feels like an assault on my mental health. So I let other people who call themselves journalists spew their commentary, which I spend far too much time sifting through in search of a grain of truth or a crumb of good news, like, say, a malevolent ex-president being convicted of 34 felonies. Meanwhile, I lose myself in the 1970s, a time of similar despair, as I attempt to transform the raw material of those grim days into literature.

 

The other weekend I took a day off from this self-imposed masochism, and my wife and I journeyed to an obscure corner of Brooklyn known as Gerritsen Beach. We'd last been there in the 90s, when I was test-driving cars for a magazine I edited. At the time, we found Gerritsen Beach to be a quaint neighborhood of narrow streets, charming bungalows, boats docked in backyards, and a lighthouse. It was reminiscent of a fishing village.

 

This time we took the Q train to Sheepshead Bay and walked two-and-a-half miles. And what struck me was that in the far reaches of hipster Brooklyn we'd come upon a zone of "Real" America, or "Amerika," if you will. For one thing, the guard dogs who snarled and barked as if they'd tear us to pieces given the opportunity made us feel less than welcome and hesitant to venture down certain streets. And the high-flying Trump flags were disconcerting, especially in a borough where Trump got only 24 percent of the vote. But what really got me was the Christian nationalist flag hanging above a lovely little garden. I took it to mean that the flag's owner believes America should be a white Christian nation and Christianity should be the official state religion. I had an impulse to knock on the door and tell the owner that the First Amendment of the Constitution says, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion." But the impulse passed quickly.

 

Among the things I say about Trump in the afterword of A Brooklyn Memoir is this: "The pervasive hatred and bigotry that I describe in this book is the same hatred and bigotry that Trump knows intimately, having grown up in Queens, the borough adjoining Brooklyn, in the 1940s and 50s." And based on my recent excursion, I'd say hatred and bigotry are still alive and well in certain pockets of Brooklyn.

 

At least the flag doesn't belong to a Supreme Court justice.

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The earliest video of Stephen Stills I could find is from his show at the Capitol Theatre in Passaic, NJ, March 23, 1979, five years after the concert I saw at Carnegie Hall.

 

I continue to excavate the detritus of the 1970s as I assemble a book about an underground newspaper at City College in the days of open admissions and free tuition. The other day I came across a music review I wrote, published in the February 13, 1974, issue of Observation Post. In the span of a month I'd seen Bob Dylan and The Band at Madison Square Garden, Joni Mitchell at Radio City, and Stephen Stills at Carnegie Hall.

 

Stills is the one I discussed in-depth. A blizzard paralyzed New York the night of the show, February 8. Only a sparse crowd showed up. I thought it would make for an intimate evening. But, I wrote, it was the kind of concert "that can make you never want to go to a concert again." Stills alienated himself from the audience. I said he acted like "a prick."

 

He opened strong with a rousing "Love the One You're With" but after three songs walked offstage and took his band with him. Twenty minutes later he returned alone to apologize. "If you're wondering why I'm acting so uptight," he said, "it's because the organ went out in the middle of the set. I've seen a lot of bands fall apart over a lot less. If you think I'm making excuses, I'm not."

 

I thought he was making excuses.

 

He launched into a solo acoustic set but got tripped up on the lyrics for "4 + 20" and "Blackbird." When he played a new song that wasn't greeted with enthusiastic applause, he said, "I like that song. I'm sorry if I bored you."

 

The band, recovered from their organ issues, came back and rocked out on songs like "Bluebird," the Buffalo Springfield classic. Stills and company were on the verge of redeeming themselves. But just when it seemed the crowd had forgotten what happened at the beginning, he waved goodbye and everybody walked offstage. The mandatory encore, "a half-hearted '49 Bye-Byes,'" was met with a standing ovation in an attempt to coax a few more songs out of him. But the "cheers turned to boos" when the audience realized Stills wasn't coming back. The show was over.

 

I spent 14 bucks on two orchestra seats (a lot of money at that time) and had fun tearing his performance apart. But on the basis of Déjà Vu alone, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young remain one of my favorite bands of all time.

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Dak Mills, an easygoing New Yorker, wanted to talk about all aspects of my life and career on his podcast Comfortable Being Uncomfortable. And I was completely comfortable chatting with him about the three books I've published—Nowhere Man, Beaver Street, and A Brooklyn Memoir—as well as the untitled book I'm writing about an underground student newspaper at City College in the 1970s, as the antiwar movement was giving way to the despair of punk. So Dak and I jump around from the days of free tuition and open admissions, to John Lennon's dairies, to industrialized pornography, to post-traumatic stress disorder in Flatbush in the aftermath of WWII. I even throw in some hard-earned writing advice.

 

Please do give it a listen, either on YouTube (above) or on Spotify, Apple, or iHeart.

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Colombia is one of the many Spanish-speaking countries where readers embraced Nowhere Man: Los últimos días de John Lennon. The book appeared on best-seller lists, and El Heraldo, in Barranquilla—the newspaper where Gabriel García Márquez once worked as a reporter and columnist—ran an excerpt as the cover story in their Sunday magazine supplement.

 

This was back in the mid-2000s, but Colombia's fascination with Nowhere Man continues. The other week, the book came to the attention of a columnist at the first newspaper to publish Márquez, El Espectador, in Bogotá. (I keep mentioning Márquez because the Venezuelan newspaper Últimas Noticias listed Nowhere Man as one of "Five Indispensable Books" along with Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude.) Novelist and poet Luis Fernando Charry's May 4 column is titled "Los últimos días de Lennon
." (You can also access it on MSN.)

 

He starts out talking about the multitude of Lennon biographies and memoirs, including books by Albert Goldman, Philip Norman, Cynthia Lennon, May Pang, and John Green. This is a setup for his impressions of Nowhere Man. I wouldn't agree with all of Charry's interpretations. I don't know why, for example, he finds Lennon's yoga sessions "disturbing" or why he implies that Yoko Ono was a student of yoga (she wasn't). But he does a good job of making the book sound interesting, describing such things as Lennon's paradoxical diet that wavered between health food and sweets; his obsession with his weight; the "miracle" of his son Sean's birth; and how fatherhood had an adverse effect on his career. This being Latin America, he also mentions that the New York Daily News mistakenly reported that Ono worked for the CIA. And he ends, of course, on how Mark David Chapman put an end to the legend.

 

I'll count it as a positive review.

 

Which brings us to the perennial question: Why has Nowhere Man endured for 24 years? The short answer: Because people keep reading it and writing about it. I hope they continue.

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My semi-annual journey to West Palm Beach to visit my mother, Eleanor Rosen, in her assisted-living facility coincided with Passover this year. The facility, Morse Life, observes the holiday. As we were sitting under an umbrella in the lush garden, an aide brought my mother her lunch, matzo pizzas consisting of tomato sauce and melted kosher-for-Passover mozzarella cheese on matzo. I reminded her of all the good food she used to prepare for Passover when I was living at home.

 

My mother is one of the main characters in A Brooklyn Memoir, a book she hasn't been able to read due to failing eyesight. In the book, set in the 1950s and 60s, I describe her as a magician in the kitchen who often cooked gourmet meals like crêpes suzette. When I visit, she likes me to read to her from the book. In honor of her 97th Passover, I read from her favorite chapter, 15, "The Flatbush Diet":

 

Sometimes on weekends, she'd whip up a batch of blueberry pancakes or a cheese omelet or cinnamon toast or French toast (often made with challah), occasionally with a serving of ambrosia-like bacon on the side. Though we routinely consumed other pig meats as well—notably pork chops and ham—we also observed Passover. And to make more bearable those eight days of giving up virtually every food I liked to eat, my mother made a mouthwatering matzoh brei, latkes as light as feathers, and a sponge cake that she then transformed into a strawberry shortcake so delectable it seemed to defeat the very purpose of the holiday—to remember the suffering and deprivations of the Jews who'd wandered in the desert for 40 years.

 

And the only reason I can think of that she didn't add matzo pizzas—a variation on English-muffin pizzas—to her repertoire is because kosher-for-Passover mozzarella cheese hadn't been invented yet.

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On May Day, as the majority of Americans wallow in the misery of Donald Trump, I've returned to the 1970s to explore some of that old-time misery. In the book I'm working on, Nixon is president; Agnew is vice president; teenagers are being drafted out of high school and sent to Vietnam to die for the greater glory of Nixon-Agnew; and people in Berkeley, like the Red Star Singers, are writing and recording songs like "Pig Nixon."

 

I came upon a reference to "Pig Nixon" in the January 24, 1974, issue of Observation Post (OP), the radical/pornographic student newspaper at the City College of New York that's the main setting for my work in progress. The title intrigued me and sure enough, more than 50 years later, there it was on YouTube. So I gave it a listen, and can only wonder why a song this catchy got no radio play that I'm aware of. Fortunately, OP's music critic knew about it.

 

Now we need a song about that other ex-president who continues to set new standards for piggishness. Everybody should sing it.

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More than a dozen academic books have cited Beaver Street: A History of Modern Pornography as a source of information. They have titles like Desire and Consent in Representations of Adolescent Sexuality With Adults; Digital Gender Sexual Violations; and Revenge Pornography: Gender, Sexuality and Motivations. Unless you've taken a college-level porn studies course, I doubt you've heard of any of them, and even if you've come across such a book, it's unlikely you've read it. They're filled with academic jargon and are almost unreadable.

 

Historian Jane Kamensky, a former Harvard professor, recently published a book about the porn industry that, unlike its academic predecessors, is written for a mainstream audience and has been getting some high-profile media attention. Candida Royalle and the Sexual Revolution: A History from Below cites Beaver Street four times.

 

Royalle (real name Candice Vadala), who died in 2015 at the age of 64, was a porn star who became a producer of X-rated videos that explored women's fantasies.

 

I was curious what information Kamensky had gleaned from my book. So I checked out Candida Royalle's extensive notes, practically a book in itself, and was impressed with the enormous amount of research Kamensky did.

 

Though Beaver Street doesn't mention Royalle—I never dealt with her during my tenure as an editor of "adult" magazines—I did write extensively about other people and topics Kamensky explores: the late Gloria Leonard, who was the figurehead publisher of High Society magazine and a member of Royalle's porn star support group; Traci Lords, the underage sex superstar who disrupted the porn industry; male and female porn stars in general; and the nitty-gritty of porn technology and economics. One of Kamensky's Beaver Street notes has to do with Lords and another concerns porn technology and economics.

 

The Leonard note calls for closer examination. In Beaver Street I wrote that High Society's circulation was 400,000. This is accurate information based on what I learned during my time working at the magazine with Leonard in 1983 and '84. In Candida Royalle, Kamensky quotes Leonard as saying that circulation was four million. This is absurd—she added a zero to the true number. If it were true, it would have meant High Society sold more copies than Hustler and was running close behind Penthouse and Playboy. The whole time I was there, the real publisher, Carl Ruderman, was obsessed with catching up to Hustler, his personal white whale that would brand him "Asshole of the Month" in November 1983. In her note Kamensky writes, "Rosen disputes Leonard's figures."

 

This is correct. I here and now dispute with great vigor Leonard's fantasyland PR hype that nobody with any sense ever believed.

 

The most interesting footnote is for a quote Kamensky uses in Chapter 22, "Pornography of the People." Izzy Singer (real name Neil Wexler) is one of the main characters in Beaver Street. He's an intellectual pornographer and my porn industry mentor. Kamensky writes: "For male performers, orgasmic reliability was the gold standard, and could insure a lifetime of work for those with the homeliest faces. But for women, ripeness was all, and in the heat of the triple-X theater, ripeness quickly sugared into rot. The publisher of For Adults Only magazine put it bluntly: 'The sad fact is that porn stars age in dog years.'" In footnote 53, Kamensky identifies the source of this wisdom as "Izzy Smith."

 

The dog years quote comes from Beaver Street, page 91, and Kamensky got it almost right—it's "sad part" not "sad fact." And she got the pseudonym, Izzy Singer, half right. (Wexler was the editor, not the publisher, of For Adults Only.) But she must be given credit for recognizing Wexler's profound insight, one that in my non-academic opinion deserves a place of pride in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations.

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May Pang's relationship with John Lennon began in 1973 after he separated from Yoko Ono. Eighteen months later, in early 1975, Lennon returned to Ono. Pang's 2023 documentary, The Lost Weekend: A Love Story, covers the same ground as her book Loving John, published in 1983. It's not surprising that it took Pang almost 50 years to get the movie version of her story into theatres and onto streaming services. As I've discussed in my book Nowhere Man, in The Village Voice, and elsewhere on this blog, Ono, now 91, uses the threat of legal action to try to control what other people say about Lennon. And she's often successful at repressing stories that go against the official narrative of Lennon as a happy househusband and secular saint. (Michael "Mike Tree" Medeiros's unpublished book, In Lennon's Garden, is an especially egregious example.) What Pang went through to make and release The Lost Weekend must be quite a story in itself. That the film exists is a tribute to her tenacity.

 

If you know the story of Pang and Lennon, The Lost Weekend, set in LA and New York, will seem familiar. It's a diary-like collection of still photos of the two of them, some iconic, some taken by Pang; video of Lennon and Ono; video of Pang on various talk shows; recent video of Pang with Lennon's son Julian; and a bit of animation to fill in the gaps. Pang provides the narration and does a nice job of it. The entire film is well done and has garnered a wide array of mostly positive reviews, like the one in Variety.

 

What I found most interesting about The Lost Weekend is that Pang confirms virtually everything I wrote about her relationship with Lennon in Nowhere Man, a book that grew out of my access to diaries the former Beatle kept during the final six years of his life. Lennon's diaries begin in 1975, when he's living with Pang in her apartment on the east side of Manhattan and enjoying himself very much. The diaries confirm that he had deep feelings for Pang and carried a torch for her the rest of his life. They were in love, she says in the film.

 

"John was torn between May and Yoko," I write in Nowhere Man. "He wanted both of them but that was out of the question. May was fun, and pure sexual passion." But Yoko "was survival." May, with some hesitation, talks about their active sex life and mentions that the last time she spoke to John was when he called her from Cape Town, South Africa, a "directional" journey he took in April 1980. This is all detailed in Nowhere Man.

 

One thing May didn't know was that Lennon had learned to program dreams and many of the dreams he programmed were about making love to May. It was often the only way he could be with her after he returned to Yoko.

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Aida Vílchez and Martín León Soto rehearse "If I Fell," by the Beatles, for their Nowhere Band show at La Tregua in Sevilla, Spain.

 

The Nowhere Man event I did in Sevilla,* in January, was the second reading and Q&A I've done in Spain. The first was in 2018, in Madrid. And what I witnessed both times was a passion for the Beatles that's different from anything I've seen in the United States in the last 50 years. There's an innocence and purity to it that I can't quite explain. You can feel it in Aida Vílchez and Martín León Soto's rehearsal of the Beatles' "If I Fell." And you can hear it in the crowd's response when they performed the song at La Tregua. ("If I Fell" begins at 01:30:50 in the video below.)

 

 

I originally thought this innocense and purity had to do with Francisco Franco, the (still dead) fascist generalissimo who led Spain from 1938 to 1973. He repressed foreign rock music though allowed the Beatles to perform there twice to show the world that Spain was a "normal" country. But once Franco was out of power and Spain became a democracy, British and American rock exploded there. So I was under the impression that the Spanish were making up for lost time with their passionate embrace of the Beatles. But that's not what happened with the people who invited me to Spain. Franco was their parents' generation. I now think it's more a case that they were born too late and they're trying to re-create and recapture the energy of this fantastic thing they missed. They do it by playing Beatles music live and listening to stories about them, especially from people who had a connection to it. Which is true in the US, too, but it's so much more commercialized here, which diminishes that feeling of purity and innocense.

 

The Spanish passion for the Beatles reminds me of the way I felt about the Brooklyn Dodgers, who left town when I was four. I was just old enough to understand who they were and what I'd missed. But there was no way to re-create the magic of 1955, the only time Brooklyn won the World Series.

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*Forgive me for saying Sevilla rather than Seville. But Seville no longer sounds right to my ear. Two weeks with Aida and Martín and I feel like a Sevillano.

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