Robert Rosen

 

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.

 

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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 of what's going on in New York City? 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.