Rod Serling’s father wanted to invent a hot dog shaped like a hamburger.
(From Rod Serling: Dreams and Nightmares of Life in the Twilight Zone by Joel Engel)
Author Archives: Tom Crippen
Fleming Dies, Ends Up in New York Times
UPDATE: Apparently, Fleming had a good friend named Steve Cornfield who looked out for him and helped him in a lot of ways. Someone in Comments posts this:
Please, somebody locate this man because he has additional information about Fleming or contact “Butch” Parket o Oleg or the manager or assistant mgr of the Nyack Starbuck
New York Times ran a column the other day about a man who died and how his old chair at the local Starbucks was covered by cards and gifts and other tokens of remembrance from the people who knew him.
I knew him too, his name was Fleming and he was a very sweet man. The article, of course, is pegged to the idea of his old Starbucks chair being decorated, so the piece covers Fleming’s death more as a Starbucks event and less as en event in the town where the Starbucks is located. That’s Nyack, N.Y., a very nice place where I drop by when down from Canada to visit my mom. Despite what the article says, you didn’t have to be a Nyack old-timer to know much about Fleming. He was a friendly man and just a year ago he had a daily circuit of drop-ins, with Starbucks being only one among them. I met him while reading newspapers at the public library. We chatted away and he told me about his daughter in Atlanta, about his father, about working at the Journal-News. From what I remember, Fleming said he had an apartment and a doctor, then a second doctor after the first one died. The second doctor was someone he’d known back in high school.
Fleming wound up spending all his time at Starbucks because his leg was getting bad and he couldn’t get around. In January he was complaining about the leg and told me his doctor had diagnosed something wrong with it (I forget the name of the disease). In June he needed a metal cane to get around. In November, the last time I saw him, he could barely get out of a chair. This was at Starbucks, and that’s where he now spent his whole day, just like the article says.
Usually when I saw Fleming he was dozy and mild, a bit becalmed. Seeing friends made him smile, seeing kids made him smile. It was a pleasure to be around, but I wouldn’t say he was exciting. The last time I saw him, he seemed out of it.
Anyway, the seat decorating at Starbucks got the attention of the Times and wound up as the subject of a human-interest column about events in the counties around New York City. (Nyack is about 20 miles north of the city, on the west bank of the Hudson River.) And here we are:
A Shrine for a Friend Who Made a Starbucks a Village
by Peter Applebome
One by one, people made their own small contributions to the purple velvet shrine for Fleming Logan. Or was it Fleming Taylor? Everyone just called him Fleming, so we will, too.
There were red roses and modest bouquets, letters, cards and trinkets all left on the purple padded chair at the Starbucks on Main Street where he sat, chatted and took in the world every day for more than a year.
Some of the messages had the feel of letters to a child away at camp or a friend off on some long trip.
“Dear Fleming,” began one. “We all love you and miss you. It’s not the same without you here. You are a gem of a person. The joy you brought to our lives is incredible.”
Others were full of regret for words not spoken or things not done. “Dear Fleming,” began another one. “I wish you were here now because I never got to tell you that I enjoyed our conversation and that you had a warm, funny personality. I liked when you’d see me coming down the street and say, ‘There she is,’ that hilarious voice like I was some famous movie star. I wish I had taken the opportunity to buy you that coat you said you needed and to be a lot kinder.” It was signed, “Love in Jesus, Stephanie.”
They found Fleming’s body in a stairwell just up the street from the Starbucks at 10:45 a.m. on Nov. 26. The Rockland County Medical Examiner’s office determined that he died of a cerebral hemorrhage. He was 62. A week later, Nyack’s coffee drinkers are still coming to grips with the apparently homeless man who, it seemed, had found a home, at least from the time Starbucks opened at 6 each morning until it closed at 10 p.m.
He was hardly an unknown in this Hudson River town with a long history of deep appreciation for eccentrics and nonconformists.
He was the foster child of the Rev. William H. Taylor, pastor of one of the prominent black churches in town. (That’s why most people knew him as Fleming Taylor, but the police said his last name was Logan, hence the confusion.) He went to Nyack High School, and for years worked in production at The Journal News in Westchester County.
But if the old-timers knew some of that, Fleming’s new friends at Starbucks mostly knew none of it. And details of his personal life — the daughter in Atlanta from whom he was estranged, his relationship with the family who raised him, where he went when Starbucks was closed — those were secrets he kept to himself.
Instead, almost everyone from Jean Pardo, the village historian, who delighted in his spirited commentary about her hats, to the young college students who gathered around as he held court at Starbucks, knew Fleming as the compulsively affable, flirtatious guy with the cane, who loved to talk about everything but himself. Some assumed he was homeless, but few were sure, and most knew he wouldn’t want them to pry.
He showed up every morning with enough in his pocket to buy coffee (grande), and a sausage, egg and cheese sandwich or oatmeal, and spent most of the day there, chatting with old friends like Oleg Khaghani, who used to drive him to his job years ago, or new ones like Maria Giannattasio, who developed a Friday night ritual of coming with her boyfriend to listen to Fleming philosophize.
“He was a proud man — always cheerful, always smiling,” said Jen Weddle, the store manager. “He loved to talk, but he didn’t talk about himself.”
She added, “I guess we were kind of his other family and I think that meant a lot to him, and it meant a lot to us.”
People were moved by Fleming’s death for lots of reasons. Mostly, they mourned because he was a friend, a charmer, a character, a throwback to earlier village life when there was more of a cushion for people who fell off the main seating chart of life.
It mattered because of the elusive alchemy that went on at Starbucks, where his presence was just one of the factors that made it not Store No. 7449 in a giant chain, but a real local place and a reminder that places shape chains as much as chains shape places.
And in these dour times it mattered, too, as a reminder how fragile the line is between Us and Them, the comfortable beneficiaries of American bounty and those hanging on outside the tent.
So there was Fleming in our shared commercial living room, on his purple velvet throne, listening to soothing balm of the Starbucks musical canon — at this time of year Mahalia Jackson singing “White Christmas,” Aimee Mann doing “The Christmas Song,” Neil Young, Fleet Foxes — as comfortable as a creature can be until he limped out to sleep in a stairwell.
Gene Homicki, a retired math professor at Rockland Community College, said people had many thoughts. Should they have done more for him? Could they have? And there, but for fortune…
“There are a lot of people who are not far from being homeless these days,” he said. “There’s a lot of fear out there.”
Was George Herriman a Pothead?
I’m posting the same question on the Comics Journal message board. Maybe a passer-by here will also have some info.
Anyway … Krazy Kat sure reads like it was marijuana inspired. Of course it’s tedious to assume that pot lies behind anything strange and original; I wouldn’t say Dr. Seuss or Thurber were stoned. But Krazy Kat has that air, don’t ask me why.
Googling turned up nothing but this mention by, I think, Skip Williamson (scroll down a good ways or do a word search). And the Library of Congress lists a book on Herriman that I may track down someday.
Resources aside, what’s the comics-world conventional wisdom on the question of Herriman as pothead?
Omega the Unknown’s Lesson for All of Us
I read the Lathem Omega the Unknown revamp and liked it. Not much to say on the subject until the day comes that I’ve read the original. For now I’d like to underscore a valuable insight presented by the new Omega. At one point the poor schmuck high-school kid who gets pushed around by the bullies confesses that he’s not really the class brain because he’s not actually smart, he’s just a dumpy fellow who wears glasses and is no good at gym and therefore must consider himself smart because otherwise he’s got nothing else. There are a lot of guys and girls like that, and they’re not represented much by popular lore; or, if they are, it’s with the omission of their defining factor, which is that they lack brains. I know that if you work in reference publishing or for a trade newspaper you’ll run into them, lots of them. Maybe they’re in other walks of life too. It sure is fun listening to them talk about movies!
Unifinished Comics: The Eternals by Neil Gaiman and J. Romita Jr.
I couldn’t get thru this thing. The Eternals is a snooze. It is to boredom what a head-on auto collision is to fear and pain: a cataclysm that can be outlived but never analyzed. So don’t ask me why this comic is so bad; just chip in to my hospital fund.
John Romita Jr.’s stuff is fine; he’s not the problem here. Neil Gaiman is, and he baffles me. A few years ago I did a piece about him for The Comics Journal, one that featured a lush aria detailing all the ways a Gaiman script can run aground. As far as I can tell, none of those ways are present here. The Eternals features straightahead, streamlined storytelling with the occasional imaginative touch that … Christ, it’s still boring.
Years ago I worked for a bright, energetic fellow who screwed up everything he touched. He had incompetence in its purest form; no other factors assisted him in his production of disaster. Gaiman has a similar isolated gift for producing boredom. He didn’t use to: about 40% of his Sandman run counts as the most entertaining bunch of comics I’ve read. Then the rot crept it and then it spread and then I had finished The Kindly Ones and never got around to The Wake.
Some people you just can’t appreciate, but I sure used to appreciate him and it’s not like his new stuff is so different from what came before. In fact it’s too much the same old but with the removal of key elements that I’m pretty sure include fresh dialogue, unexpected ideas, and interesting balloon-caption-picture interplay. So maybe there’s the problem. But why did those elements go missing? He isn’t even 50 yet; Wodehouse kept churning out his formula for half a century and it stayed fresh.
An additional mystery: I have never met anyone who said they liked Gaiman’s post-’93 comics, but figures indicate that people buy the stuff in great quantities. 1602 was top seller for its year, I believe, and won some sort of award.
His books aren’t so bad, those that I’ve read. They rehash his old ideas, but I can get thru them. Coraline underwhelmed me, but American Gods was all right; a friend found the reverse. Whatever. They’re still a long way down the slope from the Sandman issues that I liked. Maybe I’m just older; then again I really liked “A Study in Emerald,” so I think I can still respond to what he’s got when he bothers to bring it along. He just doesn’t bother, and why not?
Anyway, I took The Eternals out from the library, so no money was lost. That fucking thing … I couldn’t get thru it.
At Last, Head Shop Posters Made of Garlic
A fellow in England named Carl Warner assembles tableaux, very elaborate tableaux, from common foodstuffs. The pieces resemble landscape paintings (plus the occasional still life) and are the damnedest things. You can see 14 of them here.
For the leadoff I chose one that might be a trippy prog-rock album cover. There are some others in that vein, but most of the pieces are more traditional. Warning: all of the works are lush stuff, so stay away if you have a low banality threshold. Also stay away if you’re weirded out by camp mimicry.
Via Andrew Sullivan and Ezra Klein.
UPDATE: Holy, shit, there are two people in England doing this crap. I guess everyone got tired of writing good comics.
The other one is named Gayle Chong Kwan and a few of her works are here, along with some pointless photos of London Metro crowds looking at the works. You’ll see that Ms. Kwan doesn’t try to fool the eye the way Mr. Warner does. Her stuff is obviously a lot of pasta arranged with care. You’re supposed to experience the food on its own terms even while it functions within … oh, never mind. The title of her exhibition is Cockaigne, after the magic medieval land of food everywhere. Kind of a pretentious choice, but she put in the time gluing pasta and she did it well, so she can be forgiven.
Ms. Kwan comes to us by way of a commenter at Ezra Klein’s site. Thanks, Marc!
UPDATE: Now it’s knitting. Again by way of Andrew Sullivan, who I’m beginning to suspect is homosexual.
Why It’s Tough to Be an Interviewer
I’m reading I Am Not Spock by Leonard Nimoy. From it:
While being interviewed by Dick Cavett, Katherine Hepburn said: “You come into town with your box of goodies and that box of goodies is you, and you start to use it and sell it and eventually the box of goodies gets used up and then you must go back to something else to fill up the box with some new goodies.”
Imagine listening to her deliver that whole sentence in her quacking Katherine Hepburn voice. How could anyone do it and not tell her to shut up?