Quotes from. . .

 . . . The Thin Man (1934) (Thanks to IMDB.com)
I just love THE THIN MAN films.  Myrna Loy and William Powell had great, comic chemistry, the cases are convoluted (until you've seen them enough to remember the culprit) and the characters are so comically dated, caricatures of gangster (not gangsta) movie thugs.  The incessant drinking, the opulent wealth and the endless one-liners. There's something musical about the production of the films that I cannot explain.  They are however, always enjoyable.

Reporter: Say listen, is he working on a case?
Nora Charles: Yes, he is.
Reporter: What case?
Nora Charles: A case of scotch. Pitch in and help him.

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Marion: I don't like crooks. And if I did like 'em, I wouldn't like crooks that are stool pigeons. And if I did like crooks that are stool pigeons, I still wouldn't like you.

---

Lieutenant John Guild: You got a pistol permit?
Nick Charles: No.
Lieutenant John Guild: Ever heard of the Sullivan Act?
Nora Charles: Oh, that's all right, we're married.

---

[On the motley group of guests present]
Nora Charles: Oh, Nicky, I love you because you know such lovely people.

---

Nora Charles: Waiter, will you serve the nuts? I mean, will you serve the guests the nuts?

---

Nick Charles: The important thing is the rhythm. Always have rhythm in your shaking. Now a Manhattan you shake to fox-trot time, a Bronx to two-step time, a dry martini you always shake to waltz time.

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Nick Charles: How'd you like Grant's tomb?
Nora Charles: It's lovely. I'm having a copy made for you.

---

Nora Charles: Pretty girl.
Nick Charles: Yes. She's a very nice type.
Nora Charles: You got types?
Nick Charles: Only you, darling. Lanky brunettes with wicked jaws.

---

Nick Charles: I'm a hero. I was shot twice in the Tribune.
Nora Charles: I read where you were shot 5 times in the tabloids.
Nick Charles: It's not true. He didn't come anywhere near my tabloids.

---

Nick Charles: Oh, it's all right, Joe. It's all right. It's my dog. And, uh, my wife.
Nora Charles: Well you might have mentioned me first on the billing.

---

Nora Charles: You know, that sounds like an interesting case. Why don't you take it?
Nick Charles: I haven't the time. I'm much too busy seeing that you don't lose any of the money I married you for.

---

Nora Charles: Take care of yourself
Nick Charles: Why, sure I will.
Nora Charles: Don't say it like that! Say it as if you meant it!
Nick Charles: Well, I do believe the little woman cares.
Nora Charles: I don't care! It's just that I'm used to you, that's all.

---

Nora Charles: All right! Go ahead! Go on! See if I care! But I thinks it's a dirty trick to bring me all the way to New York just to make a widow of me.
Nick Charles: You wouldn't be a widow long.
Nora Charles: You bet I wouldn't!
Nick Charles: Not with all your money...

---

Nick Charles: Say, how did you people happen to pop in here?
Lieutenant John Guild: We hear this is getting to be sort of a meeting place for the Wynant family, so we figured we'll stick around just in case the old boy himself should show up. Then we see this bird sneak in, we decide to come up. And lucky for you we did!
Nick Charles: Yes, I might not have been shot.

---

Nick Charles: Now don't make a move or that dog will tear you to shreds.

---

Nora Charles: Nick? Nicky?
Nick Charles: What?
Nora Charles: You asleep?
Nick Charles: Yes!
Nora Charles: Good. I want to talk to you.

---

Tommy: Say, I'm getting out of here.
Nick Charles: No, you stay here.
Tommy: If I stay, I know I'm gonna take a poke at him.
Nick Charles: Then I insist that you stay.

---

Nick Charles: Hey, would you mind putting that gun away? My wife doesn't care, but I'm a very timid fellow.
Nora Charles: You idiot!
Nick Charles: [to the gunman] Alright, shoot! I mean, uh, what's on your mind?

---

Nick Charles: Now my friends, if I may propose a little toast. Let us eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die.
Nora Charles: You give such charming parties, Mr. Charles.
Nick Charles: Thank you, Mrs. Charles.

---

Nick Charles: Now how did you ever remember me?
Dorothy: Oh, you used to fascinate me. A real live detective. You used to tell me the most wonderful stories. Were they true?
Nick Charles: Probably not.

---

Nora Charles: How many drinks have you had?
Nick Charles: This will make six Martinis.
Nora Charles: [to the waiter] All right. Will you bring me five more Martinis, Leo? Line them right up here.

---

Gil: Could I come down and see the body? I've never seen a dead body.
Lieutenant John Guild: Why do you want to?
Gil: Well, I've been studying psychopathic criminology and I have a theory. Perhaps this was the work of a sadist or a paranoiac. If I saw it I might be able to tell.
Lieutenant John Guild: Yeah, that's a good idea. But don't you bother to come down - we'll bring the body right up to you.

---

[Nick has revived Nora after knocking her out to keep her from being accidentally shot by Joe Morelli]
Nora Charles: You darn fool! You didn't have to knock me out. I knew you'd take him, but I wanted to see you do it.
Lieutenant John Guild: [laughs] There's a girl with hair on her chest.

---

Reporter: Well, can't you tell us anything about the case?
Nick Charles: Yes, it's putting me way behind in my drinking.

---

Nora Charles: What's that man doing in my drawers?

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Nora Charles: [suffering from a hang-over] What hit me?
Nick Charles: The last martini.

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Nick Charles: The murderer is right in this room. Sitting at this table. You may serve the fish.

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Nora Charles: [to Asta, as Nick and Asta are going out on a case] If you let anything happen to him, you'll never wag that tail again.

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Truly an original. . .

. . . and a BALTIMORE original at that!!

(from the Baltimore CityPaper)
Mobtown Beat

Morris Martick 1923-2011

"What I took from him was to not be scared of being unique. He just did things the way he wanted"

Katie Brennan

Morris Martick outside Martick’S Restaurant Fran�ais On Mulberry Street.

Courtesy Alex Martick

A Martick’s menu circa 2008

By Michelle Gienow

Published: December 21, 2011

Baltimore has certainly enjoyed its share of eccentric eateries over the years, but perhaps none so endearing—certainly none so enduring—as Martick’s Restaurant Français. Patrons had to ring a bell to gain admittance to the dimly lit and eclectically furnished dining room, where mismatched silver and china topped the tables and a multifarious array of works by local artists graced the walls. It was funky and shabby and utterly unlike anywhere else.
The restaurant’s inimitable founder and chef, Morris Martick, died Dec. 16 of lung cancer at the age of 88, having literally spent his life there. He was born in the building—214 W. Mulberry St.—and grew up working with his parents, two brothers, and two sisters in various enterprises operated there by the Martick family: a grocery store and then a speakeasy during the Prohibition years. (Rumor has it a gin still remains in the building’s basement.)
Martick’s own first incarnation of the family business was running a bar/jazz nightclub during the 1960s. By all accounts, it was an island of Bohemian refuge in an otherwise conservative city. Painter Raoul Middleman used to hang out there, and Martick gave him his first show—hanging his paintings above the bar. “This was when segregation laws were still in effect,” Middleman recalls. “And I had a friend I really wanted to have see this show, my first show, but he was black, and it was against the law for him to enter the bar. But Morris just said, ‘Bring him on in.’ He could’ve gotten in a lot of trouble for doing that. He thought segregation laws were stupid and he lived by his beliefs. I always respected him for that.”
Former Martick’s employee Steve Pampinelli says Martick used to recount how Billie Holiday once sang there in the nightclub days. “It was actually against the law of segregation, but he would let black folks in anyway,” Pampinelli says. “So when Billie Holiday sang there, she was actually there as a patron. When people realized she was there everyone got really excited and asked if she would sing, and of course she did.”
“Morris really only left Baltimore twice in his whole life,” recalls Scotty Stevenson, who worked at Martick’s from 1977 through the mid-’80s and off and on for several years after that. “He was gone briefly during WWII while he was in the Air Force—he was in Alaska, according to him because ‘That was where they sent all the fuck-ups.’ But then he came back and took care of his mother until she died in 1959, and ran the jazz club until, he said, he got tired of the drunks and the musicians. So he closed down in 1967 and went bumming around France for a couple years really learning how to cook. He had always liked to cook, he was a natural at it, but that was when he really educated himself in formal technique. Then when he came back, he fixed the place up and reopened as a French restaurant.”
That was in 1970, when Martick’s Restaurant Français had two dining rooms on two floors, a maitre’d, tuxedoed waiters, and a genuine French chef from Paris. According to Alex Martick, who survives his brother at the age of 83, “I don’t know where he found that chef, but the man was a goddamn drunk. He’d call downstairs for bottles of brandy, supposedly to cook with, but he’d be drinking it himself. Then when he was good and drunk he’d come after my brother.”
Stevenson recalls hearing the tale as follows: “One night the chef came after Morris with a knife, and that was that. Morris was left with a French restaurant but no French chef, and that was when he started running the kitchen himself. Then the monkey suits and the maitre’d evaporated, and it all became the artists and the musicians.”
It was a natural evolution, Stevenson explains, because “almost everything in that restaurant Morris had done himself anyway—the stained glass, the painted tile, the albino rattlesnake skin wallpaper. He was an artist himself, he drew and painted, so he was always at home with artists and musicians.”
Anna Oldfield, who put herself through college working in Martick’s kitchen from 1985 until 1991, says, “Nobody worked harder than Morris himself. He was simply always there, cooking and doing anything that needed to be done. So anyone who worked for him got into that same zone, that you just did everything necessary to make it work. That 75 people were going to come in and somehow, in this little kitchen at the top of these impossibly steep stairs in this crazy little house with a bunch of crazy people, you were somehow going to get it together and make these amazing French meals.
“The way it worked was inexplicable, but transformative for the people who worked there—the ones that stayed, anyway,” continues Oldfield, who went on to get her doctorate and now teaches at Coastal Carolina University in South Carolina. “I was there for five years, and in that time at least 50 people came in who had been hired and they’d run screaming their first night. Literally run out the door in the middle of their shift.”
“I always thought there was a little roulette wheel running in Morris’ head, and when he met you the ball either landed on ‘family’ and he treated you like family, or ‘intruder’ and he would chase you away,” Stevenson says. “It makes sense because everything in that building was his childhood—if you were banging the pots in the kitchen he’d yell at you, ‘Stop hitting the pots!’ which is exactly what his mother had yelled at him. Anything he yelled at you had been yelled at him growing up.”
“Morris was challenging and irritable and he yelled at everybody all the time. But you could yell right back,” says Katie Brennan, who began her Martick’s career in 1985, at the age of 16—and began a friendship with Martick himself that carried through the next 26 years.
“We’d get these Culinary Institute kids who’d be like, Oh I’m gonna work at Martick’s and be a chef apprentice, and the first question he’d always ask them is, ‘How long do you cook this piece of fish?’” Brennan recalls. “And they’d start this analysis of what kind it was and how thick and blah blah, and Morris would just shout, ‘Till it’s done, damn it, till it’s done!’”
Martick was famous for his pâté, profiteroles, and, above all else, bouillabaisse. “That bouillabaisse took literally days to make,” Oldfield recalls. “You’d have to bone the fish and make the stock in all these stages, sometimes boiling, sometimes barely simmering it, and add all these different things at just the right times. It was a kind of cooking that hardly anyone does anymore, because it takes so long and is based entirely on instinct. He was such a master of that, and he never used a recipe. He always improvised, which is why if you went there twice and got the same dish, it would not be exactly the same.”
Jeff Smith, the Baltimore-born chef-owner of Chameleon Cafe in Lauraville, worked briefly in Martick’s kitchen. “Even in a short time, I learned a lot working there,” Smith says. “He definitely did things differently from anywhere else I had ever worked.”
The brutal working conditions at Martick’s were famous among employees—Brennan and Oldfield both recall a thermometer in the kitchen that routinely pegged out at its top reading of 115 degrees F—and over the years there were many tales of Martick working in his underpants, if he bothered wearing them at all. “I worked there with a guy who had been with Martick on and off over the years,” Smith recalls, “who told me that Morris would be in the shower—his bathroom was between the front and back kitchens—and customers would come in, and Martick would just step out of the shower, put an apron on, and start cooking, his wrinkly old ass hanging out while he was cooking this amazing food. I never saw it with my own two eyes, but this was the legend.”
After a heyday running from its 1970 opening to the mid-’80s, Martick’s Restaurant Français began to slowly fade from its original eminence. Stevenson says that the opening of Harborplace in 1982 drew diners downtown, away from Martick’s, as did the subsequent opening on nearby North Charles Street of Louie’s Bookstore Cafe by Jimmy Rouse, who had waited tables at Martick’s. “Louie’s drew a lot of clientele away from Martick’s, but Morris never held a grudge,” Stevenson says. “He would actually go and eat there almost every night. He used to sit there at the bar, telling Jimmy everything he was doing wrong.”
“What I took from him was to not be scared of being unique,” Smith says. “The way he just did things the way he wanted and didn’t care what anybody else thought. The guy just had a lot of guts, and held out to the end. I know what it’s like when it’s slow in your restaurant. It’s scary and hard to come to work, day after day when it’s slow like that, and he did it for years. I have a lot of respect for him.”
Martick ran his eponymous restaurant for 35 years, closing to the public in 2008. He remained there, living in the building where he was born, and carrying on the friendships he’d made over eight decades of life, many of them at the center of Baltimore’s creative circles. “There are so many people in Baltimore whose early networks and friendships were made by working at Martick’s over the years,” Stevenson says. In his later years, according to Brennan, Martick kept busy going to the movies and Pimlico race track. As late as 2010, according to Pampinelli, he was still “running a business hauling people’s trash out of their basements or helping them move house. We’d make a few extra bucks hauling stuff to the city dump in that board truck of his.”
In October, however, he collapsed while walking down Howard Street and was diagnosed with advanced lung cancer. “It went pretty quickly there, at the end,” Brennan says. “A lot of people didn’t even realize he was sick. I didn’t know literally until the night before he died. I got [to the hospital] just in time. I got to give him a hug and a kiss and tuck him in when he fell asleep.”
Memorial plans are still tentative, but Alex Martick says that a celebration of his brother’s life is in the works for January. In a Facebook tribute to Martick, amid a plethora of reminiscences both affectionate and profane, Oldfield wrote:

I am overwhelmed with a combination of terrible sadness and memories that range from ridiculous to hilarious to truly tender. We were so very very very lucky to know Morris, he was like a planet that made an alternate gravity where people like us could thrive. He defied every law of physics [and] lousy boring stuff that people are supposed to do and I’ll bet y’all don’t know how close you were to having that walkin [refrigerator] fall in on your heads when you were having dinner. . . . Now that we’re all 50 or whatever we can maybe start to appreciate his absolute refusal to give in to all the thousands of things that drag people into those small compromises that destroy your soul. Morris never gave up. I’m only just beginning to get everything that he was saying to me all that time

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I feel like a . . .

. . . crazy person. . .

Yesterday's blog about Fishbone is gone, not a trace-not a link; the entire blog site is now different,     did not play my parts well in spite of many hours of practice and familiarity;  the drummer's electronic drum kit malfunctioned therefore we did not play with drums tonight;  best friend/wife/love of my life isn't feeling well;  the later it got the more I needed to accomplish;  nodding off as I try to write this;  sons are driving to Los Angeles early next week;  packing, truck pick-up, return from visiting friends must all be done effectively to carry off the packing and departure;  elder son flying back home Saturday morning;  wishing I could make a living from music;  and blogging;  getting sleepy;  having difficulty finishing this;  need extra rest;  have too much to do;  drummer has very ill relatives;  2012 is an election year;  need to write more but don't have much time;  three sons celebrated their visit tonight;  thinking about MD crabcakes;  hoping that's what the boys ate;  getting later and sleepier. . . feeling like a crazy person!

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You really have to. . .

. . . check out Fishbone.
These guys have been around since the early 80s and still YOU HAVEN'T HEARD OF THEM???? Music, brains, chops, dedication, longevity, heart, soul & humor. . . what more do you need?
It's bout damn time.


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More on Christmas. . .

(based upon the writings of John Shelby Spong)

. . . The birth story of Jesus was designed to introduce the adult Jesus of Nazareth as the one who would fulfill all the expectations of the Jews. Matthew's gospel portrays Jesus as a new and greater Moses, accompanied by the same signs that marked the birth of Moses'. The birth story is very similar to the story of Santa Claus. Both are beautiful and filled with meaning. Both stories capture a TRUTH that human words cannot fully contain.

Christmas should capture a truth that human words and actions can never fully contain or express. May we understand that truth, this and every Christmas, and apply that truth in our interactions with ALL humanity. . . throughout the entire year.

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It's. . .

. . . Christmas. . .

(from the writings of John Shelby Spong)

". . . the symbol of Santa Claus . . . is the personification of the spirit and joy of giving. . .the miraculous birth tradition disappears as history, but it re-emerges as powerful and shaping narratives that provide a primary insight into the meaning of Jesus. To journey into the heart of these narratives is to journey into the Christian claim that God was present in this man Jesus and that this experience compels us to come and worship. Frankly, this transition from history to poetry is that which will save the meaning of Christmas in our postmodern world. . ."

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And now, back to our regularly scheduled program. . .

. . . This break from over five years of regular performance was welcome, and for more reasons than one. During that period I was listening to music that I loved and that inspired me to want to make music of my own. Well, at least music more like what I was getting into than what was popular to sing along with, dance to in a drunken stupor or simply ignore while you ate, talked and generally celebrated some special occasion in your life or just a Saturday night's social event. This I was not getting. And I have myself to blame primarily. I had the freedom to leave my musical situation at the time and seek something more to what I envisioned. But alas, freedom is one thing and drive, determination and action are three others. These, quite sadly for my then musical disposition, I lacked. It really comes down to the fact that I really didn't want it badly enough.

In addition, while thoroughly enjoying the sonic antics of my art/prog/jazz-rock favorites and desiring to play things like those they played, I simply did not have the ability to create like they did. At least not on any substantial or meaningful scale. I wrote things sporadically before my retirement (my Sonata In No Particular Key is appropriate to mention here) but there was no consistent force, or inspiration for that matter, fueling the creation of much original material. I would have loved for a million new, creative musical ideas to flow freely and bountifully from my heart, mind and fingers, but it just didn't happen.

So I went happily and peacefully about building a new, married life together with my bride. My Farfisa Fast Four and Leslie 145 were setup in a prominent location in the den of our apartment for quick and easy access. Truth is, I'm not sure if I even played once a week at that time. But I was building my vinyl record album collection of my favorite jazz cats during the period and joyfully and effortlessly soaking in their music as often as I could. My Coltrane, Dolphy, Adderly and McLean collections grew with much less reliance on the old Tull, Gentle Giant and Yes for musical satisfaction. This too combined with sounds exemplifying the musical tastes of my significant other, sometimes not so willingly or graciously.

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