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R.I.P. Da|Ba Dan

UPDATE #4: Da|Ba was packed on Saturday night for dinner and drinks for a remarkable, impromptu gathering of friends and family. The restaurant’s final service was Sunday, with people invited to visit with the family today (Monday) from 2-6 pm.

UPDATE #3: Over $45,000 in donations have been raised from the community as of Sunday at 1 pm to assist the Nilsson family. You can donate here.

UPDATE #2: Bob Rasner posted the following message on Facebook from the Nilsson family:

A Message from Daniel Nilsson’s Family

We are very grateful for the outpouring of affection for our Daniel. We all miss him.

We invite everyone who wishes to share their memories to meet on Monday, February 8th between 2pm and 6pm at DA|BA.

The funeral will be private and no charity has been designated. We are planning a memorial service open to everyone in the community for Daniel’s birthday, March 18th. More information will be posted at a future date.

UPDATE #1: Philmont native and Da|Ba regular Bob Macfarlane, who was also at the restaurant the evening before Dan’s death, turned up this 2014 article which captures some of the essence of Dan’s work and presence.

 

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Hudson is awash in tears today over the untimely, unfathomable and genuinely tragic passing of Da|Ba owner Daniel Nilsson, said by a source in contact with the State Troopers to have died by his own hand on a family member’s farm.

I saw Dan just last night at his restaurant. We didn't get a chance to speak, as he was in conversation with another table. His rich chanterelle soup and clever tacos were as splendid as ever, and there was no sense of anything amiss. In recent days he had been posting hilarious photos of customers, his family and himself taken in a temporary Da|Ba photobooth.

I met Dan at the moment he landed in Hudson, while out canvassing for voters with Abdus Miah, probably in Spring 2005. A jolly young man was standing by his car near Jubilee (now Savoia), and we tried to register him to vote. He explained that he couldn't yet, but that he was here to look at the Paramount building across the street. If he bought it, he vowed to register right away.

Dan was full of life, and larger than it. He made friends easily, kept things fun, cared about his customers, provided countless people with needed work, and made a beautiful family.

That he is gone is deeply upsetting and baffling. If there was one quality to learn from Dan, it might be his absence of judgement toward others—his embrace of the many personalities and foibles which came through the Da|Ba door. And so one must honor his painful choice, even as we bitterly regret his sudden absence.

R.I.P., Sandy Socolow

Over at the Millbrook Times, Peter Krulewich (coincidentally, my father’s best friend from grade school) remembers his brother-in-law, CBS newsman Sandy Socolow.

Peter recalls:

[Sandy] was in the Millbrook Diner in 1963 when he saw people running down the street. President Kennedy had been shot. There were no open phone lines to CBS so Sandy got in a car and went immediately to CBS headquarters in New York where he was with Walter Cronkite covering the story.

For some years, Sandy had a house in the 100 block of Warren Street, in the building now occupied by The Gilded Owl. A couple of times, he asked me to buy copies of local newspapers if he was not in town; turned out the reason was that he would drive them up every week to his friend Andy Rooney in Rensselaerville. 

R.I.P. Dick May

I was very sorry to learn this week of the unexpected death of Greene County resident Dick May. A professor of history with an abiding interest in the correct use of language, Dick’s gentlemanly manner managed to keep his searing wit from ever offending.

I last saw Dick a couple of months ago at a charity poker tournament (in which he placed fourth out of a couple dozen players), and he seemed his usual acerbically-witty self.

For several years, he posted wry observations about local politics at Seeing Greene. His blog posts will be missed—with hope someone will archive them—but their author will be missed far moreso.

Pete Seeger goes drifting along

Pete Seeger and the Beacon Sloop Club sing Woody Guthrie’s So Long, It’ Been Good to Know Yuh (Dusty Old Dust)

 
When opponents of the St. Lawrence Cement plant were accused of being NIMBYs, I’d always invoke Pete Seeger’s line: “That word should be spelled with an I, for Now I Must Be Involved.” A short remembrance is here from his great admirer Alan Chartock of WAMC.

So long, Sweeps

Devastating news came early this evening that former Hudson Police Commissioner, Nassau County captain, and Sweeps proprietor Jeff Bagnall—a great friend to and unofficial counsellor to many locally, died unexpectedly today. 

On a personal note, I had many political and other strategic conferences with “Sweeps” in his shop and unofficial office (see above) over the years. A longer remembrance will be posted here soon, to remember one of the great behind-the-scenes forces in the County.    

R.I.P. Richard Artschwager

Richard Artschwager, the internationally-reknowned artist who lived for many years in Columbia County, has died at 89.

Richard used to rent a place next to the church on Union Street, and also in my barn behind Curtiss House, mainly for spraypainting some of his deeply, appealingly weird wire figures.

As the link above notes, Artschwager works could not be fit into any neat category; his art was truly sui generis. I remember being both baffled and charmed when I first saw his drawings and sculpture in person (as opposed to reproductions) in Soho at Mary Boone in the early ’90s. The bafflement was part of the charm. He truly made art only for its own sake, following his own peculiar path.

I saw his wife Ann just a few days ago in T.J. Maxx of all places. She mentioned that Richard’s retrospective at the Whitney was just closing, and moving on to L.A. It’s at least wonderful that the retro happened in his lifetime. 

His immense talent aside, he was a witty but gentle guy, and will be much missed. The Times’ obituary is here.

Roger Coleman obituary

The Register-Star has now posted an account of Coleman’s life and publishing career at this link.

A death in the community

According to two sources close to the paper (one inside, another outside), Register-Star publisher Roger Coleman died unexpectedly of a heart attack today. Reportedly he left recently for a holiday vacation at his home in Kentucky.

Coleman took over the publisher’s role in 2004-2005, after the demotion and later firing of his predecessor Jules Molenda, which coincided with the demise of the St. Lawrence Cement project. The paper remained very similar on the news side, but Coleman mostly avoided Molenda’s habit of publishing fire-breathing editorials on most every major and minor controversy, preferring to stick to more popular and boosterish material.

While this site has tangled with Coleman over various issues over the years, this news comes as a very sad shock. Sincere condolences go out to the Coleman family and Reg-Star staff.

R.I.P. Drayton Grant

Drayton Grant, the able and unfailingly jolly Rhinebeck attorney, died Wednesday morning after a battle with cancer.

Her law partner John Lyons writes:

“It was an honor and a privilege for me to be Drayton’s friend and partner. Her tremendous capacity to love her fellow man and her community and to work hard for both, along with her rock-solid integrity and character, her easy sense of humor and boundless joie de vivre, her intelligence and indomitable spirit were known by all. These are just a few of the qualities which I loved in her and which, over the course of our almost 20 years as partners and friends, changed me in so many ways for the better. Her positive imprint on those she knew and loved and on her community will be a lasting testament to her spirit and her life.”

Her obituary (with information about calling hours and funeral time) can be found here.

Gore Vidal, the Valley’s first newcomer

Gore Vidal, upstate at Edgewater

Gore Vidal bought a house upstate for $16,000 in 1946—a full 62 years ago. His Barrytown home, called Edgewater, is one of the only Hudson Valley mansions located on the west side of the railroad tracks. (It’s now owned by the financier and historic preservationist Dick Jenrette, who purchased it from him in 1969 for $125,000.)

Considering that the Hudson Valley seems to get rediscovered every 10 years or so, it’s tempting to view Vidal as the original “newcomer,” except that he was born at West Point. But apart from his birthplace, Vidal must have come across to his new neighbors on the River as the ultimate City interloper. A novelist, critic, playwright, occasional actor, Army veteran, quipster and quixotic political candidate, Vidal was also a tart-tongued tastemaker: contrarian, iconoclastic, left-wing, blue-blooded and promiscuously bisexual to boot. (He claimed a tally of conquests that rivals Wilt Chamberlain’s.)

Theatrically immodest, Vidal said that “There is no human problem which could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise.” He was much more out of the British mold of journalist/authors, cultivating high-profile feuds (with Norman Mailer, William F. Buckley, Charlton Heston, et al.) both out of personal conviction and also to milk their publicity value.

Unlike his sparkling earlier essays, Vidal’s later work could feel a bit overly-vehement and repetitive, even when one agreed with his politics. Though celebrated as a supreme stylist, the prose of his well-known historical novels is less than fluid, though still enjoyable for their imaginative leaps, bordering on outright fabications—such as his attempt to rehabilitate Aaron Burr, at the expense of Hamilton and Jefferson. More purely enjoyable is lighter fiction, such as Kalki (about a hapless would-be savior arriving on earth near the end of the world). His late-life cameos on TV and film, from The Simpsons to Gattaca, made better use of a persona that was long-since established, and by his own admission a relic of a different time in American history.

Intellectually and socially elite, Vidal was at the same time a political populist, writing that “The genius of our ruling class is that it has kept a majority of the people from ever questioning the inequity of a system where most people drudge along, paying heavy taxes for which they get nothing in return.”

Of his time in the Valley, Vidal wrote:

When a writer moves into the house that he most wants or needs, the result is often a sudden release of new energy. Henry James's move to Lamb House produced The Wings of the Dove, Somerset Maugham's move to Villa Mauresque resulted in his only satisfactory novel, Cakes and Ale. In my case, there was a burst of energy and imagination of a sort not accessible to me before. Overnight—the result of the octagonal library?”I jettisoned what I called ‘the na­tional manner,' the gray, slow realism of most American writing, not to mention the strict absence of wit and color...

According to The Poughkeepsie Journal, the actress Joanne Woodward told Vidal he “never should have sold that house,” and that the writer “dreamed” all the remainder of his life of moving back.

So long, it’s been good to know ’ya

Tom Davis, an alum of the earliest Saturday Night Live classes and a neighbor here on Bell’s Pond Road, has died after a struggle of several years with cancer. He had a wicked sense of humor about even that, recommending his illness as a weight loss regimen; after his initial bout, I hardly recognized him in his usual spot at Swoon. Tom held on for so long, and seemed so well-adjusted to his fate, that it feels that much more surprising that the death he anticipated really did overtake him.

He did an installation last year in Maximillian Goldfarb’s revolving window gallery in Hudson's 300 block, consisting of objects he’d salvaged from the Taghkanic Creek. The Creek passes by his somewhat ramshackle house—on whose lawn a gold Grand Marquis has sat most days, like the embodiment of some inside, sardonic but jovial joke. Tom managed to be easygoing even at his most absurdly cynical moments. His text for the installation is required reading:

As an old-school Malthusian liberal, I’ve always believed that the source of all mankind’s problems is overpopulation. I’m finally going to do something about it.

One of the pleasures of living Upstate is getting to know people like Tom as people, at a distance from their fame. We’d shared space at various local bars for a long time before I cottoned to the fact that this guy was the other half of Al Franken’s team, or that he played one of the goofball workers on the train in Trading Places, among many other classic scenes he acted in or scripted.

My last chat with him was at a local sushi place, debating whether it was worse to grow up as a Vikings or a Red Sox fan. I’ll remember in particular Tom’s nasal yet rotund conversational voice, which added that much more wry force to his understated wit. Tom could look up and say “it’s raining,” and it would come out funny.

Remembering Bill

Prompted by an obituary in today’s Register-Star, a longtime Hudson resident sent me this remembrance:

I just want to note the passing of one of our great local publishers, Bill Lundquest.

Bill was an old-time publisher, with real ink in his blood, a heart of gold, and a gift for sales. A big man, he had a splendid sense of humor and real sense of the community, even in dark economic days.

I met him when he was still publishing the Register-Star in the late 1980s, and was then trying to save the paper from what became its unfortunate fate: sale to a crummy—and small—conglomerate.  (He was also publishing Harold Hanson's antique journal.) His time at the Register is not mentioned in his obit. I’m sure Bill wrote that omission in himself, and I can imagine just what he was muttering! 

I would visit him frequently at the paper and would be just as apt to find him laying out pages as sweeping the press room floor, always in a white shirt and tie.

When Bill was driven out of the paper, he didn’t lose a step. He started his two advertising pubs (including the Sampler), and got in his SUV, outfitted with a front-seat computer, phones, etc., and drove and drove and drove and sold and sold and sold.

I kept trying to get him to start a real newspaper, but he just laughed and drove on and sold on. Great guy.