PICTURES OF ISRAEL GOODMAN YOUNG 2015 FOUND

At Matt Uminov's

at Luke's Bar and Grill 79th and 3rd
with Izzy's distant cousin Marilyn Goodman
and hubby

On E78th
enjoying a June evening

Along my path 

Izzy Young and I became buds.

I wouldn't be a part of the story without him.

 

MIKE PORCO Still in the musical limelight 89 years since his arrival to the States

 Wonderful article by Luigi Michele Perrifrom Italy recognized on 2.22.22.

Here's the link:

https://icalabresi.it/cultura/mike-porco-padre-calabrese-bob-dylan-folk-greenwich-village/

Here's the English translation:

(fact check: Mike arrived 2.2.33 not 1929. And his family first gave him work in the Bronx at Club 845 not at Gerde's upon his arrival)

MUCH LOVE to Sr. Perri for taking the time to collect the details for this story. We all miss MIKE PORCO

Mike Porco, the Calabrian who adopted Bob Dylan Leaving Domanico for New York to be a bricklayer, Michele takes over a small restaurant in Greenwich Village transforming it into a place that will make the history of world music. From there the older ones will pass, even a stranger minor fleeing from his parents, of which he will become the guardian before he takes flight up to the Nobel.

In the first volume of his autobiography, Chronicles (Feltrinelli, 2005), Bob Dylan remembers with grateful affection Mike Porco, the one who paved the way for his debut to the gates of success. "Mike was the Sicilian father – he writes – that I never had", Mike was the Sicilian father I never had. Actually Michele "Mike" Porco, was not Sicilian, as the American common sense defined southern Italian. He was Calabrian, Cosentino of Domanico, son of an emigrant to America, taken by the dream of reuniting his family in New York, where he was a bricklayer.

From the Serre cosentine to New York When the resumption of building activities began to loom, which the Great Depression of 1929 had blocked, Michele embarked in Naples to join his father and help him realize, as soon as possible, the anxious family aspiration. After three weeks of travel, the landing at Ellis Island, in the enchantment of the Statue of Liberty, at the access of the new world, open to the hope of a new life. On the quay, waiting for him, there was a group of villagers. 

But not the father. Death had crushed him, suddenly, a few days earlier. Mike, desperate, felt lost. Fortunately, he found hospitality from some relatives, who sent him to work in one of their restaurants, Gerde's club, in the center of Greenwich Village, a growing neighborhood in the heart of the Big Apple. From dishwasher to waiter, to trusted manager, Mike managed, nest egg after nest egg, to buy the place.

The Village and the Beat generation The Village was a village of irresistible appeal for intellectuals and bohemians, a composite microcosm of alternative culture, a New York synthesis between Montmartre and Montparnasse, teeming with pubs and bistros. It was the favorite destination of folksingers, pioneers of the beat movement. They were inspired by the autobiographical novel On the road by Jack Kerouac, the literary works of Allen Ginsberg, who was its guru, and the songs of Woody Guthrie, myth of the new musical course, revolutionary singer of the Other America, poet of social protest radicalized in communism, a solitary hobo monumented in life by his populous following.

The Village and the Beat generation Kerouac, in his wanderings, chose the Village, as a place congenial to his philosophy and his coherent way of life. Here he met Neal Cassady, a writer, who, like him, in existential unruliness, inspired the figure of the co-protagonist of his autobiographical novel for the common vain search for an indistinct lost father, suffered as they were, the first, for the death of the natural parent, the other, for having had him chronic alcoholic, reasons these, for them, of inner imbalance and existential crisis. Here, in the Village, Woody, also fatherless, fleeing from his unfortunate adolescence, found the ideal destination of his restless nomadism, the right atmosphere to fix his definitive domicile along Hudson Street, a tree-lined avenue between the river of the same name and the central Washington Square.

The Village and the Beat generation Driven by Kerouac's engaging message, by Ginsberg's poetic impulses and – more, much more – by the irrepressible desire to meet his idol Woody, Bob Dylan (born in 1941), not yet twenty, regularly penniless, guitar on his shoulder – his only available capital with some songs composed by him – he abandoned, en route with his father, the family to reach, on the road, the mythical Village, in search of the father of his artistic training and the weather suitable for his cultural pours, refined by the novels of Edgar Allan Poe and Mark Twain, writers of rupture in their genres and literary messages.

The Village and the Beat generation Il Gerde's Folk City Mike, now trained in the art of restaurateur, sniffed the emergence of the folk genre in the tastes, yes, of young people, but also of those intellectuals, those entrepreneurs and the many New Yorkers, who, moneyed, poured into the neighborhood to escape from the metropolitan hustle and bustle, in the neighborhood to experience the climate and, preferably, the nightlife. His intuition led him to renovate the restaurant, where he set up a box instead of the old piano bar to offer customers a musical tone, accompanying dinners, different from the usual.

Gerde's became Gerde's Folk City. He himself converted from a restaurateur – a role he entrusted to his brother Giovanni who, in the meantime, had joined him – to talent scouts of bands and solo singers, who, to make ends meet, during the day, performed on the street, trusting in the offers of passers-by, and, in the evening, went around the premises that exploited them, time after time, for a dollar plus a drink at the bar. He first had them tried, then selected them on the basis of customer satisfaction. If they worked, he made them rotate in turn, doubling the pay with consumption and dinner.

Bob Dylan and Mike Porco Bob Dylan happened to him. He allowed him the limelight for one evening. The audience applauded. He, on the other hand, was on the verge of rejecting him: "He has the voice of a crow," he told friends at his table – none other than Ginsberg and Robert Shelton, the first music critic of the New York Times – who, as regulars of the place, did not spare him the right imbeccate. The two certified the boy's talent. And they had to insist on convincing him to include Bob in the program of Monday hootenanny nights. It was a boom.

Bob Dylan became the protégé of Mike Porco, who, at that point, offered him a contract. Being still a minor, Bob should have had the union's clearance. The employee of the Musicians Union, to whom he turned, opposed him with the need for the consensual signature of one of the parents. To no avail, Bob, who no longer had contact with his family in Minnesota, replied that he was an orphan and alone in the world. To solve the problem was Mike, who signed as a tutor. Some excerpts from "Positively Porco", a docufilm about Mike and his restaurant: at minute 4'05" he himself tells how he acted as a guarantor for Bob Dylan.

From then on, the relationship between the two was that of father and son. Caring father and grateful son, no longer as rebellious as he had been with his real parent. Bob found the father he was looking for, unlike his idols who, not finding the meaning of life in the surrounding humanity, chased bliss by consuming themselves in drugs and alcohol. Bob Dylan didn't need it, even after having experienced the risk. He took his own path, to do so much, as he had promised himself in Song to Woody.

Shelton dedicated an exhilarating review to him. John Hammond, legendary record producer, grabbed it from Columbia Records. Hence the flight to celebrity, after having made the fortune of the Calabrian emigrant. Who, in the last years of his life, used to tell his children how his tenacity had been able to reunite the family in the well-being of the new world and thus crown his father's dream.

A place of worship Thirty years ago, on March 13, 1992, Mike Porco said goodbye to the world, the Calabrian who, in the thirties, from Domanico, a rural village in the Serre Cosentine, emigrated to America. And in New York he founded Gerde's Folk City – one of the three best music venues in the world, according to Rolling Stone magazine, along with Liverpool's Beatlesian The Cavern and New Yorker CBGB – and a cutting-edge driving force behind folk, rock, folk rock and a gathering place for counterculture intellectuals in turmoil in the Village. from the aforementioned Bob Dylan to Joan Baez, from Dave Van Ronk to Richie Havens, from John Lee Hooker to Jimi Hendrix, from Simon & Garfunkel to José Feliciano. A real launching pad for many musicians destined to enter the history of music.

The anniversary in the world vision In the limelight of the Newport Folk Festival, cyclically organized on the anniversaries of the venue, the artists promoted by Gerde's performed en masse, in declared homage to their discoverer. On the occasion of the 25th anniversary of Folk City, the concert was broadcast worldwide by PBS and BBC TV. In the 1979 one, the mayor of New York, Edward Koch, addressed to the owner of Gerde's a letter of warm congratulations for his "praiseworthy activity".

Often, the American media covered Mike Porco. He was ready to tell unpublished anecdotes about his singular experience and about the artists whose value, even without understanding an accident of music, he had instinctively grasped. He had become a character pleasing to the general public, who also had sympathy for his macaronic English. The artists themselves spoke of him as a great person, a familiar figure, certainly shrewd by the nose for business, but always available to help others.

Not only Bob Dylan: artists as sons In an interview for the book Conclusions on the wall: new essays on Bob Dylan by New York Times Magazine music expert Elizabeth Thomson (Thin man, 1980), Mike Porco told his story as an immigrant, as the owner of Gerde's, as a paternal supporter of Bob Dylan, in a special way, but also of the artists he set out on the road to success. "I feel like these guys were all my children. I have seen them grow up, he said, as people and as artists. Many of them have gone on to become real stars. I wish those times could come back, with Bobby, Janis Joplin, Steve Goodman, Phil Ochs. On the occasion of my sixty-first birthday, I saw them all coming, Bobby with Joan Baez, Allen Ginsberg, Phil, Bobby Neuwirth, Roger MacGuinn, all my old people».

Mike Porco, an affable Calabrian Robert Shelton in his biographical book on Bob Dylan described Mike Porco as follows: "An affable Calabrian, with a thin mustache, thick lenses and an accent even thicker than lenses. He barely distinguished a ballad from a mortadella. He amassed profits on consumption. He relied on the reactions of the audience to choose the singers, often listening not to the music, but to the applause. The sympathy that Mike aroused was also due to the fact that he had never learned English well.

He called his club "a Folk a City". He once dictated an advertisement to the Village Voice on the phone, which was repeated for two weeks in a row, presenting Anita Sheer as a flamingo singer (the English equivalent of the Italian "flamingo", ed), instead of flamenco. Of another who sang in different languages he said that he was a linguistic singer. He was, however, very well disposed towards new talents. "Let's give it a chance", was his motto, while his management policy was based on "the newer it is, the less it costs".

A coat that you won't forget José Feliciano declared: "Mike was like a second father to me. He helped me in every way to overcome the moments of difficulty, making me earn money. As a good and generous man that he was, since I did not have him, he gave me a new coat, because the cold in New York is felt, and how. I didn't have one that could be called such. These are things I will never forget." Of the same grateful tone, dozens and dozens of other testimonies about a man who, evidently, never forgot his origins and the meaning of his sacrifices.

To America he was able to return the capital he had given him in banknotes with the invisible, yet concrete, capital of his altruism and intuitive intelligence. If New York was not the capital of America, it became the capital of the world for that musical limelight born in the Village and conceived – who would have ever imagined it – by a Calabrian.

NOVEMBER TO REMEMBER

November 19th = Nov 6 - 11.6 Mirror flip : 11.6.21 6.11.21

(19 less 13 days=6th) 11.19.21 19.11.21 

19th=Full Moon - Blood Moon Lunar Eclipse 1st in a century and the last for nearly 900 years. 

SAVE THE CHILDREN

 On facebook today, I posted something after having a flash of a memory. 

The Saturday before 11.11.11
I went to David Amram's birthday concert with Vince Martin
who could not march down town with Seeger, Arlo, Amram and Chapin.
A couple days later, I met Joan Baez. 
Simpler times. Occupy was raging.
Kids had normal lives.
They are all fucked right now.
Save them now.

Does it matter that my Facebook post gets seen? Does it matter that I WON'T link this blog to ''my grandfather's'' facebook pages? I'm the sole admin. It doesn't matter how many likes or hits this gets.

Does the plea matter? Look him up on facebook. Mike Porco, The Dean of Folk City. My request is there. Please come back, Baez, to be a voice. 

I do not speak for Mike. I speak for me and my times. Could he have pictured business in the city LARGELY shut down? What would he say? I know only how I feel about it.

LAY OFF THE FUCKING KIDS

I'm asking Joan Baez (or just plain anyone major) to come back to NYC and save the children.

They are being asked to sacrifice more at the alter of covid closures and bottlenecks.

The current mayor is requesting that 5-11 year olds show 'papers' or proof of their vaxx. Sound eerily familiar. Don't lie to yourself. NAZI tactics based on fear can lead to.... Their survival rate is 99.998%. Wake up.

I used to care what the reader here thinks but things have changed. 

SAVE OUR CHILDREN

The kids are not losing their friends, they have ALREADY lost their friends.

They have already lost their socialization skills. They have lost precious education and development of all kinds. Social contact, speech, sports outlets, music skills, language. Five to eleven year olds? If one of you dare say 'it's to stop the spread'.....I swear.....

One. One visit.

Joan Baez (my chance 11.11.2011 meeting with her at Foley Square) is an example. I do indeed beg her specifically to return to NYC NOW to make one appearance. One.

11.11.11

11.11.11

OCCUPY Wall Street

Ancient history.

In the distant past, New Yorkers gave a shit

and defended their future.

But it could be anyone. One super star. One. If one were to come and stand up against the irrational claim that schools must remain limited and segregated, it would ALL be over.

''All of what?"

ALL OF THIS BAD ENERGY forcing businesses to close and bow to corporate rule.

Kid have lost their TEACHERS. Let it sink in!

LOST TEACHERS. Not from an illness but from a man-made decree. (not a law) No jab, no job. Starve to death, and sacrifice the children's abilities and education.

For those who have not been in NYZ recently, let me tell you, the rats are growing up to beaver size.

The garbage is piling up and the garbage men are calling in sick in opposition of mandates.

The crime is random and wild and the cops are calling in sick in opposition of the mandates. Thousands of protectors have retired early in 2020 and 2021.

The fires are responded to in much slower time because of the closure of many fire houses. Thousands of protectors have retired early in 2020 and 2021.

Children have already died in fires near closed fire houses. Elderly are being beaten. People of all ages are being pushed into the subway tracks. Children (teens) cannot be out together or alone at night. It's risky. Shall I go on? The homeless, the grime, the boarded up ex-businesses, the empty streets....

New Yorkers reading this and denying this list can fuck off because that's what New Yorkers who don't see the obvious should do. Fuck right off. Defend your city. Stand up or fuck off.

Crossing the street is risky. But reopening schools and allowing the city to function will only lead to true normalcy. It's not risky to anyone's health. Your definition of 'new normal' may also fuck right off with you. The IQ of the world's children has crashed. 

This city needs to breathe again and live. If not, it will die on its knees.

If not Baez, then who?

If not a music superstar, then what industry star? Basketball? Hollywood? It's too easy to 'cancel' any one on earth. Politicians won't stand up in Foley Square and demand a lifting of all mandates because they WANT TIGHTER CONTROL. It's their reason for living.

Does it matter? Should the children have friends and social groups? Should the children know what their parents look like without a mask halfway on? Shouldn't they?

If a superstar stood tall- one superstar on one grand day- this travesty would be declared over by the people. Together we would figure out how. If any one here says...''bbbbut infection...''... you have a real problem.

If not now, when? 

OPEN LETTER❤️

bob asks Bob vid to Dylan

The above youtube link is all you need to know. 

While doing my laundry, it came to me. Ask Bob to call Angelina. If Grandpa were alive I'd have to ask him for a favor. Do it now. Make a video. Upload it while everything is in the dryer. 

My dear Mom and sister...they have also been in lessening contact with my girl. Not many comms.

I asked a family friend to call to no avail. If Dylan won't maybe Feliciano might because Phil cannot. Those would be the three Kings I could think of. I'd rather bring gifts to them than ask a favor. This may only take a moment of their day. 🙏🏼 I'd reach out to Baez but that would be too much. 

Lesson. I'm learning a lesson. That must be it. 

And that may be: Live life. Be there for your child. Pray for her protection. Because that's what works.

But if you'd like to get a lifetime of brownie points with your child, ask Bob. ❤️

Are they trying to cancel Bob now?

Again I ask, are they trying to cancel Bob Dylan for an alleged event 56 years ago?

STEP OFF

https://iapps.courts.state.ny.us/nyscef/ViewDocument?docIndex=PCZoaLk/gBPFslAyJfbMAQ==

 

Folk City memories mailed con seis cervezas

I damn near said get yer mammaries sent in the mail but no.

The UPS guy came through today for a thirsty brother. I received a warm 6 of 7% IPA (not that higher ETOH content matters) along with my very first tee from my virtual store.

Link here:

https://www.bonfire.com/store/friends-of-mike-porco/

When I buy my own stuff, it turns out to be a few dollars off my own purchase but for you, you get a tee and I receive a few residual dollars in some PayPal sort-a way. 

It is worth the trouble for me to share these unique patterns and symbolic shirts because there is no inventory or 'store' for me to open and close. I can assure you that 100% of the proceeds are 100% guaranteed to go to feed the mouths of hungry children. 

And let's be honest, the six pack is a representation of the total profits so far. Since it is in honor of my grandfather's bar,  I thought it was appropriate. Chin Chin!

By the way, this 21st amendment IPA is highly recommended if you like your beer with a little burnt cauliflower flavor. So fucking good. 

CHECK OUT THE Store and see the designs. It's mostly ads from the Village Voice featuring Mike Porco's favorite sons and shows recorded there. See for yourself.

Help out. Show your pride. Get some beer. 

When that foot of pride come down ain't no going back.

Custom made just for you

Gratuities or

Deposit of crypto (ETH) also accepted here 

0x44222f8E571e36A8e7Ea2D29C588C83ccb1aa232

Or

Gerdesfolkcity.crypto

Friendsofmikeporco.crypto 

FRIENDS OF MIKE PORCO MERCH

 Welp. I've sold hats, chip clips, posters and cheap concert tees without a digital store. Now I offer you a selection of unique and lovely premium tees. More tees and long sleeves added soon! 

Be recognized by these exclusive and unique Tees. Show your support and spread the word about the world renown Folk Music Cabaret and Home to every Greenwich Village standout, Gerde's Folk City. Many friends of Mike Porco shot on to stardom. His good deeds and connections helped shape the sound of American Music history. 

https://www.bonfire.com/store/friends-of-mike-porco/

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