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3C THE DAILY ASTORIAN • FRIDAY, MAY 20, 2016 BOOKS WHAT ARE THEY READING? 1950s Manhattan and the man who chronicled it Columnist told the tales of New York By R.J. MARX The Daily Astorian A haircut from a head hunter? Meyer Berger expresses New York City as well as any journalist I’ve read on the topic. And there are a lot of distinguished ones, from Walt Whitman to Jimmy Bres- lin, Pete Hamill and Tom Wolfe. What I like best about Berger — bylined Meyer, called Mike — is his combination of high- and low-brow, society’s upper edge and the people who stoked their furnaces. Berger presents spry and poetic characters and undomesticated scenes from the microcosm of mid-1950s Man- hattan in “New York: A Great Reporter’s Love Affair with a City,” from Fordham Univer- sity Press. Berger, a grammar-school dropout who wrote the “About New York” column for The New York Times, bridged that gap. “Berger brought to spot- light many of those New York- ers who usually exist on the journalistic margins,” Hamill writes in the introduction. “They have neither fame nor notoriety. They never hit game-winning home runs and do not murder their spouses. ... And they know things. Often, they know amaz- ing things.” Berger, who earned a Pur- ple Heart in World War II, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1950 for his account of the murder of 13 peo- ple by a disturbed war veteran in Camden, New Jersey. Eclectic characters In this collection of columns from 1953 to 1959, Berger describes the city’s civil ser- vice examiners who prepare tests for 2,132 different civil ser- vice jobs, mark their papers and grade them. He tracks down the bus builders — Overseas Equipment Co. — who built buses shipped to Saudi Arabia to take pilgrims to Mecca. Each bus was a differ- ent color, Berger writes, except green, which, “it seems is sacred to Mohammed.” There were no marriage licenses in New York City before 1908, Berger writes. Up to then, ministers, magis- trates, sea captains, aldermen or “whoever” tied nuptial knots and sent a record to the Health Department. Berger was the only New York City Yankee to chroni- cle the cemetery for Confeder- ate soldiers in the borough of Queens, where 460 Southern Civil War dead were buried. In his columns you can read of the between 600 and 800 Mohawk Indians who worked on bridges and skyscraper construction. Berger writes of the tailor who dressed the Vanderbilts, and an animal called “the soft- eyed Panamanian oligo, kin to the kinkajou.” The last trolley car was hauled out of the city by high- way trailer-truck Nov. 3, 1958, he reports. Fires in mailboxes Berger’s columns consider ires in mailboxes and pene- trate the secret society of orchid breeders in Manhattan. We read about the “grim and fabulously wealthy real estate operator who kept his six sisters imprisoned in their mansion.” In later years, two of those sis- ters sometimes appeared in the neighborhood dressed in “black bombazine.” In one column, Berger joined 1,200 Scottish gentlemen at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel sitting down to “cock-a-leekie, to hag- gis and to salmon.” On April 20, 1955, he wrote about “grating anglers,” treasure hunters who dangled rope and wire for coins underneath the sidewalks. “They’re inclined, almost unanimously, to be on the misanthropic side,” Berger comments. Then there’s Allan Leonard Rock, the ad man who main- tained the archives of the hunter and trapper Pawnee Bill, of Pawnee Bill and the Buffalo Bill Wild West Show. Joe A. Munang was a Dusun tribesman from British North Borneo who ran a little bar- bershop opposite St. John’s Cathedral. “There’s something odd about this because Joe is descended from North Borneo head hunters,” Berger writes. Cigars for chimps I laughed out loud reading about the “mostly retired busi- nessmen from Park and Fifth Submitted Photo Meyer Berger’s collection celebrates mid-20th century New York City. avenues who keep Joe, the Cen- tral Park Zoo’s chimpanzee, in cigars.” “They unselishly give him their brand,” Berger adds. “They rarely pass him a stinker.” And a newspaper writer might try, but he may never be able to write a lead like this one: “You come across some odd collections, but you’re not apt to match Miss Del- phine Binger’s collection of 500,000 chicken, turkey and goose wishbones — 20 years accumulation. She only has room for only a few thousand in her two-room lat at 145 West 96th Street. Her aunts and other kin store the rest for her in trunks.” ‘Captain Fantastic’ a Swiss Family Robinson for today outside with his sword. For David Cronenberg’s “Eastern Promises” (Mortensen’s lone Oscar nomination), he briely lived in Russia and suggested his character’s extensive Russian maia tattoos. On “Captain Fantastic,” he built a garden. “I like to bring objects, ideas. And I like to work with directors who aren’t threat- ened by that. It’s just my pro- cess and it helps me,” says Mortensen, who also writes poetry, composes classical music and founded his own publishing company. “I just want to make the most of each moment we’re ilming, in terms of preparing it and doing it, but also as a human being. This is part of my life. It’s not just a iction.” Mortensen stars in ilm set in Washington state teepee By JAKE COYLE Associated Press CANNES, France — In the ilm “Captain Fantastic,” Viggo Mortensen plays one of the all-time great movie dads. In a teepee in remote Washing- ton state, he’s raising six chil- dren like a modern-day Swiss Family Robinson. The chil- dren, well-behaved and smart, are equally adept at skinning a deer and reading “The Broth- ers Karamazov” by the camp- ire. They pine after bon- ing knives like most kid do iPhones. For audiences at the Cannes Film Festival and the Sun- dance Film Festival (where it irst premiered before landing in France), “Captain Fantastic” has resonated as a movie for its time: a heartfelt and comic exploration about whether our hyper-digital, cacopho- nous lives have strayed from important things. “It feels like one of those movies that has connected with something related to U.S. society right now,” Mortensen said Wednesday while smok- ing a cigarette on a Cannes rooftop patio. “People get bewildered and think: `I can’t do that. I’m not going to skin a f---ing deer.’ But there are other things you can do.” Off-the-grid The ilm is the second directing feature for Matt Proudly liberal AP Photo/Joel Ryan Actor Viggo Mortensen poses for portrait photographs for the film “Captain Fantastic” at the Cannes international film festival in France. Ross, a veteran actor known to many as Gavin Belson on HBO’s “Silicon Valley.” In “Captain Fantastic,” the idyll of the family’s off-the- grid existence is challenged when their mother dies. A bus trip to her New Mexico parents (long critics of their lifestyle choices) confronts the kids with normal Ameri- can life and teases out ques- tions about their highly edu- cated but socially removed upbringing. Should 8-year- olds really be climbing rock faces? Ross acknowledges there are some autobiographi- cal aspects to the tale. His mother, he says, was “a seeker” and he grew up partly in alternative living commu- nities. (“They were hippie communes but they weren’t really hippie communes because it was the ‘80s,” he jokes.) He has lived in a tee- pee in the summer and does, like his ictional family, cel- ebrate Noam Chomsky Day. (“He’s my hero,” he says.) But the ilm, which opens in theaters July 8, mostly came out of Ross’s own par- enting. He and his wife, who live in Berkeley, California, have a 13-year-old daughter and 8-year-old son. “I had a lot of questions about being a father and a parent, and I wanted to con- textualize it or dramatize it,” says Ross. “And I was sort of butting up against our culture and who we are as a country.” Shot in Washington Ross shot the Paciic Northwest half of the ilm in Washington, and had his cast come out two weeks early to help build the family’s home. “There were many things on some scale I had to learn for this,” says Mortensen. “I’m not that kind of parent. I don’t have his way of rea- soning. But I do connect to certain things and approve of other things. I was very happy to be in the woods.” It’s the kind of preparation that Mortensen relishes. He lives his movies; the process for him is as much a part of it as the inished ilm. For “The Lord of the Rings,” he slept At their photo call in Cannes, the group held up a Bernie Sanders T-shirt. But while “Captain Fantastic” is proudly liberal, its conclu- sion rests on compromise with the father’s conserva- tive in-laws. Both Ross and Mortensen, though, are trouble by the country’s direction. “That it’s a country of immigrants has magically disappeared in some people’s minds,” Mortensen, who grew up in Argentina, upstate New York and Denmark, says, shaking his head. But ultimately, Ross hopes “Captain Fantastic” preaches only tolerance, compassion and education. “It’s asking you to be pres- ent and not just on autopilot,” says Ross. “I hope it has an impact. I hope it does.” Now available in the The Daily Astorian and Chinook Observer For more information call 503-325-3211 crbizjou rn a l.com