TALES OF LOHR: THE WHERE OF THE WORDS
On the importance of reading logistics; plus, "Factory Roll Call" buffs up a Buffy
Amazing but true: It’s already May. Here in Pittsburgh, the weather has leapt straight from overcast late-winter dregs, bypassing early spring vibes entirely, to the penetrating sunshine and humidity-courting climes of the smack-dab-in-it days of the season. People are venturing out in shorts; Kennywood, the city’s celebrated old-school amusement park, has opened for the summer; and everyone you meet on your daily rounds is encouraging you to get outside, it’s so beautiful out, you gotta go soak up some sun!
Dark times, in other words, for anyone who, like me, generally cannot abide the summer months.
As someone whose natural body chemistry “runs hot,” summertime means more generalized discomfort, the heat of the air pressing down on my already elevated internal temperature. I spend three months out of the year feeling like I’m walking around coated in a thin film of perspiration. If I have to be anywhere that requires a certain polish and propriety to one’s appearance, I generally travel to the location of said upscale-leaning event in a “sweating shirt,” a T-shirt I can schvitz all over to my heart’s content, changing into non-damp attire once I arrive. Summertime also means adding to my routine regular rounds of lawn maintenance, my least favorite of all household chores (largely due to all the heat-related issues delineated above). Add to that the ever-escalating record-high temperatures brought on by climate change, and you’re dealing for a full quarter of the year with a man who’s heat-grumpy at best, a useless lump of sweat-slicked ooze at worst.
And yet, these months harbor for me one undeniable pleasure, which I got to indulge for the first time in 2024 just this past Monday morning. I had no plans for the day, the weather was warm but not punishingly sticky, and so there was but one thing to do: Brew a pot of coffee, call up a mellow chillhop channel on my YouTube app, and settle in on the porch for a morning’s sip and read.
Nirvana.
Ask any seasoned reader and they’ll tell you: The only thing better than a great book is the perfect location in which to read it. The combination of soothing aesthetics, bodily comfort, and manageable levels of potential distraction go a long way in making a round of reading as stimulating and satisfying as possible. My summer-morning porch reading sessions are just one of the ideally curated reading experiences I have incorporated into my regular life routine. My day-job jaunts into my city’s downtown area are best when the timeframe allows for a pre-work settling in at Rock ‘N Joe, my favorite local coffee spot, where their upstairs lounge, complete with artificial fireplace, is a wonderfully cozy reading nook. (My brew of choice: Their signature medium roast, called, much to my delight, Velvet Underground.) I usually opt for public transportation on these trips to and from downtown, but I never mind it, because the traveling downtime is filled with whatever novel or non-fiction volume is currently commanding my attention. And nighttime, particularly in late fall and winter, is the perfect opportunity to venture down into my basement for an adult beverage, a quality cigar, and an hour (or, when especially lucky, two) with my latest read.
Many of my fondest memories of reading are intimately associated with the circumstances in which I consumed the books in question. A pair of visits to the San Francisco Bay area were high points of my latter years on the West Coast, and I will always remember the mornings of my second sojourn there, in the spring of 2017, spent on the balcony of my marina-overlooking Alameda hotel room, sipping my coffee while reading Touré’s insightful I Would Die 4 U, his 2013 volume on Prince, who had passed less than a year prior to my trip. (Shout-out to The Booksmith in the Haight Ashbury, always one of my first SF stops to pick up my reading material for that particular visit.) I spent a lovely, albeit unseasonably sunny, October afternoon in New York City doing nothing more demanding, or less bountifully rewarding, than sitting on a bench on Central Park’s Literary Walk, reading David Robinson’s fastidiously well-researched BFI Film Classics volume on the great silent German expressionist horror film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. And I think one of the reasons I have such fond feelings for Steven Hyden’s music-rivalry meditation Your Favorite Band is Killing Me is because I read most of it (pacing in an open space, as is my wont) in Burbank’s George Izay Park, just a few blocks’ walk from my last southern California apartment. That park, in which I spent many hours reading during my four years of Burbank residence, was a blessed oasis during the months-that-felt-like-years when my depression was at its worst, and reading was the only joyful activity I could muster my beleaguered spirit to accomplish.
I have carved beloved reading spaces out of circumstances and locales where one might not necessarily think to seek them. During the summer of 2001, my car-less grad-student self, working a program-required internship at a Santa Monica-based film production company, had to make it from Orange County to the company’s coastal offices entirely by public transportation. This brutal 90-minutes-each-way train-and-bus haul was made not only manageable, but actually pleasant, by the copious amount of reading I was able to do to and from my internship duties. (I still remember a day on which I read the entirety of Joe Queenan’s slim, fast-paced pop-culture screed Red Lobster, White Trash, and the Blue Lagoon en route to the office…and then re-read the entire book, the same day, on the way home.) Lots of people talk about beach reading…but do many of them hold fond recollections of reading while walking along the beach? I do, in Santa Monica, Venice, and Malibu. And every once in a while, when the bumper-to-bumper grind of SoCal freeway driving got especially tedious, I would scoop a volume up from the passenger seat and try to squeeze in a paragraph or two before the traffic got moving again. Crazy? Maybe. Infinitely preferable to just sitting there staring at taillights? What do you think?
And so, as summer beckons in earnest, with all of its sweltering burdens and grass-growing demands on my time and energy, I take solace in the knowledge that, for at least a couple of days a week, I will be able to dial down my focus to nothing but the ease of my YouTube music, the savor of my steaming will-to-live juice, and the ceaseless joys of an hour with nothing to do but read, reflect, and enjoy. After all, it’s already May. Time goes fast. Before you know it, it’s autumn again.
Which means sitting on the porch with my coffee, a good book, and the sound of the rain.
FACTORY ROLL CALL
WILLIAM “BUFFY” PHELPS (? - ?)
In 1965, a young man named William Phelps, his shaggy hair offset by a well-cut jacket and tie, sat for a Screen Test at Andy Warhol’s Factory. The following year, Phelps, “Buffy” to his friends, appeared in one of two filmed versions of “Their Town,” a Ronald Tavel-scripted meditation on the recently publicized saga of Charles Schmid, a serial killer who briefly plagued the Tuscon area in ‘66, claiming three young female victims. “Their Town,” which also features Warhol superstars Eric Emerson, Mary Woronov, Ingrid Superstar, and Susan Bottomly (aka International Velvet), became one of the segments that made up Warhol’s commercial breakthrough avant-garde feature The Chelsea Girls.
Phelps was himself an aspiring filmmaker who, some months after his time at the Factory, sent Warhol a letter from southern California, where he was formally studying filmmaking at USC. In the letter, Phelps mentions California Speed, a film on which he was then in production, and expresses a desire to work for Warhol in the coming summer months. As far as is known, Phelps did no further work for Warhol. Nor is California Speed included among his list of credits on the Internet Movie Database.
But Phelps has built up for himself a strong resume in both mainstream and independent film and television production. In 1970, two films on which Phelps worked were entered in Michigan’s Ann Arbor Film Festival, Sweet Return and the Phelps-co-written The Reversal of Richard Sun (the latter co-starring and directed by John Milius). Phelps has worked consistently in cinema in the decades since. His credits include several surf-focused features and documentaries, most notably the 1987 feature North Shore, which he directed and co-wrote; docs on Bob Marley and Hollywood / theater photographer Michael Childers; a 1996 episode of the TV series based on the popular John Hughes comedy Weird Science; and, in 2001, the short film Stealing Roy, for which he and his co-writer, York Alec Shackleton, were honored with a Best Screenplay nomination at the Pixie Awards, honoring internet-based filmmaking.
Phelps’ most recent credit is as a producer of the 2022 supernatural drama Until We Meet Again, which co-stars Twilight actor Jackson Rathbone and Quentin Tarantino favorite Michael Madsen. He may be Buffy no more, but William Phelps is still a name to be respected in contemporary filmmaking.