Whining Diners

Springs

December 13, 1997

Dear Helen,

Not to diminish the complaints of all the folks who have whined in this section about poor service, menu prices, and management's manners while dining in East Hampton restaurants, but since when is the letters to the editor a restaurant complaint department?

So far, there have been attacks on the Maidstone Arms, Rowdy Hall, Della Femina, the Farmhouse, and Gurney's in the last six months. There have been others. This is folderol, and a below-the-belt assault to avenge what were either bad dining experiences or disputes about menu pricing. (Memo to future complainants: Spare us your crying.)

Guess what? You can't always get what you want. Guess what? The best revenge anyone can ever exact on a restaurant is to not go there. If a diner has a problem, there are better ways to try to get one's point across: 1) approach the manager and let him or her know that you are displeased, 2) don't be bitchy - it gets you nowhere, 3) write a letter to the owner. If your complaint has not been resolved, I repeat: Don't go back.

But I have a suggestion. Why don't you start a column called "Whine & Dine," where restaurants and grumpy diners can spar in print? Because believe it or not, the restaurants have a few complaints of their own!

How about customers who: 1) abuse reservationists for a table, 2) talk on cell phones while dining, 3) have cell phones ringing while dining, 4) show up late for a reservation, 5) don't show up at all, 6) treat wait staff and bar staff like chattel, 7) get drunk and disorderly, 8) come on to staff members, which includes inappropriate touching, 9) leave less than 15 percent tips, or, 10) no tip at all? What about the old trick of drinking half a glass of wine and then saying you don't like the wine?

(Or maybe we should continue our public gripes. How's this sound: Helen, I went into Village Hardware the other day, and there was dust on a box of Borax? Then I went to the File Box and I had to wait five seconds to buy a pen while the clerk finished processing the person in front of me. I was so miffed that I went to the movies, and do you know what? I had to wait to go to the bathroom. And then I picked up a copy of The East Hampton Star only to find a typo!)

And let me say this: I have had exceptional meals at the Maidstone Arms (cassoulet), Rowdy Hall (best burger in town), Della Femina (three stars by Newsday, three stars by The Times - hello?) on a consistent basis. I haven't had the pleasure of dining at the Farmhouse, but I hear their pizzas are excellent; my last meal at Gurney's was a hearty rack of lamb. And take notice: These places are still open. They must be doing something right.

One more reminder to the whiners - and this is important: Restaurants employ lots of people, they truly help the local economy. Tomorrow's artist or writer is today's waitress or bartender; today's server may be a mom or dad. Kitchen workers have families to feed. All restaurant owners are not millionaires; they pay taxes. The next time you have a bad meal, just don't go back.

I have 23 years of experience in the food business as a waiter, a bartender, a maitre d', a manager, and as a restaurant publicist. If I ever own a restaurant and you whiners come in and don't behave (or complain) properly, you'll have me to answer to - and my pen.

Sincerely,

STEVE HAWEELI

Get Real

Springs

December 15, 1997

To The Editor,

A few thoughts about the Confederate flag issue. Let's consider for one moment that Saturday's Santa parade was actually a facade for what really lay behind it, the covert recruitment of white supremacists and militants. Men in white sheets carrying signs of hatred and racism, crosses soaked in gasoline, were they spotted? Were the words of hatred, racism, or religious bias heard? Members of a state militia, were any of those guys seen? Just a Confederate or sometimes called rebel flag, that was it, nothing else.

William Ritter stated that the Chamber of Commerce encourages flags be put on the trucks and tractors, but the "American" flag. The Confederate flag is indeed an American flag, it is a very important part of our nation's history.

It symbolizes an ill-starred attempt at liberty and was carried into battle on "American" soil. I don't condone the flag's use as a symbol of hatred or racism. I believe that the men that fought and died for that same flag would turn in their graves if they knew that it would be misused in such a manner.

It is clear that Mr. Danyluk displayed the flag as an icon to a television show, "The Dukes of Hazzard," which is popular with kids of all ages. The fact that troubles me the most is that children who are taught "prejudice" will practice "prejudice" for the rest of their lives.

The keyword here is "teach." What are we teaching our children?

Better yet, what is Mr. John F. Beuscher teaching our children? Reread last week's article and recall what his first thoughts were, and I quote: "Oh my God, there are some white supremacists looking for new members." Then my first thoughts were Oh my God, he's working with kids! He then asked around him, "Is that a Confederate flag?"

Is that a Confederate flag? He's a teaching assistant in the Amagansett School, I would certainly hope that he could identify an American flag. Teachers should be open-minded and in my opinion Mr. Beuscher is not! In other words, John, get real!

Thank you,

C. KRAMER

Please address correspondence to [email protected]

Please include your full name, address and daytime telephone number for purposes of verification.

"People think cooking is about creativity. If I have 10 minutes of creativity in a day, I feel lucky," Rick Jakobson said.

Mr. Jakobson, the chef at the highly acclaimed Alison by the Beach in Sagaponack, has nevertheless become known for his artful cuisine and a style he describes as "simple cooking."

The creative moments, and there are a few, are "something I can't explain," he said. "It's something I can't control. It's something that just happens."

"I like cooking because it uses [. . .] the senses - taste, smell, color, touch."

And cooking, he claims, is the only thing he knows how to do. The onetime Brown University student left college without graduating and later went to the Ecole Superiore de Cuisine Francaise. He stayed on in France for four and a half years, honing his skills in everything from tiny bistros to Michelin one, two, and three-star restaurants.

"In France cooking is an art, it's not commercial. It's old-fashioned artisanship. In New York it's a business."

When he returned to the States, he sought out a spot where the culinary culture shock wouldn't be too great and found a position at Daniel, a French gem on New York's Upper East Side. After a few years there he moved downtown to Bouley.

His position at Alison by the Beach was to be a sort of summer vacation. "I thought I would be going to the beach every day. I'd buy a beach chair," he said. When he was unexpectedly bumped up to head chef in the restaurant's first weeks, all that changed. Serving 1,100 to 1,200 dinners a weekend meant little, if any, free time. "I never bought a beach chair, I never made it to the beach."

Still he found something working at a country restaurant that he hadn't known in Manhattan. Though the kitchen at Alison by the Beach is very small, its windows look out over Sagaponack's farm fields and let loads of light in. "Even in the long days in summer, just to see the sunset, the sky, is something I enjoy," he said.

After a year and a half at Alison by the Beach, he said, he realizes people like what he does, and he has heard his share of compliments. But, he said, "I don't listen to it. You have to listen to the little voice inside you. You know when you're cooking well and when you aren't."

Mr. Jakobson is modest about his talents, but ambitious too. By his account, he's just now coming into his own. Despite the positive reviews and celebrity clientele that Alison draws, one of the first things he'll tell you is that it should be even better.

"The worst insult is when somebody tells me the food is okay, because they deserve more than that. . . . I like it when the customers are happy. Going out should be fun; people don't have enough fun in their lives."

Rick Jakobson's Oysters on the Half Shell

With Ginger Mignonette Granit‚

Ingredients:

16 oysters

10 oz. rice wine vinegar

5 oz. simple syrup*

4 Tbsp. finely chopped shallots

1 Tbsp. grated fresh ginger

1 tsp. whole black peppercorns, crushed

Simple syrup:

1/2 cup sugar and 1/2 cup water, brought to a boil and cooled

Method:

Mix rice wine vinegar, simple syrup, shallots, ginger, and peppercorns. Freeze in a shallow pan for about three hours.

Scrape frozen granit‚ with a fork. Store in freezer until ready to use.

Serve in the shell with shucked oysters.

Serves four people with granit‚ to spare.

William Hathaway, the author of six innovative books of poetry, recently joined the faculty of Southampton College, where he is associate professor of English, teaching creative writing and literature in the undergraduate program. He will also teach in the college's new master of fine arts degree program when it gets under way this summer.

Mr. Hathaway is low key in conversation. But he has a capacity to jolt the listener with a sudden remark; he laughs explosively, unexpectedly.

It's the kind of laugh that sets off in the auditor a little bell; it's as if he were more attuned to the absurdities of life than are most people.

The Road Runner

It's a quality one finds in his poetry, which manages to be both conversational and highly wrought; the diction can be formal at one moment and then plunge into common speech. It's the kind of poetry that can exhilarate the reader with sheer virtuosity.

A poem like "After the Beep," for example, is about the cartoon character of the Road Runner. But on a deeper level it's a meditation on life as the poet considers the image of the Road Runner, just having run off a cliff, frozen in mid-air, before plunging to the ground:

This flat planet

with us pinned on it like bugs

spread wide for science

still cartwheels forsaken

out of history.

Teaching Posts

Mr. Hathaway's poems can be utterly hilarious and shatteringly dark within the span of just a few lines. It's a muscular kind of writing, tense, jittery, witty. To read his poems is to set off on a journey and not to know where you will end up.

Mr. Hathaway has taught at a number of colleges, including Louisiana State University, where he headed the creative writing program, and, most recently, the College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor. He lives in a small house near Shinnecock Bay, just a mile or so from the college. It was a clear cool day in the fall when he led a visitor inside.

Like most poets with college posts, Mr. Hathaway has taught a great deal of freshman composition and literature, as well as creative writing.

"I've taught freshman writing in all of its manifestations," he said. "At Bar Harbor, it was called nature writing . . . they were writing about nature. I taught Romantic poetry under the guise of 'literature about nature,' " he said.

A Family Of Poets

As he approaches the end of his first semester at Southampton College, he said, he finds many of the students "surprisingly sophisticated. There is a core of marine science students who are a group unto themselves." He also finds a difference in "upstate" students - he has taught at the State University at Cortland, and grew up in Ithaca, N.Y. - and "downstate" students.

"It's like the difference between Northern California and Southern California. In a way, a downstater and upstater relate better to a Kansan than they do to each other," he said, chuckling.

Mr. Hathaway was born in Wisconsin but his family moved to Ithaca shortly thereafter. His father, Baxter Hathaway, was a Cornell professor who was a scholar and a poet. He started the creative writing program there. His brother is also a poet.

Parodies Of Kerouac

There were no particular advantages in being raised in what some might consider a "literary" household, however. "What it meant was that there were a lot of books in the house, of course. And we were encouraged to read."

"But it was the same for my father when he was growing up in Michigan. His father was something of a religious fanatic, and they were very poor. But there were a lot of books in that house, too, and people read."

Mr. Hathaway started writing poems, as many people do, in high school. He remembers writing parodies of Jack Kerouac's "Mexico City Blues" with a friend in class one day. The two boys were passing their poems back and forth when their teacher saw what they were up to. "As a punishment, she made us stand up and read them. The class thought the poems were hilarious."

Sound And Sense

"We loved Kerouac and Ginsberg. Their writing is so full of energy. The energy of the poetry and the range of vocabulary made the poems seem at the same time grandiose and terrifically acceptable."

What, a visitor asked Mr. Hathaway, is poetry? "Poetry is a highly concentrated imaginative expression with words. You have both sound and sense in poetry."

Mr. Hathaway's work is highly musical. He sometimes writes in traditional forms - recent poems include a series of sonnets - but he is equally comfortable with free verse.

"I used to sit listening to rock-and-roll on a Buffalo radio station with a book of Robert Graves poems in front of me and try to teach myself how to write formal poetry. That was essentially my early training. I read somewhere that John Keats learned how to write by slavishly imitating Edmund Spenser. So I read Spenser and did the same."

Mr. Hathaway was "not a terrific student," he said. "I did well enough in English classes, but I essentially taught myself how to write poetry."

He has mastered technique over 35 years of writing poetry - and uses complex forms such as the villanelle with apparent ease, although he emphasizes that, for him, poetry is hard work rather than a matter of being handed inspiration.

Simple And Elegant

"I work line by line," he said, and he is very much aware of the "internal structure" of a poem. "Lately I feel like I've been writing in the manner of John Donne - there's a lot going on inside the poem, technically."

For the reader, however dense a Hathaway poem may seem, it also reads simply and elegantly. This is one of the hallmarks of his work.

Mr. Hathaway started teaching when he was 25 years old. "I didn't know anything," he said. Although he was formally educated, he also considers himself something of an autodidact.

Fell Into A Habit

"I like what Robert Frost says in his essay 'The Figure a Poem Makes.' In a way, he's speaking for all poets. He compares the way poets learn things to the way scholars learn things. The poet goes out in the field and wanders around, and burrs stick to him. And that's right on the money. When I read that, I felt very reassured. I used to just feel like a disorganized person."

But Frost made him understand that he was, in fact, doing what all poets do, that experience in the world is as important as what one can learn in an academic setting.

When between teaching appointments, Mr. Hathaway has spent time in all sorts of jobs, including stretches spent in hotels and restaurants. About poetry as a kind of vocation, he said, "I didn't feel a spiritual call to it but I certainly felt that I very quickly fell into a habit, and I've never gotten out of it. I've never felt like getting out of it."

Taking A Stance

"In a funny way, the greatest threat to it has been the exigencies of being a college professor," he said. But he enjoys teaching, and is in the middle of a career that has seen him, during 13 years as a professor at Louisiana State University, create one of the better graduate creative writing programs in the country.

He left Louisiana to teach at Cornell at a time when his father, who was living in Ithaca, was dying from emphysema. Later, he taught at Union College while his wife practiced law in upstate New York. Mr. Hathaway, who is divorced, has three grown children.

About the poems in his latest volume, "Churlsgrace," he said "These are public poems. They take a stance. I see myself as something of a churl. At this point I see myself as something of a pessimist. I don't think," he said, referring to the world in general, "that this is all going to end well. But I do not in any way see myself as being cynical. There's a distinction there."

Public television, the domain of Bob Vila and a slew of home fix-it shows, has just added a classier cousin. "Decor," a sort of Architectural Digest of the screen, focuses on the fine-tuning: upscale interior design.

Linda Corley Webb, the creator and executive producer of the show, was asked, as the show was being developed, to describe what she envisioned in one word.

"Elegance," she said.

To imbue her show, billed as "public TV's first upscale design show," with that quality, she designed it with one host in mind: Dina Merrill.

"I Don't Do That"

"Dina exudes class," Ms. Webb said recently. "To me, Dina is elegant. She is classic, timeless."

"I would've liked Grace Kelly . . ." she added, calling Ms. Merrill "the perfect host."

It was two years ago when Ms. Webb approached Ms. Merrill, the daughter of E.F. Hutton and the socialite Marjorie Meriweather Post. Ms. Merrill and her husband, Ted Hartley, with whom she runs RKO Pictures, are part-time residents of East Hampton.

"Ms. Merrill said, 'Sorry, I don't do that . . . I'm an actress. I do stage and film, I don't do how-to shows,' " Ms. Webb recounted.

After examining the show's format, which includes tours of showcase and historic houses, interviews with celebrities and top interior designers, and a bit of the how-to, Ms. Merrill, whose childhood bedroom was designed by Walt Disney, finally agreed to host the show.

It has been broadcast since the fall on public television stations nationwide; locally it can next be seen on Channel 21 at 3 p.m. on Friday, Dec. 26, and on Jan. 2.

According to a press release, " 'Decor' incorporates the latest style trends of classic design for a fast-paced and informational magazine-style show."

In Five Parts

Each episode includes five segments, all introduced by Ms. Merrill. The first, called "Room Renaissance," is hosted by Ms. Webb and features a look at a room that's being "transformed" as well as a talk with the designer.

In the second, Ms. Merrill chats with interior designers and celebrities whose houses are featured examples of a designer's work. Howard Elliott, who created the interior design for Ms. Merrill's five houses, in Los Angeles, Vail, Palm Beach, Manhattan, and East Hampton, has been featured, as has Mark Hampton, whose style can be seen at the White House.

A "Tricks of the Trade" segment comprises the how-to element of the show, where the show's consulting designer, Debra Stein, gives tips on subjects such as how to organize a collection, or make a small room seem larger.

In a shopping segment, Ms. Merrill visits design centers and manufacturers to discuss how to choose items such as furniture, fabrics, antiques, art, or wallcoverings.

Home decor trivia is featured in "Did You Know?" each show's final segment, the "exclamation point of the show," according to Ms. Webb.

It includes "things people really don't know but that would make their furniture more interesting," she said. Examples include the history of the four-poster bed, and a look at "whatever happened" to plastic furniture from the '60s.

Humor Included

"We try to open up a little more knowledge," Ms. Webb explained. "Even though it's upscale, we do it with a lot of humor." The show provides "ideas that can be used immediately by viewers," providing them with "the knowledge, and, most importantly, the confidence to set a mood and create a statement for their own home."

Ms. Merrill "makes people feel comfortable," said Ms. Webb. "When we go into these homes, she has the ability to make [the owners and designers] feel at ease."

Ms. Merrill's "on-air style is warm and abiding, and she gives viewers a sense that they are guests of hers . . ." says the press release.

"Mother went in for a lot of French furniture but you can have the Louis as far as I'm concerned," said Ms. Merrill in the release. Ms. Merrill's own Palm Beach house was featured in one episode, as was the neigboring abode of Jimmy Buffett, the singer (who has another house in Sag Harbor).

"What we push is to develop your own personal style," Ms. Webb explained.

Though so far the series has not included any visits to the East End, Ms. Webb hopes to include sites here in a second 13-episode series, for which production will begin in February. "We're riding on a trend. The '90s are the decade of home," she said.

Ms. Webb, a public television reporter and producer for 15 years, would like to continue with the show "as long as there is interest there."

And as long as her host will continue. "She is the show," said Ms. Webb.

Christmas, Chanukah, and Kwanzaa will be celebrated this year a lot closer to each other than usual. Chanukah begins on Tuesday night, Wednesday is Christmas Eve, and the first day of the seven-day holiday of Kwanzaa begins on Dec. 26.

The confluence of the holidays means, among other things, that there will be lights shining from many quarters through the winter darkness in the next two weeks.

May those who light the lights, all over the world, be united, too, in peace and harmony. Merry Christmas! Happy Chanukah! And Habari gani!

On view at the Brenda Taylor Gallery, 529 West 20th Street, New York, through Sunday, the exhibit of 11 large-scale paintings by Connie Fox is packed with activity and color.

These paintings bristle with contesting patterns and even aesthetics. The goal seems to be a happy, fruitful jumble, and these winsome pictures invite us to enjoy the results. All the works by the longtime East Hampton resident are acrylic on canvas and date from 1994 to 1997.

What first comes to mind, on seeing the first painting, sensitively installed and lighted in Taylor's smashing new Chelsea space, is the 1970s - that firebrand era when everything was thrown in, just after it had all been carefully, methodically re moved. We remember Malcolm Morley and his use of strong tonal juxtapositions, as well as his combining of abstract and figurative elements.

Receding Planes

In "Skin" (1977, 78 inches by 84 inches), the entry painting, we are made aware of overlapping grounds, specified by at least four receding planes, each of which could be a finished painting in itself, in other hands.

The foremost panel makes use of earth tones, blended in a painterly manner, punctuated by dabs of pure vermilion. An elliptical form, painted in cerulean blue, hovers as the prime subject, a featureless face.

Just behind this panel is another in a Kelly green which has been almost completely painted over by languid, impastoed strokes of gold. In the upper right corner of this panel, Ms. Fox has scratched in two pictograms - a house, perhaps, and a face-like design.

Points Of Reference

This gives a sampling of the density and the playfulness in Ms. Fox's paintings, and it accounts for only about a third of this painting's surface. Elsewhere, sly, indecipherable figures are glibly drawn in paint, while a thickly painted blue-and-white striped post gives a realistic hint, like a railway crossing barrier, casually dropped into the painting and extending beyond its frame on two sides.

In several paintings, Ms. Fox makes use of a gridded ladder - or folding chair-like form, lightly painted in outline.

It should be clear by now that none of these "things" to which I am referring is actually defined by Ms. Fox. Rather, they are glimmers of imagined recognition the eye gratefully latches onto as resting places or points of reference, since Ms. Fox's compositions and huddled masses of color can sometimes be jarring and disconcerting.

Thrust Of Color

Her canvases reward close inspection. Her technique is fluent and, more to the point, vital. Every mark or scrape has a reason for being.

What is most impressive about her paintings is the range of textures and densities she is able to coax out of the acrylic medium. There are the familiar, watery, cool tones we expect from acrylic, but there are also thickly laden, drenched areas, like tarry buildup or the right-handed density of oil painting.

When she throws these different approaches into conflict, exciting conflagrations occur. In the upper right corner of "Rogue" (1997, 80 inches by 72 inches), for example, a coolly painted sequence of rectilinear forms is disrupted by a splayed thrust of blue and white strokes right on top of and through the rectangles.

Loves To Paint

On the large-scale level, Ms. Fox attempts different compositional gambits. "Quarter Round" divides the canvas into four quadrants; "Postage Due" contains a centrally located rectangle within a widely ranging mass of thick strokes; "Oda al Secreto Amor" has a large, carved shape like a mirror frame, and "Viajero, ven conmigo" frames a white starburst, nestled on a table-like slab, between two white columns.

Perhaps the most successful piece compositionally is "Ricochet" (1996, 78 inches by 84 inches), in which the shapes and areas simply evolve, organically shifting from one to another, held in place by a cascading flood of Ms. Fox's favorite ladder-forms.

Ms. Fox is excellent on the small scale, on transitions, accumulations. Her range of touches is inspiring. Her overall conceptions can seem a little flat, as though mere contrivances designed to allow her to do what she likes most - to paint. For her love of the medium and her mastery in moving it around, this exhibit is highly recommended.

The Committee to Stop Airport Expansion and the East Hampton Aviation Association agree on one thing. Both say they do not want to see a larger, busier airport in East Hampton. The agreement stops there.

Even after the election, even after a closed-door session between the Federal Aviation Administration and incoming Democrats on the Town Board, and even after a long and detailed public meeting intended to clear the air, the controversy and the talk of lawsuits continue. This is not as it should be.

The length of a runway is the determining factor for drawing larger jets, not its width. Although a longer main runway, along with rerouting Daniel's Hole Road and a global positioning system, were improvements the Republican Town Board majority had thought should be explored in a new airport master plan, no one has been arguing for any of these options since the November election.

The Republicans now say they are against lengthening the main runway, runway 10-28, and the Aviation Association recently offered to quell Democratic doubts by putting its opposition to a longer runway in writing. They should do so. Then the town should get on with rebuilding it so that its full 100-foot width is usable.

Pilots say that the project will help smaller, rather than larger planes because smaller craft are more vulnerable to crosswinds while landing and taking off. In addition, the town natural resources director says the project would have a "negligible" impact on the environment.

The F.A.A. says that regardless of whether the repair of runway 10-28 is paid for with Federal or local funds, the strip must be 100 feet wide - anything less does not meet F.A.A. standards. It has therefore warned of legal action if the town insists on a narrower strip.

And what if, after a delay and further review or an unfavorable lawsuit, the town cannot secure another F.A.A. grant for the work? Who, if anyone will pay? With all the looming expenses at the town landfills do taxpayers really want to foot a $2.7 million (and growing) bill?

The time has come for Supervisor Cathy Lester and other Town Board Democrats to relent on the runway, make it safe and solid, accept the F.A.A. grant, and put all the interminable arguing to rest. As much as some might like it to, the airport is not going to pick up and fly away.

Michael Bottini, a planner for the Group for the South Fork, is among those who have suggested that the town guarantee that the airport will never expand by putting the town-owned lands at its runways' ends into a parks and conservation zoning district. That's a proposal worth debating.

A press release this week said Brookhaven National Lab would mark its 50th anniversary by burying two time capsules made of "specially designed flame-sealed glass" to be preserved in "a polymer concrete vault" until the lab's 100th anniversary.

The capsules will contain items that, according to the release, "will most likely be historically interesting." Among them will be the lab's 1997 salary schedule, a piece of superconducting cable from the relativistic heavy-ion collider now under construction, some hybrid cotton and pea seeds from a biology experiment, and two bottles of Long Island wine.

Not a hint of what may instead be the lab's most enduring legacy: chemical and radioactive contamination of the groundwater, soil, and Peconic River Estuary. Will the Long Islanders who dig up those time capsules in 2047 know they were put there by a scientific community that was infamous for burying its head in the sand?

Almost no one was around to listen as the sounds came across Gardiner's Bay that September day in 1780, but a midshipman aboard the British warship Royal Oak was singing "Tom Bowling," a tribute to a dead sea captain that was a favorite with sailors of the time.

Now, 217 years later, it is possible to recapture a trace of that historical moment and 38 others, many of which took place on the East End, thanks to an enjoyable pair of CDs by an accomplished folk musician named Stan Ransom.

Mr. Ransom (apparently no kin save in affection for things nautical to the British man of letters who wrote the classic "Swallows and Amazons" books for children, Arthur Ransome) also is a folklorist.

Wainscott Dumplings

During a long career as a librarian, he used his research skills to ransack archives for songs that deal with Long Island or were part of Long Island life. He surely should be invited to give a concert during East Hampton's forthcoming 350th anniversary celebration.

For instance, he unearthed an 1832 poem, possibly a nursery rhyme, about a Wainscott Dumpling (the local name for a native of that hamlet, akin to Bonacker for an East Hamptoner) who "caught a whale/ Stuck an iron in his tail." He found a plaintive ballad about Captain Kidd, best known in these parts for burying treasure on Gardiner's Island, though Mr. Ransom says he dug it up again after nine days.

Nearly Home, But

Mr. Ransom sets to his own, authentic-sounding music a poem published in the American Mercury in 1925 in which George Sterling of Sag Harbor displays puritanical pride in his whaling captain grandfather, a stickler for discipline.

When his ship, Thomas Dickinson, was nearly home after two years at sea ("Block Island lay to starboard, Montauk lay to port"), the sailor "Billy Palmer, an Amagansett boy," refused to swab the decks and threw the swabs overboard. The captain, a "kind" man but "tougher than a spar," promptly turned the ship around and made the crew scrub the decks for three days in punishment.

Sings the narrator: "And when the anchor rattled down in harbor water green, Their blessed hearts were clean and wise, and the deck uncommon clean!"

Mr. Ransom, now 79, sings in a resonant, flexible bass that saw service in the Yale Glee Club. Even better, he accompanies himself with taste and skill not only on familiar folk instruments like the guitar and banjo but on two cheerfully ethereal hammered dulcimers, one of which, he proudly says in his liner notes, was made by members of his musical family in the 1850s.

Though born in Connecticut, for 20 years in the 1960s and '70s he lived on Long Island as director of the Huntington Public Library and was part of the era's folk music revival. (He recalls "times in our Huntington home when more than 70 folk musicians were crammed in every corner of every room, playing and singing.")

It was then he began collecting and performing local materials. For the East End, he acknowledges help from Dorothy King of the East Hampton Library's Long Island Collection and Averill Geus, director of the Home, Sweet Home Museum.

Mohican Text

Haunting melodies are a special discovery in his disks, which are titled "My Long Island Home," after a song composed in 1928, and "I Love Long Island," after a "theme song" he wrote for the Island that is one of the weaker pieces in the collection but that must be great fun as an audience sing-along.

One of my favorites is "Waked by the Gospel's Powerful Sound," with a tune from a book called "New and Beautiful Collection of Select Hymns and Spiritual Songs." The text, Mr. Ransom explains, was written about 1800 by a "Mohican Indian from Connecticut, Samson Occum."

The liner notes tell a fascinating tale:

Samson Occum

Occum was "educated by Rev. Eleazer Wheelock, ordained a Presbyterian minister in 1759, and preached among the Native Americans of eastern Long Island. He was sent to England to preach and was instrumental in raising œ10,000 to assist in the founding of Dartmouth College, Wheelock's Indian School."

Quaint fun lurks in parlor songs from the Island's Victorian era like "Lilly Dale" and East Hampton's own unofficial anthem, "Home, Sweet Home" (in a slightly unfamiliar tune).

A former East Hampton resident, Christian Johnson, wrote the music for "Ballad of Pudding Hill," about one of the village's local landmarks, and adopted a traditional tune to "Acres of Clams," both of which are recorded by Mr. Ransom on "My Long Island Home."

Mild antidotes to the East End's sense of uniqueness may be taken in songs about whale ships out of Cold Spring Harbor, the retreat of British soldiers from Hempstead Harbor (later renamed Roslyn in commemoration of the tune the soldiers played), and even, in a song written in 1961, about fair maidens who lived in Brooklyn.

Familiar Sentiment

Mr. Ransom's research turned up only songs from the era B.S.C. (Before Shopping Centers). But the sentiment that has driven development (and undermined the awareness of historic traditions that these recordings help reawaken) since well before Levittown was in full bloom in the 1926 song "My Own Long Island."

Stan Ransom's lively and useful collection makes clear that then as now the Island was a place of which someone en route could say: "I'll close the city's gates behind me/ And bid farewell to Old Broadway."

(Mr. Ramson sells his recordings, including other compilations of songs about the Adirondack Mountains and Lake Champlain, for $15 for CDs [$10 for cassettes] plus $1.50 for mailing and 7 percent state sales tax, from 30 Broad Street, Plattsburgh, N.Y. 12901. He'll probably handle holiday orders by phone as well.)

Christopher T. Cory, who knows folk music from way back, is university public relations director for Long Island University.

AMAGANSETT

Dunleavy to Steven and Doris Switsky, Main Street, $277,500.

BRIDGEHAMPTON

Broder to Lois Bass, Sea Farm Lane, $320,000.

Woodbridge Homes Bldrs. to Stanley and Meryl Wunderlich, Sea Farm Lane, $270,000.

Ocean View Farms to Ivan Rubin, Ambleside Lane, $1,700,000.

EAST HAMPTON

Ralston to Fairfield Pond Assoc. L.L.C., Bailow Lane, $300,000.

Shore Retreats Inc. to Vera Engstrom and Lori Belber, East Hampton Drive, $150,000.

MONTAUK

Pierce to Charles and Sylvia Murphy, Fernald Road, $155,000.

Wilderman (trustee) to Harold and Thelma Weinberg, Captain Kidd's Path, $600,000.

NORTH HAVEN

Hart to Peter and Marie Maran, East Drive, $530,000.

Speciale to Ivar and Carolyn Albinson, Cove's End Lane, $245,000.

SAG HARBOR

Yardley Jr. to Robert and Corrine Yardley, Stoney Hill Road, $170,000.

Godbout to Yvonne Rafferty, Jermain Avenue, $190,000.

SAGAPONACK

Lester to Clifford Foster, Sagg Main Street (36.2 acres), $3,016,500.

SPRINGS

Gardner to Daniel and Laria Fram, Sycamore Drive, $276,500.

Lande to Joseph, Florence, and Maura Dickler, Hiroo Awano, and Christopher Panczner, Water's Edge, $214,500.

Srob to Max Pine, Gerard Drive, $505,000.

Stewart to John and Edith Schilling, Hog Creek Lane, $183,000.