“I knew something was wrong when they took away our water bottles”
“Admiral Gravestone in his cups unable to read the tea leaves..coming off a blitz in the inner city schools, a trench coat groomed transferee discovering Gravestone’s hip pocket..among the crushing body to body straphangers, on the surface line Franklin Avenue shuttle reeling toward the Eastern Parkway station in its Southbound four station route...
II
The Admiral grabbing the pickpocket’s wrist, the caper unlike Hitch’s “Lady
vanishes”...the shuttle choo chooing... Botanic Garden and Prospect Park six decades of BMT
data based ridership the four stops honed without any derelictions, the 2010 winding
down into those raging hours of disenfranchisement...unable to discern reality’s
cosmetics ..a pop culture and egg nog landscape for what it really is about..
III
“Lemme go sir .I promise on my mother’s honor, I’ll never do it again.”
The Admiral held the miscreant’s wrist........this con never stole a ream of
computer paper ”Oh no sir, I never cheated on big tests either.”...
Why shouldn’t he pay the price for his encroaching intent? Every wino finds
their own level, don’t they? monsieur ?”
How else will he reform?. He needed the cat of nine tails spanking...
The folly of having leniency ride the rails.
Kubrick’s “Clockwork orange” the tedious reality scene of growing up amidst
the public housing environs of Lancaster Gate Hyde Park Paddington Victoria
Station the Old Vic.......
Gads not a ideal nor a lofty engagement of humanity Despair dominating
the mother and father Madonna scenario of the ancients.
How else can these stagnant booties be rehabilitated into what their purpose on earth once
was, their cosmos reopening, welcoming them back into the womb.
Being and becoming, people peoples.......
IV
“Eh what Kathy?”....Kathy Black, the new Chancellor, coming off her newspaper on line
media heroics....... her motto being “inch by inch it’s a cinch, by the yard it’s very hard”
sending her own two kids to boarding schools in the Nutmeg(Conn.)
The whole nine yards, monsieur.
V
The Franklin Avenue shuttle chug chugging along.... Admiral and his victim ..ipso facto prisoner But a victim in his mind set
Sidney Potier and Tony Curtis as the handcuffed “The defiant ones”
Madeleine Carroll in cuffs to Robert Donat “The 39 Steps” as they prowled the Scottish Moors for the killer of mister Atom, the counter espionage agent with total recall...
murdered on the West End London stage...........
But here Admiral Gravestone coming off a high in the inner city schools had captured a naive hood who thought the “easy rider” a raison d’etre of Peter Sellers ’“Pink Pantherr.”
The identities of the Admiral and his thug, playing out their needs on the Franklin
Avenue shuttle time table “in perpetua” for over six decades.
VI
Sure it wasn’t the “Education of Hyman Kaplan’ playing out...an immigrant student would never play out his inner need of assimilating the nefarious mores of a digital on
line I pod denizen crazed gone extraterrestrial.
Living in his own galaxy...is that too far from a two decade NFL quarterback .. C.Fauvre
playing out his hangups..
Like the pickpocket... he was into his fantasy...
Staying too long on the stage...”.Past yer prime ,big fellow.”
“Isn’t that the question dear Brutus?”
VII
The shuttle ripping along its track.., Admiral Gravestone and his assailant, their
hands unto each other.... the Botanic Garden platform cop sizing them up...his
lips snarling, his eyes capturing mortals clinging to each other ,waiting for their stop,
seated passengers departure..
“Gimme gimme another chance, sir,”said the thief.”It’s only a petty crime...I’m a good kid,”
said the crook out of class, caught in the act...hands down felony
“I should turn you in,” said the Admiral.”thinking of Lillian Roth’s “I’ll cry
tomorrow”: the heartache in growing up among the haves and have nots in the
age of entitlement. a callous indifference to finding yourself, Chief... .
VIII
He thought of his older brother trying to beat the system in San Diego. A naval officer on two weeks reserve duty, he met up with George Brent, an actor out at Warners, who was a Naval pilot. The second banana telling him the movie industry was but a fantasy.“The money was good” but his reality was Phantom jets.
The older brother into his fantasy ,homeward bound...a mistress liberating his appetite from the constancy of boredom’s rut... back to the routine of civies , he pulled off the
San Diego freeway.....
“If it wasn’t for the basketball coach at Tilden, I would have made the varsity,”
he said, into an obscenity. “He wanted to put me on the junior varsity. There’s no place
on the varsity . You’re a heaver, out for yourself.”..
“A star in yoir imagination but not on mine. We need team players..that’s the nature of
the game. The bottom line,”said the coach 4 decades earlier ,the high school student never
forgetting the hurt, his voice rising..
Sam Levinson his “Habla el Espanol” failing him, when he caught him cheating.....but a Richmond Hill High aunt persuaded Sam to pass him with. a “D”. .
”I hate the bastard.” never having read “I’ll cry tomorrow”
IX
On the Franklin Avenue shuttle the crushing humans oblivious to each other... the Admiral felt the sweaty hands of the pickpocket...to be or not to be, the shuttle swirling around the sixty year old route in the city that never sleeps.
Let you out on the streets again, picking pockets at bus stops...corner of 13th Avenue and 49 the corner of Pershing middle school, the surveillance cameras koed because of the blizzard,
“ No I can’t buy into that option, stud,” said Admiral Gravestone, living up to his name.
“So I won’t become a spaced out astronaut or computer enginner,”said the street smarts. Like Jean de Valjean, caught with his pants down for stealing a loaf of bread, the Frederic March Victor Hugo caper.... treading the Parisian sewers, Charles Laughton into his booted labyrinth..
X
As the shuttle pulled into its Prospect Park station, the Admiral let his good nature dominate the fierce cutthroat scene...sado masochism, drug dealers, porno you name it.....
The Admiral sweated out the wasted lives of so many.” Turn your life around, kid,”said the inner
school maestro .pretending he was Spencer Tracy as Father Flanagan reading the riot ract
to Mickey Rooney in Dore Schary’s “Boys Town”
XI
“Was it all a dream?” the Admiral asked . ”Do I look any worse for riding
the Franklin Avenue staggering shuttle.?”
His bride to be shrugged her shoulders.”I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about buddy but at least you’re not boring.
“Pick up the tab for the grub. You’re no longer Hugh Heffner in his prime
You’re into the pursuit of yourself”.
The Big Apple during the blizzard of December 2 6-27, 2010 the 6th worst storm in the
the City’s history... “Bloomy” taking the heat.......December 31,2010.
Revisited, Boro Park Rehab April 29- August 2 2010 ninth fl oor....a reunion of Midwood Abraham Lincoln Jefferson New Utrecht High Schools Pershing Jr.High six decades later.
August 7,2011
12 weeks in Boro Park Rehab
12 weeks in Boro Park Rehab, sharing space with their divine presence. Diagnosing cancer arthritis skin maladies diseases kidney dialysis fract8ured bones .August 9, 2011.
Speaker after speaker in all their cardiac information highway specialization spelled out the latest thinking from the genius of their cardiovascular disease networking…it wasn’t just Sweden, Holland, Florida, John Hopkins, Massachusetts General Hospital, the clinic in Cleveland, the New England Journal of Medicine, UCLA’s cardiac lab, Chicago’s Michael Reese, Washington University, St. Louis, Medical College of Virginia, University of Rome, “La Sapienza”.
It was the assimilation of the data, the computer software, hardware, the programming of the strengths, the weaknesses of cardiovascular culture…as it unfolds into a cosmos unto the world of medicine beyond any MD, PHD, could imagine a decade ago.
Captions like Angiography core Laboratory, Interventional cardiology, Electrophysiology and pacing put to shame the predilection for human imperfection in the likes of the cardiovascular scenarios as they continue to evolve in light of 21st century technologies. Without stopping the beating heart, without the need for a heart-lung machine, repairing valves thru a tiny incision, a minimal invasiveness Transmyocardial…, Revascularization using the laser for angina chest pain relief, carotid endarterectomy, arteries around the neck….aneurysm surgery.
Weakness of bureaucratic reviews, the limitations of cost accounting regimes, hospitalizations of 3500 Dollars a day for semi-private rooms, Medicare’s formula of reimbursement dispensing, the vital organ support system, artificial heart…the inadequacy of the historic system of health care, dominating the data as it streams like New Year streamers into E-mails, cell phones, internet passwords, that the billion dollar lipador, or E.C. Lilly foundation, American Heart Association cholesterol exercise eating the fruits and vegetables: scenarios the worshippers worship.
The stuffings for the good life as we saw millions of light years ago. UCLA’s Medical school still in the blueprint stages. Statins lipator zocor milligrams, calorie % equations to fats and saturated fats, still some forty years down the road.
Red flags like cheese omelets, frozen malteds, cheese burgers, french fries were still the norm for an imperfect life style, the aristocrats in their molecular bio and bioengineering labs coping with enzymes, viruses, the human immune system, proteins off cells, combating the viruses, the virus in its infectious disease zones, knowing how to evade the immune system.
Aortas but a tip of the iceberg as heart disease, dying hearts, calcifying arteries were almost ubiquitous in their assaults on blood vessels source of oxygen. Vein grafting risky, precluding heart disease, lowering cholesterol…exercising thirty minutes a day, eating right, watching……
“I want to be a MD” said the lithe prim Russian youngster from apartment 3B” . “My mother is studying to become a doctor”, she said. And what do you want to be?” asked Major Fenton’s good wife. “A gynecologist?”
“No, an MD for the moment,” she said in her Ukrainian state of mind. Responsive to the realities of a teaching medical center environment.
Little did she know of Professor Don C. Wiley, the 57 year old Harvard molecular biologist heading up his infectious diseases lab: high resolution X-ray crystallography of viral fusion, the immune system overwrought, waging war on influenza HIV-1 Ebola herpes virus.
Leaping off the bridge connecting Memphis with Arkansas, he being programmed for the Nobel Prize, his body found 300 some miles downstream, Louisiana, five weeks later, 12/22/01…….
Standing in the doorway, the cardiovascular system in her hands, the crossword puzzle penciled in, scrawled if you will of a seven eight year old holding her breathe…..” what is this worked across number 41?” she asked, not crossing the hearth, Major Fenton and his good wife studying the 6 spaces…… “What’s that word going down?” asked the good wife. “You sure you got it right?” she asked Lady Fenton a variation of her mother, yet identifying with her momma, and the intellectual economic capitol of medicine men with a capital M….”right?…….Major Fenton, right!”
II
Tendering their water bottles, stethoscopes hanging around their necks, some carrying clipboards, their energy seemed to be exponential to the third power, a big chemistry playing out in the Schreiber auditorium, their analytical and clinical experiences interacting with the specialists on the dais, the projectionist in the rear programming the slides, the professors clicking the baton like they were Stowkies playing out the Fantasia break through, the Dobey sound surreal, the listeners in one with the prowess on the dais, the baton’s Red nose, smashing the heart muscle’s squashing thrusting pulse…..
O sure you could say anything at all about the big leadership among these pros, their role models, their sticktoitiveness, determination and grit; they had all paid their dues..
Major Fenton wanted to tell the girl from apartment 3B, about peer pressure, land mines placed in your way, enemies around you wearing masks of conviviality, bringing you down to their level…but you were stone deaf to their entreaties…it was a hard world, tough as molasses and spelling bees.
Competitive, demanding concentration from the “get go” as they say…every human on the planet needing a support system for life’s obstacle course…the white jacketed Dr. Kildaires cardiologist apprentices, choosing seats where they could yawn, leaning against the wall, catching up on their r 3, 60 hours schedule of rounds, studying the heart’s pathology, the thick paged tome placed on a concrete wall, guarding the hospital’s manicured hedges.
Major Fenton had seen their type of camaraderie on the UCLA winning Rose bowl team, the Air Force Academy officer corps, the masterminds at Yale and Dean Lou Pollock’s Law School, his Yale roommate Professor Arvo Van Alstyne’s UCLA con law classes, defending Carl Chessman red lite bandit……whenever the subconscious mind at first apprehensive had solidified its confidence, moving down the information, dominating the algorims, the calculus, calibrating.
The girl and her mother not daring to hum ole blue eyes “Strangers on a train”…that was like an ET from another planet….an unrealistic distraction, a diversion from Sigmund Freud’s pleasure principle – Satchmo’s “Take the A Train”…..
It was hard nosed, cracking the pathology tomes, fighting your level of exhaustion, not knowing what your staying power was until it was tested…putting out of your mind the fear of failure….remember 3 days on, 3 days off.
“Hmmmm six spaces….First letter a P…..third letter an e…..meaning open….hmmmm….Lady Fenton you’re the resident authority for crossword puzzles…what do you think it could be?”
“Gads perchance what’s the good word, Lady Fenton? Open the blocked artery, reinforce artery walls with advanced stenting as soon as possible.”
“Pliant,” she said, her own technique of craft and recollection into thirty years. Her yesterdays the surcease from boredom….here the board room was into the fast lane, the reality of cardiovascular disease in and around cyberspace…
No Florence Nightingale, Madame Curie, Anna Freud, Helen Keller, Sister Teresa….could go about rescuing the world. Humans had more than enough to lick. Didn’t Major Fenton’s own boss at the Bedford Stuy high school say “You’re your own worst enemy. Yoselheimer it’s a genocide you’re teaching…Your brother is no idealist, either…consolidating his gains, climbing into the upper classes of capital gains, tax shelters, windfalls, …Genocide, castrating these kids, without telling’em the street scene is all a myth.
They’re living a lie. And so are you, Yosel…your brother, the surgeon. Buying sturgeon whitefish for Sunday brunches on ole’blue eyes legal eagle’s estate. “You’re toast”, said the principal, slamming the door.
III
48 hours into the future, a 70 year old retired high school teacher, playing out his post retirement as a member of the San Diego Chargers ground crew collapsed at the two minute warning mark, the Chargers hoping to decapitate the Oakland Raiders, their skull & bones on their helmets….the 70 year olds collapse but another statistic….into the data base of survival of the fittest…putting these players thru the bone crushing, body breaking mill…a man collapses, the game halted…viewers around the globe, stymied in their own unaccomplished accomplishments…a team of medicos applying CPR, resuscitation, pressing his rib cage, blood pressure monitoring, oxygen tanks reeled into his mouth, taking his pulse, giving the 70 year old man a chance at surviving another day, a moment to pursue himself…monitoring his vital signs…
The caring people put a board underneath his fallen body, carrying him off the sidelines, the scenario ready to begin again its tireless metaphor into the survival of the fittest, humanity’s heartbeat beating again and again. One man’s heartbeat quenched, the cosmos of pro football, the world Waited Saturday, December 15, 2001, the gig taking a breather in more ways than a 70 year old’s heart attack could ever attest to
The wheel of fate determined by a heartbeat….from oblivion, the “immortality “
IV
The MD, PHD, FACC, director of Electrophysiology and Pacing was oblivious to the pacing at the San Diego Charger-Raider football game’s own pacing…..His own data base of yearning to become one of the Faustian leading men in cardiac resynchronization therapy…..”Ask yourself why go to medical school in the first place? After all the years…of suffering, a blood bath for yourself…masochism?”
“But by asking, it begs the question of your own intelligence. Not to give up the paper chase, the pursuit, even when your exhausted, tired beyond anything you ever imagined. For myself, I got lucky, the fellowships. And today my role is not cardiology but kinesiology, bio engineering…….,” :his sense of humor at the way his career caromed thru the financial aid syndrome, the cardiologists, residents and interns, laughing at his light touch, identifying with his wit and humor, in an otherwise grisly demonstration of man’s heartbeat.., the cardiac institute’s thrust, refuting man’s last final breathe, up sparking his heartbeat, their modus operandi, the frog-like beat of a burp on the graphics.
They set the bar for a wholesome life style, treating heart disease, combating the victim’s own paucity of knowledge, how his ticker resonates in the emotional and numbers game of life’s tedious routines.
Didn’t the rehab of treadmills, bicycles, wheeling in motion, pumping the iron refute the causality of stats, their hard nosed determinism…The Washington cemetery of gravestones, family plots, mausoleums, Lasting proof, evidence of the transitoriness of the heartbeat’s travailing rhythms…its intersections with the oxygen carrying blood vessels, lungs, brain hemispheres, with its concomitant brain cells. Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, tumors, viruses lying in wait…for the first sign of a failing, the immune system, in generic disarray, Don C. Wiley, John L. Loeb Professor, Biochemistry & Biophysics, Structural Molecular Biology, Harvard, leaping off that Memphis Bridge that 16th night, November, 2001…….
Where else on the face of this Earth could their be a calling….which honors, perpetuates The life, 7 span, each day may be the last, Time passing, pathogenic & free radical damage of electrons, damage to tissues, heart disease, but genes, chromosomes 4,25 may compress sick time toward one’s life’s end.
Didn’t Roberto Campi, an internist in Novella Roma, living among the hi rise apartment houses on Via Nome fana, the trolley car passing the military barracks thru the piazzas, the Via Venito, the University of Rome medical school…Ben Hur, Marc Antony, Caesar, “ete Brute”, was here, the trolley passing above the catacombs, the sewers of the ancient city….
“Campi was here” …his wife, two Pinocchio boys, their governess, Bianco George, their neighbor. On the same floor, companion to Senora Campi while her internist H was cracking his books at the Rome University medical school, working out the protocols of his cardiac study: placebos & the real Mussolini stuffings of Italian life pills….walking exercising while devouring the rich oiled spaghetti, lasagna, Mediterranean fuzoila, pasta, the heavy calorie doughed white crusted loafs….all that starch hmmmmm at the Campi three hour siesta….
“Don’t do as I do, do as I say,” was his motto posted above the broadband computer access into the information highway of cardiovascular disease, and the turf he cycled on, walked amidst the Coliseum, the ancient ghetto, the delis with their spiced meats….Kosher you ask?
The good doctor did his best, scrutinizing the recipes Bianco George or the maid would prepare for his family….Fresh fruit – oranges, grapefruit, whole wheat grain cereals….”Fiber fiber” he’d press at the table, the family waiting for his return from his stance at the school….No mention of stents, the variation on the metal clasps for gushing artery blood that had been clogged over years of unconscionable eating on the run…those 3 hour siestas….
Risk stratification? Stupification being hooked by cancer sticks…human carnage in face of the evidence…all the trials, all the placebos…conclusive results…Indefatigable proof…incontrovertible evidence lent into the ovens..ad infinito….
Humans not “buying” antimenus: they enjoyed gasping to their last, they would go out, their self indulgence unalterable ego trip opposed to pacemakers, defibrillators, crippled from being all used up from too much living, smoking so many packs a day…doctor’s ritual like a Saturday matinee in the yesterday of our youth….
Plague and lesions, even with ultra sound…MRI’s thrown to the wastelands, abandoned for the sake of vanity, continuing the self destructive journeys from making 4 day hospital stays an uncommon common practice into the 21st century…Paradoxically seeking help, cures four and a half hours under the knife, yet rejecting any bedside relief until it’s too late for the last and final breathe.
Educating the masses be damned! They go their own way…Wasting away by their own waste.
Gads, perchance, Major Fenton what’s the good word?”
V
The auditorium lights went up, coffee break…Major Fenton the erstwhile double by pass patient, three months of Medicare rehab..an hour a day bicycling, wheeling, treadmill walking, 50 dumbbell repetitions…showering down, Turkish toweling, sitting in row X,……raising his right elbow from the chair’s arm…’Dr. Marvin C. Kochman and wife’ .
Thirty minutes away from Marvin’s reality scene at the Midwood movie theater’s balcony, he taking over the theater, converting it to his optomological base of operations, Tearing out the balcony seats where Major Fenton, a scrub at the local high school had weekly designs on the sophtic high school cheerleaders…..millions of memories ago, a half a century earlier….
“You get the drift,” was the Marvin’s utterance, as he peered thru his x-ray eye detector into your pupils, retinas corneas irises….” Look at my right ear…Look at my left…straight ahead,” impeccably dressed in his pin stripes, his graying wavy black hair combed into a leading man contour…finding himself a home in the Midwood theater balcony where he always belonged…the silver screen, a “Woody Allen” witness.
Formerly in white concrete quarters of a Quentin road medical building, his learning curve was up. “Started in a basement on Ocean Avenue,” he said, without any Julie Stein boasting. Hadn’t he come a long way without employing a jazz band, or a Music Corporation of America talent agency, or the UCLA eye hospital, part of the university’s medical landscape…..
He scribbled a few words of diagnostic wisdom…a middle aged man stepping into the room, Marvin speaking, the alter ego taking notes…the optometrist had the popcorn concession in the balcony…
“I’m retiring,” said the Marvin.”73 joining a gulf club scoring my age, but I’ll keep a hand in. Once a week on Fridays. My name out front,” he said, his tall tough like Cassius body, giving way to well groomed suited lady ophthalmologist who verified her mentor’s calibrated prescription…..
“My daughter is in London, leading a jazz band,” he said with a touch of exasperation.” Harvard law school like my wife…but she wanted to go her own way,” he said. “My son my son,” the same Brian Aherne flick that was exhibited some six seven decades earlier, Julie Stein structuring his optic training for organizing actors as an agent, then evolving back into his medical school training as an opthalmological genius….. ‘Julius & Doris Stein’s eyes’, off the LeConte Westwood boulevard entrance, University of California, Los Angeles’.
Major Fenton leaned on the armpost, remembering the flair Dr. Marvin had for his eye practice, the whole gamut of treatment, The laser healing of his hemorrhaging eyes, the Quentin Road facility…the board names of his associates following his credits….a larger than life flair, a man with the big gesture, those blue pin stripes “get my drift” tongue,
A Jack L. Warner without the stogie, seeing his soul in action was indeed more than a hemorrhaging eye patient could bargain for.
The Major had seen the doctor drive his son to a dermatologist named Morton. He had caught the drift about his daughter returning to the states, her passion for scribbling lyrics in California, associating with the likes of Grammies, lady crooners and all that encompasses..the poetry of Joni Mitchell, for instance.
Sure Marvin and his wife knew the way of the world. Didn’t Julie Stein and his Doris, their Pacific Coast counterpart know it too…dance music for Freud’s and Fred Astaire’s pleasure principle, then revolving back unto the opthalmalogical reality scene.
Who could argue with that? Didn’t the HMO’s penetrate a billion trillion-dollar enterprise? The state of Oregon Giving up their fight. A triple heart transplant going the way of cost accounting. The insurance company backing down in face of the HMO’s refusal to accept the risk of three quarters of a million coverage: if the surgery goes bad, the odds insurmountable for the patient’s recovery…even with Oregon’s poor law drafted for such cases, the dollar outlays were too exorbitant, the surgery too chancy.
Why monitor such risks argued the HMO, pulling the plug out from under the dying human, the team of cardiovascular surgeons anesthesiologists assistant doctors nurses left in the lurch.…
Alleviating human suffering and misery demanded a high price, too high for most of us, observers of the medical recovery syndrome. The participants taken aback at the costs, dying a little bit, their level of frustration peaking, then subduing at the reality of the miniscule role they were playing.
The doctor and his good wife had a marketing wizard, an advertising pro comparable to Molly Bloom’s husband out of Joyce’s Ulysses’, prowling the Brooklyn streets for ads…Allan N. in his jovial excursion into FM radio, selling the wares of his numero uno client, Dr. Marvin…word of mouth, the print media, the air waves, space transponders, satellite dishes…Why not? And they came.
The rainbow coalition, the religious people, the seniors filling the seats of the Midwood balcony for what was once a double feature…the Dr. Marvin “Rhett Butler”, his self servicing splendor, rewarded handsomely, for playing out his inner needs…in the balcony…among the apparitions & spooks of fantasies long since gone, the happy hunting ground & internet web sites for movie buffs. “George Washington slept here”, starring Jack Benny…
“Y’get my drift?”.
VI
Eleven million potential customers in the big Apple alone…why not give it a shot with an advertising blitz that would shake up, the yawning of the interns “whattaya gonna do over the Holidays?” Conversations among the audience scripted in their lily clean white jackets coffee cups in hand. “Philadelphia. Y’ever been there?” “Beautiful city.”
Aggressive gratifications in a very competitive business….Healthy so they could spend time with their grandchildren…live longer healthier lives…save the Seniors more than $1700 a year…that’s what it’s all about….so why not look into it,” sounded the politico sincerity, airwaves giving way to a “sound & fury” mythology…” We started out in a basement on Ocean Avenue,” said the wunderkid into his pin stripes, speckled gray black wavy hair. Contoured into a pompadour popular on the Avenue 50 years ago…
“If you want the administration press six. If you want Rosalind, press two….,” the musica of the classical radio station resounding…” Regards from the maestro himself,” the Major’s guttural tones in to the classics….
But could you tell the blue collar crowd, the Major’s Super undo his wits, phoning the good wife asking for a loan of six bucks until the next morning at eleven, the fourth time within the year, the super played out his role, asking for a small touch…he had chutzpah but during the Holiday season, the patrician saw fit to lean back and unScroogelike part with the six…lucky lottos, a New Jersey threesome 007…
VII
God bless Tiny Tim, Bob Cratchit, John, the cancer stick in his right paw, waiting on the sixer…into minions while the big game passes over him, the 7 year old Ukrainian girl a flight upstairs into her cardiovascular system language, vocabulary building when she realizes her promise,….if she can avoid, bypass the pitfalls of temptation, poor role models, lousy advice…hook unto the soul of her mother…not rebelling, putting aside her dreams….
Starting out in life, she wasn’t yet attuned…”the ratio of the good cholesterol, the HDL, to the bad cholesterol, the LDL was evenly split, you don’t need unsaturated fat because of the bad cholesterol…but you need it for the good cholesterol, the HDL….and in the saturated fat you need the HDL, the good cholesterol to outweigh the bad cholesterol, the LDL…again it’s the ratio between the good and the bad that counts….”
All she wanted was a six-letter word that fits within the cardiovascular system…
Meanwhile hundred year old legal eagle named Philip Levey was celebrating his 100th birthday party at the Harmony club a few blocks from the symposium…Standing tallish like the “Duke” Wayne leading man he was.” Thank you all for coming…it isn’t often we lawyers on hitting ten decades can share the moment with his closest friends and my family…my daughter, her husband, my grandchildren, great grandchildren. How do I ascribe the secret for my longevity…Albert Einstein School of Medicine claims 300 years ago in the Rhineland, my ancestors married within the family, the longevity gene carried over from generation to generation, first second cousins…Didn’t Einstein say “I
do” with his cousin?
Rolling up his sleeve, “see those punctures, my vaccination. A blood test for announcing my genetic longevity…Lottie, my companion….herself going on 94 can attest to my staying powers….4 decades she cared for me…loved me…my companion forever….I was productive for so long until 9/11 and those bastards…the smoke & ground zero is too much for me to go down to Chambers Street, the reality scene too much for my respiratory system. My breathing…I think I already said too much. I must sit down…thank you all for coming….”
Sounds impressive imagined the very young Ukranian girl waiting on a Thesaurus for finding the six letter word, beginning with P, the third letter e…”What does longevity mean?”….
“A toast,” cried some lawyer from among the guests. “To a productive long life”.
“Another hundred years,” claimed a wishful thinker, Philip mumbled “Twenty minutes a day, stretching exercise,” making a bicep, offering it…to anyone in the room for a feel…a free feel, imagined the seven year old girl from the Ukraine.
VIII
The public library honoring Phil L…at central library, a book in his name….” A tribute in my honor,” he said to himself, opening up his mail…” a book in my name at the central branch no less…from the good Major Fenton and his frau..ten decades on how I remember the forty years since we first broke the ice…it was in my office on 42nd Street upaways from the central branch on Fifth Avenue, those two lions guarding the entrances…and he walks to a wall unit where he maintains his treasure trove for clients to be , and old retainers.
“He asks me you know what I mean the cardiovascular surgeon…he says do I prefer the stent in the wall of the left ventricle or the right? Lissen’ amigo buddy boy I’m a hundred years old, Labor Day…forgive me if I belabor the point…but does it pay…that’s the question…all my life those ten decades, at every critical point we asked – does it pay…A crown on the lower side molar? Does it pay? A root canal job…does it pay? Dentures? Does it pay? Now you ask a stent the left wall – the right ventricle wall…..does it pay? Jackson…you’re the man! Precision imaging, noninvasive balloon angioplasty…reinforce the artery walls with stenting…what do I know?..a bursar ship’s salesman, night school at Fordham law…Wormser with his phonographic hearing aid…you got the brief? Y’think I need a haircut…a little off the top, the sideburns shorter…Put some color in the bald spot…My companion of 4 decades says it makes a difference….a sexy legal eagle…better for the retainer, she convinced the Gestapo to let her husband go free…women know what makes us men tick. All I got is longevity gene, Sonny.”
IX
“As I was saying,” said the final speaker, his wand red..flagging the squashing gulping throbbing heart, the cue moving between the aorta, the right and left walls of the beating pulsating squishing heart…like the beat of a frog, gulp gulping…” We can clear the clogged blockages thru advanced profile..12,12/01,…Flat panel imaging you can’t beat it!”
The joint was humming, the speaker’s chemistry, splicing with the audience of cardiac surgeons, residents, interns, education committee profs…beepers cell pones intermittently cueing their taskmasters…all in all they were alive like a fans at ninth inning rally, the speaker’s sense of humor, the absurdity of the life…the trauma of living as measured against the beat beat beat, the vulnerability of all of us…trying to gauge our life force against the grid and grind of daily expectations…..
“I’m a specialist,” he was saying, little did he know about the Argentine shakedown, the recession, the government’s collapse, rioting and looting in Buenos Aires, the International forces taking over in Afghanistan after twenty years of war, famine: humans carrying flame throwers, grenade launchers, rifles putting on the dog in the Capitol city of Kabul….the disparity between the haves and have nots growing almost every moment of a minute, changing the color of their turbans.
X
….the Dow Jones Averages on the New York stock exchange shot up a point and a quarter that day. The bulls were running and the bears were hibernating. Where did it all lead to anyhow? Leaky hearts? Clogged arteries? Ulcers? High blood pressure?
Philip Levey, a big apple legal eagle with offices on Fifth Avenue, knocked his desk twice. “Thank God, my clients have been good to me. I’ve been able to spend a few minutes stretching with a band every day. It keeps my muscles in tone,” he said, letting his friend touch his sixteen-inch right bicep. “Make a fist,” he said.
The phone rang, “Excuse me, I’m on three lines”, said the lawyer.
The friend peered into the face of the New Jersey born legal salesman extraordinaire. Those bluish gray eyes seemed indestructible…like the trunk of a tree that had seen many seeds sprout, take root, and others blown away. The layers of rings around those eyes testified to the tug of war that goes on in the feeling and thinking of 5th Avenue lawyers & corporate directors like Philip Levey.
My wife calls three or four times a day. She’s very attentive,” he said, hanging the receiver up. He took out of his desk drawer some New York Times clippings. “My daughter just got engaged. She’s a Vassar graduate. Her fiancé interning, but he wants to specialize in urology and that’s another 4 years. So you see, I have to keep my muscles in tone.”
The friend fidgeted in his chair alongside the desk, hearing a clicking. “The noise you hear is from my four phone boxes. You don’t have to worry. Our conversation isn’t being monitored,” he said.
But the friend cared little about preserving his dialogue. He cared more about the struggle of a Fifth Avenue lawyer and the rhythms that pulsated thru his life. “Should a human marry for love or money, Philip?” asked the friend.
The human named Philip Levey, slim in his conservative single breasted blue suit, blue tie, tip of his white handkerchief showing from his lapel , hesitated. Although a rapid talker, one idea giving rise to the other, he tossed off a gesture with his right hand, turning his once wavy blonde hair head…
“I’ve give that question a lot of thought lately. My wife wanted my daughter to marry a rich boy. I think love is far more important. Yes, far more important,” he said, throwing a gesture with his right hand.
The friend know feeling was equally as strong as thinking in fact to feel is no less than to think. As humans tend to grow older, they sometimes feel less.
“My father was a real estate man. Lakewood, New Jersey,” he said. “A Lincolnesque type of man I remember the bank president putting his arm on my shoulder when I was around twelve. “Phil when you grow up, I hope you’ll be as honest as your father”…When the president passed on, they read his will and found he left ten thousand dollars to my father. That’s how much he was respected.”
The friend sat back, waiting. “Yes those were my best years,” said the legal eagle.” The high school years I think are the best. No real troubles. Of course you do worry about your future. But it was worth worrying in Lakewood. I used to take long walks thru the woods.”
“How’d you get started in law, Philip?”
“I had gone to Columbia. Majored in business administration. I used to wait after the classes to talk to the professors. Asked them questions about their lectures. But they would always frown, pick up their attaché cases and walk away. It was very anti-democratic.
I started selling ship supplies to captains and pursers until one day I met a friend who told me he was going to Fordham law school. I thought I would try it out for one year. But I liked it so much, I stayed for four. The professors always answered my questions. Very democratic. I remember Professor Wormser. He was an international authority in his field. He may have compensated for his deafness. He had a big box on his lecture desk. There were no hearing aids. He’d ask me questions way ahead of the assigned cases. He never caught me unprepared,” he said, smiling happily over past briefs.
“Once I got into the law, I found I liked it. I got three lawyers working for me> The oldest has been with me for over twenty years. He was with a large firm. Had three children. But when he asked for a twenty-dollar raise, they refused. I gave him the raise and he came to work for me,” he said.
The strong right hand reached out to touch some folders and blue covered complaints lying on the desk. “I’ve handled over ten thousand cases,”: he said.” I’ve seen clients come and go. Sometimes my first impressions have been wrong But generally I’m pretty good in sizing up humans. If I thought the man or woman was in need of psychiatric treatment or needed help other than legal, would subsequently discover He or she had a nervous breakdown or been a patient in some mental hospital.”
“What do you think about Ernest Hemingway saying it’s impossible for humans to perpetuate themselves thru Economics?” asked the friend.
Again the strong right arm gestured, the head turned. “I believe it,” he said, speaking warmly and showing no outward sign of regret. “Many use the corporate form to perpetuate their legacy, their family, their children. Others use wills. Personally, I think it’s better to give your gifts now rather than later. You never know when the donees may exit, pass on. If they die first what good is the paper…They die with the will, don’t they. Speaking for myself, I like to give now,” he said, standing up from his desk…
“You think it’s your vanity?” asked the friend.
“I'm sure it is. But what of it? My ego is satisfied and the justification lies in the happiness of my friends.” “Here”, he said handing the friend two small packages. “Perfume for your sweetheart. Cuff links for you.”
Philip Levey’s strong right hand grasped the office doorknob, opening the door.
The friend saw a female client sitting on the black leather couch in the anteroom. She seemed troubled, her face a medley of scars, none of which in the beginning were physical…
He walked to the elevator as so many thousands of others had done before him. Day after day quickly passed and what did a human being have to show for it.
An accumulation of vapid desires? Or those nonaging blue grayish eyes of Philip Levey’s, circled three fold by the tug of war between feeling & thinking?*
XI
…. “Yes I said”….
“Yes I will”
“You get the drift?”
“Yes”
XII
*9/06/01, Philip Levey’s, 100th birthday party, given by his daughter & son in law, Harmony Club, 4 E. 62 , New York City, five days before ground zero…….
**12/29/01, New York Times, ‘head of Downstate. Teaching hospital demoted, 18 more deaths on his watch, heart surgery program shut down 3 days, rethinking “consultation”, part-time 10 hours, $200,000 per annum.
Speaker after speaker in all their cardiac information highway specialization spelled out the latest thinking from the genius of their cardiovascular disease networking…it wasn’t just Sweden, Holland, Florida, John Hopkins, Massachusetts General Hospital, the clinic in Cleveland, the New England Journal of Medicine, UCLA’s cardiac lab, Chicago’s Michael Reese, Washington University, St. Louis, Medical College of Virginia, University of Rome, “La Sapienza”.
It was the assimilation of the data, the computer software, hardware, the programming of the strengths, the weaknesses of cardiovascular culture…as it unfolds into a cosmos unto the world of medicine beyond any MD, PHD, could imagine a decade ago.
Captions like Angiography core Laboratory, Interventional cardiology, Electrophysiology and pacing put to shame the predilection for human imperfection in the likes of the cardiovascular scenarios as they continue to evolve in light of 21st century technologies. Without stopping the beating heart, without the need for a heart-lung machine, repairing valves thru a tiny incision, a minimal invasiveness Transmyocardial…, Revascularization using the laser for angina chest pain relief, carotid endarterectomy, arteries around the neck….aneurysm surgery.
Weakness of bureaucratic reviews, the limitations of cost accounting regimes, hospitalizations of 3500 Dollars a day for semi-private rooms, Medicare’s formula of reimbursement dispensing, the vital organ support system, artificial heart…the inadequacy of the historic system of health care, dominating the data as it streams like New Year streamers into E-mails, cell phones, internet passwords, that the billion dollar lipador, or E.C. Lilly foundation, American Heart Association cholesterol exercise eating the fruits and vegetables: scenarios the worshippers worship.
The stuffings for the good life as we saw millions of light years ago. UCLA’s Medical school still in the blueprint stages. Statins lipator zocor milligrams, calorie % equations to fats and saturated fats, still some forty years down the road.
Red flags like cheese omelets, frozen malteds, cheese burgers, french fries were still the norm for an imperfect life style, the aristocrats in their molecular bio and bioengineering labs coping with enzymes, viruses, the human immune system, proteins off cells, combating the viruses, the virus in its infectious disease zones, knowing how to evade the immune system.
Aortas but a tip of the iceberg as heart disease, dying hearts, calcifying arteries were almost ubiquitous in their assaults on blood vessels source of oxygen. Vein grafting risky, precluding heart disease, lowering cholesterol…exercising thirty minutes a day, eating right, watching……
“I want to be a MD” said the lithe prim Russian youngster from apartment 3B” . “My mother is studying to become a doctor”, she said. And what do you want to be?” asked Major Fenton’s good wife. “A gynecologist?”
“No, an MD for the moment,” she said in her Ukrainian state of mind. Responsive to the realities of a teaching medical center environment.
Little did she know of Professor Don C. Wiley, the 57 year old Harvard molecular biologist heading up his infectious diseases lab: high resolution X-ray crystallography of viral fusion, the immune system overwrought, waging war on influenza HIV-1 Ebola herpes virus.
Leaping off the bridge connecting Memphis with Arkansas, he being programmed for the Nobel Prize, his body found 300 some miles downstream, Louisiana, five weeks later, 12/22/01…….
Standing in the doorway, the cardiovascular system in her hands, the crossword puzzle penciled in, scrawled if you will of a seven eight year old holding her breathe…..” what is this worked across number 41?” she asked, not crossing the hearth, Major Fenton and his good wife studying the 6 spaces…… “What’s that word going down?” asked the good wife. “You sure you got it right?” she asked Lady Fenton a variation of her mother, yet identifying with her momma, and the intellectual economic capitol of medicine men with a capital M….”right?…….Major Fenton, right!”
II
Tendering their water bottles, stethoscopes hanging around their necks, some carrying clipboards, their energy seemed to be exponential to the third power, a big chemistry playing out in the Schreiber auditorium, their analytical and clinical experiences interacting with the specialists on the dais, the projectionist in the rear programming the slides, the professors clicking the baton like they were Stowkies playing out the Fantasia break through, the Dobey sound surreal, the listeners in one with the prowess on the dais, the baton’s Red nose, smashing the heart muscle’s squashing thrusting pulse…..
O sure you could say anything at all about the big leadership among these pros, their role models, their sticktoitiveness, determination and grit; they had all paid their dues..
Major Fenton wanted to tell the girl from apartment 3B, about peer pressure, land mines placed in your way, enemies around you wearing masks of conviviality, bringing you down to their level…but you were stone deaf to their entreaties…it was a hard world, tough as molasses and spelling bees.
Competitive, demanding concentration from the “get go” as they say…every human on the planet needing a support system for life’s obstacle course…the white jacketed Dr. Kildaires cardiologist apprentices, choosing seats where they could yawn, leaning against the wall, catching up on their r 3, 60 hours schedule of rounds, studying the heart’s pathology, the thick paged tome placed on a concrete wall, guarding the hospital’s manicured hedges.
Major Fenton had seen their type of camaraderie on the UCLA winning Rose bowl team, the Air Force Academy officer corps, the masterminds at Yale and Dean Lou Pollock’s Law School, his Yale roommate Professor Arvo Van Alstyne’s UCLA con law classes, defending Carl Chessman red lite bandit……whenever the subconscious mind at first apprehensive had solidified its confidence, moving down the information, dominating the algorims, the calculus, calibrating.
The girl and her mother not daring to hum ole blue eyes “Strangers on a train”…that was like an ET from another planet….an unrealistic distraction, a diversion from Sigmund Freud’s pleasure principle – Satchmo’s “Take the A Train”…..
It was hard nosed, cracking the pathology tomes, fighting your level of exhaustion, not knowing what your staying power was until it was tested…putting out of your mind the fear of failure….remember 3 days on, 3 days off.
“Hmmmm six spaces….First letter a P…..third letter an e…..meaning open….hmmmm….Lady Fenton you’re the resident authority for crossword puzzles…what do you think it could be?”
“Gads perchance what’s the good word, Lady Fenton? Open the blocked artery, reinforce artery walls with advanced stenting as soon as possible.”
“Pliant,” she said, her own technique of craft and recollection into thirty years. Her yesterdays the surcease from boredom….here the board room was into the fast lane, the reality of cardiovascular disease in and around cyberspace…
No Florence Nightingale, Madame Curie, Anna Freud, Helen Keller, Sister Teresa….could go about rescuing the world. Humans had more than enough to lick. Didn’t Major Fenton’s own boss at the Bedford Stuy high school say “You’re your own worst enemy. Yoselheimer it’s a genocide you’re teaching…Your brother is no idealist, either…consolidating his gains, climbing into the upper classes of capital gains, tax shelters, windfalls, …Genocide, castrating these kids, without telling’em the street scene is all a myth.
They’re living a lie. And so are you, Yosel…your brother, the surgeon. Buying sturgeon whitefish for Sunday brunches on ole’blue eyes legal eagle’s estate. “You’re toast”, said the principal, slamming the door.
III
48 hours into the future, a 70 year old retired high school teacher, playing out his post retirement as a member of the San Diego Chargers ground crew collapsed at the two minute warning mark, the Chargers hoping to decapitate the Oakland Raiders, their skull & bones on their helmets….the 70 year olds collapse but another statistic….into the data base of survival of the fittest…putting these players thru the bone crushing, body breaking mill…a man collapses, the game halted…viewers around the globe, stymied in their own unaccomplished accomplishments…a team of medicos applying CPR, resuscitation, pressing his rib cage, blood pressure monitoring, oxygen tanks reeled into his mouth, taking his pulse, giving the 70 year old man a chance at surviving another day, a moment to pursue himself…monitoring his vital signs…
The caring people put a board underneath his fallen body, carrying him off the sidelines, the scenario ready to begin again its tireless metaphor into the survival of the fittest, humanity’s heartbeat beating again and again. One man’s heartbeat quenched, the cosmos of pro football, the world Waited Saturday, December 15, 2001, the gig taking a breather in more ways than a 70 year old’s heart attack could ever attest to
The wheel of fate determined by a heartbeat….from oblivion, the “immortality “
IV
The MD, PHD, FACC, director of Electrophysiology and Pacing was oblivious to the pacing at the San Diego Charger-Raider football game’s own pacing…..His own data base of yearning to become one of the Faustian leading men in cardiac resynchronization therapy…..”Ask yourself why go to medical school in the first place? After all the years…of suffering, a blood bath for yourself…masochism?”
“But by asking, it begs the question of your own intelligence. Not to give up the paper chase, the pursuit, even when your exhausted, tired beyond anything you ever imagined. For myself, I got lucky, the fellowships. And today my role is not cardiology but kinesiology, bio engineering…….,” :his sense of humor at the way his career caromed thru the financial aid syndrome, the cardiologists, residents and interns, laughing at his light touch, identifying with his wit and humor, in an otherwise grisly demonstration of man’s heartbeat.., the cardiac institute’s thrust, refuting man’s last final breathe, up sparking his heartbeat, their modus operandi, the frog-like beat of a burp on the graphics.
They set the bar for a wholesome life style, treating heart disease, combating the victim’s own paucity of knowledge, how his ticker resonates in the emotional and numbers game of life’s tedious routines.
Didn’t the rehab of treadmills, bicycles, wheeling in motion, pumping the iron refute the causality of stats, their hard nosed determinism…The Washington cemetery of gravestones, family plots, mausoleums, Lasting proof, evidence of the transitoriness of the heartbeat’s travailing rhythms…its intersections with the oxygen carrying blood vessels, lungs, brain hemispheres, with its concomitant brain cells. Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, tumors, viruses lying in wait…for the first sign of a failing, the immune system, in generic disarray, Don C. Wiley, John L. Loeb Professor, Biochemistry & Biophysics, Structural Molecular Biology, Harvard, leaping off that Memphis Bridge that 16th night, November, 2001…….
Where else on the face of this Earth could their be a calling….which honors, perpetuates The life, 7 span, each day may be the last, Time passing, pathogenic & free radical damage of electrons, damage to tissues, heart disease, but genes, chromosomes 4,25 may compress sick time toward one’s life’s end.
Didn’t Roberto Campi, an internist in Novella Roma, living among the hi rise apartment houses on Via Nome fana, the trolley car passing the military barracks thru the piazzas, the Via Venito, the University of Rome medical school…Ben Hur, Marc Antony, Caesar, “ete Brute”, was here, the trolley passing above the catacombs, the sewers of the ancient city….
“Campi was here” …his wife, two Pinocchio boys, their governess, Bianco George, their neighbor. On the same floor, companion to Senora Campi while her internist H was cracking his books at the Rome University medical school, working out the protocols of his cardiac study: placebos & the real Mussolini stuffings of Italian life pills….walking exercising while devouring the rich oiled spaghetti, lasagna, Mediterranean fuzoila, pasta, the heavy calorie doughed white crusted loafs….all that starch hmmmmm at the Campi three hour siesta….
“Don’t do as I do, do as I say,” was his motto posted above the broadband computer access into the information highway of cardiovascular disease, and the turf he cycled on, walked amidst the Coliseum, the ancient ghetto, the delis with their spiced meats….Kosher you ask?
The good doctor did his best, scrutinizing the recipes Bianco George or the maid would prepare for his family….Fresh fruit – oranges, grapefruit, whole wheat grain cereals….”Fiber fiber” he’d press at the table, the family waiting for his return from his stance at the school….No mention of stents, the variation on the metal clasps for gushing artery blood that had been clogged over years of unconscionable eating on the run…those 3 hour siestas….
Risk stratification? Stupification being hooked by cancer sticks…human carnage in face of the evidence…all the trials, all the placebos…conclusive results…Indefatigable proof…incontrovertible evidence lent into the ovens..ad infinito….
Humans not “buying” antimenus: they enjoyed gasping to their last, they would go out, their self indulgence unalterable ego trip opposed to pacemakers, defibrillators, crippled from being all used up from too much living, smoking so many packs a day…doctor’s ritual like a Saturday matinee in the yesterday of our youth….
Plague and lesions, even with ultra sound…MRI’s thrown to the wastelands, abandoned for the sake of vanity, continuing the self destructive journeys from making 4 day hospital stays an uncommon common practice into the 21st century…Paradoxically seeking help, cures four and a half hours under the knife, yet rejecting any bedside relief until it’s too late for the last and final breathe.
Educating the masses be damned! They go their own way…Wasting away by their own waste.
Gads, perchance, Major Fenton what’s the good word?”
V
The auditorium lights went up, coffee break…Major Fenton the erstwhile double by pass patient, three months of Medicare rehab..an hour a day bicycling, wheeling, treadmill walking, 50 dumbbell repetitions…showering down, Turkish toweling, sitting in row X,……raising his right elbow from the chair’s arm…’Dr. Marvin C. Kochman and wife’ .
Thirty minutes away from Marvin’s reality scene at the Midwood movie theater’s balcony, he taking over the theater, converting it to his optomological base of operations, Tearing out the balcony seats where Major Fenton, a scrub at the local high school had weekly designs on the sophtic high school cheerleaders…..millions of memories ago, a half a century earlier….
“You get the drift,” was the Marvin’s utterance, as he peered thru his x-ray eye detector into your pupils, retinas corneas irises….” Look at my right ear…Look at my left…straight ahead,” impeccably dressed in his pin stripes, his graying wavy black hair combed into a leading man contour…finding himself a home in the Midwood theater balcony where he always belonged…the silver screen, a “Woody Allen” witness.
Formerly in white concrete quarters of a Quentin road medical building, his learning curve was up. “Started in a basement on Ocean Avenue,” he said, without any Julie Stein boasting. Hadn’t he come a long way without employing a jazz band, or a Music Corporation of America talent agency, or the UCLA eye hospital, part of the university’s medical landscape…..
He scribbled a few words of diagnostic wisdom…a middle aged man stepping into the room, Marvin speaking, the alter ego taking notes…the optometrist had the popcorn concession in the balcony…
“I’m retiring,” said the Marvin.”73 joining a gulf club scoring my age, but I’ll keep a hand in. Once a week on Fridays. My name out front,” he said, his tall tough like Cassius body, giving way to well groomed suited lady ophthalmologist who verified her mentor’s calibrated prescription…..
“My daughter is in London, leading a jazz band,” he said with a touch of exasperation.” Harvard law school like my wife…but she wanted to go her own way,” he said. “My son my son,” the same Brian Aherne flick that was exhibited some six seven decades earlier, Julie Stein structuring his optic training for organizing actors as an agent, then evolving back into his medical school training as an opthalmological genius….. ‘Julius & Doris Stein’s eyes’, off the LeConte Westwood boulevard entrance, University of California, Los Angeles’.
Major Fenton leaned on the armpost, remembering the flair Dr. Marvin had for his eye practice, the whole gamut of treatment, The laser healing of his hemorrhaging eyes, the Quentin Road facility…the board names of his associates following his credits….a larger than life flair, a man with the big gesture, those blue pin stripes “get my drift” tongue,
A Jack L. Warner without the stogie, seeing his soul in action was indeed more than a hemorrhaging eye patient could bargain for.
The Major had seen the doctor drive his son to a dermatologist named Morton. He had caught the drift about his daughter returning to the states, her passion for scribbling lyrics in California, associating with the likes of Grammies, lady crooners and all that encompasses..the poetry of Joni Mitchell, for instance.
Sure Marvin and his wife knew the way of the world. Didn’t Julie Stein and his Doris, their Pacific Coast counterpart know it too…dance music for Freud’s and Fred Astaire’s pleasure principle, then revolving back unto the opthalmalogical reality scene.
Who could argue with that? Didn’t the HMO’s penetrate a billion trillion-dollar enterprise? The state of Oregon Giving up their fight. A triple heart transplant going the way of cost accounting. The insurance company backing down in face of the HMO’s refusal to accept the risk of three quarters of a million coverage: if the surgery goes bad, the odds insurmountable for the patient’s recovery…even with Oregon’s poor law drafted for such cases, the dollar outlays were too exorbitant, the surgery too chancy.
Why monitor such risks argued the HMO, pulling the plug out from under the dying human, the team of cardiovascular surgeons anesthesiologists assistant doctors nurses left in the lurch.…
Alleviating human suffering and misery demanded a high price, too high for most of us, observers of the medical recovery syndrome. The participants taken aback at the costs, dying a little bit, their level of frustration peaking, then subduing at the reality of the miniscule role they were playing.
The doctor and his good wife had a marketing wizard, an advertising pro comparable to Molly Bloom’s husband out of Joyce’s Ulysses’, prowling the Brooklyn streets for ads…Allan N. in his jovial excursion into FM radio, selling the wares of his numero uno client, Dr. Marvin…word of mouth, the print media, the air waves, space transponders, satellite dishes…Why not? And they came.
The rainbow coalition, the religious people, the seniors filling the seats of the Midwood balcony for what was once a double feature…the Dr. Marvin “Rhett Butler”, his self servicing splendor, rewarded handsomely, for playing out his inner needs…in the balcony…among the apparitions & spooks of fantasies long since gone, the happy hunting ground & internet web sites for movie buffs. “George Washington slept here”, starring Jack Benny…
“Y’get my drift?”.
VI
Eleven million potential customers in the big Apple alone…why not give it a shot with an advertising blitz that would shake up, the yawning of the interns “whattaya gonna do over the Holidays?” Conversations among the audience scripted in their lily clean white jackets coffee cups in hand. “Philadelphia. Y’ever been there?” “Beautiful city.”
Aggressive gratifications in a very competitive business….Healthy so they could spend time with their grandchildren…live longer healthier lives…save the Seniors more than $1700 a year…that’s what it’s all about….so why not look into it,” sounded the politico sincerity, airwaves giving way to a “sound & fury” mythology…” We started out in a basement on Ocean Avenue,” said the wunderkid into his pin stripes, speckled gray black wavy hair. Contoured into a pompadour popular on the Avenue 50 years ago…
“If you want the administration press six. If you want Rosalind, press two….,” the musica of the classical radio station resounding…” Regards from the maestro himself,” the Major’s guttural tones in to the classics….
But could you tell the blue collar crowd, the Major’s Super undo his wits, phoning the good wife asking for a loan of six bucks until the next morning at eleven, the fourth time within the year, the super played out his role, asking for a small touch…he had chutzpah but during the Holiday season, the patrician saw fit to lean back and unScroogelike part with the six…lucky lottos, a New Jersey threesome 007…
VII
God bless Tiny Tim, Bob Cratchit, John, the cancer stick in his right paw, waiting on the sixer…into minions while the big game passes over him, the 7 year old Ukrainian girl a flight upstairs into her cardiovascular system language, vocabulary building when she realizes her promise,….if she can avoid, bypass the pitfalls of temptation, poor role models, lousy advice…hook unto the soul of her mother…not rebelling, putting aside her dreams….
Starting out in life, she wasn’t yet attuned…”the ratio of the good cholesterol, the HDL, to the bad cholesterol, the LDL was evenly split, you don’t need unsaturated fat because of the bad cholesterol…but you need it for the good cholesterol, the HDL….and in the saturated fat you need the HDL, the good cholesterol to outweigh the bad cholesterol, the LDL…again it’s the ratio between the good and the bad that counts….”
All she wanted was a six-letter word that fits within the cardiovascular system…
Meanwhile hundred year old legal eagle named Philip Levey was celebrating his 100th birthday party at the Harmony club a few blocks from the symposium…Standing tallish like the “Duke” Wayne leading man he was.” Thank you all for coming…it isn’t often we lawyers on hitting ten decades can share the moment with his closest friends and my family…my daughter, her husband, my grandchildren, great grandchildren. How do I ascribe the secret for my longevity…Albert Einstein School of Medicine claims 300 years ago in the Rhineland, my ancestors married within the family, the longevity gene carried over from generation to generation, first second cousins…Didn’t Einstein say “I
do” with his cousin?
Rolling up his sleeve, “see those punctures, my vaccination. A blood test for announcing my genetic longevity…Lottie, my companion….herself going on 94 can attest to my staying powers….4 decades she cared for me…loved me…my companion forever….I was productive for so long until 9/11 and those bastards…the smoke & ground zero is too much for me to go down to Chambers Street, the reality scene too much for my respiratory system. My breathing…I think I already said too much. I must sit down…thank you all for coming….”
Sounds impressive imagined the very young Ukranian girl waiting on a Thesaurus for finding the six letter word, beginning with P, the third letter e…”What does longevity mean?”….
“A toast,” cried some lawyer from among the guests. “To a productive long life”.
“Another hundred years,” claimed a wishful thinker, Philip mumbled “Twenty minutes a day, stretching exercise,” making a bicep, offering it…to anyone in the room for a feel…a free feel, imagined the seven year old girl from the Ukraine.
VIII
The public library honoring Phil L…at central library, a book in his name….” A tribute in my honor,” he said to himself, opening up his mail…” a book in my name at the central branch no less…from the good Major Fenton and his frau..ten decades on how I remember the forty years since we first broke the ice…it was in my office on 42nd Street upaways from the central branch on Fifth Avenue, those two lions guarding the entrances…and he walks to a wall unit where he maintains his treasure trove for clients to be , and old retainers.
“He asks me you know what I mean the cardiovascular surgeon…he says do I prefer the stent in the wall of the left ventricle or the right? Lissen’ amigo buddy boy I’m a hundred years old, Labor Day…forgive me if I belabor the point…but does it pay…that’s the question…all my life those ten decades, at every critical point we asked – does it pay…A crown on the lower side molar? Does it pay? A root canal job…does it pay? Dentures? Does it pay? Now you ask a stent the left wall – the right ventricle wall…..does it pay? Jackson…you’re the man! Precision imaging, noninvasive balloon angioplasty…reinforce the artery walls with stenting…what do I know?..a bursar ship’s salesman, night school at Fordham law…Wormser with his phonographic hearing aid…you got the brief? Y’think I need a haircut…a little off the top, the sideburns shorter…Put some color in the bald spot…My companion of 4 decades says it makes a difference….a sexy legal eagle…better for the retainer, she convinced the Gestapo to let her husband go free…women know what makes us men tick. All I got is longevity gene, Sonny.”
IX
“As I was saying,” said the final speaker, his wand red..flagging the squashing gulping throbbing heart, the cue moving between the aorta, the right and left walls of the beating pulsating squishing heart…like the beat of a frog, gulp gulping…” We can clear the clogged blockages thru advanced profile..12,12/01,…Flat panel imaging you can’t beat it!”
The joint was humming, the speaker’s chemistry, splicing with the audience of cardiac surgeons, residents, interns, education committee profs…beepers cell pones intermittently cueing their taskmasters…all in all they were alive like a fans at ninth inning rally, the speaker’s sense of humor, the absurdity of the life…the trauma of living as measured against the beat beat beat, the vulnerability of all of us…trying to gauge our life force against the grid and grind of daily expectations…..
“I’m a specialist,” he was saying, little did he know about the Argentine shakedown, the recession, the government’s collapse, rioting and looting in Buenos Aires, the International forces taking over in Afghanistan after twenty years of war, famine: humans carrying flame throwers, grenade launchers, rifles putting on the dog in the Capitol city of Kabul….the disparity between the haves and have nots growing almost every moment of a minute, changing the color of their turbans.
X
….the Dow Jones Averages on the New York stock exchange shot up a point and a quarter that day. The bulls were running and the bears were hibernating. Where did it all lead to anyhow? Leaky hearts? Clogged arteries? Ulcers? High blood pressure?
Philip Levey, a big apple legal eagle with offices on Fifth Avenue, knocked his desk twice. “Thank God, my clients have been good to me. I’ve been able to spend a few minutes stretching with a band every day. It keeps my muscles in tone,” he said, letting his friend touch his sixteen-inch right bicep. “Make a fist,” he said.
The phone rang, “Excuse me, I’m on three lines”, said the lawyer.
The friend peered into the face of the New Jersey born legal salesman extraordinaire. Those bluish gray eyes seemed indestructible…like the trunk of a tree that had seen many seeds sprout, take root, and others blown away. The layers of rings around those eyes testified to the tug of war that goes on in the feeling and thinking of 5th Avenue lawyers & corporate directors like Philip Levey.
My wife calls three or four times a day. She’s very attentive,” he said, hanging the receiver up. He took out of his desk drawer some New York Times clippings. “My daughter just got engaged. She’s a Vassar graduate. Her fiancé interning, but he wants to specialize in urology and that’s another 4 years. So you see, I have to keep my muscles in tone.”
The friend fidgeted in his chair alongside the desk, hearing a clicking. “The noise you hear is from my four phone boxes. You don’t have to worry. Our conversation isn’t being monitored,” he said.
But the friend cared little about preserving his dialogue. He cared more about the struggle of a Fifth Avenue lawyer and the rhythms that pulsated thru his life. “Should a human marry for love or money, Philip?” asked the friend.
The human named Philip Levey, slim in his conservative single breasted blue suit, blue tie, tip of his white handkerchief showing from his lapel , hesitated. Although a rapid talker, one idea giving rise to the other, he tossed off a gesture with his right hand, turning his once wavy blonde hair head…
“I’ve give that question a lot of thought lately. My wife wanted my daughter to marry a rich boy. I think love is far more important. Yes, far more important,” he said, throwing a gesture with his right hand.
The friend know feeling was equally as strong as thinking in fact to feel is no less than to think. As humans tend to grow older, they sometimes feel less.
“My father was a real estate man. Lakewood, New Jersey,” he said. “A Lincolnesque type of man I remember the bank president putting his arm on my shoulder when I was around twelve. “Phil when you grow up, I hope you’ll be as honest as your father”…When the president passed on, they read his will and found he left ten thousand dollars to my father. That’s how much he was respected.”
The friend sat back, waiting. “Yes those were my best years,” said the legal eagle.” The high school years I think are the best. No real troubles. Of course you do worry about your future. But it was worth worrying in Lakewood. I used to take long walks thru the woods.”
“How’d you get started in law, Philip?”
“I had gone to Columbia. Majored in business administration. I used to wait after the classes to talk to the professors. Asked them questions about their lectures. But they would always frown, pick up their attaché cases and walk away. It was very anti-democratic.
I started selling ship supplies to captains and pursers until one day I met a friend who told me he was going to Fordham law school. I thought I would try it out for one year. But I liked it so much, I stayed for four. The professors always answered my questions. Very democratic. I remember Professor Wormser. He was an international authority in his field. He may have compensated for his deafness. He had a big box on his lecture desk. There were no hearing aids. He’d ask me questions way ahead of the assigned cases. He never caught me unprepared,” he said, smiling happily over past briefs.
“Once I got into the law, I found I liked it. I got three lawyers working for me> The oldest has been with me for over twenty years. He was with a large firm. Had three children. But when he asked for a twenty-dollar raise, they refused. I gave him the raise and he came to work for me,” he said.
The strong right hand reached out to touch some folders and blue covered complaints lying on the desk. “I’ve handled over ten thousand cases,”: he said.” I’ve seen clients come and go. Sometimes my first impressions have been wrong But generally I’m pretty good in sizing up humans. If I thought the man or woman was in need of psychiatric treatment or needed help other than legal, would subsequently discover He or she had a nervous breakdown or been a patient in some mental hospital.”
“What do you think about Ernest Hemingway saying it’s impossible for humans to perpetuate themselves thru Economics?” asked the friend.
Again the strong right arm gestured, the head turned. “I believe it,” he said, speaking warmly and showing no outward sign of regret. “Many use the corporate form to perpetuate their legacy, their family, their children. Others use wills. Personally, I think it’s better to give your gifts now rather than later. You never know when the donees may exit, pass on. If they die first what good is the paper…They die with the will, don’t they. Speaking for myself, I like to give now,” he said, standing up from his desk…
“You think it’s your vanity?” asked the friend.
“I'm sure it is. But what of it? My ego is satisfied and the justification lies in the happiness of my friends.” “Here”, he said handing the friend two small packages. “Perfume for your sweetheart. Cuff links for you.”
Philip Levey’s strong right hand grasped the office doorknob, opening the door.
The friend saw a female client sitting on the black leather couch in the anteroom. She seemed troubled, her face a medley of scars, none of which in the beginning were physical…
He walked to the elevator as so many thousands of others had done before him. Day after day quickly passed and what did a human being have to show for it.
An accumulation of vapid desires? Or those nonaging blue grayish eyes of Philip Levey’s, circled three fold by the tug of war between feeling & thinking?*
XI
…. “Yes I said”….
“Yes I will”
“You get the drift?”
“Yes”
XII
*9/06/01, Philip Levey’s, 100th birthday party, given by his daughter & son in law, Harmony Club, 4 E. 62 , New York City, five days before ground zero…….
**12/29/01, New York Times, ‘head of Downstate. Teaching hospital demoted, 18 more deaths on his watch, heart surgery program shut down 3 days, rethinking “consultation”, part-time 10 hours, $200,000 per annum.
Cosmic revenge, a moral angst...
Cosmic revenge, a moral angst... indeed Cheetah. It would take away Joe E. Brown’s a comic genuis’s breathe away....the ghosts of the Dodgers into their migration.... their “ Ebbets Field” voodoo” haunting the basin’s semi tropical trappings...
Chavez Ravine, bumper to bumper traffic smog......
“Indeed Cheetah, it’s a jungle out there”, said Joe E Brown in the guise of a loinclothed ape man
grapevine..
Scanning the landscape for those vaunted heroes that made his dream come alive....viable at
Ucla’s Joe E Brown Field .,the skipper in “Some like it hot”. Gunning his motor boat’s line.
“I’m a man says Jack Lemmon.
“Well, nobody’s perfect.”retorts Joe E. Brown
II
Traipsing those heroics.....Pee Wee. Pistol Pete crashing into the right or was it the left field center field wall below Abe Stark’s clothing sign...
Fat Freddy Leo the Lip, Cookie Lavagetto Dolph Camili Babe Phelps VVan Lingle Mungo Ducky Medwick Preacher Roe Curt Davis Augie Galan Frenchy Bordagaray Waner breothers (Paul&Lloyd) Whitlow Wyatt Kirby Higbe coaches Charley Dressen Clyde Sukeforth.....
Bobby Bragan Hal Gregg Rex Barney Cal Abrams Al Gionfrido Billy Cox Arky Pete Coscarot
George Shuba Spider Jorgensen Don Zimmer....
Red Barber in his ”catbird seat”, Hilda and her rag timers Gladys Gooding at the organ.. the knothole kids in their 55 cents bleacher rows....... Larry McPhail, the owner, counting the take.
“Awesome unbelievable...
“God has the last word.”
III
Ucla’s Jackie Robinson breaking the color line, his hand eye coordinaion beguiling his grandparent’s slave ridden heritage. A four sport letterman ., sliding home in a squeeze bunt, the steal’s dust swirling over the reality scene.
Mickey Owen’s passed ball, Ed Head Don Sutton Campy behnd the plate..Joe Black Don Newcombe Pafko.....Billy Herman, Eddie Miksis Howie Schultz (a Celtic hoopster), Vito Tamles.... Burt Shotten La Sorta.
The Gas House Gang of Branch Rickey...Stan the Man
Musial Terry Moore Enos “Country” Slaughter “Pepper” Martin the Cooper brothers Marty Marion Whitey Kurowski Creepy Crespie Howie Pollet Johnny Mize at first...(“Big Jahn”)
Max Lanier....
Meanwhile back at the office Montae&Court Streets, Branch Rickey the guiding partner
(O’Malley and his father in law wearing his Judge’s robes a block away) put his hand on Jackie Robinson’s shoulder...
”Bite your tongue. Hold your fire, Mister Robinson. This isn’t Montreal. Ucla. Bigotry prevailss
among ballplayers.. Don’t let the barbs cause any wounds. Continue your aggressiveness Your resume when you were at Pasadena City College Ucla...”
“We’re not here to smoke history. Winning games.... toward the National League pennant. A World Series. That’s our modus operandi.. Be patient, Mister Robinson... .
IV
“Clem Labine, Hugh Casey in the bullpen Sandy Koufax, *Don Drysadale, Maury Wills Steve Garvey Sandy Amoros..... Gil Hodges at first Casey Stengel retired to his bank..Glendale,California..*Drysdale on hearing Koufax pitched a no hitter...”Did he win?”
Carl Oiskine Ralph Branca on the mound. O’Malley now the honcho in those Montegue*Court street reality scene, his father in law wearing his Judge’s robe at the across the street Surrogates Court.....
Calibrating transition to Chavez Ravine in the thinking apparatax....Carl Furillo the Duke many of our heroes guarded in relocating....tentative&doubtful without a passport.
V
Rousseau and Diderot “Tale of two cioties” by Dickens becomes clear in retrospect.. A moral travesty A spaced out trajectory going down the freeway. Illusions of grandeur delusions of grandeur as the O’Malleys sold ther franchise to Fox and the Murdoch” johns..”
Subsequently in trhe rough and tumble Gene Autry Anaheim Angels turf they sold out their souls to the current beleaguered moneyed tycoon.Frank McCourt.... cast in the outfield., East Los Angeles, the barrio East Los Angeles the Mojave desert 29 Palms Rancho Mirage Palm Springs beyond..Nevada and Las Vegas.
The Dodger owner embroiled in a heated divorce , his ex’s legal eagles holding the team as a bailment to their client’s community property.
The owner pleading with baseball’s founding fathers to support his coffers...
The commissioner did just hat... selling out the American past time? The public trust.?
VI
The scenario smacks ofd cronyism and insider trading. “The volice of America” condemns the archaic thinking because the game deserves Judge Labdis’s state of mind,open to a fresh look
for the fans and the age of enlightenment...the information highway.
Right Cheetah?
High school students are tuned out..one out of a class of 5o has ever been to the ball park.
A predestined disaster that seems to be an epiphany.
Joe E Brown’s motor launch crashing the shoals.............
Dangerous sharks, indeed Cheetah!
VII
No real life heroes except among the “ibyan rebs”... Senator from Arizona. Major League baseball supporting the myth..perpetuating the fantasy by tolerating the divorcee’s hi jinks in usurping a franchise that bespeaks the American Dream.
Only a myth, indeed. An asset gobbled up like in Las Vegas faro.
The sellout calls for estoppel, restoring faith in the game’s integrity..not to be interperated the Black Sox betting scandal nine decades earlier.
Burt Lancaster’s “Field of dreams”
VIII
Cosmic revenge playng out.....Bring the Dodgers back to whence they came....the tragedy playing out in the L.A. basin where the only dreams are on the studio screens..
Joe E. Brown’s “Alibi Ike”(Ring Lardner) in the role of an pitcher who falls in love with the team owner’s daughter, Olivia deHaviland, the plot as his “Some like it hot” shattering the dilemma between the sexes..
Right, Cheetah?
Right.
IX
“Restore the game’s integrity. The American past time..... our heroes....
Cosmic revenge playing out.
Jackie Robinson Junior High at the intersection of Jackie Robinson Boulevard and Joe E Brown field .... 3000 miles across North America .. April 28, 2011
Chavez Ravine, bumper to bumper traffic smog......
“Indeed Cheetah, it’s a jungle out there”, said Joe E Brown in the guise of a loinclothed ape man
grapevine..
Scanning the landscape for those vaunted heroes that made his dream come alive....viable at
Ucla’s Joe E Brown Field .,the skipper in “Some like it hot”. Gunning his motor boat’s line.
“I’m a man says Jack Lemmon.
“Well, nobody’s perfect.”retorts Joe E. Brown
II
Traipsing those heroics.....Pee Wee. Pistol Pete crashing into the right or was it the left field center field wall below Abe Stark’s clothing sign...
Fat Freddy Leo the Lip, Cookie Lavagetto Dolph Camili Babe Phelps VVan Lingle Mungo Ducky Medwick Preacher Roe Curt Davis Augie Galan Frenchy Bordagaray Waner breothers (Paul&Lloyd) Whitlow Wyatt Kirby Higbe coaches Charley Dressen Clyde Sukeforth.....
Bobby Bragan Hal Gregg Rex Barney Cal Abrams Al Gionfrido Billy Cox Arky Pete Coscarot
George Shuba Spider Jorgensen Don Zimmer....
Red Barber in his ”catbird seat”, Hilda and her rag timers Gladys Gooding at the organ.. the knothole kids in their 55 cents bleacher rows....... Larry McPhail, the owner, counting the take.
“Awesome unbelievable...
“God has the last word.”
III
Ucla’s Jackie Robinson breaking the color line, his hand eye coordinaion beguiling his grandparent’s slave ridden heritage. A four sport letterman ., sliding home in a squeeze bunt, the steal’s dust swirling over the reality scene.
Mickey Owen’s passed ball, Ed Head Don Sutton Campy behnd the plate..Joe Black Don Newcombe Pafko.....Billy Herman, Eddie Miksis Howie Schultz (a Celtic hoopster), Vito Tamles.... Burt Shotten La Sorta.
The Gas House Gang of Branch Rickey...Stan the Man
Musial Terry Moore Enos “Country” Slaughter “Pepper” Martin the Cooper brothers Marty Marion Whitey Kurowski Creepy Crespie Howie Pollet Johnny Mize at first...(“Big Jahn”)
Max Lanier....
Meanwhile back at the office Montae&Court Streets, Branch Rickey the guiding partner
(O’Malley and his father in law wearing his Judge’s robes a block away) put his hand on Jackie Robinson’s shoulder...
”Bite your tongue. Hold your fire, Mister Robinson. This isn’t Montreal. Ucla. Bigotry prevailss
among ballplayers.. Don’t let the barbs cause any wounds. Continue your aggressiveness Your resume when you were at Pasadena City College Ucla...”
“We’re not here to smoke history. Winning games.... toward the National League pennant. A World Series. That’s our modus operandi.. Be patient, Mister Robinson... .
IV
“Clem Labine, Hugh Casey in the bullpen Sandy Koufax, *Don Drysadale, Maury Wills Steve Garvey Sandy Amoros..... Gil Hodges at first Casey Stengel retired to his bank..Glendale,California..*Drysdale on hearing Koufax pitched a no hitter...”Did he win?”
Carl Oiskine Ralph Branca on the mound. O’Malley now the honcho in those Montegue*Court street reality scene, his father in law wearing his Judge’s robe at the across the street Surrogates Court.....
Calibrating transition to Chavez Ravine in the thinking apparatax....Carl Furillo the Duke many of our heroes guarded in relocating....tentative&doubtful without a passport.
V
Rousseau and Diderot “Tale of two cioties” by Dickens becomes clear in retrospect.. A moral travesty A spaced out trajectory going down the freeway. Illusions of grandeur delusions of grandeur as the O’Malleys sold ther franchise to Fox and the Murdoch” johns..”
Subsequently in trhe rough and tumble Gene Autry Anaheim Angels turf they sold out their souls to the current beleaguered moneyed tycoon.Frank McCourt.... cast in the outfield., East Los Angeles, the barrio East Los Angeles the Mojave desert 29 Palms Rancho Mirage Palm Springs beyond..Nevada and Las Vegas.
The Dodger owner embroiled in a heated divorce , his ex’s legal eagles holding the team as a bailment to their client’s community property.
The owner pleading with baseball’s founding fathers to support his coffers...
The commissioner did just hat... selling out the American past time? The public trust.?
VI
The scenario smacks ofd cronyism and insider trading. “The volice of America” condemns the archaic thinking because the game deserves Judge Labdis’s state of mind,open to a fresh look
for the fans and the age of enlightenment...the information highway.
Right Cheetah?
High school students are tuned out..one out of a class of 5o has ever been to the ball park.
A predestined disaster that seems to be an epiphany.
Joe E Brown’s motor launch crashing the shoals.............
Dangerous sharks, indeed Cheetah!
VII
No real life heroes except among the “ibyan rebs”... Senator from Arizona. Major League baseball supporting the myth..perpetuating the fantasy by tolerating the divorcee’s hi jinks in usurping a franchise that bespeaks the American Dream.
Only a myth, indeed. An asset gobbled up like in Las Vegas faro.
The sellout calls for estoppel, restoring faith in the game’s integrity..not to be interperated the Black Sox betting scandal nine decades earlier.
Burt Lancaster’s “Field of dreams”
VIII
Cosmic revenge playng out.....Bring the Dodgers back to whence they came....the tragedy playing out in the L.A. basin where the only dreams are on the studio screens..
Joe E. Brown’s “Alibi Ike”(Ring Lardner) in the role of an pitcher who falls in love with the team owner’s daughter, Olivia deHaviland, the plot as his “Some like it hot” shattering the dilemma between the sexes..
Right, Cheetah?
Right.
IX
“Restore the game’s integrity. The American past time..... our heroes....
Cosmic revenge playing out.
Jackie Robinson Junior High at the intersection of Jackie Robinson Boulevard and Joe E Brown field .... 3000 miles across North America .. April 28, 2011
Little did John Farrow directing his wife MaureenOSullivan
Little did John Farrow directing his wife MaureenOSullivan”, “Tarzan escapes” and Pope Pius XI’s Knight of the Holy Sepulchre, have the clairvoyance ... his gifted Hollywood bred
daughter Mia’s mojo deservedly, from the University of Connecticut’s Board of Trustees.
A commencement addreess at the school for performing arts May 9th. Not that it wasn’t a scarce penny to have coach John Calhoun and his Kemba Walker of the Bronx and an Apollo theater talent dominate the NCAA March Madness, Walker entering the NBA draft. ..after three years
matriculating for his recognition. (take it for what itis worth from a Storrs appointed philosopher... Hartford&Waterbury branches)
But Mia Farrow’s nature...her own spiritual quest in many ways. Didn’t she and her
sister Priscilla, make the “hirdy gurdy”to Tibet with the Beatles (Harrison Lennon) a nirvana with Marashishi Mahesh as her garu........
Yet what does that viajo have to do with the Mia Farrow, the actress, and scion of the family playing out their connections for the ordinary and mundane life that
Aaron Copeland’s “common man” is playing out.....
Did Queen Elizabeth invite Mia to trhe nuptials next week at Westminister Abbey.Surely her credentials are beyond credibility. Her grandfather into the pedigree. A Lord in his day. A barrister by his powdered wig.,the family planting their roots in Austrailia.
IV
When “Woody Allen” replicated his “Annie Hall” Diane Keaton with Frank Sinotra’s ex,,,Andre Previn’s frau, did his “I’ll never write a funny movie again” did his consciousness grasp the implications for a kid schooled in Yeshiva..... “sprechen” Yiddish.. raised on the lower East side, living on Avenue K and 14th Street in Flatbush,... a block from Stanley Kubrick’s “Space Odyssey”(Kubrick’s supermarket) attending Midwood High School...NYU... CUNY know better....
Mid Farrow’s trappings were part and parcel of his own divinity.
Admiringly he didn’t know what he was doing at Dorothy Chandler’s pavilion Puccini’s “Giccoi Schicci” As Seymour Konigsberg- a work in progress- like all of the voodoo into our mad cap cosmos of “What’s new pussycat?” “Everything you wanted to know abou tsex (but were afraid to ask)
V
Everything being relative, mister Konigsbery-Allen submerged himself into his ouvre...schtick with Max Liebvman’s “Show of shows”.
Sculpting jokes for Sid Caesar, Imogene Coco, Carl
Reiner Howie Morris..screening dialects... indiscreet camp......
long before Colonel Khadafi emerged in his Libvyan garb......
Tthe outlandish maneuvers our revolving planet takes.....
hedge funds... derivatives.. bankruptcies foreclosures unemployment.. the normal ways of doing business was becoming extinct
Unconventional thinking depending on how you look at it.
So “Hannah and her sisters” was de facto Mia Farrow and her transcendental vision and her
alliance with Simone de Beauvoir’s “Second Sex”
No “Second Sex” here.,Cheetah!
“Right Jane?” (Maureen O’Sullivan) as Tarzan (Johnny Weismuller) garbed in his loincloth presses the drapes aside in their uppity African love nest.
“There’s a jungle out there, Jane.”
Cheetah cutting an apish figure, stripping a banana, hius ape like lechers counting his calories but not aggressively delving into his master’s psyche....nor for that matter Jane’s less complicated one.
He was too smart an ape to go that way. Wasn’t it enough for the genome...the genetic coe to
spell out the similarities and differences in the networking of humans and their appearances
thru the ages...
VI
So Seymour Konigsberg aka Woody Allen pressed his luck...a role as a licorice stick auteur a funny man living with a 30 year neurosis, his witch doctor moonshing those 3 decades of love hate relationships. discarding layers of scathing flesh.
A redundancybase? Was Seymour- Woody identifying with Ingmar Bergman? La Dolche Vita’s Fellini?
A renaissance man on a Leo Tolstoy wave length...his yearning need... capturing visions: images dialogue of Charlie Chaplin in futuro. A father figure to Mia Farrow’s adopted Korean daughter Soon-Yie Previn.,his third wife....
VII
“
Broadway Danny Rose” yields a nostalgic utopia at the Kent theater on Coney Island Avenue and ‘H’, two blocks away from Woody’s turf on Avenue K.and 14th Street two blocks from the BMT subway and Wingate (Midwood) Field where Murray Eisenstadt’s tennis teams practiced...
Here at the Kent he earned his legacy, casting Morty Gunty as an groovy insider (Morty lived on Avenue H near Ocean Parkway) a Borscht Belt comic and secondary teacher playing out
the role of a substitute teacher...
He later appeared wan and pale at the Sunset Strip’s M ocambo .,exiting soon thereafter from
the mileau we shared as students at P.S. 217 and Midwood High School.
.
VIII
“The purple road to Cairo” had no pretensions and was n’t as autobiographical...but again as the Lajos Egri disciple claimed “He no longer wanted to make funny films”
An endangered species..Indeed Cheetah...... Ernest Lubitsch Greta Garbo Melvyn Douglas
Billy Wilder shedding tears in their retirement.
Mentor Egri in his Brentwood salon boasted of fine tuning Paddy Chayefsky’s scenarios, and while punching the clock at MGM. .
IX
“Bananas” “”Casino Royale” a James Bond spoof..a Chubby Brocoli convoluted 007,the calculus disorienting Bond’s cool ... “Dr No”never looking back.
Edgar’s dsughter Candace Bergen.. Tony Randal..”Play it again, Sam” the 5th dimension playing.
Shades of Ring Lardner,Jr “Mash”the hilarious l medical encampment on the Korean peninsula led by a “Three Stooges”mea culpa (Moe Curly Larry.Hoiward, once of Bath Beach)
Not that far from the Kent
theater off Coney Island Avenue trolly tracks.
X
“Unbelieable Murder Mystery” may have been the turning point when Diane Keaton of Verdugo Hills High School in Tujunga was dissed. Mia replacing her
The Keqton’s divine presence in “Anmie Hall” was in our eyes a revelation.to the third power.. .. .
Frank Capra directing Katherine Hepburn Jean Arthur Claudette Colbert would give the comedians the “Oscar” for her light touch. and killer instinct. As an exponent to rhe third quatrain....exhuming “Annie Hall”...shedding skins, not unlike the banana Cheetah was peeling Mia Farrow’sa maternal abode in her grapevine.
“You have to dig deep to strike banana oil, Cheetah.
XI
Whether Mia Farrow will entrap her own legacy, her state of mind” is an enlightened Zen Buddhism born of her alliance with visionaries who went their own way, never selling out to the machine they were engaged to..
.
XII
“Manhattan” seems to capture the love hate relationships in the guise of an older man having a bonding with a seventeen year old yung lady. Finding pleasure in the epherma of his
passing days.
Life’s absurdities deeply dug into the planet, our galaxy plagued by a pop culture and the inane craze of the sit com mentality our humanity books,
The inability to feel pleasure...Indeed Cheetah. ....
XIII
Tarzan aka Johnny Weismuller Olympic swimming fame (nee Bruce Bennet’s
103 year old Santa Monican real estaenik when he was wasn’t before the “lights camera action)”“offered Jane the Irish soda bread of her karma..
“It’s a jungle out there, Jane,” he repeated., pressing the slide doors aside.... Cheetah’s cue to to
piggy back Weismuller’s shoulders.....the two becoming Tarzan of the Apes...grasping the grapevine
Flowing thru the air...over the African flora&fauna quicksand cannibal reality scene.......
“Yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa”.
The University of Connecticut Performing Arts, Storrs, Ct...
daughter Mia’s mojo deservedly, from the University of Connecticut’s Board of Trustees.
II
A commencement addreess at the school for performing arts May 9th. Not that it wasn’t a scarce penny to have coach John Calhoun and his Kemba Walker of the Bronx and an Apollo theater talent dominate the NCAA March Madness, Walker entering the NBA draft. ..after three years
matriculating for his recognition. (take it for what itis worth from a Storrs appointed philosopher... Hartford&Waterbury branches)
But Mia Farrow’s nature...her own spiritual quest in many ways. Didn’t she and her
sister Priscilla, make the “hirdy gurdy”to Tibet with the Beatles (Harrison Lennon) a nirvana with Marashishi Mahesh as her garu........
III
Yet what does that viajo have to do with the Mia Farrow, the actress, and scion of the family playing out their connections for the ordinary and mundane life that
Aaron Copeland’s “common man” is playing out.....
Did Queen Elizabeth invite Mia to trhe nuptials next week at Westminister Abbey.Surely her credentials are beyond credibility. Her grandfather into the pedigree. A Lord in his day. A barrister by his powdered wig.,the family planting their roots in Austrailia.
IV
When “Woody Allen” replicated his “Annie Hall” Diane Keaton with Frank Sinotra’s ex,,,Andre Previn’s frau, did his “I’ll never write a funny movie again” did his consciousness grasp the implications for a kid schooled in Yeshiva..... “sprechen” Yiddish.. raised on the lower East side, living on Avenue K and 14th Street in Flatbush,... a block from Stanley Kubrick’s “Space Odyssey”(Kubrick’s supermarket) attending Midwood High School...NYU... CUNY know better....
Mid Farrow’s trappings were part and parcel of his own divinity.
Admiringly he didn’t know what he was doing at Dorothy Chandler’s pavilion Puccini’s “Giccoi Schicci” As Seymour Konigsberg- a work in progress- like all of the voodoo into our mad cap cosmos of “What’s new pussycat?” “Everything you wanted to know abou tsex (but were afraid to ask)
V
Everything being relative, mister Konigsbery-Allen submerged himself into his ouvre...schtick with Max Liebvman’s “Show of shows”.
Sculpting jokes for Sid Caesar, Imogene Coco, Carl
Reiner Howie Morris..screening dialects... indiscreet camp......
long before Colonel Khadafi emerged in his Libvyan garb......
Tthe outlandish maneuvers our revolving planet takes.....
hedge funds... derivatives.. bankruptcies foreclosures unemployment.. the normal ways of doing business was becoming extinct
Unconventional thinking depending on how you look at it.
So “Hannah and her sisters” was de facto Mia Farrow and her transcendental vision and her
alliance with Simone de Beauvoir’s “Second Sex”
No “Second Sex” here.,Cheetah!
“Right Jane?” (Maureen O’Sullivan) as Tarzan (Johnny Weismuller) garbed in his loincloth presses the drapes aside in their uppity African love nest.
“There’s a jungle out there, Jane.”
Cheetah cutting an apish figure, stripping a banana, hius ape like lechers counting his calories but not aggressively delving into his master’s psyche....nor for that matter Jane’s less complicated one.
He was too smart an ape to go that way. Wasn’t it enough for the genome...the genetic coe to
spell out the similarities and differences in the networking of humans and their appearances
thru the ages...
VI
So Seymour Konigsberg aka Woody Allen pressed his luck...a role as a licorice stick auteur a funny man living with a 30 year neurosis, his witch doctor moonshing those 3 decades of love hate relationships. discarding layers of scathing flesh.
A redundancybase? Was Seymour- Woody identifying with Ingmar Bergman? La Dolche Vita’s Fellini?
A renaissance man on a Leo Tolstoy wave length...his yearning need... capturing visions: images dialogue of Charlie Chaplin in futuro. A father figure to Mia Farrow’s adopted Korean daughter Soon-Yie Previn.,his third wife....
VII
“
Broadway Danny Rose” yields a nostalgic utopia at the Kent theater on Coney Island Avenue and ‘H’, two blocks away from Woody’s turf on Avenue K.and 14th Street two blocks from the BMT subway and Wingate (Midwood) Field where Murray Eisenstadt’s tennis teams practiced...
Here at the Kent he earned his legacy, casting Morty Gunty as an groovy insider (Morty lived on Avenue H near Ocean Parkway) a Borscht Belt comic and secondary teacher playing out
the role of a substitute teacher...
He later appeared wan and pale at the Sunset Strip’s M ocambo .,exiting soon thereafter from
the mileau we shared as students at P.S. 217 and Midwood High School.
.
VIII
“The purple road to Cairo” had no pretensions and was n’t as autobiographical...but again as the Lajos Egri disciple claimed “He no longer wanted to make funny films”
An endangered species..Indeed Cheetah...... Ernest Lubitsch Greta Garbo Melvyn Douglas
Billy Wilder shedding tears in their retirement.
Mentor Egri in his Brentwood salon boasted of fine tuning Paddy Chayefsky’s scenarios, and while punching the clock at MGM. .
IX
“Bananas” “”Casino Royale” a James Bond spoof..a Chubby Brocoli convoluted 007,the calculus disorienting Bond’s cool ... “Dr No”never looking back.
Edgar’s dsughter Candace Bergen.. Tony Randal..”Play it again, Sam” the 5th dimension playing.
Shades of Ring Lardner,Jr “Mash”the hilarious l medical encampment on the Korean peninsula led by a “Three Stooges”mea culpa (Moe Curly Larry.Hoiward, once of Bath Beach)
Not that far from the Kent
theater off Coney Island Avenue trolly tracks.
X
“Unbelieable Murder Mystery” may have been the turning point when Diane Keaton of Verdugo Hills High School in Tujunga was dissed. Mia replacing her
The Keqton’s divine presence in “Anmie Hall” was in our eyes a revelation.to the third power.. .. .
Frank Capra directing Katherine Hepburn Jean Arthur Claudette Colbert would give the comedians the “Oscar” for her light touch. and killer instinct. As an exponent to rhe third quatrain....exhuming “Annie Hall”...shedding skins, not unlike the banana Cheetah was peeling Mia Farrow’sa maternal abode in her grapevine.
“You have to dig deep to strike banana oil, Cheetah.
XI
Whether Mia Farrow will entrap her own legacy, her state of mind” is an enlightened Zen Buddhism born of her alliance with visionaries who went their own way, never selling out to the machine they were engaged to..
.
XII
“Manhattan” seems to capture the love hate relationships in the guise of an older man having a bonding with a seventeen year old yung lady. Finding pleasure in the epherma of his
passing days.
Life’s absurdities deeply dug into the planet, our galaxy plagued by a pop culture and the inane craze of the sit com mentality our humanity books,
The inability to feel pleasure...Indeed Cheetah. ....
XIII
Tarzan aka Johnny Weismuller Olympic swimming fame (nee Bruce Bennet’s
103 year old Santa Monican real estaenik when he was wasn’t before the “lights camera action)”“offered Jane the Irish soda bread of her karma..
“It’s a jungle out there, Jane,” he repeated., pressing the slide doors aside.... Cheetah’s cue to to
piggy back Weismuller’s shoulders.....the two becoming Tarzan of the Apes...grasping the grapevine
Flowing thru the air...over the African flora&fauna quicksand cannibal reality scene.......
“Yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa”.
The University of Connecticut Performing Arts, Storrs, Ct...
April 20,2911.
James Joyce’s ‘Portrait of an artist as a young man’
James Joyce’s ‘Portrait of an artist as a young man’ may be difficult to calibrate in the unconscious of movie director Sidney Lumet but being things are all relative his East New York origins struck a chord.
“Verdict” “Dog day afternoon” “Ten angry men” “Network” shedding light on issues tormenting the Willy Lomans of those whoring reality whirtls....to be and become someone
whom our mothers yearned for the moment her umbilical chord was spliced from the womb..
II
The Lee J Cobbs, Paul Newmans Henry Fondas Peterr Finchs captured their rroles...losing
themselves to find themselves-
But it was Al Pacino that may have been Mister Lumet’s finest, casting. a bank robber having an alter ego, their lamented get away seemed to these eyes, a shattered day dream that even Gloria Swanson “I’m ready for my close up, Mister DeMille” an anachronism,...a fantasy imbedded in
her mirror’s vanity...a transition to her inner needs playing out..
That mirror obliterated her fear of failing. Losing her mojo....those longings to not only command respect..an authoring figure or not...the love that was unrequited. The search for her
“Championship season”
III
Growing up in East New York...the push carts peddlers the” candy stores” the immigrant scramble for security and escape.....
”Just got off the boat”, Emma Lazarus poetry at the Statute of Liberty was the ominous energy “Give me your bread....”and its Ellis Island “arc de trumphe”
The migration to Brooklyn’s East New York.
The Hebrew Educational Society’s. melting pot.. Pitkin Sutter Saratoga Avenues.. buying and selling. “I can get it for you wholesale, sweetheart..bargaining on a pair of knickers... two for half the price...com’on bubbe... a bargain is a bargain ..not a metaphor Who are you? A slumming intellectual from uptown?
In that reality scene...fire escaped tenements. clothes lines..larceny in their nickel and dime bandit souls.
In that envirion the Loew’s Pitkin “escape” evolved.
IV
Going back to that big screen moment when Al Pacino cradled his alter ego’s head after their getaway went awry..
“Why why ”he asked, the cameras twirling, mister Lumet searching for the interior quarrelt, his bifocals piercing the laser like lenses
The accomplice aiding and abetting “You wouldn’t understand. Trapped in a man’s body...
with a woman’s soul. Where can I go? What country will take me?
Sonny answering his own rhetorical?.....Wyoming Wyoming. You love horses.The great outdoors.”
V
The organist pedaled the George Gershwin tin pan alley “I got rhythm”to that street smart
audience during the Saturday matinee. The lights turned on.... the screen cast aside behind the curtains. Seeing your friends and enemies. ..
The stage filled with management appointed East New York kids& pros: their whnirling spinning Duncan yo yos, the Pitkin awarding sweaters to the champs who could make their youo spin “around the world” “Rock the baby” “Sleep the lullaby,” twirling its own day
dream. :
Meanwhile..Arthur Miller’s “Death of a salesman” was playing out uptown...
“Attention must be paid..All Willy ever wanted was to pay off the mortgage.” his widow sobbed .at the funeral.
The Loews Pitkin..its ornamental glitzy interior&marquee... off to the
second balcony, the stage and screen welcoming the escape ala a Lasurel&Hardy madcap.
We forgot the images and melodies sounding like a Shangrila from some other planet....a comic book fantasy like Clark Kent’s “Superman” incognito or Boris Karloff ‘s “Frankenstein”
VI
Here Mister Lumet like another child of immigrant parents Arthur Miller, inherited his pursuit. The struggle to find oneself in that cosmos of subways street cars candy sores scapes
hydrants turned on ...Joel McCrea Sylvia Sidney’s Goldwyn’s Dead end”
Other flicks like Paul Muni’s “Scarface” or Warner Baxter’s ”Prisoner of Shark Island” “Sainey Potier Tny Curtis’s “Defiant ones” depicting skin pigment strangling sadism..
Suffocating in strangling small minded games that people play”.
Sidney Potioer and Ron Steiger “Heat of the night”.
VII
Mister Lumet’s dialogue ..... ‘on air conspiratorial role...Peter Finch’s
“I’m mad as Hell. I can’t take this anymore. I can’t.......” .his voice crashing thru
East New York’s Pitkin Avenue reality scene, April 13 ,2011
“Verdict” “Dog day afternoon” “Ten angry men” “Network” shedding light on issues tormenting the Willy Lomans of those whoring reality whirtls....to be and become someone
whom our mothers yearned for the moment her umbilical chord was spliced from the womb..
II
The Lee J Cobbs, Paul Newmans Henry Fondas Peterr Finchs captured their rroles...losing
themselves to find themselves-
But it was Al Pacino that may have been Mister Lumet’s finest, casting. a bank robber having an alter ego, their lamented get away seemed to these eyes, a shattered day dream that even Gloria Swanson “I’m ready for my close up, Mister DeMille” an anachronism,...a fantasy imbedded in
her mirror’s vanity...a transition to her inner needs playing out..
That mirror obliterated her fear of failing. Losing her mojo....those longings to not only command respect..an authoring figure or not...the love that was unrequited. The search for her
“Championship season”
III
Growing up in East New York...the push carts peddlers the” candy stores” the immigrant scramble for security and escape.....
”Just got off the boat”, Emma Lazarus poetry at the Statute of Liberty was the ominous energy “Give me your bread....”and its Ellis Island “arc de trumphe”
The migration to Brooklyn’s East New York.
The Hebrew Educational Society’s. melting pot.. Pitkin Sutter Saratoga Avenues.. buying and selling. “I can get it for you wholesale, sweetheart..bargaining on a pair of knickers... two for half the price...com’on bubbe... a bargain is a bargain ..not a metaphor Who are you? A slumming intellectual from uptown?
In that reality scene...fire escaped tenements. clothes lines..larceny in their nickel and dime bandit souls.
In that envirion the Loew’s Pitkin “escape” evolved.
IV
Going back to that big screen moment when Al Pacino cradled his alter ego’s head after their getaway went awry..
“Why why ”he asked, the cameras twirling, mister Lumet searching for the interior quarrelt, his bifocals piercing the laser like lenses
The accomplice aiding and abetting “You wouldn’t understand. Trapped in a man’s body...
with a woman’s soul. Where can I go? What country will take me?
Sonny answering his own rhetorical?.....Wyoming Wyoming. You love horses.The great outdoors.”
V
The organist pedaled the George Gershwin tin pan alley “I got rhythm”to that street smart
audience during the Saturday matinee. The lights turned on.... the screen cast aside behind the curtains. Seeing your friends and enemies. ..
The stage filled with management appointed East New York kids& pros: their whnirling spinning Duncan yo yos, the Pitkin awarding sweaters to the champs who could make their youo spin “around the world” “Rock the baby” “Sleep the lullaby,” twirling its own day
dream. :
Meanwhile..Arthur Miller’s “Death of a salesman” was playing out uptown...
“Attention must be paid..All Willy ever wanted was to pay off the mortgage.” his widow sobbed .at the funeral.
The Loews Pitkin..its ornamental glitzy interior&marquee... off to the
second balcony, the stage and screen welcoming the escape ala a Lasurel&Hardy madcap.
We forgot the images and melodies sounding like a Shangrila from some other planet....a comic book fantasy like Clark Kent’s “Superman” incognito or Boris Karloff ‘s “Frankenstein”
VI
Here Mister Lumet like another child of immigrant parents Arthur Miller, inherited his pursuit. The struggle to find oneself in that cosmos of subways street cars candy sores scapes
hydrants turned on ...Joel McCrea Sylvia Sidney’s Goldwyn’s Dead end”
Other flicks like Paul Muni’s “Scarface” or Warner Baxter’s ”Prisoner of Shark Island” “Sainey Potier Tny Curtis’s “Defiant ones” depicting skin pigment strangling sadism..
Suffocating in strangling small minded games that people play”.
Sidney Potioer and Ron Steiger “Heat of the night”.
VII
Mister Lumet’s dialogue ..... ‘on air conspiratorial role...Peter Finch’s
“I’m mad as Hell. I can’t take this anymore. I can’t.......” .his voice crashing thru
East New York’s Pitkin Avenue reality scene, April 13 ,2011
Lefty Pearls, Nature’s Supreme Design.....
Lefty Pearls, Nature’s Supreme Design..... Sacre bleu!
The stranger in the Brooks Brothers suit peered inside the classroom. “Are you the animal husbandry around here?”
Mister Farnham eyed the visitor warily, sizing him up as a collection agency man . “I’m subbing for the regular Ag man. He has a Bernie Madoff court testimonial back East. Can I do you in for anything?”
“My name’s Pearls. Lefty Pearls from the Health Department,” taking his wallet & card out, all in the same motion.. ‘Fly inspector’.
“You know anything about maggots, young man?”
“You ought to read up on them. Very technical , but very interesting. Great drama Great poetry. I got a stack of books at the office this high, ”he said…..” You know why I’m here. Your neighbors are complaining. They say your scholars from the Future Farmers of America aren’t keeping their animals clean …..everybody wants clean things these days. Nothing dirty anymore. Even dirty bombs are verboten. It must be a clean bomb. Some humans are even fussy about carrying dirty dollar bills .
Nor Bernie Madoff.playing out his 60 years in his 5th grade Sheik of Araby gig. And not even asking his home room teacher for the whoppen pass to the Ponzi swindle. Him 70 and looking at 150 years in the slammer,. manana...
“You gotta lose yourself to find yourself..”
Can’t be too particular on my Civil Service salary. And anyway we inspectors in Health & Maggot Research Development get samples of disinfectant. I’ll take a dirty dollar bill any day, young man.”
“Why don’t you dismiss your class? We’ll take a safari thru your animal pens. I’ll show you what I mean. By a top drawer inspection.”
One by one, the two men walked thru the pens, exploring the dirt for manure and left over maggots.
The fly inspector bent down on his knees ad infinitum .But each time the original expression of hope &promise turned into pessimism and resignation….
In the last pen a jubilant smile of happy todays &better mananas creased his benevolent face. “You’ve heard of love nests, haven’t you, young man.? Well this pen is a maggot nest. You got a regular industry flourishing right here. An industry that puts automation, IBM computer driven Microsoft, Sputniks, space platforms, the Shuttle with a capitol ‘S’, man in space, on the moon, probing for aqua on Mars all to shame.
This is Nature’s Supreme Design. A maggot nest,”he said in almost the same reverence Mister Farnham heard music lovers speak of Bach’s ‘Saint Mathews Passion’
“Y’ know young man if I were really greedy like most inspectors I’d corner the market on maggots. Get myself a good production man. Line myself up with a distributor and a national outlet. Why I’d ….but the truth is I’m not out for money. This is strictly a labor of love.”
The inspector dropped into the knee position as though he was born into the role. A one man riot of happiness and animal vitality. “These babies aren’t but five minutes old….Cinco minutos! Come down here, young man.I’ll show you the heart&soul of the maggot. Don’t let the smell frighten you. It’s only biology, part of Nature’s Supreme Design….
“It’s wonderful, wonderful,”he cried.”I caught the maggot in the second stage…you see young man,there are four stages….first,the egg, the maggot, the pupae ,and the adult fly. The whole cycle takes 24 hours, the adult laying its eggs in deciduous trees and garbage cans….”.
The inspector hippity hopped around the pen in his gray tweeds as though he was a pigmy playing hop scotch. Mister Farnham, a public servant trying at all times to please, dropped into a Siamese twin like hippity hoppity position..
Both men bonded, bouncing around like baby kangaroos feeling the terra firma for the first time, not knowing what to make of the karma...
The sub Ag man always keeping an eye on the inspector . And one step back in fear of moving ahead too aggressively, exploiting his position…..Lefty Pearls always nudging Mister Farnham when his hands came upon a fascinating sortie.
“My my this maggot is really one for the book. Just look at the size of it, young man. Why if we continue the way we’re evolving, I just don’t know. My name will be in the Civil Service
Health Bulletin. My wife will become famous. The publicity alone will change our lives..”
He scooped up a specimen, striking a pose. “It will be tremendous.”
“Fabulous,” said mister Farnham, eager to please with his sensibility.
“The taxpayers will know they’re getting their money’s worth of Lefty Pearls.. A picture of me myself and I holding a maggot. Nothing unselfish about the paparazzi…..”
“Young man, listen to me,” he said, nudging the substitute’s knees. “You’re great. I mean you’re really a great listener. A great explorer.. De Gama, Marco Polo, Columbus, Pounce De Leon.. Really great. I’ll clue in my supervisor. It might get an inch in our suburb’s “Who’s who”.
If the wire services pick it up, there’s no telling. The sky’s the limit on this minor planet, if I may drop a cliché.”
He wiped the smile from his cherubic cheeks. “Young man even if it’s against my better chemistry ,we can’t let the manure become a preservative. It has to go. Go man,” he cried, his jowls bouncing in ecstasy...
“I can’t help it. Maggots and manure do something to my basal metabolism. I don’t know what it is. Does it have the same effect on your chemistry, young man?”
“Sir, if you don’t want me to preserve the maggots, what do you advise me to do?” He asked, sidestepping the invasion of his chemistry., keeping the relationship on a high plane….
“Get some lime &sulfur .Add six inches of gypsum...and cap it. After it burns, bury the manure underneath. The larvae will never come to the surface. .The maggots will perish. I know it sounds mercenary but what can I do.. My hands are tied, young man. The neighbors are complaining. They don’t like your flies!”.
“How do you know for sure the flies they’re complaining about aren’t from their own garbage cans, sir?”
“We don’t young man. All we know is they’re taxpayers. They’re whupping our bread…….what we need is a control group like placebos…..”
“Can’t we put red flags on our maggots….and blue flags on their flies?”
It was getting dark as the sun was sinking behind the tall Palms ,overlooking the school’s pens….”I’ll have to think about it,” said the Inspector. “”I’ll have to think about it.”,turning his face upward to the darkening Heavens. “We public servants can’t take any steps on our own.. Make any decisions unless our department chief approves. That’s the Democratic thinking. It’s slow but that’s how the cookie crumbles. ”
He slowly rose to his feet, the color in his jowls warming to a cool fleshy pallor.. “Mister…..”
“Mister Farnham.”
“You have been wonderful company., Mister F.. I mean that sincerely..
You’re a born maggot hunter, mister F…”
“Thank you sir. I’m embarrassed. I never dreamt…..”
“May I ask you a personal favor?”
‘What can I do you in for , sir?”
“We know each other well enough , mister F. You can call me Lefty.”
“Yes, Lefty!”
“I’d like to borrow this specimen to show my Chief. Demonstrate my prowess….It’s a very healthy one. .I don’t think you’ll miss it, mister F. “
The substitute looking bigger and taller after the inspection., waved his left hand. As if it was holding a wand, and he was Oberon out of the Bard’s Midsummer’s Night Dream.
“Lefty, you can keep it. ..It’s only Biology .Part of Nature’s Supreme Design. Just don’t say I never gave you anything.”
Both men looked straight into each other’s eyes…. shaking hands.. the sun setting and sinking beyond the Western horizon, darkness coming upon the High School’s animal pens……
April 8, 2011 revcisiting the North Hollywood High School site before the planet went ballistic....the Ivory Coast Yemen Syria Libya Egypt Tunisia...
The stranger in the Brooks Brothers suit peered inside the classroom. “Are you the animal husbandry around here?”
Mister Farnham eyed the visitor warily, sizing him up as a collection agency man . “I’m subbing for the regular Ag man. He has a Bernie Madoff court testimonial back East. Can I do you in for anything?”
“My name’s Pearls. Lefty Pearls from the Health Department,” taking his wallet & card out, all in the same motion.. ‘Fly inspector’.
“You know anything about maggots, young man?”
II
“Can’t say that I do, sir. I’m an Engl…..”“You ought to read up on them. Very technical , but very interesting. Great drama Great poetry. I got a stack of books at the office this high, ”he said…..” You know why I’m here. Your neighbors are complaining. They say your scholars from the Future Farmers of America aren’t keeping their animals clean …..everybody wants clean things these days. Nothing dirty anymore. Even dirty bombs are verboten. It must be a clean bomb. Some humans are even fussy about carrying dirty dollar bills .
Nor Bernie Madoff.playing out his 60 years in his 5th grade Sheik of Araby gig. And not even asking his home room teacher for the whoppen pass to the Ponzi swindle. Him 70 and looking at 150 years in the slammer,. manana...
“You gotta lose yourself to find yourself..”
Can’t be too particular on my Civil Service salary. And anyway we inspectors in Health & Maggot Research Development get samples of disinfectant. I’ll take a dirty dollar bill any day, young man.”
“Why don’t you dismiss your class? We’ll take a safari thru your animal pens. I’ll show you what I mean. By a top drawer inspection.”
III
The fly inspector bent down on his knees ad infinitum .But each time the original expression of hope &promise turned into pessimism and resignation….
In the last pen a jubilant smile of happy todays &better mananas creased his benevolent face. “You’ve heard of love nests, haven’t you, young man.? Well this pen is a maggot nest. You got a regular industry flourishing right here. An industry that puts automation, IBM computer driven Microsoft, Sputniks, space platforms, the Shuttle with a capitol ‘S’, man in space, on the moon, probing for aqua on Mars all to shame.
This is Nature’s Supreme Design. A maggot nest,”he said in almost the same reverence Mister Farnham heard music lovers speak of Bach’s ‘Saint Mathews Passion’
“Y’ know young man if I were really greedy like most inspectors I’d corner the market on maggots. Get myself a good production man. Line myself up with a distributor and a national outlet. Why I’d ….but the truth is I’m not out for money. This is strictly a labor of love.”
IV
“It’s wonderful, wonderful,”he cried.”I caught the maggot in the second stage…you see young man,there are four stages….first,the egg, the maggot, the pupae ,and the adult fly. The whole cycle takes 24 hours, the adult laying its eggs in deciduous trees and garbage cans….”.
V
Both men bonded, bouncing around like baby kangaroos feeling the terra firma for the first time, not knowing what to make of the karma...
The sub Ag man always keeping an eye on the inspector . And one step back in fear of moving ahead too aggressively, exploiting his position…..Lefty Pearls always nudging Mister Farnham when his hands came upon a fascinating sortie.
“My my this maggot is really one for the book. Just look at the size of it, young man. Why if we continue the way we’re evolving, I just don’t know. My name will be in the Civil Service
Health Bulletin. My wife will become famous. The publicity alone will change our lives..”
He scooped up a specimen, striking a pose. “It will be tremendous.”
“Fabulous,” said mister Farnham, eager to please with his sensibility.
“The taxpayers will know they’re getting their money’s worth of Lefty Pearls.. A picture of me myself and I holding a maggot. Nothing unselfish about the paparazzi…..”
“Young man, listen to me,” he said, nudging the substitute’s knees. “You’re great. I mean you’re really a great listener. A great explorer.. De Gama, Marco Polo, Columbus, Pounce De Leon.. Really great. I’ll clue in my supervisor. It might get an inch in our suburb’s “Who’s who”.
If the wire services pick it up, there’s no telling. The sky’s the limit on this minor planet, if I may drop a cliché.”
He wiped the smile from his cherubic cheeks. “Young man even if it’s against my better chemistry ,we can’t let the manure become a preservative. It has to go. Go man,” he cried, his jowls bouncing in ecstasy...
“I can’t help it. Maggots and manure do something to my basal metabolism. I don’t know what it is. Does it have the same effect on your chemistry, young man?”
“Sir, if you don’t want me to preserve the maggots, what do you advise me to do?” He asked, sidestepping the invasion of his chemistry., keeping the relationship on a high plane….
“Get some lime &sulfur .Add six inches of gypsum...and cap it. After it burns, bury the manure underneath. The larvae will never come to the surface. .The maggots will perish. I know it sounds mercenary but what can I do.. My hands are tied, young man. The neighbors are complaining. They don’t like your flies!”.
VI
Mister Farnham hippity hopped over to the spot where the Inspector was x raying a specimen like a Swiss watchmaker pinpointing a 21 jewel maggot from a 17 jewel..“How do you know for sure the flies they’re complaining about aren’t from their own garbage cans, sir?”
“We don’t young man. All we know is they’re taxpayers. They’re whupping our bread…….what we need is a control group like placebos…..”
“Can’t we put red flags on our maggots….and blue flags on their flies?”
It was getting dark as the sun was sinking behind the tall Palms ,overlooking the school’s pens….”I’ll have to think about it,” said the Inspector. “”I’ll have to think about it.”,turning his face upward to the darkening Heavens. “We public servants can’t take any steps on our own.. Make any decisions unless our department chief approves. That’s the Democratic thinking. It’s slow but that’s how the cookie crumbles. ”
He slowly rose to his feet, the color in his jowls warming to a cool fleshy pallor.. “Mister…..”
“Mister Farnham.”
“You have been wonderful company., Mister F.. I mean that sincerely..
You’re a born maggot hunter, mister F…”
“Thank you sir. I’m embarrassed. I never dreamt…..”
“May I ask you a personal favor?”
‘What can I do you in for , sir?”
“We know each other well enough , mister F. You can call me Lefty.”
“Yes, Lefty!”
“I’d like to borrow this specimen to show my Chief. Demonstrate my prowess….It’s a very healthy one. .I don’t think you’ll miss it, mister F. “
VII
“Lefty, you can keep it. ..It’s only Biology .Part of Nature’s Supreme Design. Just don’t say I never gave you anything.”
Both men looked straight into each other’s eyes…. shaking hands.. the sun setting and sinking beyond the Western horizon, darkness coming upon the High School’s animal pens……
April 8, 2011 revcisiting the North Hollywood High School site before the planet went ballistic....the Ivory Coast Yemen Syria Libya Egypt Tunisia...
“A paradox” indeed quoteth the CBS announcer
“A paradox” indeed quoteth the CBS announcer. A jock from the word”go” into the spiraling March Madness sweet sixteen the final four the one two punch... the Yukon huskies of Connecticut have emerged as the dazzlingest....their gum chewing Jim Calhoun’s “arch de triumph”
II
His own tempo and flow of the game beginning back when was hired at age 42, he leaving his
Boston roots at Northeastern for UConn...the year1986 partner!.
For a quarter of a century, h and his kids evolved into three Ncaa championships, their Holy Grail of athleticism....where he learned the “game” growing up at Boston’s Northeastern...Red Auerbach’s Celtics smothering defense and Bob Cousy Bill Russell full court press., John Havelcek... “Hondo’ the sixth man coming off the bench..
III
Hero worshiping in search of the Hol y Grail goes the paradox. But Kemba Walker of the the Bronx and a Apollo theater magician led his mates thru an eleven game winning streak after losing five of six during then regular war..
Undefeated thru their Big East and the Ncaa hoops.
Are they all chewing the same gum as coach Calhoun?.
“Touche”
IV
A paradox, indeed partner.
Just ask Kemba Walker aka” EzPass”. their floor leader, and a Bob Cousy complete player.
Will he emulate two other Hall of Famers in Dennis Rodman and Bay Ridge’s own Chris Mullin of St. Johns......for “Ez Pass” to be mentioned in the same breathe as Dennis the menace and the pure shooting Mullin is in itself a paradox
To step up with the money shot is not only warranted but demanded as “Ez pass’s” passport into paradise. .
Growing up in Bronx environs.A Catholic high school.
The authority figures helping him see thru the fiction...the street scene from the reality.
V
Never straying, “Ez Pass” grasped the metaphor, and his entry into the Holy Grail.
A divine providence to the Storrs campus and the father figure of coach Calhoun,
winding down his twenty five year old program..
In this instance tte Butler bulldogs couldn’t break thru the second half, the Huskies length and tenaciousness in defending the rim, holding them to a dismal percentage, their shot selection and lay ups seemed anxious and unlucky..
VI
Arriving at Storrs philosophy department at the height of the Vietnamese transgression, the chairman put in a call to Dr. Robert Hutchins, formerly the Yale treasurer, and President of Chicago University.
Not unlike “Ez Pass” they put me out to graze at the Hartford and Waterbury campuses
The paradox as Jackie Gleason would say “How sweet it is Norton” Art Carney stepping up,
emerging from the sewer into “Ez Pass’s” promised land..
Their 67 year old gum chewing father figure Jim Calhoun and his “Ez Pass” basking in his third basketball championship ...a monumental stretch into immortality.
A paradox, indeed. “Ez Pass”?
Storrs, Connecticut April 5, 2011.
II
His own tempo and flow of the game beginning back when was hired at age 42, he leaving his
Boston roots at Northeastern for UConn...the year1986 partner!.
For a quarter of a century, h and his kids evolved into three Ncaa championships, their Holy Grail of athleticism....where he learned the “game” growing up at Boston’s Northeastern...Red Auerbach’s Celtics smothering defense and Bob Cousy Bill Russell full court press., John Havelcek... “Hondo’ the sixth man coming off the bench..
III
Hero worshiping in search of the Hol y Grail goes the paradox. But Kemba Walker of the the Bronx and a Apollo theater magician led his mates thru an eleven game winning streak after losing five of six during then regular war..
Undefeated thru their Big East and the Ncaa hoops.
Are they all chewing the same gum as coach Calhoun?.
“Touche”
IV
A paradox, indeed partner.
Just ask Kemba Walker aka” EzPass”. their floor leader, and a Bob Cousy complete player.
Will he emulate two other Hall of Famers in Dennis Rodman and Bay Ridge’s own Chris Mullin of St. Johns......for “Ez Pass” to be mentioned in the same breathe as Dennis the menace and the pure shooting Mullin is in itself a paradox
To step up with the money shot is not only warranted but demanded as “Ez pass’s” passport into paradise. .
Growing up in Bronx environs.A Catholic high school.
The authority figures helping him see thru the fiction...the street scene from the reality.
V
Never straying, “Ez Pass” grasped the metaphor, and his entry into the Holy Grail.
A divine providence to the Storrs campus and the father figure of coach Calhoun,
winding down his twenty five year old program..
In this instance tte Butler bulldogs couldn’t break thru the second half, the Huskies length and tenaciousness in defending the rim, holding them to a dismal percentage, their shot selection and lay ups seemed anxious and unlucky..
VI
Arriving at Storrs philosophy department at the height of the Vietnamese transgression, the chairman put in a call to Dr. Robert Hutchins, formerly the Yale treasurer, and President of Chicago University.
Not unlike “Ez Pass” they put me out to graze at the Hartford and Waterbury campuses
The paradox as Jackie Gleason would say “How sweet it is Norton” Art Carney stepping up,
emerging from the sewer into “Ez Pass’s” promised land..
Their 67 year old gum chewing father figure Jim Calhoun and his “Ez Pass” basking in his third basketball championship ...a monumental stretch into immortality.
A paradox, indeed. “Ez Pass”?
Storrs, Connecticut April 5, 2011.
76000 in attendance at the Ncaa’s final
“ Life after basketball.... 76000 in attendance at the Ncaa’s final four last night A “High noon”show down manana. Butler versus Uconn’s gum chewing Jim Calhoun and his Bronx born “Apollo theater” led Kemba Walker taking on the Bulldogs collective “repeat” manana ... nine pm. E.S.T.
Things won’t get better until they get worst” say the bloger pundits not unlike Walter Lippman Max Lerner James Wechsler and Grantland Rice Jimmy Cannon Red
Smith in sports.. scribbling down to earth themes in defunct Hollywood Citizen News Daily
Bruin...
Midwood High’s Argus print points....their dynamic hoopsters...
Coach Barney Cohen’s ..Lenny Singer. Honest Bill Rosenblatt Shelly Fein Wally Kaplan Jackie Singer Buddy Solomon Norman “Lefty” Fisher Stan Rubin Gerry Ringelheim Howie Weisglass Eddie Joachim Shelly Flanzig Marv(“commish”)Glauberman Lustgarten the “moose” Dym
Versus Maxie Zaviliofsky Danny Forman, Hy Gotkin, Harry Boykoff Sid Tannenbaum
Al Goodlearner in their gym bleacher hoop de loop.
Right Joey Rodriquez? “As time goes by”.
!
II
Who would have known that Virginia Commonwealth would have scorched their
final four ride to Ncaa’s “ultimate”...alumni boosters fans going
ballistic.....”standing tall” in Bill Walton’s prime time..
“Nah not me coach. A seer I am not..No crystal ball telepathy here.”
Resurrecting Lee J Cobb’s.’s “Virginian” role. Not settling for anything less than shooting the lights out as they say... the Kansas jay hawks not knowing Senor Rodriquez was feeling it like was Benito Juarez in disguise, hitting the nylon from downtown.
.
III
What could the Spider Man say about that feat, climbing the tallest building in the world earlier in downtown Dubai? 160 stories in six hours.
And talking about cyber space , what about reactor 2 spilling plutonium (“contaminated water”)
from the nuclear reactor in Japan’s Fukushima province..shades of Hiroshima and Nakasaki in
then summer of ‘45 ending World War 2.
The chain of causation stemming from the 9 point quake and tsunami .....
Libya’s own 40 years of Khadafi nightmare within the qualms of inevitable disaster.
. IV
But even in resurrecting the dinosaur age, CBS’s “60 minutes” hit a high of empathy, highlighting corporate greed on the planet as elite corporations strive for profit margins by settling in
Swiss and Irish venues.
Yet a 56 year old “Mother Teresa” from Staten Island takes in maimed children from battle worn Iraq and gets selfless peoples people to put their arms legs eye and face back together
V
On a “pumpkin” “orange” from the perimeter ,the high school coach Bob Hurley of Saint Anthony’s in Jersey City, lighting it up across the river... 1000 w’s.... with his full court conditioning, his stalwarts going on to college quintets and the NBA....9 thousand $ a year, his frau at the scorer’s table, his 2 sons coaching at the college level. .....
When are you coming home, Michael Jordan?
The Big Apple, April 3, 2011
Things won’t get better until they get worst” say the bloger pundits not unlike Walter Lippman Max Lerner James Wechsler and Grantland Rice Jimmy Cannon Red
Smith in sports.. scribbling down to earth themes in defunct Hollywood Citizen News Daily
Bruin...
Midwood High’s Argus print points....their dynamic hoopsters...
Coach Barney Cohen’s ..Lenny Singer. Honest Bill Rosenblatt Shelly Fein Wally Kaplan Jackie Singer Buddy Solomon Norman “Lefty” Fisher Stan Rubin Gerry Ringelheim Howie Weisglass Eddie Joachim Shelly Flanzig Marv(“commish”)Glauberman Lustgarten the “moose” Dym
Versus Maxie Zaviliofsky Danny Forman, Hy Gotkin, Harry Boykoff Sid Tannenbaum
Al Goodlearner in their gym bleacher hoop de loop.
Right Joey Rodriquez? “As time goes by”.
!
II
Who would have known that Virginia Commonwealth would have scorched their
final four ride to Ncaa’s “ultimate”...alumni boosters fans going
ballistic.....”standing tall” in Bill Walton’s prime time..
“Nah not me coach. A seer I am not..No crystal ball telepathy here.”
Resurrecting Lee J Cobb’s.’s “Virginian” role. Not settling for anything less than shooting the lights out as they say... the Kansas jay hawks not knowing Senor Rodriquez was feeling it like was Benito Juarez in disguise, hitting the nylon from downtown.
.
III
What could the Spider Man say about that feat, climbing the tallest building in the world earlier in downtown Dubai? 160 stories in six hours.
And talking about cyber space , what about reactor 2 spilling plutonium (“contaminated water”)
from the nuclear reactor in Japan’s Fukushima province..shades of Hiroshima and Nakasaki in
then summer of ‘45 ending World War 2.
The chain of causation stemming from the 9 point quake and tsunami .....
Libya’s own 40 years of Khadafi nightmare within the qualms of inevitable disaster.
. IV
But even in resurrecting the dinosaur age, CBS’s “60 minutes” hit a high of empathy, highlighting corporate greed on the planet as elite corporations strive for profit margins by settling in
Swiss and Irish venues.
Yet a 56 year old “Mother Teresa” from Staten Island takes in maimed children from battle worn Iraq and gets selfless peoples people to put their arms legs eye and face back together
V
On a “pumpkin” “orange” from the perimeter ,the high school coach Bob Hurley of Saint Anthony’s in Jersey City, lighting it up across the river... 1000 w’s.... with his full court conditioning, his stalwarts going on to college quintets and the NBA....9 thousand $ a year, his frau at the scorer’s table, his 2 sons coaching at the college level. .....
When are you coming home, Michael Jordan?
The Big Apple, April 3, 2011
The war between the sexes hit its stride
The war between the sexes hit its stride before the species rethought its complexity on male female roles. So much so that many human beings were no longer sure of their identity.
As thou the military “don’t ask don’t tell” wrought its havoc with battlefield fatigue and
male chauvinism.
Audie Murphy’s “Red Badge of Courage” Stephan Crane. imagining the hostility between Abe Lincoln’s weary troops and General Lee‘s led rebs.
II
In this parable.... irreparable harm did not manifest itself in the Cornell School of Architecture, nor the construction of Ucla’s Research Library as visualized by A. Quincy Jones, his name resounding with Quincy Jones of the Johnny Green Andre Previn whiz kids at neighboring MGM’s studio..
A. Quincy tapped into his pedigree.
”Names that make America”
III
A visionary planner in the Southern California basin, his reputation exceeded himself to Ithica,
New York and Cornell, where the late Harold Edelman nicknamed his roommate “Quincy” “
No ten minutes of fame but a lifetime of hearing the Bard’s barbs “Thirty lashes with a ‘t’ square.”
Frank Lloyd Wright in his “ An Autobiography” spoke about his plans growing and extending
from nature....
Harold Edelman’s first ranch style home with his wife, Judy at Stony Brook, outside Paul Newman’s Westport.,his wive’s “Three faces of Eve’..Joanne Woodwad.
IV
The London School of standards penalized “batch” professors. Holding back their sterling pounds and shillings. But once old fashioned nuptials and blessings were exchanged, the Deans abandoned Bertrand Russell’s free love for a Bill of Rights and bourgeois bliss
Perhaps our tired planet longs for royalty fever in the ever constant of moral anguish and despair Colonel Khadafi’s foreign minister seeking refuge in London in tune with Prince William’s own nuptials with his “Kate”.
The convolutions of a soap opera ... the monarchy’s cheerleaders stomping on those hallowed grounds of Westminister Abby, tripping down that road.... puts the “King’s speech”
in a bumper crop of afficionados
V
So playing the field is grounded at the graduate level, the A. Quincy Jones’s Harold
Edelmans are recognized for challenging the t squares and modules of their turf,
Their dream list of stipends for their ringed third finger left hand femme profs.
Whether this amounts to an affront for same sex marriages, no one knows the futuro. But for the moment, the space age and its information highway can
join strides in their Easter Parade.
Right A.Quincy? Harold Edelman?
Right.
Ucla’s Research Library, Cornell School of Architecture, March 30 2011.
As thou the military “don’t ask don’t tell” wrought its havoc with battlefield fatigue and
male chauvinism.
Audie Murphy’s “Red Badge of Courage” Stephan Crane. imagining the hostility between Abe Lincoln’s weary troops and General Lee‘s led rebs.
II
In this parable.... irreparable harm did not manifest itself in the Cornell School of Architecture, nor the construction of Ucla’s Research Library as visualized by A. Quincy Jones, his name resounding with Quincy Jones of the Johnny Green Andre Previn whiz kids at neighboring MGM’s studio..
A. Quincy tapped into his pedigree.
”Names that make America”
III
A visionary planner in the Southern California basin, his reputation exceeded himself to Ithica,
New York and Cornell, where the late Harold Edelman nicknamed his roommate “Quincy” “
No ten minutes of fame but a lifetime of hearing the Bard’s barbs “Thirty lashes with a ‘t’ square.”
Frank Lloyd Wright in his “ An Autobiography” spoke about his plans growing and extending
from nature....
Harold Edelman’s first ranch style home with his wife, Judy at Stony Brook, outside Paul Newman’s Westport.,his wive’s “Three faces of Eve’..Joanne Woodwad.
IV
The London School of standards penalized “batch” professors. Holding back their sterling pounds and shillings. But once old fashioned nuptials and blessings were exchanged, the Deans abandoned Bertrand Russell’s free love for a Bill of Rights and bourgeois bliss
Perhaps our tired planet longs for royalty fever in the ever constant of moral anguish and despair Colonel Khadafi’s foreign minister seeking refuge in London in tune with Prince William’s own nuptials with his “Kate”.
The convolutions of a soap opera ... the monarchy’s cheerleaders stomping on those hallowed grounds of Westminister Abby, tripping down that road.... puts the “King’s speech”
in a bumper crop of afficionados
V
So playing the field is grounded at the graduate level, the A. Quincy Jones’s Harold
Edelmans are recognized for challenging the t squares and modules of their turf,
Their dream list of stipends for their ringed third finger left hand femme profs.
Whether this amounts to an affront for same sex marriages, no one knows the futuro. But for the moment, the space age and its information highway can
join strides in their Easter Parade.
Right A.Quincy? Harold Edelman?
Right.
Ucla’s Research Library, Cornell School of Architecture, March 30 2011.
Things won’t get better until they get worst
“Things won’t get better until they get worst” say the bloger pundits not unlike Walter Lippman Max Lerner James Wechsler and Grantland Rice Jimmy Cannon Red
Smith in sports.. scribbling down to earth themes in defunct Hollywood Citizen News Daily
Bruin... Midwood High’s Argus print points.
Right Joey Rodriquez? Right.
Who would have known that Virginia Commonwealth would have scorched their
final four ride to Ncaa’s “ultimate”...alumni boosters fans going
ballistic.....”standing tall” in Bill Walton’s prime time..
“Nah not me coach. A seer I am not..No crystal ball telepathy here.”
Resurrecting Lee J Cobb’s.’s “Virginian” role. Not settling for anything less than shooting the lights out as they say... the Kansas jay hawks not knowing Senor Rodriquez was feeling it like was Benito Juarez in disguise, hitting the nylon from downtown.
What could the Spider Man say about that feat, climbing the tallest building in the world earlier in downtown Dubai? 160 stories in six hours.
And talking about cyber space , what about reactor 2 spilling plutonium (“contaminated water”)
from the nuclear reactor in Japan’s Fukushima province..shades of Hiroshima and Nakasaki in
then summer of ‘45 ending World War 2.
The chain of causation stemming from the 9 point quake and tsunami .....
Libya’s own 40 years of Khadafi nightmare within the qualms of inevitable disaster.
IV
But even in reliving the dinosaur age, CBS’s “60 minutes” hit a high of empathy, highlighting corporate greed on the planet as elite corporations strive for profit margins by settling in
Swiss and Irish venues.
Yet a 56 year old “Mother Teresa” from Staten Island takes in maimed children from battle worn Iraq and gets selfless peoples people to put their arms legs eye and face back together
V
On a “pumpkin” from the perimeter ,the high school coach Bob Hurley of Saint Anthony’s in Jersey City, lighting it up across the river... 1000 w’s.... with his full court conditioning, his stalwarts going on to college quintets and the NBA....9 thousand $ a year, his frau at the scorer’s table, his 2 sons coaching at the college level. .....
When are you coming home, Michael Jordan?
Smith in sports.. scribbling down to earth themes in defunct Hollywood Citizen News Daily
Bruin... Midwood High’s Argus print points.
Right Joey Rodriquez? Right.
II
Who would have known that Virginia Commonwealth would have scorched their
final four ride to Ncaa’s “ultimate”...alumni boosters fans going
ballistic.....”standing tall” in Bill Walton’s prime time..
“Nah not me coach. A seer I am not..No crystal ball telepathy here.”
Resurrecting Lee J Cobb’s.’s “Virginian” role. Not settling for anything less than shooting the lights out as they say... the Kansas jay hawks not knowing Senor Rodriquez was feeling it like was Benito Juarez in disguise, hitting the nylon from downtown.
.III
What could the Spider Man say about that feat, climbing the tallest building in the world earlier in downtown Dubai? 160 stories in six hours.
And talking about cyber space , what about reactor 2 spilling plutonium (“contaminated water”)
from the nuclear reactor in Japan’s Fukushima province..shades of Hiroshima and Nakasaki in
then summer of ‘45 ending World War 2.
The chain of causation stemming from the 9 point quake and tsunami .....
Libya’s own 40 years of Khadafi nightmare within the qualms of inevitable disaster.
IV
But even in reliving the dinosaur age, CBS’s “60 minutes” hit a high of empathy, highlighting corporate greed on the planet as elite corporations strive for profit margins by settling in
Swiss and Irish venues.
Yet a 56 year old “Mother Teresa” from Staten Island takes in maimed children from battle worn Iraq and gets selfless peoples people to put their arms legs eye and face back together
V
On a “pumpkin” from the perimeter ,the high school coach Bob Hurley of Saint Anthony’s in Jersey City, lighting it up across the river... 1000 w’s.... with his full court conditioning, his stalwarts going on to college quintets and the NBA....9 thousand $ a year, his frau at the scorer’s table, his 2 sons coaching at the college level. .....
When are you coming home, Michael Jordan?
The Big Apple, March 28,2010.
Benny Goodman
Benny Goodman toot tooting his licorice stick in his assault on Igor Stravinsky’s
“Ebony Suite” in a Hollywood recording studio, maestro Stravinsky conducting,
Columbia’s jazz ensemble, 1965
II
Five and a half decades later, coach ‘K’ of Duke University gunning for his assault on Boby Knight’s 903 (w’s) on the pines unlike Benny’s licorice stick, had to reconcile
the “wait till next year” for his“Big Dance” moment de triumphe almost in the same breath, the Husky coach Jim Calhoun in his 25th year at Storrs, captured his moment in admiration and joy as his grinning Kemba Walker (36 points) n his selfless led role stood by.
Alter bench egos and staff hugging each other as their unbeaten playoff Ncaa streak its full court flow rages on..
The surrogate father chewing his spearmint, open collar, tie unloosed. “The best player in America” Kemba Walker ...36 points in the paint and from down town, beaming alongside his maestro.
III
Little did Igor Stravinsky from his 1260 North Wetherly base in Beverly Hills or Wilshire Ebell podium grasp how his “Ebony Suite” would play out his aggressions on musical magicians
some sixty five years down the pike in Anahem...Newport Beach Orange County in its crib-like infancy.
“Oh my God,”he might have recoiled his baton as Ohio State, Kansas, Marquette, the Tar Heels of Roy Williams, Butler Richmond, Virginia Commonwealth, Florida State, Kentucky and Florida await his transitory tempo into the Elite Eight.
The creative and imaginative deceptions of these soulful genies displaying their larger than life
creative juices in the Big Dance’s dribbling flow& passing fast break with Benny Goodman and Igor Stravinsky’s own “Ebony suite”
Hardwood floors of college gyms everywhere, Ucla’s Pauley Pavilion, March 25, 2011
“Ebony Suite” in a Hollywood recording studio, maestro Stravinsky conducting,
Columbia’s jazz ensemble, 1965
II
Five and a half decades later, coach ‘K’ of Duke University gunning for his assault on Boby Knight’s 903 (w’s) on the pines unlike Benny’s licorice stick, had to reconcile
the “wait till next year” for his“Big Dance” moment de triumphe almost in the same breath, the Husky coach Jim Calhoun in his 25th year at Storrs, captured his moment in admiration and joy as his grinning Kemba Walker (36 points) n his selfless led role stood by.
Alter bench egos and staff hugging each other as their unbeaten playoff Ncaa streak its full court flow rages on..
The surrogate father chewing his spearmint, open collar, tie unloosed. “The best player in America” Kemba Walker ...36 points in the paint and from down town, beaming alongside his maestro.
III
Little did Igor Stravinsky from his 1260 North Wetherly base in Beverly Hills or Wilshire Ebell podium grasp how his “Ebony Suite” would play out his aggressions on musical magicians
some sixty five years down the pike in Anahem...Newport Beach Orange County in its crib-like infancy.
“Oh my God,”he might have recoiled his baton as Ohio State, Kansas, Marquette, the Tar Heels of Roy Williams, Butler Richmond, Virginia Commonwealth, Florida State, Kentucky and Florida await his transitory tempo into the Elite Eight.
The creative and imaginative deceptions of these soulful genies displaying their larger than life
creative juices in the Big Dance’s dribbling flow& passing fast break with Benny Goodman and Igor Stravinsky’s own “Ebony suite”
Hardwood floors of college gyms everywhere, Ucla’s Pauley Pavilion, March 25, 2011
Deja vu! Have we been here before?
Deja vu! Have we been here before? Muassolini’s tirade (Jack Oakie) at his compound in the sumptuous fountains of Trevi. His Novella Rome reality scene...the Nato fireflies buzzing the
no fly zone, their ships maintaining an embargo..
II
Colonel Khadafi’s demonaic “Great Dictator” role calling on all Arabs globally to wage an Arabesque...a counter offensive on the Aryans.....their pitiful small mindedness ro take out our
Jack Oakie clone like imagery..
“ How dare them? I challenge their Churchillian dialectic.! Didn’t his mother hail from Brooklyn Heights.”an ethnic turf at Montague and Court environs.
III
Let us rethink the Fuhrer’s tongue lashing out from his Eagle’s Nest These venomous Aryans and their Nato allies attacking air sea and land. Forty years of power gone up in smoke like I ws living a nightmare.
“Give me a break, Fuhrer. Wasn’t it your idea of railroading the ghettos burning their books in kristalnacht? The concentration camps. The Hholocaust ....trashing six million minion FDR and Sir Winston’s lips were sealed, Fraulein.....”
“Your Gestapo storm troopers suspecting the ‘1630' historical landmark on Dusseldorf’s Mertensgasse....numero 6....for their opposition to our dominating the planet ....grinding their vermin into ashes..
IV
“Another grape, fraulein........you’re a beauty like Elizabeth Taylor....she passing at 79....a do gooder alll her days...8 husbands and twice to”The Robe’s” Richard Burton. The pits and coal mines of Wales.....no illusions into her God like symmetry.
“A big souled woman, Two Oscars living out her own dream. Behind those Bel Air gates and Belagio Road. Stone Canyon Road. Bel Air hotel and golf course... Sunset Boulevard Saw all her flicks in my forty years.....living out my own destiny. Not maintaining a low profile.
“Believe me, fraulein......I told Colonel Stoopnagel not to fly into the no fly zone. The Arayans on land sea and air. But we will n ot submit. Nevah.”
Elizabeth Taylor’s passing, a youthful.”National Velvet”
March 23, 2010...
no fly zone, their ships maintaining an embargo..
II
Colonel Khadafi’s demonaic “Great Dictator” role calling on all Arabs globally to wage an Arabesque...a counter offensive on the Aryans.....their pitiful small mindedness ro take out our
Jack Oakie clone like imagery..
“ How dare them? I challenge their Churchillian dialectic.! Didn’t his mother hail from Brooklyn Heights.”an ethnic turf at Montague and Court environs.
III
Let us rethink the Fuhrer’s tongue lashing out from his Eagle’s Nest These venomous Aryans and their Nato allies attacking air sea and land. Forty years of power gone up in smoke like I ws living a nightmare.
“Give me a break, Fuhrer. Wasn’t it your idea of railroading the ghettos burning their books in kristalnacht? The concentration camps. The Hholocaust ....trashing six million minion FDR and Sir Winston’s lips were sealed, Fraulein.....”
“Your Gestapo storm troopers suspecting the ‘1630' historical landmark on Dusseldorf’s Mertensgasse....numero 6....for their opposition to our dominating the planet ....grinding their vermin into ashes..
IV
“Another grape, fraulein........you’re a beauty like Elizabeth Taylor....she passing at 79....a do gooder alll her days...8 husbands and twice to”The Robe’s” Richard Burton. The pits and coal mines of Wales.....no illusions into her God like symmetry.
“A big souled woman, Two Oscars living out her own dream. Behind those Bel Air gates and Belagio Road. Stone Canyon Road. Bel Air hotel and golf course... Sunset Boulevard Saw all her flicks in my forty years.....living out my own destiny. Not maintaining a low profile.
“Believe me, fraulein......I told Colonel Stoopnagel not to fly into the no fly zone. The Arayans on land sea and air. But we will n ot submit. Nevah.”
Elizabeth Taylor’s passing, a youthful.”National Velvet”
March 23, 2010...
Fort Hamilton garrison’s twinkling dream..
Fort Hamilton garrison’s twinkling dream.. Revisiting Passover&Easter 2003... 8 years later
“But what about the grub?” Would the maestro hailing from Southern Italy have a predilection? A bias?
Wasn’t he into the Monteverdi Donizetti Rossini Verdi permutations & scores? Hearing the great Caruso
storm those cluster of notes like Custer at Little Big Horn.
Could he nurture the moment, squeeze the juice out of its ephemeral ness, Time playing out in the infancy
of our .21st Century. Capturing them, from the time he popped out of his mother’s womb, the umbilical
cord spelled CHORD….….his mind’s eye into……..
History dictates its own menu in this Heidelberg castle like reality : Spudnik the space walk 3 disasters the Mir hookup....Libva Afghanistan Iraq ‘Nam Korea World War 1 World War2, the Spanish American struggle.., War of 1812 .
June15 1825....The Fort Hamilton garrison: .its modus operandi guarding the Harbor from the likes of pirates mercenaries gun runners terrorists on the quick for the Governor’s.Island of Mahican Indians, bartering their acreage for Peter Stuyvesant’s 24 dollars worth of trinkets beads and jewelry .
Those military camps that spawned GI kitchens…”Seconds Sarge?”, the adrenalin pumped up chow hounds….in their pre Baghdad Fort Dix’s basic training, reinventing their personas on the mess hall lines
Croissants pumpernickel ends sour dough bread slits of butter eggs over easy French toast cheese blintzes pancakes ice cubed orange juice in goblets. Decaf coffee, pastries, cookies…fruit salad jello Salmon lox rice pasta. .the salad bar of tired boring cauliflower beets cucumbers lettuce tomatoes broccoli carrots ,onions..
Sir Francis Bacon, the Bard’s scribe out of the Midlands into Olivier’s Old Vic, along the Thames docks…hams into their roles, robust capers of “The merry wives ..”
Tear Doll sheet for outlaw sex before the sexual revolution….
Paris’s left bank: masculinity’s strongest refuge The deux et maggots? The attic of the Grand Hotel of France on Vaugirard….the wholesale market….….
The “Second Sex” of deBeauvoir ... Simone Simone’s “gig”…, Crazy Horse Lido Josephine Baker’s “Folies Bergere” Chevalier’s .”GiGi, Little girls…...”…, Colette scribbling away… passionate Edith Piaf into her longing waif like vocals for Yves Monteau His Simone Signoret’s “Room at the top”
The scents whiffing through those cobblestone streets, the windows open into shafts, distancing the left from the right bank.
The dream like karma below the twinkling of the Verrazano Bridge, spanning Bay Ridge with Staten Island. The festive Easter Parade state of mind gripped the churchgoers at the celebrated three tables ‘Reserved’, adjacent to ‘Pinto’s Mountain’s’.
“To our ladies,” said the James Dunn double of a “Tree grows in Brooklyn”, Mickey Rooney’s boss in Saroyan’s “Human Comedy”. The Mick delivering Gold Star mother telegrams for his manager,
unlike David Sarnoff who spun off RCA, from his Kansas City telegraph yesterdays..
A glass of bubbly held high, the men &their women on their feet, he repeated himself . “To our ladies,” those hearty cheeks, the hair streaked with gray, his shirt open at the collar, beaming an open mindedness. All the way from Cork County, Ireland…Kings County, . Brooklyn, USA
Could it have been Fitzgerald’s “Great Gatsby” playing out .....…..
The sun dimpling through the windows like a Van Gogh swirling of cosmic tone color, a gossamer contrast in space and motion. A Cypress tree against the sky….
Witness to the outside pool and the cannon mounted knolls overlooking the entrance into the harbor…..the British fleet under night’s darkness, slipping into the Dutch of Manhattan..
The Fort Hamilton garrison, the guardian for this North Atlantic reality … its fragile stormy ferocity…. off & on closing,……The Revolutionary War its cause celebre 229 years ago ,General George’s guerilla fighters fresh from the French &Indian war, lightning fluid as the Marines and Army , rolled….Kuwait City-Baghdad’s 17 days ..during the Spring equinox.
Torching their cannonballs from these lofts… a thrust from the flank, thwarting cocky cockneys into their “Treasure Island” sail toward the Brooklyn Heights promenade, vulnerable Governor’s Island..
The ‘Pinto Mountain’s’ table of four had their own bubbly of delirium &euphoria, the Harold preparing himself for a four day regimen of surgical pre testing In his Sherlock Holmes bent, his surgeon had discovered a suspicious like tumor on a kidney, hidden under a rib .He and his team were thinking of grounding it forever…
It’s life aborted by the surgical knives, giving way to a long life for the ‘Pinto Mountain’ and indirectly the memories of the former Officer’s Club Maimonides cancer unit: cat scans, MRI’s, spinal taps, biopsys, chemo, radiation ..Whatever it takes for longevity-a wholesome healthy life style- in this century of the 21st..
Like the Pinto mountain: its roots forever as the Joshua Tree National Forest sentry, 20 minutes from Rancho Mirage, in the Mojave Desert.
“Long live the Pinto Mountain!”
The capping ebbs & tides flogging the concrete pillars of the Belt Parkway, the Easter bumper to bumper traffic, breathing in oxygen for an everlasting moment of Homecoming Prayer.
“To our ladies,” toasted the Irish tenor sounding like John McCormick , his octaves resounding in the sound and fury echoes of our Republic’s first 2 centuries.……
April 19, 2003.. March 21, 2011 the first day of Spring.... the whirling cruise missiles spinning like yo yos
“But what about the grub?” Would the maestro hailing from Southern Italy have a predilection? A bias?
Wasn’t he into the Monteverdi Donizetti Rossini Verdi permutations & scores? Hearing the great Caruso
storm those cluster of notes like Custer at Little Big Horn.
Could he nurture the moment, squeeze the juice out of its ephemeral ness, Time playing out in the infancy
of our .21st Century. Capturing them, from the time he popped out of his mother’s womb, the umbilical
cord spelled CHORD….….his mind’s eye into……..
I
An egg white omelet of cheese: onions red peppers… oatmeal grits. Grits first, oatmeal second for the Easter Sunday brunch? History dictates its own menu in this Heidelberg castle like reality : Spudnik the space walk 3 disasters the Mir hookup....Libva Afghanistan Iraq ‘Nam Korea World War 1 World War2, the Spanish American struggle.., War of 1812 .
June15 1825....The Fort Hamilton garrison: .its modus operandi guarding the Harbor from the likes of pirates mercenaries gun runners terrorists on the quick for the Governor’s.Island of Mahican Indians, bartering their acreage for Peter Stuyvesant’s 24 dollars worth of trinkets beads and jewelry .
Those military camps that spawned GI kitchens…”Seconds Sarge?”, the adrenalin pumped up chow hounds….in their pre Baghdad Fort Dix’s basic training, reinventing their personas on the mess hall lines
II
Croissants pumpernickel ends sour dough bread slits of butter eggs over easy French toast cheese blintzes pancakes ice cubed orange juice in goblets. Decaf coffee, pastries, cookies…fruit salad jello Salmon lox rice pasta. .the salad bar of tired boring cauliflower beets cucumbers lettuce tomatoes broccoli carrots ,onions..
Sir Francis Bacon, the Bard’s scribe out of the Midlands into Olivier’s Old Vic, along the Thames docks…hams into their roles, robust capers of “The merry wives ..”
Tear Doll sheet for outlaw sex before the sexual revolution….
Paris’s left bank: masculinity’s strongest refuge The deux et maggots? The attic of the Grand Hotel of France on Vaugirard….the wholesale market….….
The “Second Sex” of deBeauvoir ... Simone Simone’s “gig”…, Crazy Horse Lido Josephine Baker’s “Folies Bergere” Chevalier’s .”GiGi, Little girls…...”…, Colette scribbling away… passionate Edith Piaf into her longing waif like vocals for Yves Monteau His Simone Signoret’s “Room at the top”
The scents whiffing through those cobblestone streets, the windows open into shafts, distancing the left from the right bank.
III
The enchantment of Joey N &Esther betrothal 7 days prior, at the Hansel & Gretel synagogue in Lincoln Center .his right or was it his left foot breaking the glass under the chupah…..Icing their relationship for better or for worse, slipping the wedding band on her third finger left hand… the Rabbi’s presence of mind, taking the solemn moment into soul searching “From here to Eternity”.IV
The dream like karma below the twinkling of the Verrazano Bridge, spanning Bay Ridge with Staten Island. The festive Easter Parade state of mind gripped the churchgoers at the celebrated three tables ‘Reserved’, adjacent to ‘Pinto’s Mountain’s’.
“To our ladies,” said the James Dunn double of a “Tree grows in Brooklyn”, Mickey Rooney’s boss in Saroyan’s “Human Comedy”. The Mick delivering Gold Star mother telegrams for his manager,
unlike David Sarnoff who spun off RCA, from his Kansas City telegraph yesterdays..
A glass of bubbly held high, the men &their women on their feet, he repeated himself . “To our ladies,” those hearty cheeks, the hair streaked with gray, his shirt open at the collar, beaming an open mindedness. All the way from Cork County, Ireland…Kings County, . Brooklyn, USA
Could it have been Fitzgerald’s “Great Gatsby” playing out .....…..
V
The sun dimpling through the windows like a Van Gogh swirling of cosmic tone color, a gossamer contrast in space and motion. A Cypress tree against the sky….
Witness to the outside pool and the cannon mounted knolls overlooking the entrance into the harbor…..the British fleet under night’s darkness, slipping into the Dutch of Manhattan..
The Fort Hamilton garrison, the guardian for this North Atlantic reality … its fragile stormy ferocity…. off & on closing,……The Revolutionary War its cause celebre 229 years ago ,General George’s guerilla fighters fresh from the French &Indian war, lightning fluid as the Marines and Army , rolled….Kuwait City-Baghdad’s 17 days ..during the Spring equinox.
Torching their cannonballs from these lofts… a thrust from the flank, thwarting cocky cockneys into their “Treasure Island” sail toward the Brooklyn Heights promenade, vulnerable Governor’s Island..
VI
The ‘Pinto Mountain’s’ table of four had their own bubbly of delirium &euphoria, the Harold preparing himself for a four day regimen of surgical pre testing In his Sherlock Holmes bent, his surgeon had discovered a suspicious like tumor on a kidney, hidden under a rib .He and his team were thinking of grounding it forever…
It’s life aborted by the surgical knives, giving way to a long life for the ‘Pinto Mountain’ and indirectly the memories of the former Officer’s Club Maimonides cancer unit: cat scans, MRI’s, spinal taps, biopsys, chemo, radiation ..Whatever it takes for longevity-a wholesome healthy life style- in this century of the 21st..
Like the Pinto mountain: its roots forever as the Joshua Tree National Forest sentry, 20 minutes from Rancho Mirage, in the Mojave Desert.
“Long live the Pinto Mountain!”
VI
The capping ebbs & tides flogging the concrete pillars of the Belt Parkway, the Easter bumper to bumper traffic, breathing in oxygen for an everlasting moment of Homecoming Prayer.
“To our ladies,” toasted the Irish tenor sounding like John McCormick , his octaves resounding in the sound and fury echoes of our Republic’s first 2 centuries.……
April 19, 2003.. March 21, 2011 the first day of Spring.... the whirling cruise missiles spinning like yo yos
over Tripoli.....cities to the East and West... the Libyan desert..
“Hold back the dawn”, March Madness begins.
“Hold back the dawn”, March Madness begins.
Two post office cancellations in auction The White House atop CBS
Chapel Street, New Haven, Connecicut
“Do we hear any bids?”
Two post office cancellations in auction The White House atop CBS
Chapel Street, New Haven, Connecicut
“Do we hear any bids?”
What a sensibility!
What a sensibility! A feminine tenderness in a enduring sendoff to a self made man
who may have been her counterpoint for a quarter of a century.
Her berth and vantage point .. in her role as Danny Siles engineer for twenty five years...a quarter of a century may not transcend the sismic tragedy in Japan.....but the post World War2 era of 65 years captured her attention on FDR’s own March 12 1933 fireside chat....
A quarter of a century as a “d.j” what Martin Block called “The make believe ballroom”: . But Danny Stiles record spinning into his eighties seemed to Annie Bergen of WQXR... a classical
music station taking three- four minutes to acknowledge the impact he had on her odyssey in the musical landscape of radio.
Even as Japan reels in its 65 years...hard to imagine this disaster happening....but the mantra
of Martin Block’s “Make Believe Ballroom” on Sundays was akin to Uncle Don on reading the comics...Mayor LaGuardia chasing fires...Arthur Fiedler with his Boston Pops...
The Jersey born platter maven....an artist in his own right...host of dances in the Big Apple and New Jersey whirled a nostalgia and spell of a magician and his engineer playing out their lives.
Their chemistry and bonding was right out of Hansel ands Gretyl” , Danny Stiles like my father’s own Wbbc weekly radio stint. The Court Street Borough Park tirf.
Esoteric yes but Danny Stiles and Annie Bergen challenged their listeners into a deja vu state of mind...
A “swish” from “downtown” Newark and lower Manhattan.
Long before websites and 50 gigs of memory, Danny Stiles weaved his own web of nostalgia and dance rhythms. Before Bing Crosby, there was the string instruments...the nucleur uranium and their “meltdown”
Jean Goldkette and Isham Jones. Before Paul Whiteman Glen Miller, Duke Ellington the Dorsey brothers. Harry James’s “trumpet” rhapsody.
No crunching of numbers vis a vi his accounting degree but the New Jersey radio caugfht his preordained fate.
.”My mother’s eyes” sung by George Jessel. Connie Francis “My Yiddishe
Momme” Shirley Temple”s “Goodnight my love” at the age of eight.
SophieTucker belting out “Mister Siegal make it legal”
Could she have known that Danny Stiles would endure the 65 years since in his love feast with his identifying fans..
An orbit of some 20 radio stations: Wevd Wnyc Wnsw Wjom Wpat but a few..
He came down on the side of his fans. “Midnight Dan” and the
“The Kit Catt Club”
Subsequent “enchiladas” spinning his “deja vu”.
Wasn’t his passage God’s way?
A seismic consciousness of a Wqxr classical music host giving her own living breathing intelligence on what Danny Stiles’s quarter of a century meant to her career.
How many pilgrimages can find that karma in their “make believe ballroom?”
A post World War2 odyssey playing until Danny Stiles’s exit two days ago.
Transcending the marketplace .not from age 13 but from the time his fans responded to his Saturday night art deco studio and its high mahogany door. Emulating the “Inner Sanctum creaking door and “the make believe ballroom”
Playing his “oldies”... finding his listeners.
An incarnation of “to know is no less to feel”
May his legacy of spinning “oldies” endure forever. To make us more sensitive while the planet
“shakes and bakes”.
Man against nature. Man against man. Wherever conflict and antagonism are playing out their desperate shocks, Danny Stiiles will endure.
“Goodnight dear sweet Barbara,” (his wife) ,the mahogany door closing at his art deco penthouse .
who may have been her counterpoint for a quarter of a century.
Her berth and vantage point .. in her role as Danny Siles engineer for twenty five years...a quarter of a century may not transcend the sismic tragedy in Japan.....but the post World War2 era of 65 years captured her attention on FDR’s own March 12 1933 fireside chat....
II
A quarter of a century as a “d.j” what Martin Block called “The make believe ballroom”: . But Danny Stiles record spinning into his eighties seemed to Annie Bergen of WQXR... a classical
music station taking three- four minutes to acknowledge the impact he had on her odyssey in the musical landscape of radio.
Even as Japan reels in its 65 years...hard to imagine this disaster happening....but the mantra
of Martin Block’s “Make Believe Ballroom” on Sundays was akin to Uncle Don on reading the comics...Mayor LaGuardia chasing fires...Arthur Fiedler with his Boston Pops...
The Jersey born platter maven....an artist in his own right...host of dances in the Big Apple and New Jersey whirled a nostalgia and spell of a magician and his engineer playing out their lives.
III
Their chemistry and bonding was right out of Hansel ands Gretyl” , Danny Stiles like my father’s own Wbbc weekly radio stint. The Court Street Borough Park tirf.
Esoteric yes but Danny Stiles and Annie Bergen challenged their listeners into a deja vu state of mind...
A “swish” from “downtown” Newark and lower Manhattan.
Long before websites and 50 gigs of memory, Danny Stiles weaved his own web of nostalgia and dance rhythms. Before Bing Crosby, there was the string instruments...the nucleur uranium and their “meltdown”
Jean Goldkette and Isham Jones. Before Paul Whiteman Glen Miller, Duke Ellington the Dorsey brothers. Harry James’s “trumpet” rhapsody.
IV
No crunching of numbers vis a vi his accounting degree but the New Jersey radio caugfht his preordained fate.
.”My mother’s eyes” sung by George Jessel. Connie Francis “My Yiddishe
Momme” Shirley Temple”s “Goodnight my love” at the age of eight.
SophieTucker belting out “Mister Siegal make it legal”
Could she have known that Danny Stiles would endure the 65 years since in his love feast with his identifying fans..
An orbit of some 20 radio stations: Wevd Wnyc Wnsw Wjom Wpat but a few..
He came down on the side of his fans. “Midnight Dan” and the
“The Kit Catt Club”
Subsequent “enchiladas” spinning his “deja vu”.
Wasn’t his passage God’s way?
V
A seismic consciousness of a Wqxr classical music host giving her own living breathing intelligence on what Danny Stiles’s quarter of a century meant to her career.
How many pilgrimages can find that karma in their “make believe ballroom?”
A post World War2 odyssey playing until Danny Stiles’s exit two days ago.
VI
Transcending the marketplace .not from age 13 but from the time his fans responded to his Saturday night art deco studio and its high mahogany door. Emulating the “Inner Sanctum creaking door and “the make believe ballroom”
Playing his “oldies”... finding his listeners.
An incarnation of “to know is no less to feel”
May his legacy of spinning “oldies” endure forever. To make us more sensitive while the planet
“shakes and bakes”.
Man against nature. Man against man. Wherever conflict and antagonism are playing out their desperate shocks, Danny Stiiles will endure.
“Goodnight dear sweet Barbara,” (his wife) ,the mahogany door closing at his art deco penthouse .
March 14r, 2010. Lower Manhattan’s “make believe ballroom”
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