Navigating the emotional meltdown: World War one the Russian Revolution Russia’s civil war Tsar Nicholas Romanov’s murder not unlike his grandfather AlexanderII..
The Cossack atrocities in Berdechev.... Kiev’s reality scene....timber and lumber assets seized, the Kaminskys fled to Odessa and steerage to America’s Buffalo the Bronx and Bath and Cropsy Avenues off Bay 28th Street in Jackie Gleason’s Bay Parkway.....four blocks South.....Grandpa Kaminsky’s dry fruit store on the corner..
II
Meanwhile the scorched upheaval of what was once entrenched power and the diminishing value of life’s expectations: exponential to the labor camps and the Siberian gulag but a cattle train that made the Orient Express a joy ride to Lunacy Park..
The Czarist regime not only was collapsing by its wicked excesses .... plunging indifference not listening with their third ears.....deaf to their own sinister Robespierres.
Surreal as only Picasso could fashion it, his sensuality into its DNA pool, transcending “crimes against humanity
“We want bread ddddy.... we want bread
III
It was in this framework of maddening calamity that the enlightened Kerenskys of the Ukraine attempted to model a semblance of America’s founding fathers revolution to the once solecisms of Rasputin’s conspicuous consumption.... ....dachas and self indulgence swept away ... the genesis of grandparents mothers and fathers brothers and sisters... one year old tots in their own swirl of baby strollers... nannies changing diapers dissolved in the Muscovite dust .
IV
Shostakovich Prokoiev Rachmaninoff Stravinsky capturing those cataclysmic moments in their symphoniuc textures.....man’s inhumanity to man playing out....exhorted by Boris Pasternak in his Nobel Laureate saga....
“Siberia you pasgodniks....bread and water you scum!
V
However back at the Olympia Theatre in Paris but a crow’s flight from the Odeon .... Gertrude Stein’s Shakespeare and company.....James Joyce... Ernest Hemingway .... Tonya hanging by her thumbs waiting.......
“Paths of Glory” co starrring Adolph Menjou and Kirk Douglas (“You’re a fraud, General”)_ the trenches, the Bolsheviks and the Whites thrusting their bayonets , while Dr. Zhivago and his nurse Lara ministered to the laboring breaths of comrades and their alter egos. .
Tonya listening to the expatriate Afro American jazz bands....a foretaste of genocide: an entire race of Jews obliterated..... World War 2 Korea (Spudnik) Vietnam Iraq and Afghanistan.
Art Blakey and his jzzz messengers in their set “I remember Clifford”.bass trumpet piano tenor sax drums... (Buddy Rich Shelly Manne Gene Krupa)
Miles Davis with John Coltrane...working band in jazz , Tonya caught up in the improvised flowing riff:...some measures of “Monk” as a skinny.... she snapping her fingers, stomping her eoes...
A look aslike for Charlie Chaplin’s oldest daughter Geraldine, Sydney’s step sister.
Bugs Bunny at 70 (Mel Blanc’s son ) Warners animation July 28 2010
