No one in Carnegie Hall knew the difference. The anthropological annexation of “The
midnight ride of Paul Revere”, with heavy duty Napoleonic
deletions of the little Emperor’s name from mmanuscripts ascribed to Beethoven
in Venna, Mozart in Salzburg, and Goethe in Weimar
The fait accompli and chain of
demise of Saturday snail mail being thrown under the gill o tine in the States:
its birth and termination was as vast and glorious as the continent itself.
II
So traumatic was the obituary that Oscar Levant, the with, pianist
to his composer and friend George Gershwin, that he had a second movement
keyboard bloc on George’s “Rhapsody in Blue” that conductor, Paul
Whiteman, tapped Levant’s chain smoking nonce with his baton twice, so he could
get back into the beat.
No one of the Carnegie Hall
brass and free loaders knew the difference.
Certainly not Isaac Stern, .the
violinist who brought the Hall’s presence back from dinosaur extinction.
III
“Listen my children and you shall hear the midnight ride
of Paul Revere” as his poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow heard those
galloping hoof beats, foretasting the
pony express thru the Colony’s 13 post offices and the calibration of
canceling letters, stamps and Saturday delivery in all corners of the New
World.
On hearing about it by word of mouth or Western Union
telegram ( Saroyan’s “Human Comedy”
Mickey Rooney delivering the wires on his bicycle. )
IV
Meanwhile those
other dynamos of music and creativity,
the composers from Vienna Salzburg and Weimar... Beethoven, Mozart and Goethe
caught in the thrall of Napoleon ‘s “liberating worship” felt as Beethoven
did.....Goethe’s Faust (Harvard’s lady honcho), his Egmont overture.
That the little Emperor double crossed their own ocean of
humanity, deleting his name . In Beethoven‘s case, it was the Enrico, (Symphony
3) the Bonn giant crossing out the tyrant’ s dedication out with one quill of
the pen. The other two immortals, following suit in their symphonies and
Faustian prose and poetic mesmerizing.
V
But in the new world, the metamorphosis of those early hoof
prints, the mail delivery transcended into stagecoaches, railroads (the baggage
car) ships, prop planes( Colonel Lindbergh’s ‘Spirit of St.Louis’), jets, and
space shuttles.... “Discovery”....
“The grosses in Sydney, Sidney?”
VI
In our World War 2 ambience,
the Coney Island Avenue Post Office hired holiday temps from Midwood
High School, packing the holiday mail, delivering thru icey Avenues H, I, J,
K..
L.A’s Terminal Annex from colleges....Ucla, USC.
The temps memorizing zip codes, sorting out mail, while sitting on persecution stools,trying to stay awake,
their eyes on the clock as the midnight shift came aboard like “Midnight
Cowboys”. (Blossom Hoffman’s brother, Dustin)
VII
Didn’t Roy Fitzgerald aka Rock Hudson get his break and
change of gender, delivering special delivery mail to the Sunset Strip flesh
peddlers and sharks.
Marlon Brando getting his special delivery up on Mulholland
Drive from Marviola, a genius from Crown Heights and the Battle of the Bulge,
WW2.
Faulkner sitting on the agony rack, at the University of
Mississippi.
VIIlI
Now it was coming to an end. A foreclosure, if you
will. Snail mail on the seventh day of
the week, the Sabbath, pleading from
their soul saving prayers and blessings..
But unlike many of the patrons of the snail mail, we will
miss those glory days of Saturday first class mail verve, receiving news that
couldn’t be delivered even by Mickey Rooney on his bike.
Expressions of warmth, love, sympathy that embraced both the
reader and the composer’s hopes and dreams.
The citry that never sleeps, Febrary 6, 2013
