Ted Turner must be a quality human being….

Ted Turner must be a quality human being…. Once married to Jane Fonda, Henry (“The Grapes of Wrath”) daughter….. theowner of the Atlanta Braves, he  is a connoisseur of the finerthings in life ,not unlike John Steinbeck’s original ‘Grapes of Wrath’. .

                                         II

His movie channel presented “Man hunt”, a *George Sanders with a “cool” Nazi accent coming to grips literally, with “Mrs.Miniver’s” staid sounding spouse, Walter Pigeon, and a blimey heretofore a youngish Joan Bennett with an accent(long before Holmby Hills manse, two husbands and raising her nonconformist daughter Melinda Markey , while married to Walter Wanger. A formidable straight shouldered grad of Dartmouth, Hanover, New Hampshire..

Her real life as grim and volatile as her reel one.

in a Fritz Lang directed masterpiece, the premise of this ironic thriller, being the assassination of the Fuhrer, Adolf himself, at his Eagle’s Nest, high in the German Alps..  

An authority figure in search of himself, peoples, people..

                                         III.

The footage in “Man hunt” ..land sea and air may have “Hitch’s“39 Steps”  “North by North west” flavor but the coup de grabetween  cynical George Sanders ,going beyond his irony in “All about Eve” is his Nazi role, as he  and Walter Pigeon play out their “duel on land sea and air, “  the cynical Nazicommandant, in counterpoint, trying to get the Englishman (a for taste of James Bond, (Cubby Brocalee) into signing a confession, in his foiled attempt to assassinate the Fuhrer, pruning himself on his veranda… from long distance, a lomgrange sighted rifle, the chambers loaded with two bullets, the barrel pointed at the Fuhrer’s Adams apple…..his art decoblouse, bespectacled with medaled victim’s blood..

“A friggen karma!

Gimme another gum drop, Momma.”

                                       IV

Dragged before the commandant as they diplomatically parse the language ,commencing their self serving chauvinistic needs.

“Once you sign your confession, acknowledging England as the real aggressor, we will give you your freedom. You may return to your country.”..handing the alleged confession to the famedintentional head hunter, himself a captive of the Fuhrer personified.

                                   V

The ensuing conflict of their breathless ego trips…. the release of the trapper and the trapped, thru the wooded swamps, barking dogs picking up the Pigeon’s scent….eluding them…. crawling thru the morass, his nation’s 10 Downing Street, carved into his aristocratic soul.                                    

                                  VI

The chase continues on  sea, as the Englishman is helped by a cabin boy, played by Roddy Macdowal.

An urchin kid who hides the fugitive in a closet, and a hidden disguised trap door, the Nazi pursuers clip clipping along, a New Yorker magazine left on the Captain’s table as a ruse, the ship sailing for the bonny shores of the English Channel boondocks. 

“Mates ahoy.” 

Dunkirk, the nearest  port in a Swastika storm..

                                    VII

Whistling the ‘White Cliffs of Dover, Hitler’s headhunter, slips off the ship, his characteristic words of Barclay Bank courage and fortitude. The cabin boy “You are in my memory bankforever, Sonny. God save the King!”.

So in the seaside town, akin to Lancaster near the Irish Sea, he walks the talk, catching a glimpses of his avengers and George Sanders in  a homburg and civvies, searching for a rogue hero.. in this port town.

                                   VIII

As he breaks into the blimey brunette Joan Bennet’s second floor flat, he convinces  her of his real I.D. , “Fleeing the Nazis is no fish and chips at Stratford on the Avon pastime.”.

The next morning  in a pawn shop ….jewelery store, he buys her a sword like hat pin to remember him. In a two line squabble, she snuggles up to the fugitive, accepting the  hat pin sword.

But the George Sanders flunkies are hot on his trail as the Pigeon lives up to his name, fleeing into the Metro, the chase into the underground, the darkness and solitude of the station,heightens the tension, the bleak darkness, the third rail, James Bond in disguise flees the scene..

                                     IX

The pert brunette Joan Bennet makes her big scene into comedy as she moves into Pigeon’s brothers aristocratic digs. But upon leaving to return to her own down to earth second floor space, shopens the door and is confronted by the George Sanders possewho sweep her blimey presence away, using the hat pin sword  pin to do her in.

                                     X  

Meanwhile, our James Bond alias the Pigeon  hides in a sewer like tunnel akin to Fredric March, Jean Val Jean, hunted by Inspector Charles Laughton for stealing a loaf of bread in Victor Hugo’s “Les Miserable”, the long running ‘Phantom of the Opera’ on Broadway.

Here the commandant, cynical George Sanders senses the sewer as the escape route for his eternal foe.

In a repeat of their give and take at the Fuhrer’s Eagle’s love Nest, the two again bargain for the signature, the burden o n Bond as an agent for England, neither human knowing the Prime Minister’s mother was born in Brooklyn Heights, a stone’s throw…  a Pigeon’s flight from Montague and Court Street in downtown Brooklyn, akin to  the Name Detective’s Surrogate Court, his Adler surname meaning ‘Eagle’ in English.

                                  XI

As the two antagonists play out their fates, the cynical commandant puts the tabled confession on the edge of a stick,the blimey hat pin holding it in place lie a paper clip.

The Pigeon takes the dagger sword pin off the stick…signs the “confession”, pushing the stick back trough the narrow opening, while improvising a boomerang bow and arrow, the hat pindagger attached to the ‘confession’ by an elastic band. 

                                   XIII

When George Sanders reveals his cynicism for what it is, believing the fabled “confession”s infallibility, the Pigeon no cynic himself, releases the dagger pin…into the commandment’s fated cynicism, firing his pistol at the Pigeon presence, as he falls mortally wounded.

                                      XIII

In  the penultimate scene, a B 17 from Duxford RAF base, and the  RAF USAF base at Laken -heath, a parachuting crew member, with a long distance rifle  on his lap, the chute opening, Walter Pigeon descending…….   

July 27,2015  The City that never leeps….(*George Sanders like Hitler, took his own life later)        

The metamorphosis of the pianist

The metamorphosis of the pianist, German born composer and friend of Felix Mendelssohn and Johannes Brahms, both of Hamburg, Clara Schuman’s sweetheart, husband, Robert Schuman, variations of a theme playing out.

                                      II        

But in his brain neurons and musical soul, the  German bornpianist, composer and writer, went ballistic.…being fished out of the Rhine on his attempt at ending his “burned out” career.

Passing away two years later at the sanitarium asylum where he was being treated akin to Thomas Mann’s reminenses in his “Magic Mountain” 

”When he awoke from his sleep, his dreamy imagination put him into a cathartic post awakening. His forehead damp with sweat,” said Clara, her own virtuoso into worldly big time feminine majesty tours and magnetism, if not Teutonictwentyish sexuality..

                                     III

Sins of old age is a misnomer in this instance. Clara’s father was steadfast. “Clara my baby.., you fool yourself. Robert may be a good humor man and piano virtuoso and a transcendent composer. But to be your kindred soul in  wedlock, I forbid it.”

Her father seemed to savor a narrow minded  state of mind. Having one artist in the family, but to invite another prodigythru a marital alliance?

A friendship is a temporary utility. A marriage? Sharing space? “Impossiblee”. I forbid it..”

                                       IV

Little did he nor Clara know. Had she read “the Razor’s Edge” the artist becoming a taxi driver in Chicago.

”Of Human Bondage” the protagonist being and becoming a medical student intern resident.….but Clara was not listening.Her father could go on for days,            

weeks, months, years …”From here to Eternity”  

Spelling out the case that Meister Schuman , his own brilliant student on the keyboard, was a penniless genus.

                                            V

Robert by his given name, wasn’t a match for my Clara.  Where is a match for Clara?

Clara’s refinement?.  Clara’s sensibility? No, never. “Nunca” for Spanish speaking readers. 

Isn’t one keyboard genii enough? Two?. Impossible! dreamer Robert Schuman!  Dumbkompf”!  

                                              VI

But in the contradictions of existence, Clara Schuman’s papafinally acknowledged Clara’s devotion to her twin soul, husbandRobert Schuman, his former student, son in law become father of eight, four surviving.

“I want to see my grandchildren. What can I say?”, he asked himself in a self pitying moment ”I got to be true to myself and my strong willed  daughter, Clara. 

Don’t I ?”

                                   

And finally through humility

“And finally through humility, we may be able to regain thesense of the absurdity of man…..” quoteth Professor Pierre, Columbia University, 1952 at the height of Senator Joe McCarthy’s outrage, weeding out Commie sympathizers in our land.

                                               II

Fibber McGee and Molly, George Burns and Gracie Allen, Jack Benny Mary Livi9ngston, Fred Allen and Portland…Lamont Cranston (“The Shadow” and ”Margo”) Eddie Cantor and Ida, Blondie and Dagwood, Jimmy Durante  “Good night,…”Mrs.Calabash”…. 

                                              III

One wonders whether or not our founding fathers, would have been able to recognize our Republic, no less the original 13 colonies. 

Isn’t it bad enough the law of the land is but a fiction in light of gun tyranny, ,the gun shows and the failure to demand back up checks, and the 5-4 decision at the Court, giving same sex couples the right to cohabit, shaking up the right to procreate and raise a family of quality human beings, setting an example for the generations to come.

Yet saying that our own ladies, wives,  mothers, grandmothers…….Gracie Allen Mary Livingston, Portland Hoffa, Missus Calabash, Ida, Molly are like the tea barrels thrown off the  ship holds, docked in Boston Harbor.

                                       IV

A Revolution in our time.. And who among us is prepared to confront it. Not the 17 campaigners for General George Washington’s highest office in the land.

                                          V

And a once handsome Coney Island 10 billion dollar man,itching for the General’s legacy, cradling cyberspace smoke and shadows by admonishing a Vietnam prisoner of war who’s playing out his own legacy in his seat, the United States Senate. 

                                         VI                                                                                         

Civility like Margaret Mitchell’s “Gone with the wind”? Earl Carol’s “Vanities” playing out.

Our cosmos and solar system is but a stage…..

“Twinkle twinkle little star”

July 22, 2015 The City that nwever sleeps.

                                              

                                                                                                     

Between Aaron Copeland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man”

Between Aaron Copeland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man” and the patriotism inherent in Chopin’s Etudes and Mazurkas, one is struck with the ultimate sadness of his gigs (etudes and yet our own small hands rippling thru those piano keys, one can’t help but capture the fervor these artists capture and recapitulate from “here to eternity”.

                                            II

The pop culture is so overwhelming at times with their owntentative sound and fury….the insignificant trivia….

“Strings, piano, clarinet”…..by the aforementioned Aaron Copeland, a Boys High graduate, the “Common Man”resonates..orchestration three years later by Benny Goodman.

                                            IV

The lingering sadness in Chopin’s mazurkas (dances) compelled the Polish patriot of his “fortissimo”, his twelve fingers in patriotic delirium, elicited at UCLAs Jan Popper’s Opera Workshop and at noon recitals across the quad in Royce Hal’s recitals.     

                                          V

Who was to know that Chopin into those mazurkas: A minor and major keys was a triumphant testament to his patriotic fervor.

Could Ferde’ Grope (Santa Monica resident) capture that spirited soul in those 12 fingers crashing the keyboard, his feet on the petals, the composer into his ‘Grand Canyon Suite’…Arizona’s painted desert, petrified forest...

                                         VI

Our musical landscape brings to mind, the “History repeats itself” down thru the ages, since the Holy Grail.

President Woodrow Wilson never able to get his World War One adage “the War to end all wars” off the Holy Grail’s track.

Man’s inhumanity to man.’ 

                                           VI

Here the 5nations in their historic nuclear chess playing… meeting of the minds with Iran, may repeats President Wilson’s WW1 epiphany.

‘THE WAR TO END ALL WARS.’

The threats remain in our solar system into millions of miles of travel, the landing on Mars and the discovery of Pluto….can the these quality human being discovers in their meeting of the minds, perpetuate mankind’s eternal quest? And deter….

‘History repeats Itself’. 

July 16, 2015 The City that never sleeps.

The last unfinished novel by Charles Dickens was the “Mystery of Edwin Drood”

The last unfinished novel by Charles Dickens was the “Mystery of Edwin Drood”  Maybe not a masterpiece like David Copperfield or Oliver Twist.

                                      II

But in this instance, a mystery of a very steady and solid high school amigo at Flatbush’s Midwood High School and Wingate Field basket ball hard courts  on Avenue K and  East 16th Street..

His name was Gerry Ringelheim and he died prematurely. He was a letterman for coach Barney Chen’s varsity, coming off the bench.

With Eddie Joachim, they had a chemistry, unlike any two teammates and classmates we had the gift of knowing, during those basketball forays in Flatbush at venues in  the intra mural league, contesting those hoops and nets..

                                                III

Barbra Striesand’s manager of 50 years, was part of that mix. Downstairs in the Flatbush gym, off Coney Island Avenue and Avenue I. The Gremlins, the Comets, and Marty Erlichman’svintage five.

But above all was Gerry Ringelheim….after all the years……wars Buck Rogers Flash Gordon, (Pluto) Cyber Space, “as time gone by”, his down to earth steadfastness like the shade trees on the side streets, off Avenue ‘J’ and Bedford Avenue..

                                           IV

When we last saw him in practice: warm-up drills in the Midwood High School gym, he shared his playmaking gist withStan Rubin, Howie Goldman (transferee to Hollywood High)Jay Sablow.

“Honest Bill Rosenblatt , Howie Weisglass were part of his basketball afficiandos, the aforementioned Eddie Joachim.Along with the “Commish”, Marv Glauberman.

Wearing their golden uniforms, the weekly intra mural games…Ocean Avenue between ‘K’ and ‘L’ …the ‘East MidwoodJewish Center.’

                                       V

Where is Clint Eastwood aka “Dirty Harry” when we need him?   

July 14,2015. The City that never sleeps., some70 years after the “Mystery of Gerry Ringelheim”

                                                   

In the late seventies (1979) Michael Cacoyannis, a film director

In the late seventies (1979) Michael  Cacoyannis, a film director,out of his Greek heritage, did a play by Euripides, translated by Edith Hamilton, about the revenge sought by King Agamemnon, starring Katherine Hepburn, Irene Pappas, Vanessa Redgraveand Genevieve

Bujold.

                                              II

Thirty five years later, the City that never sleeps, gave a rousing digital tape (hash mark  trashing) parade to our own heroines…young   women, twenty two+ World Cup soccer champions,having beaten Japan 5-2, in Vancouver, several days ago.

                                              III 

As these dynamic selfless teammates rode down  the canyon of champions, one witnessed the emancipation of Trojan Women…quality huan beings of our minor planet…as one by one they embraced their royal encomiums by the Mayor, the soccer royalty, the federation that singularly broke the male domination of the feudal (serfdom) male dominated  Canyon of Champions.

                                       IV

To these eyes,  3 Rutgers University  players…three of their leaders were from  New Jersey….had an  awareness, a consciousness akin to Pete Sampras’s sister, coaching UCLA’s girls tennis team.. A competitive drive to b a role model for realizing  feminine dreams and passion in a once “male only” Champion of Canyons.

Of being a cast (caste) of blessed heroines, transcending role playing. Their short acceptance statements (not a speech by these ladies) seemed a historical spectacle moment to bring anawareness that was long in arriving.

”Th is for you guys. We love you!

                                     V

This recognition by the civic leaders: Mayor, his wife, the embraces handshakes trophies was but the gravy for  thesefierce passionate young women.  

“We love you guys.”

                                    VI

Bringing their species into their own Euripides’s “Trojan Women” into the 21st century, almost akin to discovering another planet in our galaxy.

Their leadership bespeaks well of the myth of the Cro-Magnon man, coming to grips with quality human beings being distaffsoccer world champions, for ringing true the immortal wordsinscribed at the Statute of Liberty.

                                          VII

‘I lift my lamp to the golden doors’

Emma Lazarus

Please keep that train away from my door

“Please keep that train away from my door” was the motif for the 106 year old Sir Winton who died on Wednesday in his home outside London, England.

                                            II

What was playing out, but another 20th century monstrosity and insanity… the dreaded Kristallnacht  two day pogrom... “The black night of broken glass” in stores, homes, churches and synagogues… Prague, Czechoslovakia, November 1938                .

                                            III

The Fuhrer into his pretensions, Adolf Hitler, began his “Mein Kampf” propagandist persona ..”his crusade to eradicateannihilate eliminate 6 million human beings of Jewish origin, but for their quality (Herr Doctor Albert Einstein)

Men women  and children . 

“ The Fuhrer spits on you scum!”

Especially the kiddies. With their whooping cough, measles, chicken pox.…wipe contagious dreams/ diseases from the face of “this mortal coiled planet”.  (war poverty and disease, UCLA’s Prof Frederic Woelner)

“Hansel and Gretel, Jack and the beanstalk ,3 litte pigs went to market,  Humpty dumpty sat on the wall…. Little Red Riding Hod…Cinderella

Aladdin… ‘Diary of Anne Frank’  transcending the fablesthrough divine intervention.

                                              IV          

His “Mein Kampf” its own blasphemous delirium: rounding them all up in trains, shipping them out the final solution….withered to vanish in gas chambers and soap bars, inconcentration camps (*Auschwitz, outside Munich, Germany, among several death camps. 

                                         V

Where was the free world in the face of these  racial murderers,led by “The great  dictator” (Chaplin’s “off the charts”)

Where was Nevile Chamberlain? England’s prime minister? Churchill, the First Lord of the Admiralty, his mother and aunt, born  in the Brooklyn Heights.. off the Court Street & Montaguereality scene.        

                                        VI

Sitting on their hands, yet the foretaste in the ’36 Olympic Games, the Fuhrer sitting on his, not cheering nor shaking the hands for the Jesse Owens  a sprinter, whose skin pigment’s moment moment wasn’t his.. 

The sprinter’s eye and hand coordination, not unlike Ucla’sJackie Robinson who broke the color line years later with the Brooklyn Dodgers   under  Rickey’s “Gashouse gang” openmindedness ….( Gershwin’s ”Porgy and Bess”)

                                          VII

“Sir Winton put his life on the line to save these youngsters from evil,” said the former librarian at the Fort Hamilton Army library. “The highest calliing  of Judaism and Christianity.”

Winton’s mother and father converting to Christianity, s they made their way from Germany to England. before the war broke out..

                                       VIII

A merchant banker a la the titled(Baron) Rothschild “muse” on a smaller scale..

Indeed! 

Their son however was humbled during those years…not Eton nor public schools but the hard knocks….(“Dead poet’ssociety”) where he m y hve identified with the needs of the “have nots”, the masses living from day to day, mouth to mouth.

(Stanley Kupbrick’a (Avenue J supermarket delivery boy “The clockwork orange” public housing , London’s reality scene.)

                                          IX

Whether it was George Arliss, C Aubrey Smith, Loretta Young, Robert Young, Alan Mobray (Lacienica tennis courts), the House of Rothschild” depicts father and founder lay dying, delegates his 5 sons to create oportunity (the cream cheese bandit in Los Angeles) in Italy, France, and England..a moral decision since aristocratic Europe sold off in front of the Napoleonic wars, the Rothschild “muse” didn’t panic..

Therefore in this calamity, Winton, later knighted by the Queen…”you are Sir Winton”, this aristocrat on a skiig vacation hears “Drop your skis. Come to our Prague apartment hotgel and help us,” said a friend, off the divine intervention radar scope.

                                        X

Thus began a revelation, a higher calling than any God forsaken conspiracy or money making banking heritage.

“Right MJ?

Right, Major!”

                                        XI

Leaving his skis in the lobby, Winton strode to his friends andtheir hen pecking status apartment...

The three guality friends got dow to scrutinizing the attaché case innards. Warner Brothers “Confessions of a Nazi Spy”, produced by Jack L..

                                         XII

“No ninetyish Francis Lederer here,” said the skier “Where’s our Holy Grail?” he asked,  those soulful eyes, beyond his years and persona into Rotarian leadership: President, giving his presence an impact the holy unholy trio would not have the appearance, the trio could embrace and demonstrate with trheGestapo bureaucrats in their herdy gerdy Prague stance.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             X                                    XIII

“How to outwit the Gestapo and Goebbels,” said Winton..thefinal solution estoppel in the palm of his hand. … a sporting news racing form….the personas of three gentlemen, betting on  horse flesh …the human race, on hold, while on a skiing holiday….(Jockies Johnny Longden, Willie Shoemaker on hold)

The three Czech spies murmured “Horse flesh , comrades is where it’s at.” The blue prints detailing the Prague train station. Them location of the elementary and secondary schools…religious symbols  disguised or disfigured, so that the Goebbel’s machine and subservient would dismiss the school fire drills as a bureaucratic disaster drill…….the three skiers as confederates, their skis in anticipation,  waiting for the Kristalnacht  crisis, evolving into the goose stepping “HeilHitler” .

                                         XIV

In those ensuing moments of liberating the youngsters from their pending doom, Winton used his Rotarian presence to persuade the Gestapo bureaucrats of their cosmopolitan entreaties into Prague  yesterdays for Elemtentary and Secondary Education.

Young innocents..kindegarden  to senior problems and the prom playing out…..                                                                                                                                                                                                            

                                             XVI            

“Hose flesh not human flesh,” said Winton to his two accomplices, handing them the scenario “Confessions of a Nazi Spy”                                  

                                            XVII

How could they have known the exterminon of the 6 million….Goebbels genocide from the University of Heidelberg. … a wishfulfillment   by a PHD doctor of Philosophy.

An admirer of Dostoevsky, Joseph A. Goebbels became a journalist and found his role as a propagandist for the National Socialist Party .

                                         XVIII

In the meantime our three reenergized ski   aristocratic personas, their pedigreed ,touring the corridors of Prague Academia knew that the corridors of power by Goebbels storm troopers in Berlin, could undermine their own mission to evacuate the schoolchildren of Prague, before the Goebbels machine could round the up. .. deliver a crushing death blow. 

                                      XIX

Six trains filled with the revels of Czech school kids  on a “Life is beautiful” rfrainite…..the spirited sounds of the kids ….the 7thtrain about to depart the Prague station when  suddenly a auniformed officer…a Gestapo agent on orders from “uppity ups”halted the train at its departure gate..

But the six had already left…….thru Holland…..

                                           XX       

The world  knows how Sir Winton for all his hundred and six years ,played out his persona in the London countryside, officiating as the President of the Rotary club, playing out the directives, insuring the schoolchildren of Prague, saw the light of day, knowing their parents were persecuted and eliminated for being nothing than a human being of Jewish ancestry…a potential human being with  promise to be….fulfilling his immortal soul.

*Anna Adler her last breath from 6 Mertensgrasse, Duseldorf,Geermany  (163)..  Auschwitz  burial rites.

                                     XXI

At the Liverpool London Station,the cast of “Confessions of a Nazi Spy” ….the cast gathered to honor the  presence of SirvWinton, his persona at the Rotary club.

Ucla Professor CharlesTitus of the Political Science “Rotarians” Jack L. Warner from the Burbank studio…..”Confessions of a Nazi Spy”

“They came..they saw..they conquered”

Edward G Robinson, Ward Bond, George Sanders, Francis Lederer, Paul Lukas…. Anztol Litvak directing, score composed by Max Steiner…..

Their  personas into the tyranny of a bullying masquerade: torture and systemized slavery and mass murder of 6 million innocents.

The Warner Brotbhers…Harry, Jack, Sam and Albert, out of Burbank, the kosher butcher shop in Steubenville, Ohio and the Vilna ghetto on the Lithuania  Polish border.

The refrain …  ”Please keep that train away from my door”playing out.

July 7, 2015. The City that never sleeps.