Raul Fleischmann, the moneyed quality human behind The New Yorker Magazine may not have gambled the family fortune(Fleischmann’s yeast) but he never wavered in his gamble to finance a think tank literary magazine (“The talk of the town”)In the Big Apple.
II
Where else could one get a handle on talk of the town, critiques on literary undertakings: (the 1907 McDowell Colony, NewHampshire) movies, books, music….(Aaron Copeland’s“Appalachian Spring”) Brooklyn’s old Boys High School, off Fulton Street.
“What’s easier to buy? dreams or nightmares?
Intrigue like Dore Schry’s’”Red Badge of Courage”, the plotting of the Civil War battle gets its 20 century how down at the Culver City studio on West Washington…Metro Goldwyn Mayer..
Of dream making…The Wizard of Oz, Judy Garland’s ‘Over therainbow’ (Yip Harburg)
III
Hold onto your seats! The most decorated soldier(WW2) AudieMurphy cast as the non battle scarred innocent, facing enemy for the first time… a mirror of his own survival.
Confronting survival of the fittest, facing the mirror of himself, which harkens into today’s cyber space, social media acclaims, and the tip taping of the electronic message on this keyboard.
IV
In the face of the huddled intrigue, the producer and director John Huston, fought out the shoot’s clambake: scene by scene, citing the New Yorker’s own circulation manager, Arthur M. Davis, port city of Piraeus, Greece, outside Athens and the Acropolis, the magazine lying on the Captain’s table, the ship sailing toward Cypress…..(Sutton Place, Arthur two blocks down from Grand Aunt Carrie’s Goldfarb flagship flower center at 57th and Third Avenue in the Big Apple.
V
In the meantime, Lillian Ross flew out to the coast for a first hand appraisal of the “lights cameras action” battleground.
To calibrate a climate of empathy, sympathy, social significance, laughter at absurdity…. the ideals that are perpetuated in public schools and higher education, inspiringthe descendants of immigrants. “to go for it”.
To metamorphose into well rounded quality human beings… the joy of being alive and well..
VI
Depicting the deceits of spite jealousy fear, talking out of bothcorners of your mouth, triggering ambiguity: a defeating logarithm, where the intrigue outweighs the grandiose scenario. (“Streetcar named Desire”)
The Bard’s “Measure for Measure” may be an apparition of the “Red Badge” intrigue, but Lew Ayres “All Quiet on the Western Front” the vision atrophying as the creative dream is pollutedthrough the nightmare of once kindred souls compromising and selling out..
VII
In as many installments, Lillian Ross demonstrated how the “Red Badge” without the Pablo Picasso touch, succumbed to the clash of temperaments and ego, the ideal being compromised by so few, that the dissing destroyed the gravity of AudieMurphy’s emancipation…knowing himself.
VIII
But in the best of all possible worlds, the very vision demands a shattering of compromise and mediocrity .
Enlightenment goes hand in hand with determinism, doesn’t it?
VII
Goethe’s Faust at Weimar? The Bard at the Stratford on Avon?Dante with Beatrice in Rome’s Seven Steps? (Lord Byron and Shelly sneezing up a poetic storm, at the Steps)
A round of applause and honors for Fleischmann yeast and its inspirational magnate Raul Fleischmann.(Fleischmann, New York, Camps Ta-ri-go , Cascade) or its unambiguous
assault on the cheap and tawdry, in the whirl of creative juicesand imagination.
May his ”cool as butter” the New Yorker’s yeast continue its commentary and flow forever.
August 26, 2015 The City that never sleeps.
