“Songs my mother taught me” by Antonin Dvorak

“Songs my mother taught me” by Antonin Dvorak . A Czech composer who sailed to these shores for a creative period in the City that never sleeps, stretches the mind..”Any intelligent and sensitive artist is always very pleased if he can find at least one voice to which he can respond: “Yes, he understands me.”

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But where was that voice?   Norbert Weiner, the father of cybernetics at MIT?

Across Boston’s Charles River at Cambridge? Drew Faust, the first femme fatal President that presides over Harvard University?

Ucla’s Opera Workshop honcho  Jan Popper( Mozart’s “Cosi fan tutte” (2 Army Reservists,their wives)?) Professors Woellner “Heaven is on the way to it”,Titus of Machiavelli’s Prince” Politics:? Graduate manager Bill Ackerman and varsity tennis  coach of ASUCLA’s penthouse? Sponsor for being a speaker for the U.S Senate’s Public Television Act 1967. Italian Department for tutoring Rome, Italy home stay, Experiment for International Living.

 Harry Morris of publications? Colonel Bing of Air Rotc,  Bill Stout, editor in chief, The Daily Bruin?

Ed Pauley, Regent and oil tycoon, named for Pauley Pavilion. Copaches Wilbur Johns.. John Wooden whose 7 footer teams “toastred” there. Dorothy Chandler, Regent and founder of the pavilion in her name, downtown L.A..

Band leader and ophthalmologist, Jules Stein at his Ucla eye institute.

Aarvo Vanalstyne, of Yale law school, teaching Constitutional Law.

Chairman of cla’s Theater Arts, Sam Selden, preuiding “Mozaret&Nushrrom Barley”, Macgowan Theater.

 

 George Lorbeer of Elementary and Secondary Education, Cal State Northridge, L.A. State College..

General  Paul McGuire manning the Reserves ,during the Russian Cuban crisis..

                                                

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In the now, Mayor Bloomy of the City that never sleeps, struck pay dirt, naming her Loews Kings of Barbra Striesand’s Flatbush Avenue reality scene a historic movie palace , where she toiled the greasepaint and ticket stubs as an usher.(“usherette”?)

“A Radio City Music Hall!. The chandeliers, the marbled lobby, the frescos on the walls, the  cavern ous orchestra and yawning balcony, hiding an organist...those long legged Rockettes.on stage.

 “Let’s throw the dice, people’s people.”

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To suggest that the composer of “The New World Symphony” found his home on Flatbush Avenue, down from Erasmus Hall High School, and down aways from The Dutch Reform  Church of Flatbush” lost his way, while orchestrating his mother’s songs.

“Say it ain’t so, Antonim.”

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 Fritz Kriesler, even Glen (In the Mood, I got a gal in Kalamazoo zoo zoo” )Major Miller identifying with the Songs my mother taught me from the collection of Gypsy Songs for piano and violin.

Didn’t  he launch his summer impressions in the Czech like Iowan village of Spillville. He would nev er forget in his lifetime, those  moments and movements in his home away from home..

His Norwegian contemporary Edvard Grieg by two years   Concerto in A Minor for piano and orchestra, had the Flatbush Avenue Erasmus High teens humming and whistling its sweeping inhale of mountain air...”its long feverish cadenza seems to speak of towering pines writes David Dubal.. “The adagio is tender and melancholy, leading to a grand peasant dance.. The finale is an exhilarating peroration in the grand manner.....”

 

“The artist is an optimist. Otherwise he would be no artist. He believes and hopes in the triumph  of the good and beautiful. He trusts in his lucky star till his last breath.”

the City that never sleeps, January 26,  2013

In “Field of Dreams” Kevin Costner leaps out of the Iowan corn fields

In “Field of Dreams” Kevin Costner leaps out of the Iowan corn fields , not listening with his  third ear, he would have heard Stan the Man Musial playing his harmonica in the outfield for 22 years...Stan the Man Musial’s celestial swan song at ninety two years.

 

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An outfielder for the Cards,. He patrolled the right field at Brooklyn’s Ebbets Field whiule his Terry Moore and Enos Slaughter mustered their feet, arms and eyes, with their mitts in center and left field.

 

The bleacher knot hole kids bouncing on their schoolboy discordance of fifty five cents, didn’t know Musiasl, living up to his 22 years of a Ted Williams aura of Iowan cornfield War time service and “Field of Dreams”.

 

 A puree of a first time Hall of Famer., a twenty time All Star.

 

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Even a realist, like President Obama recognizing Stan the Man’s dream playing out. No, not the “luckiest man on the face of this Earth”, Lou Gehrig, but the joy of  playing his harmonica once his day time job had come to its nine inning (extra inning) inevitability.

 

“The most singles, doubles, triples. Three time most valuable player,” said the President, at

 those “Field of Dreams” honors  in St Louis’s Sportsman Park.

                                                

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He was a born Hero.. A harmonica player disguised in a baseball player’s uniform. He wore his heroics like humble clothe, the modesty so natural , like pitcher Harry the Cat Breecheen, warming up in the bullpen, waiting for the telephone to ring...”You ready,Cat?”

 

 The Gas House gang of Pepper Martin the Waner brothers (Paul&Lloyd, “Big Poison “Little Poison”) “Ducky” Joe Medwick and Leo the Lip Durocher “nice guys finish last”, and the Professor. Branch Rickey, who later broke the color line with Ucla’s Jackie Robinson in Ebbets Field’s “Field of Dreams” His 7^th heaven hand and eye coordination already tested and proven, plying ping pong in Ucla’s men’s gym.

 

 

 

So Stan the Man’s quest unlike Orestes slaying the Minotaur, was the harmonica. His hand mouth

instrument.

 

Boris Mikovovitch and his Musial musketeers... Larry Adler notwithstaning his pleasure

principle.......his soul feasting on the Brooklyn turf, always up for the bus ride, the train, the hotel, the grub. The sweepstakes of a knothole kid’s hero worshiping.

 

 

Studying his stats, his left handed batting average: the hits he made in his times at bat.

 

Dividing the hits and home plate appearances for his batting average.

                                              

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“Wow! Aweseome!”says the 21^st centuiry information age. A genius of a Musial, playing the harmonica, while playing out his National Pas time’s “Field of Dreams” .

 

The Ebbets Field center field bleachers above the once upon a time Abe Stark clothier sign . The harmonica’s blues sounding out the drift of a 331 lifetime batting average.....a legendary melody, sweeping thru the ceiling of our skies.

 

“On the ole coyote prairies.........stout hearted men stood the test of time, testing stout hearted “field(s) of dreams....

 

 “We will fight for the right to be free.”

 

St Louis, Missouri, January 19, 2013

A tour de force. Canyon lined faces ,the scars ravaged by man’s inhumanity

A tour de force. Canyon lined faces ,the scars ravaged by man’s inhumanity

to man.”Lincoln” a massive scenario by  Stephen Spielberg&Tony Kushner with sublime ”commander in chief” portrayed by Daniel Day-Lewis as the towering 16^th President of the United States.                                                

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 Southern “rebs” against Northern “blue bellies”. Brother against brother, minefields of slavery in dispute. The whole range of  emotion come to life amidst cunning   self serving  playing out in some 120 minutes.

The inundation of role playing out as Daniel Day-Lewis gives his inimiocable energy to flesh out  Abraham Lincoln’s moral life, a battleground for the Civil War and the 14^th amendment.

Forces of  compromise playing out among what was once young naive idealistic white males, as they evolving into tough  but loveable as they spell out their passions on black folk in chains of servitude, during  Jefferson Davis and General(a West Pointer) Robert E. Lee’s “tentativeness” playing out below the Mason Dixon line.

“Your character is your fate”, Lincoln  under unrestrained pressure&probing... being vilified relentlessly. Aging ten years before our  eyes as Tony Kushner with the three dimensional Tommy Lee Jones, Hal Holbrook, Sally Field become the apotheosis of the President’s war room and inner sanctum, as he plays out his  day to day struggle against the knights of darkness during the war and win the accompanying 14^th amendment vote in the House of Representatives.

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 Lincoln’s state of mind and temperament  being tested from all . His dreams becoming nightmares, having only his alter ego to sustain his Magna Carta in his fated American birthright. His need to relate parables and memories to his opinionated fractured listeners, coveting their own selfish agendas, Lincoln fuming at their opportunism and self serving.

“The people be damned”.

Not that he believed in the crony tableau, and its conspicuous consumption. Reality of trrading skins in the chess move maneuvering...even George Washington’s portrait being the buffoon, on the wall of an water cooler, owned by an English diplomat, never getting over the Revolutionary War.

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Meanwhile the sympathetic creative minds and what seemed like thousands of credits and cavalry horses galloped into their own trail and Divine Providence into this monumental “Lincoln” that comes alive, breathing fire and brimstone.....in pursuit of his own Holy Grail.

Tommy Lee Jones fresh from the vote, dusting off his wig, jumps into bed with his colored sweetheart mistress wife , the “fers” outscoring the “agins” in the 14^th amendment wooing vote...

                                                 

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 To his wife, as they rode off in their chauffeured buggy “ We ought to travel. To the center of it all. Jerusalem” John Wilkes Booth waiting, in the theater, later that night.

Pavilion theater, adjacent to “Bryna Court”, Park Slope, opposite Prospect Park, Novemeber 27,2012