Going Fourth

It's time to continue on with the gardening post I started, but first I want to wish everyone a very Happy Fourth of July!

Last year, I spent a great deal of time on a 4th of July post, only to have it censored by Blogger. It has scans of a number of photos I took years ago on the 4th in Boston, one of the best places on the face of the earth to celebrate this day. As I've noted before, I grew up in a small town in the southern part of New Jersey, close to Philadelphia. I don't know what Philly does for the 4th these days, but I don't remember them doing the kinds of things Boston does.

Because it still rankles me, I have to note that last year's post had an embedded video of a musical number from the stage show "1776". The number was broadcast on the Tony Awards show on tv. Sony filed a copyright violation against me for the video, and Blogger removed my post until such time as I deleted the offending material. Sony owns Columbia Pictures, for whom I used to work. Columbia owns the rights to the movie version of "1776". But not to the stage version, and not to the Tony Awards. I wrote Google (which owns Blogger and YouTube) a note in protest. I detailed the rights on the material and noted that the offending video was still on their own site. The address I was given for such a response turned out to be phony. I had no recourse. The video which I embedded is still available on YouTube. Welcome to Corporate America, Happy Independence Day.

There are lots of things in this life which offend me as much as that silly piece of corporate ownership kowtowing offends me.., A lot about my country currently offends me. It used to be that one could protest things one thought were wrong. The media reported such protests. Until the Bush II administration invaded and bombed Iraq as punishment for 9/11. At the time, there were huge protests in the major cities of the US. What was thought to be the largest protest ever held in this country was held in NYC over this invasion of a country most knew was not involved in the events of 9/11. It was mentioned on a network news program I watched on ABC. There were no pictures, and there were no crowd estimates, it was only mentioned. I watched other news programs that day which didn't mention it at all. Corporate America controls the news instead of reporting it.

See, my problem is that I'm old enough to remember a lot of things. A world before a small handful of conglomerates controlled a huge percentage of the economy. For instance, TV dinners were a convenience. But they also helped pave the way for corporations to create processed food and food perfect for microwaves. Food was seasonal once; if it wasn't in season, it was a luxury purchase - if it was even available. It had to be flown in from other countries. Now just about everything is flown in to everywhere, with the attendant costs that entails passed on to the consumer. The costs go up, but not the consumer's wages or purchasing power. The fields near my house used to be sprayed for insects. The chemical used was DDT, and who knows what else. The DDT was considered harmless, but it turned out to kill birds too. My hometown area has never been declared a hot-spot, but a lot of people there (including my father and my Aunt Mary) have died of cancer. The lake in which we kids used to swim was long ago declared too polluted for human use. Now the crops that grow nearby have been genetically modified (and it's seed can't be saved, it must be purchased) to be bigger, fatter, and to grow through poisons like Roundup which is meant to kill weeds, but which now will evidentially kill anything that isn't genetically modified to grow in ground treated with it. A corporation makes the seed, owns the farms, owns a part of the purchasing manufacturer, part of the trucking company, part of the company that purchases oil and makes gasoline, etc. ad infinitum. The various companies involved pay each other, but they are all owned by the same folks.

As TV in the early 1960's showed us, the ideas of equality and rights in this country were always a little bit illusory. We all know this. But in the past we could fight, organize, protest, work to create legislation, vote and riot to secure those rights. The media would report these efforts and investigate claims of intolerance or prejudice. Much progress was made. Progress is still being made, and still needs to be made. But the forces of wealth and privilege are fighting back, up to their old tricks of using social issues to divide and distract the populace from focusing on real problems. Problems, like pollution (a major player in global climate change), which they created and don't want to pay the bill to fix. These folks are always referred to as rich white men. Be careful - that is the same stereotyped jingoistic thinking the rulers are foisting on the country. The desire to hold onto wealth and privilege is not just the province of old white Anglo-Saxon protestant males. It is endemic to anyone of any race or gender who is on the have side of the scale who does not want to be on the have not side. It is instinct.

So here I am living in a world in which my country uses buzz bombs - oops, I meant "drones" (buzz bombs refers to the V1 and V2 unmanned rocket bombs used by the Nazis in WWII) against its own citizens in other countries. Maybe they are bad people, but they are still citizens of this country who were executed without due process even being given a thought let alone a chance to fail miserably. And this country holds many foreign nationals prisoner without giving them legal protections that should be given to anyone. We have to practice what we believe and the truths we hold self-evident. They apply to everyone, or they are simply convenient fictions. Our lives, purchasing habits, and expressed thoughts are monitored thanks to our modern electronic inventions, in an effort to "keep us safe". But we are still monitored. Safety is a polite fiction.

Now, I had started writing a bit about my old garden in Boston, in the area known as the Victory Gardens. Here's a picture of a small portion of them in early spring circa 1990. This portion contained my garden, which is partially hidden by a tree.

If my memory is correct, there were about four hundred plots all together. Here's a pic of my humble self in my plot:

That picture was taken my gardening neighbor, who was from one of the Caribbean Islands:

And here's a couple of my other garden plot neighbors. I wish I could remember everyone's names, but it's been too long. I think the gentleman was Stu or Stewart. The lady in the picture had emigrated just a couple of years before from Russia.

The area wasn't really very safe - we all looked out for each other. If someone was sick, they sometimes returned to find that their neighbors had watered and weeded their gardens for them. Not everyone fit in. I tried to adopt the new gardeners who got the plot at the end of my row, two young female students from one of the nearby colleges. They started hatching their plans, I lent them tools to work with & etc. On their second day in their garden, I was hard at work weeding away when I heard them scream. I tore off out of my garden and ran to theirs. They were alone. I asked if they were all right. It seems that they had begun digging and seen worms, Worms! I told them that for a garden, worms were good. They never returned.

I didn't mean to run off at the fingers as much as I did, so I'll post more of my garden pictures another time. I won awards for that garden, by the way. In 1995, I moved to Brattleboro, and located a garden spot for myself and my then housemate Jonathon. But that's a story for another time. I was never able to get all of my plants out of Boston, but saved what I could. My initial garden here had to be moved when my original plot became part of an experimental school's expanded play area. My relocated garden, although only a few hundred feet away, had soil of very poor quality with lots of slate just an inch or two down. The plot is on an incline. There was a shrub and a wisteria (that didn't bloom and which was trained into a shrub form) that the land's owner asked me to keep. It was kind of discouraging, but I kept at it. Then, when I moved to a nearby village (Brookline) for awhile, I stopped properly caring for my garden. When my car died and I couldn't afford to replace it, I basically abandoned it. Here's a couple of shots of what it looked like when I stopped working on it.

Without a car, and a 45 minute walk away (and that's when I'm moving right along at a good clip), the years of neglect have taken their toll. Here's what the same two shots look like now:

 Most (not all) of the white stuff that looks like Queen Anne's Lace is a plant known as Bishop's Weed, or Gout Weed. It spreads by seed as well as underground roots. A small piece of broken root can regrow an entire plant and its siblings. There is a lot of work to do to save what I can. This weed has taken over and destroyed many, many plants. It's going to be a huge task.

It's July the 4th today. Over the years, my country made lots of progress even when the soil wasn't hospitable. The country is like my garden; when it wasn't properly monitored, and was out of sight and out of mind, pernicious weeds took over and destroyed many many plants; the garden is endangered.  It remains to be seen if we the people have what it takes to do the constant weeding.

That kind of day

Every now and again I begin my own modest campaign to upgrade my use of the American version of the English language. This is accomplished by a refusal to use "adult language", although it might prove just as valuable to try to rid my personal lexicon of euphemisms. When I refer to 'adult language", I mean obscenity. Or what we used to call obscenity.

I'm old enough to remember when such language was used mostly between men in private. It was not to be used in front of women or children. I don't believe that this was sexist or ageist in intent. The main reason had to do with how we used to define civility.

Certainly,  as a teenager I was all for the loosening of societal strictures. At some point I became aware of Lenny Bruce and the legal problems he had from the use of expletives. His adult humor was a disguise for some occasionally insightful social commentary. While I did think that society needed to be less "uptight" about such things, I also understood that if it became acceptable to use such language in public, the floodgates would open and we would be inundated with a veritable tsunami of obscenity. The effect of such a change would be to devalue the use of those words. Back in the late 50's and early 60's, if one uttered a "damn it", people knew you were upset. If you uttered a good old fashioned "Goddamn it", the shock value was such that people scattered and stayed out of your way. I miss that.

Over the years, such language proliferated in fiction, in movies, in music, on TV. Now one can barely escape it on a day to day basis. And I am tired of it. I'm not only tired of it, I'm sick of hearing very young children curse like the stereotype of a sailor. I don't know why it really bothers me all that much when I also hear 8 year olds singing, or to be more precise rapping, sexually explicit material with great attention to detail. I got used to young girls dressing like Madonna in the 1980's, not quite understanding that the kicky outfits they were wearing were the accoutrements of exceedingly cheap ladies of the evening. But just because I became used to such things doesn't mean I enjoy them. (Well, maybe occasionally.)

It is good that we can now freely use real adult words, not just obscene ones. If my Aunt Mary had been able to talk about her female parts, her cancer might have been discovered before it took her life. As a people, we talk openly about sex now. It was good to demystify such things.

But that doesn't mean that I want to hear a constant stream of obscenity everywhere I go. Sometimes it can be funny (the character of Deb in 'Dexter', most any early Quentin Tarantino script), sometimes it can denote character, sometimes it can still shock.

Now, all of that having being said, I have to observe that today is an "oh, fuck" kind of a day. I'm not referring to the US Supreme Court, although they are certainly worth an "Oh, Fuck". It's all the little things, the heat, the humidity, the carrying of the vase with the peonies to refresh the water and having a thousand and ten petals shed all over the floor, the realization that the only thing cool I have for desert or late night snack is the jello and I'd forgotten to make it for the third day in a row. The discovery that the bananas intended to go into the jello had passed any acceptable edible standard in this heat. Well, they would make a great banana bread (especially my cranberry walnut banana bread) but it is really just too damn hot to have the oven on. I was a little extra pissed off as I had paid a tad more for organic bananas which really do taste better than the regular ones. Then there was the discovery that the refrigerator has been stressed in the heat and that the grapes had grown more fuzz than a teenage boy with Cro-Magnon tendencies. The discovery that the forever sharp paring knife I purchased to support a co-worker's shilling for the efforts her child should have put out for that school project won't even cut any of the useable grapes anymore. It's been the kind of day when one attempts to make the bed only to discover that somehow during the night a corner of the pushed aside sheet and blanket combo got under a container with a couple hundred home burn CDs which with the slightest flick of the sheets went sailing through the air spilling its contents far and wide. (That was a slight exaggeration - it merely turned over and spilled a couple hundred home burned CDs far and wide.) It's the kind of day when I had an appointment at the radio station, requested by the non-profits' vice president, and when I showed up at the requested time discovered that the person it was imperative have a chance to meet me had already left. So I did close to two hours of work and chores that needed doing, walked home in weather meant to crush the spirit of jungle ants, arrived home just in time to experience a power outage, which meant I had to return to the radio station to restart password protected computers that govern our automation and web stream. I have to admit, I was okay with all of this until about 4pm or so, when I heard myself utter a loud, plaintive "Oh, Fuck". And you know what? It's the perfect description for my day so far - it's been an "oh, fuck" kind of day.

Criminy!

criminy - used as a mild oath or to express surprise. probably euphemism for Late Latin Jesu domine Jesus Lord! First Known Use: 1681

 

 

Uh, oh. After using that divider I'm having a sudden flashback to Dover Books and their volumes for decoupage and copyright free Victorian illustration. Sigh. I loved those books and always made sure to carry them in bookstores I ran. Most people never knew it, but Dover had their own bookstore - if memory serves it was on 7th Avenue South in New York City, and on a second floor.  Of course I just had to go online and see if Dover still exists, and gloriosky and beJesus they do. They're in Mineola now, poor things Thankfully, they have a website - where one can sign up for free samplers! (I just did, woo-hoo.) Suddenly visions of my younger self slaving over graphics presentations, using fine edge tools to cut stencils for the hand cranked Gestetner float through the air... it's the heat.

 

Forget what the calendar says. Weather wise, over the last couple of days we jumped from early May right to late July. Well, in their "old school" incarnations anyway. It's cooler outside than it is in my apartment, which is a toasty 90 degrees Fahrenheit. Criminy! My head is full of images of older adults in sweaters, always feeling cold, moving to Florida where it's warm. That stereotype does not fit me, I'm afraid. With each passing year I take the heat with lessening degrees (!) of equanimity. I used to love basting in the sun, but that activity was often accompanied by a cool ocean breeze. Now I find it difficult to work in the garden after 10am. Double Criminy!

My garden is a mess. Back when I lived in Boston, I was lucky enough to get a plot in the community garden in the Fenway. To anyone who lives in Boston, those are the "Victory Gardens". During World War Two public lands, including parklands, were turned into "Victory" gardens. Food was needed for the war effort, for feeding soldiers, for our allies in Europe, and for our home front. Of all the land across the United States given over to such use, the only one left is the Victory Gardens in Boston. After the war, the cranky old Yankees of the Back Bay and the Fenway refused to give them up. When I left Boston to move to Brattleboro in 1995, that was still an ongoing fight. The city has finally stopped trying to get the land back, and the Victory Gardens now have a website! And if you've noticed that they are in the "Fenway" and are wondering, yes the classic home ballpark of the Red Sox is just a block away.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

To be continued...

 

 

Strolling

Well.

Now I'm all grumpy.
I started out in a nice mood.
But, before I could even get into the blog, just as it started opening I got one of those error messages. My security settings have decided they no longer like the little rotating globe. For awhile there, I got a window dialogue (oh, yeah, with whom?) box which required me to approve the globe's use. It appeared all the time, even after repeatedly checking the "always allow the rotating globe with the little red dots to do its thing" box. I like the globe. I like the little red dots. They show the geographic locations from which visitors to this blog have arrived. It annoys some people. It makes me smile. There have been a few updates recently to programs I use, most for security issues of course. Somewhere in the updates, default settings were changed - but not by me. So now I get a message that my security settings have blocked the globe application from running. This message was a statement. I was not given an option to change the setting involved. It didn't even note which program was doing the blocking. Was it Java? I've always suspected that in the end the Java would get me, but I expected the word mocha to be involved. Was it my web browser? My antivirus? My Firewall? Windows own security settings? My ISP? I know what is likely to happen here. I'm going to become obsessed at a time when I'm really, really busy with other things in life. I don't have the time right now to allow gritty determination to conquer the problem to take hold. I'll inevitably end up at some point spending hours checking settings, trolling for updates, researching otherwise arcane inane online forums for a solution that allows me to see the little rotating red globe with the... arrrgh! Frustration is already mounting.

Maybe this is just an illustration of my topic. In a way, these ramblings are here for me to come back to 20 years from now (if I last that long) so I can snicker at the hopeless idiot I used to be. What happened was this: I walked down the street. Ya know, I wonder how many times I say I walked "up" the street. It feels like it's always walk "down" the street. I don't know that for sure, it just seems likely. I was walking down the street to go up to town. Well, I'm already in town, so I guess I meant walk uptown to downtown. At any rate, I was zooming off somewhere when it hit me smack dab in the middle of the ol' third eye - I was zooming. Again. I walk fast. Even using a cane I pass most people out there. I find myself doing it all the time. I walked fast in New York. There the energy is manic anyway and I was a diagnosed manic depressive - we fit like a glove, but maybe I shouldn't use that tired old phrase anymore as somewhere in the back of my mind I now hear "If the glove don't fit...." But I never hurried because I felt unsafe or anything like that. I just rushed from place to place - a lot. From time to time, when the pressure to start, to do, or to finish something was off, I'd stroll. I like strolling. Down the beach. Down the boardwalk. Down the boulevard. Through the Village, through Central Park, out onto the Morton Street Pier, through Boston's historic downtown, the South End and Back Bay neighborhoods of Victorian bowfronts, down the trails on Mount Wantastiquet (a.k.a. rattlesnake mountain, but no one has seen a rattler for ages so strolling is okay) across the river from Brattleboro. Yes, I like to stroll. Every now and again, I find myself bustling about like I was auditioning for a holiday movie scene, rushing home to get warm again. Zooming around in winter has a purpose, I can excuse it. But this time of year? It's a pattern into which I often fall. I have to remind myself to stroll. I'm retired now. It's okay to do.

Certainly, there is a lot to take in around Brattleboro these days. June just about anywhere in New England is a wonderful thing. There's lots of flowering trees, lots of gardens to walk by. The peonies are in bloom. Etc. For instance, here's a building more or less across and up the street from my place. I see it when I look out my sliding door windows. it's one of those old big houses left over from the days when the rich local merchants built huge homes just off the center of town.

The trees and shrubs were in bloom, it would have been natural to run over there for a visual drink it all in tour. But I never got there. Too busy. Then it rained for days and days. When the rain stopped, the blooms were gone. I've lived in this apartment through five springs, but I've never seen that place bloom like this. And I missed seeing it up close because I was rushing about.

Summer has arrived. It really is nice out, if a tad warm. This time of year the setting sun hits the leaves of the birch trees in front of my apartment in such a way as to make a glance heartrendingly beautiful. The effect only lasts a few seconds as the late afternoon begins the slide into twilight. It's one of those things I enjoy seeing, one of those things I like, one of those things that make me smile. Sometimes I have to remind myself to slow down, to see, smell, take it all in.

I have a garden on another edge of town, on the grounds of an old Governor's mansion which is now home to many holistic health practitioners. For the last several years, my poor garden has been left to its own devices. Now that I'm retired, I'm trying to save what's left. I've no car and it's a good 45 minute walk. Two days ago, a day the sun came out after another spate of rainy days, I remembered to stroll on my way there. I suddenly noticed I was passing a beautiful classic Triumph.  I would normally have hurried by and not noticed it. Now, my pocket sized digital point and click died, and I'd just purchased a new one on sale plus discount coupon. I decided to stop and take a snap.

 

When I looked up, I saw this almost immediately across the street in front of the Blind Masseur:

 

 

 Over the last few years, "classic" cars and bikes seem to have become a 'must have' item around these parts. And they are spawning. Every year there are more. Now there is barely a nice weekend that goes by without a small coterie of Chevys, Fords, or what have you rolling through town. They fit in to the area, they belong here - if you know what I mean.

 

The above picture, for instance, is not an old kodachrome. It was taken just 5 minutes up the road last fall by a local friend, Gene Herman. The blue Dodge is his. I hope to get a ride in it one day.



When one talks about June in Brattleboro, one must be careful using the word "stroll". Brattleboro has become known for our annual rites of tourist June, The Strolling of the Heifers. There is a big parade, with young cowlings led up Main Street to the Common. People come from all around to see it. Lots of people from nearby cities who have only seen cows on the animal planet channel. I'm not making this up. When the idea was first broached, I was quick (along with about 12,000 others) to label the concept "The Running of the Cows". The original sponsors were big corporations like Con-Agra, and a new company becoming known for its ice cream - a company with a home address right in the middle of Pennsylvania Dutch country, redolent with images of bucolic scenes of goodness and wholesomeness, except that they refused to commit to using growth hormone free milk in their products. In other words, it was a sham, its location meant to burnish a false public image. Sort of like the Parade of the Cows. Over the years (how can this have gone on for more than a decade?) the event has repositioned itself as supporting local organic family farms. It even raises money for education. I finally broke down and watched the parade a couple of years back. After the parade there is a "dairy fest" on the Common and on the grounds of the Brattleboro Retreat (which started life as the Vermont Asylum for the Insane - enough said.) I didn't get to go this year, as the radio station participated in the parade and I was in the studio with DJ Wild Goose playing appropriate strolling music. Here's a couple of pics from a couple of years back just to prove I'm not making this stuff up. It's Brattleboro, making stuff up never trumps the unreality of the place.

And at the "Dairy Fest", which used to give out ice cream for free, but now everything costs. And since everything has the label "local" (even when it's not) the price has a "value added" extra cost:

 

Oops. I just noticed the time. I'll have to finish this another day - this has already been a two day'er. If I don't start work on my radio show for tonight in the next few minutes... What on earth possessed me? Ah, I know what happened. I was strolling...

 

 

Dispatch

So here I am, 62 years old, writing from the front lines of early retirement on Memorial Day. But it's not the real Memorial Day. I'm old enough that I remember when Memorial Day was on May the 30th. That was before the United States Congress changed it to a 3 day weekend shopping extravaganza intended to kick off the summer vacation spending season.

I've lived in New England for over a quarter of a century now. Here, the summer season used to be July 4th to Labor Day in September (that's the phony Labor Day; the one the rest of the world celebrates is on May the 1st and honors events that happened here in the U.S. of A., which big money interests don't want people to know about let alone remember). With the change in the weather the summer season starts earlier here now. This year has been a little more like the old days, with the result that newscasts bemoaned the rainy and cool weather we had Saturday and Sunday - so many open campsites, so many unused barbeques.

Memorial Day started when the widows of the Civil War (or the "War of the Insurrection of the Southern States" as it used to be known in these parts) brought flowers of remembrance to decorate the graves of soldiers, "Decoration Day". After other wars it became "Memorial Day". There used to be parades; people used to display the flag. When I was a kid, it was a mixture of honor to the fallen and patriotism with the jingoistic flavor of the Post World War II era.

By the time I was a teenager, the War in Vietnam was oh so au currant. But just as television and its news programs had shown the lies of prosperous equality versus the malarkey we were fed through civics classes and entertainment, it also told uncomfortable truths about Vietnam. It became more and more difficult for me to accept the unquestioning flag waving exemplified by a mirror I found in 1969 with a painting on it of Stephen Decatur with the Carl Schurz quote (attributed to Decatur), "My Country right or wrong, My Country!"

The other day, I found a movie coming attractions trailer on the internet which I decided to play. One of its stars is a young man whose career choices have interested me more than any talent he has displayed (which is considerable). He played Harry Potter in a stage musical he co-wrote and co-produced in his teens. He showed up on the tv show "Glee", playing a gay teenager in his first relationship - it is a main story thread. Such things were unthinkable once. Anyway, as the trailer played there was one quick shot that made me pause it. I was right, it was the boardwalk of my once beloved Ocean City, NJ where summers started on Memorial Day weekend.

There's a "Subway" on the boardwalk now. A chain store. When I lived there, chain stores had names like A & P, or Dairy Queen. And they weren't on the Boardwalk. And now there's junky signs. It's actually worse than how it looks in the frame grab. Here's another contemporary view:


























Back when I lived there, back before there were giant cheap backlit plastic signs, back before there were BigBucksMarts, before there were chains of inedible overblown thin hamburger patty plastic arches, back when gaudy wasn't acceptable unless you were whoring on 8th Avenue in New York City, back when Memorial Day had just been changed to a Monday, it looked more like this:

The last picture is a little out of focus, like so many memories tend to be. But you can see that the hard sell isn't there, signs are on a human scale. By today's standards you might say it's 'quaint'.

 

In the 1970's or so, Memorial Day Weekend became the opening of the Hollywood extravaganza season. When I was in the business, a few of us used to say that a good picture would play in any season. When one studio dared to open a big budget picture at the beginning of May, the other studios thought they were crazy. It played. The old patterns (which had been new patterns maybe a decade before) started changing. Now it seems like almost every movie has a budget well over one hundred million dollars - and that's before advertising. Twenty years ago, an extremely successful movie might gross one hundred million dollars. "Iron Man 3" opened 3 weekends ago and has already grossed $1.15 Billion worldwide. And that's before cable, tv, DVD, Blue-Ray and streaming internet sales, before merchandising tie-ins. It's a live action cartoon. They all seem to be live action cartoons anymore. Well, this year there was a new adaptation of "The Great Gatsby", which has grossed over 100 million domestically, but in Brattleboro it was pushed off screen after two weeks to make way for "Fast and Furious 6" and "The Hangover Part whatever". Basically, live action cartoons. Don't get me wrong, I like live action cartoons. And these are usually very well made special effect bonanza live action cartoons. I can't often afford to part with close to ten dollars to go see one, though. And here it's not even in 3-D. But what happened to the other movies, you know, the ones that just told stories and attempted to uplift the spirits? Oh, we get the occasional art film about 90 year olds facing death with dignity, but that's not what I mean. We just don't live in a world where they make beach party movies with guest musical stars anymore. They don't even make suggestively dance your asses off in the Catskills summer movies anymore. Unless the dancers have superpowers and their pasodoble is used to kick the villains into the stratosphere.

 

A news article I read this morning reported on a study which revealed that the IQ's of people in western civilizations have declined by an average of 14 points since the Victorian era. That would include the Civil War, the Insurrection of the Southern States against the idea of Union.

 

And that brings my little roundelay back to Memorial Day. I don't like standing armies. I don't like the idea of conscription. Just today, in a guest editorial in the New York Times, a writer called for a return to the draft. The aftermath of the Vietnam War left us with a volunteer army. There are now army families. It's a job. It's a job the undereducated and the underclass can get. It's a profession-al army. If another marine holds an umbrella over the President, will Fox news call them the Praetorian Guard? Will the Fox News readers even know what the Praetorian Guard was?

 

I dislike the world we got, for which the honored dead allegedly fought. There is no real depth to it, it's a plastic chain store corrupted cartoon version of the American Dream. Which we once tried to sell as part of our presence in that miserable war in Vietnam. There was a summer movie I saw with friends here in Brattleboro the summer before I moved here called, "Forrest Gump". When the movie was over, one could have easily thought we'd won in Vietnam. A friend who was with me leaned against the Latchis' old outdoor box office and said, "We're getting ready for war again, aren't we?" Is that the real American Dream?

 

 

Over the years, I've made my peace with this day. I memorialize the very honored dead who fought the wars of government. Wars against evil. Wars of conquest. Wars of expansion and corruption. Wars of greedily grasping corporations hungry for oil. I also honor those who fought and those who died in our other wars. Economic Wars - the fight for the 8 hour workday, the end of child labor, the minimum wage, the end of hunger, health care. There are martyrs there too, non-military soldiers who fought on at the Haymarket, at the Hoovervilles, at the mills. Not all were killed - Inez Milholland collapsed and died of pernicious anemia at the age of 30 while giving a speech. Her last words were, "Mr. President, how long must women wait for liberty?" That was in 1916. And then there is Charlie Howard, who has been forgotten. He was killed, martyred, in the late 1980's in Bangor, Maine by teenagers who threw him over a bridge into a river because he was gay and walking alongside his boyfriend. He was 23 years old. Or Matthew Shepherd who was literally crucified on a split rail fence because he was gay. Or any of the unknown soldiers of this nasty little war - did you miss the news story in April of three teens who were tortured and killed at a "camp" to turn them into "men"? Oh, that's right the camp was in South Africa, so who cares? Who cares about the gay dead in Uganda and the gay dead and women dead in various Muslim countries? Who cares about Bradley Manning? It's been a long war, this war for simple human dignity. Times are changing. They always are. But now there's a President who is African American, women have rights if not yet equal pay, and there is a tv show with two main characters who are gay male teenagers who kissed right there in front of all America. Imagine. And so, on Memorial Day, the soldiers whose memory I honor are more varied than most might accept. The world, the changes, the Dream they fought and died for wasn't and isn't a plastic cartoon. These are the people I choose to remember. These are the soldiers I honor.

 

Requiescat in Pace.



 



A Toast for Taylor Mead

It's a sad morning here at the Auto de Fey. I've just learned of the passing of one of the great characters of New York City, the very bohemian Taylor Mead.

If ever there was someone who sashayed to a different drummer, it was Taylor. He was born in Grosse Point, a child of wealthy parents. He referred to his private school education as "brainwashing for the bourgeoisie". Back in the day he lived in a tiny cramped apartment on Ludlow Street and was known in all the worst places. You might stumble upon him reading his poetry at some dive, or you might find him feeding cats in cemeteries. He was often described as the first underground movie star. He was involved in the San Francisco Beat Poet scene, when a filmmaker saw him shouting his poetry over a crowd of drunks in a bar. The filmmaker, Ron Rice, started following Taylor around, filming him with a hand held 16mm camera. The result was "The Flower Thief" (1960), in which Taylor played a befuddled and wide eyed mystic who wandered around San Francisco carrying his three most precious possessions - a teddy bear, a flag, and a stolen gardenia. In other words, he played himself.

He moved to New York City because he thought it would be easy to be anonymous there. But Taylor wasn't the kind of guy who could be anonymous for long (he tended to attract attention) and was soon asked to be in a play by poet Frank O'Hara. He won an Obie. As a regular on the fringes of the Lower East side arty scene, he became involved with Andy Warhol and the gang at the Factory. He played Tarzan in one of Warhol's first movies; as he climbed around in the trees his loincloth kept falling off, leading one critic to complain of the film's featuring two hours of Taylor's derriere. Warhol wrote a letter to the Village Voice noting that no such footage existed, but that he would try to rectify the situation - he made an hour long film called (ahem, my more gentle readers may wish to avert their eyes) "Taylor Mead's Ass".

Dennis Hooper and Taylor Mead in "Tarzan and Jane Regained... Sort Of"
a film by Andy Warhol (1963)

In the late 1970's and early 1980's, in a world before cable tv, the most outrageous program on the air was "The Anton Perich Show" which appeared well after midnights on NYC's own UHF channel 31. Perich was another of the Factory regulars, and his outré avant-garde show featured a number of the Lower East Side crowd like the punk rock country western singer Wayne County (before he was Jane County). The show was vulgar, crude, and absolutely hysterically funny. The funny part was usually Taylor being flamboyantly gay in an era when such things simply weren't done.

For the last several years, Taylor had been in a fight with realtors who were trying to force him out of his long time (and rent controlled) apartment so they could convert it to a high priced market rental. He'd just made a settlement with them and was visiting a niece in Colorado when he passed. He was 88. I want to write "Rest in Peace", but he wouldn't do that. If there is an afterlife, I suspect he'll be busy writing poetry and being very, very, deliciously naughty.



(Bill Rice and Taylor Mead in a scene from Jim Jarmusch's "Coffee and Cigarettes".)

"You Can Buy a Dream or Two..."

Every now and again, the almanac information for a particular day contains something that makes me stop whatever I am doing (usually perusing the almanac listings) and leads me down paths of imagination or reverie. Needless to say, today's listing of the famous, the infamous, the worthy, the athletes, and the entertainers contained one name in particular which caught my attention and started me thinking of musical and other memories.

Maybe you had to have to have been a child in the 1950's, and remember music before Elvis, an era when the last of the big bands and the likes of the McGuire sisters, or doo wop anthems like "Sh-Boom" caught and/or created the public mood to really appreciate the name which caught my attention. Today is Ricky Nelson's birthday. I just called him Ricky, even though at age 21 he became Rick. I wonder if my calling him "Ricky" has to do with nostalgia or habit.

Rick Nelson was the son of big band leader Ozzie Nelson. His mother, Harriet Hilliard, had been the band's "girl singer", and gave up a potential career in the movies to continue with the band. (She'd sung "Get Thee Behind Me Satan" in the Fred Astaire - Ginger Rogers movie, "Follow the Fleet". The song had originally been intended for Rogers to sing in "Top Hat".) The band had been on tour in Los Angeles when they were signed as the house band for a radio show hosted by Red Skelton. When Skelton was drafted during WWII, Ozzie was given the chance to create his own show. The most popular radio program in the country at the time was "Fibber McGee and Molly", which had a recurring cast of characters who moved through Fibber and Molly's lives - it's regarded as the first situation comedy. Ozzie created a show about his family's life. His two sons were played by professional actors for several years before the boys were considered old enough to take on the roles themselves. After a successful movie version, Ozzie moved the show to tv, where it premiered in 1952. It must have been a trifle strange for the boys to go to work everyday pretending to be versions of themselves, working in a set that was a duplicate of their real life home. Ricky was often described as an odd little kid who suffered from asthma, and who encountered problems fitting in at his school. He got into trouble a lot. In 1957 when he was 16, he wanted to impress a girl who liked Elvis Presley. He bragged that he could make a record, too, and used his Dad's connections to do it. Ozzie was happy to see Ricky channel his energies, and wrote the song into the show. It was a Fats Domino's, "I'm Walking".



The episode aired in April of 1957. America changed a little bit that night.

Rock and Roll was still considered something wild and unruly. Preachers condemned it as an evil influence from their pulpits, and held public burnings of Elvis' records. Suddenly here was that nice Nelson boy, a kid who was growing up in front of America, a kid everyone liked, singing rock and roll. If Ricky Nelson liked it, if Ozzie and Harriet liked it, well then - it must be all right. Elvis, Bill Haley and the rest may have made rock and roll popular, but it was Ricky Nelson and his rock-a-billy infused style which made it acceptable. I was 6 years old at the time, and bought the 45 rpm record of "I'm Walkin" from the allowance I received for doing household chores.

Ricky didn't care for the musicians his dad had hired to back him so he put together his own band, starting with a kid around his own age, 18 year old James Burton, who became one of the great guitarists of rock and roll. Hit followed hit, with Ricky and his band preforming every couple of weeks on the show. During the 1958-1959 season (the year Elvis went into the army), Ricky Nelson had 12 big hits, one more than Elvis. Here's one of his biggest hits, "Hello Mary-Lou". Sadly, I  couldn't find a good copy on You Tube of the first version from the show, with Burton's electrifying guitar solo.



Ricky was a good looking kid, and there was something about him. There was a slight touch of a sneer that could turn into a smile, or which could hint at something slightly dangerous - but in a "nice" way. And, while he could really rock when his Dad would let him, he could also handle a ballad with style. For one big hit, Ozzie added a little bit of film imagery which some argue was a precursor of the first music videos.



The big hits, around 60 of them, continued until 1963, when the "British Invasion" moved rock and roll away from its rockabilly roots, girl groups, and doo-wop. Times were a'changing; the family tv show ended in 1966. Rick Nelson moved on to pioneer a blend of rock and country that paved the way for groups like The Eagles.

There would be one last big hit. In 1971, Rick was booked into a rock and roll revival show at Madison Square Garden. He made his entrance wearing long hair and bell bottoms, and launched into a couple of the old songs. For his third number, he performed a country tinged version of the Rolling Stones' "Honky Tonk Woman". The audience began booing. Some say the audience had expected young Ricky, but got Rick. Some say it was due to a police action against concert goers in the back of the auditorium. Whatever really happened,  the booing was loud and Rick left the stage. He wrote a song about it called "Garden Party" :



Over the next several years, Rick had his share of personal problems, including the very public break up of his marriage. He and his wife tried to reconcile, but neither were able to curtail the style of spending they had once enjoyed during his years at the top, which meant that he had to constantly tour to pay the bills, which further affected their marriage. When they finally divorced the financial settlement left him with no choice but to continue his life on the road, playing engagements in small clubs where he could still get bookings.  He acknowledged his predilection for marijuana (he used to bury his stash in his back yard), and publicly supported legalization (as did other 'smokers' like Bing Crosby). In interviews on tv he was always quiet, soft spoken, a little hesitant, often very funny, and quite modest. He usually made sure he gave credit to the people who performed with him or who wrote the songs he sang. On New Year's Eve in 1985, he was on his way to the last stop of a three concert tour when his rented plane crashed, killing everyone but the pilots. He was 45 years old.

While I've been putting this post together over several stops and starts, I can't help but notice that the little globe on my blog page shows my point of origin as "Nelson, NH"...

In all of his hits, both the rockers and the ballads, there is one song that I rediscovered as an adult that haunts me. I don't know why, maybe it's feelings of lost youth, or the passing of time, of an era when life was allegedly simpler. I grew up without a mom. My Aunt Lorraine filled that role for a few years. The tv shows I liked to watch had families with moms. I identified with two particular characters - the Beav, and Ricky. Both were younger brothers like I was. Maybe this song haunts me because it was one of the songs to which I first "slow danced", holding someone close. Maybe it's because I think the song catches something of the kid who didn't fit in, the real Ricky Nelson. Maybe it's the stirring of long lost feelings of another kid who didn't fit into his own small town in the southern part of New Jersey, who now finds himself writing from a place called "Nelson"...



So Happy Birthday, Rick Nelson. Thanks for the music, and the memories. Miss you.

May the fourth be with you

Life has been far too busy to allow time to post on my blog. I've had several things I've been meaning to get around to, but since I'm retired now... (heh, heh).

Today, May the 4th, is Star Wars Day. It's been celebrated for a few years now. It should really be bad pun day as a tribute to its origins. Needless to say, I was (and still am) a Star Wars fan, as attested by the little round graphic over in the right hand column of my blog page. That is actually a scan of the wearable button that was given out on the very first day of the Star Wars engagement at Loews Astor Plaza Theatre in New York City. They ran out of buttons during the matinees - I managed to get one of the last ones.

I also have the original 1977 Star Wars movie poster, an original Empire Strikes Back "Gone With the Wind" style poster, the Star Wars reissue poster with "coming soon : Revenge of the Jedi" in a banner in the lower right hand corner, the original Variety color insert for "Revenge of the Jedi", etc. (Lucas later decided that "Revenge" wasn't a Jedi concept, so the title was changed.)

It was Wednesday May the 25th, 1977. At the time, I was running the Bookmasters store at 33rd and 7th Avenue, across the street from Penn Station and Madison Square Garden. It was a very large store, and I had hired a friend from my days at Doubleday, Harold Biddle, to run the children's books and remainders departments. That morning, I'd read the review of Star Wars in the New York Times. I decided I had to see it right away as I would hear too much about it otherwise, and never go. Harold and I left work a little early and went off to the 4pm or so late matinee.

Loews Astor Plaza, which opened in 1974, was one of the last of the large screen movie theatres. It was deep underground at the site where the Astor Hotel and Theatre had been. There was an long escalator ride down to the auditorium, which was under the already underground Minskoff Theatre (where I would be fortunate enough to attend performances of "Sweeny Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street a few years later). There were 1,440 some seats, and the screen was said to be as long as a football field. When the movie started, there was a "story so far" kind of scroll as though it were an old Saturday matinee serial. To the best of my memory, the text did not start with "Episode 4: A New Hope". Somewhere I have an (ahem) "private" Betamax video tape of that vintage. When I get my Betamax working again I shall dig it out just to check and see if my memory is correct. The Astor Plaza movie theatre closed some years ago and was converted into a concert venue.

In one of those odd little synchronicities of events, "Pippin", whose advertising
poster can be seen next to the Loews marquee, is currently back on Broadway.

At any rate, the 'story so far' scrolled by, and then a spaceship or two flew around, and then there was this incredible rumbling (the theatre had the sensurround sound system designed for the movie Earthquake - then again, it could have been the rumble of the subway line which was very close by the auditorium). As the rumbling continued a starship began to appear on screen - and it kept going - and going - and going. It was huge! I literally found myself bouncing up and down in my seat. I had ceased to be a 26 year old bookstore manager, and become a kid again. The magic of the movies.

This will probably get me into trouble, but I even like the "special" editions Lucas prepared for the original trilogy's re-release on the original Star Wars (now Episode 4) 20th anniversary in 1997, and which are the official DVD's. Of course, I have the original trilogy on laser disk which are unaltered - and in which Han properly shoots first.

Within a year or two, I'd be out of the book business and in movie distribution. One of the stories I eventually heard was that at the time of the first movie, 20th Century Fox had no confidence in Mr. Lucas' little over budget production. They thought the big hit was going to be a different movie they released that month, "The Other Side of Midnight". In the Boston market, "Star Wars" was relegated to lesser theatres in the suburbs. Allegedly, many distributors were told that if they didn't agree to book Star Wars to follow "Midnight", they wouldn't get either film. This was against the old Columbia consent decree which prohibited 'block booking' - i.e. it was illegal. There were lawsuits over it, there were lawsuits in Boston trying to get Star Wars into the big in town houses. "Midnight" grossed a little over 18 million dollars. "Star Wars" spawned several industries from special effects companies (Industrial Light and Magic), to sound processing, toy tie-ins, and etc. ad infinitum - which have grossed billions.


Over the last few years, as my life hit personal and financial skids, I found myself having to move several times. So, back in 2007, in order not to lose track of my precious first day matinee button, I attached it to a Mickey Mouse Sorcerer's Apprentice doll I had picked up somewhere along the way. As it turns out, that was rather prophetic. I hope the series fares well.

A couple of years ago, when I signed up for Facebook, there was a questionnaire which Facebookers are asked to fill out (one can leave most things blank). One question asked my religious views. I put, "Learn about the Force - and may the Force be with you".

 Oh, one last thing, Thank You for everything Mr. Lucas - but Han shoots first.