in the season of Radical Chic

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     Two influential writers died in the past two weeks:  Philip Roth (age 85) and Tom Wolfe (age 88).

     Wolfe's body of work includes

The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby  (1965)
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test  (1968)
Radical Chic  (1970)
The Right Stuff  (1979)
The Bonfire of the Vanities  (1987)

as well as other books, both nonfiction and fiction.


----------------------- [excerpt, Radical Chic] ----------------- Felicia is remarkable.  She is beautiful, with that rare burnished beauty that lasts through the years.  Her hair is pale blond and set just so.  

She has a voice that is "theatrical," to use a term from her youth.  

She greets the Black Panthers with the same bend of the wrist, the same tilt of the head, the same perfect Mary Astor voice with which she greets people like Jason, D.D., Adolph, Betty, Gian Carlo, Schuyler, and Goddard, during those aprés-concert suppers she and Lenny are so famous for.  

What evenings!  

She lights the candles over the dining room table, and in the Gotham gloaming the little tremulous tips of flame are reflected in the mirrored surface of the table, a bottomless blackness with a thousand stars, and it is that moment that Lenny loves.  


There seem to be a thousand stars above and a thousand stars below, a room full of stars, a penthouse duplex full of stars, a Manhattan tower full of stars, with marvelous people drifting through the heavens, Jason Robards, John and D.D. Ryan, Gian Carlo Menotti, Schuyler Chapin, Goddard Lieberson, Mike Nichols, Lillian Hellman, Larry Rivers, 

Aaron Copland, 

Richard Aevdon, 

Milton and Amy Greene, Lukas Foss, Jennie Tourel, Samuel Barber, Jerome Robbins, Steve Sondheim, Adolph and Phyllis Green, Betty Comden, and the Patrick O'Neals . . .


. . . And now, in the season of Radical Chic, the Black Panthers.  That huge Panther there, the one Felicia is smiling her tango smile at, is Robert Bay, who just 41 hours ago was arrested in an altercation with the police, supposedly over a .38-caliber revolver that someone had, in a parked car in Queens at Northern Boulevard and 104th Street or some such unbelievable place, and taken to jail on a most unusual charge called "criminal facilitation."  


And now he is out on bail and walking into Leonard and Felicia  Bernstein's 13-room penthouse duplex on Park Avenue.  

Harassment & Hassles, Guns & Pigs, Jail & Bail -- they're real, these Black Panthers.  

The very idea of them, these real revolutionaries, who actually put their lives on the line, runs through Lenny's duplex like a rogue hormone.  Everyone casts a glance, or stares, or tries a smile, and then sizes up the house for the somehow delicious counterpoint... Deny it if you want to! but one does end up making such sweet furtive comparisons in this season of Radical Chic....


     ...Cheray tells her:  "I've never met a Panther -- this is a first for me!" . . .

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The way I see it, he said
You just can't win it

Everybody's in it for their own gain
You can't please 'em all
There's always somebody calling you down
I do my best
And I do good business --

There's a lot of people asking for my time
They're trying to get ahead
They're trying to be a good friend of mine

I was a free man in Paris
I felt unfettered and alive
There was nobody calling me up for favors

And no one's future to decide

You know I'd go back there tomorrow
But for the work I've taken on
Stoking the star maker machinery
Behind the popular song


I deal in dreamers
And telephone screamers
Lately I wonder what I do it for
If I had my way
I'd just walk through those doors
And wander --

Down the Champs Elysées
Going cafe to cabaret
Thinking how I'll feel when I find
That very good friend -- of mine


I was a free man in Paris
I felt unfettered and alive
Nobody was calling me up for favors
No one's future to decide

You know I'd go back there tomorrow
But for the work I've taken on
Stoking the star maker machinery
Behind the popular song

______________________________

On Google, type in 

Joni Mitchell, Free Man In Paris

and Play.

"Free Man In Paris" painting by Rod Craig

-30-

{"Free Man In Paris," written by Joni Mitchell.  Asylum Records.}