very rare, almost unheard of

 

In the 1990s, then-Mayor of New York City Rudy Giuliani appeared on an episode of the situation comedy, "Mad About You."  He spoke straight ahead into the camera, to the audience -- it was at the end of the episode.  

He said,

"In spite of the Buchmans' experience tonight, New York is a great city, one of which we can all be very proud.  As you just saw, some of our hardest working residents drive taxi cabs, almost all of them are fair, courteous and honest.  But like any cab driver in any city, they merely wish to be told on which side of the street--the right or the left--their passengers want to get out.  I'm sure that you'll agree that's a very reasonable request.

Quality of life is very important to us in New York, and that's why we keep our streets as clean as possible, occasionally we may miss a spot here or there, but I assure you incidents of people stepping in veal are very rare, almost unheard of.  New York is a great city and we're constantly striving to make it even better.  I just thought you should know that."

---------------------- It was a humorous, droll turn for the mayor.  (That was the old Giuliani; no one seems to know who this new guy is that replaced him....)

That 'which side of the street' part in there referred to a cab driver in the episode where, the Buchmans are riding in the back, he's driving, and he would say, "Right side or left side?" with a heavy accent.  And Paul would ask, "I'm sorry, what?"

     "Right side or left side???!!!" the driver would bellow....

-30-

staring, staring out to sea

 

----------------- [excerpt] ------------------ 

1

_____________________

Stretching eyes west

Over the sea,

Wind foul or fair,

Always stood she

Prospect-impressed;

Solely out there 

Did her gaze rest,

Never elsewhere

Seemed charm to be.

                     HARDY, "The Riddle"

___________________________

An easterly is the most disagreeable wind in Lyme Bay--Lyme Bay being that largest bite from the underside of England's outstretched southwestern leg--and a person of curiosity could at once have deduced several strong probabilities about the pair who began to walk down the quay at Lyme Regis, the small but ancient eponym of the inbite, one incisively sharp and blustery morning in the late March of 1867.

     The Cobb has invited what familiarity breeds for at least seven hundred years, and the real Lymers will never see much more to it than a long claw of old gray wall that flexes itself against the sea.  In fact, since it lies well apart from the main town, a tiny Piraeus to a microscopic Athens, they seem almost to turn their backs on it.  Certainly it has cost them enough in repairs through the centuries to justify a certain resentment.  

But to a less tax-paying, or more discriminating, eye it is quite simply the most beautiful sea rampart on the south coast of England.  And not only because it is, as the guidebooks say, redolent of seven hundred years of English history, because ships sailed to meet the Armada from it, because Monmouth landed beside it... but finally because it is a superb fragment of folk art.

     Primitive yet complex, elephantine but delicate; as full of subtle curves and volumes as a Henry Moore or a Michelangelo; and pure, clean, salt, a paragon of mass.  I exaggerate?  Perhaps, but I can be put to the test, for the Cobb has changed very little since the year of which I write; though the town of Lyme has, and the test is not fair if you look back towards land.

     However, if you had turned northward and landward in 1867, as the man that day did, your prospect would have been harmonious.  A picturesque congeries of some dozen or so houses and a small boatyard--in which, arklike on its stocks, sat the thorax of a lugger--huddled at where the Cobb runs back to land.  Half a mile to the east lay, across sloping meadows, the thatched and slated roofs of Lyme itself; a town that had its heyday in the Middle Ages and has been declining ever since.

  To the west somber gray cliffs, known locally as Ware Cleeves, rose steeply from the shingled beach where Monmouth entered upon his idiocy.  Above them and beyond, stepped massively inland, climbed further cliffs masked by dense woods.  It is in this aspect that the Cobb seems most a last bulwark--against all that wild eroding coast to the west.  There too I can be put to proof.  No house lay visibly then or, beyond a brief misery of beach huts, lies today in that direction.

     The local spy--and there was one--might thus have deduced that these two were strangers, people of some taste, and not to be denied their enjoyment of the Cobb by a mere harsh wind.  On the other hand he might, focusing his telescope more closely, have suspected that a mutual solitude interested them rather more than maritime architecture; and he would most certainly have remarked that they were people of a very superior taste as regards their outward appearance.

     The young lady was dressed in the height of fashion, for another wind was blowing in 1867:  the beginning of a revolt against the crinoline and the large bonnet.  

The eye in the telescope might have glimpsed a magenta skirt of an almost daring narrowness--and shortness, since two white ankles could be seen beneath the rich green coat and above the black boots that delicately trod the revetment; and perched over the netted chignon, one of the impertinent little flat "pork-pie" hats with a delicate tuft of egret plumes at the side--a millinery style that the resident ladies of Lyme would not dare to wear for at least another year; while the taller man, impeccably in a light gray, with his top hat held in his free hand, had severely reduced his dundrearies, which the arbiters of the best English male fashion had declared a shade vulgar--that is, risible to the foreigner--a year or two previously.

     The colors of the young lady's clothes would strike us today as distinctly strident; but the world was then in the first fine throes of the discovery of aniline dyes.  And what the feminine, by way of compensation for so much else in her expected behavior, demanded of a color was brilliance, not discretion.

     But where the telescopist would have been at sea himself was with the other figure on that somber, curving mole.  It stood right at the seawardmost end, apparently leaning against an old cannon barrel upended as a bollard.  Its clothes were black.  The wind moved them, but the figure stood motionless, staring, staring out to sea, more like a living memorial to the drowned, a figure from myth, than any proper fragment of the petty provincial day.

________________________________

{The French Lieutenant's Woman.  A novel written by John Fowles.  Published November 10, 1969.  Publishers:  Jonathan Cape (UK); Little, Brown (US).}

-30-

a vast wasteland

 

------------------ [TIME magazine article, 2016] --------------- On May 9, 1961, Newton N. Minow stepped to the microphone in front of a meeting of the National Association of Broadcasters in Washington, D.C.  Minow had recently been named chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, and this would be his first speech.

After telling those gathered that he had admiration and respect for the "honorable profession" of broadcasting, he cut to the theme of his remarks:  how television could uphold the public interest.  And it was clear he felt that goal was not yet being met:

     -------------------- " "  When television is good, nothing--not the theater, not the magazines or newspapers--nothing is better.

     But when television is bad, nothing is worse.  I invite each of you to sit down in front of your television set when your station goes on the air and stay there, for a day, without a book, without a magazine, without a newspaper, without a profit and loss sheet or a rating book to distract you.  Keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off.  I can assure you that what you will observe is a vast wasteland.

You will see a procession of game shows, formula comedies about totally unbelievable families, blood and thunder, mayhem, violence, sadism, murder, western bad men, western good men, private eyes, gangsters, more violence, and cartoons.  And endlessly, commercials--many screaming, cajoling, and offending.  And most of all, boredom.  True, you'll see a few things you will enjoy.  But they will be very, very few.  And if you think I exaggerate, I only ask you to try it.  [end / speech excerpt]

     The phrase with which he described television--a "vast wasteland"--would stick, cementing the speech in the annals of rhetoric.  (The person who came up with the phrase was journalist John Bartlow Martin.) --------------------------

___________________________________

     And the person who repeated the phrase periodically was my dad.  Cartoons would be on, and he would be like, "Vast wasteland"...

     But when "Get Smart" was on, Dad would watch that and laugh, and forget all about wastelands....

-30-

sing a lonely song - of a deep blue dream

 

--------------- [excerpt from Woody Allen's autobiography] ------------------- My goal subtly shifted.  I would do some gag writing for a while, perhaps, for Hope, perhaps for Berle or Jack Benny if I could make them aware of me.  

But perhaps I should write deeper things than mere one-liners.  

It was somewhere at that time that my relatives suggested I have a talk with a very distant relative by marriage, Abe Burrows.  

Burrows was a famous comic writer and director and had coauthored the book of Guys and Dolls among other things.  Perhaps an aunt who married into the family was circuitously related to him.  I could never figure out the lineage.  

I asked the aunt, who said she couldn't help me except to say he lived at the Beresford, the stylish West Side co-op.  "How can I contact him?" I asked shyly.  My mother, more aggressive than General Patton, said, "You don't have to contact him.  You know where he lives.  Just go over to his house."

     Against my better judgment I dressed for a royal wedding and set out for the Beresford.  I told the doorman I was there to see Abe Burrows.  Tell him it's Nettie's son.

     Just as I waited while he called up, out strolls Abe in a dark suit with a Homburg hat.  The doorman points to me and says he's here to see you.  I tell him who I'm related to, a tenuous connection, like maybe ten degrees of separation.

     Burrows, who is heading out to an appointment, reverses himself, takes me by my shoulder upstairs, tosses his Homburg away and proceeds to chat with me for an hour, feeding me and showing great interest in seeing my jokes.  

The guy was so nice, so decent, so wonderful.  

I went back to that apartment a number of times.  

He liked what he read of my jokes.  

He criticized the ones he thought I missed on.  

He wrote a letter on my behalf to Nat Hiken, the fine comedy writer of The Phil Silvers Show.  Nothing came of it, but he tried.  

     During one of our chats when I told him my ambition to be a TV writer, he said, "You don't want to be a TV writer all your life."  I said, Movies?  He said no, theater.  But don't all the playwrights want to write movies?  No, all the screenwriters want to write plays. -------------------------------------------------------- [end / excerpt]

                                                          

___________________________

___________________________

Rock and roll for today, taking us into the weekend:

"Love Her Madly" by The Doors.

On You Tube,

uploader:  215 Days

and / or

uploader, NoMadU55555.

     The NoMad one has film of the band playing.

___________________________

{Apropos of Nothing, by Woody Allen.  Arcade Publishing, New York, NY, 2020.}

-30-

you know that it would be untrue

 

[excerpt from Jackie as Editor, by Greg Lawrence - Thomas Dunne Books - St. Martin's Press - New York - 2011] ----------------- ...A professor of modern French at the University of Leeds, David Coward, had reviewed the book favorably for The New York Times, but suggested with his opening line, "In the 1940s, France went to war with herself yet again, and the tale, told with relish by Antony Beevor and Artemis Cooper in this fascinating book, is calculated to stir mixed feelings in the devoutest Francophile."  

The author said, "Yes, interestingly the French didn't like it.  Well, let me put it this way:  Some French liked it.  It was very much French left-wingers who didn't like it.  That was certainly true.  

     What they didn't like particularly I supposed was the mixture of the serious and the frivolous which was the reality in Paris at the time.  Paris was living on the edge, because nobody knew whether there was going to be a Communist coup d'état or a right-wing coup d'état at almost any moment.  That was reflected in the diaries of people at the time....

     "But what many French disliked so intensely about the book was the way it showed how they basically had no control over their own fate at that particular stage.  They were part of the world game between the Soviet Union and the United States, and it was a question of which side you chose.  And also the fact that we could not resist taking a little bit of fun at the vanities of the Aragons and the other intellectuals, which was something the French do not appreciate.

     "The other thing they didn't like, of course, was that we mixed social, political, and intellectual history.  Their academics believe strongly that all of these are separate disciplines and must be kept completely apart....  But in fact, the whole point particularly during that tortuous postwar period is the importance of all the interreactions between all these different areas.  And I think that's also what Jackie liked so much."

____________________________________

___________________________

On You Tube, type in

"Light My Fire" by The Doors.

Uploader "RHINO"

has vinyl album on turntable.

Play and listen.

...The time to hesitate is through

No time to wallow in the mire...

____________________________________

{"Light My Fire" - written by Jim Morrison, Robby Krieger, John Densmore, and Ray Manzarek.}

-30-

the doors of perception

 

William Blake

English poet     1757 - 1827

___________________________________

Aldous Huxley

English writer

1894 - 1963

          *

The Doors

American rock band

   vocalist:  Jim Morrison

   keyboardist:  Ray Manzarek

   guitarist:  Robby Krieger

   drummer:  John Densmore

          The name of this band was inspired by the title of an Aldous Huxley book, The Doors of Perception.

     Mr. Huxley in turn had borrowed the phrase from the poet William Blake's line that says, "If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite."

On You Tube, listen to the Doors song, "Break On Through (to the Other Side)."

The video uploaded by

RockArt Michal

has good sound.

You know the day destroys the night

Night divides the day

Tried to run

Tried to hide

Break on through to the other side

Break on through to the other side

Break on through to the other side, yeah

We chased our pleasures here

Dug our treasures there

But can you still recall

The time we cried

Break on through to the other side

Break on through to the other side

Yeah

C'mon, yeah

Everybody -- loves my baby

Everybody -- loves my baby

She get high

She get high

She get high

She get high, yeah

I found an island in your arms

Country in your eyes

Arms that chain us

Eyes that lie

Break on through to the other side

Break on through to the other side

Break on through, oww

Oh, yeah

Made the scene

Week to week

Day to day

Hour to hour

The gate is straight

Deep and wide

Break on through to the other side

Break on through to the other side

Break on through

Break on through

Break on through

Break on through

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah

__________________________________

{"Break On Through (to the Other Side)" - written by The Doors.  Label:  Elektra.  Released January 1967.}

-30-

our life will never end

 

[excerpt from Chronicles, by Bob Dylan] --------------- A lot was changing in America.  The sociologists were saying that TV had deadly intentions and was destroying the minds and imaginations of the young--that their attention spans were being dragged down.

     Maybe that's true but the three minute song also did the same thing.  

     Symphonies and operas are incredibly long, but the audience never seems to lose its place or fail to follow along.  

With the three minute song, the listener doesn't have to remember anything as far back as twenty or even ten minutes ago.  There's nothing you have to be able to connect.  Nothing to remember.  A lot of the songs I was singing were indeed long, maybe not as long as an opera or a symphony, but still long . . . at least lyrically.  

"Tom Joad" had at least sixteen verses, "Barbara Allen" about twenty.  "Fair Ellender," "Lord Lovell," "Little Mattie Groves" and others had numerous verses and I didn't find it troubling at all to remember or sing the story lines.

     I had broken myself of the habit of thinking in short song cycles and began reading longer and longer poems to see if I could remember anything I read about in the beginning.  I trained my mind to do this, had cast off gloomy habits and learned to settle myself down.  

I read all of Lord Byron's Don Juan, and concentrated fully from start to finish.  Also, Coleridge's Kubla Khan.  I began cramming my brain with all kinds of deep poems.  It seemed like I'd been pulling an empty wagon for a long time and now I was beginning to fill it up and would have to pull harder.  

I felt like I was coming out of the back pasture.  

I was changing in other ways, too.  Things that used to affect me, didn't affect me anymore.  I wasn't too concerned about people, their motives.  I didn't feel the need to examine every stranger that approached. ------------------ [end, Dylan excerpt]

__________________________________

_______________________________

     On You Tube there's a song by The Doors called 

"Riders on the Storm"

uploader: 215 Days 

Play and enjoy.

-30-

drivin' down your freeways

 

----------------- [excerpt, Woody Allen autobiography] -------------------------------- I've taken some criticism over the years that I didn't use African-Americans in my movies.  And while affirmative action can be a fine solution in many instances, it does not work when it comes to casting.  

     I always cast the person who fits the part most believably in my mind's eye.  

     When it comes to the politics of race, I have always been a typical liberal and sometimes maybe even radical.  

I marched in Washington with Martin Luther King, donated heavily to the ACLU when they needed extra to push the Voting Rights Act, named my children after my African-American heroes and said publicly in the 1960s that I was in favor of African-Americans achieving their goals by any means necessary.  Anyhow, when it comes to casting, I do not go by politics but by what feels dramatically correct to me. ---------------------- [end / excerpt]

__________________________

____________________________

     On this Monday of positivity, I want to make a recommendation to listen to a great song by The Doors, called

"L.A. Woman."

It's on You Tube -- there's an upload by The Doors, which has excellent sound quality.  And there's another one, uploader Flying Dutchman, that has a moving-picture video accompanying the song:  there are a lot of cars in it--if you're a car person, you may particularly like this one, because you can spot mid-20th-century auto styles.

Well, I just got into town about an hour ago--

Took a look around, see which way the wind blow...

_______________________________

-30-

an unstolen typewriter

 

[excerpt from Woody Allen autobiography] ------------ I managed to hit Nick Kenny's column several more times, but the big hit was one school day when my first gag appeared in Earl Wilson's column.

     While Nick Kenny's column was soppy and square, Earl Wilson was the voice of Broadway.  His stories and gossip were about show people, plays, movie stars, showgirls, nightclubs, supper clubs.  Midnight Earl was a feature, and when a quip by Woody Allen showed up in his column it was as if I was part of the flashy Broadway nightlife scene.  

In reality, I was in my bedroom on Avenue K in Brooklyn, but I daydreamed myself cracking wise at Toots Shor's with a couple of Copa girls on each arm.  Soon I was mailing in jokes to all the columnists and getting printed everywhere; in Bob Sylvester's column in the News, Frank Farrell's in the New York World-Telegram, Leonard Lyons in the Post, and Hy Gardner in the Herald Tribune, and still Earl Wilson and Nick Kenny....

     In those days there was a Madison Avenue publicity firm, David O. Alber Associates, whose job it was to get their roster of famous clients as much publicity as possible by securing stories about them, TV and press interviews, magazine covers, and whatever gimmicks they could think of to keep their names in the public eye.  

One source of publicity was to constantly have your name appear in the newspaper columns, and to be quoted you needed to say something witty.  

     Someone's column might read, "Overheard at the Copa..."--and then some funny remark about traffic or mother-in-laws or the president or whatever attributed to the client.  

Of course, the client never made the joke and probably couldn't have if his life depended on it.  

He probably wasn't even at the Copa, although both the client and the nightclub were paying for the print exposure.  

It was the press agent who mailed the gag in to the columnists who foisted the myth of a scintillating nightlife on Broadway around celebrities doing one-liners in the manner of Groucho Marx or Oscar Levant.  

So it was that Gene Shefrin, the dynamic motor power of the David O. Alber publicity firm, couldn't help but notice that this unknown character, Woody Allen, was appearing in Broadway columns all over the papers week after week.  Shefrin calls Earl Wilson and says who's this guy?

     Earl Wilson says he's some kid in Brooklyn who comes home after high school, sits at a typewriter, and mails us a few gags every few days.  Next thing I get a message from Earl Wilson's office to call the Alber office.  

I do and I'm invited for a job interview.  

Would I be interested in coming in each day after school, sitting at one of their unstolen typewriters, and knocking out gags for them so the likes of Guy Lombardo, Arthur Murray, Jane Morgan, Sammy Kaye, and others not famous for their wit could fasten their names to my inspirations and claim them as their own?  

     For this, they would pay me forty dollars a week.

________________________________

{Apropos of Nothing, by Woody Allen.  Copyright 2020.  Arcade Publishing, New York, New York}

-30-

not the other Phil Wasserman

 

Bill Dougherty, Lieutenant Governor of South Dakota, 1971 - 1975

I was thinking about memorization as something that people--children anyway, maybe not adults--used to do "back in the day" but they don't seem to do as much now.

I was not yet old enough to go to kindergarten when I memorized the 23rd Psalm, for church.

     We all memorized and repeated the Pledge of Allegiance at school.

A man in his eighties whom I knew in the '90s recited the Rudyard Kipling poem, "Gunga Din" for us one evening--unplanned.

...It was 'Din! Din! Din!'

   With the bullets kickin' dust-spots on the green.

    When the cartridges ran out,

    You could hear the front-ranks shout,

'Hi! Ammunition-mules an' Gunga Din!'...

His grade-school years would have been filled with even more memorizing than mine were, because when you look at the 1920s and '30s--the further back you go, the more memorization was valued as a learning method.

     It doesn't mean memorizing is good, or bad--education like every other endeavor and institution evolves and has methods and approaches that come in and out of fashion.  (Although serious educators probably wouldn't like us to call it "fashion.")

     (Example:  when I started working as a lobbyist at the state legislature, there were some people practically ready to have a "war" over whether or not children should be taught to read using the phonics method....)

     And--I forgot to mention, it was not only memorizing something, it was also reciting it--memorize (learn) and say it back, to a teacher, or a class... and that part of it included enunciating, speaking clearly, and with proper expression,  you were not supposed to just "drone on"....

...He leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name's sake.

     Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil:  for thou art with me...

____________________________

These days, I consider memorization and just--memories and knowledge--in the context of our digitized age of modern technology:  sometimes I think of something and then, stop myself from the feeling of wanting to "Google" it and just see what I know--or what I think I might know, or remember on my own, and then Google it to see if I was right, or how close I was.

     Recently I was trying to see if I could remember, without checking Google or my own blog, the five crime families of La Cosa Nostra in New York City,

Bonanno

Colombo

Gambino

Lucchese

Genovese

and also the six published novels written by Jane Austen:

Emma

Pride and Prejudice

Sense and Sensibility

Persuasion

Northanger Abbey

Mansfield Park.

     I remembered the Mafia families on my own, but could only recall five of the Austen novels--checked with Google, and found that the one I couldn't come up with was Mansfield Park.

_________________________________

[excerpt from Woody Allen's autobiography] 

                --------------- And so, I was closing in on the final term in Midwood High getting bad grades and not helped by the romantic notion that a life of crime might be the most fun of all my options.  

Then one fateful afternoon, after a particularly good volley of gags directed at the screen during a movie, someone said, "You should write some of your gags down.  They're funny."  

A casual remark, but through the noise of the Flatbush streets, I heard it.  I had the stolen typewriter Dad had fenced, and so I went home and sat down at it.  I made up a few jokes and banged them out on the Underwood.  

On a roll, luck always being my portion, my mother, a serious woman with a heart of liquid nitrogen, paused in her daily ritual of slapping my face on spec and said surprisingly, "Why don't you show your wise cracks to Phil Wasserman [not the other Phil Wasserman--the original, the press agent] and get his opinion?  He runs always with those Broadway wags."

     I followed her advice.

___________________________________

{Apropos of Nothing, by Woody Allen.  2020.  Arcade Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY  10018}

-30-

a poem can be long or short

 

----------------------------------------------------

the Timex and the to-do list

The day and the sparkling hours

Light transported in a drop of water

We have all the time there is, and none

-30-

imagine my relief

 

On You Tube, I listened to a video about "forgotten hit songs from the 1960s" or something like that.

     And then in the Comments, people were like, "These songs are not 'forgotten'--everybody knows all of these songs!"

The uploader of the video invited viewers to name other songs in this category--someone mentioned a song I had never heard,

"Israelites"

by a group I had never heard of:

Desmond Dekker & The Aces.

So then I found that and played it, and read those comments:

George Vreeland Hill

----------------- This song never gets old.  It's one of those classics you love to hear every time it plays.

Saraiyah Yisrael

-------------------- Wow!  Never knew how much relevance this would have today.  Shout out to all of my Israelite Mispacha!  Shalom!

Patrick Girouard

---------------- The first record I ever purchased with my own money.

Jim Hayes

------------------- I missed this song's regular airplay, and heard it once, on the radio, in 1973.  ONCE!  My brother and I were entranced, but had no idea what it was or how to hear more.  

     And I didn't hear it again for about 35 years, whereupon I glommed onto it and made up for lost time.  Thanks, Internet.

Black Cherubim

------------- Just heard this song playing on the "Watchmen" series it sounds fly.

Rob Derrick

------------------- When this first came out, I heard it on the radio.  Was either WISE or WKKE, Asheville, North Carolina.  After one hearing, not even sure what I'd heard, or who it was, I HAD to have it.  

I was about 13 years old.  I hit the pavement walking, and went to Every record/music store in town, where I was met with incomprehension as I tried to find/describe this Holy Grail.  

Finally, after almost a whole day, I found a store with a 45RPM of a song called "Israelites".  Couldn't even be sure it was the right one, but I bought it and took it home.  Imagine my relief when I put it on and heard that first "Get up in the morning..."

     There are so few pleasures in life that are as intense, immediate, and pure as that.

________________________________

___________________________

On You Tube type in

Desmond Dekker & The Aces -- "Israelites" (Official Audio)

uploader:  Trojan Records Official

(views:  3,474,424)

...and listen.

_______________________

-30-