Trout Mask Replica

According so some of the musicians who played for Don Van Vliet’s Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band, fifty years ago they began to work out the bits and pieces of two songs that, two years later, would be included on a double record album called Trout Mask Replica.

I found out about Beefheart and his music through a friend, who read Stereo Review and bought any record the critics liked. He especially enjoyed “The Blimp” and “Old Fart at Play,” the more juvenile of the astonishing, infuriating assortment of blues, folk, dada, naive, primitive, atonal, poly rhythmic music on the record.

Today we’d call Trout Mask a mash-up, a cross-cultural collage employing deliberate appropriation and combination of previous styles, motifs, and methods that subverts categories, challenges standards and norms, celebrates irony and, at best, is sufficiently interesting to be called art.

But it’s more than that. Van Vliet started performing in California as another white man mimicking black blues stylists Howling Wolf and Bo Diddley, with a beat poet’s playful sense of subversion. At times, you know the band, and producer Frank Zappa, who met Van Vliet when they were teenagers, are just fooling around, recording snatches of conversation, improvisational goofs and silly phrases that sound disgusting or marginally obscene, but are just goofs.

At other times the band you can feel the band’s furious concentration as they try to play music with definite blues, folk and rock roots that is so complicated and difficult that you might as well call it a tour de force. You ask yourself how could anyone write this stuff, or even perform it?

On the first few listens, the record can be silly, annoying, trite, sloppy–all the things that a slickly produced, blues-oriented studio recording like Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon–is not. The music was composed from tape recorded motifs, many coming from Van Vliet, who composed at the piano, an instrument he did not know how to play. Van Vliet banged away at the keys, coming up with refrains, snatches of melody, and phrases that he liked. These were taped and then rearranged by the band, which, according to legend, recorded their parts in a single day. It took several days for Van Vliet to record his beat-poet lyrics, the horns (which he also did not know how to play) and other overdubs and studio effects.

It still sounds like a mess, but it is far from that. The record has a wild, frenzied, free-jazz, anything-goes sensibility that can take several listens to appreciate. Like the splashier abstract expressionists (Van Vliet has a second career as a painter whose work was similar to Robert Motherwell and Joan Miro) and and the seemingly disordered ruckus of John Cage, Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band produce a singular work of modernist art that is so turbulently original that few who hear it ever forget it. Fewer still want to hear it again. But enough have for many publications to put it on their best album lists, somewhat lower down than Dark Side of the Moon.

The album did not sell in the United States, though it charted as high as 21 in England. After it appeared, Beefheart changed his style, veering toward the longer, slightly more listenable compositions on The Spotlight Kid and Clear Spot, before zooming off into the more completely realized songs of Ice Cream for Crow and Doc at the Radar Station.

Like too many musicians of his day, Van Vliet denied publically that he took recreational drugs, but wallowed in them. When I had a chance to see him live, I heard from those backstage that he was far too fond of cocaine. But his performance was even more amazing than his recordings: for once, all that strange, disjointed, seemingly chaotic music–worked!

Van Vliet was also notorious for being cruel to his band. He did not credit his musicians as co-composers, often did not pay them. Most who joined his Magic Band later spoke of the exhilaration in playing music unlike anyone else’s, and the financial destitution that awaited them at the end of a long concert tour.

Today Frank Zappa is honored as an important composer who worked within the rock milieu and even had a top-40 hit (“Valley Girl”), Captain Beefheart is mostly forgotten, though his influence on Tom Waits, The Simpsons cartoonist Matt Groening, John Cale, The Residents, and many others, is significant. Like many artists whose work surprises and even shocks us at first, Beefheart’s recordings yield their value slowly, requiring several listens and a patience unusual for contemporary music “consumers,” who are confronted with far too many easily likeable musical pieces on streaming services that have changed the way music enters our lives. Why listen to peculiar, challenging music that defies conventions, when there is so much more that has mastered those conventions?

Because much of life isn’t about mastery (and its metaphors: wealth, high status, connoisseurship, the self-congratulatory state of having made the “right” choices), but how we master the challenges we must meet along the way. If we can be patient with “difficult” art, we can apply that patience to the difficulties we find in ourselves and others, and accept that what is of lasting value is not always obvious the first time we encounter it.

Yes, it was very easy to adore Dark Side of the Moon on the first listen. And I can still appreciate it today.

And it was just as easy to be delighted at Trout Mask‘s triumphantly absurd “Neon Meate Dream of an Octafish” when I fifth time around.

Or was it the sixth?

 

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Happy Ending

I just finished the last scene in my novel. The book is far from finished, but the end is in sight, and it’s happy. Now I have to connect it to all the other stuff that arose over the last year and more, from that day my wife and I were celebrating her birthday in London, and we ordered room service.

I had been raised to never, ever do that. It was a sin so expensive that it was almost on par with paying full retail. My father, who grew up in the Great Depression and favored motels when we took long car trips to Florida and Canada, loved a bargain, and was eager to use every coupon in the newspaper, or go to someone he knew “in the business” before buying anything. Why order room service, most of the time, you could walk across the street, or go for a short drive and find a place open all night, for about half the price you’d be charged by a hotel, for food that was cold when it arrived at your door, and then, have to leave a tip?

After a long, but uneventful transcontinental flight, I suggested that, instead of taking the fast train and a cab to the hotel, we take the London Underground, my chosen mode of transport when I was last in London. The ride was very long, providing peculiar glimpses of a densely built urban sprawl. When we left at the station I calculated to be closest to the hotel, it started to rain.

Rain in London is characteristic, atmospheric, predictable and, if you’re in the right mood and have the rain gear, a little bit of splishy splashy fun. After so much jet lag, it wasn’t remotely enjoyable to huddle under an umbrella that was too small, get wet and not know that you have to go down a narrow little street from The Strand to find the lobby of the Savoy, a hotel I chose because it was among the most famous in the city, I wanted to have a drink with my wife in the American Bar, and…I got a reasonably good deal on the room.

Yes, at times I am my father’s son.

What a nice room it was! Not only did we have his and hers bathrobes, but slippers and a bed so comfortable that we went right to sleep, waking up, as jet lagged people always do, at a time when restaurants are closing and who wants to go out anyway?

So we ordered room service: we decided to split a turkey club and a cheese plate. I asked if I could have my favorite cheese, cheshire. Though the hotel did not normally serve that cheese, they promised to find some at 11:30 p.m.

The food was delightful and  came on a shiny cart, with beautiful presentation. Yes, it cost too much, but we enjoyed ourselves so much, and I began thinking of a hotel whose room service was so well prepared that people check into it, just to order the food.

As readers of this blog know, I write slowly, fretfully and doubtfully. I don’t jump eagerly into my work, as I once did. I brood. I mull. I waste time on trivial things. I play too much computer solitaire. Eventually, the words come.

And so the ending arrived, but not the relief of having finished, because there are many scenes left to write. I have learned to celebrate often, but, somehow, finishing a novel doesn’t feel as good as it once did, probably because of how much difference it DOESN’T make to everyone but me.

Once, when I finished writing a novel, I told my karate teacher. He said, “give me a down block.” People who knew me immediately said things like when is it coming out? I didn’t know. Unless your previous book sold well, or you’re already a celebrity so that the book is just another branded item to foist upon the fans, publishers tend to look at books that are merely the best you have ever done in your entire life as–risky business. Even if publishers have paid for the book (or a portion of it–your advance is doled out in fragments, the last on “publication,” which, in itself, is an incentive for the publisher to delay publication as long as possible). My conversations with my editor and agent were reserved. I was a factory that had manufactured a product that may, or may not, make money. They were in no hurry to move it to the marketplace.

By the box arrived I was wrestling with another manuscript, another “good idea” that, like every one that preceded it, inspired a difficult birth.

My contract required the publisher to send me ten copies of my book. It did not specify when those books were to arrive. I didn’t know the book was “out” until I opened the box and held the topmost bound copy in my hands.

The cover illustration appeared cheaply done. The book was priced too high–the only way I’d pay that much money for a book was if I could get a discount! Knowing people in the business wasn’t going to help. The cheesy jacket copy had been written by someone who had not read the book. The author photo I’d paid for was cropped so small you could barely see it was me.

But it was my book and, for about two months, it was in some stores. A few stores invited me to do a signings. The reviews were mostly good. Some were very good. I got on a radio show and talked briefly about how much I wanted people to enjoy what I wrote.

I still do, though I have no idea who will read this one. I never do. And then, somehow, someone does and is kind enough to say to me that the book was worth reading.

And that is a happy ending.

 

 

 

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Killing the Monster

“Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public.”

So said Winston Churchill, the conservative politician, imperialist, warrior, historian and one of the greatest statesmen of the 20th Century.  Though scowling, cigar puffing frown is best remembered as the face of victorious defiance during World War Two, Churchill suffered a long period of ostracism and neglect between the wars. He retired to his relatively modest estate at Chartwell and wrote a biography of his ancestor, the Duke of Marlborough, and his memoirs, which, it turns out, were premature.  World War Two, as he called it, would not just be the United Kingdom’s “finest hour,” it would be his.

His sentiment about writing has been true for me, though I wouldn’t go so far as to call the work a monster (the Latin root corresponds to words for mountain and “what shows” or is most obvious). And, due to changes in how the English speaking world writes, distributes and reads book, what you fling–or, as I prefer to see it, offer gently, with the greatest good intentions–to the public is most often ignored. Most traditional gate keepers–agents, editors, booksellers, critics and those eager minions who search for anything other than a comic book, toy or video game to turn into a movie–want something that’s already popular, in demand or otherwise “sold.” What’s merely worth reading is…nearly worthless.

Such discouraging truth has discouraged me. I wish I could say I’ve had that unshakeable faith in myself that is so often cited in celebrity interviews as a reason, if not a necessity, for the kind of success that brings your work to those who may most enjoy it. To attain those brief minutes of fame is to risk eternal damnation on social media (and the mainstream media that now covers a tiny portion of social media as news) for not making the correct and timely responses to current events of which you may know little or, worse yet, be misinformed. Failing to respond is now considered a response, as controversies swing back and forth, what “side” you’re on doesn’t matter as much as how many responses you get. Worse than that, cyberspace is now inhabited with pranksters, trolls and other anarchic types who will say and do things on line that are cruel, rude and grossly false, just for the fun of it.

I always wanted people to like what I did as a writer. If they didn’t like it, I hoped that they would at least consider that my intentions were honorable, given the constraints and exigencies of the creative life. This has happened with most (though far from all, alas) of the small critical reception my work has received.

My mood about my current novel has been up and down over the last year. I’m now at the point that I don’t want to kill the monster as much as I want to finish it so I can say to myself that, with the few years I may have left, I wrote something worth the struggle.

Anything else is…something else.

 

 

 

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A Question Unasked

I attended an evening lecture a few days ago in which a crusading civil rights lawyer recounted some of his most famous, paradigm-shattering court cases, some argued before the US Supreme Court.

I took notes as he spoke, out of a habit that began long ago, when I was assigned to attend open-to-the-public events by the Philadelphia Inquirer. The work appeared anonymously in a section modeled on The New Yorker‘s Talk-of-the-Town, that quirky, front-of-the-book (people who write and edit a magazine call their publication a book) assortment of quick  interviews and profiles, “think” pieces and breezy, self-consciously witty fly-on-a-wall observations that, when taken together, celebrated the unique excitement of living in the Biggest of Apples.

At the time I wrote for newspaper (whose reporters and editors definitely do NOT call their publication a book) my section was zoned, that is, it appeared only in the editions sent to New Jersey. The territory of the coverage was the entire half of the state from Princeton (whose McCarter Theater productions were reviewed faithfully by newspaper’s second string drama critic), all of the shore from Sandy Hook down to Cape May, as well as the Delaware Bayshore towns of Greenwich and Salem, with its atomic power plants. I typically spent more time driving to and from the event (and frequently getting lost), than attending and writing about it. In those days before hand-help GPS, I splurged on a half dozen street-by-street country road maps that I kept in the trunk of my car. This led to a fascination with back roads and towns with such names as Ong’s Hat, Berlin (a former settlement of German immigrants),  Winslow Junction (where steamer trains from Camden and New York would refill their engines with water taken from the Pine Barrens), Miami Beach, Rye Gran and Byoona”–Jersey for Rio Grande and Buena and Leed’s Point, legendary birth-place of the Jersey Devil.

One assignment sent me into the Pine Barrens where state forest rangers offered a Halloween-themed Jersey Devil Hunt, an evening, bring-your-own-flashlight nature tour. Though I am shy and afflicted with social anxiety, a reporter’s notepad, and need to “get the story” for a tiny section of THE major metropolitan daily in the Delaware Valley, helped me banish any personal impediments.

One challenge of this kind of reporting was to find reasons for people who would not normally be interested–to maintain their interest. An easy way to do that was to find, among those who gathered for the event, some people who come from distant lands (Scranton, PA!). Where there any degreed professionals among us (a botanist searching for rare species, perhaps)? What, you’ve written a self published book about the Jersey Devil?! Had someone done this before (this is your TENTH Jersey Devil hunt?).  and a cute kid who would say cute things. What would you say to the Jersey Devil if you met him? “Why do you have to be a devil when you can be a angel instead?”

Of course, I talked to the park ranger leading the tour and  then reported what happened, more or less. We shined flashlights on rare, weirdly translucent tree frogs. We trudged across the Pine Barrens’ luminous white sand. We stepped carefully among the dwarf pine trees, prized by bonsai collectors. We visited the ruins of a ghost town almost completely obscured by vegetation. I asked questions constantly and even aggressively to obtain information and quotations to give the article a special zing. The hunt ended without an appearance of South Jersey’s most famous monster, but, after a cute quote from the cute kid (“The Devil is hiding because he’s scared of us.”)  a good time was had by all. I rushed back to my apartment in Pennsauken, pulled out the typewriter, hammered out the piece and hand delivered it across the Delaware River to the Inquirer’s classical revival office tower, which, at the time, was on Broad Street, a few blocks from City Hall.

This was a living and, sometimes, a thing that led to something else. Covering a kite-flying contest led to a two larger articles about a guy who flew some of the largest kites in the world–one was four miles long! Stuff about Atlantic City eventually led me to move closer to the shore, where my coverage “peaked” when I covered the state and the shore for the New York Times.

Also, I genuinely liked learning interesting things about New Jersey, the people who lived and worked there.  I wallowed in the history and personality of different regions, no matter how trivial (Did you know Welch’s Grape Juice was invented in Hammonton by a Methodist who wanted to preserve the juice but NOT drink alcohol?!). I let my enthusiasm take me where it will, especially when the rather low amounts I was paid precluded moderately priced indulgences.

It was odd, then, to go to this lecture and not talk to people. I didn’t see any cute kids attending, or even those who might be in college. A discussion of the history of the irrational, hateful, murderously violent struggle for racial, ethnic and gender rights did not seem to be a date night draw: most attending were of senior years, which meant that they lived through this, even if, as I did, most of the conflict was watched on television, or portrayed in movies and stage plays.

The speaker was, without question, a hero who had not only defended successfully the rights of mixed-raced couples to marry. He trained Freedom Riders who challenged the “separate but equal” hypocrisy of the South, got Martin Luther King out of one of the many jails that tried to hold him, consoled those who had been beaten during protests and counseled those whose repeated marches on Washington helped to end the Viet Nam war. He sued colleges that refused to admit women, school systems that fired female teachers when they became pregnant (he quoted one of his adversaries explaining that “We don’t want children to think there’s a watermelon under her dress”) and, as a board member of the American Civil Liberties Union who happened to be Jewish, and who rediscovered his Jewish identity when he practiced civil rights law–defended the American Nazi Party.  When his parents found out about this, they did not listen to him explain that any abridgement of civil rights, no matter how despicable the people exercising those rights happened to be, could lead to further restrictions. His parents refused to speak to him for two years.

Some of the court cases were actually easy to win. The baseless claims used to defend racism, bigotry and inhumane cruelty did not work against a highly educated judicial elite that knew American society had to change for the better. He quoted a college administrator: “We don’t discriminate against women here. We just treat them differently.”

He barely restrained his contempt for the way members of the current Federal administration, many in Congress and specific Supreme Court justices, are trying to limit, curtail, “roll back” and otherwise deny the rights that so many died for in the last fifty years.

When the talk ended, we were told that this was our speaker had turned down an honorarium and, because of his advanced age, this was probably the last speech of this kind that he would ever give.

Then we were told we could ask questions. I had one to ask that was similar to the kind of questions I used to ask many important people. This question was especially important to me because my father not only practiced law, he had helped ban the death penalty in New Jersey. I remembered how my father became so happy when we won a case, and so bitter when he didn’t.

Other hands went up. Those permitted to ask questions seemed to talk more about themselves. They couched their queries in long preambles, sometimes demonstrating a knowledge of the law, other times subtly challenging–in light of the harrowing turn our current government has taken–the propriety of going up against the powers that be.

He answered the questions forthrightly and, at just the moment when I thought to raise my hand, we were told that there would be no more questions.

I wanted to ask if, when he was trying a case where the outcome did not seem obvious, logical or easily won, did he, in a private moment, pray that things would happen his way? Or did he, like my father, withhold importuning Heaven, and put his faith in the rule of law that, for all its many faults and failings, still aspires to be the essence of justice in the free world?

Perhaps if I had a reporters pad in my hand, and the certainty that a newspaper or magazine would print my account and give me some paltry pile of coins for the privilege, I would have jumped up and done the “one more, Mr. President” act that, far more than not, does get one last question from your source.

But I didn’t and, as people left, I reminded myself that part of what makes prayer so interesting, compelling and, for some, necessary, is that, when we are genuinely afraid, when we want one outcome over another, or when we are tired of losing, of seeing our values defied and insulted, of suffering and watching other suffer even more for no reason other than the powers that be do not care enough to make things better–we do it anyway.

And sometimes, you get what you want.

 

 

 

the Inquirer’s circulation was most of northern Delaware, all New Jersey south of Trenton, all of Philadelphia and the five Pennsylvania counties surrounding it. My section was zoned, that is, it appeared in only the New Jersey editions.

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Not to be Taken Away

On the front cover of Who Are You, the last worthwhile album by the British rock band The Who, bandmembers pose before a stack of bulky cables, plugs and massive electrical equipment that could be the back of their concert gear. Their different clothing styles are supposed to demonstrate divergent personalities on an over-produced recording (too many string sections!) padded with songs so weak that, with the exception of the sensational title track, are indications of band that has run out of things worth saying.

Pete Townshend, the band’s blues-infused songwriter, confesses as much on “Guitar and Pen,” about the frustrations of writing anything meaningful–a fitting lament for a band that had begun to take itself too seriously. “Sister Disco” and “The Music Must Change” are pathetic, rock mockeries of musical styles that, with punk rock and new wave, would render irrelevant much of adolescent alienation and geeky humor that had made the band’s “rock opera” Tommy and the fragments of its sequel, Lifehouse, on Who’s Next, so powerful.

And then the album ends with “Who Are You,” a thundering triumph of alienated anger made even more notorious by singer Roger Daltrey’s inclusion of the f-word in the lyric. I remember when the song came out and ruled “album-oriented-rock” FM radio, American stations played a version with the f-word edited out.

But to a generation that equated music with rebellion, excess, freedom, gratuitous destruction–the band no longer smashed their instruments at the end of their concerts, as shown on the first Woodstock film, but drummer Keith Moon, was still famous for vandalizing of hotel rooms and swaggering defiance of social norms, hearing Daltrey yell “who the f— are you” was proof that in-your-face exuberance of rock ‘n’ roll was still alive, though, as we were to find out, about to leave us.

Shortly after the Who Are You album was released, Keith Moon died of an overdose of a drug that was intended to blunt the symptoms of alcoholic withdrawal.

On the album’s cover, Keith Moon sits on a chair in dressage riding gear, as if he’s an English aristocrat who has just come from the stables after a day at hounds.  The chair is turned around, and on the chair’s back is a painted sign: NOT TO BE TAKEN AWAY.

I thought of that sign yesterday morning when my brother called to tell me that my step sister had died.

Townshend, eventually replaced Keith Moon with the less interesting. far less destructive Kenny Jones, but the driving, thundering, defiant rock ‘n’ roll energy in Moon’s drumming was gone. In 2002, bassist John Entwhistle died of a cocaine overdose in a Las Vegas hotel room. Townshend, who was nearly deaf from playing too loud, and politically conservative from watching so much of his royalties taxed away, broke up the band, a second career as a book editor and memoirist. He also came out as bi-sexual. He and Dawltry continue to tour, playing the music that still thrills their aging fans, who call them affectionately  “the Two.”

My step sister and I were always pleasant with each other, but never close. In the last year, I tried to change that.

I don’t “do” death well. Ever since I lost my grandfather at age 11, the passing of those close to me throws me into an emotional whirl. I become cynical, reckless, angry, despairing and very sad. When I was a child, my father told me outside the cemetery, that I did not have to go to the grave site, that I could sit in an idling car and watch people in dark clothes walk among the tombstones and trees, gather somewhere in the distance, and walk back. He said this to spare me, in a voice that suggested that funerals were for other people, and I would be better off by myself. Later, as a man with my cousins at the graveside funeral of my uncle, I saw my father refuse to get out of the car, claiming that because he was a kohain, a descendant of Jewish priests, he was forbidden to be in proximity of the dead, much less enter a cemetery. He had aged awkwardly. What was left of his personality would disappear in the angry blur of Alzeimer’s Disease.

I am also a kohain. On that day, I had no problem setting my face to the cold wind blowing off the Hudson River, scouring the graves as I followed my uncle’s coffin to the opening in the ground. I dropped dirt on the casket. I washed the dirt off at the spigot sticking out of the wall of the cemetery’s office. What sustained me was the wordless cry I had heard from the cantor at my uncle’s funeral. The song, if I can call it that, seemed to open a hole in the sky. For a moment, I thought I could peer through that hole and see the sacred.

When my father died and I went back to the cemetery, I could not say anything. My relatives were offended. Why didn’t I show some respect and say a few words? It did no good to tell them that, having not forgotten what I had seen, and heard from him two weeks ago in the hospital, I could not speak. A year after that, at the unveiling of his tombstone, I found some words.

In addition to my uncle and my father, I have lost all four grandparents, my mother, my stepmother, my father and mother in law, a brother in law, family friends, some that I knew as kids in high school, colleagues in teaching, publishing and writing.

And now, my step sister.

Our spirit is burnished over the years. We’re supposed to learn from, or, at least, remain resolute when confronting failure and loss, so that we can push forward, find purpose and, as we age, be an example for our kids and those who are momentarily lost.

Today I found some words. I can speak. I can think of things that are not to be taken away, but find ways to leave us.

But I am not any better at “doing” death.

 

 

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Remote Listening

And so I heard from two people in my past, a friend in high school, and the husband of a teacher I may have passed in the hallway of that high school.

Before the Internet, I wondered if thinking about someone was more than just an idle notion. Was it possible that we are not alone with out thoughts and that, in the same way that subatomic particles could interact with each other by winking in and out of existence across impossibly far distances, so might our thoughts be interactions, ways of touching, communicating, being with people, living and dead.

Have you done that thing, in private, when no one is looking, or asking you to be a serious, grown-up type person who doesn’t believe in things that cannot be proven–when you think of a person who has since died, or another you do not even know is still living, or just someone you knew too briefly, and hoped that you can say something to that person, if only for an imaginary moment?

We’re not allowed to do such things in public (unless you’re doing it on a cell phone). We can’t admit that we wish we weren’t so much alone–especially when we’re surrounded by people we work whom we’d rather NOT know so well. For me, loneliness has always been a specific passion ironically triggered by the presence of other people. I never want to speak to, or hear from, anyone person. It’s always someone specific.

Over the many years that I was isolated from the person who was to become my wife, I thought of her just about every day. We can go back now to days, weeks, minutes and find that, yes, when I was wallowing in the blues about her being somewhere else, she was also thinking of me.

This isn’t so wonderful as we wish it would be: our brains think a great deal (I was told recently that about 60,000 thoughts run through our consciousness every day–I found this disappointing and confusing. How do we count these things? How do we distinguish one thought from another? When is a thought over and one with? And why 65,000? Why not 62? Are these thoughts profoundly unique or squeaky repeats? Is this a good thing that so many thoughts gurgle along our synapses? Or should we slow down a little, pick a few choice notions from the gushing torrrent, sip them gently, swish them around in our mental mouth, contemplate the terrior that nurtured the vintage and, at some lofty point, swallow?) and, with so much thinking going on, patterns emerge. Our neurons tend to rewire when we repeat activities, or mull over a problem. Daydreaming isn’t the wasted time: it’s actually a way we process information.

And these processes can become habitual. As Tom Jones must sing at every performance, “It’s not unusual…” to think of someone who has had an effect on you, so that repeated thoughts become customary, familiar, welcome. The people I tend to think about are (or were) living in an American society that, despite who voted for whom in the last presidential election, experience similar things in a day. Run the statistics and two people who may have known each other for a limited period may eventually think of each other at one point or

Another.

Ahh, but why would they think of each other and not…someone or something else? Here we have so many possible variables that could trigger the imagination, or maybe turn some screws that were already rather loose, and…we get this idea, feeling, sense of character, identity, familiarity.

Arthur C. Clarke has been quoted famously for stating that any sufficiently advanced technology will appear as magic to the uninitiated. What about the reverse? Are there times when technology is so specialized, complicated or just tedious, that we must step back and see it as magical in order to appreciate it?

This happens in cooking when you eat the food. So much goes into bringing that food to you, and, if you think about it while eating, it just doesn’t taste as good as when you bring it to your lips and let the flavors, textures, heat (or chill) fill your mouth.

So why not believe, occasionally, when no one is looking and you don’t have to be that rational, sensible person you were when you voted in the last presidential election,  that thoughts are more than the sum of their parts, that we are not completely isolated in our heads, and that thinking of someone here can somehow connect you to that person, wherever that person may be?

Because it can get scary. Suddenly the private opinions we may keep to ourselves become something…public. It’s not just God above (or some angel when, as Tom Waits sings, “God’s away on business”) hearing (and certainly disapproving most of) your inner monologue, it’s…someone else!

It’s astonishing but true: for about a decade the U.S. Army spent money trying to see if “psychic” powers could be used as a way of spying on an enemy at a distance without using any mechanical or technological devices (read all about it: The Men Who Stare at Goats, by Jon Ronson, non-fiction basis for the film comedy that starred George Clooney).

Just close your eyes, think of that person place or thing and…you’re there!

If only we could be sure that this wasn’t just wish-fulfillment and imagination. It turns out that imagination is also a pattern-filled thing. The few successes in this program may be just as easily explained away by coincidental, and entirely unrelated, similarities in what we imagine, and what may actually exist, in that person, place or thing.

But what if there was more to our imagination than just what was in our brain? What if our mind was as much a receiver as a transmitter?

Thus we get the idea of remote listening. In a quiet place where you won’t have to check your cell phone, answer the door, or take orders from a person who really shouldn’t be your boss but is, open yourself, without judgement, without fear of failure, not just to a single person, place or thing, but to…

Watch what happens.

 

 

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Savoring Every Bite

After my father left us, my mother changed her eating habits. She still set a table for my brother and me, and cooked most meals. But after the dishwasher happily gurgled and my brother began his evening of television and I sauntered back to my room to read a science fiction novel, she would make little things for herself and eat them somewhere in a house that was suddenly too big.

Sometimes it was a bowl of cereal, or a glass of chocolate milk. Occasionally she’d dig a leftover out from the back of refrigerator, unwrap the plastic film and eat it over the sink because, to put the food on a plate from the cabinet would make a newly dirty dish, and the dishwasher was already full.

You do this when you eat alone. Though my brother and I were full-time, pre-college residents of our house, my mother developed the habits of a person who lived alone.

When I learned to cook, from my grandmother, ny girlfriend (now my wife), a college cooking course and haphazard experimentation that too often filled the kitchen with angry gray clouds,  I scorned some of the my mother made: meat sauce and elbow macaroni, fish baked in condensed vegetable soup, baked hamburger and the occasional broiled steak with baked potato (with sour cream and chives, just the way you got it at a restaurant we no longer visited, because my mother did not want to be seen in public as a woman dining alone).

What took me so many years to notice, and understand, was that, unlike her apprentice gourmand of a son, she ate slowly.  She did not warm up the leftover pizza slice because, in the days before microwave ovens, reheating pizza required the electric oven to awaken, followed by careful scrutiny–too much heat and you had burnt cardboard, too little heat and you had cold, cheesy cardboard.

How can cold pizza be delicious?

Nowadays, my wife and I make our own, using a gas-fired pizza oven identical to one used by a professional pizza restaurant that does on-site catering. A few nights ago we made two pies, with fresh dough. Her pie came out better than mine and, like scrupulous people cautious about eating, we ate only half of what we cooked and put the rest in the refrigerator.

On this unusually gloomy day, I missed my wife. She is at work. I’m here, putting words together with the hope that the experience, as well as the reading, will be meaningful. The summer we spent every day together ended in fact two months ago, but, in spirit, it lingered for me until today. Though the dog was eager to provide company (in the hope of a mid-day walk), I could not help but feel alone.

I found our cold pizza in the back of the refrigerator, and, though we do have a microwave oven that can make cheese go from sub-zero to sizzle in seconds, I decided not to heat the slice.

I ate slowly, without a plate, savoring every bite.

 

 

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The Pencil Intrudes

My dog, an ineffably cute West Highland Terrier, brought the pencil to me in her mouth. I took it from her mouth and wondered, Just how smart are you?

The previous night I had watched the somewhat slow, but lovingly photographed retrotech documentary, No.2: Story of the Pencil. I discussed with my wife a difficulty with writing long, extended passages that I did not have during my youthful make-the-deadline days.

I was too indecisive. Instead of letting the words flow (with or without caffeinated inspiration) and then cleaning up whatever seemed yucky later, I agonized over far too much for far too long. This agony drove me to do too much research on the Internet, or to cool my anxiety by rounds of solitaire. The result was predictable: not much was written, less was finished.

I recalled from biographies that many of those whose work I admired began their creative day with a pen or pencil. Though some writers graduated to fancy pens or snazzy typewriters (I, too, owned an Olivetti electric portable and tried for a brief time to write with a Mont Blanc fountain pen), John Steinbeck preferred pencils. He would sit down most mornings and start writing something, a letter to a friend, or a passage of description. This may, or may not have lead to useful work: he burned almost all his early drafts. But it coalesced, sooner and later, into finished work that he then sent to a agents and publishers who stood by him when his work was incredibly controversial (California farmers vigorously denigrated him for The Grapes of Wrath),  turned into a play (he refused to have anything to do with Of Mice and Men‘s theatrical adaptation and even bragged of not having seen it) and, finally, won the Nobel prize–a distinction so overwhelming that it turned him into an indecisive writer who had difficulty finishing anything.

Throughout his life, his writing began with pencil and paper.

The next day I was on my word processor, preparing a piece for this blog, when my dog, or rather, the pencil intruded.

As I held the pencil in my hand, I wondered if my dog could understand English. Could she sense my emotional turmoil?

Pets, like children, will do things that we can’t explain. Some of what we can explain (or, at best, we believe we can explain) are so astonishing.

I turned off my word processor, went downstairs, sat in a comfy chair, pulled out a pad I used to bring to places that served coffee so, among the intense lap toppers, parents chatting about children, business folk who can’t or won’t spring for a meal and teenagers on a tentative first date, I could build worlds, move stories forward, invent marvelous characters and polish a gleaming turn of phrase.

I began writing. I didn’t finish anything but I liked immediately how easy it was. I didn’t have a keyboard in an awkward position on my lap. My wabi sloppy handwriting was easy to read, without perfectly legible letters appearing on a screen. I had no urge to switch screens and check the news, check e-mail or run down a fact. Having lost my deck of cards, I could not resort to solitaire.

If I didn’t like a passage, I drew a line through it, or I flipped the pencil and rubbed it away. As one of the talking heads in the pencil documentary observed: you hold creation and negation in one object, two opposing characteristics at opposite ends.

The limitation of choices, the inflexibility of narrative flow, the feeling that what you’re doing must go somewhere because a pencil is a thing with a point and a point does not merely indication direction: a point creates it.

So I’m off and scrawling. The current strategy is to let things happen with pencil and a pad (NOT a yellow legal pad–I associate that with my father’s law office) and then revise as transfer text to digital form.

Then?

Maybe I’ll find editors, publishers and more readers who just may stay with me for a while.

 

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New York Times Correspondent Makes News! Read All About It!

For about ten years I covered Atlantic City and New Jersey for the New York Times. The gig didn’t pay well, and it frequently drove me crazy, as when, hours after the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center Towers and the Washington, D.C. Pentagon building, an editor wanted me to go to a quiet predominantly Muslim community in South Jersey, bang on doors and ask for comments.

I turned that assignment down.

My editors said working for the Times would lead to something. When the New Jersey section was eliminated, and I was not offered any similar or subsequent place for my reporting within the newspaper, I felt let down. The only thing the gig led to was the privilege of saying I used to do something.
Of course, the essence of experience is that it is not fixed: the more we think about what we’ve done, the more we savor (or wallow) in memory, the more notional truths await our discovery.

As many writers have learned, even if you feel you don’t “know” anything, writing about what you know (that is, what you have experienced, or something so fixed in your soul that revealing it is an act of honesty) feels stronger, more reliable, more powerful and (we hope) less likely to be contradicted, than the stuff we wish we knew.

Journalism was valuable for me because I had to gather enough information, understand it and structure it in a way that made sense, before I could write about it. For me, research was like eating: I had to keep doing it until I felt “full.” That’s one reason my fictional output is slow: you’re never sure how much you need to know about a story whose major truth is that you invented it.

Writing for the Times opened doors (temporarily), inspired sources to return phone calls, made fellow journalists who previously ignored me ask me how they could get jobs, and transformed the little mistakes that slipped by me that, at any other newspaper, would die quietly (not in the dark crypt the Washington Post recently reserved for democracy, but in the pale gray of insignificant neglect), into news.
A major philosophical ideal at the Times is that the newspaper reports the news, it does not make it. Of course, the Times makes news all the time, be it an article from confidential sources revealing some inner nastiness in Washington, to the kind of critical theater reviews that can close a Broadway show.
At one, and only one time in my tenure with the Times did I use my power to make the news.

Every time I go to the Atlantic City Boardwalk I walk past the flamboyant facade of the Warner Theater. The theater itself used to be a wonderfully gaudy showplace, one of several in the city, but it was torn down and replaced by a parking garage. The facade remained as a retail store for a while. At one time, hot dogs and pork roll sandwiches were sold out of so much sadly decaying Spanish Mediterranean glitz.

For me, the Warner Theater was a truth that had not yet become ironic: a piece of the “old” Atlantic City whose decor achieved what Boardwalk architecture had always done: make people want to spend money. And yet, it was charming reminder of an earlier era, at a time when the rapacious, new-but-not-much-improved, rapacious, cynical and outrageously ugly casino-fueled city was demanding attention.

Then ITT, which owned Caesars back then, bought the entire block of Boardwalk frontage that included the Warner Theater. They were going to tear everything down, and build new casino frontage that would connect their Roman-style gambling complex with the adjacent Bally’s “Wild West” casino, which they also owned.

I dug up Florence Miller, whom we journos used to call “feisty.” Ms. Miller was the head of the Atlantic City Arts Commission, which built a small museum devoted to New Jersey artists and Atlantic City artifacts at Garden Pier. Miller’s real clout was in approving works of art that, by zoning decree, the casinos had to pay for and install before they could complete expansions. When Miller decided that the decoration inside one casino did not qualify as art, the casino mogul in charge exploded that the “entire damned building is art.” Miller held her ground and a statue was erected near the entrance of the gambling pit.
Ms. Miller told me that she could do nothing about the Warner Theater. She said she’d asked Al Cade to save it–no, she pleaded with him, but the facade wasn’t on the National Register of Historic Places, and, even if it was, a property owner can modify and tear down a registered site. I replied that this wasn’t what I expected from a person who had fought so hard for art and artifacts that represented the city’s heritage. She said you had to pick your battles and the Warner Theater wasn’t worth fighting for.
I disagreed. I liked looking at the thing. Other casinos had “preserved” bits of the city’s past and the results had been hideous (Resorts International’s awful orange, red and brass lobby) to pitiful (before tearing down the Blenheim Hotel, Bally’s Park Place preserved one of the gargoyles that once adorned it near the casino’s convention ballroom). I dug up the city’s official historian, a Philadelphia architect specializing in incorporating existing structures into new ones, and one of the theater’s former owner’s, George Hamid, a marvelously colorful character who also owned Steel Pier.

Then I called up Caesars and found out that they didn’t care about the facade one way or another, and that if Florence Miller and the city wanted it so badly, Caesars would let them peel the facade away and take it to Garden Pier–if the City Arts Commission would pay for the removal. I was told, off the record, that the Commission either didn’t have the funds, or the desire, to save the facade, but that I shouldn’t go to the Commission to get confirmation about that because that might make the Commission want to hold up the expansion project in some other way.

I wrote an article about the theater.

The president of ITT lived in New Jersey then, and nobody at Caesars told him about the theater when he had gone over the expansion plans. He read my article in the Sunday Times. The next week Caesars made some public noises about being good neighbors, and the facade was incorporated into the expansion, where it remains to this day.

My original New York Times article is here:

ATLANTIC CITY: Fighting Off the Final Curtain

By Bill Kent

THE Warner Theater may be most famous for the singer who didn’t play there.

“I got a call from the William Morris Agency around February of 1957,” recalled George Hamid, who owned the Steel Pier and several theaters in Atlantic City. “They said, ‘We have an act so big we can’t put it on Steel Pier.’ I laughed and said, ‘There’s no such act.’ “

Mr. Hamid refused the offer. “I said, ‘We’d go for a Perry, a Pat or a Frank, but who’s going to go for a guy with a crazy name like Elvis?’ “

And so Elvis Presley never played Atlantic City.

“But next year,” Mr. Hamid added, “when they called me about Ricky Nelson, I said yes.”

It’s been a long time since Ricky Nelson, Ella Fitzgerald and Mel Torme performed at the Warner Theater. Today the Warner is a forlorn reminder of better times. Its last tenants, who moved out last month, were a Boardwalk fast-food restaurant and karaoke bar.

And now Caesars Atlantic City, a subsidiary of the ITT Corporation, wants to remove what is left and build a 620-room hotel tower, with restaurants and a 20,000-square-foot convention ballroom. Whether the once-splendid Spanish Mediterranean facade can be salvaged will depend on the efforts of preservationists and the willingness of Caesars to help.

Built in 1929 at the then-extravagant cost of $2.7 million, the 4,300-seat Warner was Atlantic City’s grandest movie palace and most romantic showroom. In 1958 it was sold to Mr. Hamid, who had been booking concerts and stage shows there. As a condition of the sale, he had to drop the Warner name, and he called the theater the Warren because that was the least expensive way of changing the marquee.

Mr. Hamid later transformed the theater into the Boardwalk Bowl. “Snooks Pearlstein and all the old-time pros used to play pool there,” recalled a local historian, Sidney Trusty, who staged bowling competitions there.

Mr. Hamid sold the Boardwalk Bowl to the Howard Johnson’s Boardwalk Regency Hotel, a block away, in 1970. The property was later acquired by Caesars when the casino company bought the hotel in 1977. Now Caesars has received preliminary approval to build the tower, and no provisions have been made for what is left of the theater.

“Nobody expected it to go away, so nobody did anything about it,” said Anthony Kutschera, a founder of the Atlantic City Historical Society. “This is all that’s left from the time when going to a theater was an experience.”

When Florence Miller, the feisty executive director of the Atlantic City Art Center, heard that the Warner might be demolished, she called Caesars executives and pleaded for a stay of execution. On Jan. 8, which happened to be her 79th birthday, Al Cade, a Caesars vice president, told her, in her words, that “whatever could be done to save it will be done.”

Mrs. Miller took this to mean that Caesars would either incorporate the Warner into its expansion plans or donate the facade to the Atlantic City Historical Museum. But through Valarie McGonigal, the Caesars spokeswoman, Mr. Cade said the company had not determined the facade’s fate and would not for several weeks.

Because the theater is not on the National Register of Historic Places, and therefore not subject to Federal restrictions that protect structures of historic value, no plans were made to save its auditorium, which Caesars demolished to build a parking garage.

Another friend of the Warner, Steven Izenour, an partner in the Philadelphia architectural firm Venturi, Scott Brown & Associates, says Caesars should be thanked for saving the facade as long as it did. A co-author of “Learning From Las Vegas” (M.I.T. Press, 1972), Mr. Izenour researched Boardwalk architecture.

“Everything on the Boardwalk was considered disposable and replaceable when it was originally constructed,” he said in an interview. “Survival is worth something. Something is gained by the fact that these few pieces are all that’s left. The Warner Theater’s is such a beautiful, handsome facade that even as run-down as it is, you can’t help thinking that famous people played there.”

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A Street Corner Miracle

I agreed to meet my brother Neal in Baltimore sometime before 4:30. But it didn’t turn out that way.

For those who don’t know it, the Baltimore’s Walters Art Museum is a collection of mostly 18th and 19th century art amassed by two brothers and then left to the city. Having spent some time in and around other private collections in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and D.C., I decided to leave home earlier, so I could visit the Walters, which was a few blocks from Neal’s hotel.

To give myself an hour or so at the Walters, I parked my car at around 1:45 near his hotel, walked out to the street to begin the walk to the Walters and–

There Neal was, across the street. We were astonished to see each other, more so that, given all the places we each could be, we would be so close at that instant.

Sitting at home on a shelf is a book entitled Fluke: The Math and Myth of Coincidence, by Marlboro College Emeritus Professor Joseph Mazur. In the book Mazur provides the math that shows that coincidences are not as rare or nearly impossible as we would believe.  After my brother and I embraced, I began thinking of the Mazur’s math to dissuade myself of the notion that fate, or a nod from God, as we wandered into a nearby drug store to purchase some toiletries he forgot to pack.

I imagined Mazur telling me that a Casablanca response (from the famous Humphrey Bogart film, “Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine.”) isn’t quite correct. Neal came to Baltimore to attend a convention at a hall about five blocks away from his hotel, so it is very likely that he’d spend most of his time within those five blocks, especially on streets that connected him to his hotel. I had parked on the same block as his hotel. It is immediately likely that we would find each other on that corner than if we had been anywhere within the city limits.

Apparent coincidences are explicable, understandable and more to do with our brain’s tendency to “connect the dots,” that is, find patterns in discrete phenomena. When we don’t see a pattern, or don’t understand how likely events may be, we presume that fate or luck or some supernatural force has determined the outcome.

Especially when the outcome is positive.

We spent much of the afternoon catching up. Having just turned 60 (I’m older by 2 and 1/2 years), he told me how disturbed he from recently visiting one of his best friends from college. His friend was the same age: 60, but now permanently confined to a nursing home because of Alzheimer’s Disease.

I agreed with him that 60 was too young to be incapacitated by this terrible, irreversible mental decline, especially because this friend had suffered for much of his life but had always remained cheerful and upbeat, even now, as his memory of current and distant experiences became no more lasting than a wisp of steam.

We ended at that uneasy question: why do bad things happen to good people who did nothing to bring them about?

The Zen people say we suffer when we become “attached” to ideas of good and bad. Give up attachments, give up the sense of identify that isolates you and life is…what it is.

An infamous answer is in the Book of Job, in which Job, a good man in all respects, is tortured by God to prove a point. After God restores Job to good health and fortune, Job demands why? God’s response is “where were you when I made the world?”

Or, as a rabbi I know put it, “this is above your pay grade.” That is, you’re part of a larger plan that you have no right, or reason to understand.

Science would find genetic causes, or, as some research as indicated, dietary indulgences. How could so many of those who died of the medieval plagues know that their suffering had nothing to do with good deeds, or bad, but proximity to contaminated water, fleas and rats?

And yet, scientific explanations are not final. As soon as an apparent cause is revealed, new complexities challenge that finding. Also, science is not always done well. Breathing radioactive air was once thought to be a cure for respiratory ailments. If a portion of your brain wasn’t functioning properly, a lobotomist would eagerly open your skull and scoop the bad stuff out. Inept research in the 1950s led to a “fear of fat” in the American diet. One generation’s miracle drug–thalidomide, opiod painkillers, etc.–can have horrendous consequences that initial tests did not identify.

Alas, the explanations, for both the seeming miracle of finding Neal across a street at a time when neither of us expected to see the other, and the undeserved suffering of his friend, did not satisfy. Why is it in life that we feel blessed one day, cursed the next, especially when we “know” better?

If the answer is above my pay grade, how do I get a raise?

 

 

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