Pride, Hide, Vied, Lied, Died

There is an episode of the classic television program of the early 1960s, "The Twilight Zone", in which the two main characters, members of an exclusive upper crust private men's club, place competing wagers over the issue of whether one of them (a young, elegant, patrician, loquacious braggart) can remain absolutely silent for a year's time. The considerably older man is generationally and temperamentally disinclined to like his garrulous fellow club member, but the latter's nattering seems to strike at a very deep chord of loathing and revulsion, especially because of the oldster's passion for peace, quiet and reflection that is the norm at this club's premises, much like a library's or church's much valued silence.

To insure the integrity of the rules of the wager, the young member is placed in a glass enclosure within the confines of the rather large sitting room of the club. Highly sensitive microphones and tape recorders are installed to capture any breaches of the peace, i.e. any sound at all that might escape the lips of the contestant. The bet, $500,000, is mutually vouched for after some suspicious dickering and the period of mounting drama begins with great interest and a dearth of good humor: these men are at war.  Suspenseful music is congruent with the growing tension and the days come and go, telescoped of course for the requirements of the teleplay.

A stately clock is seen in the main drawing room on the final day of the marathon test….To Be Continued

Words At War With Lovers of Thoughtfulness

New expressions, like newborns or anything generationally nascent have, in a sense, always been with us. So, in a way, they're not really new, but just at a stage where they shortly are assigned, by usage and popularity, to the vocabulary of mainstream American English or in some cases are rejected or abandoned by degrees through indifference or the fickle pronouncements of vogue mongers who many of us slavishly kowtow to, though in most cases these manipulators of new lingo are promoters of this junk. The following phrases or expressions have grown in recent years, like unpleasant weeds in a garden. And while they may yet prove to be "plants" not hardy enough to survive until a welcome mat is placed before them by the folks who prepare the O.E.D., their nuisance value is enormous particularly since they are so typically used to express attitudes (a limited collection of them), but all with unpleasant undertones that underscore the zeitgeist in most unappealing ways. And so, like dangerous potholes in a road it is worth warning one about such verbal hazards. Brevity is a chief characteristic (nothing wrong with that, at least on first flush). Exultant emotionalism is another. And dismissiveness, together with a short attention span, are features of these new expressions or rather they echo such mindsets of the great mass of people who use these very dull tools of communication with predictability and numbing repetitiveness.

Here is the list: 1) "Is this great or what?" (Why am I enjoined to ascertain how wonderful a situation is, one that the person experiencing the positive news or event obviously knows the answer to? There's something almost furtive and self-protective about not wanting to indulge in an expression of unbounded joy, as if one has found a diamond ring and is more concerned about the coast being clear of a possible rightful owner). Suggestion: use instead "This is wonderful news. I couldn't be happier."  2) "Whatever!" (Is mentation too exhausting for the person who uses this  mind-deadening word?  The deliberate cloudiness of this unenlightening remark seems to signal supreme indifference that leaves a person at sea regarding what may be an important matter to him/her.  A non-committal remark like this is less desirable than an emphatic rebuke or sharp criticism that, while it might bruise an ego, let's someone know where he/she stands and might lead to enlightenment or clarification that may edify both parties.  But "NO-OOOO!", in the words of the late John Belushi's character on Saturday Night Live, our self-indulgence of demonstrating our world weariness or smugness about our jaded world view is a higher priority than striving for excellent communication with a fellow human). Suggestion: Try venturing an opinion rather than expressing a moodiness reminiscent of one lounging on a couch while yawning in another's face and passing gas.  3)"Shut up!" (That this weatherbeaten expression of rude rejection has developed in many cases into a positive remark, i.e. a simple substitution for "Hey, you're kidding!" is quite amazing.  It seems that the implied violence of the phrase is preserved and calculatedly so. Again, like "Is this great or what?", there is a pessimism and defensiveness, that conveys the wish to remain unharmed by what may prove to be faux good news and so there is a kind of pre-emption that almost threatens the bearer of good news to not taunt by giving such unreliable tidings). Suggestion: use instead "You're kidding me, pal! I can't believe it!" And when your incredulity fades as shock gives way to pleasure, why not say "Gee pal, I appreciate the great news. It was really nice of you to break it to me." 4) "No problem!"(This has long been an irritant that now almost totally dominates telephone conversations, especially during customer service business calls.  There is again, the brevity of assuring all that any reflection or cogitation about the matter or qualms about a product or a service and the shipping involved are totally unnecessary endeavors. In short, "stop worrying and most importantly, stop thinking so that this exchange can end sooner rather than later" and so that the entrepreneur or his agent can get on to another call to enable more orders to be processed and more profits to be made.)  Suggestion: return to the quaint but thoughtful "Oh, yes sir, that is what we shall do to expedite your order and yes, the product will be delivered on or before the date I indicated. Yes, we will attend to that special feature that you requested and I have made a note of the special handling you requested. IF there are any questions that come up, please feel free to call me, Mr. So and So, at this number and my private extension ABC or that of my associate Mrs. Jane Doe at extension XYZ. You are very welcome. It's our pleasure to serve you. Good bye."

Well, I believe I'll say "goodbye" as well. Hopefully, a point or two has been made and received as helpful. The time that is required to express a clear and heartfelt thought is not so great that the above short-cuts are acceptable or as valuable as the tried and true methods that our beautiful English language affords us.  Words are not merely "words." They can enlighten. They can obfuscate. But most importantly, they have the power to delight and to raise our spirits as well as consciouness and increase our knowledge and wisdom. Why deaden that richness of possibilities, i.e. that "nerve", with brain atrophying utterances like "later, dude", "cool" or the afore mentioned examples?  Better to cling to a silence that may be interpreted as studied, rightly or wrongly, but that will not inflict any harm or disappointment, while allowing one's opposite communicant an opportunity to use his/her imagination about your "depth" and contemplative capacities. In other words, "shut up!", in the traditional sense of the phrase.

"Stocked My Heart With Icy, Frigid Air"

Russ Columbo was one of the first crooners on American radio. His talents and efforts seriously rivaled those of Harry "Bing" Crosby, the preeminent vocalist of this genre. Russ was forging a promising career even before the Stock Market Crash of October 1929. His voice's intimate timbre was, like Crosby's, ideal for the new carbon springs microphone and its revolutionary use on the airwaves. He was quite the "hearthrob" and his songs of lost love and other laments of pining Romeos (in fact, he was dubbed the "Romeo of Radio"), ushered in an era where sexuality and celebrity would both strengthen their respective impacts immeasurably and unceasingly, as they have evidently continued to do so, up to the present time. Yet the raucous and libertine zeitgeist of the Jazz Age was abating as Columbo's career was beginning to soar. Exhaustion with the excesses of the post war era's freneticism, disillusionment and suppression of tender sensibilities, allowed for the "sweet" sounds to come to the fore in American music, both among vocalists like Russ and orchestras like Guy Lombardo and His Canadians, Les Brown and His Band of Renown and Paul Whiteman and His Orchestra, to name a few. These groups were really a continuation of the Society orchestras that flourished early in the century and that were so popular with New York's and other urban upper class circles.                                                                                                                                                

But what was the new spirit at the dawn of the Great Depression? The nation's economy was obviously front and center for most, while the totalitarian mindset was beginning to attract more and more persons who tired of democracy's seemingly anemic response to unemployment and poverty. Fascists or bolsheviks: they both were able to push reality away from the minds of many with stirring appeals to darker impulses and quick fixes for our various ailments. Still, a certain gentleness, a feminine spirit, contrastingly seemed to pervade the arts, particularly pop music. Columbo himself, though a sex symbol, seemed to cause more women to want to nurture him rather than be ravished by him. His big hit "I'm Through With Love" (the above title of this blog entry is a fragment of one of the song's lyrics) was like many another in which themes of unrequited love, rejection and the slavery of obsession and other dicta of the libido were the foci of a great number of consumers of musical entertainment. Perhaps the subject of angst, though unremarkably on the minds of so many relative to the basics, such as putting food on the table, was permeating all spheres of life. Then again, there's nothing new or trailblazing about sorrowful love songs. Barbara Allen and Greensleeves tell forcefully of their ancient pedigree. Some songs of the '30s even directly addressed the existential and/or economic pain. Al Bowlly's Twentieth Century Blues and Got The Jitters by Ben Pollack were among them as was of course, Rudy Vallee's As Time Goes By. This one though had an upbeat message that really fit (and hopefully, fits) the American character, namely that the old verities are just that: immutable because they are true and are grounded in something that in some way can melt the most determinedly frozen tickers over time.

Fishing Trips And Hidden Places

A vacation is a time to vacate. Like the emptying of a trash can, a kit bag of troubles, a cluttered mind or a careworn soul crowded with unchanging ways of perceiving reality: all these and more can be lightened and enlightened by a journey on a small skiff to a sunny, summer kissed bay where an off shore zephyr of clean, salty air envelops one and helps forgetfulness remind us how simple and quickly sweet daydreaming can thrive. And all the while nature, so thoroughly, is at the helm while we trick ourselves into supposing that we are masterful sailors or captains of our fate. The thrill really comes as we begin to understand, consciously or not, that something or Someone else is in charge. Sure, we may open the throttle on our outboard with a simple twist of our wrist and we may adroitly zig or zag to avoid a "school" of kelp or negotiate a path safely between pilings under a causeway bridge, but what we have done at root, is to have hitched our maritime "wagon to a star", one that is in truth, some immutable beacon, greater than the lights of all the lighthouses beaming their aid to seafaring men since near the dawn of our time here on this planet, an orb that's three fifths covered by the briny expanse that beckons and repels us with strangely competing powers.

As a child, the joke was never appreciated or even understood. One understood it intellectually as pubescence came and went. But it was not really until the backside of fifty, that the old bromide ("Gee this is great, a beautiful sunny day, water like glass, gentle breezes, my favorite fishing pole, favorite beer, favorite pipe, comfortably padded life preservers and delicious sandwiches….am just going to lay back, maybe sleep, and if the fish don't bite, why things'll be simply perfect!") was comprehended at that "gut" level and that only an old soul could concur with via chuckles aplenty and cries of "amen." And yet, the pulsating drama of the hunt and the call of the unknown (if not the wild) are things never quite dispensed with even when one is an old man. We're ever restless, hard wired to perform and innately inclined toward conquest. Plumbing those depths, whether five feet below the bottom of one's dory or sixty feet down on a deep sea jaunt with diesel fuel, a pitching deck and the added edginess of competing fishermen aboard an inboard party boat, all threatening nausea, well, the tension and mystery of what piscatorial monsters await one's provocations is forever a theatrical phenomenon that only a dead man ignores. There is life under those swells, creatures that do not philosophize, but that kill or are killed in an endless battle royale called survival. The removal of the actual demands placed upon a hunter who is not threatened by hunger (as the last nearly one hundred years have granted Western men), does little to blunt the craving to subdue a fish, to ensnare and thwart his unfettered wriggling and writhing. Others may deride this sport as not worthy of the name, but these are fish, not men that we are catching, unlike the Fisherman from Nazareth. Does a fish feel? May as well ask if it has a soul.

The sense of the universal is upon one while sitting under a broiling sun and open to all of the elements.  And it is there, while seeing as far as the eye can, where gray blue water meets azure sky with enshrouding mists or crystal clarity, and where other kaleidoscopic combinations of color and varying visibilities work their magic. And yet, what is more intimate than being confined to a fragile bark with a fishing buddy and then experiencing the sudden visit from a thrashing beast fighting for its freedom as no other man or beast can hear or see the battle save for a batch of killies trapped in a floating wooden box alongside and attached to our craft with a short, stout knotted rope and perhaps a marauding salt water fly who sinks his "teeth" into one's ankle right through a sweat sock. He seems a kind of miniature fighter plane literally nipping at one's heels and an ally of the finny foe trying desperately to quit one's hated hook.

But feeding frenzies exploited by deceiving anglers always abate sooner or later as time and tides change the environment both above and below the ever changing waters. That aging fisherman's not so secret prayer for no action is encouraged by a becalmed sea, a sun just beginning, almost imperceptibly, to set and a cyclical yearning for peace in his psyche, or is it simply a function of his weariness?

Kosciusko on Social Teas

Characters once abounded in America. A friend who grew up on Long Island's south shore during the second world war and the first decade immediately after it, is of this opinion as well, based on his first hand experiences. He is a natural storyteller and a character himself; his Hibernian heritage perhaps assured both.  More than mischievous, he and his pals each were neither colorless nor cut from the same cloth as are so many automatons of our twenty first century collection of drab cyberspace addicts and tweeting twits. No, Danny and the gang that he gallivanted with had so much to stimulate them and the big, wild world of an America still largely rural, minimally regulated and still untamed by technology and the blandness of today's liberty loathing authorities, was a special place where youthful hijinx and rebellious derring-do could and did flower. With gasoline at mid century just a little over 20 cents per gallon, the roads not yet choked with motorists and the American spirit of innovation and grand schemes of unbridled fun and mayhem given the greenest of lights with the fledgling post war prosperity, the world for these pre-teens and teens was their oyster and they missed nary an opportunity. Drag racing, joy rides, midget car racing, dangerous rides of hanging from trains, the backs of buses, sanitation vehicles, amusement rides made dangerous by flouting safety rules, and elaborate pranks played on older citizens, police and plenty of other unsuspecting stuffy folks or those furtively attempting to conduct their own naughty business, all were fair game for these semi-harmless hooligans. This last group of victims were usually relatively older kids or any adults who, while canoodling, or preferably much more amorously occupied in a Lover's Lane, were assaulted in mid-passion by these miscreants who would pounce by suddenly opening the victim's car door, drag the male half of the horizontally indisposed couple out of the vehicle, further pulling down his already "half-staff" trousers in the process (we'll forego any other allusions communicated by the above compound word). "Gall" does not seem the appropriate or strong enough word to apply to such conduct, but "ballsy" does. Said victims, suitably outraged, would often attempt to throttle these characters, the zeal to accomplish such not infrequently causing them to fail since they typically forgot while in such a state to safely hitch up their pants first; the results were predictable and ego-crushing, if only rarely seriously injurious.

But less antagonistic demonstrations of character abounded in those bygone days as well. Poverty, isolation and again, minimal intrusions by do-gooders: each played a part in this, no doubt. A man could eke out a living gathering, pushing (and eventually selling) stacks of newspapers in an abandoned baby carriage, those big four wheeled jobs that seemed capacious enough for three toddlers to romp in. Such a man (am remembering one infirm, unshaven old guy in my neighborhood with ratty black woolen suit jacket and unmatching dun trousers, who limped on a clearly deformed limb, and with an Andy Capp styled hat upon his gray head), could walk (or shuffle) as long as he was willing or able with no social worker or authority from an agency for the homeless interfering with his enterprises. Beggars were once authorized in New York. Before the second world war, my grandfather would be regularly greeted in his fruit and produce store by a man in a rumpled suit displaying a mendicant's license who would remove his battered fedora and promptly receive a dime from Nonno. This happened each and every time he and his tin cup showed up at regularly spaced intervals.

Oddballs were often encountered in Automats, those exciting fast food restaurants in the Manhattan of yore that were almost militantly democratic with their great popularity, technological novelties and very affordable prices. A fellow, down on his luck, could linger of a mid-winter's evening at a table with yesterday's newspaper and a hot bowl of "tomato" soup. The soup was free since the water was simply hot tap from a spigot for tea and one of the table's standard condiments, catsup, was readily at hand. A few crackers completed the "luxury" meal. Once I spied a guy happily imagining the life of a gourmand as  the "crackers" with his hot meal were the very dignified "Social Tea" cookies, perhaps a gift from some  nearby swell that he slathered repeatedly with globs of brown mustard from the shiny white earthen little pot with the lid/stopper, another regular amenity on every Horn and Hardart dinner table. Maybe it was Gulden's brand or Bauer's, but the dark grainy texture calls to mind the very tasty latter day Kosciusko that was especially available by the mid-'80s when Plochman bought the famed Polish name. In any case, brown mustards of more than half century ago were associated with exciting, exotic repasts, i.e. very grown-up gastronomy and not at all pedestrian like the bright yellow condiments we dutifully ate and that Mom smeared on our bologna and white bread school day sandwiches.

But what made for a genuine character? Memorable, idiosyncratic folks, those who did things from the wellspring of their individuality: these persons might qualify for such a designation. A lack of formal education was a factor too. Societal "sanitizing" by the "use your fork in your left hand while cutting your meat with the knife in your right and then switch and use the fork with your right hand to bring the food to your mouth" crowd was not yet as successful and widespread in its missionary work to make uniform the behavior of their benighted and less fortunate (or so they were deemed) fellow pilgrims. Folks left to their own devices, either by again, geographic isolation, temperament or an intelligence bereft of sophistication or gadgetry, produced results, both interesting and unique. Folk art comes to mind.  In the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn there was a fairly ornate concrete bench festooned with chunks of colored glass and bits of a wide variety of tiles that formed a kind of mosaic design embedded in this particular outdoor "furniture" on display in a front yard along Metropolitan avenue. The carefully gathered pieces installed across the bench's back formed the words "New York World's Fair 1939." Alongside the space was the artist's home and it too was partially covered, like a not so modest tattoo, going up a portion of one side of the building, with similar material and was equally arresting to the eye.  Further south, in Sheepshead Bay, there once was an automobile parked publicly near where I used to work. The car was one of those late '60s American muscle cars, a Chrysler product: long, low and yet not very stylish, but it silently spoke of power and swagger.  The owner clearly loved the vehicle, but it was also clear that he had limited means for restoring the then thirty or so year old car.  He did what he could with elaborate homestyle paint jobs every year.  To preserve the chassis as best as he was able, the paint was applied thickly with numerous oil based coats of a smokey orange that was dabbed all over to include the bumpers and chrome as well. It seemed to be wrapped in a cocoon of paint and it proclaimed the individuality of its owner with a certain intensity if not beauty.

Individualism lives. It has been battered by many forces in the current Dark Ages, but it trudges on.  As long as the American, nay, the human spirit has corporeal beings to animate and bring to life its imaginings and yearnings, the "nuts", "kooks" and colorful characters will be with us. It's a comfort and an encouragement.