September 30, 2002 6:42 PM
The fires are damped; the smoke has thinned, clear sailing ahead. Look yonder! Freedom when we pass the Straits of Scylla and Charybdis.
I cleaned my basement this weekend. A small corner with deep piles of unnecessary books and accumulated papers (now stacked up near the street for tomorrow’s trash pick-up). Deep behind a bookshelf that leans like it belongs to German expressionist set, tables stacked with appliances, cups, glasses and utensils, a wine rack, there now lies a clear desk in the midst of a secret garden for wrapping myself, when several inches of blizzard snow are berating us from the west, and writing. It is autumn and soon the chill will chase me from the patio or my handy dandy summer made picnic table down near the woods where the West Nile Virus breeds.
I cleaned with a terrible crick in my back which has developed into creak enough to make me writhe in protest when I sit too long this way, or that. Post prandially I applied myself to this dark corner, popped a Martin Denny cassette into the player and now I sit as Quiet Village takes me, macaws and other jungle birds, down the river. My stomach, not unlike Charlie Olnutt's gurgles from the mounds of tomatoes that I piled into my salad. I hope that I don’t have to pass the Queen through a swampy mass of leeches. Why? You may well ask, Martin Denny? Some may even ask, who Martin Denny? Well it is terribly tacky, and although I don’t have any tiki lamps or bamboo evident in my décor (not a single purple mottled green delighted drink with an umbrella stir, not a saried maiden to relieve the tension of the day (I guess maybe such a maiden might well increase my blood pressure, negating the effects of all those lovely drugs that I take in the morning), but I do have Martin and his band of cawing musicians, with piccolo skratchers, chop blocks, triangles, tambourines, tambale bells and crashers filling my ears with the exotic strains of Hawaiian music (Aloha Oy!) and flattening my alpha rhythms to a dream like enough state that I can write irreverent and irrelevant forever.
Lackzoom (less Foley who was oozing from an attack of poison ivy) met last Friday at the Squirrel Cage. We, Marc, Dean, Phil and I, tossed down a couple pitchers and ate in the modified Lackzoom style that a couple heart attacks and delicate stomachs can now allow. We asked the waitress for a sampling of fine snack that adorned the back wall of the bar. We look too mature, too sedate, not a tattoo or piercing adorning us, the poor young thing took us seriously. So we guided her through a menu of gently baked not fried pretzels, sour cream and dazzle chips, we stopped short at the Pork Rinds. Times and physiologies just ain’t what they used to be. Let me explain.
IN THE OLD DAYS, After a performance we would unwind up at this Squirrel Hill Bistro. I can now state with great objectivity that you would never find anyone sitting close to us because our heritage would show, the guardedness of a Greek after hours club, the secret bitter sweetness of a Jewish religious ceremony, the raucous rambling of an Irish wake and the obstinate enrollment rites of Cosa Nostra. In short, we managed through the entire snobbery of our family camaraderie to be an almost totally unbearable group. Tolerable only to ourselves. We would laugh! Talk about the show and before the owners decided that they had enough and would toss us on to Forbes Avenue we would manage to eat Lackzoom style!
One of every snack from behind the counter, opened and poured on the table, mingled with the puddles of booze, beer, plastic bag and cigarette ashes in a frightful volcanic mound. In we would dive. Grabbing handfuls of the most redolent prepared snacks ever created by our western intellectual tradition. Yelling above the incessant beat of the juke box, talking over the mutters of neighboring tables, joking freely, discussing the universe of comedy discourse, making a bubbling boiling world, oblivious to the secondary world of our dulling senses. Sometimes the waitress got it, some times she didn’t. That was part of the grand blast! The other customers steered a course around us to the balcony seats or the rest rooms in the rear next to the pin ball machines, which still smell of the same urinal cakes.
By these tasty chips we are in hock to Senor Wences once again.
Monday, September 30, 2002
Wednesday, September 18, 2002
Wednesday, September 18, 2002 6:20 PM
Doohan, Meany, Please beam me up!
On the way up and on the way back, in the car, from Cleveland and to my various suburban destinations I listened via audio cassette tape, the middle button on the convoluted display of my automobile radio set, between Tuner and CD, to Star Trek Movie Memories. William Shatner.
So my recent entertainment and education wafts between the History Plays of Shakespeare and Star Trek the Original Generation. Surprisingly both complement the other. Both bring a new intellectual and personal outlook to a medium and an age. Although the Enterprise crew is relatively virtuous and stalwart some of the villains on Star Trek exhibit a humanity not seen on TV. Richard III and Kahn. Mudd and Falstaff. Lovable Bastards All.
I am of an age that says, yes, I watched and enjoyed the series on its first run (Outer Limits, Twilight Zone and even Truman Bradley on Science Fiction Theater past normal bedtime on Friday nights.) I recall the episode with Michael J Pollard and the one with Frank Gorshin and so on. The reason you can’t really call me a Trekker (Oh man this name and identification stuff will make you nuts, Can’t say Frisco to San Francisco, can’t call it sci-fi to a science fiction fan, can’t, for goddon sure say Trekkie to a Trekker.) because I can’t categorize, name or much remember any of the details of the episodes. My wife and I sat circa 69-70 in our Berkeley CA kitchen and watched the “reruns” at 6 o’clock as we ate dinner. I have, yes seen every episode at least once. AND I
don’t lead my life per the precepts of Kirk et al. It was, after all a television program with more depth than most, but not nearly as astonishing as the Science Fiction I read and adored in a younger day. Or the misery found in Dostoevsky, or the warmth found in Steinbeck or the play and intellect found in Joyce, the image found in Eliot etc etc etc.
I find myself coming to Star Trek once in a while. Watching now, for example, the First Series of the Next Generation on DVD as I chew a garden of green and purple food at dinner. And the movies, in order of appearance, on the weekends. I have not yet become a fan of Deep Space Nine or Voyager and don’t even know when the new series appears on TV or for that matter its name. I am irritated by the glut of Star Trek Books that stand next to a equal glut of Star Wars books which stand between a mess of X Files, Babble On Five (Unviewable as I remember) and whatever other media blitz including made for novels about Video Games at the local book stores.
I listen to Shatner’s story about the making of the movies. It is amusingly light and fine for traveling down the superhighways of America or even the side streets on my way to work and life. It is good for dreaming. (Perhaps, not so great for cruising the highways) Good for putting a pretty thought or two in my head. Good for recapturing some of the wonder that used to ride high in my life each and every day. Some of that wonder that gets buried amidst problems that don’t have as much meaning as they seem to at the time they occur. I dream a cosmology as the wide world buzzes me. I twirl off the rotating planet and hang breathless in black velvet surrounded by the blazing blinding colored jewels of the lights of the universe, somewhere midway between here and the beginning, infinite and bounded, look into the mysterious creation and the true face of God.
Taped to the faux wood cabinet over my desk is Walt Whitman’s wonderful poem about the Learn’d Astronomer.
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander'd off by myself,
In the mystical moist night air, and from time to time,
Looked up in perfect silence at the stars.
Doohan, Meany, Please beam me up!
On the way up and on the way back, in the car, from Cleveland and to my various suburban destinations I listened via audio cassette tape, the middle button on the convoluted display of my automobile radio set, between Tuner and CD, to Star Trek Movie Memories. William Shatner.
So my recent entertainment and education wafts between the History Plays of Shakespeare and Star Trek the Original Generation. Surprisingly both complement the other. Both bring a new intellectual and personal outlook to a medium and an age. Although the Enterprise crew is relatively virtuous and stalwart some of the villains on Star Trek exhibit a humanity not seen on TV. Richard III and Kahn. Mudd and Falstaff. Lovable Bastards All.
I am of an age that says, yes, I watched and enjoyed the series on its first run (Outer Limits, Twilight Zone and even Truman Bradley on Science Fiction Theater past normal bedtime on Friday nights.) I recall the episode with Michael J Pollard and the one with Frank Gorshin and so on. The reason you can’t really call me a Trekker (Oh man this name and identification stuff will make you nuts, Can’t say Frisco to San Francisco, can’t call it sci-fi to a science fiction fan, can’t, for goddon sure say Trekkie to a Trekker.) because I can’t categorize, name or much remember any of the details of the episodes. My wife and I sat circa 69-70 in our Berkeley CA kitchen and watched the “reruns” at 6 o’clock as we ate dinner. I have, yes seen every episode at least once. AND I
don’t lead my life per the precepts of Kirk et al. It was, after all a television program with more depth than most, but not nearly as astonishing as the Science Fiction I read and adored in a younger day. Or the misery found in Dostoevsky, or the warmth found in Steinbeck or the play and intellect found in Joyce, the image found in Eliot etc etc etc.
I find myself coming to Star Trek once in a while. Watching now, for example, the First Series of the Next Generation on DVD as I chew a garden of green and purple food at dinner. And the movies, in order of appearance, on the weekends. I have not yet become a fan of Deep Space Nine or Voyager and don’t even know when the new series appears on TV or for that matter its name. I am irritated by the glut of Star Trek Books that stand next to a equal glut of Star Wars books which stand between a mess of X Files, Babble On Five (Unviewable as I remember) and whatever other media blitz including made for novels about Video Games at the local book stores.
I listen to Shatner’s story about the making of the movies. It is amusingly light and fine for traveling down the superhighways of America or even the side streets on my way to work and life. It is good for dreaming. (Perhaps, not so great for cruising the highways) Good for putting a pretty thought or two in my head. Good for recapturing some of the wonder that used to ride high in my life each and every day. Some of that wonder that gets buried amidst problems that don’t have as much meaning as they seem to at the time they occur. I dream a cosmology as the wide world buzzes me. I twirl off the rotating planet and hang breathless in black velvet surrounded by the blazing blinding colored jewels of the lights of the universe, somewhere midway between here and the beginning, infinite and bounded, look into the mysterious creation and the true face of God.
Taped to the faux wood cabinet over my desk is Walt Whitman’s wonderful poem about the Learn’d Astronomer.
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander'd off by myself,
In the mystical moist night air, and from time to time,
Looked up in perfect silence at the stars.
Monday, September 16, 2002
Monday, September 16, 2002 7:44 PM
Well Shiver Me Timbers – Bobbing along somewhere in America
Here is it that I yam where I yam -
½ mile off US North 271 on the borderline twixt Beachwood and Pepper Pike some miles east of Shaker Heights, suburban playgrounds all of Cleveland Ohio. For a short stay in an Extended Stay America.
I have just washed some clothes in the coin-op and finished a fine feast of fairly foppish foods. And am feeling tired dejected and out of round.
How I came to this thriving city that has every other neighborhood labeled Heights, when there are no definite high or low spots, is a story that I will leave for another more plebian and quotidian journal. It is enough that I sit here in the relative quiet of what is essentially a motel room with a kitchenette hard opposite the bathroom and write.
People hump up and down the hall, talking, slamming doors and blocking my way as they talk in a conclave that manages to make five people take up the space of the throngs that greet the Pope’s high mass at the Vatican. They are discussing plans for the evening until I harrumph loudly and ask to be excused while they look tolerably surprised that someone would dare to want to cross into the hallway opposite while they are making what are probably momentous decisions in their lives. To their ever loving credit they part like the waters before Moses when I make my return trip. I feel quite grand and biblically correct. I manage a short circling motion with my hand as I pass among and through them.
Today is my son’s birthday (Happy Birthday, Tim). I didn’t forget the date, merely the day (thought it was tomorrow, the date). This month I must be working on some peculiar perhaps ancient certainly personal Calendar. It is Yom Kippur which I also missed as we pulled into Corky and Lenny’s Deli for lunch marveling at the many parking places available. A Miracle? Oi! Yech! I heard the Yiddish ghosts chant as we got back into the car looking for open Christian fare, dumb Goyim.
Time does indeed march tediously onward while I beat a rough rhythm that manages to evade the tempo, riff and cycle. Some days I almost have a clue and can see the whole world at a glance and put it into an interesting perspective that lies before me like a diorama. My heart and the whole damn world just throb. Mostly I scurry trying to match the cadence. Succeeding suspiciously, du temps à temps.
This weekend at some bookstore or other I managed to purchase a book (imagine that) called Speak the Speech (Shakespeare’s Monologues Illuminated – An Actor’s Toolkit written by (speaking of delicate essence) Rhona Silverbush and Sami Plotkin (go figure). It is a truly swell (and swelled running to 1028 pages) book (Hey, Kevin Spacey has a blurb on the back) that indicates the scan (iambic pentameter most) and has commentary as well as notes of interest about the Monologues – History Comedy Tragedy and Problem Plays. Shakespeare has at last caught my fancy. I can’t get enough, (daughters with their hands removed, a lover awakes with her husband lying next to her – less his head, Richard III offs a couple kids in the manner of a Mafia don, Hamlet pours poison down Claudius’ gullet after he guts him, if those slash and gash, gore and whore, slice and dice, movie lovers only knew).
But, My, his language, (it’s so elegant) the flow of meaning and sound, the resonating depth of image, the incite, the horror (that Shakespearean rag). I am amazed. Once again it took me this long to catch up. Dense, I am buoyed up and sipping coffee about two and a half hours from home. Atone.
Well Shiver Me Timbers – Bobbing along somewhere in America
Here is it that I yam where I yam -
½ mile off US North 271 on the borderline twixt Beachwood and Pepper Pike some miles east of Shaker Heights, suburban playgrounds all of Cleveland Ohio. For a short stay in an Extended Stay America.
I have just washed some clothes in the coin-op and finished a fine feast of fairly foppish foods. And am feeling tired dejected and out of round.
How I came to this thriving city that has every other neighborhood labeled Heights, when there are no definite high or low spots, is a story that I will leave for another more plebian and quotidian journal. It is enough that I sit here in the relative quiet of what is essentially a motel room with a kitchenette hard opposite the bathroom and write.
People hump up and down the hall, talking, slamming doors and blocking my way as they talk in a conclave that manages to make five people take up the space of the throngs that greet the Pope’s high mass at the Vatican. They are discussing plans for the evening until I harrumph loudly and ask to be excused while they look tolerably surprised that someone would dare to want to cross into the hallway opposite while they are making what are probably momentous decisions in their lives. To their ever loving credit they part like the waters before Moses when I make my return trip. I feel quite grand and biblically correct. I manage a short circling motion with my hand as I pass among and through them.
Today is my son’s birthday (Happy Birthday, Tim). I didn’t forget the date, merely the day (thought it was tomorrow, the date). This month I must be working on some peculiar perhaps ancient certainly personal Calendar. It is Yom Kippur which I also missed as we pulled into Corky and Lenny’s Deli for lunch marveling at the many parking places available. A Miracle? Oi! Yech! I heard the Yiddish ghosts chant as we got back into the car looking for open Christian fare, dumb Goyim.
Time does indeed march tediously onward while I beat a rough rhythm that manages to evade the tempo, riff and cycle. Some days I almost have a clue and can see the whole world at a glance and put it into an interesting perspective that lies before me like a diorama. My heart and the whole damn world just throb. Mostly I scurry trying to match the cadence. Succeeding suspiciously, du temps à temps.
This weekend at some bookstore or other I managed to purchase a book (imagine that) called Speak the Speech (Shakespeare’s Monologues Illuminated – An Actor’s Toolkit written by (speaking of delicate essence) Rhona Silverbush and Sami Plotkin (go figure). It is a truly swell (and swelled running to 1028 pages) book (Hey, Kevin Spacey has a blurb on the back) that indicates the scan (iambic pentameter most) and has commentary as well as notes of interest about the Monologues – History Comedy Tragedy and Problem Plays. Shakespeare has at last caught my fancy. I can’t get enough, (daughters with their hands removed, a lover awakes with her husband lying next to her – less his head, Richard III offs a couple kids in the manner of a Mafia don, Hamlet pours poison down Claudius’ gullet after he guts him, if those slash and gash, gore and whore, slice and dice, movie lovers only knew).
But, My, his language, (it’s so elegant) the flow of meaning and sound, the resonating depth of image, the incite, the horror (that Shakespearean rag). I am amazed. Once again it took me this long to catch up. Dense, I am buoyed up and sipping coffee about two and a half hours from home. Atone.
Monday, September 02, 2002
Monday 9/2/02 7:30 AM Labor Day
Double Bubble Toil and Stubble.
It is hard as wood, petrified in a dry climate, to get a point into my head sometimes. Worse when I thought of it myself. I have set this laborious glorious weekend aside to contemplate the nature of work. It seems somehow appropriate. As well as embarrassingly unimaginative and facile. A depth of subject that I sound on a daily and most familiar basis. Full fathom one, my analysis spun, completely exposed in the sun.
It came to me on this leisurely celebration of labor that I have thought of work as the enemy for all these years. A living, that is to say, accompanied by great psychic pain, to earn. Now armed with new and slightly dangerous knowledge, I explore my wicked older ways and try ,somewhat desperately, to come up with a scheme that will integrate my writing life with my comedy life with my commercial working life with my leisure life (and to be complete, lest some narcoleptic god intervenes, my dream life).
Let there be no mistake about it, I consider this integration my highest level of achievement and have little tolerance for segregation in any sense. I have always believed that unity can lead to a master of all trades allowing only little jacking around left to be done.
I have been working in the world of commerce for almost all my life. Since the summer of 1958 I have been paid for that work. That, I think, is the definition of a pro. My father, likely enough, was my first teacher. In his own perverted Italian contractor way he was the Mr. Miyagi of the construction trade. His wick was short and the explosion often violent and couched in foul language and a healthy fist connecting with the newly muscled flesh of my upper arm. He definitely lacked the infinite patience of the wise and old Zen teacher. Although I have problems with method, it definitely got my attention and kept me interested.
I learned, as I perspired mightily over a saw cut on a two by four piece of lumber that would somehow leave the pencil marked line made by a square behind and follow a jagged canted line of its own design, that I must always keep all things plumb, square and level. I further learned that it was important, sweat burning my eyes, to let the saw do the work. Pow! Biff! ~Bam! One of these days right to the moon, Joey. Where I most fervently wished to be. I had stars in my eyes and could think of no more wonderful place to inhabit than outer space. I just wanted my conveyance to be of a more refined and controlled explosive construction. Now make that cut again. Make is Square! To Make the wall Plumb! So that all will be Level! Cross cutting I would go. Eventually I got the point. Of course, the saw was designed to do the work!
My father taught me the true inner glowing of mathematics. He was straddled one day on the railing over a second story stairway. He reached into his apron and realized that he was out of 16 penny (16d for the initiates) common spikes. "Joey," he yelled as I bit my tongue and tried for the hundred thousandth time to force the saw to cut straight, "hand me a couple nails." I was on a roll. Not only had I cajoled and worried the cut to almost straight perfection (it was unfortunately also almost fifteen degrees out of square), I also knew the size and shape of the nails he was using. I hopped over to the nail kegs and grabbed two beautiful new sharply pointed dull steel spikes and ran across the room to his perch and handed them to him. I waited for an acknowledgment of thanks.
"What the farbidyqurab is this?" he said. "I asked for a couple nails!" Which I had given him. With some accuracy and precision. He then launched into an explanation that confuses me to this day. "When I ask for a couple of nails," he said with some force and passion, " I want at least a thabamitywhack handful of nails. If I ask for a few nails bring the whole kilbbityflammed box. If I ask for a handful bring me the godlyfarbiquradifared keg!" Clearly this was a logic that was new to me, but as my father would point as old as the earth is tired. I have encountered it however when trying to understand a soliloquy from Shakespeare. It is a poetic vision of the logical universe that entirely escaped me until just recently.
This weekend.
I, not work, am the enemy! The harder I battle to force my mind to do the work, the more fatigued, unsatisfied and unfulfilled I become. I just gotta let things go a little.
Hi Yo! Hi Ho!
Double Bubble Toil and Stubble.
It is hard as wood, petrified in a dry climate, to get a point into my head sometimes. Worse when I thought of it myself. I have set this laborious glorious weekend aside to contemplate the nature of work. It seems somehow appropriate. As well as embarrassingly unimaginative and facile. A depth of subject that I sound on a daily and most familiar basis. Full fathom one, my analysis spun, completely exposed in the sun.
It came to me on this leisurely celebration of labor that I have thought of work as the enemy for all these years. A living, that is to say, accompanied by great psychic pain, to earn. Now armed with new and slightly dangerous knowledge, I explore my wicked older ways and try ,somewhat desperately, to come up with a scheme that will integrate my writing life with my comedy life with my commercial working life with my leisure life (and to be complete, lest some narcoleptic god intervenes, my dream life).
Let there be no mistake about it, I consider this integration my highest level of achievement and have little tolerance for segregation in any sense. I have always believed that unity can lead to a master of all trades allowing only little jacking around left to be done.
I have been working in the world of commerce for almost all my life. Since the summer of 1958 I have been paid for that work. That, I think, is the definition of a pro. My father, likely enough, was my first teacher. In his own perverted Italian contractor way he was the Mr. Miyagi of the construction trade. His wick was short and the explosion often violent and couched in foul language and a healthy fist connecting with the newly muscled flesh of my upper arm. He definitely lacked the infinite patience of the wise and old Zen teacher. Although I have problems with method, it definitely got my attention and kept me interested.
I learned, as I perspired mightily over a saw cut on a two by four piece of lumber that would somehow leave the pencil marked line made by a square behind and follow a jagged canted line of its own design, that I must always keep all things plumb, square and level. I further learned that it was important, sweat burning my eyes, to let the saw do the work. Pow! Biff! ~Bam! One of these days right to the moon, Joey. Where I most fervently wished to be. I had stars in my eyes and could think of no more wonderful place to inhabit than outer space. I just wanted my conveyance to be of a more refined and controlled explosive construction. Now make that cut again. Make is Square! To Make the wall Plumb! So that all will be Level! Cross cutting I would go. Eventually I got the point. Of course, the saw was designed to do the work!
My father taught me the true inner glowing of mathematics. He was straddled one day on the railing over a second story stairway. He reached into his apron and realized that he was out of 16 penny (16d for the initiates) common spikes. "Joey," he yelled as I bit my tongue and tried for the hundred thousandth time to force the saw to cut straight, "hand me a couple nails." I was on a roll. Not only had I cajoled and worried the cut to almost straight perfection (it was unfortunately also almost fifteen degrees out of square), I also knew the size and shape of the nails he was using. I hopped over to the nail kegs and grabbed two beautiful new sharply pointed dull steel spikes and ran across the room to his perch and handed them to him. I waited for an acknowledgment of thanks.
"What the farbidyqurab is this?" he said. "I asked for a couple nails!" Which I had given him. With some accuracy and precision. He then launched into an explanation that confuses me to this day. "When I ask for a couple of nails," he said with some force and passion, " I want at least a thabamitywhack handful of nails. If I ask for a few nails bring the whole kilbbityflammed box. If I ask for a handful bring me the godlyfarbiquradifared keg!" Clearly this was a logic that was new to me, but as my father would point as old as the earth is tired. I have encountered it however when trying to understand a soliloquy from Shakespeare. It is a poetic vision of the logical universe that entirely escaped me until just recently.
This weekend.
I, not work, am the enemy! The harder I battle to force my mind to do the work, the more fatigued, unsatisfied and unfulfilled I become. I just gotta let things go a little.
Hi Yo! Hi Ho!