An article in the newspaper last week told of an autistic teenager who correctly picked the first 24 winners in the NCAA basketball tournament against odds of 30 million to one.
He reminded me of me.
In 1949, when I knew everything, I was also a part-time sports savant. I became big news in one particular newspaper when I predicted 18 out of 20 college football games one weekend. Forest Hills Prognosticator, the headline shouted.
I walked around beaming like Nostradamus for week or two but couldn't talk about it or show anyone. Why?, I hear you ask.
Of the dozen newspapers in New York City I had to choose the Communist Party's one, The Daily Worker. This was no coincidence.Along with the N.Y. Times (A.M.) and Post (PM) the Daily Worker was frequently read under our roof. And, yes, they had a Sports section in which the achievements of Black athletes was regularly celebrated. Maybe they thought overtime meant time and a half, as if I was to lead workers out of the class struggle.
My father was a quiet, self-contained man who radiated equanimity and abhorred confrontation. He was also among the minions whose compassion for the down-trodden resulted in his joining the Communist Party. He had no violence in him, no conspiracies. He was incapable of overthrowing anything, including my mother.
Politics and sports can not be separated. Certainly not in those days. I knew it then but never expected the two to converge the way they did. Who knew when I nailed Fordham over Syracuse and other upsets I would open a page in the FBI files.
Two of them, suited, clean and after-shaved came knocking on our door one day. Was it my breadcrumbs that lead them here? If they knew about my football feat it was because half the readers of the paper were FBI agents probably reporting on each other.
My father didn't give an inch in that scrimmage. He stiffened like a goal line stand and wouldn't let them cross, closing the door on their badges. They did an end run, went to his boss and had him fired but my father seemed taller after that day. His silence was his spine.
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
Sunday, March 28, 2010
Spring Sprung
Easter, yeaster, a soufflé rising as out of bondage, tulip bulbs pushing up on sweet chariots swung low; an exodus, sprung as in Spring, a perhaps hand reaching across; tendrils, rhizomes, old and new testaments, that word derived, swear-to-God, from testicles held in oaths, phallic spires, a resurrection-erection-insurrection toward a promised place, pass the bitters, pass the old words, chosen, not chosen, bless wine, bless herbs, most of all bless us all, good eggs hard boiled go up the hill with Jesus, Moses and Jack and Jill to fetch and pitch nine commands and one for extra innings, take two for C.B. De Mille with his cast of thousands, no time for leavened bread, for corn rye sliced thin with seeds, but seeds, yes seeds for hope and homelands, for miracles, for turning cheek to cheek, think Fred & Ginger, think love is the answer 'cause Jesus don't like killing no matter what the reason for, think outside the box, a fable is a fable; it's enough that the equinox is vernal, something to shout about, the poppies going wild wearing April dresses, odes of them in terraced stanzas strutting their stuff from Fifth Ave. to desert floor, from plots to flower pots to bombed and empty lots; it’s been a too long winter; let me hear that trumpet in the daffodil, the sax in the foxglove, what was dormant is now emergent.....an urgent aching for Spring.
Friday, March 26, 2010
Non-Verbal Communication & Non-Communicative Verbiage
What do heads-of-state talk about when push comes to shove? When one is a hawk and the other’s a dove? When there is no lost love and one is below and the other’s above? Blah, Blah. What did he say? zzzzzzz Jet lag. Winston and Franklin seemed to get past the smoke of cigar and cigarette.. Even Putin and Bush wore the same cowboy boots. Did Mao tell Nixon it was opera they were rehearsing? Does diplomacy-speak ever get real?
As authentic as what passes between a batter and a third base coach with 50,000 eyes on them? You have to admire the certitude of the scratch, the tip of the cap and hitch of belt; that elegant dialog resulting in a steal or a bunt.
John Boehner must have his language nuked in the tanning salon. His words die from exhaustion on the way to our ears.
In those Spelling Bees you would get it right or sit down. No mumbles.
Instead, what we get are "talking points"; the re-fried beans they have cooked up for the day's sound bites. Flip the channels and you hear the same limp phrases from dittoed lips; the sound and the fury that signify nothing.
Contrasted with this we can watch a Marx Bros. movie and see Groucho overthrow a government (or Margaret Dumont) with a raised eyebrow and flick of the cigar. Harpo breaks our hearts when he plays as if he is communing with distant stars.
Van Gogh regarded himself as a musician of paint. We hear his voice on every canvas, his howl to the sky, his anguish in the shoes.
Women in high circles spoke volumes the way they positioned their fans. We have to talk she said, as her fingers crossed the ribs. I love you she sighed, her eyes behind the open fan.
In 1919 Nijinski danced for the last time. He spun and whirled and fell apart crashing through the window into the snow. He was deemed to be mad having entered his exile. He said he had danced the war.
Ahead of his time and ours Antoni Gaudi's architecture still sings and shocks us. His aesthetic is a choir of mosaics, a hymn to the pagan and sacred in us all.
As authentic as what passes between a batter and a third base coach with 50,000 eyes on them? You have to admire the certitude of the scratch, the tip of the cap and hitch of belt; that elegant dialog resulting in a steal or a bunt.
John Boehner must have his language nuked in the tanning salon. His words die from exhaustion on the way to our ears.
In those Spelling Bees you would get it right or sit down. No mumbles.
Instead, what we get are "talking points"; the re-fried beans they have cooked up for the day's sound bites. Flip the channels and you hear the same limp phrases from dittoed lips; the sound and the fury that signify nothing.
Contrasted with this we can watch a Marx Bros. movie and see Groucho overthrow a government (or Margaret Dumont) with a raised eyebrow and flick of the cigar. Harpo breaks our hearts when he plays as if he is communing with distant stars.
Van Gogh regarded himself as a musician of paint. We hear his voice on every canvas, his howl to the sky, his anguish in the shoes.
Women in high circles spoke volumes the way they positioned their fans. We have to talk she said, as her fingers crossed the ribs. I love you she sighed, her eyes behind the open fan.
In 1919 Nijinski danced for the last time. He spun and whirled and fell apart crashing through the window into the snow. He was deemed to be mad having entered his exile. He said he had danced the war.
Ahead of his time and ours Antoni Gaudi's architecture still sings and shocks us. His aesthetic is a choir of mosaics, a hymn to the pagan and sacred in us all.
Wednesday, March 24, 2010
Action And Reaction
Isaac Newton’s third law of motion….
For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.
True in physics and politics as well. The push-back against healthcare reform reveals the Republicans as classic Reactionaries.
The word came into use describing defenders of the Bourbon monarchy and authority of the Pope against the French revolutionaries. They argued for the restoration of the old order. In the 20th century Reactionaries were the pro-fascist elements leading up to WW II.
The current Conservative rhetoric has the same rancid smell marked by repetitive lies, demonizing of opponents and instilling fear and dread in the public imagination.
These people must have had mothers who never taught them how to be gracious losers.
Consistent with their opposition to every piece of social reform from woman’s suffrage to popular election of senators to anti-trust laws, graduated income tax, rights to collective bargaining, Social Security, Medicare and Civil Rights they have earned their proper name, Reactionaries.
They offer nothing except to stop the clock of progress. Reactionaries are the palace guard protecting the privileged be it the emperor or corporate self-serving agenda. Greed has been alchemized into a virtue and compassion branded as coddling.
They wrote the playbook; a compendium of grand deception at high decibels. They are very practiced at the art and seem to have already won the war of rhetoric. With their finger on the pulse of inchoate rage they have tapped into the loathing of an uninformed electorate. Certain code words are understood to incite racial tensions.
The beast in America has been un-caged snarling, spitting and spewing hatred at every turn. These are the functionally deaf among us for whom reasoned conversation is outside their audible range. One can only conclude that they are either pathological racists or just nitwits incapable of directing the source of their woe begotten existence.
If Barack Obama’s name was Rocky Alabama and he looked like Joe the Plummer much of the vitriol would go away. It may well be that all the rancor is the rant of a lynch mob, noose at the ready.
When will civility return to our national discourse? When will the slumbering underserved population align themselves with a government ready to reach out?
For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.
True in physics and politics as well. The push-back against healthcare reform reveals the Republicans as classic Reactionaries.
The word came into use describing defenders of the Bourbon monarchy and authority of the Pope against the French revolutionaries. They argued for the restoration of the old order. In the 20th century Reactionaries were the pro-fascist elements leading up to WW II.
The current Conservative rhetoric has the same rancid smell marked by repetitive lies, demonizing of opponents and instilling fear and dread in the public imagination.
These people must have had mothers who never taught them how to be gracious losers.
Consistent with their opposition to every piece of social reform from woman’s suffrage to popular election of senators to anti-trust laws, graduated income tax, rights to collective bargaining, Social Security, Medicare and Civil Rights they have earned their proper name, Reactionaries.
They offer nothing except to stop the clock of progress. Reactionaries are the palace guard protecting the privileged be it the emperor or corporate self-serving agenda. Greed has been alchemized into a virtue and compassion branded as coddling.
They wrote the playbook; a compendium of grand deception at high decibels. They are very practiced at the art and seem to have already won the war of rhetoric. With their finger on the pulse of inchoate rage they have tapped into the loathing of an uninformed electorate. Certain code words are understood to incite racial tensions.
The beast in America has been un-caged snarling, spitting and spewing hatred at every turn. These are the functionally deaf among us for whom reasoned conversation is outside their audible range. One can only conclude that they are either pathological racists or just nitwits incapable of directing the source of their woe begotten existence.
If Barack Obama’s name was Rocky Alabama and he looked like Joe the Plummer much of the vitriol would go away. It may well be that all the rancor is the rant of a lynch mob, noose at the ready.
When will civility return to our national discourse? When will the slumbering underserved population align themselves with a government ready to reach out?
Monday, March 22, 2010
God, Julian And Apple Pie
We arrived in Julian after an arduous 4 hour drive with mirages of their famous apple pie in our head. Julian is a destination for those of us who regard hot apple pie as a religious experience.
Thank you Jeeeez, Yahweh’s in the crust, and pie Allah mode.
It takes some special skill to wander into what must be the only restaurant in town with no apple pie on the menu. This is a town of bountiful appetites. The leftovers on my plate contained enough food to feed the Mormon Tabernacle Choir but as any glutton can tell you there’s always room for a slice of apple pie. We had come this far; made the pilgrimage to Americana to worship at the altar of the almighty apple.
We then moseyed across the street and found the Julian Café & Bakery. The menu reminded us that there was “no freedom in a godless world.” Was this their way of saying that they reserve the right to refuse to serve their sanctified pie to anyone but the properly ordained? Too much piety in the pie for my taste.
The fake flowers which sprouted at every turn and the seventeen frilly pillows on the bed of the Gold Rush B&B should have been a warning. When we left town the next morning Peggy suggested we pick up some Godly Julian apples at the market. I was told that the apple harvest was long gone and they only carried regular apples brought in from godless places.
Do you mean that the pie I ate last night wasn’t from home-grown apples?
Yup!
God was in evidence as we headed down the 4000 feet grade onto the Anza Borrego desert floor which ends 235 feet below sea level at the Salton Sea. The drop is spectacular with the green rolling mountains of the Cleveland National Forest almost close enough to touch. The landscape looked like the skin of an immense mastodon.
Wildflowers were seen along the side of the road but not in great profusion as we had seen poppy fields in the Antelope Valley a few years ago. Lupine and desert Lily strut their stuff as well as the red blossoms of Ocotillo and Brittlebush.
Too late for the apples and too early for the desert flowers that bloom in the Spring, Tra La, we got our reward in the unexpected as we drove through the Borrego Badlands, the most un-earthly geological site I have yet witnessed. As far as could be seen were canyons, caves, sunken mesas and corrugated hills dating back 1.6 million years. This was the receiving basin of the ancient Colorado River, the best place in North America to view sediments of the Pliocene and Pleistocene age.
For all this I bow my head in awe. The Badlands don’t get any better. It could be God's address.
Thank you Jeeeez, Yahweh’s in the crust, and pie Allah mode.
It takes some special skill to wander into what must be the only restaurant in town with no apple pie on the menu. This is a town of bountiful appetites. The leftovers on my plate contained enough food to feed the Mormon Tabernacle Choir but as any glutton can tell you there’s always room for a slice of apple pie. We had come this far; made the pilgrimage to Americana to worship at the altar of the almighty apple.
We then moseyed across the street and found the Julian Café & Bakery. The menu reminded us that there was “no freedom in a godless world.” Was this their way of saying that they reserve the right to refuse to serve their sanctified pie to anyone but the properly ordained? Too much piety in the pie for my taste.
The fake flowers which sprouted at every turn and the seventeen frilly pillows on the bed of the Gold Rush B&B should have been a warning. When we left town the next morning Peggy suggested we pick up some Godly Julian apples at the market. I was told that the apple harvest was long gone and they only carried regular apples brought in from godless places.
Do you mean that the pie I ate last night wasn’t from home-grown apples?
Yup!
God was in evidence as we headed down the 4000 feet grade onto the Anza Borrego desert floor which ends 235 feet below sea level at the Salton Sea. The drop is spectacular with the green rolling mountains of the Cleveland National Forest almost close enough to touch. The landscape looked like the skin of an immense mastodon.
Wildflowers were seen along the side of the road but not in great profusion as we had seen poppy fields in the Antelope Valley a few years ago. Lupine and desert Lily strut their stuff as well as the red blossoms of Ocotillo and Brittlebush.
Too late for the apples and too early for the desert flowers that bloom in the Spring, Tra La, we got our reward in the unexpected as we drove through the Borrego Badlands, the most un-earthly geological site I have yet witnessed. As far as could be seen were canyons, caves, sunken mesas and corrugated hills dating back 1.6 million years. This was the receiving basin of the ancient Colorado River, the best place in North America to view sediments of the Pliocene and Pleistocene age.
For all this I bow my head in awe. The Badlands don’t get any better. It could be God's address.
Friday, March 19, 2010
Life On The Cusp
Life On The Cusp
With my life half over now I feel it’s time to get off the cusp. How much longer to I need to equivocate between Aries and Pisces? I’m ready to either swim or do whatever it is that rams do.
All these years I’ve been a fish out of water flapping for breath, only half on land mingling with the golden fleece. It’s been an amphibious life, out of the wet, finding my legs to sheepdom yet straying from the herd.
This may account for my preference for un-matched socks or why I keep seeing re-runs of The Agony and The Ecstasy and The Bad and The Beautiful.
Ambiguity is my default position, is that clear? Keats wrote about his version of living on the cusp. He called it Negative Capability; a comfort with uncertainty and doubt without reaching for facts, reason and resolution. When I come face to face with the inexplicable I know I’m getting close to truth.
In an early poem I wrote about friends who went off with Jim Jones I had a line, Dying begins when doubt is forbidden. Lose doubt and you lose your autonomy. When you have to check your autonomy at the front door you are doomed. And so they were.
As for ambivalence I feel strongly both ways. Baaah as in humbug is the way I might lean on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Then sharpen my battering horns in the other direction on Tuesday and Thursday. Cusp-people reserve the right to make U-turns, even cross double yellow lines in their reversal.
Come to think of it I withdraw my petition to get off the cusp. And what better time to sprout than at the vernal equinox when the sun is directly overhead on its way over North America and day and night equipoised?
I’ll continue to straddle the Zodiac; half-splashing around in earth’s aquarium and half-woolly as in the mammoth who roamed and rammed until the big ice came and then finally melted under the stars all Piscied and Aried. Who am I to question the choreography of constellations?
With my life half over now I feel it’s time to get off the cusp. How much longer to I need to equivocate between Aries and Pisces? I’m ready to either swim or do whatever it is that rams do.
All these years I’ve been a fish out of water flapping for breath, only half on land mingling with the golden fleece. It’s been an amphibious life, out of the wet, finding my legs to sheepdom yet straying from the herd.
This may account for my preference for un-matched socks or why I keep seeing re-runs of The Agony and The Ecstasy and The Bad and The Beautiful.
Ambiguity is my default position, is that clear? Keats wrote about his version of living on the cusp. He called it Negative Capability; a comfort with uncertainty and doubt without reaching for facts, reason and resolution. When I come face to face with the inexplicable I know I’m getting close to truth.
In an early poem I wrote about friends who went off with Jim Jones I had a line, Dying begins when doubt is forbidden. Lose doubt and you lose your autonomy. When you have to check your autonomy at the front door you are doomed. And so they were.
As for ambivalence I feel strongly both ways. Baaah as in humbug is the way I might lean on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Then sharpen my battering horns in the other direction on Tuesday and Thursday. Cusp-people reserve the right to make U-turns, even cross double yellow lines in their reversal.
Come to think of it I withdraw my petition to get off the cusp. And what better time to sprout than at the vernal equinox when the sun is directly overhead on its way over North America and day and night equipoised?
I’ll continue to straddle the Zodiac; half-splashing around in earth’s aquarium and half-woolly as in the mammoth who roamed and rammed until the big ice came and then finally melted under the stars all Piscied and Aried. Who am I to question the choreography of constellations?
Thursday, March 18, 2010
The Permanence Of Change
It has taken me 77 years to become 77 and it's become a cliche among my friends to regard our lifetime as witness to the most astonishing changes in human history. Here's the question: Have these past 77 years been all that or did those who exited this world 77 years ago feel the same way about their 77 years and so on? Consider the fine run they had, having been born in 1856.
They marveled at telephones, electricity and its many offspring, movies, cars, planes. Slavery, gone. suffrage, universal, Indians, ethnically cleansed. The greatest migration of people from one continent to another. Freud, Marx, Einstein, Whitman, Darwin, Joyce, Babe Ruth, Charlie Chaplin and Picasso. Coca Cola, Olympic Games, Nobel Prize, World's Fair, World War, God, dead then making a comeback, jazz, antiseptics, aspirin, pasteurized milk and lawn mowers.
How could anyone live through all this and not be rattled and raptured? Both inscape and landscaped so thoroughly ushered into a new land.
Or consider this imagined year-end letter written by a Chinese youngster circa 200 BC.
It is a great time to be alive here in Xian province. Papa’s oxen furrow our field pulling a new marvel called plow. Emperor Han’s doctors have mapped our bodies; blood rivers like the Yangtze, run inside our village leader, neither to be clotted nor spilled. Papyrus has given way to paper but we have no word yet for these many wonders. Some write the ideogram of body leaping. Kites have come to our town. Paper birds fashioned with whistles bring music over rice paddies. We are blessed by the wind’s thousand lutes. Some denounce sudden change but Grandfather’s wisdom is always new. We have made room for brother Wu’s bride, now living under our roof. The cut worm welcomes the plow and multiplies.
Maybe everyone has been awed by the changed landscape during his/her lifespan. Have we been changed accordingly? Ah, the subject for another day.
They marveled at telephones, electricity and its many offspring, movies, cars, planes. Slavery, gone. suffrage, universal, Indians, ethnically cleansed. The greatest migration of people from one continent to another. Freud, Marx, Einstein, Whitman, Darwin, Joyce, Babe Ruth, Charlie Chaplin and Picasso. Coca Cola, Olympic Games, Nobel Prize, World's Fair, World War, God, dead then making a comeback, jazz, antiseptics, aspirin, pasteurized milk and lawn mowers.
How could anyone live through all this and not be rattled and raptured? Both inscape and landscaped so thoroughly ushered into a new land.
Or consider this imagined year-end letter written by a Chinese youngster circa 200 BC.
It is a great time to be alive here in Xian province. Papa’s oxen furrow our field pulling a new marvel called plow. Emperor Han’s doctors have mapped our bodies; blood rivers like the Yangtze, run inside our village leader, neither to be clotted nor spilled. Papyrus has given way to paper but we have no word yet for these many wonders. Some write the ideogram of body leaping. Kites have come to our town. Paper birds fashioned with whistles bring music over rice paddies. We are blessed by the wind’s thousand lutes. Some denounce sudden change but Grandfather’s wisdom is always new. We have made room for brother Wu’s bride, now living under our roof. The cut worm welcomes the plow and multiplies.
Maybe everyone has been awed by the changed landscape during his/her lifespan. Have we been changed accordingly? Ah, the subject for another day.
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