Category Archives: Entertainment

One may find, not twenty feet apart, these plagues located not far from the Waldorf Astoria (undergoing renovation) on the street facing the south end of Central Park.  So high culture and popular culture meet at street level. 

 

 
Since my last visit a huge pile of dirt—as well as big yellow tractors—has appeared in my former parking lot.

 

Brother Dan’s language ability continues to return.  He wrote the following interesting email:

El Bros-

I had an interesting view of the dreaming. From 6 O’clock I had a dream, it was nonsense in nature. I woke up when I screwed the bottle back on itself, and there was much fuzziness about that.

Brother Steve reports via email:

my head feels like a ton of bricks…..did not go to visit again at the hospital, what with coughing and sneezing all over the place….might have caught the cold in that freezing emergency room anyway…..so today I’m going to just rest as much as possible…..will have to go out sometime to buy chicken soup and some kind of cold remedy…..the good thing is I’m off work until Wednesday, so maybe I’ll be better by then…..

That’s the Manhattan skyline from the freeway headed towards JFK.

So we left the hotel at 7 am ECT and arrived in SB at about 3 WCT. That’s a long travel day, about 11 hours by my reckoning but we had no untoward or extended delays.

This morning I woke wide awake at 5 am.  That would have been 8 am ECT.  Apparently my interior biological clock was in the process of resetting itself.  This interior clock is a pretty amazing thing; mine is very accurate.  I would like to know more about how it works.

While in Manhattan, received an email that Joan had to be removed from the Villas to the hospital.  The doctor thought stroke, but now they believe pneumonia.  Brother Steve reported via email:

went by and looked in on J…..nothing much new…..no test results back from the urine sample, but the nurse says there is some kind of infection obvious….she asked that I pass along info to the family, so that they don’t get too many phone calls….J has a phone in her room, but they say she needs rest as much as anything….so she will be in Palomar for an unknown number of days, until her lungs are clear….and then back to the Villas, where her bed is being held for her…..she was more coherent today than yesterday, hence nastier today than yesterday…..in other words, not much new

Below the Manhattan skyline is hardly visible as an irregular black line at the very bottom of the snap.

Well, the talk is over, and it went well.  Last year, we—Len and Joanne Podis and I—had 30 to 35 people in the room and this year 50 to 55.  People were standing.  We have no idea why especially since we were up against the talk of the woman who wrote bastard out of Carolina.  Joanne thought maybe people came because we had one of a very few interesting titles for our talk…”Dude! Where’s My Voice: Identity, Language and the Working Class Writing Instructor.”  I think Len and Joanne had thought too that this would be the last time we presented together.  But in light of the surprising turnout we decided to think about putting together another panel for next year.  I am in charge of coming up with an idea.

 We had a lot of laughs in our session.  We want to keep the humor, the more personal approach and say something further about the working class teacher/student issues.

We ate way too much today.

 M n’ M’s seem to be taking over the Times Square area.

Spent the day on airplanes, to arrive, exhausted in NY, NY at about 5 east coast time.  It’s now ten east coast time but Carol and I are still in west coast time, so it’s just seven here.

We ate at Virgil’s Barbeque, excellent greens, cheese grits, macaroni and cheese—Carol had bbque brisket.  I had fried chicken. Turns out Virgil’s is just a half a block from Times Square. 

See picture.

Also they had a huge screen with a huge M and M on it, so I took a picture of that too.

 Tomorrow, I will truck over to the MOMA and observe some pictures.  And probably I’ll go walk across the Brooklyn Bridge. 

I didn’t always curse up a storm.  As I reported, when I first told my parents to “got to hell,” I got my mouth soaped up.  That’s a pretty literalistic way of telling a kid not to develop a dirty mouth, but it worked for me for a good while.  Except “fool,” one day I called somebody a “fool” and the old lady snapped at me and said I shouldn’t call anybody a fool because it says in the Bible if you call one of your brethren a “fool” you will go to hell.  I hadn’t heard that one so I said where was it in the Bible which was a mistake since she accused me of talking back, being insolent and so forth.  So I went to look it up myself, but with no luck since as you may have noted many Bibles don’t have an index.

But it’s there all right:

But I tell you that anyone who is angry with his brother will be subject to judgment. Again, anyone who says to his brother, ‘Raca, ‘ is answerable to the Sanhedrin. But anyone who says, ‘You fool!’ will be in danger of the fire of hell.

That’s from Matthew and I have no idea what that “Raca” is.

For a long time, I didn’t curse and was pretty proud of myself too.  But one day maybe I was in the fifth or sixth grade, I remember the occasion pretty clearly, I was up at the elementary school sitting in the cool of the shade and watching other little boys my age playing a game of touch football and cursing up a storm.  It was goddamn this and goddamn that!  And fuck you!  And up yours!  Asshole!  And go fuck yourself!

And I remember thinking I wasn’t like those bad little boys since I didn’t use dirty words but, cursed as I am with introspection, I really didn’t like the idea that I was so prim and proper and a regular goody two-shoes.  And I went on like that inside for a while between being a good little boy and being a regular goody two shoes, and after going on at this inward struggle for a bit, I just said fuck it.  I guess you could say I just gave into peer pressure, but if I did, I did it thoughtfully and not without agnoizing over it.

Not that I went on some sort of cursing rampage.  No, what I had decided was that cursing didn’t make a person bad.  But after a while I accustomed myself to fuck this and fuck that, and my father, when it came to cursing, was a pretty good role model since he cursed all the fucking time, most especially, he liked to say goddamnmotherfuckingsonofabitch.  He also liked to say, well kiss my rusty red bunny.  Which was his socially acceptable way of saying kiss my ass, though what that has to do with a bunny, and a rusty red one at that, I don’t know.  He also liked to go bleed his whistle which meant take a leak or piss.

So I had a pretty good source of off color pungency right in the house and I didn’t have to go far in my neighorhood to meet kids who used fuck like a punctuation mark, as in, “Fuck me, but I am so fucking tired I fucked up and didn’t fucking bring that fucking essay.  But who the fuck cares.  I certainly fucking don’t.”

And of course the biggest fucking foul mouth of all was this guy on the basketball team whose father was a minister.

For a long time, as an adult, I didn’t remember my dreams.  And when I did they were really grim affairs.  Anxiety dreams that just went on and on repeating themselves.  I was always going somewhere and I was late or I was on the wrong street, or in the wrong town or city.  And on top of that I was late.  These would go on for a long time.  Repeating themselves.  The one I liked least was I would be down in something like the bowels of a ship going up this stairs and down that one and on and on like a mouse in a vertical maze.  That dream just tired me out.

 I also had the teeth falling out dream.  I called it the Chickletts dream.  Because my teeth looked like Chickletts in my hand once they had fallen out. 

But when I was a really little kid, before five maybe, I had a couple of dreams which if I remembered them during the day made me feel warm inside.  One was a flying dream.  I would be flying along in the forest and without thinking about it I would swing this way or that and miss this or that tree and if I came to a cliff I did not fall, but flew straight down the face of the cliff and then flew again a foot or two above the ground.

I enjoyed this dream a lot; it’s a dream of having great and magical powers.  Most little ones have that inside them, but in my case, my parent’s beat that out of me pretty quickly.  Well, they didn’t beat it out so much as beat it down and under.  If you are lucky, you get gradually weaned from the idea that you have magical powers so that you are able slowly to adjust and adapt to the loss of those magical powers.  But if they don’t get out this way and get pushed down, you go through life as an adult feeling like shit because way deep down there in the unconscious you still feel as if you have magical powers, but as an adult you are not living up to those powers.  You can’t fly and you never will.

Winston Churchill was walking across a bridge one day and there was the top of a tree not far from the bridge.  So he jumped, like he could fly, or something and almost killed himself from the fall.  He turned out to be a man with near magical powers.

The other one was about money.  I would be walking along and I would notice a penny, and then another penny, and then a dime, and a quarter and so on, a trail of money in the forest, and sometimes I would dig in the earth and find a whole cache of coins.  But most frequently the trail of money would lead to a kind of hole at the base of a tree and I would dig around in the leaves in the base of that tree and unearth whole handfuls of coins.

I guess this dream is about being lucky and striking it rich.  But there’s something about that hole in the base of the tree that reminds me of an anus.  So maybe the dream is about turds. Freud says the kid’s first gift is a turd.  Some kids in fact upon first going to the bathroom pick up their turds and take them back to mom or dad and say, Look Mommie what I have done.  Our turds are our first really big production; the first thing we make all on our own.  So if a little kid ever walks up to you with a turd and says, look what I have done, don’t yell, you fucking little perverted monster get that shit out of here.  Instead, admire the shit for a little bit, and then instruct the little one on the toilet’s flushing function.

But certainly I was most powerfully influenced by stories from the Bible, especially the Old Testament.  I still think about these and over the years have written a couple of cheerful attempts at blasphemy.

An idea for one such story came to me as I was driving along a few days ago feeling mildly depressed.  I call it:

The True Story of Jonah and the Whale:  As Told By Jonah

 If you have the time you might also want to check out an informal lecture by Doctor Peter Pedanticus, PhD (or PP as he is known by his friends):

“What’s the Big Deal About the Pelvis:  Or: Re-probing Evolutionary Theory

Very little, if any, knowledge of evolutionary theory is required to grasp PP’s major point.  I have made no attempt to imitate PP either as I have no idea what he sounds like.

I have never been one to arrange social outings.  But a couple or three times with movies, I did.  I got together some guys and we went to see this movie I had read a review or two about.  Afterwards, I was the only guy standing up and shouting Bravo! Bravo!  Heck, maybe 30 people were in the theatre so nobody really noticed.  

Bravo! Bravo, I went for Clint Eastwood in a Fistful of Dollars just released in the USA in 1967.  I had trilled with every scene.  A breakthrough, I said, of revolutionary proportions; the Western would never be the same again and good riddance to bad rubbish.  No more John Wayne sanctimonious moral fable shit.  This was the Western stripped down to its core.  Ugly men, in an ugly, greed ridden town, killing each other quite liberally and graphically.

 Call it nihilistic.  I wouldn’t have minded back then.  But mostly it was incredibly macho in an absurdist way.  Aside from a kind of half-assed plot line about the man with no name protecting a woman, women don’t play a part in it.  Romance in the western was always damn awkward anyway, and quite unbelievable if John Wayne was doing it since the man walked like he had a pole up his asshole.  But Clint was macho in the mode of the maxed out, stay out of my face, I hate authority and the human race more generally, loner.

 People said Eastwood was a fascist, anti-flower power, and a woman hater to top it all off.  I didn’t think so really.  Maybe because I never was really pro-flower power.  When push came to shove people would hit each other.  I had learned that pretty early and was scared of the prospect.  Hell, I liked Dirty Harry too.  

My other outing of this kind was none too successful partly because we had to drive to get there in my 1950 Plymouth with the bad brakes that needed to be pumped every time I needed to stop.  This was quite hair raising.  Also the movie this time was Warhol’s Chelsea Girls.  Once again I had read a review and talked some guys into going.  Hell, I said, a movie like this comes around only once in ten years, and when you are old you can tell your kids you saw it.

As I recollect that movie was fucking 3 hours long; hell it was 6 hours long because Chelsea Girls was experimental and had two movies running right next to each other on the same screen, or maybe they were one movie.  I don’t care.  It looked like two.  Most of the time you didn’t know which one to watch or if it was worth watching either one. And most of the time, the two movies didn’t have anything at all to do with each other.  It didn’t seem to be about anything in particular.  Just a bunch of fucking weirdoes talking about something and shooting up.  I remember particularly one big hefty gal who would drop her drawers and throw her needle into her buttock like it was a dart going into a dartboard. 

Guys started getting antsy, but be damned if I would leave.  Once I had paid for a movie be damned if I was going to walk out.  So we stuck out the whole thing and now we are old enough to tell our children and our grand children about it.  Not that they would give a shit.  Most of them haven’t even seen the Godfather.