Dr. Metablog

P. S. 217 Graduating Class: June, 1952

On your left is the official photograph of the 1952 P. S. 217 eighth grade graduating class, contributed by a classmate who now teaches in Brazil. (Click to enlarge). It's quite the time capsule, isn't it -- the dated costumes, the old-fashioned hairstyles, along with the clean-cut and dewy enthusiasm of far-away-and-long-ago youth. What has become of these promising young people? Some of them have long since left the planet and some are no doubt still engaged in distinguished careers. Do any of them still live in the old neighborhood?  Sent their children or grandchildren to the old school?   

A panel of experts has tentatively identified some of the graduates. Some of these ascriptions are sure to be inaccurate. Corrections, suggestions and comments are very welcome. 

First row, left to right:  Carl Bernstein, Robert F. Cohen (now Robert C. Forst, attorney, Montecito, CA), Michael Silver (ret. stockbroker, Queens), unknown, Nicholas Antonucci (said to have died in Korea), Arne Neilson, unknown, unknown, William Roberts, unknown, George Coven (entrepreneur, owner of Score Oil and Zodiac nightclub, d. 1983), Ralph Tromba, supposedly living in steamy Florida, Theodore (Teddy) Schorr;  second row: Ira Bernstein, Bernard Sandigorsky, Anthony (Buddy) Sogluizzo (semi-retired from a career in librarianship), Elihu Pearlman (Boulder, Colorado), Helene Rosen, unknown, Harold Jacobson, Fred Ljubicich, Donald Carbone, Michael Brody;  third row: unknown, unknown, Claire Rabinowitz (now Claire Maret, formerly Dominican Republic, now Orlando), Charlotte Meineke, Carol Gerber, Marlene Gold, Ruth Rubinstein, Eleanor Troy, Sheila Katz, Carol Coniglio, Barbara Heiferman, Maureen Haynes, two unknowns, Josephine Casalino, two unknowns, Mary Anne Abrahams, Sandra Abrahams;  fourth row:  unknown, Beryl McLeod, Sandra Roseman, unknown, unknown, Karen Scheer, Jeanne Boyce, Barbara Dinner, Bridget Pugliese, unknown, Marjorie Rennick, Selma Schnier, unknown, Wendy Rosenberg, Mimi Shyko, Barbara Wolowitz, Evelyn and/or Norma Greenberg, two unknowns, Rochelle Yasser, unknown, Beverley Leventhal, Lori Katcher (now Laurie Lindner, psychoanalyst, NJ), two unknowns, Hilda Tarud;  fifth row: Herbie Wessoly aka Percy Wessoly, Albie Luongo, Donald Schiebel, Daniel Roos (Prof at MIT), Tommy Bellavita, John McKay, unknown, Robert Goldstein (retired orthodontist, now of Asheville, NC),  Alan Ihrig, Lester Silberman (ret NE ob/gyn), Harvey Greif, Melvin Polay (CPA, died 1996) Howard Nirenberg, Morton Kamienny, Eric Sanders, Herbert Damsky, unknown, unknown, Melvyn Krauss, Martin Wallenstein;  sixth row: Anne Perkins, Linda Bly, seven unknowns, Pauline Aridas, Estelle Tarman, Lisa Pomerance (finance, LA), Phyllis Mancuso, Roberta Katcher, four unknowns, Marcia and/or Virginia Gargiulo, unknown, Evelyn Fleishner, unknown; seventh row: Stuart Blickstein (now a South Carolinian), Allen Guday (longtime Israeli), Paul Citron, Stuart (Sandy) Stillman (atty, Southampton and Scottsdale), Donald Caress (MD), Carl Sprung, Norman Young, Jonathan Guliner, Michael O'Gorman, Stephen Lewin (ret from a career in publishing), Edwin Lawlor, unknown, George Molinari, Allan Stern, Robert Jaclin, unknown, Fredric Litto (Prof in Brazil), Fred Hohl, Richard Schwartz, Stephen Richard Conn (Cornell grad; deceased); eighth row:  two unknowns, Judith Peretzman, Norma Harris, Diane Wert, two unknowns, Dolores Bormann, Rosalind Simons, unknown, Loretta Tillman; top row:  Alfred Podhurst, Michael Welch, unknown, Ira Blum, Herman Bressel (USN ret, Long Beach, CA), Norman Kaufman, unknown, unknown, unknown, Kenneth Tucker aka Drupiloff, Gary Steinberg, Charles Gillen.  

May 14, 2008.  More names of members of this class have been recovered.  They can be found at this site,  Match the name to the face and win the eternal gratitude of your classmates.

News from Alameda

We’re in Alameda, California, for ten days, visiting the grandchildren and also their parents. The big news here is that the Alameda public schools are in a money crunch. The root cause is Proposition 13, the granddaddy of pernicious tax-limiting amendments (we have one in Colorado, too -- it’s paralyzed us).  The immediate precipitant of the Alameda crisis is Governor Schwarzenegger’s plan to balance the budget by cutting brazillions of dollars out of the education budget.  Public-spirited citizens in the island city have responded by proposing a supplementary “parcel tax”  -- most people say property tax – of $120 per "parcel" of real estate to help the school district survive these dark days.  To me, the tax supplement is an imperfect but obvious fix.  Public schools must be supported, and if the state shirks its responsibility, local effort must ride to the rescue. 

There’s the usual testy opposition:  too much fat in the budget; teachers are overpaid; school board is incompetent; bad planning.  I know enough about public education's lean diet not to be swayed.

What gets my goat is that some of the arguments against the supplement are just plain mean.  Here’s an example.  A local curmudgeon named Guy Smith has written a guest opinion in the Alameda Journal under the heading:  “Make Parents Pay for Child’s Education,” His gist:  “It is no longer appropriate to tax childless homes for public education.”  And also:  people who support such taxes suffer from “collectivist mentalities."

And here I thought that the American constitution had in its preamble a phrase about promoting the “general" and not just the individual welfare.  No doubt  Mr. Smith would stigmatize Madison and Jefferson as early collectivists.

The argument that the childless need not contribute to education is flimsy  -- so slight that it’s hard to believe that it’s argued in good faith and is not just a rationale for skinflintism.  Does Mr. Smith think that he shouldn’t pay for the fire department or the police department, except on the days that he happens to use them?

Does he think that he doesn’t profit from the educational system because he has no children in school.  He can read and write. Did he teach himself?  He’s sitting at a computer, designed by someone with an education.  His chair and his table and his coffee and the cup out of which he drinks his coffee were designed or planned or imported or constructed or distributed by people who could read and write and figure.  Take away the learning of his predecessors and members of his own age-cohort and Mr. Smith would be out there chasing squirrels with a flint hand-ax. And whining about the cost of the clan-supplied flint. 

The essence of  Mr. Smith’s argument is selfish and narcissistic  -- “I’ve got mine – you take care of  yourself.”   It’s shallow, vulgar libertarianism.

It's a shame that these nay sayers need to by reminded that we’re all in this together.  We’re interconnected -- a tissue of tessellations.

Even  Mr. Smith must know, deep in his heart, that when he promotes the general welfare, he improves his own lot.  In fact, the parcel tax will be the best investment he’ll ever make. 

A Parable for Teachers of Writing

My good friend Professor L---- is an eminent scholar of American literature and an upstanding  teacher at the University of C------.  A few months ago, Professor L ------ told me the following story.  I repeat it unvarnished and unadorned -- a curious but instructive anecdote from the trenches of learning.

Some years ago, on the last day of the semester, a student approached my friend and gushed:  "Oh Professor L-----, I just want to tell you what a great course this was, and what a great teacher you are.  I learned so much. Especially about writing.  I really really appreciated all the thoughtful comments you made on my papers.  You were so helpful.  I feel like I've made a great deal of progress with my writing.  I have just one question.  Why do you always write "frog," "frog," "frog" all over the margins of my essays?"

This anecdote raises a number of questions.  The most obvious:  if the student thought that Professor L ----- was afflicted with some sort of obscure batrachian obsession, why didn't she raise the point with him or with the proper medical authorities?  Poor child, she must have been both mystified and intimidated.

However, it's not the student but the teacher who should profit from this parable.  Here are a few of its many moralia.

If you're a teacher of writing, don't assume that any student knows the difference between a sentence and a fragment.  Or even knows that there is such a thing as a fragment.   Don't assume that just because you have written something that you think is helpful in the margin of an essay that therefore a student a) reads it, b) understands it) or c) profits from it.  Even more important:  don't imagine that enthusiastic praise from a middling student has the slightest value -- it's simple vanity to think so.  In fact, better not to build any structure, however slight, on a foundation of student regard. 

And finally: mind your minims.

What We Read in the Fifties: Mutiny on the Bounty

Aficionados of this blague will remember that Dr. M. occasionally revisits books that were notorious in the days of his unnaturally elongated adolescence. Here’s a small sample of the novels that Dr. M has reported upon: I the Jury, King Solomon's Mines, The Caine Mutiny, Blackboard Jungle, The Amboy Dukes, Lord of the Flies, Catcher in the Rye, Scaramouche. It’s quite the roster, isn't it, of time-sensitive material.

Some of these novels have worn astonishingly well. Others are merely astonishing: what in the world could I (or the drab Eisenhower-era sensibility, for that matter) have possibly found worthwhile in most of these colossally dated and inartistic fictions?

To extend my anti-nostalgia, I’ve now tackled, for the first time in more than fifty years, a novel that enthralled the heck out of me. It’s Nordhoff and Hall’s Mutiny on the Bounty, first published in 1932 but widely read at least through the 1950s. Why was I so infatuated? Certainly not because of the novelists’ skill. The story of the tyrannical Captain Bligh, the Byronic rebel Fletcher Christian, the mutiny, the open boat, and the settlement of Pitcairn offered the opportunity to engage all the important themes: family, power, sex and love, religion, sanity, rebellion, technology, colonialism and cultural conflict. But N and H fell far miles short of the mark – not only did they write gawky sentences, but they also left gaping holes in the plot, created disappointingly shallow characters, and failed to explore the opportunities for thoughtful commentary. The novel is swift and superficial and clumsy.  It’s not for all time; it’s for the supermarket checkout stand.

Nevertheless, there’s little mystery why the novel captured this Brooklynites's youthful fancy. What adolescent would demand artistry from a novel that is awash with exoticism, romance, and sex?

Let us consider the following piece of reheated anthropological observation.  Midshipman Byam (the story is cunningly told through the eyes of a juvenile narrator) attends a Tahitian entertainment at which young women perform a dance “believed by the Indians (i.e. Tahitians) to ensure the fertility of the crops.”

The dress of the dancers consisted of no more than a wreath of flowers and green leaves about their waists, and the dance itself, in which they stood in two lines of three, face to face, was of a nature so unbelievably wanton that no words could convey the least idea of it.

“No more than a wreath of flowers about their waists?”  Does that mean…?  Holy smoke.  “Unbelievably wanton?"  Exactly how wanton is that?  What in the censorious world did these young ladies actually do?  They didn’t…?   No, they couldn't. “No words could convey….” 

What openings did N and H leave to be filled by an inexperienced but lascivious imagination!

And how does Midshipman Byam deal with such provocations?  Good luck for him as well as for all the randy young readers who identified with his circumstances.  Byam takes as his eager concubine a young Tahitian woman.  “Slenderly and strongly made, in the first bloom of young womanhood, and with her magnificent dark hair unbound, Maimiti made a picture worth traveling far to behold.”

OK, so I fell for it.  Sure it was contrived and manipulative.  But I was thirteen or so years old, living in concrete, subwayed, bepigeoned Flatbush where young ladies danced not in wreaths of flowers but in stiff and forbidding crinolines.  Exactly how many fertility ceremonies had I attended?  I was exoticism-deprived.

I’m just slightly embarrassed to admit that I did not just read Mutiny on the Bounty and call it a day.  Not at all.  Instead, I read everything that I could find about Bligh and Christian and Pitcairn Island and even about Norfolk Island, where the mutineers relocated after Pitcairn became overpopulated.  I became something of an expert on the geography of these islands. I also took to reading about nineteenth-century sailing vessels, and though an arrant land-lubber, I could accurately, in those days, define taffrail, yardarm, orlop, lanyard, hawse-hole, gimbal, lanyard, poop, mizzen.

Nor was it all erotic displacement.  Although I began with Nordhoff and Hall, I later read Cook and Bouganville and eventually moved on to the writings of Mead and Malinowski and others in that pioneering generation of anthropologists.  Of course I didn't understand or have long forgotten much of what I read  -- but neither Maimiti "with magnificent dark hair unbound" nor that unbelievably wanton ceremony ever entirely evaporated from my susceptible, impressionable young brain. 

The Kent Theater/ Sex

I can't recommend Marion Meade's The Unruly Life of Woody Allen (New York, 2000), which I too hastily snatched off the library shelf. Written at the tabloid height of the Woody-Mia-Soon-yi fracas, it masquerades as a biography but in truth it's nothing more than scandalmongery.   

Before it gets down in the dirt, however, Unruly Life offers a quick summary of Allen’s life, a matter of which I was largely ignorant. Of course I knew that Allen was a Brooklyn boy who grew up in the old neighborhood.  Allen Koenigsberg attended P. S. 99 on East 10 Street near Avenue K (where my cousin Louie was also a student).  In addition, I knew, from Louie, that P. S. 99's principal was Eudora Fletcher and that, in the very inventive chameleon movie, Woody gave Ms. Fletcher's name to the psychiatrist who takes Zelig under her wing. 

But cousin Louie did not know, or did not bother to tell me, that Allen was a frequent patron of the Kent Theater on Coney Island Avenue and that it's rumored that it was at the Kent that the interior scenes in The Purple Rose of Cairo were filmed.  I've seen Purple Rose recently and if it wasn't the Kent, it sure looks like the Kent of my memory.  The Kent, along with its sister theater, the Leader, was one of my own childhood haunts.  In fact, it was my father’s aunt Manya, substitute cashier, who sometimes sat in the box office and took my quarter.   

It was not at the Kent but at the Jewel Theater on Kings Highway that Allen encountered Ingmar Bergman for the first time.  Well, not exactly Bergman himself.  It was Harriet Andersson disrobing in Summer with Monika that seems to have caught Allen's attention.  Unruly Life reports that Allen sat “with eyes bulging” to watch this and other early Bergman films. 

Allen’s protruding orbs brought to mind the impact that those shocking 1950s Scandinavian films had on the days of my early adolescence. It was at the Kent (aunt Manya must not have been on duty that day) that I once watched a Danish film in which there was a very brief flash of a woman in naked silhouette.  All I can remember is that I sat through to watch the picture again -- it might even have been a double feature -- and that by the time the silhouette appeared a second time, my poor bladder was so swollen (I was afraid to leave my seat for fear of missing the moment) that it was about to rupture.  How embarrassing it would have been to die of an aneurysm of the urinary tract simply to catch a glimpse of Harriet Andersson or one of her friends. 

In the 1950s, naked bodies were simply not on view.  Never at all, at least not in my slice of the universe.  I doubt that anyone from the post-Vietnam, post-sexual-revolution generation can imagine how nude-deprived were those severely repressed years.  Bodies, women's bodies, were so rare and mysterious that a brief and evanescent flash of shadowed skin, circa 1953, could remain in the memory for more than fifty years.

Which is why I retain the warmest feelings for Coney Island Avenue's Kent Theater.

Irene Nemirovsky's Fire in the Blood

Irene Nemirovsky's spare but luminous novella, Fire in the Blood, is set in an out-of-the-way French village a few years before the start of World War II.  Just as the plot is beginning to come to a boil, the author interjects an easy-to-overlook but very telling incident.  "A car full of Parisians arrived and stopped in front of the Hotel des Voyaguers. 'It's so quiet,' one woman said."  The automobile and its condescending passengers soon drive on and Nemirovsky, speaking through her narrator, offers her readership a few words of guidance:  "How many peaceful sleepy places they'll drive through tonight, how many sleepy villages.... They'll pass silent sombre country estates and will not begin to imagine the dark secret life within -- a life they will never come to know." 

In Fire in the Blood, Nemirovky's subject is Issy-l'Eveque and its "dark secret life."  As it turns out, there is as much mystery and passion in this corner of rural Burgundy as in Paris or any other modern metropolis.  In fact, the yearnings and loves and jealousies and inhibitions of these patronized village folk soon achieve nothing less than tragic proportion.

Fire in the Blood resists easy classification. It's a satire, a novel of manners, a mystery, and also a romance. Nemirovsky manages to depict an entire society in little -- not only its ingrained customs, but the resistance to those customs.

Not to spoil the story, but here's the situation: unmarried old Uncle Sylvio, after many years abroad, has returned home to the village of his birth.  His upstanding young niece Colette marries a local miller named Jean Dorin.  A couple of years later, Jean Dorin falls into the river and drowns.  Uncle Silvio happens to know that his niece has been carrying on an affair and he also knows that her young lover has been visiting not just Colette but also Brigitte Declos, an attractive woman married to an elderly farmer.  From this beginning, the story takes a series of winding and unanticipated turns.  But Nemirovsky is not content merely to complicate the plot. Her quarry is larger:  it's the moral and psychological ramifications of Issy-l'Eveque's mysteries.  Indeed, the story, the plot ends thirty pages before the novel comes to a close, and revelations that at first seem like a coda became a climax. It's a little miracle that Nemirovsky has created a story that manages to be both a wicked satire of rural complacency and an exhortation to a more full life.      

I've now read Fire in the Blood twice, the second time with great care.  The novella was more intricate, more carefully plotted the second time than I had noticed or appreciated.  Unless I'm deceiving myself, this is one heck of a piece of writing.  I'm dazzled.

Irene Nemirovsky was thirty-nine years old when she was murdered at Auschwitz in 1942.  She wrote Fire in the Blood in 1940.  Thought to have been lost, the manuscript was discovered in an old valise and the novella published for the first time in 2007.

How many more stories might Nemirovksy have told?  How much more life might she have lived?   

What Happened at the County Assembly

At the precinct caucus last month, I was chosen to be a delegate to the county assembly.  The assembly is where we Dems nominate candidates for county-wide offices (and do a lot of other business, using procedures that are obscure to veterans and incomprehensible to first-time attendees).  Yesterday, we filled the Skyline High School auditorium with 1600 delegates, at least three-quarters of whom were young, impatient pro-Obama initiates.  It was exciting and even more chaotic than usual.

All of the local Dem incumbents were re-nominated without opposition, but there were some open and contested seats: a state senator, a university regent, and, the big one, a congressman (our longtime representative Mark Udall is making a run for the U. S. Senate).  And also the Clinton-Obama showdown, but that event wasn't held at the morning county assembly but reserved for the afternoon county convention, to which I was not credentialed.

I was in place at 7:15 A.M, handing out leaflets and stickers for Rollie Heath, a candidate whom I'm supporting for state senator.  Politicking inures you to rejection.  Some delegates for the other candidate, Cindy Carlisle, wouldn't accept my piece of paper; they acted as though it would compromise their integrity to read or even to touch my pamphlet.  Sometimes they were downright and inexcusably rude, even though we're all Dems and all in the same family.

The new attendees didn't seem to realize that before we could get to Obama, we had to carry out the business of local government.  I heard occasional grumbling and a lot of puzzlement and confusion.  But in compensation there were some rousing addresses:  Ken Salazar, our middle-of-the-road Senator, adapting to his audience, emphasized his liberal side.  I'm skeptical of Salazar, but better a centrist Democrat than a benighted Republican.

Eventually we voted.  The morning results were predictable.  My candidate for state office came in second but qualified for the party primary, which is in August.  The race will be a marathon.  But the good news is that whoever wins the nomination won't have a Republican opponent -- the other side is punting on state senator.  The Repubs are also surrending the congressional seat, where Fitz-Gerald won over Polis;  there will be a three-way Democratic primary (Shafroth is "not going the caucus route" but petitioning on -- I said that it's  complicated).

In the afternoon, Obama had a smashing 3-1 win over Clinton.

Here's the million-dollar question:  will the Obama enthusiasm carry over to the general election?  Will the young 'uns who turned out yesterday still be around in October to donate, to walk the precincts, stuff the envelopes, make the phone calls?  Or are they just in it for the glamor of the moment?  Colorado's now in play; it's a swing state.  We could go blue. But not unless Bush-disgust, Obama-love translates into weeks and months hard work.

My Campaign for City Council

It's election season once again. I'm thinking of making a run for city council in our progessive western town. Here's my new platform, voters.   

1.  NO LEAF BLOWERS.  Rationale: it's a horrible noisy unecological machine that can easily be replaced with a broom. And everyone knows that single-stroke engines are major polluters.

2.  ALL MALL PERFORMERS MUST BE JURIED. Rationale: no more off-key singing. No more bad juggling.  No more ugly balloon animals. No more noisy drummers or whining didgeredoos.

3.  EVERY RESTAURANT MUST KEEP A PIG. Rationale: a perfect. ecologically-sound solution to the waste food problem. Come to think of it, let's require a piggery of all institutions with lunchrooms, such as high schools and hospitals. Let's fatten up those porkers, turn them into bacon and savory spare ribs. 

4.  NO "HOLIDAY" LIGHTS. Rationale: waste of electricity and other scarce resources. Global warming. Bad taste. Bad theology. Bauble-olatry. 

5.  NEW ANNUAL HOLIDAY: Charles Darwin's birthday, February 12. Rationale: uncontroversial celebration of a great thinker. (I reject out of hand those extremists who propose to celebrate Darwin's birthday on December 25. I'm a uniter, not a divider.)

6.  NO MUSIC WRITTEN AFTER 1897. Rationale: obvious. Why 1897?  Death of Johannes Brahms. Also, no amplified music of any kind in an automobile that is audible outside the vehicle. Higher fines and jail terms hip hop and for excessively patriotic "country."   

7.  NO SMOKERS.  Rationale:  lung cancer, heart attacks, emphysema, ashes, disgusting odor, cigarette litter. Note: not "no smoking"-- "no smokers." No going outside of city limits to light up and then re-entering.

8.  NO VISIBLE TATTOOS. Why only "visible "tattoos?  Because whole-body inspections might be considered intrusive by squishy civil libertarians. Also, no nose rings, navel rings, or other bodily piercings. Except earrings. I rather like earrings. But no more than one per ear. 

9.  ANNUAL JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL PRAIRIE DOG SHOOT AND BARBECUE. Let them kids exercise their Second Amendment rights; eliminate them pesky varmints;  learn to cook. One platform position, three social benefits.

10. NO DOGS PERMITTED WITHIN CITY LIMITS. Rationale: fatal dog attacks, dog bites, barking dogs, whining dogs, ubiquitous dog "waste," dogs carrying on in parks and open space, the goopy indulgence of dog "guardians," the ecological disaster of dog food. But what about seeing-eye dogs, you ask?  Well, that's a slippery slope, ain't it. Sorry folks, no dogs (except for purposes of vivisection).  

11.  NO MORE COLLEGE FOOTBALL. Rationale: I don't like college football.

12.  NO "FACILITATORS" WITH WHITEBOARDS OR FLIPCHARTS AT OFFICIAL MEETINGS. Goodness gracious, do I ever hate those things.  

That's about it. I feel that I have my finger on the pulse of the electorate. It's going to be a landslide. Tell me that life won't be better as soon as we enact these new laws. 

Away From Her/Fiona Andersson/Julie Christie

Away From Her explores the infinitely sorrowful subject of early-onset Alzheimer's. Fiona Andersson, in her vigorous mid-sixties, has begun to lose her way and to forget names; she stores the frying pan in the refrigerator. She thinks that she’s “beginning to disappear.” Fiona’s plight is worrisome to every human being but it is especially disturbing to people of her own and of Julie Christie's generation.

Here in our home we still manage to find appropriate places for the cooking utensil, mostly.  Nevertheless, things happen. We set out to purchase six items at the market and come home with just three. We have three errands to perform and we arrive back home with two of the tasks undone. We put the camera in a special secure place and then spend a couple of hours searching for it. Keys and lists and books and tickets regularly evaporate or disintegrate or dematerialize.  Are these forgettings normal or are we en route to something that is too horrible to contemplate?

We exercise, we eat carefully, we gulp those horrid fish oil boluses. Perhaps these defensive procedures have value. Perhaps we'll be the ones to dodge the Alzheimer bullet.  Perhaps we won't.

It doesn’t help that we spend many hours a week at the facility where the Aged Parent is incarcerated. We encounter people just like Fiona -- or the remnants of them -- every day.  They're hollow shells, slumped in the wheelchair or poking at the boiled-to-mush food. The angry ones, the ones with dead eyes, the ones who moan all day long, “help me.” Better the Seconal and applesauce, the ice floe, or the bullet in the brain than to live in such horrible oblivion.   

In Away From Her, Julie Christie is entirely persuasive as the alzheimered Fiona. But let me ask you, friends of a certain age-cohort, is it really possible that that gray old lady was Julie Christie? Here’s a woman I’ve known for forty-five years, ever since she was Liz for thirty incandescent seconds in Billy Liar -- and feckless Billy was too much of a jerkass coward to run away with her. Julie and I have had a long (albeit entirely one-sided) relationship.  I was dazzled by her when she was the voracious Diana Scott in Darling and I feared for her when she was Laura Baxter in Nicholas Roeg’s scary-as-all-hell Don't Look Now.  She was my favorite Gertrude. But Fiona Andersson is outside any recognizable trajectory;  she's too raw, too dislocating to my tender sense of the way things ought to be.  No, Julie will always be Liz to me.  I've held on to that first image for most of my adult life.

I have no intention of progressing to the "second floor," or to sunset village or to memory lane or to however they euphemize the place that they put the folks with clogged synapses, but, if I should find myself in such a state, let's hope that it won't be Fiona but Liz to whom the brain clings.

Sweet and Lowdown

Woody Allen's Sweet and Lowdown is a sentimental love story with an unhappy ending.  Like most of Allen's works, it has become a far better work of art with a few years on its back than it seemed on first viewing (1999) -- probably because audiences habitually come to the Woodman's films with the mouth set for wisecracks and one-liners.  Woody's films grow on you;  some day, when the fuss has died down, their emotional range and artistry will be better recognized.   

The lovers in Sweet and Lowdown are Emmett Ray, who talks constantly but says very little, and Emmett's girlfriend Hattie, who is mute but miraculously expressive.  Emmett is a shallow, vain, brittle, damaged bit of goods who exempts himself from emotion and human connection with the assertion that he's an "artist."  Hattie is said to be dull-witted but whether she is or not we don't know.  We do know that she's a woman of great appetites: for sex, for food, for music.  Emmett cannot acknowledge that she's his best audience and he runs like the wind when it's revealed that she loves him.  The climax of the film is inarticulate: all Emmett can manage is "I've made a mistake."  Viewers, however, can easily fill in the gaps.

It's a fine and lovely movie, well worth the re-seeing if only for the music and the affectionate re-creation of the 30s jazz scene.  And also for the acting.  Sean Penn twists his face into an expression of perpetual dissatisfaction.  His Emmett Ray, except for a redeeming moment or two, is horrid and knows it.  On the other side of the coin, Samantha Morton is transcendent as the vulnerable but resilient Hattie.

See Sweet and Lowdown for what it is.  It's not a farce;  it's not raucus.  Don't look to it for more than it offers or for something other than it offers.  It's sufficient unto itself. 

Hoop News

Extremely important bulletin:  Cornell's basketball team is going to the NCAA tournament -- first time in a generation.  Twelve and 0 in the Ivy League, Randy Wittman's son the main man.

Is the Big Red going to manhandle Kansas and UCLA and Duke?  I'm not, at this moment, prepared to bet the house.  But Cinderelloid success is not beyond possibility. 

Let's hear it for Cornell, where I took my first timid steps into adulthood. 

March 22.  Bad news:  Cornell played like a bunch of junior high-schoolers.  They were nervous and intimidated.  Hey, Duke didn't do much better.  And is that a rug that Coach K is wearing, or is he just using too much black shoe-polish? 

"Cautionary" Songs of the 1950s

A while back, I recalled that during the late 1940s and early 1950s, students at P. S. 217 in Flatbush were force fed patriotic and religious music.  I've now remembered (perhaps it's the DHA) that we were also indoctrinated with songs that could be called "cautionary."  For example: do not chase a bouncing ball into the street, because while you could get a new ball, but "you can't always get a new leg."

I also remember a lyric in which we were exhorted to solicit divine intervention, and which contained these deistic lines:  "Pray in any language, to Him they all are dear/ Pray for it is music to His ear."   It was in this same song, I believe, that we were allowed the ecumenical freedom to pray "in temple, mosque, or tabernacle,/ He won't need to search."  (I had heard of temples, but the word "mosque" was beyond my ken and "tabernacle" was a complete mystery, though it had warm associations with "pumpernickel.")

Does anyone out there in Bloglandia remember either of these songs?  Or other cautionary songs from the old days?  They don't google.  Any information or citations will be much appreciated.

Incidentally, despite the well-meant advice, I pursued many a rubber ball into the street.  Nor was I ever once moved to pray in a consecrated building, except perhaps in Ebbets Field, and then only in tough ninth-inning situations.