WQueens7

I remember the cambridge common in 1968, when I was 8. Scotty, my
brother, and I were running around in the outskirts of a crowd of
eugene mccarthy supporters listening to The Doors on a dirty field.
Campaighn hope was high for an end to tje war and a progressive
president.

Tonight I’m watching my kids run around the prospect park bandshell
listening to Cold War Kids. Occassionally from the stage a woman
harangues the crowd about voting (never mentionig Obama or the war).

God I hope everything has changed in 40 years. .

–
Sent from Gmail for mobile | mobile.google.com

Stafford

6-20-08 6:20 am

Where to begin? The last time I wrote in my journal was right after the funeral of Joonhong Min, an 8th grader from PS122. I didn’t post that because it seems to personal and tragic, though I should celebrate his life.

Now, today, I’ve got a couple of months worth of recollections to catch up with. On Thursday (or was it Wednesday?) Sunnyside afterschool gave its spring show. Mason was not to be seen in any of the acts (I’m sad that he gave up on breakdancing, who did a hip-hop version of Grease). Lennox’s class did the Mexican hat dance, sang La Cucaracha and sang “I’m moving up.” There was a multi-culti spin to these proceedings when the kindergarteners from other countries came in their native dress. I was particularly moved by the Tibetan costume modified to fit a 6-year-old (it was very authentic and she sweltered in the wool costume twice her size) and the Romanian girl who, with a voice like a bell,sang the Romanian version of some common song about “friends” and “moving up.” (I miss Walter Schell)

Mason’s graduation was yesterday. It was a big deal at PS150, because the school (built in 1930) only goes to 6th grade, so the big kids, most of whom have always attended PS150, are leaving. When you go to the school they are the ones who have a constrained sence of ownership and entitlement because they have been there for half their lives. I say constrained because they are still only 11 or 12, and they really are still kids. The ones who have adopted “adult ways” are avoided by the majority (or at least Mason and the kids he hangs out with).

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Tattoo II

The blue lightning bolts that
Traced the flat plain between
His pelvis and the six pack
That defined his pelvis,

The once jaunty flourish
Etched into the beauty
Of youth incarnate
Tantalized toward

Pubes unseen below a flat
Hip-hugger-tummy called
Desire aloud to all who
Lust for primal youth

The tattoos that once
Vanished behind overpriced
Jeans now ride the rolls

Of fat that taste-desire
Filled his skin with.
Those tattoos now lie
Flaccid in the creases that

His mushroom cloud belly
Drops on his lap of fat

5/10/2008 8:00 AM

I went to see LaGuardia Community College’s production of Cabaret. Now I’m not much of a theatre aficionado, but I had a great time. I am strongly recommending that, should you read this before their run ends, you go and check the kids’ show out.

So when I went into the little theatre and heard Rashisda the Emcee start with the tune “Welcome,” which I had only heard John, the campy waiter from the Magic Pan sing before I was sold. I was ready for a new experience that resonated with the others, but was completely original. Ms. Rashida, in addition to singing well, moves marvelously, and her dance and stage presence was a fun thing to watch on top of the play. When she would do turns around the stage during different parts of the play she would invoke everyone from Groucho Marx to Cab Calloway (the swallowtail jacket didn’t hurt).

The cast was vibrant and real. Now, I know that a play must be “real,” but, what I was excited about was being in the room with the live, lively and alive performers out there giving it their all without a net. Was every note perfect, I dunno, I have a tin ear, but the whole show was perfect. I wanted to know whether Frauline Schneider would marry Herr Schultz, and there might be a happy ending for one or two characters (when I saw the swastikas I knew which way this one was going). It is odd that “the Old Man” and “the spinster” should have been so compelling in a musical so focused on youth and flesh. But so it was that Jamie Davis and Will Koolsbergen stole the show, emotionally and dramatically speaking, from the ample charms of the handsome and beautiful young leads and the breathtaking chorus line (another musical from the 70s). Of Course when Sally Bowles tells Clifford Bradshaw that she’s had an abortion, well that got my attention. Oh Yeah, And Will K. can turn, the little bit of dancing he did was amazing, in its octogenarian way.

I want to give a general shout out to every member of the cast, who I watched with constant interest. They were all wonderful to look at and hear, and I often found myself looking back into the chorus line and at the “extras” marveling at the wonderful courage and diversity of these LaGuardia CC students. Whether it was Mr. Footman as the cabby looking for his money, Jocelyn Catasus as Frauline Kost (cost) and her many sailor/suitors, Mr. Ochoa as the drag queen, or any of the lovely lads and ladies of the chorus line, there was plenty of multi-cultural-multi-talented “eye-candy.” I am far too repressed to admit how beautiful all of the young women are and too homophobic to admit the same about the men. I also have to say that I love hearing live music, and the production got a lot of mileage out of the horns, keyboards and drums they had tucked away above stage. This was a great way to Spend a Friday night, and I highly recommend catching it if you can.

Ernst, the Nazi who opens the play was a surprisingly convincing actor and I have to say, though his role of scoundrel was exposed in the second act, his bonhomie from the first act made him hard not to watch, even when he was the Nazi, in a krystalnacht redux, beating down Darryl Sorrentino as our Harrisburg Hero Clifford Bradshaw (who was good in his role as the idealist cuckolded by the torch-singer Veronica Palazzo as Sally Bowles).

The voices were all good, the show was really exciting, and since I had never seen any version of it before, neither the Queen Latifa version nor the Joel Gray jammy, it was fresh and I really wanted to know what was going to happen. Now, I’m not sure that having the plot spoiled by previous versions would have stolen anything from this show because, like I said, the music and actors were all really present and engaging.

The cast was vibrant and real. Now, I know that a play must be “real,” but, what I was excited about was being in the room with the live, lively and alive performers out there giving it their all without a net. Was every note perfect, I dunno, I have a tin ear, but the whole show was perfect. I wanted to know whether Frauline Schneider would marry Herr Schultz, and there might be a happy ending for one or two characters (when I saw the swastikas I knew which way this one was going). It is odd that “the Old Man” and “the spinster” should have been so compelling in a musical so focused on youth and flesh. But so it was that Jamie Davis and Will Koolsbergen stole the show, emotionally and dramatically speaking, from the ample charms of the handsome and beautiful young leads and the breathtaking chorus line (another musical from the 70s). Of Course when Sally Bowles tells Clifford Bradshaw that she’s had an abortion, well that got my attention.

I have to confess that I have never seen Cabaret in any of its guises before. I remember back in the 70s when it was a play and all of the theatre majors from Emerson College with whom I worked at The Magic Pan would go about belting out the tunes from the show while we did sidework. Then I recall the movie coming out and another surge of popularity, and hearing the tunes “Cabaret” and “Money Makes the World Go Around” floating into my pop-culture-world. I think there was a disco version of the $$ song (it was right about then that NY NY with Robert Deniro and Liza Minelli; Frank Sinatra stole the song from the film, but that’s another sad, sad, story).

It was a great pleasure to see Cesar Mack, a student from my ENG101, Professor Raven Blackstone and, most of all, Gail Mellow who is always there to support our students. IF you can, go ask any of them how they liked it, and I’m sure they’ll say that this show is a Must See.

5/9/2008 5:56 AM

So, with some revisions I posted the esparks café musing at Queensrocks.blogspot.com (http://www.queensrocks.com/2008/05/woodside-cafeesparks-ok.html) and it is driving me crazy because I can’t see any of the data on whether it has been read or not. I posted the picture on todayeye (for which I bought some more space) and I’m hoping that that directs some of my readers to it. I guess that I should write an explicit post on westernqueensland directing people there, but I haven’t.

I got an email from Jacqui, and I’ve thought about writing back about it. The day I got it I was on the subway and I was literally looking at the following people/vignette as I read it (such was the power of their uniqueness): A tall man got on the subway, he was about my age, but looked to be in his late 50s. He had grey hair, needed a shave around his whispy goatee but was otherwise strangely clean for someone who was fairly obviously an addict or “methodonian” (methodone addict in ‘chemical recovery’).

Holding his hand was the most beautiful little girl. She looked to be about 5, and she looked around the train with a big smile and absolute wonder. She had a pink knit cap (though it was not cold or rainy) with two points in a kind of jester-like configuration, with two pom-poms. The hat almost covered her right eye and was high above her left ear which with her inquisitive look made her look that much sweeter; I wanted to straighten her hat so it wouldn’t fall off.

Her face scanned from person to person smiling and making contact in a way that seemed inappropriate on the rush-hour-train. The absolute wonder on her face lit up the car and those who looked at her involuntarily smiled back in spite of the weight of their days. This marvel contrasted with the “game face” of her escort who seemed focused on some mission that lurked down the tunnel that would come. The corners of his mouth were drooping into what, in a more thoughtful man, might have been a sneer.

But still they were there holding hands, and when a seat opened up at 33^rd/Rawson he gently rushed her over to get it and doted on her until she was comfortable. It was when she had changed angles in getting the seat at the station I detrained at that I saw that her eyes were way-far-apart. The hat, tipped just so, had covered the breadth of her downsey forehead. She is, as they say nowadays, a “special” child. By this I mean she is retarded, but what I really realize is that she is still traveling on the seven-train-in-my-head, looking at the world in that special way with a special wonder that I will continue to try to emulate (hopefully, as long as I live).

Here is one of the poems I’ve been feverishly composing on my phone:

Belongings and Warnings

The gear in their lives has a strange impermanence.
Not because you get the feeling they can always replace it.
They can

They will

It is the whimsical attachment they forge
Between themselves and their things
That means less than nothing, less and less
Less than even the functions the things are made to perform
Bottled bottles and capped caps
That don’t carry water or cover heads

Splashed belongings of multiple values
Layers of colors, textures, depths and wealths
Parfaited in a life of conspicuous plenty
Serving functions that no longer exist

Then one day a rumor from a magazine
Picked up by a website too mighty to ignore
(Its offbeat the surfers control bricks of credit cards)
A local tv show repeats the warnings

A thirteen syllable polymer had been caught leaching
Out of twenty six of yogamagazine’s top ten products
In amounts traceable by 30 million dollar microscopes
In lab conditions reproducible on three of the outermost planets.

In their overstuffed home, layed out on chemical lawn
The layers of belongings, merge together
Under the unseen pressure of their belongings
Making extraction of particular elements hard

Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T

4/25/2008 6:24 AM

Yesterday we went to Coney Island. A lot more than that actually happened, but the trip to the edge of New York was the most interesting part. TO get there we had to bring Mason to the doctor (don’t like this orthopedist) and do a few other things. Chandler’s new friend Jasmine came by and woke her at the crack of 11 after Lennox and I had failed and she went out and floated around the big six schmoozing and kibitzing on the grounds. The fact that she’s made friends is probably the biggest news of this break, but today I’m writing about Coney Island.

We took the train and I started to write a poem before the other adults had found me. I’ll try and include the two lines and the idea here in a bit, but I was in a foul mood after the cost of escape velocity from our apartment was a huge fight with Mason about the brace that he is supposed to wear and Linda just exempted him from wearing after I had fought, been cried at, insulted and changed multiple shoes, laced braces and new shoes and generally acted like a butthead. As I treat my wasted ankle at 48 I think about how Mason should “____(^{insert macho platitude here}) ” to insure his athletic future.

We drove to the cousins’ house and took the F to the park. It was a fun ride with the kids running up and down the car looking out the window at the various sights below the F on McDonald Ave. My favorite is the Jewish Cemetery that you float over looking down at a century of graves (with some new shiny laser etched ones near the tracks so you can kinda see the eternal portraits chosen by the next of kin. It is in much better shape than Mt. Zion over here in Woodside/Maspeth which has me thinking about the anecdotal nature of the conclusions I’ve been drawing about Jewish cemeteries from my runs here in Queens.

The excitement of the park fully grabbed me as we crossed over Surf Avenue from the train. It is great how you can make it straight from the W. 8^th street Stillwell Ave station to the boardwalk with out having to touch the “common” ground of the city: I felt like I was floating over my cares and worries associated with life in NYC. Now, needless to say after my journal entry yesterday about Great Adventure I was not in the mood to totally forgive the Amusement Park Gods, but the fact that I was in New York and I hadn’t been hazed by a two our car ride or a $15 parking fee put me in a mood more amenable.

As we turned onto the boardwalk by the Aquarium I saw another reminder of the previous day’s excesses: a sea of Hasidim in black and white. Again the shock of seeing people whom I think of as particularly reserved and clannish out at the great American amusement park (really great and American, not the six flags/paramount llc brand) further reduced my resistance to the deities of common diversion. As we turned off the boardwalk and descended the stairs to Astroland I was literally shocked at how insanely crowded it was in April. Even in July and August it is generally not that crowded, and this time it was about ½ orthodox and conservative Jews. It was like looking at a puzzle or a test pattern where the dominant motifs (black and white) are overplayed for effect. It was stunning and beautiful aesthetically, a bit overwhelming as a parent and a consumer. Keep reading →

4/24/2008 7:04 AM

We went to great adventure yesterday and had a great time, sort of. The drive through zoo (aka safari) was kinda neat, I especially liked the baboons and the ostriches picking at us and fighting across the yard.

I have to say the experience of going to a zoo in our car was weird, there was something quintessentially American about it, not in the good way. Each pod of people has an experience that is a) isolated and b) tainted by driving (dipped in traffic). The isolation is probably why this is such a popular experience, so you can see the unwashed animals without having to stand next to the unwashed masses. Driving slowly around the track jockeying for position with other (suburban) drivers reminds me too much of rush hour. I know that there were at least two times when people (men) zipped in front of us and kept us stuck where we were or took the spot in front of the (non-human) fauna that we had been waiting for. And don’t even get me started about those people who did open their windows to get better pictures (having reviewed ours I see why now).

I noticed in the various queues for the park (all automotive) that there were a lot of orthodox Jews. I have the middle-class liberal affinity for Hasidim, so I was kind of excited. I didn’t say anything to the kids when I saw a floatilla of four late-model minivans and a couple of nice Acura and Infiniti sedans off to the side of one of the roads with bearded men in white shirts and black hats kibitzing. I thought, “how cool, Hasids, must be because of Passover” (which B&H photo, where I’m buying a new camera soon, has been announcing that they are closed until next Monday for the holiday).

As we jockeyed for position in the next parking and purchasing lines in our car I felt like the park had been reserved for orthodox Jews. There was our car, a mid-90s Continental with Anti-UN bumperstickers and a sea of shiny family cars full of eastern-European Jews in their starched white shirts and modest skirts. Inside the park it seemed like about ¼ - 1/3 of the guests were there for Passover.

Not all of them had the old-world mien of the Hasids. There were more suburban looking men and women with Rangers gear and a couple of hippy families with colorful hand-embroidered yarmulkes that looked more functional and perhaps north-african. There were a few groups of young men who were hip-slick-and-cool, tricked out in the latest oversized warm-up-suites with three day growths and (in one case) black-leather yarmulkes.

The Country Kitchen, off by the waterfront and away from the main-(streetUSA)-drag, had an adhesive sign, not hand lettered, but also not part of the regular signage, that announced that this restaurant was Kosher, and the lines there were long and white-and-black. I wonder if the food there was any less greasy or less expensive. My stomach still aches from the food I ate yesterday.

It was right by there that I saw a young Hasid, say early 20s, who was obviously downsey (had downs syndrome). Ever since I saw the two downs-syndrome kids making out in Madison Square Park in 1984 I’ve had an affinity for this particular sort of “special person.” He was dressed like everyone else but more excited then most of the other orthodox adults there. He was holding his mother or grandmother’s hand and lobbying for some great-adventure-delight or another.

There were folks who looked like they were less into the starched formality of some of the families. While they technically had the same outfits, white shirts, black pants and shoes, fringe dangling off the belts as the others I noticed that they were wearing Marshall’s-type no-iron shirts and black chinos. These families were in marked contrast to the ultra-starched white shirts of the men who had custom slacks (suite-pants) and hand-made shoes. The variations go on and on, and since I am not an anthropologist I’ll leave these distinctions for better suited chroniclers to catalogue.

I will add, however, that two or three times I saw groups of men and boys off to the side, not totally public, but also not quite private, praying in small groups of about 10. The last time I saw them pray, off to the side by the exit, there seemed to be a rave-like quality to the unsynchronized quality of the floating and rocking back and forth that they did. There were a couple of pre-adolescent boys who seemed to have a rhythm of their own that was, well, rebellious, shocking and rocking.

I will spare you my usual anti-amusement-park diatribe, maybe I’ll look for an old one and post it up later.

4/21/2008 5:57 AM
Here is another gem from Lennox to keep with the “Daddy remembering is like fish talking” zinger that she announced at the park the other day. Speaking of Mason “pulling the girls legs,” or teasing, about something or another, Lennox observed, when he exclaimed “I’m joking,” in a deadpan tone with the slightest roll of the eyes: “a joke is when people laugh afterwards.” Miss Lennox is quite the witty little thing and really enjoys saying things that make people laugh.
Now Mason is a witty guy, his ability to frame things in new ways with his excellent 11-year-old vocabulary is legendary. It began when he was younger than Lennox when he tacked onto one of his parents’ bromide about “when life gives you lemons, you should make lemonade,” the coda “and sell it!” at dinner one night. He used to get so angry when Linda and I would crack up at something he said, some little witticism (which I cannot remember any of right now [see “fish talking”]) because he thought we were laughing at him.
Chandler, never much of a joker, is the best linguist in the house. She saves her parsing for two main categories of utterances: requests and commands. She can detect, with annoying and unerring accuracy the slightest hint of resentment, bossiness or command in the day-to-day talk of a house. “Put water in the pitcher before you put it back in the ‘fridge,” is a statement where the tone, syntax or intention can embed an insult potent enough to stop the morning in the tracks. “I would do that but you cannot just boss me around like I’m some sort of nitwit. I have my reasons for not refilling it, and the way that you ordered me will NEVER get me to do it. I’m so mature that we might as well have restarted the Hattfields and the McCoys up for a century of good Appalachian vendetta: hillbilly omerta in Woodside.
When we think to frame our utterances in the form of requests, “Chandler would you change (meaning clean) the guinea-pig cages today?” “Sure” she’ll reply. But in that request, framed in a way so as not to rankle Honey, Rocky and Buttercup’s “mommy,” is enough wiggle room for her to not do it until bedtime; her chores become late night filibusters against bedtime. All day long, as we politely remind her that the cages need attention we are parried, feinted and dodged with grammatical explications, “I said I would, and I will, just not right now.” Chandler’s quiver is filled with arrows that any semiotician would be proud to use. Her ability to “lawyer” will be wasted on the law because with the silicone slickness of her linguistic abilities and the cudgel of her willingness to take offense remains untouched by discipline in the old-fashioned 50s sense (most recently enacted in the 1970s on the Brady Bunch), which she reminds us came with primitive behaviors like corporal punishment.