Sense Memory

Personal objects, and associated smells, texture, weight, color, and sometimes sounds from our distant past, can, if remembered with unexpected clarity, trigger strong emotion. I'll give two examples, one from fiction based on a real life event, and another from yearly forest fire coverage shown on television.

In the former, taken from Swan's Way, the first book of Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, the character of the narrator remembers the smell of cake dipped in tea by his mother from when he was young. That smell brings back (hence the phrase 'Sense Memory' in acting theory) a flood of forgotten memories of the past. Every year in California News on television shows interviews with victims of forest fires standing in front of the remains of their homes. With amazing regularity weeping, deeply shaken home owners mourn the most, after pets, the loss not of their late model vehicle, but the loss of their photo albums. Our photo albums are beyond price because very often they are our only source of our emotions from the past that otherwise might be lost forever.

As a result of these truths from life, sense memory has been used to teach acting by several famous acting teachers, including Lee Strasberg and Uta Hagen. What's most valuable about working from that method is that it is reliable, and not prone to disappear as so often does 'inspiration,' and simply not show up when most needed.

In order to dig deep from the use of "Personal Objects" what's needed and wanted is physical relaxation achieved by the work described in my previous entry.

Forgive, please, the too didactic tone inadvertently adopted here today; it's raining sweetly and memories are flooding back, so I'm beside myself. In a way you make this possible.

Barry

 

Self-Observation

Dunno about you, but I was brought up to be outgoing, athletic, and not a 'bookworm,' and, frankly, to be suspicious of others who did too much thinking.  'Self-Observation' was not even in the vocabulary of grownups in my childhood.

So, it was a very great shock at age twenty-nine, living in NYC, to attend Lee Strasberg's acting class, which consisted of 'Sense Memory,' and 'Scene Study,' to be asked to sit in a chair and "relax." Only the enormous reputation of the teacher kept me there. I learned to love what Lee called "Professional Relaxation."  The object was to deliberately relax each separate part of the body through observing which limbs and muscles needed to be let go of, sometimes by slowly and separately moving limbs, and trunk and head.  Ah, but there is more to it. While five people on stage sit apart, each on a metal, folding chair,  twenty five or more people, actors, watch your attempt. Being observed, the mere fact of being observed, cranks up even more tension to be overcome. On top of that, once the actors onstage are making progress in relaxing the major muscles, Lee encourages those onstage to explore their relaxation by making non-verbal sounds. Soon the room sounds like a zoo.

You know what happens? From only the effects of letting go of clutching muscles working overtime, many people actually sob, scream, groan, whimper, or just plain have a good cry. 

Here's the kicker, proof, that many of us are wound too tight. Without forethought, since those classes so long ago, I've made non-verbal sounds during love making. "Oh I do that! what's the big deal?" you might say. Well, good for you, but some people, me for example, had to be taught to do what should be natural.   

Sexology Class will resume tomorrow. <g>

Barry

(I oughta be paid for this stuff, ha!)

The People vs Larry Flynnt (1996)

Woody Harrelson won an Oscar Nomination for his portrayal of Larry Flynnt in 1996. Am I out of it or what? Harrelson seems to have disappeared. Where is he? 

By accident I stumbled upon his movie, in progress last night around midnight. I had to see the end, when the Supreme Court rules in his favor. That's one heck of a well-done movie. Character acting is Harrelson's forte. He had the slurred speech, the reckless temper, the little boy lonely, the needy genius and aggressive thug-like publisher down pat. Wonderful acting. And, it's impossible not to root for him, regardless of how we feel about smut, censorship or the First amendment.

The writing is very clever. I'd like to know if the legal aspects of the story, liability for defamation, were accurately depicted. I learned recently that the plot of the Stephen Spielberg movie Amistad takes liberties with history. I was stricken. Once again I was bowled over by great acting, this time that of Anthony Hopkins playing Senator John Quincy Adams, so believed the story completely.

Flynnt's magazine, Hustler, published in retaliation for personal criticism by a televangelist, that the latter had had sex with his mother in an outhouse. The story says that the US Supreme Court ruled that Flynnt had the First Amendment right to satirize the preacher in that manner. In the cold light of morning, the day after being overwhelmed by Woody Harrelson's acting, and the clever directing, photography, editing and writing, I can't help wondering if Hollywood again pulled a fast one. When people write and post ugly, untrue, vulgar, horrid, spiteful, sadistic, defamatory, cruel, threatening and invented untruths about me and my family on message boards I'm stricken further to find out that my tormentors have a First Amendment right to thus malign me and my family. So, my hope actually rests on Hollywood having invented a world of unlimited 'rights.'  It makes good theater though to have the naughty boy get away with bloody blue murder. After all he was confined to a wheelchair after an enraged former fan (?) shot him.

Achievement requires, I'm pretty sure, a certain level of aggression and persistence that sometimes can irritate the people around us. So finding a balance between risky actionand comfortable, hidden or muted activity takes some skill. I either hide, or overreach. I'm trying to find a balance. Still! Ha!

Barry

 

 

 

 

 

Thanksgiving

'Germ of an idea' that's what I have a germ of an idea about Puritans. Thanksgiving is a big deal, right? More people travel, I've read in the newspaper, on Thanksgiving weekend than at any other time of the year. It's family time, and with good reason. We love Thanksgiving but do we really love Puritans, the people we celebrate in theory with Thanksgiving dinner? We eat, but we don't say thankyou, and that's a fact.

I got this 'idea' yesterday listening to a NPR review and interview on the subject of a published reexamination of the poetry written by the wife of a Puritan leader, whose name I forget. One of her poems, unkown to me, is famous. The poet expresses her love for her husband (now there's a novel subject, how often do we hear about a wife's love for her husband these day, ha! Never!) and very great fear that if she dies in childbirth she'll never see her beloved husband again. The interviewed author of this book told us that 50% of Puritan mothers died in childbirth.

The poet mother did not die and left a record, in her poetry, about the rigors of being a Puritan. When they set sail from Europe they literally didn't know where they were going. Most of them fully expected to die before they arrived anywhere.

There's no need to belabor what we have to be thankful for. I'll stow that.

He's where I'm going. I'm madder 'an Hell at the absurd play that purports to be about the Salem Witch trials, The Crucible the play by the recently deceased Arthur Miller, more deservedly famous for Death of a Salesman which is oft produced still. The Crucible is supposed to be an analogy, mirroring the Congressional 'witch hunt' during the Red Scare of the 1950s led by crazed Senator McCarthy and his henchman Roy Cohn, the criminal made palpable by Al Pacino in Angels In America. 

My 'Idea': The Crucible has nothing about it that in any way is like the McCarthy hearings. Also, The Crucible in no way, not even indirect, says anything worth knowing about the Salem Witch trials.

We need to get off it about the Puritans. They gave us America. Luckily the native Americans, when the 1500s Spaniards travelling North from Mexico to take a look, were not wearing gold ornaments or Spain would have gobbled North America as well as Mexico, Central and South America. The Puritans weren't looking for gold, they were looking for God's will and how to be obedient to the Bible. Take your pick, gold grubbing sadistic Spaniards, or over zealous lovers of goodness and obedience? I'll take the latter anyday. You know what the Spaniards did to Mexican Indian temples? Built Churches on top of them, and used the building materials of that plunder to make their walls. The Puritans too made grave mistakes with respect to the Indians but that came much later.

To understand the Puritans it is necessary to imagine the terror of coming to a totally foreign place, virtually alone, with almost nothing except their love of each other and their love of God to support them.

They came to worship not to plunder. And they gave us North America, except for Canada. Ah, that's another topic for another time. The French, and presumably Catholic part of Canada still wants to be separate. The French, by the way were much smarter with the Indians than were the Puritans (and Quakers?).

Barry

 

 

 

Temperament Theory

Nothing enrages and disappoints me more than does so called Temperament theory. It's akin to typecasting and minimizes the individuality of every, separate, human being, and their capacity to bend for any task.

Let me begin by pointing out that this year's Basketball MVP is likely to be a guy named Nash who plays for Phoenix, The Suns. He's short, he's white, he has long hair, and he scores, scores and scores some more. He's like the other short scorer the one on the 76's, the one who was nice enough, thank you, to represent America in the Olympics when others wouldn't.

Temperament theory is having its temporary day in the sun because clever hustlers convinced American big business that they'll have more malleable employees if they hired on the basis of types of temperament. These creatures who use the "Briggs Myers Type Indicator MBTI" (see how they scurry for jargon?!) I reverse the names for insult: they have everything backwards, & do so to make money.  

Apparently the current popularizer book on TT (I can't type out those disgusting words anymore today) is titled Please Understand me II

"Please understand me"? Huh?  To which I shout at the top of my lungs, "Stand up and make yourself understood!"

This miserable book obviates all notions of individual responsibility, and encourages the weak and depressed, who maybe need to take a look at their diet and how much they exercize, to blame all their employment, marital, spiritual woes on their having been born with the wrong temperament. Hogwash, BS and criminal irresponsibility to foster such a mewling, puking bunch of baloney. And yet, there are bastions of higher learning that actually propagandize antique theories originating thousands of years ago and since discredited by numerous disciplines, as well as by common sense and observation of the world and its hugely diverse peoples. Don't fall for this crap. If you think you don't have long enough legs for tennis, move faster.

The ocean of ignorance and prejudice must continually be walled up against. Let's build a dike to contain Temperament Theory and work diligently to expose it for the crackpot excuse it is for avoiding getting the job done. There are millions of lives deliberately put on hold because they believe they have been cursed at birth with the wrong temperament for what they really want to accomplish.  

There are enlightenment seminars to teach, perhaps indirectly, what's wrong with Temperament Theory. One such is called Landmark Education. It's in many, if not most American cities. They won't attack it head on, as I will with great enthusiasm, because they have a general rule against making anyone wrong, but I'm not so coy.

Good luck. Remember to write, ha!

Forward-Looking

Patrick, age four, has a ritual involving listening to The Backstreet boys. He walks around and around in a circle. In the beginning when he first started what I thought of as private, he seemed to want to do it alone, but I might have projected that onto him.  He does it less frequently nowadays. Back then his compulsion was a bit frightening to observe because he seemed driven by something unknown, and apparently invisible.

Now that he is far more openly expressive, voluable, energetic, healthy there's nothing to worry about. He's lucky to have an older brother, nine, and a younger one, three. And of course, a mother who adores him.

What will the future be? How forward-looking can one be when so often the past has more allure for private ruminations? This occurred to me as a result of noticing how often my journal entries were backward looking. I wonder what percentage of Blogs (exact same meaning as Journal?) are about this very day, everyday, and even this very hour? Having so far experienced 26,280 days (72x365) habit has set in so I'm not too concerned about getting through this particular day/morning. This day will be a 'snap' as they used to say. It's some tomorrows that are not so easy to plot on the calendar, and to finish untangling the past still looms as an enormous task impossible of completion.

I have a hunch that writing in my journal has some affinity with, some correspondence to, Patrick and his Backstreet Boys dance. Such 'Aborigine' dances are done by firelight by actual Aborigines and called Corroboree. Watching them on film gives me chills. For it's likely we all have a common ancestor.

Barry

 

Kinsey Report

In high school I borrowed The Kinsey Report from the school library. Nowadays that might sound unlikely, so let me give the name of the HS: Lowell in San Francisco. It's still there, but, I believe it's moved to a new building. Lowell, if you will allow, is the pride of San Francisco. Just this minute I called Lowell HS Library and in answer to my questions found that The Kinsey Report is no longer in print (it's not in print!!??) but if it were, yes, they'd definitely lend it out again to teenagers. I was most happy to hear that, and speaking to the lovely older lady librarian just now my voice quavered as I told her how grateful I was to have gone to Lowell and particularly glad they lent me that most reassuring and scientifically accurate book.

When the Kinsey movie came out last year I was appalled that the promotion and reviews made the book sound prurient when it was no such thing. The movie, I guess - I will not see the movie for two reasons: the screenplay sounds yucky, and the actor playing Kinsey might be tall, but he's not tall enough to play Kinsey who was a daring pioneer to whom we should all be grateful, and about whom I consider it sacrilege to gossip as Hollywood has oh so true to form gossiped. 

During those last two years of Public High School I lived alone in the maids quarters behind a very tall luxury building on a hill overlooking the Bay and Alcatraz at 947 Green Street. My God, I even remember the address? My benefactors were Mr. and Mrs Clarence Morse. They had a son who built his own hotrod. Yes, it was that long ago. I was envious, of course, but in no way did I feel deprived, at least not consciously. It was in their apartment on the top floor that I first saw Television. The very first image was Garbo in Camille. I think I was born lucky.

I remember laughing at a lot of The Kinsey Report. One subject, an African American (in that book probably called Negro but I'm not positive) tied his member, he said, to a bell and his objective was to make the bell ring as many times in a day as he could. Gee, I have to tell you I'm still laughing.

America has advanced. Oh sure, hotrods today don't just go 125 MPH, no sirree, they go over 200 MPH. But do you figure we've improved? I have a doubt. Not gonna let it get too serious, but I have a doubt.

Barry

 

 

 

 

Childhood, Ours Yours and Mine

Early, so early the first sounds of the city awakening are not audible yet, so early the faint whir of the hard drive and fans of the computer can be heard, I want to see if I can squeeze into the doorway of the day an account of some childhood memories. If it didn't make so much noise I'd dig out two letters I wrote to my country cousins indirectly begging to be invited up for the holidays, and quote them here. I've quoted one of them before on a message board and apparently it was so embarrassing not a word was offered in reaction. Maybe readers thought I'd made it up. Sometimes if one is too confessional with strangers tension sets in and glances are averted.

Those letters were written when I was ten. I have photocopies of the letters thanks to the kindness of one of those cousins who sent them to me when his mother died; she had kept them, much to my astonishment, since the letters are full of imaginary violence, presented as actual, and written about with lies, distortions, and wild boasting thinking to swell my cousins estimation of me and so invite me for a visit. My aunt came from a large family of boys so I guess, now, nothing dismayed her about boyhood braggadocio. (Perhaps later in the day I will edit this entry and include at least one of those letters to add a further note of truthfulness: the letters couldn't be faked; they are too outlandish and ridiculous, which is what makes them so extroadinrily valuable to me. Childhood is an incomparable mine of precious ore from which to smelt and craft one's present life.)

That same aunt sent me away five years later when I actually lived in her home after my mother died at age forty one. I was never told the reason. To my uncle, who broke the news, I complained, "I'm only a boy." He mocked me for a sissy. What they did was probably illegal, even then, and in that place, rural Australia, but that fact never occurred to me. I got over the shock quite early. I was definitely in shock however. I know because some of my hair fell out. I guess I was a tender, naive soul. Even after all this time, and much introspection, I'm still compelled to attempt even more self analysis.

Last night, late, my wife of nearly thirteen years casually mentioned some facts of her childhood, the same facts I knew but restated with more evident trust, of a kind that adds to my certainty that exploring one's own childhood searching for the motherlode can be most profitable for adult poise and self assurance. One's first reaction might be negative, since the facts have often been repressed, but that passes and is replaced by an odd sort of proud bemusement.

Barry

 

 

 

 

 

Fiction Writers

Fiction writers! Yucky pooh. My suggestion to the millions of would-be published fiction writers is to form a labor union for the purpose of stopping all bellyaching about not being paid. Force every published writer to share equally the profit earned by all American-written fiction. Well, that's no more stupid and impossible-sounding than any of their schemes and strategies aimed to convince the reading public that their slant on things, life, love, sex, and fulfillment (subjects they actually never really come close to discussing as an adult, or even interestringly as a child) is superior to, and more deeply felt than that of any other writer.

One such writer has a Blog site decorated to look like the inside of an Italian brothel. (Yes, I've had that pleasure, referring to the brothel, not my reading of her Blog.)  She bribes over emotional lonely old women to post glowing encomiums about her perspicacity, depth, sensitivity, acuity and loveliness. One of those admirers I greatly fear might be a Nun who longs to write a lascivious novel, but wants her female idol in the 'brothel' to do it for her but can never seem to get up the courage to ask point blank.

One of the periodicals this "Author" brags about having been published in, THE SUN, a tax free, non-profit North Carolina vanity production that sneakily attacks women by such methods as having headless women on the cover, and about every three or four months publishes overtly male homosexual fiction, which probably finds a big audience in prisons where it is distributed free as part of 'earning' its tax free status. You know, the same as the motive in California for airing TV commercials urging citizens to visit prisoners as a way to curb repeat offenders. (There's no spell check in this wilderness and I can't spell the 'R' word. My theory is bad spellers make the best fiction writers, ha!)

So, my basic message to fiction writers is that their complaining is repulsive, learn to serve, and give up all ideas of getting rich from writing fiction. After all, you shouldn't want to be whoring like Danielle Steel, and her atelier of copycat servants. You didn't imagine she wrote all those weekly novels all by herself did you?! Would you? Yes, you would wouldn't you, and fast. I sent one of these puffed up Blogging scribblers a published short story of mine and she deigned to say not a single word. Piss!!

Barry

 

 

Prayer

2 : to communicate intimately <commune with nature>

What's all the chatter about, hey birdies? Where were you all night? So now you're pretty happy, huh? Tell me about it, please, while I sit here typing trying to figure it out. Faintly, in the distance, in the middle of a huge city, I can hear a lone rooster sort of complaining cause he's alone, I guess. The nearby chatterers are the piccolos, and plucked violins, and the distant rooster is a discordant percussion background theme. Just what does the composer have in mind?

So, led by the winged creatures I too offer up a sound or sorts, a hopeful prayer of thanks for a new day, for opportunities to mend the past, for blessings received and the strength to acknowledge all those who helped me, offered comfort and guidance.  Amen.

Barry

 

Papua, Kombai Tribe Humans

An amateur's* account of visiting primitive humans living in the tropical jungle of Western New Guinea is published in the April 18, 2005 The New Yorker Magazine, beginning on page 124. Be careful, don't be too over-excitedly gushing, as I might, after reading this astonishing essay. It is cautiously claimed that some of the humans sighted had never met a White person before, and had no knowledge of the outside world.

There is one undoubtedly truthful piece of information provided about the Kombai forest dwellers: For safety they live in trees, in tree houses.  That is, the men live in the trees, and the women live and sleep on the ground. I take that as a sign that gender equality, when it arrives, will be a product of civilization, not something inherent in nature.

Barry

 *"Lawrence Osborne ('Strangers in the Forest' page 124) is the author of The Accidental Connoisseur, An Irreverent Journey Through The Wine World." - The NYer.

Life's Upheavals

My daughter from a previous marriage is a sophomore at Wellesley. I'm her non-custodial parent. By an amazing stroke of luck my present wife, and that daughter, are well-acquainted and appreciate each other. My wife told me she'd seen my daughter play basketball and told me she shot threes over and over. I didn't get to see that, and still haven't. My wife and I were living in the Mexican State of Oaxaca at the time, and my wife flew to LA to have her baby, our son Patrick, in the good ol' US of A for obvious reasons: citizenship, and an obstetrician we had total faith in.

Recently my daughter and I communicated by email. I will write her some snail mail, thrilled to be in communication without anything in the way. My 'story' is that the previous marriage was destroyed by the 1980s Feminist movement. Maybe more accurate would be 'aggravated by,' rather than destroyed by, the hysteria of the 1980s Feminist movement.**

Forgive the cliche, but life sure makes some peculiar twists and turns. Can one's life be written about without betraying that the writer has a 'position,' a judgment, an evaluation, and an interpretation? In any and all circumstances probably not, but in this particular family soap opera (I've been an actor in three different soap operas, small speaking roles, and my first wife [of a total of three] played the lead in As The World Turns when the leading lady went to work on the stage in London (Eileen Fulton); my first wife's stage name was/is Pamela King) there's the possibility that my daughter might read this journal entry. No need to make the family soap opera any more convoluted. My favorite novelist, Charles Dickens, wrote what some people regard as soap opera. If that's true, then soap opera as an art form is underrated. 

**Author Susan Faludi's "Pulitzer Prize Winning" non-fiction book BACKLASH, 1991, which I bought new (pristine, hardcover) at Goodwill recently for 50 cents, and still haven't read, is actually about the 'backlash' against women, when I thought it was going to be about women striking back at men! Here it is fourteen years later and the "Backlash" is in full fury as demonstrated every weekday on the Tom Leykis radio talk show, a program which receives as many calls from women as it does from men! women just gurgling with appreciation for Tom's sexism.

Somehow, someway, I must, I absolutely must create a relationship with my daughter. The really bright spot in this mess is that she really likes my present wife, a fact that gives me courage and hope. It also fills me with admiration for my wife, Elsa, who created the friendhip all on her own. I was thousands of miles away holding the fort.

Barry

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Second HWY 110 Murder

A second murder of a motorist on the Harbor Freeway south of Los Angeles has been reported this moment. The shooter, as in the first written about here Sat. April 9, '05, fired many bullets from another vehicle.

Barry

 

(Below took place in a 24 hr laundromat after midnight.)

Have you ever met anyone who spoke in streams
of hi-falutin phrases but failed to link them up in any
meaningful way? I have, for the first time last night. He wouldn't stop talking. I was in a good mood so I let him prattle while I simulated interest, throwing in a few phrases of my own every eight minutes. He was young and African American. He threw in Abe Lincoln, OJ, Michael, and Kobe. The sociology
of the talk was truly amazing. Abe is his hero (good choice!) and underneath all the apparent equivocation he hungers deeply for OJ, Michael, and Kobe* to be innocent. He was sweet and deeply troubled. We don't get it, still, how devastating it can be to be Black in America. (cf Black Rage written by two African American psychoanalysts decades ago.) 

*Two of the three were found not guilty, and the third is on trial still as of this date, 04/13/05. 

How, how, could Michael carve up his face like that and not have that fact openly commented on in the media for what it is, self-mutilation for not being White?  Instead there are insipid jokes half pretending that it's just makeup.

Barry

Singing

"Though singing incompetent I have recently in the privacy of driving my car, and a couple of times to amuse my young child while driving, given my rendition of a Native North American Indian chant along the lines of the lone horseman on a cliff near the end of  Dances With Wolves. Improvizing in this way (and please with no offense to Native Americans) I've been astonished to find the experience strangely uplifting. In my case it might have something to do with leaving the everyday convention, the tired cliches of singing, and getting back to the roots of the will to sing out. I mean like flat out, on the level, telling God how one feels, for real. S/he can handle it, good singing or bad, I figure."

Barry

In the above I groped with the subject of self-expression in a response to someone else's journal. Another respondent praised this response earning me the enmity of that confused and extremely upsetting Blogger.  So, in my own space I'm gonna go deeper into the subject, something that has, frankly occupied my attention for a very long time.

Self-expression is partly an athletic endeavor. Many of us, depending to some degree on ethnic roots, are actually taught to be non-expressive, rigid, tense. Think Senator John Kerry struggling manfully to express himself over at least a thirty year span, from Vietnam to the election of 2004. He proves that good intention is not enough to acquire expressiveness as an adult. (Although by sheer force of will and intellect he did well anyway!) Most of the time, for a locked up adult, the chances of having a breakthrough in physically manifested self-expression such as in dance, singing or athletics, is damn near zero. So, extroadinary measures are called for. Clinton's saxophone playing used to put me off, but in the context of this discussion I see his playing in an entirely different light.

Because this subject is so out-of-bounds, not usual, I'll mull it over for a while and post again on this subject.

Barry

 

 

Stream of Consciousness

She sat next to me in the DMV waiting for her number to come up. We'd been married for thirteen years, parents now of three boys. "When are you gonna give me a girl?" she asks quite frequently, kinda funnin' me for laziness. One's life sorta snaps into focus waiting in a public place with hundreds of others to observe and ruminate upon. Why does that young man standing up because all the chairs are taken, have three rings in his lower lips? and why is he massaging the flabby neck of his father? Another, older man is sitting on my other side from my wife; he says that the wait is like being in Hell. "The difference," I say, being older and therefore theoretically wiser, "is that you have the option of making it Heaven." To my surprise, and pleasure, he good-naturedly agrees with that. Only high class people go to the DMV.

I sneak peeks at her. Today she's wearing her hair in a bun, drawn back with I know not what. Her skull is unbelievably perfect, a work of art, a sculpture; too bad I'm not Picasso to explain in graphics why perfection shows up in a head, it's shape and mass. When I first saw her at the airport, after twenty hours in a plane, I reluctantly admit even to myself that I was taken aback, on some primal level, by how dark she was. Today she's not so dark; she's been living in a more moderate climate. Race, you can become enlightened, but you can never completely escape the clutches of race awareness: it's in our genes mostly for good, survival and hybrid vigor, base stuff it's best not to deny, and best to never admit to in public. The beauty of her head is a product of the sum of its parts, their appropriateness with all the rest of the parts. She does not believe she is beautiful; the reason might be that she doesn't look like anyone else. Gradually she just might be getting it because as the boys grow she sees herself reflected back and she smiles. Ya gotta see that smile: perfect teeth and perfect gums pink, pink, pink, all lovely pink.

Now don't go gossiping to her that I talked about her to strangers.  The early birds are making more racket now the light is coming. 'God's in His Heaven, and all's right with the world.'

Barry 

 

 

 

Seeking Help & Support

If a rich, successful person frequently tells the world, anyone listening that is, that he sees a psychiatrist what might be our first reaction? Mine would probably be that he was wound so tight from having personally made all that money, he needed a safe place to vent. I have in mind a man in his 50's who will soon be making $2,000,000 a week and he's not even a basketball player, ha! I'll reveal who the person is in a minute; perhaps you know, or have already guessed.

The subject, 'seeing a psychiatrist' came to the fore yesterday or the day before because someone posted on a writer's message board that Sigmund Freud was an avowed "Atheist." I had to admit I did not know that. Curiously I was made to feel shame for my ignorance, especially since Freud has always fascinated me. Also, I've been in therapy, and know people I admire who have been psychoanalysed. In spite of Freud's expressions of distaste for religion I retain my great interest in, and admiration for all religions. In theory I believe wholeheartedly that one's relgion would be even more beneficial for a good life and fulfillment if one possessed keen self awareness, a benefit conferred by psychoanalysis and therapy, group, or one-on-one. 

Howard Stern, radio talk show host about to move to satellite radio in about nine months, freely and humorously confides that he sees a psychiatrist. Doting on all forms of self-revelation, even though it gets me in trouble, I applaud Howard for his guts and strong desire to contribute to people's well-being through alleviating their guilt. Sometimes we don't know, we don't know we are miserable. Ha! Every day I strive to say something out loud that is difficult to give voice to.  Why hold it in? Well, to not hurt someone's feelings could be a good reason.

My access has been a little iffy lately so I'd better save this now. Thanks for listening.

Barry    

 

 

 

Rambling

Sections of the California Harbor Freeway 110 were completed around 1985. It joins Los Angeles to San Pedro on the Pacific coast.  Parts of the highway, taking North and South together, are twelve lanes wide. The other day a driver was shot to death by a shooter in another vehicle. The young man was only 20, and handsome, and in college, beloved by his mother shown on television weeping uncontrollably, begging for witnesses to step forward. Nobody has come forward.

I was driving South when it happened. An ambulance, and a police car passed, sirens wailing. There were already helicopters overhead. Passing the scene on the North bound side I saw perhaps ten police cars, and at least twenty uniformed policemen walking around with measuring tapes. The victim's car, I later learned driving home shortly afterwards, was the one crashed into the dividing wall. Going by my daily newspaper, and evening news, no progress has been made in solving the murder. I did hear on television that many shots had been fired. The policemen with measuring tapes were probably collecting bullets and spent cartridges.  I'd never seen so many policemen in one place before.

That engineering marvel, the Harbor Freeway runs through South Los Angeles. Not far from the scene of the murder is Malcolm X Avenue which runs beside a small Muslim Temple. Nearby, also, is a thoroughfare named after Martin Luther King Jr.  Not far away, just a few miles, is the King Drew County Hospital. The Victim of the Highway shooting was African American.

I intend to make no case or comment. Yet, that is utterly impossible in fact. Put A next to B and the result is some new entity, AB.

Road rage must take many forms, and happen everywhere. I believe the government no longer publishes the number of highway fatalities. Could there exist a belief that numbers induce more numbers? Of course millions more acts of kindness and caution happen on the highways than do acts of madness. We are saved by that fact, the innate goodness of people, and our desire for loving connectedness.

Barry

 

 

 

Burying The Pope

My immediate family was agnostic. Yet, my mother sang in the choir of a Catholic Church on Sundays a few times when she visited her brother, my Uncle Hugh, in the rural town of Mudgee, NSW, Aust. Hugh also sang in the choir. He married into a wealthy, Irish Australian, Catholic family, and converted. Just this minute, right now, did it occur to me that not once did I hear anyone mention how and when the conversion came about. Approximately 65 years later he included in a letter to me his observation that the Pope was a good man, but "misguided." He could say that then; his wife was dead. Helen was spectacularly beautiful, and gave birth to eleven splendid children. Not only was she beautiful, but she was also 'winning,' warm, quick to laugh, gracious, almost as if she had modelled herself on an image of Mary. As a child, before my father stupidly put his foot dawn, when I visited my country cousins I took an active role in saying the Rosary, and went to mass. On later visits, after my agnostic father denied permission, I had to stay at the house, alone, on Sunday mornings when I visited my cousins.

My Uncle, and my mother, both committed adultery with devastating results. My mother, after the event, and before my mother knew that I'd seen her on the dark livingroom couch with a man not my father, one of several 'other men' during the war while my father was overseas, said to me while she sat at her mirror, "It's alright what you do provided you don't hurt anyone." Not long afterward, maybe a month, I murmured in the kitchen that I was going to "Tell Dad." My mother said, ever so quietly, "That would be a very hurtful thing to do." Not only did I never tell Dad, I forgot all about it until, in America, I brought it up in therapy.

Hugh was found out, causing a whopping scandal. His wife went to South America, alone, for a year. The neighbor had to divorce, and move to the city 200 miles away, a broken woman when I met her some years later. She told me how much she loved Hugh. She actually used that old cliche, "I loved that man with every fibre of my being." She was plain and pedestrian compared to Helen, who went back with Hugh and made more babies. She forgave him. Her family did not.

I became Catholic while serving in the U.S. Army in Korea. No, it wasn't fear of dying in combat, it was fear of the negative 'rewards' of leading a too clever life getting by on not letting anyone find out what I'd done, or what I really wanted.

Another leap in time and I'm in confession in Los Angeles, Blessed Sacrament on Hollywood Boulevard. After talking for a while the impatient priest said to me. "That's enough of the sex stuff, have to cheated in business lately?" Shocked, I stuttered and stammered I'd been in tax trouble. He was even less interested in that than he was in my sex life. He instructed me to say ten Hail Marys and go in Peace. Wow, I was singing.

I hope and pray that with that sketchy outline of formative influences you'll understand, no matter your religious views, how it came about that I'm deeply moved by the present spotlight shining on the Catholic Church. Let us together enjoy a brief moratorium on criticism.

Barry

 

 

 

 

 

INNOCENCE

Had to look up the spelling anyway, so here's a reminder just in case. I deleted #3 at the end which said "BLUET."  I looked that up too, and it said a flower, perhaps denoting innocence? an addition I really can't fathom.

Main Entry: in·no·cence
Pronunciation: 'i-n&-s&n(t)s
Function: noun
Date: 14th century
1 a : freedom from guilt or sin through being unacquainted with evil : BLAMELESSNESS b : CHASTITY c : freedom from legal guilt of a particular crime or offense d (1) : freedom from guile or cunning : SIMPLICITY (2) : lack of worldly experience or sophistication e : lack of knowledge : IGNORANCE <written in entire innocence of the Italian language —E. R. Bentley>
2 : one that is innocent

________________

All the Pope talk has me longing for a return to innocence. If I'm not too inordinately rigorous with myself I believe I lived in innocence up till about age 14. For example, it never occurred to me as an option to think ill of someone. I'm positive I never characterized anybody negatively, not even in thought. It's true I was on one occasion very angry with a younger brother, and I chased him for two or more blocks then hit him. That doesn't sound too "innocent" does it? The event was so isolated I'm appalled at what I did.  Well, I said not too rigorous, and I'm ashamed. My brother Hugh knocked over my windup train.

That state of innocence is thrilling. The much televised weeping for the lost cleric, the recently dead Pope, is partly about fear of losing a connection with innocence, and the thrill of integrity.

The next Pope will be African Black. Cardinal Mahoney of Los Angeles stated on the news last night that the next Pope will not be American. That's for sure, Father. So, that leaves possibilities from South America (we can forget Mexico, where in my opinion the Catholic Church is in disarray) and from Africa. Like Mexico, the rest of South American Catholic clergy cannot emerge untainted by political turmoil, at least in reputation if not in actuality. So, if the new Pope is to come from Africa, how in good conscience can that choice NOT be Black? To give some idea of how Catholic is much of Africa, there is a full scale duplication of Saint Peters Vatican Cathedral in Africa. I'm embarrassed to admit I do not know exactly where it is located. I think I read that the African duplication is actually bigger. It would be good theater if the Pope were Black. "Theater," you know, is not a dirty word. I simply cannot resist quoting just once more someone I loved: "The Catholic Church is good theater." - Lee Strasberg. 

What should we do when our "train" is knocked over? Life doesn't seem to offer many answers. Striving for innocence sounds too abstract. And what do we do with our fear of being tricked, or lied to, or spoken against behind out backs? What many young people do in America (and elsewhere of course) is join a gang. A great deal of ego strength is provided by gangs. That part gets left out of news accounts of the growing number of gang members in America, so many that California is probably about to make it a crime to belong to a gang. Can you imagine? What that offers is an opportunity to sue a compnay that hires a gang member, which would damage the economy!

Is our popular music innocent? How about our movies and television? Innocent? Not bloody likely. How does one measure innocence? By many measures Howard Stern is innocent. This morning he begged, tearfully almost, for his present employer to fire him, release him from the remaining 9 months of his contract. Howard Stern is faithful to his employees and his girl friend and his friends. In many areas he is devoid of guile, lies, defamation, and disloyalty. Notice how he is loved by large numbers of people. He gets along beautifully with both his parents who must be 75 or 80 or more.

One interesting measure of the degree to which we are innocent might very well be how comfortable are we at entertaining ourselves at home alone? Alone we can't so easily escape the infuriating mind chatter that dogs us when we lose our innocence.

Barry 

 

Working out

Declaration: I will compete in a USMS (United States Masters Swimming - age divisions) Long Course swim meet (under SPMA, the local, CA., body) on this coming May 8, a Sunday.

For one thing I must prove I'm under certain times in order to be eligible for the Nationals, this year being held in Southern California.  My best event, probably, the one in which I might place, is the 1500 meters freestyle. That's the event at the Athens Olympics where American television broke away in the middle for several commercials. I was horrified, and embarrassed for America. In Australia, swimming nuts, one can be absolutely certain the TV coverage did not break away. And, an Australian won.

Okay, okay, so I'm American. My parents were not.

Today, Sunday, in a public place, a crowded laundromat to which I drive some miles for their huge, $6 a load machines-- we have a family of five -- I did my stretching and balancing exercize which I employ before every swim training session. How happy I was, and very surprised, I could balance for minutes on one foot while holding the ankle of my other leg against my buttock, looking straight ahead while standing tall and erect. No shyness, no self-consciousness, no miserable doubts. I'm ready to compete. 

I have a month to get used to, and break in, a new pair of goggles, and a new swim suit. For competition I will use a make of goggles that give good peripheral vision, and don't fog up. (Secret: 'Original' Palmolive dishwashing liquid  poured direcly on all surfaces of the goggles, then thoroughly rinsed, obviates fogging for at least an hour of swimming. Don't ask, I don't know why. I can definitely swim 1500 meters in less than an hour. Less than half an hour also.)

Then there's the question of should I take son Vincent, aged 9, to count laps? (30 in a 50 meter pool.) The mind plays tricks with you so you lose count without help. At the Championships, I guess, never having been in the Nationals, only So. Ca., I'll have to count my own, so I better try it alone for practice. I never practice the actual event. Superstitious. Hey, I'm an amateur.

Thank you for listening to my declaration. I'm not nervous already. I'm not, really. Really.

Barry

 

 

Schemes Hopeless, and Schemes Delicious

"Nothing is more hopeless than a scheme of merriment," quoth Johnson // Sam (or did he sign 'Sam : Johnson' ?) the august assembler of the first English dictionary, wit, contrarian, amusing snob in the 1700s from whom derived the still oft used acronym TIPS: 'To insure prompt service.' He was clever and made more famous than he might have been otherwise by his biographer whose name I have no intention of ever remembering. 

Plays, movies, sitcoms, standup comics, and birthday parties are successful or not in providing "merriment" depending how studiously created are their "schemes." I enjoy quarreling with Samuel Johnson, Gentleman, because he was idle, drunk, and fat, and said of the sublime Paradise Lost, "Nobody ever wished it longer." With this famous, oft repeated witticism, the writer immediately places himself, and not Milton, front and center, and who dare contradict him? given the potency of his barbs and opinions and putdowns?

One's private merriment can also be willfully created. The trick is to get off it regarding your negative judgments about acting and actors and practice preparing for the daily stage appearances of one's active life, even if that activity is done solo in the house all day. We create our experiences. Even those sudden shocks unexpected can be processed for merriment. Well, that's my opinion; there are those, including myself sometimes, who turn down merriment, and go instead for high drama, and rending one's raiment.

I must at this juncture give up the word processor to another family member. I'll revisit this subject. Sudden changes of plans are not exactly merriment are they? Ha!

Barry 

Mooning

"It's only a paper moon." April Fool: that's some old song lyric. "Moon over Miami," is another song lyric. Who 'mooned' the Boston Celtics years ago? Give up? Jack Nicholson. Why? Don't ask, the guy's nuts (calculatedly) crazy like a fox. He has to be a part owner of the Lakers don't you think? He gets away with murder, screaming at the refs (Umps?) to eject him: "Go ahead and see what happens," he yells. Moonstruck, that guy. Shine on Harvest Moon. Moonshine: ya like some? Just a nip to get you started for the day ahead?

What is that rock that follows us around in such an irregular-seeming fashion? Sometimes a planet hangs around, under, or beside it, kinda sucking up, like a lamb.

While still only three my son found the moon out of our bedroom window, then moments later dragged me into his bedroom to show me the moon was out that window also. Moon watching continues now that he is four. Why, he asks is the moon sometimes yellow, and sometimes almost white? My explanation began by telling him it is even orange when near the horizon, and almost white when directly overhead. He doesn't really get that yet, nor can he get it that the moon is an inert mirror. Who could blame him? The damn moon wanders all over the sky, showing up wherever it damn well pleases and adds to the general human state of constant confusion. Moonbeams indeed: effing nuts, that night sky. Then, like a mooncrazed loon turned pale grey the lonely moon shows up sometimes in the daytime. Shouldn't it be at work, or hanging out, chilling, waiting for nighttime? In bright sun I wear a baseball hat for safety while driving. Think I'll wear the same thing at night when the moon is full. They don't call it moonshine for nothing; the moon can make you drunk. and see how it swells up when it's giddy? Hey, and those flyboys who walked and played golf on the moon, are they alright? I suppose they get regular checkups. Did they bring the flag back with them or is it still there? Why don't they tells us that stuff? Give us an update.

April Fool I am, every month, what with that loopey moon shadowing me. What? It's from the FBI or what?

Barry