Television | The Gad About Town

Daily Prompt: Four Minutes and 24 Years

Posted on September 22, 2014 by Mark Aldrich

The benches in front of 1 Penn Plaza, along West 34th Street, are lively at lunchtime and look like they remain so long after lunch, as deliverymen pick up and drop off all day long and limo drivers waiting for their VIPs kibitz with one another and with passersby who want to know how famous the person about to become their next brush with fame is and whether he or she is worth pausing for on their way to their next New York City attraction.

There was no reason for me to be in front of the famous skyscraper to make this observation last Thursday afternoon. Five minutes before passing the limo drivers and their VIPs and the lunchtime crowd, I was finishing up being lost in Penn Station, the renowned train- and bus- and everything else station (flying saucers will someday land there because it is shaped like one). Ten minutes before that, frustrated that I could not find a sign directing me to exactly where I was going, many many blocks away, I reasoned that any door with sunlight coming through it and people’s shadows walking past must lead to the outside and a street, any street, and the possibility that, once there, I would be able to figure out where I am. In New York City, on the streets, I am (usually) okay, since it is one of the easiest cities to negotiate on foot. It’s a grid. (Mostly.)

That hunch led me up one staircase to plate glass doors that entered into Madison Square Garden. I headed back down that staircase.

Out on the street, I made my way back around MSG to the front of Penn Station and then onward, north along 8th Ave. to have coffee with a college classmate and then meet up with other friends to attend a taping of “The Colbert Report.”

The college classmate and I had not seen each other in almost 24 years, when I had thrown a post-graduation party he attended; thoughts and memories of this party were on my mind while I strolled up 8th. Cars were blocking the crosswalk, so instead of waiting to cross, I turned right and started over to 7th, where I would continue my northward stroll.

This is how small a moment any moment can truly be. Had the crossing been available, I would have continued on 8th. But sitting on a bench on 34th Street at that moment was another college classmate, in fact the co-host of that post-graduation party, someone I have not seen or spoken with in three years and who did not know I was in New York City. He has an office in 1 Penn Plaza and was on his lunch break, people-watching.

Had I walked past ten minutes earlier, I would have missed him, but I had just spent those ten minutes escaping from Penn Station.

“Is that … Kevin? Really?” I thought to myself. Can’t be. I was not going to say anything; I was going to walk past the person who I assumed was a merely a stranger with a familiar face, since how could it be that I would bump into a long-ago friend in this giant city; a hunch had just now almost gotten me lost in Madison Square Garden. I had better leave the hunching business to others, I thought.

“Mark?” That settled it; it was my old friend. With one friend waiting for me in a restaurant in midtown and about 20 more blocks to walk, I had about four minutes to bring my graduate school housemate up to date. He had the same four minutes to bring me up to date. What was I doing in the city. What was he doing on that bench. Our relationship statusi, our work situations, my physical condition. How long it had been since. How utterly baffling the fact of what we were experiencing right then was. Why I was not taking the subway instead of walking 20-plus blocks. We finally, after all these years, exchanged phone numbers.

“How long has it been?” That was my other friend’s first question as I walked in the restaurant, a few minutes later. I reminded him: 24 years. And an extra 10 minutes because I had run into someone. He, too, was on his lunch break, so we had limited time in which to reacquaint each other with each other. Relationships, work, life.

How much time does it really take to tell someone what you’ve done and seen? Maybe it only takes about four minutes to (re)establish who you are and the rest is elaboration with anecdotes.

Who am I? Someone who takes 10 minutes to get out of a wide-open train station but is happy at the social accident that was thus made possible.

* * * *

My thumb.

__________________________________
The WordPress Daily Prompt for September 22 asks, “You’re about to enter a room full of strangers, where you will have exactly four minutes to tell a story that would convey who you really are. What’s your story?”

Daily Prompt: ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty …’

Posted on September 16, 2014 by Mark Aldrich

(Some thought-fragments about art with a small a and Beauty with a capital B.) (Or vice versa.)

The title is from the final lines of Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” which the poet ends by telling us that the centuries-old vase he has been describing serves as a reminder that, “‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.'” Earlier the poet also says, “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard / Are sweeter … .”

The ones I can not hear, because I am a mere mortal and what I hear on Earth is all I need to know, those are the sweeter ones. O, vile mortality!

* * * *
Some experiences are almost universal: without sharing a common language, audiences will laugh at many of the same things. A person slipping on a banana peel. The fish-slapping dance. Analysis of comedy kills comedy (unless one is making fun of analyzing comedy) because laughter is more than a feeling, it is a reaction; when honestly expressed, it comes in an instant. Conversely, some experiences are unique to each one of us: all of us experience physical and/or emotional pain, but the best any of us can do is talk around it in an attempt to almost come close to describing it. Pain management specialists present their patients with a chart of a series of faces and ask the patients to circle the grimacing face that “matches” how they feel. It is simplistic, but it does something important in that it asks us to leave language, which can be misinterpreted, aside.

Language. The most vile and hateful sentiments can be expressed in sentences that might sound pretty when they are spoken. There is probably a language in which the sentence “I am going to kill you” would make me swoon just before I got shot.

* * * *
What makes me laugh might make you cry (if you were the person who slipped and fell) and what makes me cry might make you laugh. There is much ugliness in this world and someone somewhere finds harsh and violent things funny.

I find the sentence on that poster at the top, “We all have within us our own …,” which is a piece of typical Facebook inspiration-stuff, a poster that is designed to elicit a hopeful gaze or something, to be clunky and, worse, empty. Sunsets are nice and all, but why put words all over one? (I would rather the Kadampa Center had just put a picture of their temple on there.)

* * * *
To the best we can tell, birds are singing shopping lists to each other. “Seeds over here, seeds over here; nice sturdy branch I’m standing on.” The most boring and necessary stuff, but pretty to our ears, a sweet unheard melody to Keats.

* * * *
We teach each other what we find beautiful. The cartoon at right captures, without words, something of this. Artists in a class learn to depict reality, but what about the world made Egyptians in the era of the pyramids and pharaohs depict things and humans as they did? We look the same now as we did then, but the art seen in the ancient (and beautiful) monuments does not look like our twenty-first century reality. Did life in the ancient world look all that different to eyes that are biologically identical to ours?

Certainly not. The same cartoon could be drawn about art classes from other eras: the flat crowds with identical faces in Giotto’s scenes, the extraordinary gowns and suits that probably rendered most people who wore them immobile for longer than the time it took to to sit for just the start of a portrait.

* * * *
Someone might bring up the Cubists, Picasso specifically. At different points in the cultural history of art, the visual and the performing arts diverge from mass notions of “pretty.” They always seem to reconvene, usually when the mass notions of pretty start to include the works of art the masses once rejected. Rocks were thrown at the orchestra during the debut performance of Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring,” because it sounded so odd. You might hear snippets of it in television ads during NFL games now.

I can tell you that for me, Picasso’s drawing line is voluptuous and his color scheme, well, beautiful. And the intellectual challenge the Cubists presented themselves and attempted to conquer: to include time and time’s passage in a static form, painting (which is why two eyes will appear on the same side of a human head—think of any photo you have taken in which someone turned away just as the camera snapped); I find the intellectual challenge and game and the attempt to meet and match it exciting and, well, here is that word again: beautiful.

Here is one of David Hockney’s “joiners,” a type of photo-collage that he explored in the 1970s and ’80s. It is made of 77 Polaroid photos of a swimming pool taken as the sunlight shifted through the day, photos taken over the period of time that it would take to make 77 Polaroid photos with one camera and one artist. Pretty as a sunset but with time added as a design element as important as color in the image. It is a Cubist sunset. It is a beautiful attempt at one.

* * * *
The WordPress Daily Prompt for September 16 asks, “We’ve all heard that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Do you agree? is all beauty contingent on a subjective point of view?” The answer is a definite and thus easily questioned simultaneous yes and no.

There is a famous “Twilight Zone” episode that I am sure someone else has referenced in their response, titled “The Eye of the Beholder,” in which a world that culturally dictates notions of physical beauty sends away people that we Americans of a certain era might find beautiful. We live in neither a world of only sunsets and platitudes and easy listening music nor in one in which we force one precise, single idea of beauty on one another, and that, that in itself, is beautiful. (Sadly, this is not true in every country, not right now; in some countries, Rod Serling’s script might seem to present a pretty good idea.)

Vivian Stanshall: Not an Eccentric

Posted on March 20, 2014 by Mark Aldrich

The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band played the role of jester in the court of the Beatles in the late 1960s, and Vivian Stanshall was the charismatic, curious leader of the leaderless and leader-resistant Bonzos. The missing link between the Beatles and Monty Python (if one was needed), in 1967 the Bonzos appeared in both “Magical Mystery Tour” (partially entertaining the Beatles with a performance of “Death Cab for Cutie”) and in the pre-Python but mostly Python-staffed afternoon television show, “Do Not Adjust Your Set.”

Here, Michael Palin of the Pythons introduces the Bonzos, and Stanshall does his best worst Elvis in “Death Cab for Cutie.”

Stanshall, a writer for whom no declarative statement could be too perplexing (“I’ve never met a man I didn’t mutilate”), was paired up with Neil Innes, a songwriter whose Beatles-esque melodies led not only to to the Bonzos being produced by Paul McCartney (the minor hit “I’m the Urban Spaceman”) but also to a Beatles lawsuit after music for his parody group, “The Rutles,” was thought to be too reminiscent for comfort. (Further cementing the Beatles-Python link, “The Rutles” was an Eric Idle project.)

Their collaboration “Mr. Apollo” combines an almost-too-catchy Innes tune with Stanshall’s absurdly deep baritone and lengthy fake sales pitch for an exercise gimmick: “Five years ago, I was a four-stone apology. Today, I am two separate gorillas. No tiresome exercises. No tricks. No unpleasant bending.” It also features a heavy metal guitar lick invented about six months before heavy metal.

Vivian Stanshall was born 71 years ago tomorrow, March 21; few people have spent their lives (his ended in a house fire in 1995, a sadly Stanshall-esque end if anyone did not deserve one) confounding more people and delighting in the resulting stares than he. After the Bonzos disbanded, if they ever truly did—the group’s set lineup varied in name and number whimsically and reunited a number of times, so it could be said that its members simply wandered away—Stanshall became known as a presence. He was a person about whom wild anecdotes proliferated, usually starring Stanshall, his friend Keith Moon, and their friend, alcohol; whose voice was heard on overnight radio talk shows that had no set sign-off time except daybreak; and who semi-occasionally emerged with enormously creative, incredibly language-saturated audio theater pieces, usually concerning the fictional family of Sir Henry Rawlinson. (In one of the oddest of all possible odd coincidences, Stanshall and the real Sir Henry share a death date, precisely one century apart, March 5, 1895 and 1995.)

Joycean in its surreal ambitions, Stanshall’s “Sir Henry at Rawlinson End” always opts for the obscure joke and invented pun over the profound statement, which resembles Joyce in many of his Joycean ambitions, too. The recorded piece was made into a film starring Trevor Howard and Stanshall that may as well have been a rumor until its DVD release a few years ago. One can piece together the hour-long film from clips on YouTube. The Rawlinson family saga offers an English Addams Family whose adventures take place in a landscape of long-standing family games with long, obscure, histories behind them and traditions that must be celebrated by exploding them. It is aristocracy viewed through the eyes of an alien, not just to these traditions, but to the idea of tradition.

The opening sentence: “English as tuppence, changing yet changeless as canal-water, nestling in green nowhere, armored and effete, bold flag-bearer, lotus-fed Miss Havishambling, opsimath and eremite, feudal-still reactionary Rawlinson End. The story so far.”

According to radio legend John Peel, the friend on whose programs the Rawlinson stories were first dictated, Stanshall’s appetite for drink and tranquilizers hindered his career. “Unreliability and prevarication, on an epic scale,” is how Peel mournfully described his friend’s habits of work, in a comment about how working with Stanshall could yet be extraordinary and worth the effort.

In most articles, Stanshall is described as an eccentric, a member of the famous English eccentric class. No other country is said to celebrate its eccentrics more than England, or to reflect more on the idea of having a group of people called “eccentrics,” and Stanshall offered plenty of material to draw from: living on a houseboat, showing up in a Nazi officer’s uniform for photo sessions with Keith Moon, cultivating an epic beard. He dressed the part, alternating between hobo-chic and carnival barker classy.

But for those who insisted he was an eccentric in the classic, “English” sense, Stanshall had a reply:

A few years ago a woman from the Daily Mail phoned to inform me they were doing a piece on Sir John Betjeman and they would like me to companion him in the article, I being representative of the younger English eccentric. She wanted to know if was still doing it. Well, I don’t do it, I’m merely myself, … I’m whatever you like, just don’t expect me to join in. I do like games, though. You see, I’m not different for the sake of being different, only for the desperate sake of being myself. I can’t join your gang: you’d think I was a phony—and I’d know it.

“For the desperate sake of being myself.” That is as true and good a personal code as any statement one could come up with towards having a worthwhile life.

Around the time of the “Sir Henry at Rawlinson End” film, 1980, Stanshall provided his friend Steve Winwood, one of the least cynical or eccentric of performers, with a lyric that is confident in its obscurity (“my rock and roll is putting on weight”) and yet sweet and plain in its sentiment (“This time to the sky I’ll sing, if clouds don’t hear me/To the sun I’ll cry, and even if I’m blinded/I’ll try moon gazer…because with you I’m stronger”). “Arc of a Diver” does not seem like a Vivian Stanshall lyric because it is.

She bathes me in sweetness, I cannot reveal
For sharing dreams I need my woman
This humble expression…meagerly dressed
My eyes so mean it has no meaning
But jealous night and all her secret chords
I must be deaf…on the telephone…I need my love to translate

I play the piano, no more running honey
This time to the sky I’ll sing if clouds don’t hear me
To the sun I’ll cry and even if I’m blinded
I’ll try moon gazer, because with you I’m stronger…I’m stronger…I’m stronger

Arc of a diver…effortlessly…my mind in sky and when I wake up
In daytime or nighttime…I feel you near
Warm water breathing…she helps me hear
But jealous night and all her secret chords
I must be deaf…on the telephone…I need my love to translate

This time to the sky I’ll sing if clouds don’t hear me
To the sun I’ll cry and even if I’m blinded
I’ll try moon gazer…because with you I’m stronger

But jealous night and all her secret chords
I must be deaf…on the telephone…I’ll need my love to translate

This time to the sky I’ll sing if clouds don’t hear me
To the sun I’ll cry and even if I’m blinded
I’ll try moon gazer…because with you I’m stronger

Lean streaky music…spawned on the streets…I hear it but with you I have to go
Cause my rock ‘n’ roll…is putting on weight…and the beat. it goes on
Arc of a diver…effortlessly…my mind in sky and when I wake up, woah-oh-oh
Daytime and nighttime…I feel you near
Warm water breathing…she helps me hear

But jealous night and all her secret chords
I must be deaf…on the telephone…I’ll need my love to translate

With you my love we’re going to…raid the future
With you my love we’re going to stick up the past
We’ll hold today to ransom…’til our quartz clock stop…until yesterday
Woah, until yesterday
Until yesterday
Til our quartz clock stop

____________________________________________
Follow The Gad About Town on Facebook! Subscribe today for daily facts (well, trivia) about literature and history, plus links to other writers on Facebook.

Follow The Gad About Town on Instagram!

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.