Lament & Prayer
Why is a punch in the face
More real
Than the love you’re supposed
To feel?
Why is where you arrive
More important
Than the fact that
You’re alive?
What I am I supposed
To think
When gamblers gamble
And drinkers
Drink?
What can be done
With a bomb and a gun
That love cannot undo,
Honest and true?
What is this rancor?
Why is there war?
God Almighty,
What’s worth fighting
And dying for?
When people spread hate
And leaders lead through fear
What in the world’s
Going on here?
Are there not enough angels?
Too few fairies?
Can they save the world?
Maybe…
If we save ourselves first.
If we love each other more.
If hate were much less.
If…
Dry our tears, Lord.
Make us all strong.
Let us all get along.
Monday, June 29, 2009
Sunday, June 28, 2009
Wayfarer
I’ve been alive for longer
Than you can remember.
I was there
When the pyramids were built
And the pharaohs reigned.
I sat in on coversations
Between Plato and Socrates
And reveled in their wisdom.
When Roman criminals were
Fed to the lions,
I sat in the Colosseum and wept.
I fought along with Lancelot and Galahad
And whether you know it or not,
I drank from the Holy Grail.
I held the telescope and saw
The New World.
Columbus would never have known
I am an old soul.
I was the angel on Paul Revere’s shoulder
And the musket man at Brandywine.
I’ve stopped counting queens and kings
That have lived and died on my watch.
What matters now is that I’ve come here
And I am here now for you.
You deserve someone ageless in your life.
Everyone needs a wayfarer.
I have lived forever.
You will, too.
I’ve been alive for longer
Than you can remember.
I was there
When the pyramids were built
And the pharaohs reigned.
I sat in on coversations
Between Plato and Socrates
And reveled in their wisdom.
When Roman criminals were
Fed to the lions,
I sat in the Colosseum and wept.
I fought along with Lancelot and Galahad
And whether you know it or not,
I drank from the Holy Grail.
I held the telescope and saw
The New World.
Columbus would never have known
I am an old soul.
I was the angel on Paul Revere’s shoulder
And the musket man at Brandywine.
I’ve stopped counting queens and kings
That have lived and died on my watch.
What matters now is that I’ve come here
And I am here now for you.
You deserve someone ageless in your life.
Everyone needs a wayfarer.
I have lived forever.
You will, too.
Saturday, June 27, 2009
A Bafflement
I realize this is a matter of personal taste only, but I have a question.
Why is it that when Luciano Pavarotti died nearly two years ago, there was almost negligible media coverage? Why was his obituary consigned to the top right hand corner of the local paper? Did CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, FNC, LGBT, etc., etc. break into their regualr programming to announce that probably the greatest singer in the history of music had died? For that matter, were there hour-long tributes to him on any of those channels, or on the radio? Sure, there were old Met Opera and Three Tenors performances broadcast in Pavarotti's honor, on PBS. Besides that, Pavarotti's death was just a sad footnote to the day, and much of the planet seemed to shrug and put Britney Spears songs on their IPods.
In stark contrast, the world media fell all over itself to cover Michael Jackson's death the day before yesterday. People didn't seem to know whether to moonwalk in Michael's honor (whatever that was) or sob uncontrollably. You saw what it was in the first hours--breathless and frenzied reportage, followed by hasty and heavy-handed tribute. The world had been blindsided. All the networks seemed to forget for the moment about the disputed Iranian election, the truly frightening posturing of Kim-Jong Il, the hobbling economy, and the hours-old grief of Farrah Fawcett's loved ones. From on high, I would like to think that Luciano Pavarotti looked down and sobbed into his fabled white handkerchief, not merely because Michael Jackson had died, but probably because he was not mourned so publicly and such fervor.
Don't even try to figure out life, folks. There's no plausible explanation as to why two equally talented people are mourned in such radically different ways. But I would mention that to my knowledge, there was no moment of silence at any ballpark in either man's memory. Life goes on for those who have it, until suddenly, it doesn't.
Why is it that when Luciano Pavarotti died nearly two years ago, there was almost negligible media coverage? Why was his obituary consigned to the top right hand corner of the local paper? Did CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, FNC, LGBT, etc., etc. break into their regualr programming to announce that probably the greatest singer in the history of music had died? For that matter, were there hour-long tributes to him on any of those channels, or on the radio? Sure, there were old Met Opera and Three Tenors performances broadcast in Pavarotti's honor, on PBS. Besides that, Pavarotti's death was just a sad footnote to the day, and much of the planet seemed to shrug and put Britney Spears songs on their IPods.
In stark contrast, the world media fell all over itself to cover Michael Jackson's death the day before yesterday. People didn't seem to know whether to moonwalk in Michael's honor (whatever that was) or sob uncontrollably. You saw what it was in the first hours--breathless and frenzied reportage, followed by hasty and heavy-handed tribute. The world had been blindsided. All the networks seemed to forget for the moment about the disputed Iranian election, the truly frightening posturing of Kim-Jong Il, the hobbling economy, and the hours-old grief of Farrah Fawcett's loved ones. From on high, I would like to think that Luciano Pavarotti looked down and sobbed into his fabled white handkerchief, not merely because Michael Jackson had died, but probably because he was not mourned so publicly and such fervor.
Don't even try to figure out life, folks. There's no plausible explanation as to why two equally talented people are mourned in such radically different ways. But I would mention that to my knowledge, there was no moment of silence at any ballpark in either man's memory. Life goes on for those who have it, until suddenly, it doesn't.
Monday, June 22, 2009
This, too, must be said...
Whoever these Jon & Kate characters are, nothing, and I mean nothing, makes them special. Their eight children, twins and sextuplets, are special. Jon & Kate do not appear to be.
So reality teevee claims another ten victims, as clearly the overexposure of this family has forced Jon & Kate to go on teevee tonight and announce their intention to divorce.
Not that Sidney Lumet was a spectator, but if he were, he would no doubt be pursing his lips and sighing a deafening disgust. As for myself, I wonder aloud again why the teevee people don't refer to the late local news as reality teevee and be done with it.
So reality teevee claims another ten victims, as clearly the overexposure of this family has forced Jon & Kate to go on teevee tonight and announce their intention to divorce.
Not that Sidney Lumet was a spectator, but if he were, he would no doubt be pursing his lips and sighing a deafening disgust. As for myself, I wonder aloud again why the teevee people don't refer to the late local news as reality teevee and be done with it.
Saturday, June 20, 2009
DIALSCAN: MIAMI, JUNE 20, 2009
About now, what I would think is going to be a severe traffic jam is starting to build at the entrances to what is now called LandShark Stadium (after Jimmy Buffett’s brand of beer) at Northwest 199th Street in Miami Gardens. I think it’s fun to wonder what the various Marlin and Yankee fans coming to this evening’s game are listening to as they wait.
Betcha even money that a Mercedes is parking close to the stadium on what has to be a searing asphalt lot. Odds are better that the Mercedes is blaring WKCP-FM 89.7, which comes billed as Classical South Florida. Pure, unadulterated classical music 24-7-365, alas with the aftertaste of the occasional pledge drive—thank God we haven’t been tripped up by one. And so one can listen to the heroic strains of Wagner’s overture to Herzog Wildfang in relative peace. I wonder why they don’t play classical music between innings or at-bats; surely it would lend a certain stateliness to the proceedings. They’ve now moved into The Devil’s Trill by Giuseppe Tardini, a piece that comes billed as—the Announcer’s words now—“devilishly hard to play.” I’ll come back here after I’ve finished the piece.
I don’t know when the gates open at LandShark Stadium (f/k/a Joe Robbie Stadium, Pro Player Stadium, Dolphins Stadium and Dolphin Stadium, soon to be known quite possibly as Minnow on Wheels Stadium). I will bet, though, that there are people who will bring their own radios in and while away the time listening to WLRN-FM 89.3. In six minutes—it’s 4:54PM right now, they’ll be listening to All Things Considered. Some earlycomers are listening to Tavis Smiley interviewing some vaguely familiar –sounding fellow. I just realized—it’s Mike Farrell, still trying to sound relevant twenty-six years after M*A*S*H. He’s extolling his book Of Mule and Man; but which is which? Tavis himself is a pretty cool fellow—he’d probably be cooler than anybody in South Beach. Sadly, to my knowledge, there are no portable HD Radios. If there were, someone could cut in to WLRN’s HD channel. Supposedly it carries classical music, but at the moment, Marketplace Money has come to interrupt the music lover’s reverie.
So let’s walk a little further back in the parking lot. And maybe we come upon a Chevy Suburban, where WINZ-AM 940, a sports radio station, perhaps blares away where a group of guys is tailgating. We draw within earshot just as Dan Moriarty and Lincoln Kennedy of Fox Sports Radio are broadcasting “live and direct” and proud of it from California. They tell me what’s happening at the U.S. Open golf tournament on Long Island. If you’ve been following it, all that has been going on is rain and wind and Tiger Woods pouting through it all. Messrs. Moriarty and Kennedy must be bored, because their guest is a private eye who has started a reality show about cheating spouses, which has virtually nothing to do with sports. Maybe the one of the guys doing the barbecuing has ears like an eagle and goes to change the station. We move along.
You would be very, very surprised, and maybe even a bit perplexed, to find that three of the AM stations have the same call letters: WFTL. They’re all owned by the same company. So let’s say there’s a Saturn L200 in the logjam about a mile away from the stadium spinning the dial. Revealing a wisdom beyond his or her years, the driver bypasses 1400 AM, the ESPN Radio affiliate. He or she goes nearly all the way back to the left to 640 AM –it used to be called WMEN, giving a big tip as to its shtick. Not much going on there, either. In the middle of the dial, at 850 AM, the driver finds former WABC talker Steve Malzberg, who (s)he loved to listen to on the way home from Yankee Stadium. And the driver begins to feel ever so slightly nostalgic, even a little more secure in the knowledge that when (s)he eats that overpriced hot dog, (s)he’ll be a little bit better informed than the guy in the next seat. Little by little, the driver’s anger at not being able to hear Sterling and Waldman describe the game on 640 dissipates.
By the way, his or her seatmate may be in the beat-up Ford LTD listening to WQAM-AM 560, waiting for the next perceived inanity to come out of the host’s mouth so he can press the already worn-out “talk” button on his prepaid cell phone and find another useful way to spend his precious cell minutes. We don’t want to be in his field of gravity one second longer than absolutely necessary.
Just now starting his car in the downtown area possibly, an older man and his wife have WIOD-AM 610 permanently locked in, to a point where there’s quite possibly a padlock on the dial. And as they open the Cadillac Seville humpback up to about thirty-seven miles an hour tops, they are entertained by the 5:30 traffic update, and wonder why the reporter has nothing to say about the route they are taking. Granny groans at the weatherman’s announcement that record heat is gripping South Florida and bemoans the fact that they couldn’t get tickets under the overhang. Both of them roll their eyes in disgust hearing about the man who shook his baby because he was aggravated at the baby’s crying. The old man pushes his green Titelist cap down just a little bit further has they turn into the late afternoon sun and Mike McConnell resumes after the newsbreak. Just as I turn my attention elsewhere, the old man’s wife wonders why Tiger Woods pouts so darn much.
Quite possibly the coolest cats in this traffic jam are the ones in the Lincoln Navigator with the tinted windows, listening to WDNA-FM 88.9. They don’t care who wins or loses; all they care about is that there’s a baseball game to go to, and they’re going to squeeze every ounce of happiness and enjoyment that they can out of it. You may have seen someone like that on the highways in your town. A peace symbol on the rear window and the bumper sticker that tells you to “Coexist.” These are the coolest, happiest, most spiritual, most happening dudes you’ll meet. They’re as cool as Miami is hot. They know that besides baseball and classical music, nothing soothes the soul and lifts the spirit quite like…jazz.
Cool.
About now, what I would think is going to be a severe traffic jam is starting to build at the entrances to what is now called LandShark Stadium (after Jimmy Buffett’s brand of beer) at Northwest 199th Street in Miami Gardens. I think it’s fun to wonder what the various Marlin and Yankee fans coming to this evening’s game are listening to as they wait.
Betcha even money that a Mercedes is parking close to the stadium on what has to be a searing asphalt lot. Odds are better that the Mercedes is blaring WKCP-FM 89.7, which comes billed as Classical South Florida. Pure, unadulterated classical music 24-7-365, alas with the aftertaste of the occasional pledge drive—thank God we haven’t been tripped up by one. And so one can listen to the heroic strains of Wagner’s overture to Herzog Wildfang in relative peace. I wonder why they don’t play classical music between innings or at-bats; surely it would lend a certain stateliness to the proceedings. They’ve now moved into The Devil’s Trill by Giuseppe Tardini, a piece that comes billed as—the Announcer’s words now—“devilishly hard to play.” I’ll come back here after I’ve finished the piece.
I don’t know when the gates open at LandShark Stadium (f/k/a Joe Robbie Stadium, Pro Player Stadium, Dolphins Stadium and Dolphin Stadium, soon to be known quite possibly as Minnow on Wheels Stadium). I will bet, though, that there are people who will bring their own radios in and while away the time listening to WLRN-FM 89.3. In six minutes—it’s 4:54PM right now, they’ll be listening to All Things Considered. Some earlycomers are listening to Tavis Smiley interviewing some vaguely familiar –sounding fellow. I just realized—it’s Mike Farrell, still trying to sound relevant twenty-six years after M*A*S*H. He’s extolling his book Of Mule and Man; but which is which? Tavis himself is a pretty cool fellow—he’d probably be cooler than anybody in South Beach. Sadly, to my knowledge, there are no portable HD Radios. If there were, someone could cut in to WLRN’s HD channel. Supposedly it carries classical music, but at the moment, Marketplace Money has come to interrupt the music lover’s reverie.
So let’s walk a little further back in the parking lot. And maybe we come upon a Chevy Suburban, where WINZ-AM 940, a sports radio station, perhaps blares away where a group of guys is tailgating. We draw within earshot just as Dan Moriarty and Lincoln Kennedy of Fox Sports Radio are broadcasting “live and direct” and proud of it from California. They tell me what’s happening at the U.S. Open golf tournament on Long Island. If you’ve been following it, all that has been going on is rain and wind and Tiger Woods pouting through it all. Messrs. Moriarty and Kennedy must be bored, because their guest is a private eye who has started a reality show about cheating spouses, which has virtually nothing to do with sports. Maybe the one of the guys doing the barbecuing has ears like an eagle and goes to change the station. We move along.
You would be very, very surprised, and maybe even a bit perplexed, to find that three of the AM stations have the same call letters: WFTL. They’re all owned by the same company. So let’s say there’s a Saturn L200 in the logjam about a mile away from the stadium spinning the dial. Revealing a wisdom beyond his or her years, the driver bypasses 1400 AM, the ESPN Radio affiliate. He or she goes nearly all the way back to the left to 640 AM –it used to be called WMEN, giving a big tip as to its shtick. Not much going on there, either. In the middle of the dial, at 850 AM, the driver finds former WABC talker Steve Malzberg, who (s)he loved to listen to on the way home from Yankee Stadium. And the driver begins to feel ever so slightly nostalgic, even a little more secure in the knowledge that when (s)he eats that overpriced hot dog, (s)he’ll be a little bit better informed than the guy in the next seat. Little by little, the driver’s anger at not being able to hear Sterling and Waldman describe the game on 640 dissipates.
By the way, his or her seatmate may be in the beat-up Ford LTD listening to WQAM-AM 560, waiting for the next perceived inanity to come out of the host’s mouth so he can press the already worn-out “talk” button on his prepaid cell phone and find another useful way to spend his precious cell minutes. We don’t want to be in his field of gravity one second longer than absolutely necessary.
Just now starting his car in the downtown area possibly, an older man and his wife have WIOD-AM 610 permanently locked in, to a point where there’s quite possibly a padlock on the dial. And as they open the Cadillac Seville humpback up to about thirty-seven miles an hour tops, they are entertained by the 5:30 traffic update, and wonder why the reporter has nothing to say about the route they are taking. Granny groans at the weatherman’s announcement that record heat is gripping South Florida and bemoans the fact that they couldn’t get tickets under the overhang. Both of them roll their eyes in disgust hearing about the man who shook his baby because he was aggravated at the baby’s crying. The old man pushes his green Titelist cap down just a little bit further has they turn into the late afternoon sun and Mike McConnell resumes after the newsbreak. Just as I turn my attention elsewhere, the old man’s wife wonders why Tiger Woods pouts so darn much.
Quite possibly the coolest cats in this traffic jam are the ones in the Lincoln Navigator with the tinted windows, listening to WDNA-FM 88.9. They don’t care who wins or loses; all they care about is that there’s a baseball game to go to, and they’re going to squeeze every ounce of happiness and enjoyment that they can out of it. You may have seen someone like that on the highways in your town. A peace symbol on the rear window and the bumper sticker that tells you to “Coexist.” These are the coolest, happiest, most spiritual, most happening dudes you’ll meet. They’re as cool as Miami is hot. They know that besides baseball and classical music, nothing soothes the soul and lifts the spirit quite like…jazz.
Cool.
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
Fifteen years ago tonight, right about now actually, where were you?
I was at home, ever so slightly peeved that NBC had cut away from a fairly significant basketball game in order to bring me the confoundingly bizarre spectre of a white Ford Bronco a stately forty miles an hour (if that) along the freeways of Los Angeles. Its driver was Al Cowlings; his passenger, football legend O.J. Simpson, in a state of suicidal indecision. Both me and my mother were both baffled and hooked.
We all know what happened. Simpson surrendered to the police, setting the stage for the trial Larry Gelbart would later moan that "it seemed we had all been sentenced to watch for life." We were glued to CNN for fourteen hypnotic and bewildering months. It seemed we knew the lawyers in the case better than we knew members of our own families. The Bronco and The Juice Within was merely a touchstone--three cable news networks, the advent of the World Wide Web and the now too-familiar trappings of the Information Age would build upon it. A sustained attack of media frenzy has evolved into incessant bombardment, until we are numbed to the screams of pain.
And now, you ask? Simpson rots away in perpetuity, but in Nevada for a completely different crime. The families of what we still refer to as Simpson's "alleged" victims have only a fraction--if that-- of the eternal peace and heavenly solace that Nicole and Ron have found in Heaven. One of Simpson's attorneys has died, another founded a self-help legal website. Two of his prosecutors wrote books; how we rooted for them so long ago. Me, I have distanced myself from the teevee news glut, for better or worse. I am hopefully the wiser.
Now let me ask you this. If O.J. Simpson had gone and killed himself and not surrendered himself to the police, would the world still be talking about him fifteen years later? Would the last fifteen years of media development and over-growth have happened anyway? Perhaps. The Simpson Saga would be found in a few true-crime paperbacks gathering dust on a far shelf in a corner bookstore, and not have attracted the eye of Dominick Dunne, Gerry Spence, and all the other prestigious commentators whose two pennies, to say the least, were invested in the trial. Had O.J. Simpson killed himself, there would be no trial and no verdict of innocence to split this nation along racial lines. And in 2007, Simpson would not have had a gang of men to recruit so he could rob a poor bastard in Vegas of sports memorobilia he thought had been stolen.
My mother always told me when I was younger that what goes around comes around. No man is exempt, not even Orenthal James Simpson.
I was at home, ever so slightly peeved that NBC had cut away from a fairly significant basketball game in order to bring me the confoundingly bizarre spectre of a white Ford Bronco a stately forty miles an hour (if that) along the freeways of Los Angeles. Its driver was Al Cowlings; his passenger, football legend O.J. Simpson, in a state of suicidal indecision. Both me and my mother were both baffled and hooked.
We all know what happened. Simpson surrendered to the police, setting the stage for the trial Larry Gelbart would later moan that "it seemed we had all been sentenced to watch for life." We were glued to CNN for fourteen hypnotic and bewildering months. It seemed we knew the lawyers in the case better than we knew members of our own families. The Bronco and The Juice Within was merely a touchstone--three cable news networks, the advent of the World Wide Web and the now too-familiar trappings of the Information Age would build upon it. A sustained attack of media frenzy has evolved into incessant bombardment, until we are numbed to the screams of pain.
And now, you ask? Simpson rots away in perpetuity, but in Nevada for a completely different crime. The families of what we still refer to as Simpson's "alleged" victims have only a fraction--if that-- of the eternal peace and heavenly solace that Nicole and Ron have found in Heaven. One of Simpson's attorneys has died, another founded a self-help legal website. Two of his prosecutors wrote books; how we rooted for them so long ago. Me, I have distanced myself from the teevee news glut, for better or worse. I am hopefully the wiser.
Now let me ask you this. If O.J. Simpson had gone and killed himself and not surrendered himself to the police, would the world still be talking about him fifteen years later? Would the last fifteen years of media development and over-growth have happened anyway? Perhaps. The Simpson Saga would be found in a few true-crime paperbacks gathering dust on a far shelf in a corner bookstore, and not have attracted the eye of Dominick Dunne, Gerry Spence, and all the other prestigious commentators whose two pennies, to say the least, were invested in the trial. Had O.J. Simpson killed himself, there would be no trial and no verdict of innocence to split this nation along racial lines. And in 2007, Simpson would not have had a gang of men to recruit so he could rob a poor bastard in Vegas of sports memorobilia he thought had been stolen.
My mother always told me when I was younger that what goes around comes around. No man is exempt, not even Orenthal James Simpson.
Saturday, June 13, 2009
Odds & Ends
--Whoever Miley Cyrus is, who does she think she is that you can't go to one of her concerts with a paper ticket? Just asking.
--Here's some fun: At the end of a major sports championship, do yourself a favor. Get on the Internet and try to find live video of a newscast in the winning city. It's a lot more interesting to see how a city celebrates a success than it is to mourn a failure. For three days afterward, no one in the city wants to talk about anything else; this is particularly true in a city (like Tampa) that predicates much of its well-being on the success or failure of its sports teams.
--If it were up to Governor Sarah Palin (R-Alaska) and her family, I'm sure David Letterman would be out of work, out of a fortune and out on the streets of Nome with a placard saying "Will Tell Inoffensive Jokes for Food". I'd like to see David make jokes under really stressful conditions; serves the son of a bitch right.
--Seven hundred thousand people have called an FCC hotline for assistance with the digital television transfer that just took place. At least one person in America doesn't give a shit; the one who called in to WBZ-AM in Boston the other night to tell Dan Rea that. She's smarter than the average American would appear to be.
--It is impossible to Twitter--whatever the hell that means--when you are in the shower, when you are sleeping, when you are having sex, or a combination of all three.
--Wendy's has come out with "buffalo wings". They're not wings in the academic sense. They're Chicken Nuggets that get dipped in sauce that render them useless for picking up. All of these are terrible things to do to a chicken's balls.
--Somewhere in Heaven, Walter Matthau and Robert Shaw are reading the reviews of the remake of their film The Taking of Pelham One Two Three and snickering with glee among themselves. Their legacy is safe.
--Whatever the benefits of Blu-ray video discs are, I can tell that this is what happens when you scrape the emulsion off the film. It must be akin to the pain one feels after plastic surgery.
--Most days on the way home from work, only--only--because there is nothing else on the radio at that time, I listen to Michael Savage. He is what Howard Beale might have been if he had a radio mike and not a teevee camera to talk into. He also, as you may or may not know, is the talk show host who has (probably inadvertently) been banned from Britain. I worry, when Dr. Savage is not variously calling me a schmuck, a schmendrick or a putz, that he will obtain the transcript of his trial after he wins and go on the air and do nothing but read from it every day. The good news is that I really only listen to Dr. Savage for forty-five minutes or less at a time. A little bit of a lunatic goes a longer way than you'd think.
--The circus is a little easier to take if it's happening over there. Ask anyone who lives in a city that has hosted a Super Bowl.
--Here's a packing tip if you're visiting Florida: Pack a oilworker's proximity suit if you want to beat the heat. Also, pack a wetsuit not just to jump into the ocean, but also to brave the summer monsoons.
--During this piece, I've been listening to the Subway Series game at Yankee Stadium. Nowadays, when John Sterling tells me that one of the Yankees is safe on the bases, he must launch right into a plug for New York Life. One of these days, he and Suzyn Waldman are going to tear up all of those ad cards on the air in a revolt; I'm just rooting for something like that to happen. The play's the thing, after all.
--Similarly, on one of these all-news radio stations, I'd be very happy to hear one of these newscasters tell me the temperature, as they must do every four or so minutes, and then add, "If you don't know how hot it is by now, you have no damn reason to be outside in the first place."
--
Tuesday, June 9, 2009
Fair-Haired Baby Boy
The little fair-haired baby boy
Pits and patters and
Crawls along the floor.
He wears a blue blanket sleeper
With Winnie-The-Pooh
On the breast.
He bops along the kitchen floor
Excited to see where he goes
And what he’ll do
When he gets there.
Look at his sweet, merry face.
How the delight registers in
His rosy-red cheeks.
His smile and delight
Open his mouth
And my heart
And brings tears to my eyes.
His hair
Is blond
And fair.
His hazel eyes
Could light
Every lamp and soul
In every city.
He reminds me
Of me
When I was
That age.
Maybe he is me.
The little fair-haired baby boy
Pits and patters and
Crawls along the floor.
He wears a blue blanket sleeper
With Winnie-The-Pooh
On the breast.
He bops along the kitchen floor
Excited to see where he goes
And what he’ll do
When he gets there.
Look at his sweet, merry face.
How the delight registers in
His rosy-red cheeks.
His smile and delight
Open his mouth
And my heart
And brings tears to my eyes.
His hair
Is blond
And fair.
His hazel eyes
Could light
Every lamp and soul
In every city.
He reminds me
Of me
When I was
That age.
Maybe he is me.
Saturday, June 6, 2009
This Must Be Said...
I know I'm several days late to the dance on this but the more I think about this, the more aggravated I get.
I cannot help but think of Susan Boyle, whom I'm sure you've seen sing or read about in the papers and online. Englishwoman, late forties, having stumbled upon full adulthood without owning a computer or even having been so much as been kissed. Zaftig, merry, and reportedly--because I've never heard it--one hell of a singing voice. Anyway, Susan gets on Britain's Got Talent--NBC airs an American version as a summer replacement--and sets the world on fire with her renditions. Everybody's in love with her, except for the people in Britain who think that a dance troupe called Diversity is just a little more Talented.
Now instead of performing in the Royal Variety Show for an audience that would have included no less a personage than Queen Elizabeth the Second, Susan Boyle was only yesterday released from a hospital, as a result of a nervous breakdown.
Let me tell you this--if I were Susan and I were invited by the producers of America's Got Talent to perform for the Yank audience, I shouldn't even have to flinch when I say no. Why even have a spoonful of such poison when I've already had a gallon jug.
In his commentary track on the DVD of Network, Sidney Lumet, who directed live teevee before he ever directed films, tells us that inevitably, somebody is going to get killed on live television, just like the main character of his film. He may be more right than he knows. As much as anything else, the Colosseum mentality that drives reality television similary drove Susan Boyle to a nervous collapse. Is this what television has become? I just about wash my hands of teevee--reality and otherwise--if this is so,
As for Susan herself, I envy and empathize with her in equal measure. I don't even know how she resisted the pressure as long as she did, but it would have driven me just as nuts.
Life goes on, for sharks and minnows alike.
I cannot help but think of Susan Boyle, whom I'm sure you've seen sing or read about in the papers and online. Englishwoman, late forties, having stumbled upon full adulthood without owning a computer or even having been so much as been kissed. Zaftig, merry, and reportedly--because I've never heard it--one hell of a singing voice. Anyway, Susan gets on Britain's Got Talent--NBC airs an American version as a summer replacement--and sets the world on fire with her renditions. Everybody's in love with her, except for the people in Britain who think that a dance troupe called Diversity is just a little more Talented.
Now instead of performing in the Royal Variety Show for an audience that would have included no less a personage than Queen Elizabeth the Second, Susan Boyle was only yesterday released from a hospital, as a result of a nervous breakdown.
Let me tell you this--if I were Susan and I were invited by the producers of America's Got Talent to perform for the Yank audience, I shouldn't even have to flinch when I say no. Why even have a spoonful of such poison when I've already had a gallon jug.
In his commentary track on the DVD of Network, Sidney Lumet, who directed live teevee before he ever directed films, tells us that inevitably, somebody is going to get killed on live television, just like the main character of his film. He may be more right than he knows. As much as anything else, the Colosseum mentality that drives reality television similary drove Susan Boyle to a nervous collapse. Is this what television has become? I just about wash my hands of teevee--reality and otherwise--if this is so,
As for Susan herself, I envy and empathize with her in equal measure. I don't even know how she resisted the pressure as long as she did, but it would have driven me just as nuts.
Life goes on, for sharks and minnows alike.
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