IT has Started

In Florida, the presidential election robo-calls have begun (put this number on your blocked call list if you are so inclined: 646-891-2992).  It was Donald Trump calling! – his recording about the “emergency” of defeating Hillary Clinton and then another voice seeking contributions as, he claims, the Trump campaign is no longer self-funding (do they need funding at all as the mass media and the world of “Tweetledum and Tweetledee” seem not to get enough of him?).  The follow up voice said that by contributing $25 you get a nice elect Trump sticker (guess the hat, “made in America” but mostly by Latinos, Mexicans, and Salvadoreños, is too expensive) and if you feel generous enough to contribute $1,000 you get a signed photograph of him “suitable for framing.” So it begins.  Where do I puke?

The Great American Songbook Inhabits the Palm Beaches

Some recent events bear witness to the title of this entry.  A focal point, though, is Palm Beach’s The Colony Hotel which has its very own version of Manhattan’s Cafe Carlyle, or any of the well known NYC cabarets, only more intimate.  The Colony’s Royal Room attracts some topnotch American Songbook talent. Also, the Colony’s Polo Lounge Sunday brunch this season featured one of the best jazz pianists, Bill Mays. Sometime ago we heard Mays accompany diva Ann Hampton Callaway (a composer and a great jazz-cabaret singer) at the Eissey Campus Theatre of Palm Beach State College and made it a point to seek him out at the Colony’s Polo Lounge a couple of weeks ago. 

I asked him to play Bill Evans’ Turn Out the Stars, not very frequently performed, a work of beautiful voicing and emotion.  After a break, Mays played it solo, without the bass, effortlessly as if he plays it daily.  To me, it was heartrending. Then we were treated to an impromptu performance by the then featured performer at the Royal Room -- Karen Oberlin.  Amazing how an unrehearsed number by three professionals can be so natural.  Bill Mays’ CD Front Row Seat is exactly as titled – it’s as if he is playing in your living room.

Last month at the Royal Room we also caught Jane Monheit who we saw years ago and who has matured into such a great stylist, with phenomenal range, her latest album, The Songbook Sessions, a tribute to the great Ella Fitzgerald. She gladly posed with Ann for a photo. 

She performed pieces from her album and other numbers with her trio, husband Rick Montalbano on drums, Neal Miner on bass and Michael Kanin on piano, just the perfect combo for classic jazz.  Unfortunately her album (and this is very personal, not a professional observation) included a trumpet player, at times a distraction. I just wonder why the addition of a brass instrument was necessary. The bass, piano, and percussion combo is (to me) ideal for intimate, classic jazz.

Nonetheless, just to tie this together is a YouTube performance by Jane Monheit of Bill Evans’ Turn out the Stars, which was recorded at the Rainbow Room some six years ago.  What a sultry performer, one of our leading jazz first ladies, along with Stacey Kent, two completely different styles but both at the top of their games.

Last Saturday our close friend and neighbor, Nina (the artist who painted “Jessica” which hangs over my piano), who is also a cellist and a singer (do her talents have no bounds?), performed in the Choral Society of the Palm Beaches (S. Mark Aliapoulios, Artistic Director) – at Jupiter’s Florida Atlantic University auditorium. 

This was one of the most diverse programs we’ve seen in a long time, culminating in a partially acted out version of Frank Loesser’s The Most Happy Fella, a Broadway show which was recently performed at the New York City Opera.

The program’s featured performers made it especially enjoyable, vocalists Lisa Vroman, a soprano with extensive Broadway experience (who played Rosabella in that New York City Opera presentation) and Mark Sanders, a baritone who frequently performs with the Gulf Coast Symphony.  They had the perfect chemistry for performing one of the most beautiful Broadway duets ever written, Loesser’s "My Heart Is So Full of You."

But for me the highlight was the appearance and performance of Paul Posnak, who arranged Four Songs By George Gershwin for two pianos, which he played with the Choral Society’s pianist Dr. Anita Castiglione.  The songs reminded me so much of Earl Wild’s arrangement, Fantasy on Porgy and Bess and after the concert I told him so. He was delighted by the comparison, and it was apt.

Not enough praise can be directed to Dr. Catiglione for her nearly non-stop performance during the 2-1/2 hour program, easily transitioning to soloing, to accompanying, from Gershwin, to Irving Berlin, to Rogers and Hammerstein, to then to Frank Loesser and finally to classical, accompanying songs beautifully sung by the 2016 Young Artist Vocal Competition Winners, Mr. Julian Frias and Ms. Celene Perez, both high school seniors with great artistic careers ahead of them.  Our friend, Nina, was instrumental in organizing this competition.

Judging by these events, the American Songbook thrives and its future seems assured in the Palm Beaches!

If It’s Spring, Then….

The Boys of Spring are back and this Old Boy of Spring is once again attracted to the diamond of my dreams, formed by four bases each 90 feet from the other.  But in my mind’s eye, I see the interior, 60’6” from home plate, the long expired vision of my playing years, replete with fantasies of facing that last batter in my perfectly pitched game, the World Series tied three games each, my Yankee teammates urging me on.  I’m behind in the count, facing a right-handed slugger (I’m left-handed).  My catcher calls for a fastball inside, but I shrug him off, favoring my secret weapon, rarely thrown today, a screwball which looks like it’ll be down the middle of the plate, breaking away from the batter at the last second.  Strike three!  Poof, there goes the dream, but when I return to the Roger Dean Stadium to see the Class A+ ball there, it’s a testimony to the one thing in my life that has essentially remained the same: baseball.

I’m convinced though that minor league games are better than going to any major league game. We have TV for the latter and IF you can get tickets to a critical MLB game, be prepared to shell out $$$ for any decent seat.  Otherwise, you are in the stratosphere watching a postage size game.  Much better on HD TV.

So, last night we went to our first “Silver Sluggers”night, a “deal” for us aging fans.

And last night had a special treat for me, seeing a left-handed pitcher who really impressed – Austin Gomber.  He’s a big guy, 6’-5”, so you'd think he'd have a blazing fast ball, but no, “only” about 90 or so. But his breaking stuff, especially his curve, and placement was great.  He pitched a shutout during his 7 plus innings and he looked more like a major league pitcher, thinking strategically in his selection of pitches, relying on his dipping curveball and an occasional slider and change up to get guys out. Usually down here in the minors they just hurl the ball, but he's already a thinking pitcher.  In the past I had signaled out other lefties for the majors, including Andrew Heaney (now with the Angles) and Justin Nicolino (now with the Marlins).

The way the New York Yankees are playing, perhaps they could use him today?  Make a trade!

Unfortunately, Roger Dean Stadium has now erected netting in front of the seats where we normally like to sit, so photographs suffer, although not the enjoyment of the game. Ah, baseball is back.

Remembering Jeremy

In spite of knowing it was coming, no one is prepared for the news of the death of a close friend.  Jeremy Geelan succumbed to pancreatic cancer on April 12 on the eve of his 59^th birthday after a five year struggle fought with dignity and courage.  He was the middle son of my close colleague, Peter Geelan, who also died of cancer, when he was 63. 

In his short 59 years Jeremy lived at least two lifetimes.  He was a person with titanic energy and vision.  With his wife Kirsten, his constant soul mate, they raised four beautiful children, Torsten, Sebastian, Christian and Anne-Sofie.  He loved them deeply and our hearts go out to them, and to Jeremy's brothers, Michael and Christopher.

Jeremy flourished in the world of the future, and I worked with him copublishing his “very” 20^th century printed book program in the 1990s.  It met with modest success but that was only because it was before its time.  The Internet’s rise corresponded with Jeremy’s business metamorphosis, going way beyond the printed word, becoming the guru of the “Internet of Things.”  Kirsten too was having a challenging professional life representing Denmark as an Ambassador to a number of countries, most recently Nepal (and thus Jeremy’s love of Katmandu). 

On his LinkedIn profile Jeremy describes himself as being “British by birth, upbeat by nature, intercontinental commuter by choice, anthropologist and exponent of Internet co-technologies by trade.”  I can testify to the veracity of those words, each and every one of them, particularly his temperament which was always so optimistic that I sometimes wondered whether he was acquainted with the real world.   But visionaries are that way.  If nothing is impossible, well nothing is.

When his terrible illness was diagnosed five years ago, Jeremy seized Whipple surgery --a literally gut-retching procedure, with a long, difficult recovery.  Right afterward he wrote to me unchecked, pancreatic cancer is quite the Silent Killer, with a quite spectacular mortality rate. Whereas I have a ton of things still to get done, ten or fifteen years more of flat-out work. So I figured there was no way I was ready yet to throw in the towel just because of some miscreant neoplasm! ;-)  That truly encapsulates his attitude, toward the disease and toward life itself.  The photo here shows Jeremy after the surgery in one of his more precarious strategies to achieve business as usual.

The survival rate drops off sharply after five years but Jeremy made it to those outer fringes and I think during that time he accomplished what it would have taken us mere mortals those ten to fifteen years to achieve.  

He wrote publicly about his illness, most recently on Medium on Jan. 26, 2016 A Love Letter To Life and and earlier one on Oct. 26, 2015 'Man Plans and God Laughs’ — How a single day can change your life.

Before those entries, he had given me a “heads up” email about their contents and we wrote soul-searching exchanges, too personal to post here. I had written about Jeremy’s illness before in my blog, particularly commenting on his own blog entry from 2014, a milestone marking his third anniversary after Whipple surgery.  It seems like only yesterday. Before that entry there was one describing a Baltic cruise we had taken in the Fall of 2011 which was only six months after Jeremy’s life-saving surgery and ironically about the same after my difficult open heart surgery. 

We both were recuperating simultaneously, having gone down similar, but different life-threatening rabbit holes.  This was yet another bond in our lives.  Shortly afterward, Ann and I were on that Baltic cruise visiting Copenhagen for only one day but unfortunately Jeremy was in Norway on business already.  However we were able to enjoy a typical Danish luncheon with Kirsten and two of their children.

I think of Jeremy as a comet, gloriously, inexplicably appearing and then disappearing for months on end, but when streaking across my sky, our email was deeply personal, rewarding, and we both knew it.  It is unthinkable to me that Jeremy’s Comet is now off, never to return.

As I said at the beginning of this entry, our relationship goes back to the time of the printed book.  Jeremy was a 21^st Century man caught in a 20^th Century world.  In 1993 he had visited my publishing offices in Westport, Connecticut for a couple of days and we had talked about co-publishing arrangements.  This was in the day when the publishing world was still segregated by geographic territories.  His Adamantine Press was to publish “Adamantine Studies of the 21^st Century” in the UK and Europe and my company in the rest of the world.  Mind you, scholarly books at the time sold in the thousands or merely the hundreds.  This was not the audience Jeremy imagined.  How couldn’t EVERYONE be concerned about the future?

His enthusiasm was contagious.  After all day and all night discussing forms of cooperation, I arrived at my office and found a hand-written letter waiting for me, delivered by Jeremy before the office had opened and he had departed for home (wherever that was at the time having lived in different places all over the world). It was 12 pages dated March 17, 1993 on the stationary of the Westport Inn, probably hastily written in the wee hours of the morning.  It gives a sense of the man before he became an “Internet of Things” guru.  Jeremy was unique.  Why I took that letter with me when I retired I now know.  I thought he was an exceptional human being, great things to become of him, and here were twelve pages in his own hand for me to cherish.

The first part of his letter was to thank me for spending that time with him and my wife Ann for hosting cocktails and then for our dinner at the Cobbs Mill Inn, a restaurant near our home in Weston, CT at the time. The second part of the letter I quote in part as it shows the vision which would carry him to his destiny:

Strategy is what makes me buzz, what makes me feel I am on the verge of Understanding, on the fine line where passive –going-with-life’s flow becomes proactive management of life’s flow: containment of it, at least, harnessing of it, manipulation of it.

Which (early-morning) stream-of--consciousness brings me to a general observation about all these darned books that I’ve worked so hard to bring to your attention which I can see making a viable – perhaps even, in time, a substantial – contribution to your publishing program. The observation is this:  that “21^st Century” books are not about prediction, they are not even (save tangentially) even foresight.  They are about scholarship – and vision.

The whole point of harvesting these demonstrably forward-looking books is not to enable prediction but to enable understanding of alternatives.  “Simply to be a human being is to be a futurist of sorts.” (I employ this useful statement in a little descriptive blurb!)  “For human freedom is largely a matter of imagining alternative futures and then choosing among them.”

North America contains not 2,500 futurists but 250 million!   Two hundred and fifty million choosers, making choices in a variety of areas on a variety of timescales – strategizing as best they can, which, in these headlong, accelerating times ain’t no cakewalk.

Now we can’t expect to sell 250 million copies of every title!  Some of our “futurists” – our human beings who job is to surmount The Challenge of Choice (bankers, economists, CEOs, urban planners, environmental strategists, designers, public servants; practical men and women of action – some of them, I say, aren’t yet turned twenty).  But from 25 onwards – to 45, 55, and maybe right through till 95 – there is our target audience.  Typically, s/he has already “flagged” this interest in choosing – through an organisational or professional affiliation: and the scale of these organizations can be reassuringly large.

These are the core consumer of “21^st Century Studies” – of books which challenge, stimulate, and help to provide a sense of perspective and hope about the future.  These are the strategizes, for those heading up organisations as dynamically as today’s fast-changing circumstances allows – thirsty for insight from whichever source, always provided the insight is captured, kept lucid, and brought to them in some value-added way.

Maybe books, as we discussed at breakfast, and maybe CD-ROM.  But “insight capture” remains our business, our stock-in-trade: and forward-looking, interdisciplinary insight capture is going to be at a premium over the coming years, an opportunity to stake this thirst for insight aimed at helping strategies.  By God, I think that you and I might have to read the titles and not just to publish them.  For strategy is all: and how can those with responsibilities formulate good choices without involving themselves in informed choices?  “The best possible choices, in the best possible order” – that is what you’re paid to make for your publishing organization, in nine simple words.  And there are choosers in the hundreds of thousands in this land of yours.  So Let’s Go For It, let’s get that sector synonymous with the “21^st Century” branding and then keep it that way.  Whether in time we supply the sector via printed page, or fax modem, by CD-ROM or “video magazine” that will be a judgment call on the way through.

[The letter continues about proposed financial terms. We did copublish but not on the scale Jeremy envisioned.  By then the next challenge, the Internet, had reached critical mass.  Jeremy concludes his letter with the following thought]:

“…And what about your 5-year plan, …more challenges and choices.  Simply to be Robert Hagelstein is to be a futurist of sorts.  Oh, yes.

See if you can include me in your future, Bob, I would aim to make it one of the shrewdest investments you ever made (and god knows you’ve by all accounts made a goodly few).  Because in some way, for better or for worse,

I am the future.

Fondly --- Jeremy

The last email I had from him was only weeks ago.  It was long, detailed, somehow still intrinsically optimistic, but accepting the inevitable, knowing these days must be spent with his loving family.  It concluded:

Sorry for waylaying you like this on a Sunday morning with so much (too much?) info...but how much is too much when it comes to possibly being one if the last emails I get to write to you who have brought so much love and wisdom to my blessed, if too-short, life?

THANK YOU, Bob - from the very bottom of my heart. For everything.

J xxxxx

I was stunned by it.  I sent him a tearful, heartfelt reply, expressing my regrets that we hadn’t actually seen each other since 2001, but grateful we’ve always been there for one another in cyberspace. I can’t imagine my world without him and it is hard to do justice to such a human being in mere words.  Jeremy, I will always remember you.

https://www.justgiving.com/Jeremy-Geelan