Memorial Day

It’s already started: media advertising inundation announcing Memorial Day sales. It is bad enough that every holiday is turned into a shopping opportunity, but converting Memorial Day to a quick buck is especially disturbing. How many of us will stop to remember, pay homage to the millions who have given life or limb, or have made extraordinary sacrifices to establish our freedoms and protect them? Instead, we head off to the malls or the beach and hardly give a thought to the true meaning of the day. “Lennar Homes announces a Sell-a-thon Memorial Day Weekend Savings!!!”

I think of my father, just a “regular Joe” as he described himself, newly married and having a young son (me), who like so many others went off to WWII. It was not something he wanted to do, and he was ill prepared for the experience. As he said at the conclusion of the war with many soldiers being held in Europe for possible police action, “my desire is so strong, the urge so great to be able to come home again.” But he made those sacrifices.

He never talked much about the war. Maybe that was because he had seen atrocities filming one of the concentration camps at the war’s end as a Signal Corps photographer. Stars and Stripes featured a photograph OF him in one of its pages: “Signal Corps cameraman T/4 Robert Hagelstein, assigned to Ninth Army, ignores the German warning, ‘photography forbidden,’ to shoot movies of activities along the Rhine River March 5, 1945.”
http://www.gordon.army.mil/ocos/ac/Edition,%20Fall/Fall%2001/images/NONO.JPG

Thanks to some of his letters I know how he felt about making the sacrifices of those years: http://lacunaemusing.blogspot.com/2007/11/ikey-lubins-and-letters-from-past.html

I, on the other hand, through a number of coincidences, never served in the armed forces. I was married before the VietNam conflict escalated and although I had planned to go into the US Army Reserve, President Kennedy then declared married men “3A” so I did not enlist. By the time they were calling up married men, I already had a son, and continued to be deferred from the draft. Truthfully, I was greatly relieved at the time. But friends of mine were called, and today I feel a sense of self-reproach about not having been among them.

This heightens my great respect for those who served and I think we as a nation owe more to them than just a tip of the hat and a Sell-a-thon. And, I think it behooves us to reflect on the ideals and freedoms our founding fathers so valiantly and brilliantly struggled to establish. David McCullough’s magnificent biography of John Adams provides a behind the scenes view of the birth of our nation and those sacrifices.

“Our obligations to our country never cease but with our lives.” -- John Adams

Too Much of a Good Thing?

I’ve written about this many times in this space: the United States has no national plan to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels. And it’s only because we have no leadership and, therefore, our tax structure and incentives are inadequate. China, Japan and Germany are the leaders in solar cell production. Below is a link to a recent New York Times article "Germany Debates Subsidies for Solar Industry." Ironically, the dispute in Germany is whether to curtail some incentives, as they’ve been “too successful,” and this in a country that has less annual sunlight hours than much of the United States.

To briefly quote from the article, “with wind, biomass and other alternative energy also growing, Germany derives 14.2 percent of its electricity from renewable sources…At the moment, solar energy adds 1.01 euros ($1.69) a month to a typical home electricity bill, a modest surcharge that Germans are willing to pay.”

The fear in Germany is that surcharge will have to rise to continue to underwrite the expansion of their solar industry. Seems like a small price to pay for energy independence. Strange that the United States will have to follow the leadership of a country that was an adversary only a few decades ago.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/16/business/worldbusiness/16solar.html?pagewanted=1&ei=5070&em&en=21d0c75da6823c40&ex=1211083200

Open Letter to Senator Obama

Dear Senator Barack Obama:

Does history make the man or does man make history? Rarely is there a confluence of events which might help answer that question and, with your presumptive Democratic nomination for the Presidency, you have the opportunity to make the kind of difference our founding fathers did at the birth of our nation, or Lincoln did bringing our nation back from the brink of self destruction, or Roosevelt’s seeing us through the most destructive war in history.

Although one could cite a litany of maladies our nation now suffers from, at the core is our loss of credibility abroad, our lack of a national plan for energy independence, and the ongoing irreconcilability of conservative and liberal values and its resultant impact on the social fabric of race relations, religious tolerance and educational opportunities.

Your life reads like a microcosm of the United Nations, born to a black, Kenyan father who was raised a Muslim, and a white mother who you described as being “detached from religion,” who later divorced your father and married an Indonesian; thus you attended schools in Jakarta until you were ten years old. But you then lived with your white grandmother’s family in Honolulu until you graduated high school. You met your wife Michelle, an African American, while you interned in a law office and you were married at the time you became a Christian.

I came of age during the tumultuous late 50’s and 60’s as the civil rights movement and the cold war raged, as we became mired in a senseless war in Viet Nam, and painfully endured the assassinations of beloved leaders, John F, Kennedy, his brother Robert, and Martin Luther King. Then, we succumbed to the national disgraces of the 70’s, a wrecked economy, becoming hostages to countries that hate us in the Middle East, American prestige sinking to new lows, and the age of Watergate politics. The one thing we could point to with pride was our ability to set a national goal as John F. Kennedy did in 1961, to put a man on the moon by the end of that decade and actually doing the unthinkable, the impossible.

Today is not too far removed from then. Our economic difficulties of mounting national debt and a declining dollar, a decaying infrastructure, and the lack of better healthcare for our sick and better education for our young can be traced to a needless war, and to being hostage, once again, to oil producing nations. Racial and religious divisiveness still erodes the fabric of our society. The view of America abroad has undermined our ability to effectively deal with terrorism and to address global environmental issues. Politics again slithers along a slippery Machiavellian slope.

It is extraordinary that we could be at the brink of electing you, our first African American President. If these problems were less extreme, this moment may not have arrived. Senator Obama, seize the day, and use this unique opportunity as a conciliator, to help bridge the abyss between races and religions, leading us away from Iraq and towards energy independence. We have the alternative energy technology, the clean natural gas resources, and nuclear capability to substantially decrease our dependence on fossil fuels if only we could develop the backbone to sacrifice short-term gratification for long-term gains, declaring it as a national objective. By achieving energy independence, our economic problems will diminish.

Your opponents have criticized your limited political experience, making it one of their main issues in attacking your candidacy. Lincoln too was relatively inexperienced, something he made to work to his advantage. Forge cooperation across the aisle in congress, creating your own “team of rivals” as Doris Kearns Goodwin described his cabinet in her marvelous civil war history.

Some people have pointed to 9/11 as a manifestation of the clash between the Muslim and Christian worlds. Given your personal background, you have what may be a unique opportunity to establish a dialogue between these two worlds and in so doing begin to restore our international standing. Just electing you will demonstrate to the world that we can put our ideals into action.

Friedman for President

It is not surprising that the most emailed article from yesterday’s New York Times, is Thomas Friedman’s “Dumb as We Wanna Be”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/30/opinion/30friedman.html?em&ex=1209787200&en=c74689f177717558&ei=5087%0A.

I’ve missed reading Friedman who just completed a sabbatical book-writing project that expands an article he wrote for the magazine section a year ago:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/15/magazine/15green.t.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
The book version, Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution--and How It Can Renew America, will be published in August.

Why not start a write-in campaign to elect Friedman President? He always seems to have the right perspective on foreign policy and our economic and energy crisis. I also like his even-tempered demeanor. Someone once said you have to be crazy to want to be the President of the United States. Maybe that is the problem with a plan for his Presidency. Friedman is not crazy.

He calls Clinton and McCain’s proposal for a summer gas tax “holiday” political pandering (Amen) and a form of money laundering, borrowing from China, moving it to the oil producing nations, leaving a little in our gas tanks as the broker for the transaction, but also leaving our children with the debt. The analogy would be funny if it were not so sadly true.

But the rest of the article goes to the core of the problem, not having a game plan to achieve energy independence, and helping to repair our decaying environment along the way, something I’ve also ranted about: http://lacunaemusing.blogspot.com/2007/12/politics-as-usual-where-is-leader.html

The ongoing political shenanigans over this issue and the lack of a plan are enough to make me sick. I had thought our current administration was just too clueless to grasp the importance of leading our nation to energy independence through alternative solar, wind, and geothermal technologies. Imagine my shock at seeing Laura Bush recently conducting a TV tour of their home in Crawford, Texas, which is replete with geothermal heating and cooling and a system for capturing rainwater and household wastewater for irrigation. I would have expected this from Al Gore, but George Bush?

His public environmental policies are in direct contrast to what he has done in his own home. So it is not a question of not knowing better, it’s knowing better but not leading our country to a better place, an immoral travesty of the public trust. Where would we be today if we had thrown down the gauntlet at the beginning of his Presidency? By delaying a commitment to energy independence, we have made the goal even more difficult as we must now start with massive debt, and a devalued dollar.

Instead, we pour resources into ethanol with the unintended consequences of food shortages and burgeoning food prices. Sounds like a good plan, subsidize the farmers to buy seeds and fertilizer (at triple the cost vs. last year), squeeze out food crops and tax our water resources, buy oil for the energy needed to convert crops to ethanol (be sure to take on more debt to get that oil), and continue to watch fuel prices escalate in spite of increasing ethanol additives, while paying much more for all food staples (hoarding rice along the way).

Yesterday the Federal Reserve laughably said, “readings on core inflation have improved somewhat” (which excludes food and energy). Maybe it’s time we go back to the Consumer Price Index as a fairer measurement of inflation so government has to face the real facts.

Stacey and Nicole

Kudos to Rob Russell and his vision for the Colony Hotel’s Royal Room. What used to be a storage room at the famous Palm Beach boutique hotel has been transformed into what the Oak Room is at the Algonquin, or Feinstein’s at the Regency, or call it the Great American Songbook South. Last week we were fortunate enough to see Stacey Kent there. She may well be regarded as the new first lady of the genre. Very talented musicians back her up, in particular her husband, Jim Tomlinson, a superb saxophonist who produces her albums and is her business manager. He and novelist Kazuo Ishiguro wrote several new pieces for Stacey’s recent album, Breakfast on the Morning Tram, four of which she performed.

What catapults an artist like Stacey Kent to the top of her field? First, she is completely dedicated to the genre, living the music. When she says that her very favorite lyric is from People Will Say We're In Love, “Don't keep your hand in mine; Your hand feels so grand in mine” you feel it deeply when she sings those words as she did the other night.

Then, she articulates the lyrics while singing them, and when listening to the Great American Songbook selections, the words are as important as the music itself. http://lacunaemusing.blogspot.com/2008/01/great-american-songbook.html
Every nuance intended by the songwriter surfaces in her performance.

Stacey came to her art somewhat by accident, studying for a Masters degree in comparative literature in Europe where she met her husband who also arrived on the music scene via an academic labyrinth. http://www.staceykent.com/. Her perfect phrasing is reminiscent of Sinatra’s who was the master. But she is a one-of-a-kind; just listen to her rendition of The Boy Next Door: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NScBJtKkrk .

After her performance at the Royal Room we chatted with her and Ann gave her a big hug, which was reciprocated. It’s as if we’ve known her forever.

She reminds us of another great jazz singer, Nicole Pasternak, whom we’ve befriended and regularly see perform when we’re in Connecticut, as the Northeast is her home base. http://www.nicolepasternak.com/. In some ways Nicole is a more versatile performer, belting out a Patsy Cline song as readily as an Irving Berlin classic. Stacey by contrast has honed a distinctive style, restricting her performances to the very songs and style she can make immortal.

It is hard for a regional performer such as Nicole to bring her talents to the national scene. I’ve been trying to find the right gig for her in South Florida without success. I’m more disheartened by this than Nicole who mostly sings just for her love of this unique musical treasure we call the Great American Songbook. Thanks to her dedication and to artists such as Stacey Kent this distinctively American cultural experience lives on for future generations.

Fifty, Going On…

Last April I sent a 50th birthday greeting to a friend I worked with, Pat. I had remembered her 40th birthday party at the office ten years before (or so I thought), festooned with black crepe paper and black balloons. Imagine my embarrassment when she told me I was one year early with my greeting. Well, like a broken clock I can confidently now say Happy 50th to Pat.

Coincidentally, my friend Martin is turning 80 (pictured here, playing Scrabble with Ann), so I am exactly midway between their ages, a triangulation that tripped a “growing old” electrode in my brain, conjuring those immortal lines on the topic I’ve carried around with me since I read them: Eliot’s Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock: “I grow old … I grow old …I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled” http://www.bartleby.com/198/1.html and John Masefield’s poem I inexplicably memorized in its entirety when I was a teenager, perhaps for a moment such as this, On Growing Old: “Man, whose young passion sets the spindrift flying, Is soon too lame to march, too cold for loving.” It is perhaps the most eloquent poem on aging. http://www.humanitiesweb.org/human.php?s=l&p=c&a=p&ID=430

When I turned 50, I wrote Martin a letter, part of which covered the way I felt about that birthday at the time. Hopefully, Pat is more sanguine about the occasion than obviously was I:

Yes, I am watching middle age fade in the sunset as I approach my 50th birthday next month. I have never been sensitive to my age, perhaps because I have always been among the youngest of my peers -- in business particularly. Suddenly, as if someone flicked a switch of a grotesque neon light, I am caught in the glare of my own impending senior citizen status. No longer am I among the youngest. Even my boss is younger than I. Everyone calls me "sir" and I do not like it one bit.

I can't imagine how I am going to be able to adjust to this unwelcome shift in status. Originally, I thought it might be fun to gormandize my 50th head-on by giving a funky country music party -- ten-gallon hats and all.

Now, I've convinced Ann that it might be best if I just slip-away into the oblivion of seniority by doing nothing. Even though you are a few steps in front of me, you need not feel honor-bound to point out all of the wonderful reasons it is to be 50. The only one I can think of is not to be 70!
(Post Script: We had that party anyhow. Glad I did. Now, 70 doesn’t seem so onerous.)

But, my favorite 50th was Ann’s (pictured to the right just a "few" years earlier). It was special as it was a surprise party, and it was not the first time I had successfully pulled one off for her. For Ann’s 40th she thought she was going to a wedding. Friends of ours who had been living together had agreed to serve as the bait and we printed one wedding invitation, which was of course sent to us. So Ann was dressed to the nines and we had to drop off our young son at another friend’s house on the way for babysitting, thinking she was going to a big “wedding.” But at our friend’s house everyone from Ann’s past had gathered, including her mother and relatives from California. Her knees buckled when the door was opened.

So it was with much pleasure I was able to engineer another surprise party exactly ten years later. That afternoon we were out on our boat ‘Swept Away’ at our favorite Crow Island anchorage, the tiniest island in the Norwalk chain, where we literally lived during summer weekends, year in and year out. Many of our friends were there too on their boats but gradually they left and I had persuaded Ann to stay to enjoy the waning hours of the languid Sunday late afternoon. That should have been her first hint something was up, as I was the one who usually left first, to clean up the boat, and then return home to get ready for the workweek.

Unknown to her, our friends and many relatives were waiting at a restaurant at our marina where I had reserved a private room. Upon our return to the slip I suggested we go out for dinner, something I knew she would jump at after a weekend on the boat. I said I preferred the restaurant at the marina, that I was too tired to go off someplace else, and so she was ambushed by another surprise birthday celebration, this for her 50th.

Here is my toast to her at the gathering. While some specifics might make sense to those who have been close to Ann over the years, the gestalt paints a picture of a special person, without whom birthdays would be meaningless to me:



Welcome, friends and relatives, to Ann's 50th birthday celebration. Thank you all for helping to make this a special day for a special person and thank you to Patti, who was my co-conspirator in arranging this celebration.

The relationships one forms weave the fabric of one’s life; by this definition, our Annie has a real reason to celebrate on this special day. And those relationships are as much built around many small detailed moments as they are around life's more momentous occasions.

How many languid afternoons have there been -- on the 'Afternoon Delight' -- at our beloved Crow Island, with Annie, Betty, Tony, Cathy and John locked in mortal battle over a scrabble board, Ann suddenly exclaiming, "I can put all seven letters down and my word has a j,x, and z!" Publicly, I have contended that Ann cheats at Scrabble. (After all, she is always clutching that book that lists one million two-letter words and one billion three-letter words.) The truth be told, though, she has always been a fierce competitor and has a real love of reading and words.

Then, there were those times with Sue and Ray, their Donzi skimming over the Long Island Sound at nearly 60 miles an hour, Ray smiling demonically with his hat turned backwards, Sue employing Ray to slow down, and Annie in the rear seat screaming, "Raymond, Raymond, RAYMOND!" Be assured, Ray, she loved every minute of it, but not as much, perhaps, as those quiet, harbor cruises as the sun was setting at the Great Salt Pond, Block Island.

Potluck suppers on the 'Swept Away' and the 'Our Dream' (or, as Richard and I have sometimes referred to our boats as an "Eggaton") also stand out among these special moments. Watching Annie cook -- and as you all know she is a great cook -- is quite an experience. It gives new meaning to the word "hyperactive" and watching Marlene and Annie in tandem entitles us mere mortals to reach for the Valium.

Nancy and Betty-- in the New York arena, and Marge and Peter -- in London territory -- know of Annie's love of the theater, eating, and, let's not beat around the bush, fine, EXPENSIVE, things in general. And, as in other matters, going to a restaurant or the theater with Annie is an experience, ranging from her crying out "BRAVO, BRAVO, BRAVO!" at the end of a performance, to turning to a stranger in a restaurant to ask for a bite of his meal, or, even, his life history. Annie has no shame in a restaurant and even has been known to ask for large take out portions of the Fried Calamari from La Bernadine.

So, it is no wonder that Annie's friendship with Arlene began in a restaurant on 14th Street, La Bilbania, in 1964. Annie's love of travel was fostered by this friendship. Together they braved the vicissitudes of Montezuma's revenge in Mexico and left most of the men in Spain and Italy pining for their early return. Their antics at the Pensione in Spain have been written about in some of the world's most notable tabloids.

But being a friend of Ann's is not always like trying to follow a big brass band. Patti and Ann, while ostensibly taking their dogs for a walk, engage in secret "girl talk." In fact, if there is one single, attribute that makes Ann Ann, it is her capacity for intimacy, for understanding human nature, for giving and helping. She has touched many lives.

But with that great gift is also an innocence, even gullibility. Exactly 10 years ago we orchestrated a surprise 40th birthday party for her. She was easily convinced that our friends, Carole and Terry, were going to be married. One wedding invitation was printed and sent to us, and that is where she thought she was going when she arrived at her own party.

Of course, Annie is no different as a Mother, Aunt, or Cousin. Cousins Mimi and Sherman have watched her grow, since she left Atlanta, Georgia in 1959, for New York City, to find her life. When you think about it that was either an extraordinarily brave act or one borne out of naiveté. Annie was one of the original "women's libber" but did not even know it.

Mimi and Sherman were nurturing to Annie in her early New York years and, in fact, she ultimately inherited their rent-controlled apartment at 33 West 63rd Street. This became our first apartment.

As a young, single woman she made a career for herself, first as a receptionist and ultimately as a Customer Service Manager at the publishing organization where we met in 1965. In between, she dated men with simple names such as Takeshi, Schlomo, and the one I have the most difficult pronouncing, Jack. Favorite activities in New York were bicycling, exploring the Village and dancing the Mambo at the Palladium. Simply put, Annie was a beatnik, a bohemian who chose the path most of her Atlanta high school classmates could hardly imagine.

To her niece, Regina, and her Cousins, Suzanne and Michael, Aunt Ann has been an inspiration -- an accomplished career women, who has traveled around the world and, of course, let's not kid ourselves, she married well.

But that strong nurturing, zest-for-life instinct in Annie is never more evident than in her role as Mother to Chris and Jonathan. She stood by Chris while he went through some difficult transitional years. She was, and is, always there for him.

Her relationship with Jonathan is, as many of you can attest, a very complicated one. Perhaps that is because they are in many ways alike. Jonathan, I can think of no better compliment.

Finally, the most incredulous thing about Annie is that she puts up with me. That qualifies her for Sainthood! So to my best friend, I raise my glass to say, "Happy 50th Birthday, and here is to the next 50!"

Post Script: While posting this, I realized that today would have been my dad’s 92nd birthday. I included a piece about him at the conclusion of one of my first blog entries: http://lacunaemusing.blogspot.com/2007/11/literature-and-family.html

Hunger Artist Redux

Last Friday we went to the Maltz Jupiter Theatre, where we have had a season subscription since the theatre opened five years ago, to see Master Class, Terrence McNally’s Tony prize-winning play about the great soprano, Maria Callas. The play was based on classes she gave at Julliard at the end of her illustrious career.

The theatrical productions at Maltz have been inconsistent. Some are chosen to appeal to its diverse, mostly retirement age, audience and as such they are merely a pleasant way to pass the evening. But Master Class was unlike anything else this season or in prior ones, with a soaring performance by Gordana Rashovich who plays the iconoclastic diva. The review that appeared the next day in the Palm Beach Post provides the detail:
http://www.palmbeachpost.com/search/content/accent/epaper/2008/04/05/a4d_feathea_master_0405.html

We knew we were watching an extraordinary performance, one that vaulted a very good play into greatness. During intermission I stepped out into the breezy, balmy Florida night and was surprised to see a number of people leaving the theatre, overhearing objections such as they felt they were being lectured to, the play was too confrontational, or, even, disappointment there was not more music. These criticisms of course missed the whole point of what this play is about. It was a lecture; the audience is attending a “master class” which by the very definition is a place where students come to be taught, but the play is a conceit for us to see into the very soul of a true artist, the remarkable opera soprano, Maria Callas. And we are confronted by Callas’ caustic observations about art and life, and her inner musings about her rivalries and her love affair with Aristotle Onassis.

The comment about not being “enough music” jogged a memory, while standing there in the Florida night, of the Franz Kafka’s short story I read so many years ago in college, A Hunger Artist. Those details came flooding back as I watched a few people getting into their cars, driving off. Kafka’s allegorical work portrays a “hunger artist” – a man in a circus sideshow who is a fasting artist, one who is literally starving himself to death for his art and for the spectacle of the masses. They ignore him, streaming past his cage, going off to see the lions being fed instead.

And similarly Master Class is about the artist’s relationship to society and the sacrifice required to attain a level of perfection, one that Callas achieved in her career, and now Gordana Rashovich finds in portraying Callas. All art is a solitary journey, for the creators and the performers, although in the performing arts it is a symbiotic relationship, somewhat of a contradiction for the performer who on the one hand must be a vessel for the creative artist’s intention, and this was at the heart of Callas’ performances (“listen to the music!” Callas demands of her students in the play), but on the other hand feeds on the approbation of the audience. McNally says, and Rashovich states with such conviction, that the performer must dominate the audience, in a sense to bring the audience to a level that the artistic creator intended. McNally and Rashovich make you actually feel the gut–wrenching sacrifices and demons that possess a great artist such as Callas and the artists for which she serves.

Rashovich’s performance prompted my wife to write her first ever “fan letter.” It says volumes about this extraordinary performance…

Dear Ms. Rashovich:

I'm 66 and this is my first fan letter. I've been a devoted theatre lover since I was 16 and spent a summer visiting NY from my hometown of Atlanta, Ga. and saw a string of fantastic plays on Broadway that left an indelible mark. I moved to NY on my own in 1959 and saw every conceivable play I could afford and have been an insatiable devotee of live performance all my life, both in this country and abroad.

But last night, I felt privileged and blessed to witness what I can only say was such a tour de force as to leave me breathless. Your performance was so outstanding, nuanced and powerful, that it reincarnated Diva Callas before my eyes. I had seen this play years before in NY, but the actress was completely lacking in your ability to possess the role, body and soul.

I just want to say thank you, for all your hard work, years of dedication to your craft and for giving my husband and me such a thrilling evening, which we will never forget.