Civic Progress

Help!

Police!

Knatz.com / Teaching / Society / Social Order / NoHier Stories / Cops /

While working to establish FLEX in my early thirties I heard a story about the police which upset me as much as any of my own experiences. FLEX’s founder spend a lot of time visiting churches: seeking allies, looking for free working space … In I forget what context, a Protestant Minister told me that he had seen uniformed policemen, on public time, passing out Catholic literature. Grrr! My own religious indoctrination had been anti-Catholic (as well as anti-Jewish.) note My secular indoctrination had been adamantly in favor of the separation of Church and State. Subversion supported by mis-allocated tax dollars had to be one of the worst kinds. [links will be restored]

“Wha … what can we do?” I stammered.
“There’s only one solution,” the young reverend answered brightly: ” Lose
a war to a superior
civilization!”

Notes

Anti-Jewish: Prejudice

As a child I was told that the Jews had killed Jesus. (My Homeostasis module offers an impersonal treatment of the subject; this note is personal.) I imagined, as I am confident that many many others have done before me, that Jews had horns, cloven hoofs, and tails. I was in the seventh grade before my friend Dorothy revealed to me that she was Jewish. … Uhhh … What was I to do? Kill her on the spot? (I was only eleven or twelve: how would I have done it?) A fierce but brief war was waged internally, in my mind. The blood of that war suffused that part of my physical system which tracks and reveals emotions. Permanent peace was declared as I realized: this is Dorothy. My friend. I’ve known her for months. We’ve been intimate. What monster would have let me kiss her breast while she groped my apparatus? she’s not a monster. Either I got it wrong or my Sunday School gave it to me wrong.

My emotional system registered no more than ripples as I learned that a huge plurality of my other seventh grade classmates were also Jewish. (That hadn’t been true in grade school: Rockville Centre, Long Island was partly ghettoized by a combination of factors. I lived in a neighborhood of mostly Christians; the Jews tended to live in other parts of town. But Junior High School had brought us all into contact without IDing the participants other than by name. And I as yet knew nothing of the ethnicity of names, including my own.) Columbia College was similarly if not even more saturated. Once of college age, the majority of my friends were Jewish. In business, the majority of my clients and colleagues were Jewish. I now live in Sebring, Florida which I strongly believe would be a much better place if similarly populated.

Dorothy’s revelation brought me face to face with my unconscious childhood anti-Semitism. It wasn’t until I became a disciple of Ivan Illich that I faced my anti-Catholicism.

John F. Kennedy’s candidacy and presidency came and passed without my challenging my inherited feelings about the Irish or Harvard men with Boston accents. Johnson’s Texas twang was more bearable to me than Kennedy talking about our crisis with “Cuber.” Is there any of us so liberal that we don’t retain some prejudices? A committee of disciplined skeptics should test any nominees.

I’m sure that when the minister was telling his story that I would have been picturing Irish cops passing out the literature. (Serves us right if we first ghettoize our immigrants and then offer opportunities only in certain institutions.)

I’m still on the road toward getting rid of all of my prejudices. Don’t misunderstand: I judge people, institutions, ideas, habits, manners, laws, and such freely and not flatteringly (as you already know if you’re reading as far as this note). It’s judgments made without review of statistical data matched with considerations of etiology that I’m against.

(I now know the Catholic Church to be a wicked organization, but so too are all the Protestant churches I’ve encountered.)

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One more story in this context: My mother’s sister had married a Catholic. My favorite cousins were therefore Catholic. I accepted it. They were my favorite cousins. We didn’t discuss theology. In 1949 my cousin Tom announced his engagement just before his graduation from Princeton. Both families trucked out to New Jersey both to see the ceremony and to meet the fiancée and her family.

I was ecstatic. I already loved the Princeton campus after attending a Princeton-Columbia football game there. But with graduation, fraternity after fraternity was offering live Dixieland jazz with their parties. Tom was marrying a townie and the next day we sought her neighborhood for dinner at her house. My love of my cousin was already great. But it knew no bounds as I met Aggie and her family. She was beautiful. They were friendly and there seemed to be no end of them. I’d never seen a bigger cooking pot or more commodious dining table. The men were playing cards — one novel excitement after the other — but they swept the table clear as the women arrived with settings and then course after course: antipasto, pasta, chicken oreganata … I was even allowed some of the homemade wine! I’d never tasted such food!

I couldn’t understand the long faces between my mother and my aunt.

I’ve explained it to myself only years and years afterward: these people were

I t a l i a n !

That’s Italian as in Eye-talian.

How had I managed, after picking up my childish anti-Semitism, anti-Romanism, anti-Irish, anti-Harvard, etc., not to pick up any anti-Italian? I now infer its presence into my own family. I also don’t doubt the presence of class prejudice: Aggie’s father and older brothers were neither lawyers nor military officers. Neither did they own a thriving liquor store; they were working people.

I will not name the now famous artist I took with her son to Puglia’s restaurant one night in New York’s little Italy. I saw my mother and my aunt’s looks of uncomfortable disapproval on their stern German faces. The “Italians” in the restaurant, from the waiters to the clientele, were committing an unpardonable sin and committing it in public: they were having a good time. (For more on Puglia’s, see also this other note.

If Sebring can’t have more Jews, then it should definitely have more Italians.

There. See how far I’ve risen above my prejudices?

2002 08 02 It just occurs to me: “99%” of my clients as an art dealer specializing in multiple original graphics were either Jewish or Italian. One of the reasons I wanted to publish Robert Vickrey’s work was that I was hoping for something that would push the envelope to include WASPS. These days I sell a few McCormicks to WASPS (just sold one into Ireland! to genes quite obviously Celtic), but still: I sell more to Jews and Italians.

Context

Hierarchy vs. Conviviality Stories

Cops Can Be Funny

Help!

Police!

Knatz.com / Teaching / Society / Social Order / NoHier Stories / Cops /

Knatz.com told stories galore, many featuring pk’s personal experiences. Some were put in the Personal section, as personal; others were gathered in the / Teaching / Society / NoHier / HierCon section: NoHier being a Knatz.com symbol for Against(Factitious, Imposed)Hierarchy / Imposed Hierarchies (Nazis, brown-shirts) versus the Christian ideal of a convivial society. I had several dozen cops stories in the social mis-order section, most nasty, but one funny.

The first girl I ever fell in love with I met when I was nineteen. She was twenty. Her college roommate in Boston took the following picture when she was around twenty-one. I’n she cute?

Jackie on Boston Pier, late 1950s

I had no pictures of Jackie until she sent them to me this past winter: 2009-10. I scanned some, retouching as I could, much of the data too indefinite to do much with; but she’s beautiful even in a faded pic. I’ve told Jackie that Knatz.com had told of the time we were raided by the cops. I repeat some of that version here: she knows she has editing rights.

Jackie in Greenwich Village, early 1960s
Adorable. So soulful.

Here’s the story as I told it at Knatz.com:

I met Jackie at a party in a loft situated in the shadow of the Manhattan Bridge. Bird was on the phonograph. She said that something he played was “something else” and I was smitten. I maneuvered her toward the loft’s version of a terrace, breathed New York’s version of fresh air, and, screened from the mob, put my arms around her from behind. She didn’t just lean back: she stepped backwards till as lush a set of buttocks as I’d ever seen or felt enfolded my erection.

That summer I was running a Mexican art and artifacts gallery on Macdougal Street while taking a course or two at Columbia’s summer session. Jackie would visit the gallery, I’d close up, and we’d get hot and bothered on the couch in the back. The first couple of times, though still not a virgin, I still didn’t dip the wick. In fact one night, sore as hell but still unfulfilled, I get back uptown, stop in the West End for a night cap, and Jack Karouac’s “wife” Loretta asked if she could crash in my bed. “Sure,” I said, “but don’t expect anything but the bed: I’m red and raw.” “Oh, you are,” she said: and put Noxzema on it.

Thereafter, Jackie and I didn’t hold anything back. Too soon August was almost over and Jackie was going back to Boston College. One last dinner and she’d be gone. She came to pick me up at my place on W 112^th Street. We had each other for an appetizer, for the bread, for the soup course, and so on. I fucked her every way but hanging from the ceiling: standing, seated, sunny side over … In between I’d change the record from Bird to Bud to Sinatra … However many orgasms she had, I had just finished number seven when the door bell rang. 11 PM? Who could that be? My roommate was gone for the month. During the school year the place was Grand Central Station, but for the summer the place was my hermitage. I walked naked to the door planning to just peek through the crack.

The next thing I know I’m pinned against the wall as something burly, badged, and uniformed brushes past the guy, also burly badged, and uniformed, who’s got me paralyzed and off my feet. “Jackie,” I called, “it’s cops.” Once his partner was inside, my guy let me back down but held me still. A minute later, the second cop reappears at the far end of the hall accompanied by Jackie, blushing and sheepish, her unbuttoned trench coat wrapped tight against her body by pressure from her arms. “They’re just kids,” the partner announced to my cop.

“Look,” my cop says. “We were young too. Not that long ago. I’m sorry we busted in on you, but we had to answer the complaints. Next time, couldn’t you just pull the shades down?”

“What?” I asked. “I had all the lights out.”

The cop tapped the 25 watt bulb at the front entrance where we were now all gathered. “It was like you were on a stage.”

Now the partner speaks up. “We waited as long as we could. We were over there” (indicating beyond the alley airspace beyond the living room) “for hours.”

It turned out that a family also in a rear apartment, back to back with us on 111^th Street couldn’t get the kids to watch television or, finally, to go to bed. They wanted to keep watching the nooky. The mother had called the cops reporting a hooker. (Jackie was what we call “black,” so she had to be a whore, right?) The cop said they delayed, made excuses … “But you just wouldn’t stop.” His story invited me to guess who the complainer was: throughout the year we’d hear her screaming, whenever the windows were open — “Hey! You Kids! Shut up and watch television.”

Perhaps I should also explain: the apartment of the six-floor walk-up was laid out like a hook. There was the front door, solid wall on the right, a small bedroom on the left, followed by the bathroom, then the kitchen. After about thirty feet the hall ended in the living room. French doors closed off my room, and curtained beyond, the point of the “hook,” was a third bedroom. My room was the largest but also the least private: the door was curtained glass panes and the occupant of room three had to pass through to go anywhere. Perhaps I should explain further: we couldn’t close the curtains or pull the shades down: there weren’t any. This was a student apartment, rented “furnished,” but not completely furnished. Rent came to like $25 a month apiece. And why should we need curtains? We were guys. We were on the top floor. We couldn’t see anybody: who could see us? Even if I thought there might be a neighbor with a spy glass I didn’t imagine much light from the dim bulb by the door could illuminate the living room let alone my room to the side.

I can see why Hitler would need to spy into my bedroom window;
but I don’t see why I need to spy into his.

I’ll never know how many more pre-dinner “courses” Jackie and I would have had had we remained uninterrupted. But the mood had burst. She said, “Come on, I’ll buy you dinner.” Riker’s up on 115^th was one of our few choices by that hour. She’d arrived at 6:30 or so. The cops came at 11:00. We had a midnight dinner and she walked me back to 112^th Street, so then I walked her down to the subway at 110^th. I’ll never forget how Jackie looked in her trench coat waving good-bye to me from the bottom of the steps of the Cathedral Parkway IRT station. Such a sweet face. The most luscious tint of red in hair otherwise ebon. In all the decades since, the person I’ve seen who comes closest to resembling her is Chanda Rubin, the tennis star. Good-bye, she waves. For who knows how long? Jackie would be lucky to be home in NJ by dawn.

The next time I saw her — up in Boston — is a different story altogether. All I’ll say about that episode is that she delighted me forever by calling me her “fountain.” Actually, her exact phrase was “my little fountain.” Can you blame me for wanting to forget the “little” part?

Now 2010 11 19 I see I never did get to comment on what I found appropriate and inappropriate in the cops’ behavior. I see nothing wrong in neighbors seeking ways to tell other neighbors what they find welcome and unwelcome in their behavior. The kids were watching us screw, we had no idea we were visible, the neighbor could have shouted across the alley, “Pull the shades down,” or “Come up for air why don’t you?” This neighbor chose to convey dissatisfaction via cops. OK: and the cops dragged their feet, not entirely cooperating in curtailing our amorous acrobatics. Once arrived at my door the cops did knock, but then they busted in once I answered! No, no, no: not in a convivial world. What would Jesus say?

I had to yell to warn Jackie that a stranger was intruding, the cop raced by in silence to grab her unprepared. No, no.

Should I have called my own set of cops to barge in at midnight on the complaining neighbor and tell her to mind her own fucking business?

I’m just reading Tom Wolfe’s I Am Charlotte Simmons. Mountain girl goes off to the big college where the reader has already discovered that a roomie can walk into his suite in the coed dorm and find the other roomie humping a shaved pussy on the common room rug. There’s little point in complaining about culture, the river has already flowed elsewhere.

Hierarchy vs. Conviviality Stories

Cop Stories Intro

Help!

Police!

The following text got “posted” last summer on a Page, it belongs as a Post, while the Page is supposed to be a Menu: a submenu.

I bak it here, will edit it after I correct the Page Menu.

2011 08 29 The Hierarchy vs. Conviviality Stories menu links to Help! Police, the top of my cop stories sting (censored, just getting recreated): then there’s this Cop Stores sub-menu which temporarily, mistakenly, houses a cop story! I’ll straighten it all out if I can. Actually I’ll be lucky to get 10% back up, and there’s a huge data base that never got put at K. in the first place.

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Early on my home page added a piece on the police. Dozens of cops stories got added, dozens more waited patiently in a cop story data base. I’ll recreate those files here if I live and can post, but right now I have to begin with a cop story from the other day. I was wading for bass off the beach by the local library. Several other fishermen were there ahead of me: and a whole bunch of guys wading, swimming, splashing … horsing around. The government had dredged the area in building the public beach: the drop-off holds fish. The water is very low right now, but I hoped some bass would be lurking within casting distance of a modest wade into the water. I noticed a cop walking across the beach, headed straight for me. I waded toward him, to find out what he wanted.

He ordered me out of the water. No wading, no swimming. He was about to tell the others too. We could fish from the shore, but not stand or wade in the water. He prefaced all this by saying, “I don’t want to spoil your fun, but …”

I tell the story not because of the absurdity of the “beach” allowing no entrance to the water, but because this cop wasn’t content to give orders, he wanted to explain: he mentioned the drop off, added that it could be dangerous, added that someone had drowned … said the prohibition was “to protect us.”

This cop was taller than average, heavier than average, and I don’t doubt stronger than average. Like many a good cop I don’t doubt that he was far stupider than average. Indeed his big upper body made him look like a pinhead: especially with his middle all bulked up by his utility belt which conspicuously bore a gun. I said, “I’m leaving, I’m doing as you say, I’m not arguing: but note: I don’t want your protection, I want to fish.”

The cop went on with his justifications: some guy drowned, he repeated. It’s public property (read that as city property, government property), the city doesn’t want to be liable if someone else is hurt … (Ah, now there’s a real reason for chasing us: fear of responsibility, government’s fear of its own court, its own laws (once citizens get involved, in the form of a jury).)

Then the cop’s endless list of “reasons” took to blaming the drowned guy! “One person spoils it for all,” he said! My impression of this cop’s intellect, low to begin with (prejudiced I’m aware), was plummeting. He blames the drowned guy for government cowardice, for his own role in the interference with our use of our environment. When I told my army sergeant in basic training that I was a pacifist, the draft board not having conveyed any of my messages to the army and the army not having conveyed any of my repetitions to its many branches, it just kept repackaging me without any of my statements, he asked if I didn’t believe in defending myself against my enemies: I answered, “So far, Sergeant, the only enemy I’m aware I have is YOU!” (Sergeant Bradley liked that. He was a neat platoon leader. RIP. (A trainee shot him on the rifle range.)) Here’s this cop, interfering with our use of the lake, and he blames a dead guy!

I submit that this guy’s unending litany of excuses proved in stereo how wrong he knew he was.

Schmuck: following wicked orders for pay. A fascist pig, as advertised.

The cop did add that he got called to clear people out of the water there at the
“public” property. If I waded further over, by the apartment house’s water front, I might be alright, “Though they may also call us to chase you,” he added.

Once out of the water, standing near him, I went on with my anarchist advice: Go home, put your gun away, take your hands out of the tax payers pockets. I didn’t want cop protection then, I didn’t Ever want cop “protection.”

I didn’t iterate my online theme that all government is nothing but a protection racket. I didn’t tell him that I just got out of jail, that I was a censored writer, a falsely-convicted “felon” … That is to say, I didn’t point out to him how well the cops had protected me previously. Indeed, the cops led the FBI to me and assisted with their armed assault on me. Neither did I start to inventory other protesters against government abuses who’d been pistol whipped by the police, jailed, silenced …

But of course none of these things are reported in the press. And those few who know of it get tired of telling a public determined to remain deaf, dumb, and blind.

I’ll move the rest of my many cop stories there, then try to tell those many still untold.

Poly Mono

Monotheism, monopoly, monoculture … have been my subjects for decades, for a life time, including recent posts here: especially in the wake of getting excited by Michael Pollan’s Botany of Desire. (See Wild versus Cultivated.) This is a place marker declaring that I’m going to be developing these subjects, symbols, metaphors … even further. I acknowledge that it ain’t easy. We’ve been drilled in monotheism since birth. We’ve practiced political monopoly since birth, whatever we’ve called it, however we’ve mislabeled it (while mislabeling ourselves).

I’ll scribble scrapbook style, then edit, maybe in time reduce all to a few good essays, a book or two.

Meantime: we were taught that God is one, that God is good …
God created the world, and Adam, and Eve … God put Adam and Eve into a garden. Civilization is gardening, civilation thus far has led to monoculture. Civilization may be leading us to a dead earth, an extinct humanity … Maybe we should swap mono-theologies, mono-cosmoloties, mono-politics … for a little diversity.

The anarchist internet I offered the public in 1970 would have fostered all that. My offer was ignored, punished, sabotaged, the media lying about it, and everything, then, and since. 1970 may have been too late then, it may be beyond too late now. But what the hell, I’m a writer, I’m still breathing, somehow. I’ll still write about it.

Weeds
There are no weeds in nature.

A weed isn’t a plant, a weed is a prejudice, or a judgment: an unwanted plant. If you’re growing strawberries, a tulip is a weed.
If you’re listening to Bach, then a jackhammer is noise, while the Bach is music. If you’re a doctor, listening for a heart murmur, then the Bach is noise: as is the Beethoven, the Beatles … and the jackhammer.

In other words, a weed is a social concept more than a biological concept. The priests in the Temple of Jerusalem (in the Christian stories) were practicing a monopoly on the word of God, without any verifiable contact with God! So: Jesus, symbolizing actual contact with God, was a weed! had to be weeded!
At NYU, I, an intelligent, literate, imaginative reader of Shakespeare et alia, was a weed. Noise. I had to be silenced. The state gives them money, they silenced me. And you too, not to mention God.
Any monoculture must protect itself from actual information, raw data … new readings.

Monotheisms produce false prophets. (Maybe all the prophets of monotheisms are false! including me!)
Far worse (or, maybe the same — at a different resolution), monoculture breeds

false profits!

Note: Poly Mono isn’t a girl’s name that I don’t know how to spell; it’s an oxymoron of abstractions (and I can’t spell). (Or, fifty years ago, my spelling was nonstandard: until I had to correct my students’ English compositions! I standardized overnight!)

Society

Cosmo

Quotes Queue

Adding quotes to an existing quotes post isn’t always easy. I’ll post all such here while I find time to code the addition into the correct file.

Lit

My ideas usually come not at my desk writing but in the midst of living.

Anais Nin

Note: one problem with my Lit quotes file is that WordPress is now showing authorial quotes, I’m adding some of theirs to my existing collection: the file is getting way too big for one post.

Miles

Knatz.com / Personal / Stories / Themes / Music & Art /
@ K. c. 1996

Miles Davis

Every great artist leaves
prints on your soul.

Bird & Miles

Seeing them,

reading them —

that’s a different matter.

Listening to Bird (music recorded in the 1940s, listened to by this kid in the 1950s, I’d hardly heard Miles. (Bird was improvising melody; Miles was improvising counter-melody!) Listening to the same cuts now, I hear them both.

Gangsta Genius

Brando could look both divine and brutal at the same moment, or only microseconds apart. Miles can look gorgious, or sociopath, brilliant, or evil … all at once.

By the late ‘Fifties I was listening to as much Bach as anything else: as I long continued to. These days I prefer to just play, however poor my accomplishment is at the keyboard after a late-middle-age start. Bach, spirituals, folk and pop — compositions by Miles, Duke … Horace Silver, Wayne Shorter … Rota, Jobim … If I do put something on the machine, it’s just Miles and more Miles. And sometimes a little Wagner.

For me, not too many Western musicians deserve to have their shadows visible beside Bach’s. (For non-Western music, check out Abdul Alaudin Khan, Ravi Shanker, Oum Kalthoum … Try listening to waynos from Chile.) For modern Western music, I see less and less outside Wagner’s shadow. Total musicianship I’m talking about. Prokofieff is one. Miles is another.

Miles’ Jack Johnson cover image

(There’s a credit there to a Julian Alexander: the photographer? the layout man? All credit, wherever it’s due.)

2012 01 22 These days one can listen to much of what I refer to online. Last month I heard Oum Kalthoum for the first time since some Arabs loaned me a cassette in 1968 or 69. Spotify.com however found not one of the Folkways waynos I used to be addicted to. I still have the LP: old, scratchy, dirty, no needle to play it with, my hifi components not even set up: neither is my MIDI equipment! I just play the keyboard: and a third rate keyboard at that, the switch on my Roland having gone the way of entropy. And now, my Mac is too old for Spotify.com to bother to talk to.

K., like my life, has always had references to Miles, all over.

MusicArtLit Quotes

MusicArtLit “Stories”

God Cartel

Elder magicians, priests, owners … jockey so that their institution will substitute in the public mind for some natural force: The church speaks for God: till God can’t speak except through the church: government substitutes for order, schools monopolize learning (license skills, without being at all honest or competent about it) …
Thus, if God does send a messenger, the story of Jesus already tells his fate.
If nature does send a messenger, the story of Galileo already tells his fate.
And if social pressures form a Thoreau, his name will be buried alive at Harvard.

I’ve been saying, prevented from communicating, for half a century, humans, dumb Irishmen that we are, have accepted monoculture, succumbed to the god-cartels.
This, typical, is just a place marker, the slap of a glove: the fight will follow in time.

Mingus Meets Roland Kirk

Knatz.com / Personal / Stories / Themes / Music & Art /

I’d told the following story more than once, but not online. I just reminded bk of the basics via email, and select from that message to establish a draft of it here:

Do you easily recall my Rhasaan Roland Kirk story? just pre-army? 1961 or ’62. Living with Alice on 4th crossing 10th, taking her to the Five Sport, Mingus the show, Percy Heath (MJQ, the Vanguard must have closed early that night) the only customer, either at the bar or the tables, Alice and I walk in, take the bar: three at the bar, none at tables. One bartender, no other employees in sight: and Mingus et alia on the stand.
Know it so far?

Charles Mingus

A train-load full of guys come in the front door, carrying instrument cases. somebody holds the door, somebody else leads in a blind guy. One guy approaches Mingus, whispers. The word Chicago reached me. Mingus looks around, sees me, sees Alice, doesn’t have to scout Percy: knows he’s there: his peer. Mingus shrugs, and the guys start unloading sax after sax after horn, hanging them all from the blind guy’s neck. Mingus and band look very skeptical, Danny Richmond’s face was always comical (Danny on drums).

The Five Spot
on Bowery, near St. Marks Place

Mingus kicks off a basic vanilla blues and the blind guy instantly launches into one of the most totally amazing, cooking, solos I’ve ever heard. Mingus flips out, starts plucking the bass like crazy, double time, quadruple time, and the blind guy doesn’t stop, solo after solo after solo, playing one horn, two, three …

But 64 bars hadn’t passed before Mingus stopped playing, started again, stopped again … Said, “Play with me, man, we make a million dollars, two, three days!”

All the many Kirk recordings I’ve heard since then, never has any part of the energy of that one hour in the Five Spot been relived.

At the time I’d thought, Mingus has never heard of this guy! but I think I have!

At Columbia Frank Lunzer played drums, talked a lot of jazz, told a lot of stories, the most amazing bullshitter I’ve ever known. Some of it could have been true. Talked a lot of dope, sold, used, a lot of dope.

Paul, if hashish was addictive, would I smoke it every day?

Told me my first string of windup doll jokes: Miles: you wind him up and he turns his back on you.

Claimed to read a book a day. Smart as a whip, or gave a good imitation. Frank pretended to know EVERYTHING and I never once caught him in a flaw, not one lapse.
Or perhaps one: change the subject on him and he didn’t miss a beat: except the one time I mentioned Ravi Shankar, c. 1957 or 1958.
Nah, says Frank, there’s this YOUNG Indian guy you should be listening to: probably meant Shankar, didn’t realize that was who I’d said, maybe thought I’d said Kahn: so HE’d mean Shankar. Always one up: or think he was one up even if he was one down.

Played gin with him once. I won the first hand, he won the next twelve, promised me I’d never win another.

But my favorite memories of Lunzer are of him playing the piano afternoons at Barnard. Showing off for the fems? I never saw him with a female, never saw him come directly on to one. But he did love to show off, never stopped.
Drums? Dave Levy said He sounded like Art Blakey with two broken arms. I loved Blakey, Levy didn’t. Over four years I don’t think I once saw him play drums. Though at Fire Island he had sticks and a practice pad.

Maybe Levy hated him because Levy was a glib one-upper: and I bet he never once didn’t wind up a point or two down with Lunzer.

Anyhow, I’m walking around Barnard, hear jazz piano, find Frank. The girls all seem to be ignoring him, a fixture I’m only just happening on. So Lunzer will show off for me. He plays a history of jazz sequence: New Orleans, rag time, stride piano … This is Jelly Roll, this is PP Johnson … He named and imitated more pianists than I’d ever heard of: and damn if each style wasn’t distinct! I didn’t know half of them, all sounded flawless whether I was ignorant or knowledgeable.

Anyhow, one day I run into Frank on Bdwy. I’m praising this guy, that guy. At a time when cutting guys, insulting everybody was fashionable.
Frank says, There’s a guy in Chicago, totally unknown, blind guy … I hear he might just be able to cut anybody.

I suspect that Lunzer was a pathological liar: about how big a junkie he was when he was eleven, about how huge his hashish territory was, about showing guns to gangs in Harlem … and maybe about reading a book a day, but he sure did know a lot about music, and he certainly knew his jazz.

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Maybe I should have said at the start that the context for the story’s including in my email to bk was my report that in several days of listing to Storyville, shoutcast.com, I’d heard several Roland Kirk recordings come up, and didn’t like a one of them: in fact I though each-and-every was bad.

What a loss: he sure was phenomenal introducing himself in New York that night at the Five Spot.

After the session, Mingus made sure he had his name, then made sure that Percy Heath, Alice, and I had heard it. Mingus said nothing about “Rhasan.” He skipped it, or it came later. I don’t know what the title means, I’m not sure I want to know, I can (we can) guess.

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Associate memories: Soon after, Trane was at the Village Gate. I took Alice. We got a table practically in the band’s lap. I sat Alice directly in front of Elvin Jones’s drums, told her to pay attention.

That old devil moon danced in Alice’s beautiful eyes as she devoured him. After the set, Elvin came rushing up, not to us, just to Alice, certainty of a blow job in his eyes. She acknowledged him as I steered her past him: certain she was with me, not transferring to him. Speaking of one-upsmanship, that wasn’t my thing; and even were it, I never would have dreamed I would one-up Elvin Jones!

Based on behavior Alice would soon begin displaying though I shouldn’t have been so sure. I bet she found an opportunity to go back to him and let him try again. She would up living with Ornette Coleman, for quite a while I hear. I wonder if she still had money then: Ornette sure was typically broke. When I met her Alice had a millionaire ex-husband and a millionaire father.

After a solid month, 24/7, of Alice I learned that she liked to display tonight’s boyfriend right in this morning-and-last-night’s boyfriend’s face.

The friends who told me that she was housing Ornette were astonished when they heard me refer to Alice as beautiful. They assured me that those days we was very ugly, looked like a witch. I believe it. Alice did look like a witch: a very sexy witch. (My friends knew about this because my friend’s wife had lived, a long time, with Alice’s first husband (not the millionaire husband). (And we were only twenty-one, twenty-two or so.)

MusicArtLit “Stories”

Criminal Two

Every human group believes that it’s wrong for someone to kill you. By a simple extension of logic, similar begets similar, it’s wrong for you to kill someone else. Next thing you know there’s a God telling you — what you already know, what everybody already knows — Thou shalt not kill.

If you break that law you’re a criminal. Same if you steal a purse, rape the girl … lie — to someone else’s harm. Those are all crimes. Maybe some crimes are complex, need discussion, need a committee to come to a decision, but there are plenty of basic crimes that few will disagree with: it’s wrong to eat human flesh, it’s wrong to mate with your sister, it’s wrong to kill the guy who’s just walking along, minding his own business: even if he is black, or a Jew, or a Republican …

Crimes that we easily agree on, let’s call those crimes of the first type: Crime One.

You’re a Scotsman. You distill whiskey. You’ve always distilled whiskey. Your father distilled whiskey, his father, his grandfather. You’ve all distilled whiskey as long as anyone can remember. But then along comes the English government. Friends of the king distill whiskey, and sell it. They sell lots of whiskey, make lots of money. They want to sell even more whiskey. They want to sell whiskey to you! And the English king now says that you can’t distill your own whiskey, you have to buy whiskey distilled by the king’s friend! Whaat? You go right on distilling whiskey, selling it … Only now you’re a smuggler. Now you’re a criminal. Now if the English king catches you, you go to jail.
You used to live, now you live in a country that itself a criminal: a nation of smugglers, no goods: according to the English.

Smugglers

Or you’re a Mohawk. Every day you fish in the lake. You, your family, eat the fish: just like your father did, and your grandfather. Then on day some white man tells you that your lake is his lake, that you can’t fish there, that you’re trespassing, that trespassers will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law …
You used to live, now you’re a criminal: because of course you go on fishing in your lake.

Your crime is only a crime on paper, and that paper isn’t in the Bible. Lets call that Crime Two.

Once upon a time you could smoke opium instead of looking for food. So, you don’t eat, you shrivel up and die. Whose business is it but yours? Oh no. Not with governments. Governments want to saddle you with a lot of Crime Two. Smoking dope, for example.

That’s a behavior that not everyone will agree is a crime. Some will say that saying it’s a crime is a crime: me, for example. I say that.

I don’t smoke dope. I had difficulty giving up smoking tobacco, I had difficulty giving up drinking booze, but I have no difficulty not smoking dope: it doesn’t tempt me, it never did. But whose business is it but mine? unless there’s a government around! a government with friends in the booze business. And friends in the mind-other-peoples’-business business.

drawing by Jackney Sneeb

Eat Here

HG Wells had Martians invade the earth. Their assaults were irresistable. But just as mankind looked cooked, the Martian saucers began falling out of the sky, Martians, sick unto death, came crawling out of their craft, utterly helpless, dying, then dead. We had no weapons of defense: except our germs. The Martians were done in by the common cold.

Smart as he was, literate as he was, Wells couldn’t have known that the same thing had already happened in history: Columbus sailed west for India, landed in the Caribbean: and by the time others were sailing in his wake, Magellan, the Mayflower, nine million North Americans were dead of European diseases: 90% of the total human population, most of them living along the Mississippi. “White” men hadn’t ventured inland to the river: all they had to do was set foot on an island, step ashore in Virginia. Once microbes were on the beach, they were soon in the forest, and crossing the mountains. HG Wells didn’t know that because no body knew it: not the natives, not the scientists, not the histories … until recent decades. Europeans, colonists, George Washington, had no idea that the native population had been around ten million in 1492. We hadn’t yet found their graves, hadn’t yet autopsied their corpses.
(It’s thought that the disease of syphilis may have migrated in the other direction. Obviously the exchange was hardly equal.)

One human species emerged out of Africa, seventy or eighty thousand years ago. But then populations, going in different directions, drifted apart evolutionarily. Human diseases evolved by their own timing, the co-evolution of resistance wasn’t homogenous. Jared Diamond’s mapping of this stuff, in his Guns, Germs, and Steel, is marvelous: read it carefully if you haven’t already.

Point is: it isn’t that we have an organism here, a man, and a disease there, a germ; put them in contact, and whammo, a dead man, and an exuberant germ. No. The man has to learn how to survive: in the series of environments he encounters, and survives. Simultaneously, the germ has to learn to breed in the man. Contact with the man changes the germ, contact with the germ changes the man.

NASA is careful-careful to sterilize its rockets and contents, coming and going (pretty naive, humans thinking they could do anything right, thoroughly, effectively, outsmart nature, scientists or not). Anyway: let’s imagine that humans send a ship to Mars, without washing its hands. Let’s imagine that Martian germs waltz aboard the ship, the ship’s arms open. Let’s image that the ship is returned to earth, burgeoning with Martian germs. Now, go up to the ship and lick the gangplank. Will you die that very minute? A day later? Next week?
Or will the Martian germs have no idea what to do with you?

The black widow spider may have a vagina. I certainly have a penis But that does not mean I can give blue eyed children with high verbal skills to the black widow. We’re not compatible in more ways than I could calculate the number of.

So: we put Howdy Doody on television, then The Lucy Show. Light is emitted by the sun. Eight or so minutes later that light is streaming onto my neck as I fish the lake. Eight minutes into Lucy, the sun receives the skit. A day or two later anyone on Pluto might chuckle. But the Pleiades won’t have the skit yet. It will be years and years and years and years before some other galaxy gets streamed by Kennedy debating with Nixon.

Anyhow, when I was a kid, and HG Wells wasn’t that long ago, in fact he was still breathing in my toddlerhood, and I, not many years after his death, learned to love science fiction, the idea of traveling to other worlds was appealing to me. I was writing my own stories about doing it by the seventh grade. I didn’t worry about getting eaten, or getting Martian syphilis, or being hung as fresh meat in the Aldeberan spider’s larder. The universe was a benign place, a Pipa’s Song, by Browning. God was in his heaven, all was right with the world. (This was despite McCarthy, Korea … school …) I didn’t worry that the Lucy Show was sending Eat Here signals to Neptune, and to Rigel, to the Andromeda galaxy …

Nowadays even Stephen Hawking is warning us about our laxity.

But realize this: I can’t go to Sirius Beta, just get out of the ship, walk around, and eat the first thing I come across that looks like a hamburger! Not and expect to live.

Realize this also: let’s say that there’s a cook in Thailand who cooks a perfect hamburger. Let’s say that the Thai cook is willing to sell it to me for eighty-nine cents. There’s a Macdonald’s only about two miles from here that will sell me a hamburger for ninety-nine cents. Maybe the Thai cook will give me his eighty-nine cent hamburger for free! Maybe he’ll give it to me for free and pay me $1.99 to come and review it!
I can’t go to Thailand! not for $19.99, not for one hundred times that!

Let’s say the long pork eater on Sirius Delta knows somehow he can digest human meat. Let’s say his ship is all fueled up and ready to go. Wouldn’t he be better off finding some equivalent to long pork a lot closer to home? Has he considered how many explosives the Pentagon will hurl at him the second the US feels its ceiling space violated?

I don’t know. Maybe the Sirius Deltan is as warped in his vision as Columbus was. Maybe I should be looking over my shoulder.