May 2010
Kent State
The photograph is forever etched in the collective memory
of those of us of a certain age: a young girl—Mary Ann
Vecchio, a fourteen year old runaway—on bended knee,
as if singing an aria in some climatic scene from an Italian
opera.
But of course this is not theater. And lying dead there,
is Jeffrey Miller; frozen forever in time at age twenty.
One can argue over exactly what happened that day and who
specifically was at fault. Indeed forty years later, some
still do. But regarding the Kent State Massacre
that Monday, May 4, 1970— 12:24 PM, the Nixon appointed
President’s Commission on Campus Unrest (or
the Scranton Commission as it came to be called)
is unequivocal:
“Even if the guardsmen faced danger, it was
not a danger that called for lethal force. The 61 shots
by 28 guardsmen certainly cannot be justified. Apparently,
no order to fire was given, and there was inadequate fire
control discipline on Blanket Hill. The Kent State tragedy
must mark the last time that, as a matter of course, loaded
rifles are issued to guardsmen confronting student demonstrators.”
Yet, as always, one’s political eyewear will color
what one sees. The word massacre itself for example, is highly
charged. According to Webster’s, it’s the
act or the instance of killing a number of usually
helpless or unresisting human beings under circumstances
of atrocity or wanton murder. (Underlines…ours).
Is that what happened at Kent State? And besides, how big
does that “number” have to be to qualify as a
massacre anyway?
As a point of reference, we have the Boston Massacre; considered
to be a defining patriotic moment in our defiant history.
Five were killed that day, including Crispus Attucks a runaway
slave turned sailor who was the first to die, and a couple
of seventeen year old boys. And as described at www.ushistory.org
it was…
“a street fight that occurred on March 5,
1770, between a ‘patriot’ mob, throwing snowballs,
stones and sticks, at a squad of British soldiers.”
Absent the snowballs, the scene sounds eerily similar to
Kent State in which four were killed. Though this is not to
suggest that there are no distinctions between the two events.
Just that one man’s massacre is another’s self
defense; one man’s patriot is another man’s agitator.
While we were not at Kent State that day, it was a cold day
in Washington just five months earlier, when we, along with
almost a half-million others, marched in protest against The
War. So we know something about crowds and passions at such
times; something about the unease one feels knowing, that
an outbreak of violence might be just around the corner. All
the same, we felt we had to be there.
Washington in November of ’69 was about Nam…Kent
State in May of ’70 was about Cambodia. But whatever
moral oppositions or political ideologies were stoking the
fires back then, ultimately at the heart of it all, was a
five letter word that can never be overlooked: D-R-A-F-T.
As in, Uncle Sam Wants You!
In the absence of the draft these days, rhetoric regarding
preemptive wars in Middle Eastern countries, tends to leave
us shaking our heads. Though to be clear, we are not calling
for its reinstitution. But as a product of turbulent times,
we cannot help but feel, that we (as in country) never would
have found ourselves in Iraq for seven years (and counting)
if there was a “draft” on the backs of our necks,
and going right on down to a lower extremity as in: “
it is YOUR ass on the line.”
Imagine your son or daughter (and given gender equality these
days she would have to be included), being sent to
Iraq as a result of the “un-luck” of the draw—a
low draft lottery number? How would this have shaped the dialogue?
How quick would those in Congress and the Senate have been
to vote for war? How would Hillary have voted if it meant
Chelsea might have to go? (For the record, on December 1,
1969 in the first draft lottery held since 1942, our number
was 344. You might be curious to click here to see how you
would have faired (www.landscaper.net/draft.htm).
For us, all of this provides a more meaningful and larger
context in which to put Kent State. This is one situation,
in which we believe God is not in the details. Rather, she
is in the bigger picture. Bigger than the iconic one of that
tragic day.
Coffee Beings
Once upon a planet earth
when it was the silence that was golden—
call it Mid-Century Millennium Past—
in the sacramental rite
of coffee
in the God-given American right
to coffee
in the hospitality of dropping by
for coffee
with a box of canolis so finely attuned
to that percolation in syncopation…
Maxwell House:
Good to the very last drop!
We guzzled in privacy absent the buzz
from the lives of strangers—
this pulsation of patter
of business propositions
and interviews at adjacent tables—
we want to sometimes interject:
“Ah jeez, don’t say that!
You just blew the job!”
then the tutors force feeding irregular verbs
to deer in the headlights—
the tattooed teens
so naked in their cluelessness;
“I’m like: wow;”
the extra terrestrials phoning home
still agog with the new age ring tones
and that orgasmic taze they get on
“Vibrate;”
the background music
a
tad and half too loud
above the din of permutations
and
combinations
of
repeated concoctions
built
on shallow syrups and false foams
by baristas in Rocket J. Squirrel voices:
“A vente non-fat half-decafe latte
with one pump of sugar free
cinnamon dulce
extra foam…”
while laptops plugged into eternity
eat up time and space
the restrooms in their political correctness—
wide enough for elephants—
yet rarely vacant as the homeless time their dumps;
and the line like the universe
keeps expanding
and the guests like relatives
keep coming and staying
and the caffeine IV’s keep
drip,
drip, dripping
and the growers keep
planting and planting
and their beans keep ripening
on every continent
(even Antarctica)
and the pickers pick
till their fingers bleed
and the marketers keep spewing out
new “product experiences”
and someone is still
in the goddamn bathroom
and now in these—
the years that are said to be golden
we always have to pee.
—Ron Vazzano
Text and the Single Girl
For some time, we have been fascinated with the idea as to
how the new technologies impact social interaction and relationships—now
and going forward. We are still waiting for a definitive book
to be written on the subject, though it might be outdated
at the moment of its publication, given the warp speed of
technology. In fact the very notion of “publication”
is being redefined as the eBook appears to be reaching its
“tipping point.”
This semi-obsession of ours is at least as old as the coming
of the telephone answering machine into our life, some thirty
years ago. Suddenly, we no longer had to pick up a phone when
it rang, fearful of missing a call of some import. No more
talking to someone we didn’t want to at that particular
moment. (If ever). What a concept!
So it was with particular interest that we read “How
Much Is Too Much?”— a satirical piece on the angst
of high-tech communications— in GENLUX
which just hit the newsstands. This trendy magazine of 60,000
circ, bills itself as: “The only luxury fashion
and beauty magazine created expressly for today’s affluent
Southern California woman.” The article was written
by Almie Rose (who just so happens to be our daughter) under
the byline of her popular blog, Apocalypstick. A
marriage of new and old technology, if you will.
Here for just the second time in these Muse-Letters,
we include a guest piece in its entirety, as it appeared in
the magazine.
SOMETIMES,
WITH A FREAKISH HULK-LIKE PASSION, I REALLY HATE THE INTERNET
AND TEXT MESSAGING. IT’S TOO EASY TO GET IN TOUCH
WITH PEOPLE, AND THAT’S THE PROBLEM. IT’S ALMOST
IMPOSSIBLE TO PLAY HARD-TO-GET WHEN YOU ARE LITERALLY NOT
HARD TO GET, AND NO ONE ELSE IS, EITHER.
I was told that
it’s a good thing to want people to know you like
them. Big Bird was always hugging people and had lots of
celebrity friends hugging him back. Even DeNiro hugged Big
Bird. On Valentine’s Day you would bring in bagfuls
of paper valentines, one for everyone, and you would get
one from everyone too, because that’s just how it
worked. E.T. reached out and touched Eliot with his finger,
and that damn kid almost fell to the ground he was so excited.
So when did it become a bad thing to let people know you
were interested? Or, more accurately, how often can you
call and/or text someone before you look desperate and undesirable?
How much is too much?
I’ve been
on both the giving and the receiving end of Constant Text
Syndrome (or CTS). It’s just so easy to send a quick
thought out to someone else. With a flick of your finger
you can ask someone, “Watcha doin?” and not
have to wait on the other end of the line, trudging through
a valley of awkward silence that you sometimes come across
on the phone. You know those conversations. They begin with
such hope and vigor, where your voice is about two octaves
higher than it should be, and quickly descend into silences
so bizarrely spaced that you eventually ask the other person,
“Are you high?” If you’re lucky, they
are. Then you can think, “Oh, this dying conversation
has nothing to do with me, thank God” and ask them
if they would rather talk about Fraggle Rock.
But if you send
that innocent, breezy “Just wanted to see how you’re
doin” (never with a G on the end, because you’re
keeping it casual) text and you don’t hear back, you
suddenly feel like you want to kill yourself. “They’re
probably just napping” is the first reasonable explanation
you come up with, but before long you find yourself rehashing
everything you know about them and their lives, mentally
mapping out what you think they’re doing with their
day, stealing clues from previous emails and online profiles
the way birds steal crumbs of food. “I know that Bo
likes to jog in the morning. So he’s probably off
doing that, and then later he’s probably having a
lunch meeting and I know he has a show in a few days so
he’s probably at band rehearsal and he’ll probably
get to my text/voice mails soon as he’s done with
that unless it’s a Thursday in which case he’s
probably visiting his brother and they probably went to
see that new John Cusack movie because he has a Say Anything
poster hanging in his room so he’s probably catching
the 9 o’clock show at The Grove.” Hopefully
you have someone who can slap you before you get to this
point.
The worst thing
to do is another text. That’s the quickest way to
Crazytown. It’s like buying a first-class ticket.
It doesn’t make sense; this technology was created
for us to get in touch with each other at a faster and easier
rate, but God forbid you actually do that. Sometimes we
pretend that the Internet doesn’t even work. “Maybe
he just didn’t get my email,” you think, as
if the Internet is an old bus that breaks down from time
to time. You also do this when someone you’re trying
to avoid sends a barrage of emails. “I’ll ignore
this, and if they question me later I’ll tell them
my Internet was down.” It’s the new socially
accepted lie, like “Sorry, there was traffic.”
We all buy it because the other option is that we were purposefully
being ignored, and that’s unbearable.
I think if either
party is saying more than the other person, it’s probably
too much (or if for every text they send, you send three
to five). By “saying,” I literally don’t
mean “saying”; I mean that new medium of sending
messages out into space through phones or computers or magic
or however it works, I have no idea. To me it’s magic
that anyone is ever able to function at all. We’re
a complicated species.
Picture a Palindrome: #2
LEE SEES EEL
Seeing Red
Though the theme of the new play Red is bigger
than the struggles of the abstract artist Mark Rothko (1903-1970)
on whom it is based, it does focus very specifically on the
passions and ideas that can go into the making of abstract
art. And in so doing, perhaps provides a better appreciation
of that genre and the creative process it can entail.
If you are like us, you may not always “get it,”
as you stand before a canvas; paint-slopped seemingly at random.
You might immediately think: “Looks like something a
kindergarten kid did,” or sentiments to that effect.
To which we offer a response that was recently passed on to
us:
What little plot there is in Red, concerns five
large murals that Rothko was commissioned to paint for the
new Seagram Building in New York—circa 1958. And his
painting of these murals, becomes the springboard for so many
rich ideas in which this play abounds. In fact at one point,
Rothko—portrayed by Alfred Molina in a dynamic Tony
Award winning performance, we think— literally states:
“I am here to make you think…I am not here to
make pretty pictures!”
But even in the midst of much thought provoking dialogue,
there is a piece of stage business, which for us was worth
the price of admission alone. Most tasks on stage are “faked”
and not done in real time. The audience is given the illusion,
for example, that a meal has just been consumed in a dinner
scene. But here in one extraordinary moment, the playwright
John Logan, has Rothko collaborating with his assistant, in
mixing real paint and priming a real canvas. With classical
music blaring from a record player, to quote John Lahr in
his review in The New Yorker…
“they slather the paint over the canvas, a balletic,
two-minute explosion of activity that deftly conjures
what most plays about artists don’t: the exhilaration
of the act.”
The moment receives audience applause in homage to two actors
working without a net.
This play, having only opened last month on Broadway (at
the John Golden Theater), will most likely have a long run.
Though we do not know for how long Alfred Molina has been
contracted. And though a solid play on its own, it is a special
night of theater with Molina in the lead role.
fini
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