Procrastination Strikes Again!

Edward Bulwer-Lytton, one of 19th century Britain's most popular novelists, coined such memorable phrases as "the great unwashed" and "the pen is mightier than the sword." His plays and novels did not survive the test of time.


However, the opening phrase of his 1830 novel, Paul Clifford (famous for being used by Snoopy) has become a literary icon. Or should I say a literary laughingstock. "It was a dark and stormy night..." Those seven words have become synonymous with wooden writing.


They are just the beginning of his 58-word opening sentence, and the impetus for San Jose State University's Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. Since 1982, the contest has attracted writers from across the country. Wordsmiths have strove to concoct the worst, most convoluted and verbose opening lines. Over the years, prizes in crime fiction, romance novels, purple prose and other sub-categories have developed.


This year's winner was Sue Fondrie:  "Cheryl’s mind turned like the vanes of a wind-powered turbine, chopping her sparrow-like thoughts into bloody pieces that fell onto a growing pile of forgotten memories."


My favorite nugget came from Mike Pedersen, the Purple Prose winner: "As his small boat scudded before a brisk breeze under a sapphire sky dappled with cerulean clouds with indigo bases, through cobalt seas that deepened to navy nearer the boat and faded to azure at the horizon, Ian was at a loss as to why he felt blue." A periphrastic locution worthy of Thesaurus Girl herself.


Every year with the contest winners' announcement, I vow to submit an entry for the upcoming year. Alas, my penchant for procrastination prevails, and I have yet to plunge into that prose pool. A love of film noir, pot-boilers and Runyanesque slang impels me to the crime fiction category:


I figured her for a good egg, not a banana, but I guess my judgement took a powder at the sight of those never-ending gams, so she cheesed me and now I'm on the lam with just a gatt, a sawbuck and a vacant expanse of empty where my heart used to beat. As ever- BB


"I've been as bad an influence on American Literature as anyone I can think of." - Dashiell Hammett

Nostalgia

For my birthday, a good friend gave me a 3-CD set of the Grateful Dead performing at the Big Rock Pow Wow in May 1969. They were at their psychedelic peak. Songs like Dark Star, St. Stephen and The Eleven mixed with bluesy jams behind Pig Pen's vocals.

Three months earlier, I had my first Dead experience at the original Electric Factory in Philly. At 14, it not only changed my idea of music, but my outlook on life. I realized a different lifestyle than the one I had grown up with existed. Years later Garcia put it into words. He explained the concept he had learned from Neal Cassady, "Living your life as your art."

Listening to those songs again transported me back. Nostalgia has no hold on me, but I found myself awash in waves of it. My mind contemplated the yin/yang of  the sixties' final year- man walked on the moon, Woodstock, the Manson Family murders, Altamont...war, children, it's just a shot away.

It wasn't the momentous events that fueled the reminisces. My wistfulness sprang from lost innocence. Remembering the simple things - mastering changes between the G, C and that damned F chord. Riding my bike in the crisp morning air. Lying under a tree watching the light dapple through the leaves with absolutely nothing on my mind. The naive belief that the new generation, of which I was becoming a part, could build a bridge of positive change for the future.

The river of time has ravaged the trestles of that bridge leaving the detritus of cynicism and Weltschmerz in its wake.  Hearing the live muisc of what one critic of the time called "that band of hirsute simians" stirred embers of optimism in the bonfire of my soul. As ever - BB

"...how sad and bad and mad it was - but then, how it was sweet." - Robert Browning

Guys

Last night, I beat the heat lounging in a cool tub reading Life by Keith Richards. In 1979, he was living in New York City, hanging in tough neighborhoods in Brooklyn and the Bronx, visiting West Indian restaurants and record stores. He alluded to his friends at that time as "this group of assholes." A blog was born.

Referring to your closest friends as assholes is a guy thing. We do it in a humorous, tongue-in-cheek fashion with affection, even pride. Over the years, I've been blessed with a congregation of kindred spirits. Guys who are there when you need them. In the same breath, they can be satirical, sardonic, and at times, downright mean-spirited. Assholes indeed.

While the opposite sex perplexes me, guys I get. Growing up with three brothers gave the house a locker room atmosphere...much to the chagrin of my sister and mother. I'm sure dad relished in our boisterous brotherhood.  At 13, I entered  the all-boy, Bishop Eustace Prep School. This strengthened the male-bonding aspect of my psyche. Showing affection through insults and jibes, substituting lewd innuendos for compliments, throwing punches and wrestling as physical signs of friendship. Basically acting like assholes.

I used to attribute this aspect of my personality to heavy doses of Hemingway, John Wayne movies and sports at an impressionable age. Grace under pressure, a stoic attitude to pain and heartache, a man has to do what a man has to do. As I get older, I understand that we act this way as a manifestation of our inner man. Something in the Y chromosome's nucleotides trigger the asshole tendency.

So, with pride, affection and esprit de corp, I express a deep appreciation to my "group of assholes". You know who you are - as ever  BB

“It snowed last year too: I made a snowman and my brother knocked it down and I knocked my brother down and then we had tea” - Dylan Thomas

Remembrance of Strings Past

Who do you think is the best guitar player?  Why not meditate on how many angels can dance on the head of a pin? Which is about the room Kristin and I have some nights dancing in Fells Point.

Such a conversation got me pondering my path up and down life’s fretboard.

When I was 5 or 6, my Dad would sometimes take me on house calls. One of his patients, Mr. Ketzner, seemed to own every type of stringed instrument. That gentle man died when I was about 12 and bequeathed me a Vega “Little Dixie” tenor banjo. I still have that lovely instrument.

When I was 13, the Mahon brothers moved in down the street. Pat played rock then transitioned to jazz and eventually classical. From him, I purchased my Gibson ES-175. Joe, a folkie, taught me flat-picking standards like Wabash Cannonball and Tom Dooley. 

My college career began coherently enough, but was soon befogged in ignominy. One shining light was Charlie Brocco. Many a cold, upstate New York night he showed me not only where my fingers went, but how to make the strings sing. He also taught me not to regurgitate songs, but to make them my own. 

In the waning of my 20s, I came to the realization that the time had come to abandon my Peter Pan lifestyle. A return to college and the casino industry ensued. The guitar became a hobby, an idle way to pass the time.

Life’s river flowed, and the revolution of Fortuna’s wheel brought me to Fells Point. In the waning of my 50s, I was touched by a red-haired Aoide, the muse of song. Through her, I embraced and was embraced by a brotherhood of players.  The guitar is again a passion. Words cannot express my gratitude. As ever - BB


"There is no end. There is no beginning. There is only the passion of life." - Federico Fellini

Writing on the Wall

Graffiti personifies the concept that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Some see it as a symbol of urban decay, some as art, some as vandalism. Its spontaneity and unsavoriness attract me.

Cave drawings are not considered graffiti; they are assumed to be "societally approved." But the troublemaker is part of our collective unconscious. I know that some paleolithic prankster drew an arrow to the backside of a cave-drawn beast showing the other dwellers that Atok was an ass.

Graffiti disconcerted the Egyptians, Greeks and Romans. From Napoleon's troops to WWII dog faces, soldiers' names and/or obscene bon mots marked the military global presence. During the 1968 French student revolution, graffiti functioned as a political call-to-arms.

By 1977,  New York artists like Jean-Michael Basquiat brought media attention to graffiti. Ten years before that, a Philadelphia kid named Darryl McCray began what is considered modern graffiti.  Cornbread (McCray's tagger name) became a legend in the City of Brotherly Love. Known not only for his art, but for his unique placement of graffiti, Cornbread tagged the side of an elephant at the zoo and Jackson 5 airplane.


The dorm bathrooms at Siena College provided my first, and only, canvas for graffiti. Always more garrulous than graphic, my scribblings tended to be more literary. No dirty limericks, or "Here I sit broken-hearted..." ditties, my stall scrawls gravitated toward the satiric and sardonic.

A favorite work was the on-going poem. During a morning meditation, one would write a single line. As more guys dropped in, other lines were added. By the next morning an entire verse was composed. A new day would bring a new oeuvre - as ever BB

Soyez réalistes, demandez l'impossible. (Be realistic, ask the impossible.) - graffiti in Paris during the 1968 student protests

That Guy

He’s that guy, you know, the guy who played in…Anyone who has watched an old movie or television show with me has heard that phrase. 

Growing up during the Golden Age of Television, I overindulged in cathode ray tube emissions. Not sated by the torrent of effluvia produced by episodic programs, I immersed myself in old movies.

For reasons unknown even unto myself, I enjoyed sitting through the credits putting the players’ faces to their names. Ergo my encyclopedic (and somewhat useless) knowledge of character actors and “B” movie stalwarts.

From the westerns: Royal Dano, Dub Taylor, Jack Elam, and Arthur Hunnicutt

From gangster flicks: Mike Mazurki, Brian Donlevy, Elisha Cook, Jr and Murray Kinnell

Cue the ones who change genres faster that cold cream removes pancake make-up:

Akim Tamiroff, J. Carroll Naish, Aldophe Menjou, Helmut Dantine

Unlike the Avon lady, some of these names may not ring a bell. (Another pun becoming anachronistic in the age of the Interweb) However, most will recognize the faces. These actors lent their talent to hundreds of movies and TV shows. Yet, they remain anonymous images flickering on late night TV.

Don’t despair old friends. I still remember. As ever BB

“I don't mean to be forward, but ain't I had the pleasure of meeting you two broads before?” – Mike Mazurki in Some Like It Hot

Who's Buried in Grant's Tomb?

Trick question? You bet. The answer is no one. The General Grant National Memorial, commonly called Grant's Tomb located in New York City's Riverside Park, is a mausoleum. One gets entombed, not buried, in a mausoleum. Semantics aside, saying Ulysses Grant would be only half correct as entombed next to him is his wife.

The "correct" answer has led to the untrue belief that no bodies are interred there. But then, aporcypha abounds among us.

From the Greek for hidden away, apocrypha originally referred to Biblical books considered by the canonical powers as not divinely inspired, i.e. the Gnostic gospels. The word's definition has expanded to mean anything spurious.

Another classic example is the idea that before Columbus' voyage in 1492, people believed that the earth was flat. Since ancient times, most knew the earth was round. A century before the birth of Christ, Eratosthenes calculated the world's circumference within 100 miles of the actual figure. Even the common man could look at the unobstructed horizon and notice the earth's curvature.

The "world is flat" theory became popular after Washington Irving's 1828 biography of Columbus. An inveterate story-teller, Irving wouldn't let facts interfere with a good plot device. I concur.

Other facetious facts include Ben Franklin's support of daylight saving time. He mentioned it in a letter as a jab at the French habit of sleeping late. He did not mean for the idea to be taken seriously. Unlike Paron Weems' stories about George Washington. Weems coined the cherry tree story. His goal was to immortalize Washington as an American-Augustan demi-god.


Why does ever-gullible man take such pleasure in these tales? I believe it's an atavistic predisposition. Some chromosomal link to ancestors sitting watching the fire's shadows play on cave walls as the tribal storyteller weaves his verbal tapestry. Intrinsically, we are as credulous as those cavemen. Our technology has advanced, but we still delight in a good story and passing them on to others. It would be more romantic relating them around glowing embers as opposed to opening and/or sending an email.

To debunk some popular emails which people enjoy sending me: the word shit in not an acronym for shipping manure, Captain Kangaroo did not rescue injured fellow Marine Lee Marvin on Iwo Jima and displaying the middle finger as an insult has nothing to do with the Battle of Agincourt. - As ever BB

"There are people so addicted to exaggeration they can't tell the truth without lying."  ~Josh Billings*

*Pen name of 19th century humorist, Henry Wheeler Shaw - no relation