Magic in the Universe

The term, Magic, is our term, we who create and use language. We of science reject it. To say there is or is not magic in the universe is to apply our language to what are to us mysteries. Even after we create explanations there is the magic in those explanations achieving results. The scientific balances we establish through measurement are signs of consistency in the laws we discover through the application of our numeric systems. Somewhat sadly I add that the explanations proving or disproving the existence of magic, going one way or the other, do not make a difference. Time establishes outcome and we exist as segments in time. We are always estimating our expectations of achievements and there are always surprises that after the fact seem like we knew them all along. So with the intent of building upon a foundation of something already established, I assemble upon remnants of my own work. It's not that I revere my creatiivities. I use them as reference. I am a product of my attempts at applying systems of randomness, of action without reason, and of magic in the universe. I am evidence that the application of those systems is achieving outcomes according to plan. This is my delusion. All my work is a product of it, making all my work an exercise in futility. The prospects of achievement cannot be included in this process without stopping the process. I have not stopped the process but going forward is an act of faith, or of my not needing or expecting any return from doing it.

A New Episode in The History of 315-321 Apartment Corp

Thank you for being part of our East Village Coop of two buildings between 1st and 2nd Avenue on historic East 12th Street, running the width of Manhattan Island from West to East.

In prior episodes of the history of the 315-321 Apartment Corp we've gone back to Stuyvesant Farm and the pre-grid cemetery of St. Mark's Church on East 10th Street.  

This new episode is about the six three-story Greek Revival townhouses with the addresses 311, 313, 315, 317, 319 and 321 East 12th Street, built in 1853.  

At the turn of the last century a developer, Jacob Fish, bought 5 of them.

What could they house? four families each?  

Here's the idea:  If we overlap lot 317 we can build two mirror buildings each with 35 apartment units, sharing a single steam heat burner in the basement of 321.

Jacob Fish commissioned architect Samuel Sass to transform the houses into two 6-story tenements, completed in 1907.

Unfortunately, or rather, fortunately, Mr Fish complied with the new law for tenements, allowing space for courtyards instead of air shafts.

Our rooms are smaller but they all get light, and our common hallways are bigger than the tenements built in the 1890's.  

Remember, though, he could only buy 5 lots..

So when you pass by our neighbor to the west, at 311 East 12th, you are looking at the last still standing of the row of 6 Greek Revival townhouses from 1853.

A Night at the Opera with Ruth Bader Ginsburg - Kaiser/Roberts Clear Hor...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=11xz6J6umC0

from Quando ce ne sono nove (When There are Nine): A Night at the Opera with Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, 12th Night at The New York City Bar Association, Scene 10 song (by Peter Dizozza) with Peter Dizozza and Lawrence Mertz as Michael Kaiser and John Roberts. (Sep 04, 2013 Washingtonian: "With the Kaiser-Roberts ceremony, Ginsburg became the first Supreme Court justice to perform a same-sex marriage.") RBG Song: Of Gender Let's Be Blind (Clear Horizon) by Peter Dizozza Pianist: Dr. Nathan Brandwein Percussion: James Mussen Flute: Deborah Karpatkin

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHMmPmswG9Q

The demo description:

On the Basis of Gender (instead of Sex) here is the studio demo of Clear Horizon, The RBG Song by Peter Dizozza Recorded by Horacio Pena Sung by Martin Ginsburg to his wife, Ruth Bader. In the Amanda Bakale RBG script this was sung by Michael Kaiser to his spouse John Roberts. Music adapted from the "Clear Horizon" piano piece. Song inspired by the book, "Chef Supreme, Martin Ginsburg" created by the Justices' spouses in memoriam. This is the June Version of the recording by Horacio Pena of a song by Peter Dizozza lyrics Of gender let's be blind. I love you for your mind. Intense, intellectual, emotion is the Connection that we find. And if I'm wonder cooking for the fam'lies of our highest court I'll look back on our great careers and how we shared in our support. We both may be strong willed. Your strong will makes me thrilled. In family and work, together we will always See us both fulfilled. And if I'm one day chef supreme and all the judges look to me I'll say that, though defined by difference, We live on common ground. As we lock our eyes we're gazring at a clear horizon. Its a Moment like the moment we were born. We begin again More than friends. A love once joined together, never torn.

Corey Meredith plays vinyl Now That You Run from Me on $400,000 Martin L...

Songs of The Golf Wars came out on Vinyl in 2018.   Here is the album played on a simple, simply expensive and basically excellent stereo system introduced to us at the Hi-Fidelity Fair.

As for my own audio plans, I have a trio tube receiver that I imagine one day repairing... I've had limited luck with getting anyone to help with that.   I got a automatic record changing dual turntable from ebay which had its issues because of a decay in the mount for a grado cartridge, it's the same one that came with the denon turntable I've had for many years at home.   I like the Grado people in Brooklyn.   They used to actually take my calls but now it's replacement needles online, maybe using needle doctor?  The beige low end grado cartridges I'm using will take their more expensive needles.   This reminds me of the Bang and Olufsen cartridge Michael Duffy mounted on my Gerard turntable transforming all sound, and I've never been able to replicate that though I do have the B&O replacement needle.

The Gerard turntable always ran a bit fast and I had no idea how to adjust it.   Now the dual and the denon adjust and can match the piano tuning.  

The dual has a lighter tone arm. Also it plays stackable records so we can listen to the LPs laid out for stacking, mostly operas.

For home I use four bose speakers, two wood from 1985 and two plastic, for outdoors? to fill the room.

The amp is an akai transistor that is over 30 years old and just works continuously including the remote control.

To me it's all about the needle.   

2019 10 31 Halloween Joker at TNC - Peter Dizozza - Mike Hill

We played a late night set at Theater for the New City's 40th Halloween Ball, and one song references a movie I haven't seen based on a story animated in a movie I had seen on tv called The Killing Joke... Anthony Newley is amazing; I suppose the more distance away from him the more fun he is...  But Who Can I Turn to if YOU Turn Away???...

The Halloween Jack Future Legend and 2 Verses of Diamond Dogs (David Bowie)

The joys of fatherhood affect a daily perspective of 60 prior years. 
Today I experience activities anew 
My long term job is in transition. 
Letting go is hard.  The feeling of investment with no return is strong. 

Then I realize my thought expression; it's as I write

(I'm letting other thoughts happen while I write of prior thoughts.)

I took on "per diem" work this morning with a 50H hearing scheduled for me to appear and conduct at noon.  Well, here it is noon and I'm still at court on the per diem matter, in this case before a judge with whom I've played music   He's a percussionist.  He's removed from the court room.   He's now walking back and forth in his office.
I must say hello but a lot of good it does when I'm in a bind of overscheduling done for the money I'll receive which is not much.  I'm calculating... 125 ...(1st appearance 75 + 25 each additional...)+ 85x 50H Hearings.  Idiot! 

(I don't have to bother thinking myself an idiot.  Let others use their moments of thought about me to  think that...)

At court without the other side there I could have just put in a paper to get on the list.  (by waiting for my "adversary," we're nearly last with each of the hundred cases on the calendar, each getting an especially pedantic attention, providing detailed opportunities to learn and relearn almost as if the holy words of codification require repeating at every opportunity... ultimately chilling the desire to add another word.)

Ah, momentary considerations.
And tonight is an Inn of Court CLE about discrimination, avoiding it in the law office, far removed from my concern, although recent activities remind me of the nebula of its impact.  This cloud upon us is fun-based in many ways... race and sexual orientation and gender...trans.... is that it?  People from all over the world, unique in ways, the same in ways.
All shapes and sizes and excitements are physically based. 
Where's the charge now that we are ...A Father? 
Parents existing in time with a future, 'cause we're leaving behind our bodes for the  body of a young'un, a young one. 
Now Gerald (Lebovits) is reviewing the orange folders, tossing about, looking into them, shaking his head, accepting help from his clerk.  He is of the shaved head group, also an orientation of sorts.
Now he's taken a pile.  He's leaning on the witness box.  There is an issue of the balding men.  (theirs is the higher testosterone level.   Magnificent!)
He'll sit at the conference table in front of his own bench on the dais, etc. 


Eventually we will talk about the upcoming RBG show and I'll have achieved completion at 1:30PM of the 10:00AM scheduled per diem status conference.

I since learned after missing my noon and 1PM hearing commitment, that if I need to be relieved I need simply inform the per diem group. 
When I noted to the per diem group that the assignment was running overtime they immediately cancelled my appearance and sent a substitute per diem attorney. 

By that time (12:30) I thought I was next and said no, no I must complete this, and sent away the substitute and waited ... another hour...

As for the case itself: There was a Dr. performing the usual surgeries on a car accident victim who billed and received notice that the No-Fault insurer withheld payment until completion of EUOs (Examination Under Oath).

The EUO apparently included him but without the insurer actually scheduling his EUO.  The insurer denied his payment of $12,000 for the two surgeries for failure to comply; he went before no-fault arbitration which found that the insurer's EUO notice was deficient and that they had to pay him. 

During that time the insurer sued the doctor??  that's why we were in New York Supreme Court. 

Several prior orders directed the doctor as defendant to appear for a deposition so rather than have the case dismissed I actually agreed he would appear...this was a very silly case... it looks like they'll get their examination...even with an arbitration order to just pay him...

now this is a matter that demands the attention of those with an obsession with the ludicrous... of which I am often one.

While this document seems objectively documented, we have yet to see whether I learn anything from it....

Perhaps worst of all is the taking of time to write this...

The Song Should Go Where No Song Has Gone Before

There is a Piano Vocal Chord Book, “Only What We Need, The Songs of Peter Dizozza”

Take it home and enjoy at your parlor piano at your leisure, after dinner, or in this case after dinner and a show. It's dinner theater.

Life goes on while I write songs.

I confront issues with success, with failure,

Revealing my character, and its flaws.

How bad can be the portrait that I paint of myself?

This can be one of many nights.

Tonight we share the Fast and Upbeat songs.

THE 1960s... I barely get a few songs in this decade...

1. A Day (Guitar), anticipating the future in 1969

Other early songs include A Christmas Carol called That's What It's All About. Monica's Yuletides sang it at the Forest Hills Station Square Christmas Eve Celebration. That may be my first song.

I came from a time when the songwriter was glorified. Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley didn't write their songs, the Beatles and their friends did.

It's weird now to discover so much of pop songs were played by the same band of musicians, the wrecking crew, but we didn't care about those songs. We only cared about the bands that ostensibly did play their instruments. The Beatles really did, and they played independently together. It's a chamber ensemble. I felt close to them although all I had of them were their albums. Their movies bought them that much closer to me.

Also in the 1960's Burt Bacharach explored radical harmonic progressions, perhaps arising from James Bond Secret Agent music. Radical chord changes. Bacharach enhanced that with asymmetrical rhythm, creating surprise and new momentum. Pop music became asymmetrical. The patterns became hit making. EXAMPLES?

Recovering an Opera, dated from the possibility of writing one.

When did Tommy write The Who, or rather when did The Who write Tommy? It was 1969

Before I heard Abbot and Costello ask Who's on First, my friend Frankie, who was older than me, looked like George Harrison, and played guitar, told me about a band with an un-pronouncable name one day just gave up on it to become The Who,

and they wrote a rock opera where they destroyed their instruments at the end..

In hushed tones, my mother's cousin, Joy, told me about people undressing onstage in Hair. Then we listened to the soundtrack.

I was frustrated by what I was hearing. When I heard something I liked I couldn't find it again and when I heard other things I wanted to improve them. I definitely wanted to write the dialogue for the movies, because they didn't say what I was thinking. Like the girl Mathilda, on Broadway, I wanted to write my own story.

Combining rock intensity/aggression with symphonic fidelity became my preferred approach.

I searched for the illusive song that I heard on WNEW FM.

Radio began playing album tracks, instead of just the hits.

Lyric: I can't seem to get away, I can't seem to know

but somebody up there must not want me to go.

Important lyric:

Say I've Done It with the Help of No One

and the thought of that makes it even more fun,

to think that I have done it alone,

well that is something new.

Oh yeah that is something new.

Because the reality was I was doing very little for myself. Even today I am happy to defer to others, but if no one is going to do it or knows what to do then I'll do it, and that's how I approach songwriting, which is to say, I supply what's missing in music, an ambitious aim.

Oh let me get away from here, you don't know what I've been through.

Oh let me get away from here, I don't know just what to do.

Hey hold on, Hey Hold on. I don't know why you're all so hung up.

Hey hold on, hey hold on. I don't know jus what to say.

So let me go. Oh please just let me go....

The search for the elusive song played once on FM radio became a driving factor in my writing songs.

However, other sound became mine. The song should go where no song has gone before.

Can it work that I am speaking to the phone?

I know what I'm doing! And what I'm doing has a ring of upsetting the table, as if the sound of a bell could upset the table -- that I have some creative thought or new way of looking at things, and communicating that can influence an outcome, can help shape the world as it continues to reformulate.  In a song you have a place to experiment.  It touches upon the random when it is written without training or instruction, but even in the most formulaic formats there is chance, however, as professionals we have left as little as possible to chance. 

I feel today that there is more of a fear or at least a rejection of the random because we live in an intentional world.  We intend to accomplish in an age where chance is no longer thought of as having Integrity, but rather is an act of perversity, like the flip a coin fellow in the Christopher Nolan Batman movie.

But we are on firm footing in the universe.  Believing that is an act of faith. 

When I notate songs I wrote at an early age I see that there is order in the universe.

Woody Allen rode on the romantic lead created by and for Humphrey Bogart.  They both crossed beyond the lead but they rode it first, Mr. Bogart through Maltese Falcon, Casablanca and To Have and Have Not, the last of those going so far as to provide him with a wife.  Woody Allen with Play It Again Sam into Sleeper, Love and Death and Annie Hall, then they went overboard into their own reality, with Manhattan and Stardust Memories for Mr. Allen, and Treasure of Sierra Madre and In a Lonely Place for Mr. Bogart. 
Mr. Bogart was rather reasonable in his depiction of the romantic lead gone wrong, susceptible to suspicion, when his female lead, the director's wife, Gloria Graham, takes the bait (offered by the outside world). 
Mr. Bogart seems to have his ego well within his control to portray these roles so completely. 
I'm longing for the romantic lead movie role that allows for the actor to embody an identity worthy or capable of receiving an audience transference.  This transference is the relatability of the movie star, that he or she can sustain the identity transference of the viewer.  Indeed this would happen when I was younger as I became Jack Nicholson in Chinatown sustaining the romantic lead in a movie land.  Mr Nicholson, with director and scriptwriter, provided a substitute identity, the way Bogart does for Woody Allen in Mr. Allen's own script, establishing himself, Mr. Allen, as the romantic lead. 
I'm realizing we mentioned the Quentin Tarrantino romance inspired by Play It Again Sam (True Romance, which provides a lead of great appeal but lacking in substance.  I don't know why I say that with conviction (Christian Slater is ok).  I'm trying to imagine the roles that have substance in a Tarrantino movie.  I feel like everyone is following the acting of Robin and the Seven Hoods, which is also quite a grim and gruesome movie of knuckleheads.  And his True Romance uses Elvis Presley as the Bogart figure.   Elvis is also somewhat lightweight in comparison to his viewer -- forgive me for suggesting this since I know Elvis's own movies can be amazing.  (I think of Jailhouse Rock, Blue Hawaii and Viva Las Vegas).  But who gets the audience identity transference?  Could James Bond get it as portrayed by whomever, ie, Daniel Craig?  When I first saw the newer Casino Royale I was somehow affected by the youthful appearance of the male and female leads, as if they weren't going to put up with the 1960's typecasting, but they had to.  Meanwhile, the 1970's movie with Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway (Chinatown) offers them only a moment before they plummet to the movie's end.
Oh remember where both Mr Allen and Mr. Bogart came from.  Mr. Allen was the nebish behind the scenes author and Mr. Bogart was the gangster, but they were destined for Romantic Lead!  It looks like Mr. Allen wrote the lead for himself.   Mr. Bogart was an egoless actor intent on working, acting, good thing since he only lived 57 years.  John Huston gave him an identical Maltese Falcon script (it had been filmed in the 1930's) with a built in private eye, Sam Spade.  Casablanca was the script that would teach scriptwriters how to activate the ticking bomb (ruining movies by exposing the formula?).   To Have and to Have Not had a director and his wife provide an offscreen model of how the on screen actors could interact... Oh Howard Hawks, the same director, gave Humphrey Bogart a Philip Marlow role.  That's the movie, The Big Sleep, with two versions, the one before realization of the appeal of Bacall, and afterward. 
Create a romantic lead.  Is La La Land romantic?  Maira is suggesting Punch Drunk Love, while I consider Daniel Day Lewis... he can sustain this kind of audience identity transference, but he doesn't care and his main director PT Anderson, is looking to create something new, something that distances us even as our fascination grows.   Robert Downey Jr. could do it with Guy Richie in the Sherlock Holmes private eye... private eyes are everything, like their counterparts, secret agents.   perhaps the most we get from the quirky personality, the loner with paranoia is Humphrey Bogart, the loner with obsessive compulsion is Robert Downey. 
I need someone to speak to me because I need guidance.   Am I really on my own... well, we're on our own together...

Religion from Shanghai to Ubud

A Mandarin is a Chinese Bureaucrat or Imperial Magistrate.

Buddhist

Hindu, the Bat Cave (Pura Goa Lawah), the monkey forest.   

Taoist -- Qin Yubo a Taoist Deity in the City God Temple, Shanghai, filled with the Guardian Gods of the City.

1997 Informative Essay- My Issue is "I'm Always Right." Wahproovit All Night

What I'm reading below from  20 years ago produces the feeling of a riot in my mind...

I'm trying to communicate coherent thoughts today like I almost did in 1997 when I attended something called "The Landmark Forum,"which was basically a good experience, by the way.
What I wrote then makes sense to me now and perhaps helps others as well, so I'm posting it here...

However, I also remember that the idea of writing my story was to dismiss it, therefore it becomes worse the more I try to clarify it...the more you fix a problem the more you prolong it...

"My issue is

I am always right and I prove it all night to the destruction of the relationship.

I was born and loved.

I played piano. 

I felt different from the kids in the alley    http://youtu.be/8T_yI9WUNZw.

I didn't connect physically. 

There was teasing by the older girls, and I was sensitive and protected by my parents, though my parents couldn't do much to, or about, the outside world.   (Instead my parents effectively sheltered me from the outside world...)

I am sure that I was better by being different. 

At a time when My Favorite Martian was a popular TV show, I was a martian.   My friend (Michael Cavagnetto) accepted me as that and when I went to breath the car exhaust he said cut it out you're not. He humored me, but it was fun for me that he went along with my special delusion.

I think people like being with a special person so I tried to be one, to get friends, but actually I never (developed close relationships) because I was never genuine. I was always different and somehow it became right to be my way. I wasn't successful except in my own mind where I was the tremendous hero of supernatural ghost stories, fantasies that compromised my happiness to show how real they could be. 

(By fantasizing, I could convinced myself to believe in my own imagined successes.)

I remember ending one of my ghost stories by confronting a chasm in the cellar by the plumbing

------------

(There were copper pipes under a bar counter at the far end of the finished cellar at 67-113 Dartmouth Street.  Across from the bar were built in bookshelves where I could climb up and catercorner like a monkey.  Covering the cellar floor were black and white tiles large enough for life-size chess pieces to stand upon, so it felt like a location from Alice Through the Looking Glass.)

(As for the ghost story, I persuaded those ghost friends, to back away as I bridged from their ghost world past - 1910?  into my day to day existence of a finite life path.)

--------------

I was exceptional and I received some recognition in my 8 years of small school. (Our Lady Queen of Martyrs http://youtu.be/OKq_zStHpuk.)

High school recognition lasted for the first semester, then my grades plummeted to average.  (Archbishop Molloy   I remained isolated until I joined a rock band.)

My friends were unique but I would abandon one for the more interesting other - a lovely girl friend at 8, a boy – (a href="http://youtu.be/JTnkOMPHnTA">http://youtu.be/JTnkOMPHnTA.)

well, I made movies with them and this involved them in creative projects.

If they weren't enrolled, someone else would be there. I never planned filming prior to the moment. Something turned out and I was right to do what I wanted. No one expected anything. In fact there was no competition. I was doing what no one else was doing at the little league. I was making a movie.   (reel three of The Ruins is here with the Pink Floyd sound blocked: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhB7fT9H794&t=59s)

Then, because I didn't practice piano, I did what no one else was doing, wrote songs.  (sample concert (a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGXEz2LepvY">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGXEz2LepvY.

))

I was struggling against excellence in a competitive field (no sports for me... but then I remember loving everyone, all the children in the alley, playing a casual game of baseball while the sun was setting...a lovely event).

I could excel if no one else was doing it at the time. That forged the way for my doing what no one else was doing, ever, in a performance or in writing, but I got so far gone that I embarrassed myself and those around me, because my art was an expression of my emptiness, and here I drop terms like necrophilia and fixual?? ideas.   (For example, my movie, The Last Dodo considers the practice of circumcision as a mark of civilization http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rliw1JVv6QA )

I thought my ideas crazy – like songs of one boy loved by a group

(“Yes It's True” into “Crowded Avenue” http://www.cinemavii.com/dizozza/images/crowded.jpg... )

They were from current pop ideas, I guess.

So I figured, if you are creative, inventive and unique then your limitations won't matter, and indeed I improved, but improved no further because I had proved enough.

And nobody could get it.

I couldn't say about it (writing songs, making these little movies) that I was doing art as my work.  No one wanted it and I was so undisciplined with it. 

 Of course I was right about its uniqueness, and my uniqueness, and I was lonely because no one could accept my distant aloofness... 

Actually, when I revealed myself, I presented a boring ordinary privileged kid with barely an iota of relatable suffering, who had abused his own privacy, and was in fact his own abuser... 

– what was I punishing myself about? 

I was a child (of 4) when I discovered sex.  I couldn't rightfully share that with anyone, and I was getting all the secrets through self-discovery. No sharing there. I was too embarrassed about it.  Years later I could share it but (felt that I and my partner) were at different levels.

I've become so bored by this (I think that was the intention of this exercise), still trying to focus on "I'm right" and that "everyone comes back and agrees," and I prove (I'm right) through the acceptance of my creative work, which remains nebulous and incomplete because of time constraint excuses, preventing the confrontation of people's judgments.

I who am so judgmental and so vicious in my critique with such command of words yet I never really hurt any one.   I'm only dangerous in my callous lack of discretion in revealing secrets, and in having no integrity because my word is never fulfilled except by coincidence which I play up, and by blind luck.   Really I act only under pressure and am amazed when it works out and I take all the credit.

Susan (I had a friend as a client who I represented in a car crash) kept pushing me on her case to the point where I said to the adjuster, pay me her demand or she goes to a really good attorney. 

What the hell was I talking about? I have no self regard and I succeeded (the adjuster offered me her demand and we settled her case.).

 I've been trashed and remain here because I don't care, and succeed and don't care.  How did I get to be an attorney?  'cause I'm so smart and angry, but barely able to drag myself around with these gifts and a creative mind and just being there.  (Yes I'm an attorney:  http://lawyers.justia.com/lawyer/peter-william-dizozza-1173507)

I don't take drugs or drink.

So the details go to the present (1997) total loneliness because people expose my falsehood of greatness and uniqueness and yet there is something going on so I'm trying to picture what I want and be right about it before going for it.

I want a relationship, and an active creative life. I'm just a story teller. Where do I go? What do I do?

I wrote a show with Jim Vogel while I was in a workshop (Gunshy, our 10 minute musical for the BMI Music Theater Workshop http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ail0NaUkZU). That was an opportunity for the greatest exposure to other people's greatness, and I didn't have time, only excuses.

(I like that piece, Gunshy... based on a William Saroyan short story, knife like,Knife-like, Flower-like, Like Nothing at All in the World) 

All I can say is my opinion of my work matters in that I can pick and choose and it's only mine. How do I leave this stuff?

(We need each other.  I admit I need people.  I need you to agree with me...as I take a stand and be a possibility, and from where I stand, I will listen to your possibility. )

This was 20 years ago....

Not tomorrow never again I did it and don't want to do it I'll wait until then when everyone's happy nobody is guilty besides I've nothing to give but the strength that is guiding me I who am weak am Despicable with it decrepit without it I must get an agent perhaps I can Market it

The Charles Busch Cleopatra

Mr. Busch presents original productions at Theater for the New City.  I think the prior one was a compendium of religious movies, perhaps like King of Kings, or Samson and Delilah or, the Robe.  I sometimes associate them with sword and sandal movies. There is a genre aspect to his TNC offerings.   His latest is a compendium of Cleopatras, with an emphasis on Mae West.  Part of the script incorporates a Mae West song, and that is a very beautiful segment... We have to begin with the notion that 1930's Hollywood acting is valid, while being perhaps histrionic and over the top.  The ultimate hysteric for me was Colin Clive in Frankenstein.  I sincerely believe in his performance.  The problem may be a question of naturalism.  I grew up with a love for melodrama and it has left me with an expectation.  Melodrama penetrates my skull.  So Mr Busch writes a perfectly eloquent script seriously considering the magic of relationships.  I can't tell how important I think it is to turn antagonism into eroticism, or rather, into coupling.  I don't know... I was thinking about the hit man who goes home to his wife.   It's a closed circle, all his relationships, his seductions with the outside world get redirected to the one true love, and in a way one might think it misdirected... ok

So the piece lives within the realm of gay camp... Maybe it doesn't.  Maybe saying that secures its position elsewhere because in fact I see nothing in it that is gay, nor camp  It's informed... Historically it is informed by Cinema, and yes, to me that is valid.  Cinema dialogue is the drama I know.  

As for his acting, he is reforming the English language.  They all are.  They are excellent actors working with their physicality and further validating the realism of their characters.  

I realize my offering of thoughts to the world requires more thought in doing so. however, this is it.

Addendum:  The introductory announcement for piece, that it's a story of love, betrayal, murder...concludes its list with "eye-liner."   It sounds funny but, yes, look at the eye of Horus.  Eyeliner figures prominently in the symbology of Egypt.  

How to Fly

Masonic

Finally an upbeat story reminding us to do and not INVEST PASSIVELY.  

Cement binds.  Its mortar of concrete is ground stone.  

Grind the stones to dust; pulverize them.  Add water to the dust and fill the space between puzzle mounted stones and any space between them is forgiven   You have a sealed fireplace chimney. 

When water permeates the stones, because cracks in the cement allowed the water to gather and freeze, expanding the cracks, then water gets into the fireplace.  

The fireplace insert that was the rage in the 1930’s was a heatilator, with self-contained interior vent-paths on each of its sides, with openings at the bottom to draw in cool air and openings up top to release the hot air, having passed through the fire heated iron lining to the left and right of the fireplace.  How heatilating!

Because our fireplace stones had been laid and cemented around this enormous 1935 iron heatilator box, all our options for the fireplace addressed inserting an insert inside and up the chimney, through its flu, of which there are two running through the one chimney,

The water that permeated the stones for the past 80 years, corroded the iron.  As the iron rusted thin, it became brittle until, at last, gashes breached its elemental fabric. 

-- Such that I could bend and pull out the pieces.  The Mason observed that our old corroded heatilator box even came with its own (corroded) flu flap, which was incompatible with the flu cap wire that also ran through it to the chimney top.   

So you could never close the heatilator flu containing the fireplace box without catching the wire running up the chimney to the chimney-top flu cap. 

As for the two flues inside the chimney, they run parallel, side by side.  

Surrounded by cemented chimney stones are two clay lined flues running up to the chimney-top, one is for the fireplace and the other for an oil burner below the house.   This took me a while to comprehend.  There are two passageways, the big fireplace is only using one of them.  It is like only 4 inches square... I know this as if I always knew but I assure you, that is not the case.  Was this small opening causing smoke to pour out when we lit a fire?

Water had also rotted the fan of our forced air oil burner and, along with its corroded 300 gallon iron oil tank, it is now gone from the basement. 

In order to heat and cool the house without oil or propane or other fuels, we are using an electric powered Japanese freon-manipulating Heat-pump which also provides cool air through the old oil burner ducts that snake through basement ceiling.  The installers humored me when I asked them, rather than mounting the air-conditioners around the house, to mount them in the basement ceiling and use the old ducts.  

This is the same split system whose condensers you see everywhere, hanging from brackets mounted into the buildings throughout the shanty tenements in the shadow of the Marriott skyscraper along the windy streets of old Shanghai.   

However, our one big fan vented condenser runs its recycling freon through three differing units also mounted into the basement ceiling.

Realistically a zero degree temperature must make it a strain for that freon to produce heat from temperatures lower than the outside weather, but this is a system that is still somewhat incomprehensible and as they say about our judgment of it, the jury is still out. 

So every shanty apartment in old Shanghai has its split duct condenser hanging from the walls.  It is just another example of how our ancient worlds (of the 1930's) live on.

For the Shanghai of 600 years ago, go to the Yu Gardens.

And we're really straying from the topic of successful fireplace masonry.

So I thought that the self-contained re-purpose idea of using those oil fired forced air heat ducts to run the modern heat pump was a good idea, even though it also sends cold air through the floor vents and cold air tends to settle on the floor.   

We just have to remember to kick around the air during the summer. 

The mason man's first job was to re-point the chimney-top cracks.  He also restored the original stone grill (that Candlewood Isle Founding Father Mr. Ducey must have built his own in the back of the house). 

Smoke still poured into our a-frame living room especially as the fire in the hearth died down, so while the mason scanned the internet for a replacement heatilator (I think he did) I drove around the entire Candlewood Lake searching for insert ideas, two places, and then visited the guns and weapons stores -- a Japanese Guy named Hans was quit forthcoming there.   Yes they are collectible saved from the trenches during world war I.  Yes they work.  And if you want magazine guns, there's an extra form to submit.  And I didn't take pictures, no.  

I also visited the pipe by the damn and lake pump.  I drove around the entire Candlewood Lake.  

What of the wood? Buy proper wood.  Don't use the cuttings from your crazy scissorhand prunning  There's Crenolite?  Pine oils?

Forget it.  All the  cuttings are going in there, and yet the chimney is clean (I bought and ran through it a 50' chimney sweep rod.  Nothing.)... 

So the mason just pulled out the entire interior and relaid the stones without the heatilator, kept the vents to the sides, used the original wood mantle, and raised the fireplace one foot, building a hearth stone that looks as if it was always there.    

We've still got our $5 four flap screen in front of it, it’s low cost attributable to its light weight, which is of course preferable.  And I was at last able to use my Columbian artifact antique bellows with the copper embossings of owl chewing lobster tail on one side and eight-pronged man on the other.  

The turning point for the commercially manufactured wood burning inserts with the glass window was my visit to the New Fairfield thrift store.  I may have actually bought nothing but when the lady behind the counter heard me talking about the woodburning insert with a neighbor she said, all those fuels are dirty.  There’s a reason we no longer use wood as fuel, it’s the dirtiest there is and when I walk down the street I have to breath the smoke from the homes heating themselves with these woodburning inserts.   

Well you can always get pellets. 

That was pretty illuminating.  Even though fossel fuels are NO LONGER the subject of international price-gouging, electricity is still cleaner.  

Finally, in the lower back of the fireplace box the mason installed a vent pulling air from outside through an opening at the bottom of the chimney. 

The Mason is James Delafield, referred to us by our primary country cottage counselor, Joseph Snopkowski.  Green Star installed and continues to support the Heat Pump HVAC system.  

Monica's insisting that we raise hearth is transformative, even as it looks as if it was always there. 

The Candlewood Isle Film Fest continues the Third Saturday of Every Month with homemade dinner and a movie at the Clubhouse.

Last night, we saw The 1962 Manchurian Candidate, which varied our pattern in previous months of viewing collaborations between directors and their spouses. 

Les Diaboliques stars Vera Gibson-Amado, Henri Clouzot’s wife.

Under Capricorn is scripted by Alma Reville, Alfred Hitchcock’s wife.

Meet Me in St. Louis stars Judy Garland, Vincent Minelli’s wife.

The Great Gatsby should have starred Ali McGraw, producer Robert Evens’ wife, had she not run off with Steve McQueen... Instead it starred Mia Farrow, the former wife of Don't Drink the Water playwright Woody Allen.

Rachel Rachel stars Joanne Woodward, Paul Newman’s wife.

Here are my notes on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, a book enhanced by a 1974 movie, of which I watched at least 70%.  It runs 2 and a half hours, in 4 reels, flat and red, 1:3 to 1, well-cropped, in 16mm perhaps to run during airplane flights across the Atlantic.

It is first and foremost a Robert Evens golden age of Paramount production (1968 through 1976). Ali McGraw, his wife, was to play Daisy until she left him for Steve McQueen.

Francis Ford Coppola already wrote the script, then directed the Godfather I and II, the Conversation, and Finiah’s Rainbow, while Robert Evens held onto the script.

Nelson Riddle adapted the music.

Ralph Laren worked Way Too Hard for the credit he received but it is his movie, too. 

I read the book in high school.  I saw the opera at the MET.  I held the prettily packaged soundtrack to this 1970’s movie in my hands.  That’s the extent of my patchy Gatsby appreciation, until Monica ordered an Ebay print as my Christmas present.

An impeccable cast for the delivery of content consists of Sam Waterson, Bruce Dern, Karen Black, Mia Farrow and Robert Redford (5’8”). 

Its British Director also made The Innocents.”

Gatsby is a purist.  Everyone together is not worth one of him.

There’s a problematic issue, never hit and run.

The Robert Evens bloodbaths are somehow always more violent and upsetting than anything depicted today.  First there is the lingeing over the details of warmth, beauty and luxury (He wants us to smell the pasta.).  

There’s another transgressive moment, too, where Karen Black puts her bloodied hands into her mouth after putting them through a shattered window. 

The languorous pace is heavy with poetic Fitzgerald crafted words.  The text rewards thought and attention with illuminating life experience. 

Rachel Rachel is Paul Newman’s wife’s movie.  Our version is in 16mm Technicolor (from Films Incorporated).  By the time it arrived I forgot why it was initially interesting, because Fairfield County area provided its location.  People who attended the screening remembered its production and knew members of the cast. 

It introduces the exceptional range of Joanne Woodward, in a production directed by her husband.  His next collaboration with her was only as producer.  It’s They Might Be Giants, a Sherlock Holmes windmill of a movie with a memorable supermarket scene near the end, which is currently missing.  Ms. Woodward plays Watson to George C. Scott’s Holmes.  

It was this production's connection to They Might Be Giants that sold me.  

This movie has a lovely conclusion.  Why further impose upon the hospitality of the buyer? When Ms. Woodward leaves her childhood home she takes along her mother.  The change is gonna do them good.  ..  

The April 18^th, 2015 Candlewood Isle Film Fest featured pizza made from scratch, the 16mm condensed digest of The Spider Woman with Basil Rathbone, Nigel Bruce and Gail Sondergaard  and, for the feature, The Manchurian Candidate, delivered in the form of a one-gigabyte mp4 file.

The modern television screen that rendered the file refreshes so rapidly (60 times a second) that it made the 24 frame film movement look as smooth as a live video broadcast.  Do you remember when movie theaters were mostly projecting darkness, between which our eyes had to carry one image to the next?  This persistence of memory theory has been debunked, but I still think that traditional film projectors display mostly darkness between the flashes of transparencies… Our eyes are just not sensitive enough to read the flickering. 

Frank Sinatra’s two foiled presidential assassination movies are The Manchurian Candidate and Suddenly. 

My impression gleaned from wikipedia research is that he didn’t buy up these movies and suppress them, it’s simply that the movies weren’t that popular and weren’t remembered until 25 years later.   It turns out, that the New York Film Festival returned Manchurian Candidate to the screens in 1988, when I originally saw it. 

To paraphrase my second favorite moment, it is:  They will pay.   I asked for a trained assassin and never imagined they would give me you.  (Ms. Lansbury’s actual concluding line: “… when I take power, they will be pulled down and ground into dirt for what they did to you. And what they did in so contemptuously under-estimating me.”)

And the other great scene is in the pressroom when a shouting match opens between the drunken senator and a defense department head, while the news cameras run (and while Frank is acting as a publicity manager?)  The overlap of TV coverage caught within the larger movie frame seems groundbreaking.   

Laurence Harvey, a man from Lithuania, with a Chinese manservant who looks strangely like

The author, Richard Condon, also wrote Prizzi’s Honor. He’s a great storyteller with a rampant imagination.

I also saw John Frankenheimer’s Seconds and The Island of Brando as Dr. Moreau.  I like his Moreau movie, with Brando’s Eleanor Roosevelt routine… Moreau’s Horrors!  This version from 1996 added dictatorial implants.  All the mutating population needs to do to revolt is to pull them out.  According to L. Ron Hubbard we should do the same. 

I entered the world of Les Liaisons Dangereuse last night through a preview performance of the Palm Beach Dramaworks production.  Elizabeth West Versalie, playwright/lyricist of Convertible and member of the South Florida Theater League, also attended.
What is amazing to me is my total lack of sympathy for this play, which took 3 hours to deliver.  I'm sure my low level irritation arises because the subject matter cuts so close to home regarding my own work, in which audiences are challenged to find anything that concerns them.
Somehow after three hours I am at a loss to find character development in the figures parading about.    Their sincerity or lack of it seems arbitrary.  Somewhere buried in them are feelings, and the lead fellow's drive to not take no for an answer is somehow a show of strength and ingenuity, useless though it may be.  The playwright's waste of eloquent speech to resurrect the novel, giving costumed actors the opportunity to pretend and prey upon lower realms from a godlike precipice, is completely inconsequential.  Perhaps it lays a foundation for the French Revolution, but the main question after seeing what you'd be overthrowing is, why bother?  Ok, there's more to consider....   Perhaps this griping goes to the merit of classical french theater, the only names coming to mind being Voltaire and Moliere, which is vaguely satirical.  I remember being also annoyed by The Miser and The Hypochondriac (is that Tartuffe?).  I suppose I've grown to love the Bernstein Wilbur modern day derivative of Voltaire's Candide.  I may grow to love Christopher Hampton's Play, too.  

The Candlewood Isle Film Fest continued last Saturday night with a holiday dinner party screening of Meet Me in St. Louis,” a 1944 movie that introduced the Blane & Martin song “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.” 

During dinner we projected a 16mm kinescope TV broadcast print of the 6^th installment of “The Judy Garland Show” (1962), which included memorable commercials of odd products of the time (Wondra Flour, Winston Cigarettes, Head & Shoulders Shampoo). 

The show featured June Allyson and Steve Lawrence, as well as sidekick Jerry van Dyck.  We focused our eyes on the screen when Ms. Garland began her solo finale, her “informed” heart throbbing version of a rousing Jeanette McDonald song called “San Francisco.”  Triumphant as the credits ran, she contentedly rolled about the stage ending in a fetal position.  

Then we projected the Blue Strip Technicolor transparencies of Meet Me in St. Louis, a print from Rochester New York, perhaps from the George Eastman House, purchased from The Cure Thrift Shop on East 12^th Street for $5. 

The movie commemorates the transformation of St. Louis’s marshland into fairgrounds for the 1905 World’s Fair. Its episodes cover a year of holidays in the lives of a St. Louis family threatened with a move to New York.  Its screenplay drew from a collection of stories Sally Benson wrote for the New Yorker magazine as a series called 5135 Kensington Street.   Ms. Benson’s varied credits include screenwriting Shadow of a Doubt, Viva Las Vegas and The Singing Nun.

By 1944 Vincent Minelli, had left set designing for Radio City Music Hall and had already directed for MGM the black and white musical “Cabin in the Sky.”  He had a way of creating an intimate family atmosphere in his movies.  Another highlight for me is his Shirley MacLaine bar scene in Some Came Running.  

The Three strip Technicolor printing process used for Meet Me In St. Louis, developed by MIT scientists in 1918, was still precious in the 1940s, so the studio indulged Mr. Minelli’s attention to color detail while allowing him to direct this film.   The color palette is intoxicating.

To photograph in Technicolor, Red Green and Blue filters cover the exposure of three strips of black and white film.  The three films are imbibed into one strip of film, such as the strip we ran through the projector on Saturday. 

The blue strip on our print suggests that the print itself was from the 1940’s when it was necessary to conserve on silver for the war. For some reason this adds to the softness of the high color saturation, giving viewers a blue rather than black base.   

The no-place-like-home warmth of the film becomes satirical against such highlights as the anarchy in the streets bonfire of the Halloween segment,

This is the movie where a bonfire burns brightly in the background as Margaret O’Brien, playing a 5-year-old child, bravely goes forward toward the home of a cat killer and throws flour in his face.  As she runs away the house-dog laps it off the floor.  Throwing furniture into the street fire she yells, “I’m the most horrible.”  Ms. O’Brien demonstrates her range to me in the Secret Garden (1949) where she and another boy engage in a yelling match and I think she wins.  The camera crew must have stood back and let that happen.  She’s a pretty great actor.  . She’s still alive, by the way.  

It was such fun having dinner with the movie that we plan to charge $10 and serve dinner and drinks at all future screenings, which are the third Saturday of the month.   

For The Candlewood Isle Film Fest Newsletter, an essay following the dogma,

“Some people write about that which they know.  We write about what we want to find out about.”

---------------

Last month the Candlewood Isle Film Fest screened "Les Diaboliques," the movie of a script Alfred Hitchcock lost to French director Henri Clouzot, forcing him to make "Psycho" instead. 

"Les Diaboliques" preserves the screen acting of Jeanne Moreau and Vera, Clouzot’s Brazilian wife who some years later passed away from a heart attack… just like in the…

This month we saw Sir Alfred’s “Under Capricorn,” a title descriptive of its 1800 setting; near Sydney, on the then prison island (an island the size of the 48 States) of the British Empire, Australia, below the Tropic of Capricorn.  Yes, Glenn Moore knew … The Tropic of Cancer and Capricorn are on our earth’s 23^rd parallel.

As with all Hitchcock possessives, “Under Capricorn” is collaborative.  His Hollywood power was off the charts but look at the credits:     

Writer, Alma Reville, was his wife since his movie career began in 1926. 

In later decades, the blondness of his starlets distracted, or rather, inspired him, but in the 1940’s he focused on the project assigned.

After his off-the-charts British success (What are the “39 Steps”?) David O. Selznik brought him to the States and exerted over him some control.  

Efforts to control Hitchcock inspired him; his greatest US inspiration: the Motion Picture Production Code.

Collaboration highlights through the 1940’s include:  

-- with Joseph Cotton and Theresa White in "Shadow of a Doubt" (1943), featuring "Our Town" ambiance purchased from Thornton Wilder. 

-- with composer Miklos Rosa, painter Salvador Dali and Ingrid Bergman in "Spellbound,"

-- again with Ms. Bergman, Cary Grant and Claude Reins in "Notorious,"

-- and with Cary Grant and again Joan Fontaine (of Rebecca) in "Suspicion."

The efforts of Ingrid Bergman and Joseph Cotton combined (with help from Mr. Cotton’s friend Michael Wilding) in “Under Capricorn,” made in England in 1949 during Hitchock’s Transatlantic Studio movies, preceded by “Rope,” the movie that implemented the dogma of real-time single shot continuous camera continuity.

Did the box office for “Rope” (with script credit including Arthur Laurent, inspired by the case of Leopold and Loeb) suffer from a simplified perception of the relationship between its two murderers?

Did "Under Capricorn" suffer from its Ingrid-Bergman-has-a-baby-with-Roberto-Rosselini synchronicity?

Both Technicolor films disappeared for a time after their release.  Today, for us to see “Under Capricorn,” we watched a Korean DVD.

Hitchcock did not again go Technicolor until "Dial M for Murder" which made everything all right again and opened the gate for Hitchcock's traipse down the stony end of blondness.

Like “Rope,” “Under Capricorn” uses continuous shooting, but not “real time.”  Also here Hitchcock permits himself cutting between cameras when needed. 

This means more amazing tracking shots.  Hitchcock’s single-shot tracking journeys date back to his focus on the No-One-Can-Drum-Like-the-Drummer-Man drummer in his British film, “Young and Innocent” and can be dated forward to Brian DePalma’s focus on the bucket above the prom stage in “Carrie.”

“Under Capricorn” writing credits include John Colton, the “Shanghai Gesture” Playwright, Jessica Tandy’s husband, Hume Cronyn, and Warsaw Concerto Composer Richard Addinsell.

There are love lessons and life enhancements obtainable from directing one's attention to the two hours of "Under Capricorn" screen time.  See it when you can.  Peter