Author Archive
April 3, 2013 by Jerry Kurtz
Tirade Against Front-Enders
Tirade Against Front-Enders Including Certain Friends of Mine To see the background for this third tirade, go to “About Tirades.” What you Front-Enders are missing: the last 4 minutes of Barry White’s “Your Sweetness Is My Weakness.” (Are you a Front-Ender? — someone that listens to 25 seconds of a song before skipping to the next? — or even 10 seconds? If so, this diatribe is directed at you.) Yes, sometimes the Front-End is building a foundation for what can happen if you — yes, you out there, the listener — are willing to open yourself. Open to a transforming experience. A transforming experience that you Front-Enders miss out on. Sad? Okay, take Buena Vista Social Club’s “Pueblo Nuevo” — you miss out on the overwhelming charms that can blow you away with their beauty, its climbing trumpet crescendo at 4 or 5 minutes in.
February 11, 2013 by Jerry Kurtz
The Spy Niki Club
In fourth grade I organized the “Spy Niki Club.” The most reliable members were my friends but it had the advantage of other alliances against a common enemy, that it was possible for non-friends to join and discover they had less reason for mutual hostility than had been believed. Dodger fans predominated over Giant fans. A couple of Yankee fans — considered a foreign culture — were tolerated. All members were male, a bias no one thought of. Girls didn’t spy on boys, anyway. Well, how would anyone know? The duties of Club members were to move around the concrete schoolyard during lunch recess, observe Niki and report to other members about her whereabouts and activities. We’d meet excitedly at the cornerstone — it was a granite block that said “1928” — and confer, I’d talk into my hand like highway police into a microphone on television (or Sky King!): “Goldman to Taqi, Goldman to Navarro, over.” “Come in, Goldman.” “We read you. Over.”
February 10, 2013 by Jerry Kurtz
Love Highway
I was following down the highway after my dream-love at ninety-five miles an hour. She and I were the two fastest cars on the road. I was at the wheel of an air-conditioned 1971 Ford Galaxie
December 15, 2012 by Jerry Kurtz
Birds
A cat peers through the banister-barred window and with the deadsureness that can’t afford a mistake turns to check the other direction. Bessie replaces a blue ceramic sugar bowl on the table and begins to examine another item. Though the owner has tired of watching her Bessie has been trained to touch with care, with respect, even when she has contempt for the work itself. She is courteous but admires nothing. In the Museum of Modern Art many of these items would have impressed her but Mexico is not the handicraft Meccashe was led to expect. She leaves, nodding to the proprietor, guiding her cloth shoulder-purse so that it doesn’t come in contact with the door. It is the last of the artisan-retail stores in town. It is her last day in Mexico. Twenty yards in front of her something vaguely unpleasant is dumped from an upper window. Bessie is something of/rather an artist. She does not actually sketch any more because her mother is an artist too and their relationship is tense as it is. Besides, everybody wants to be a great artist and it is hopeless to try. She does, however, retain strong likes and dislikes about the
December 15, 2012 by Jerry Kurtz
Harsh Talk re: Fate; Apology
Everything that happens is a coincidence and all the purveyors of cause and logical sequence are illusion-mongers. The event is primary; the sooner we get hold of this wisdom the richer will be the succession of instants that makes up our lives. Nothing that happens is probable. Say that analysis shows you have 1 chance of running into your mother downtown and 999 chances of running into “nobody.” Yet each of those 999 chances is distinct. In one case my (your) attention is caught by an Indian craft shop, which I enter, seeing a boy in a purple suit smoking a cigar. In another I get mental pictures of going swimming last year in North Carolina. The point is, meeting my mother downtown is — objectively — no more startling than meeting no one I know and thinking about swimming in North Carolina; they are equally improbable. Yet it is only in the mother-meeting — no more special than the others, no less unspecial — that our minds go to town and start to question the supposed plodding dullness of everyday life.
December 15, 2012 by Jerry Kurtz
No Clock in the Forest
The more indifferent we are to received (i.e., established) ideas the better we can see what’s happening.* When was America discovered? When was Tricia Nixon’s wedding? What is the correct chronology for the following events: the killings at Kent State University, the freeing of Huey P. Newton, the moon reaches its 73rd consecutive fullness (excluding times before 1900) without an eclipse in San Francisco, the Tupamaros capture Dan A. Mitrione in Montevideo, Jonathan Jackson tries to kidnap Judge Harold Haley and others, the earth is “created” from condensing clouds of gases/matter and what-have-you? Who won the World Series in 1962 and in which game? Yet nature is made better by no mean But nature makes that mean; so, over that art Which you say adds to nature, is an art That nature makes. You see, sweet maid, we marry A gentler scion to the wildest stock, And make conceive a bark of baser kind By bud of nobler race: this 1s an art Which does mend nature, change it rather, but The art itself is nature. — Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale
December 12, 2012 by Jerry Kurtz