SNAPSHOT: Silhouette

Mister Wizard

One Sunday night when I was twelve my uncle showed me a card trick that changed my life.

Fanning the deck out on the kitchen table he instructed me to pick out one card and turn it face up so that everyone in the room could see it. To this day I still remember that card: The 5 of Clubs.

Then my uncle did something completely unexpected. He picked up the telephone and dialed a number and asked to speak to Mr. Wizard. After a moment he handed me the the phone.

"Ask the Wizard what card you picked," Uncle Tony instructed.

If I'd been a little older at the time and already cynical, I would have no doubt suspected that my uncle---a notorious funster and practical joker---had prepared a suitably elaborate stunt of which I was to serve as the butt-end, and so thinking I would have naturally adopted a bored and disinterested tone of voice that so that later I could claim I'd never really been 'taken in'. But in those days kids of twelve were still young enough to be credelous and naive and open to magic, and I can even now recall a tingle of anticipation as I took up the phone and innocently inquired,

"What card did I pick, Mr. Wizard?"

A lugubrious voice answered, "5 of Clubs," then disconnected.

I was flabbergasted. How could such a thing be possible?

"Once you know how a trick is done," my uncle cautioned me, "it's magic is all gone."

But after much pleading and cajoling and outright begging on my part, my uncle finally agreed that if I came to his house the following Thursday night he'd reveal Mr. Wizard's secret to me. While I waited impatiently for Thursday to roll around, I ran the trick over and over in my head, and even before my uncle's revelation I pretty much figured out how it was worked: it was based on a simple word code, and those so inclined can look it up in a dozen magic books. After a half-hour's practice with my uncle I was confident enough to go out and perform the trick for my friends, who were all equally as astounded as I was. And in this way I was set off on a mission that would obsess me all that summer.

I went down to the Grand Book Center where they sold used paperbacks for ten or fifteen cents and bought up every book on card magic I could find. Then I raided the shelves of the public library and came home with another armful. I taught myself dozens of basic mathematical formula tricks, but not content with these, I spent hours working in front of the bathroom mirror until I could (with tolerable proficiency) palm a card, create a break in the deck, perform a double and triple lift, shuffle without and shuffling and deal off the bottom of the pack. Contrary to my uncle's warning, the more I learned the more I wanted to learn, the more magical it all seemed. I had no interest in card games at all, but was never without a deck of cards. I read biographies of Houdini, Dunninger, and Carter the Great. Before long I had amassed a small personal library that spilled over onto the floor of the room I had the misfortune of sharing with my older brother.

"How many of those stupid books do you need?" Jack sneered.

One trick I would have loved to pull off would have been to make my brother disappear---permanently. But that wasn't in any of the books I read. So instead I kept my focus on magic and eventually I put together a small repertoire of tricks with which I astounded (maybe bored) anyone I could corral for ten minutes at a time. With practice, I became bolder.

It happened that there was a girl in our neighborhood named Roseanne Kessler, a cherubic-faced early-developer who seemed to fill out her blouses long before any of the other girls did. Just being in her presence caused me to feel thick and clumsy and tight inside. As I was completely lacking in all social and romantic skills, I decided to woo her with my most elaborate and (so I thought) astounding effect.

"Pick a card," I instructed her, "and turn it face up." The King of Diamonds.

Then I had her insert the card back in the deck, shuffle and re-shuffle to her heart's content, then fan the cards out on the stoop again only to find her her card had mysteriously gone missing from the pack.

Then the Coup-de-Grace: from behind my back I produced a hardboiled egg and instructed her to roll it back and forth on the stoop. When the shell fell away the words "King of Diamonds" were clear and legible (in black ink) on the surface of the egg.

It had taken several hours to set up the trick, and for my thanks I received a blank stare, followed by the only two words Roseanne Kessler ever spoke to me: "You're weird."

But notwithstanding Roseanne and my brother, my magical summer continued apace. Toward the beginning of September a movie house in Manhattan began showing a revival of "Houdini" starring Tony Curtis, Every day for a week I took the subway from Brooklyn and sat each time through two showings. Never had I been so mesmerized by a movie in my life. By the end, when Houdini's Upside Down Water Torture Tank trick goes horribly awry and he expires onstage after promising his wife Bess that, "If there's a way...I'll be back," I was awash in tears. I felt the movie was speaking directly to me. And there was not the slightest doubt in my mind that I would someday join the ranks of the legendary stage magicians.

Of course, I never did. In fact, by the following summer I had almost completely lost all interest in my tricks. I'm not sure I can say exactly why. Except that the next year I was thirteen, and the year after that fourteen, and as usually happens with boys entering into adolescence, my attention wandered to other things. I lost my focus and eventually magic drifted out of my life for good.

Nowadays my fingers are thick, my timing is shot, and I wouldn't dare to try even the simplest effect. So it goes: we have it, and we throw it away.

And yet, in later years, on the most boring, rotten, paper-thin days of my life, I might riffle through a deck of cards just to be doing something, and if I should happen to light upon the 5 of Clubs I get a sudden surge of joy and enthusiasm. I may not know what to do with it anymore, but I know exactly what it is. Childhood summers are like that, they best ones anyway. You carry them around with you all your life, even if you only stumble on them in the dark once every few years or so.

Thank you, Mr. Wizard. Thank you, Uncle Tony.

SNAPSHOT: Leaf After Rain

In Their Own Words:

"For Shaftesbury, Burke, Kant, Schiller, and their followers,
{B}eauty was the path back to the world that they were losing in losing the Christian God -- the world of meaning, order, and transcendence, which we must be constantly emulating in this world if our lives are to be truly human and truly meaningful."
---Roger Scruton

STORY: The Lives of the Dead (500 word Challange)

The 500 word challange is just that: create a complete short story in 500 words; this is not exactly my specialty, but I've given it a shot. How well or poorly I've done the reader can decide.


The Lives of the Dead

I go down to the place where I know she’ll be waiting, on the street where Turtle Park used to stand before they tore it up. I find her pacing the small edge of sidewalk as if the trees and the grass and the swings have remained intact all these years.

“Have you seen my babies?” she asks.
“Not yet,” I tell her.
“They were supposed to be home two hours ago.”
“I’m sure they’re fine,” I lie. “Anyway, the police are looking for them now.”
She nods and begins pacing the sidewalk again. After a while she turns back to me and speaks.

“Have you seen my babies?”

The first time this conversation occurred I was a boy and had no idea what to make of it. I told only my grandfather, Vincenzo Tresca; he told me I had a gift he called “the sight”. Now many years have passed and I return to this place over and over and the words are always the same:

“Have you seen my babies?”
“Not yet.”

This is what it means to be dead:

Imagine your life as a giant reel of film unspooling for many thousands of feet. Now imagine a three minute segment clipped from somewhere in the middle of that reel and looped so that it plays over and over again long after the rest of the film has disintegrated. This is all that was left of a young mother: the dread and anxiety of hopeless waiting.

As a teenager, I read the particulars: her two little girls never made it home from the park alive. After the funerals, the young mother, broken by her grief, swallowed a nearly full bottle of Seconal. In all these years, my only wish is to see her at peace.

“Have you seen my babies?”
“Listen,” I tell her. “I don’t have much time. Your daughters are gone. They are at peace. There is nothing more you can do for them now.”
“They were supposed to be home two hours ago.”
“They aren’t coming home. Their home is no longer in this world. Neither is yours. You must let go.”
“Have you seen my babies?” she asks.
I keep at it, knowing it will never do any good. She hears me, she must understand, but nothing will ever change.
“They were supposed to be home two hours ago.”
It’s almost light now, I give it my last try:
“I never married,” I tell her. “I have no children. I have left no one behind.”
“Have you seen my babies?”
“For over eighty years, since I was a boy, I have loved no one but you. Now it’s my time to rest as well. Only you bind me here. I want to rest only with you.”
“They were supposed to be home two hours ago.”
“Please”---
This is what it means to be dead. This is all I have left.

I go down to the place where I know she’ll be waiting…

Jane Saw it Coming

Though she could have no way of knowing it, Jane Austen offered, in Pride and Prejudice, a pungent criticism of modern middle-class American life.

Reading the novel today, one is struck by how modern and familiar the character of Lydia, youngest of the Bennett sisters, seems. We know this girl. She lives in our neighborhood, down our street, even---God help us!---in our own home!

She is the American teenager in the year 2010. Or any other recent year.

Put another way, Lydia is almost an amalgam of the worst aspects of modern-day American adolesence---female variety. (The boys are just as bad, but they are another story).

It is easy to see what makes Lydia so familiar to us today. There is her boldness and flirtatiousness, her obession with boys and trivial gossip, her bursting-out sexuality. Of course she is the perfect product of an unconstrained consumer culture ("I bought my bonnet...only for the fun of having another bandbox"). And there is her general ignorance and, above all, the utter vacuousness of her personality. For all these reasons, Lydia seems the one character who would feel most at home in modern day America. She has friends here. If you could somehow propel her forward in time two-hundred years to any middle-class suburb in America, I'm sure that, allowing for some adjustment to modern technology (cell phones, Facebook), she would fit in very nicely with her mall-hopping sisters of the 21st Century.

Now anyone who has read Pride and Prejudice knows that Elizabeth Bennett, the novel's heroine (and Austen stand-in) almost violently disapproves (disapprobates?) of her youngest sister. Attempting to convince her father to intervene and forbid Lydia from accepting a friend's invitation to follow the regiment to Brighton, Elizabeth describes her erstwhile sibling as "a flirt in the worst and meanest degree of flirtation, without any attraction beyond youth and a tolerable person", and further laments the 'ignorance and empitiness of her mind"

As it happens, of course, Elizabeth is proven right with regard to her errant sister. Lydia elopes with the scoundrel Wickham. Retruning home with her new husband, Lydia creuelly gloats to her eldest sister Jane that she has usurped her rightful place as the first sister to marry---ignorant, of course, of the fact that Wickham had to be bribed into marrying her and that only through the efforts (and financial help) of Darcy is she saved from the tragic fate of a 'fallen' woman.

On second thought, I don't know if 'tragic' is the appropriate term here. I am not sure that anything that happens to Lydia can be considered 'tragic' except in the most general sense of the word. Her life may indeed turn out to be lousy, but in literature 'tragedy' requires a certain degree of self-awareness, and Lydia is certainly one of the stupidest characters in all of fiction. She lacks the depth of understanding and feeling needed to experiece real tragedy.

One thing we can conclude from all of this is that Jane Austen surely did not like silly, frivolous women. What is interestng to consider here is that Austen is often proclaimed to have been 'ahead' of her time', meaning by this that she was one of 'us' and not one of 'them'---'them' being the closed-minded, unliberated British gentry of the 18th Century. But somehow, I don't think that our modern world and lifestyle would have suited Jane Austen at all.

In Their Own Words:

"It is not upon you alone the dark patches fall,
The dark threw patches down upon me also;
The best I had done seem’d to me blank and suspicious;
My great thoughts, as I supposed them, were they not in reality meagre? would not people laugh at me?"

Walt Whitman, "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry".

SNAPSHOT: Directionless

Summer Everlasting

When I was a boy Summer offically began on the Last Day of School---no matter what the calendar said.

It wasn't a real school day, because you didn't really have to go. Maybe half the class would show up. Sister would ask us about our summer plans, there would be treats---cupcakes, candy leftover from the weekly candy sale, baseball cards for the boys---before we were dismissed with the admonition to stay out of trouble and to pick up a book once in a while on a rainy day.

Though I was a poor student and no favorite of the nuns, I was always among those who stayed behind to straighten up so the room would be neat and in order when September rolled around again. With the windows open wide and a sweet summer breeze undulating through the room, life was transformed. The torments of the late school year were completely forgotten. It was the first day of summer. The very first.

And I think now the reason I stood behind was to extend for as long as possible that moment of absolute beginning. Maybe some part of me already understood that once the sands begin to run through the hourglass it’s only a matter of time before they run out completely. I wanted it to be the first moment of summer as long as possible. Then I’d bound down the rickety stairway, home to lunch and my friends, the freedom of time and Brooklyn completely our own.

What did we do for three long months? Once Mikey smuggled his mother’s cigarettes out of the house and we smoked in the park until we turned green and sick to our stomachs. We were maybe nine then. Mostly we played tag in the bankyard, punchball in the street, went to the movies, explored new neighborhoods, hung out on rooftops, ate hot dogs with mustard and onions from the street vendor and salty pretzels from the German bakery, told outrageous lies, and wondered what it would feel like when we were all grown up.

And because it was a working class city neighborhood and no one had a swimming pool, we’d open the fire hydrant on 90 degree days and dance madly in the streets under a hundred pounds of ice cold water pressure until the cops came and shut it off.

But for all the fun I had with my friends I mostly liked to be alone. I spent hours wandering the stacks of used paperbacks, comics, and monster magazines at the Grand Book Center. Or I’d go down to the pier with my copy of Tales of Mystery and Imagination by Edgar Allan Poe, and read until the weight of words forced my eyes shut and I feel asleep in the afternoon sun.

“Life passes by like a dream,” my father used to say.

I didn’t believe him then. But always when I awoke the air was crisp and the shadows were long and it was time for school to begin again.

Silents, Please

I love silent movies. Maybe you do too. Try telling that to someone.

Looking through Intolerance and some Harold Lloyd comedies the other night, it occurred to me how difficult it is to explain to almost anyone---even those who consider themselves 'knowledgeable' film buffs---the appeal (or even the sanity!) of watching silent movies.

To me, silent film represents a lost art form, perhaps even a lost language, and the greatest silent movies tell their stories with as much, and often more, power and emotion and meaning as the most up-to-date modern films.

Try explaining this, and you're likely to get a blank stare. Or a laugh. Some may even question your sanity.

Only the most devoted and *truly* knowledgeable films buffs will understand.

The reason for this, I believe, has to do with deeply ingrained beliefs and attitudes that we as Americans hold.

Which is to say, our belief in 'progress'.

That, as technology advances, the old becomes ipso facto 'obsolete' and 'useless'. What was achieved under the old technology is now fit only for the trash can.

The reasoning goes something like this: "Movie companies produced silent features only because they had no way to synchronize sound. Once they had the technology to synchronize sound with picture, then silent films became obsolete and sound features became the standard." End of story.

So, in this view, watching a silent movie makes as much sense as filling an old rain barrel with water, poking some holes in the lid, hanging it upside down from the ceiling, and trying to take a shower that way.

The same argument has been applied to color vs. black & white. Once color became affordable and feasible for all films, it became the standard. Old films *would* have been made in color if he studios could have afforded it, so no reason not to colorize them now.

All of which is true to an extent. But what this view doesn't take into account is that, within the confines and admitted limitations of silent cinema, a number of true artist could have produced a number of true masterpieces---masterpieces that hold up today as artistic creations, and indeed far surpass most of the crap that fills the modern cineplex today.

A true artist will work within the limitations of whatever medium he or she chooses. Not only that, but an artist will even turn those limitations to her advantage, creating works of art that can only exist *within* those limitations.

And of all these masterpieces, the aforementioned Intolerance stands as perhaps the greatest artistic achievement of the silent era, as well as one of the greatest American works of all time.

And certain forms of physical comedy---Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd, Turpin, etc.---actually play better in silent cinema than sound.

In short, what our all-pervasive faith in 'progress' will not allow us to do is to enjoy many great and entertaining films that happened to be produced under now 'obsolete technology.

Too bad for us.

In Their Own Words:

"I have been taking stock of my fifty years since I left Witchita. How I have existed fills me with horror, for I have failed at everything---spelling, arithmetic, writing, swimming, tennis, golf, dancing, singing, acting, wife, mistress, whore, friend, even cooking. And I do not excuse myself with the usual escape of not trying. I tried, with all my heart."

---Louise Brooks (actress)