"John Lennon died at age 40, 40 years ago today. I did this blog post 12 years ago, linking to both of my parents' memories..."

"... of being in the same city where he died on December 8, 1980. Both of their posts mention that they named me John when I was born 99 days later. Now I'm almost 40 and I'm living on the Upper West Side, not far from where it happened on West 72nd Street. I've walked by there many times, always thinking about it, never quite believing it really happened here." 

Writes my son John (on his blog). Here's his old post, written in 2008, which links to his father's post, written in 2005, and to my post, also written in 2005. 

I wrote: 

On the day I heard that John had died, I was a law student at NYU. I remember dragging myself in to the law review office and expecting everyone there to be crying and talking about it, but no one was saying anything at all. I never felt so alienated from my fellow law students as I did on that day. I was insecure enough to feel that I was being childish to be so caught up in the story of the death of a celebrity long past his prime. I didn't even take the train uptown to go stand in the crowd that I knew had gathered outside the Dakota. What did I do? I can't remember. I probably buried myself in work on a law review article.... 

How I regret not going uptown to be among the people who openly mourned John Lennon! How foolish I was to think I was foolish to care and to put my effort into blending in with the law review editors who, I imagined, were behaving in a way I needed to learn!

Looking back at that reaction, I realize I was influenced by the shame I'd felt in 1977 when I showed my feelings about the death of Elvis Presley. Did I ever blog about that? It's something I've thought about lately, as I've reflected on my life. It turns out I blogged about that in 2005 — August 2005:

"The meditative 'Because' has John, Paul, and George singing every line together. John said he was listening to his wife, Yoko Ono, playing Beethoven's 'Moonlight' Sonata..."

"... asked her to play the chords backwards, and then wrote 'Because' around that. The actual chords to 'Because' aren't the same as the Moonlight Sonata's first movement played backwards or forwards, but you can still feel how the spirit of Beethoven touched Lennon."

So writes my son John in a blog post yesterday about "Abbey Road," which came out 50 years ago yesterday. I had just started college, and I remember being surrounded by people who were all so excited about the new Beatles album. I remember listening to the album for the first time with the person who would turn out to be [my son] John's father and it was specifically the song "Because" that we both especially loved the first time we heard it. I even remember the line that seemed most sublime: "Because the world is round/It turns me on."

John writes:

"Come Together" starts the album on a dark note, with the band sounding united as they play a primal, minimalistic hook that fuses guitars, bass, and drums; every instrument feels essential, especially Ringo's repeated fill. Eerily, John starts each repetition of the hook by saying: "Shoot me!"

I don't know when I started, but ever since maybe the 3rd playing of the record, I put the second side on first. To me, the album begins with "Here Comes the Sun." Very bright. Not dark!

ADDED: I added the bracketed "[my son]" because there are 2 Johns mentioned here and one could imagine not just that there's no heaven but that I got mixed up into some time travel and listened to "Abbey Road" with John Lennon's father. I don't want you to be confused!

What did Noel Neill — the Lois Lane of the 1950s — mean to you?

The actress has died at the age of 95, and I hadn't noticed, but I got a text from RLC saying: "I assume you're going to blog about Noel Neill!!" I didn't even remember the name, and I looked it up and saw the obituary, and I wondered why my ex-husband had that assumption about me. Or was it just that he liked her?

Then I was looking at old pictures of Neill and I saw one that took me back to a childhood memory that perhaps, long ago, I conveyed to RLC. Here's the picture:



"Adventures of Superman" was on TV from 1952 — when I was 1 — to 1958 — when I was 7. That show made some kind of impression on my undefended, very young mind. When I thought about becoming an adult — turning into a woman — I pictured Noel Neill. Dressed like that, hair like that, demeanor like that.  I had my own particular look and ways about me as a girl, but I believed a finished condition, adulthood, stood at the end of childhood. My formative period — girlhood — would end, and I would, of necessity, at the age of 21, become an adult woman, and that woman I saw in my head for years and years, was — as I got closer to actual adulthood I recognized her — NOEL NEILL!!

Goodbye to Rocky Rococo.

"The man who played Rocky Rococo, the beloved character behind the namesake Madison, WI-based pie chain with a cult following, died Thursday."

RIP, James Martin Pedersen.

The link goes to my son John's Facebook page, where he says: "When I was a kid, I always loved to go there with my dad, Richard L Cohen."

Which I think says something about what I thought of that pizza. I moved to Madison in from New York in 1984. Rocky Rococo pizza was let's just say incomprehensible compared to New York pizza. As for Rocky Rococo, he always made me think of Leon Redbone....



I love Leon Redbone....

With his wide-brim hats and big sunglasses, Redbone was a man of mystery from the start. He rose to fame in the mid-Seventies after Bob Dylan spotted him at a folk festival and told Rolling Stone how curious Redbone was. "Leon interests me," Dylan said in 1974. "I've heard he's anywhere from 25 to 60, I've been [a foot and a half from him] and I can't tell, but you gotta see him. He does old Jimmie Rodgers, then turns around and does a Robert Johnson."

Leon was at the extreme bottom end of Dylan's 1974 estimation. Today, he's 66.

The man who played Rocky Rococo was 68.

“On Valentine’s Day, he’d go to all (11) of our stores in La Crosse and Madison and entertain everybody at each place by handing out breadsticks and singing out a kind of rap poem that he’d change all the time,” [co-owner Roger] Brown said. “He’d get great applause at every place he visited. People would count on him coming every year.”

And: "He was a comedian with Chicago’s Second City and worked with John Belushi and Bill Murray for two years on stage before he moved to Madison."

Trouble in "Serial" land?

The prodigious podcast is suddenly switching to every other week — apparently so they can absorb all the criticism, do more research, procure more interviews, and tweak the script in the story of Bowe Bergdahl:

“There are more paths we need to go down,” [said executive producer Julie Snyder.] “Since we started broadcasting the show, we have gotten more people willing to talk, and because of that, it has opened up more avenues of reporting.” She declined to comment on whom those interviews were with, or what additional reporting the show needed to pursue. “We have narrative developments,” she said. “I hesitate on calling them news developments.”

There's also the fact that the show is not doing as well as the last season, the one about an imprisoned man and a murder we'd never heard of. Shifting to Bergdahl is telling us about somebody we already knew and had already, perhaps, processed into a kind of oblivion. Did we really want to pull him back into our attention and, week by week, hour by hour, take some differing complicated perspectives on him?

The characters in both seasons are mysterious men. We can wonder who is this guy? But in season 1, there was the solidity of knowing a young woman really was murdered and a young man really was suffering the punishment, and the mystery was whether he's the murderer. In season 2, we know the external reality of what the man did. That part is solid. The mystery lies in why he did it and what it meant to him. He's not been punished yet (though we might decide his suffering in captivity was punishment enough, so let's leave him alone). It lies in the future, what the legal process will give him. His mental state will play some part in that determination. But we'll see that unfold in the news as his trial proceeds.

Why would we want the alternative viewings of the mind of Bergdahl as managed and manipulated by the "Serial" crowd? I think the answer should be: Because there's a fascinating, delicate art to the the "Serial" presentation. But when art is about real-life facts subject to dispute, especially about current events, there's a lot of static between you and the artist. It can make you want to turn the dial to another channel.

ADDED: Saying that about art made me think about this, a quote from David Bowie that I'd read earlier this morning on Facebook. You can see that I commented over there, linking to the comments section of an old post of mine in which my ex-husband quoted Oscar Wilde: "Views are held by those who are not artists." That old post, by the way, links to 2 other posts, one of which quotes me quoting myself in my own comments section — recursive enough for you? — saying something about Bob Dylan that caused an uproar back in 2005: "To be a great artist is inherently right wing...." Lots of my current husband in the comments there, 4 years before I met him, talking about Bob Dylan, saying things like: "I thought Ann's quote was very smart - nearly brilliant" and "Seriously, with her aversion to politics and her ability to tweak the self-satisfaction and dogmatism of diverse groups, don't you agree that AA just might be the '66 Dylan of this new blogging medium, albeit sober? She is clearly an inspired artist hitting her stride."

"My dad, Richard L Cohen, on December 8, 1980: 'We were living in an NYU-owned studio apartment...'"

"'... on the fifteenth floor of Washington Square Village on Bleecker Street. I was awaiting the publication of my first book and writing the second one; Ann was in her last year of law school and pregnant with our first child, who, three months later, we decided to name John. The clock radio woke us, and the first sound that came over it was an announcer’s voice: "We’ll have more about the murder of John Lennon after this."...'"

John remembers.

"Are you comfortable right there, right there?"

I'm quoting a Justin Timberlake song...

Shake - like you know you got nothing to lose
Make it move - girl, you know what we came to do...

...  because it's the first thing that came up when I googled "are you comfortable," which I did because we were talking about the hateful graffiti that appeared in Madison, Wisconson over the weekend. Swastikas and the words "fuck Jews" written across the street from the residence of a man who is the president of the Jewish Federation of Madison. This man, Jim Stein, said, strangely, "This is anti-Semitic to the extent people feel comfortable equating Jewish people or the Jewish religion with sexual terms and sexual parts of people’s bodies."

In the comments Richard Lawrence Cohen (my first husband) said:

In the climate of today's American intelligentsia, he thinks he has to *justify* calling the most blatant kind of Jew-hating (I prefer that term to "anti-Semitism") what it is. And he only partially, qualifiedly, calls it that, giving his enemy a chance to weasel out. ("To the extent" -- as if it's something else to some other extent. What bullshit!) And he can only justify his standing up for himself by analogizing the attack vaguely to sexual harassment. He tries to make his self-defense palatable to the educated community by enlisting feminist language ("feel comfortable"). If only the vandals hadn't used the word "fuck"! Otherwise, how dare he complain?

Is that feminist language? Of course, I immediately thought about the British journalist who asked Scott Walker "Are you comfortable with the idea of evolution?" Comfortable! After thinking about that for a few days, I decided that the correct answer to that question must be: No! The question whether the theory of evolution is accurate is entirely different from the question whether we should be comfortable with it. If you understand it, it should make you uncomfortable. Why are we here — we... and not some kinder, gentler people who were murdered and whose genes were superseded by the genes of marauding rapists?

What's up with this "comfortable" locution? Who talks like that and why? 

The original meaning of "comfort" is strengthen. You see the root "fort" which means strong. When did it turn into something so much more cushiony?

For what it's worth: In the King James translation of the New Testament, Jesus spoke of the Holy Spirit as "The Comforter":

And I will pray the Father, and he shall give you another Comforter, that he may abide with you for ever.... I will not leave you comfortless: I will come to you.... But the Comforter, which is the Holy Ghost, whom the Father will send in my name, he shall teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance, whatsoever I have said unto you.

About that conversation about song lines that we like (and why do we like what we like when we like a song line?).

Blogged 2 days ago, here. One of the participants in the conversation — my ex-husband RLC — sends his list of lyrics:

Everything dies baby that's a fact
But maybe everything that dies someday comes back.
Put your makeup on, fix your hair up pretty
And meet me tonight in Atlantic City.

Uh oh! This list begins tellingly. It was only last month that I was saying: "I can't stand Bruce Springsteen, and much as I dislike the Weekly Standard's bellyaching, it's not as bad as listening to Bruce straining histrionically."

Back to Richard's list:

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.

"I almost feel sorry for the people in that black-and-white 1951 video who needed to sit through all that..."

"... instead of being able to live in the present, when you can go through a bunch of different versions on your computer and choose to listen to your favorite one."

The Drowned World.

That's "The bridge shadow," posted yesterday, turned upside down, as recommended, in the comments, by The Crack Emcee.

"The Drowned World" floated into my head as a good title for this picture, and I had to look it up to remember what it was.

The Drowned World is a 1962 science fiction novel by J. G. Ballard. In contrast to much post-apocalyptic fiction, the novel features a central character who, rather than being disturbed by the end of the old world, is enraptured by the chaotic reality that has come to replace it....

[A] natural catastrophe causes the real world to transform itself into a dream landscape, causing the central characters to regress mentally.

Just as psychoanalysis reconstructs the original traumatic situation in order to release the repressed material, so we are now being plunged back into the archaeopsychic past, uncovering the ancient taboos and drives that have been dormant for epochs… Each one of us is as old as the entire biological kingdom, and our bloodstreams are tributaries of the great sea of its total memory.

The Drowned World, J.G. Ballard... p. 41.

I'd like to read that. Perhaps there's an insight into how we might adapt to the future of rising sea levels. Maybe I have that book in the house, in amongst the old SF paperbacks that my first husband left behind when he moved out:



I was reading this New Yorker article about the book genre of books about books, where the author undertakes some reading project, like "The Shelf: From LEQ to LES: Adventures in Extreme Reading," where writer reads through a set novels that just happened to be shelved together because of the authors' names and alphabetical order.  Also: "The Know-It-All: One Man’s Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World" (2004), "Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages" (2008),  and "The Whole Five Feet: What the Great Books Taught Me About Life, Death, and Pretty Much Everthing Else" (2010).

I got the idea of reading all the sci-fi books in that box. They're from an era in the past. They are the selections of my ex-husband, and he left them in the house. Who knows what all I could bullshit about reading all that and riffing however the mood strikes me?

.... plunged back into the archaeopsychic past, uncovering the ancient taboos and drives that have been dormant for epochs… Each one of us is as old as the entire biological kingdom, and our bloodstreams are tributaries of the great sea of its total memory....

"I offer you this missive..."

"... not only because it links to a tempting NYT article on kindergarten classroom decor... but because the article — nay, the very circumstances themselves! — allude, perhaps unconsciously, to the title — and by no means not the substance! — of a pardonably obscure, and deliberately hilarious, Edgar Allan Poe satire on permissiveness."

... writes my ex-husband RLC, linking to "Rethinking the Colorful Kindergarten Classroom" and to Edgar Allan Poe's "The System of Dr. Tarr and Prof. Fether."

An Uneasy New York Times Juxtaposition.

Click to enlarge and fully enjoy:



Here's the actual article, "An Uneasy Inheritance of India’s Political Dynasty," published in The NYT on April 30. Thanks to RLC for noticing that and sending me the screen shot.

"You can wish me a 'Happy Poop Day.'"

Says Meade 5 minutes after I ask him if it's okay if I blog him a happy birthday.

Context: Meade will be celebrating his 60th birthday by participating in the volunteer spring clean-up at a Dane County dog park (where he frequently takes our neighbors' Labrador Retriever, up after whom he always picks).

How are you celebrating this next blessed day of human existence?

Does your celebration include poop? Poop beyond your own personal bodily production? Poop beyond your own family members, including your own pets? Poop beyond the pets of your neighbors that you've undertaken to squire around the county.

Whether it's your birthday or not — and if it's your birthday, whether you're hitting a big landmark like 60 or not — please take a moment to notice the good and — to increase the good and to magnify your own goodness — to take away some of the bad, even the bad that plopped from somebody else's dog that was not even the somebody else's dog that you took to the park.

And by dog, I mean real dogs and metaphorical dogs, on this beautiful last Saturday in March.

A toast to the formidable Meade:



My old man.

"The liberal Internet has been in a righteously indignant tizzy (my favorite kind) today over a new column from Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen..."

"... (there’s even a hashtag, #FireRichardCohen, for ease of expression). Cohen has long been derided for lame op-ed writing and general 'unreconstructed,' 'power-worshiping' bigotry. But many readers and critics, including my Slate colleague Matthew Yglesias, apparently found today’s piece — a familiar rehearsal of the resistance Chris Christie, a relative moderate, might encounter during a GOP presidential campaign in more socially conservative contests like Iowa and South Carolina — to be the final, actionable offense."

Good lord! Liberals got themselves into a vortex.

I just wanted to say — as I've said before...

That's WaPo columnist Richard Cohen, or as we call him around here: the never-slept-with-Althouse Richard Cohen.

UPDATE: I wrote another post on this topic, here.

"To Be or Not to Be."

RLC emails to say that the great old Jack Benny/Carole Lombard movie (directed by Ernst Lubitsch) — which we loved in the 1970s — is out in a Criterion Collection edition. He notes the 97% positive rating by the critics collected at Rotten Tomatoes, and I see that the 3% negativity is accounted for entirely by the one review that comes from 1942, when the movie was released. It's Bosley Crowther in the NYT:

Perhaps there are plenty of persons who can overlook the locale, who can still laugh at Nazi generals with pop-eyes and bungle-some wits. Perhaps they can fancy Jack Benny, disguised be-hind goggles and beard, figuratively tweaking the noses of the best Gestapo sleuths.

Carole Lombard is, Crowther tells us, "very beautiful and comically adroit." Twice, in this short review, he informs us that this is her last movie. He writes the strange phrase "the feelings which one might imagine her presence would impose are never sensed." She's beautiful and dead, so he thought he was going to have feelings, but he's forced to see her there with that big old ham, the "radio comedian," Jack Benny:

Too often does he pout or grow indignant or pull a double-take. Of course, the script en-courages the old Benny legend of "ham." Once a German officer comments, laughing loudy, "What he did to Shakespeare we are doing now to Poland." That gives you a couple of ideas about this film.

How dare Jack Benny get the last of the beautiful and adroit Carole Lombard!

"Who was the better war poet, Rupert Brooke (i.e., WWI romantic jingoism) or Emily Dickinson? Answer: Emily Dickinson."

In the comments to this morning's post about J.D. Salinger, Richard Lawrence Cohen (my ex-husband) paraphrases something Salinger once said.

That got me looking for Emily Dickinson's war poems, but I got distracted thinking about something else I read this morning, the obituary for the actress Julie Harris. She played the part of Emily Dickenson in a 1977 play called "The Belle of Amherst." A quick search on YouTube turned up a fine print of the entire 90-minute play. It probably shouldn't be there, and I won't embed it, but here it is.

"Chock Full o’Nuts is that heavenly coffee".. and the lady who sang that tune now drinks her coffee in heaven.

Page Morton Black was 97.

Mrs. Black, the widow of William Black, the founder of the Chock Full o’Nuts company, curtailed her singing career after their marriage. But her voice lived on in the jingle, which was broadcast for more than 20 years....

The jingle’s original last line, “Better coffee Rockefeller’s money can’t buy,” was changed in 1957, after John D. Rockefeller Jr. and his family complained.

The line became "Better coffee a millionaire’s money can’t buy." Today, they've changed the word to "billionaires."

I wish I could find my favorite old Chock Full o'Nuts commercial — the one with the line "many times, in many suitcases," which became an all-purpose catchphrase for years with me and RLC (who emailed me the link above). Instead, I'll have to give you this a dreadful old commercial, in which Page Morton Black appears dressed up, atrociously, as Snow White.

ADDED: RLC emails to say thanks, "But for the life of me I can't see why you didn't use" the joke he'd suggested: "The Chock Full o'Nuts girl has gone to meet her coffee-maker!"

"When a marital therapy book looks promising, Mr. and Mrs. Dash buy two copies, one for each of them."

"When they’re both finished, they exchange copies to see what their partner has underlined. They never underline the same passages. It’s like a pair of photos by two different photographers, where you can’t tell that they’re of the same landscape. Two soothsayers reading the same entrails and foreseeing two entirely different fates."

A super-short fiction by RLC, written a few years ago, but long after the time when I was married to him. These days, books are bought as ebooks, so you don't have to buy 2 copies of everything, you just have to authorize 2 Kindles/iPads on the same account — which is what Meade and I do — and the husband and wife can simultaneously read the same book or — as in our case — the same 300 books that we wander around in endlessly, perhaps eventually encountering a passage that we'd underline electronically if the other hadn't already done the underlining. Are there any marital therapy books? Not unless "Lady Blue Eyes: My Life with Frank" counts. Or "Lady Chatterley's Lover." Or "The Obamas." Or — this has a self-helpish title — "How to Be Alone."

"Rules for Radicals"? Rule 13: "Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it." There's marriage for you!

Why was I reading that old post? Because when I read that wonderful garden club politics article out loud, I said it was like a compressed novel and Meade said it was like one of RLC's super-short fictions which you can read the best of in book form or read at his blog. The one about married couples reading marriage therapy books simultaneously is just what's at the top when you click the "fiction" tag.

I was also considering blogging "If We Could Only Understand a Pink Sock" — a propos of the fuzzy pink socks that played a central role in the news story of the week, how North Korea is about to drop a nuclear bomb somewhere Mitch McConnell's people considered quoting things Ashley Judd wrote about herself.

"So I will not be writing the scenes of the well-meaning but ineffectual school guidance counselor giving the teenager advice that ironically pushes him closer to destruction..."

"... the casually incomprehending teachers joking about him in the lounge; the parental arguments caused by the stress of having to deal with an unfathomable evil in their house (plus the deadpan authorial hints that maybe they had something to do with it); the school classmates taunting him and driving him further into fury... You can imagine all this as well as I can."

"There were other science fiction writers, and we loved them, just as there were baseball players besides Willie Mays and rock groups besides the Beatles..."

"... but we loved him best, and when I try to remember why, I have to conclude, proudly, that it wasn’t because his alien worlds were so magazine-cover thrilling, or his dystopian predictions so convincing, or his speculative inventions so original — they were, but plenty of others’ were too."