Off-Off-Broadway

I rolled into town as a journeyman scribe and left a more intrepid visitor. A country rube goes to the big city…well, not quite…but not that far off either.

New York City had never held much appeal for me. Despite the romance of ‘West Side Story’ and numerous ‘it’s a lovely summer in the city’ songs, The Big Apple has never held much sway over my affections…until now.

I’m not a fan of big cities in general although a few stand out from the rest. These cities have captured my imagination with their history, location and that strange indefinable vibe you feel upon stepping onto the tarmac or exiting the train station. Singapore, London, Hong Kong, Amsterdam and Copenhagen have all had a special way with me. Several have played an integral part in several novels and screenplays of mine.

Now I can add ‘Gotham City’ to my list of urban retreats. I don’t know if it was the old lady with whiskers, the somber yet respectful respite that is the World Trade Center Memorial or T-Rex on the way home. It could also have been those pesky ‘Jersey Boys’ or the lilting melody of ‘Amazing Grace’ that changed the equation for me. Whatever it was that recaptured my imagination has me already mulling over another future venture into mid-town mayhem.

The last time I rode into New York City it was on a tired old Greyhound bus coming down from Boston. It was a bright and sunny day but there were storm clouds on the horizon and a chill in the air. It was a different time and a different place.

One of the first things I remember back then was passing a young guy on the street, probably a model, dressed in his blue shirt, tweed or herringbone sport coat and pressed blue jeans. I had no idea one could dress like that and still look so cool. Welcome to the land of anything goes. Yet despite the coolness of the place I still felt like a country rube lost in that vast urban wilderness.

Fast forward a lifetime of travel and it was with some excitement that I agreed to a quick week-end foray up from Annapolis for a couple of Broadway plays in the Big Apple. There were a lot more miles on this old chassis of mine now. So I would be coming into town with a different perspective. It was one short weekend on the east coast and away from the reality of Sharon’s Mom’s failing health back home.

We landed at Penn station and immediately got swept up in the street scenes of characters and chaos that define the city.

‘Jersey Boys’ entertained us that first evening. As we pushed through the crowds on Eighth Avenue I was reminded of the epic battle back in the ‘60s between city planner Robert Moses and urban pioneer Jane Jacobs. I had devoured her now classic book ‘The Life and Death of American Cities.’ I was in the heart of that battle still being fought and reality would come in the form of an old woman with whiskers.

The next morning found me sitting at a Starbucks overlooking the circus that is Times Square. Garbage had piled up from the night before. There were painted illusions on the side of a tour bus. Tourists were wandering about pushing past the nattily-dressed business man in his bright pink tennis shoes. The city was coming alive.

I was squeezed in next to a Chinese tourist on one side and a French couple arguing over my shoulder. The old homeless woman was close enough to rub elbows with me. She was nursing her cold cup of coffee and mumbling to herself. She had no place to go and a seat at the counter was as good as it got.

She began by telling me that “They don’t have nutmeg here anymore” and thus began a half hour lecture on herbs, vitamins, supplements and other medicinal medicines. A life-long New Yorker she had spent her better years working the work. Now she was trying to stay warm in a crowded Starbucks at 7:00 in the morning.

Her parents were Ukrainian Jews who had escaped the holocaust and landed in New York City after the war. The old woman had lost half her hearing and half her sight but her observations of life were spot on. She repeated herself a lot yet her knowledge of alternative medicines was clear as day. It was a lesson for me in the foibles of quick judgement calls on my part and the simple honesty in that old woman’s Canterbury Tales.

For that brief half hour it was one human being sharing her vast knowledge with another. She could recount old radio shows on nutrition, the best places to buy supplements in New York City and the evils of some vitamins. It was a lesson in urban survival replete with the old woman’s secrets for a long and eventful life. I was her student and she the teacher. There was a lot to learn from a life of hard living. I got her a refill and then had to leave. As I walked out the door she turned to the Chinese tourist and had engaged her as I disappeared into the teaming masses outside.

World Trade Center Memorial

A walking tour of the World Trade Center Memorial was a somber reminder of lives lost and the worth of each minute. I remember being eyes-locked on my TV that morning not believing what I was seeing. Now I was at that site and struck by the beauty which had transformed that old site of unmitigated horror.

After a harrowing ride back to midtown, I became an expert in the game of cabby chicken. It’s a glorified game of stare-down and fender bumping. My driver wasn’t about to lose to some other cabby or impertinent truck driver. Then his ears perked up when we heard the thunderous roar of an ambulance right behind us. He pulled over and as the flash of colors rushed by he cut in behind it along with two other cabs. It was a flat-out ‘balls to the walls’ race down Eighth Avenue as a river of traffic parted ways and we plowed ahead.

We made it up three blocks before he had to make a split-second decision whether to hold his place in line or miss the tourist that had just stepped off the curb. “Can’t clip a nip” he shouted as he slammed on his brakes and we watched the Japanese man leap back to the sidewalk. We lost our place drafting the ambulance and were relegated to crawling the rest of the way home.

Lunch was at a Paris Bistro before ‘Amazing Grace.’ We were listening to two Belgium college students debating something we couldn’t decipher.

Then the Amtrak back to Annapolis, Maryland.

T-Rex had just come back from Comic-Con 2015. He was over-lubricated even before he stumbled down the aisle and aimed for a seat next to us. Fighting his ‘damn tail’ that kept getting in the way he landed with a heavy thud. He was loud and boisterous and very funny as any reptile can be. He couldn’t get a good picture of himself but managed to capture us…his audience.

 

On the way back to crab town I reviewed my mental notes from the plays I’d seen. When or if I return is still in question. But the old lady with whiskers and cabby with nerves of steel got my mind to wandering.

I’d like to go back to that laboratory of lost lives and denizen of dark dreams. I want to mix with the masses and overhear their tales of hope and dreams and desperation. There are universal stories there that need to be told and I’d like to think I’m the man to write them.

Pushing Past the Bull...oney

One of the benefits of old age is an accumulation of wisdom gleaned over years of living the life.

One of the negatives of old age is an assumption that when criticisms surface it’s just ‘an old

man’s take’ on a changing world. It’s like being caught betwixt and between your reality and everyone else’s.

Having said that…I think living in our world today is like riding a roller coaster blindfolded and without a safety harness. It’s a kaleidoscope full of fluff and deception that can make your stomach spin. An environment where everyone seems to be angling to get into your pocketbook, influence your mind and move you in their direction.

Simply look around and you’ll realize you’re in the consumer bullseye for everything from music to skin cream. It’s isn’t your parent’s black and white monotone world any more. This is where age hampers that realization because it is neither good nor bad; it is simply a fact of life. The world is changing at such a rate that the only constant is change itself.

So despite risking the chance I’ll be labeled an old man mumbling I’d like to examine a few aspects of the world we live in today. Let’s look at it honestly and without valuation. Then decide what you like, are willing accept or want to change. And ultimately how do you learn to deal with it.

National and local news outlets have become a cash-strapped commodity meant to attract eyeballs and no longer advance the art and science of journalism. The honorable world of journalism as I knew it growing up no longer exists.

National news is now mostly fluff. It’s an ad-filled half hour of sound bites designed to make us worry more about our health (via the pharmaceutical industry), believe politicians (via their lobbyists) and fret about the fate of our planet. Weather reports are disguised as news. Self-promotional business packages are fed to the news departments who are too understaffed to create their own news segments.

Print newspapers are struggling to find their way in this new era of instant ‘breaking news.’ Yet some of the most egregious offenders are the pretend internet news sites that offer up a mixture of advertisements disguised as news articles along with meaningless pap mean to titillate the senses and collect eyeballs. Magazines fare no better.

Cable is a stumbling dinosaur. It’s inflexible scheduling and viewing options are being threatened by mobile devices, streaming video, internet options, apps and a growing consumer dissatisfaction with the bland tasteless programming being offered.

The world of politics has become so jaded with vested interests and partisan politics that consensus is nearly impossible on most relatively simple policies.Worst yet, money talks and yet nobody is actually listening.

Alvin Toffler called it the ‘third wave.’ In retrospect, he was dead right and couldn’t have been more wrong. With the arrival of the microchip and digital information technology our world was about to change…exponentially. Between 1990 and 1995 there was a tidal wave of digital products and new experiences that were to affect almost every aspect of our daily lives.

I was one of the first believers and converts. I read everything I could on this new computer technology. My kids had a Macintosh at home to do their grade school homework. They would be prepared for a whole new world opening up before their very eyes. It was my business to make sure that Sharden Productions, Inc. was using this new technology to stay ahead of the game. I devoured the new magazines and collected articles of relevance to my new ventures into cyber space.

I tried to ride that North Shore wave of bites and bytes but it kept pushing me further and further behind until I was back among the masses, lost amid the conflicting claims and acclaimed benefits of this new technology. Now I’m content with my Windows 7, won’t touch Windows 8 and am suspicious of Windows 10. 

So what happened to that ‘new economy’ as predicted? The promise of the information revolution has been shattered into a million pieces of economic and social reality.*

The new economy wasn’t a ‘new economy’ after all. The old mantra of ‘e-business or out of business’ was premature. More money has been lost in computer technology ventures than has been made. On-line shopping hasn’t erased bricks and mortars. We still crave the ‘touch and feel’ of hands-on shopping instead of the ‘fill my cart’ and ‘press here to pay’ buttons on our computer screen. Only a few companies now stand at the pinnacle of success while hundreds if not thousands of others are still struggling to stay alive in a constantly changing business environment.

Despite the ‘new’ which is increasingly looking like the ‘old,’ there is still hope. High-energy entrepreneurs with new ideas can still get their turn at bat. While the old days of ‘garage to global’ are almost over there are still a myriad of opportunities for those daring pathfinders willing to take a chance and risk it all for a chance at that mythological gold crown in the cyber sky.

The Internet was supposed to create a world community. It did and it didn’t. The term community has taken on a new and interesting moniker in the digital age. Community is now defined as any group of any size with any common interest. Just peruse Facebook and look at the numerous and sometimes bizarre groups gathered there.

The other side of that ‘community’ coin has proven to be spot-on. I am now able to review playbills from the Knightsbridge collection of theaters. I can check in with fellow western writers from Australia. I can wander down Streetview over the old familiar cobblestone streets around the Amsterdam train station where I used to hang out. The planet and universe has morphed into my world with a simple click on my keyboard.

The digital age was supposed make us all smarter. Not true. Today’s kids aren’t really tech-savvy as much as they are just button-savvy. Few of them know or even care what’s going on inside their smart phone or video game console. They just know how to turn the machine on.

Fortunately my grandchildren have their screen-time rationed at home. Outdoor activities, reading and sports take precedent over video games and television watching.

The Internet was also supposed to make us better informed. This takes me back to my earlier comments about the news media and the rocky road they’ve put us all on just to get some semblance of news.

Despite the many failings of the new Information Revolution there have been some wonderful changes to embrace. This reached home when I returned to my two original westerns written back in 1974 and 1975. With new scanning technology I was able to change those old gray pages into screen pages which I could easily rewrite and manipulate. About that same time, Create space, a company owned by Amazon, became one of the first POD (print on demand) publishers in the world. It has become a true double-edged sword.

The old prediction that anyone and everyone could become a publisher has proven to be true. Unfortunately along with the ease of publication came a tsunami of books, both print and electronic, that has totally engulfed the reading world. Without the East Coast guardians of print to check for editing, plot development and other pre-publication standards, the quality of these new books flooding the marketplace is questionable at best. It’s nearly impossible to find footing in this new flood of vernacular mud and it’s only getting worse.

The new task ahead for any writer will be to manage and maneuver through this sludge pile of distractions to try to find footing and grow an audience. Working smarter and harder will be the new moniker for these new publishing explorers.

Despite the failed predictions of the new Information Revolution there have been many improvements in our lives. There is much to embrace and welcome as change. But in the end it all circles back to the very core of our being and what makes us happy and content as human beings. Those old truisms born of older generations have never changed they’ve just been covered with a vapid cloak of ‘new.’ The old is still the most honest.

·         Your health is your own responsibility and no pill will take the place of common sense.

·         Most, if not all, of the true treasures in life are free and found all around us.

·         Often times the simpler the life the richer and more diverse it is.

·         The answer is not out there. It is inside your head.

So for all the changes swirling around us the old can still be relevant and important in our lives.

Self-direction, self-control and personal responsibility are still the monikers of all of us to wear. It’s a brand new world. But then it’s always been a brand new world just depending on which generation you’re talking to.

I want to embrace some of the new, hold on to some of the old and have fun doing it. Life is too short for anything else.

*Many of the points of the ‘Information Revolution’s Broken Promises’ were taken from an   article by Karl Albrecht which appeared in the March-April, 2014 issue of The Futurist Magazine.

California State of Mind

The beauty of this great country lies in its diversity of people and places.

I was on the East Coast recently to savor the salt brine of the Chesapeake and the closter phobic cacophony that is New York City. While both were replete with their own virtues and charms I once again found myself dreaming cross country to the land of wild dreams, mythical goddesses and eternal sunshine.

Perhaps it started in the mid-50’s when well-to-do families started to fly off to Hawaii for vacation. Maybe it was the mid-sixties when the Beach Boys and their surfing music introduced us mid-westerners to the California beach scene. By the time ‘Beach Blanket Bingo’ came along we had all been inundated with beach party / surfing movies starring Annette Funichello and Frankie Avalon. Most of my friends and I totally bought into that fantasy image of California sun, sand and beach bunnies. We were hooked. California has been doing that to out-of-staters for years.

The migration to California has been going on since the great depression and continues to this day. For the snowbirds it’s like watching the seasonal migration of the wildebeest in a Disney nature film; clean, sanitized and kid-friendly. Despite its roller-coaster economics and left-leaning politics, California continues to attract old and young alike.

For some reason the state seems to hold fast to its long-held moniker that ‘whatever happens first on the coast will eventually move to the Midwest and then the other coast.’ Whether it is massive housing developments, movie magic, new computer technologies, solar initiatives, fashion trends or otherwise innovative, invasive or surprising new trends in all sectors of our lives, many of them seem to happen first there. Perhaps that’s why I like the place so much. As much as I like the Midwest, California speaks to me in a voice that is fresh, exciting and at times provocative.

It’s the perfect climate for a writer trying to uncomplicated the lives of so many people who compete for space in his head. ‘Debris’ is now complete and my character’s stories have been told. By the end of book two some of the folks had left the scene while new ones were already waiting in the wings. In book three they took their own prominent place in this continuing drama. Now all that’s left is the editing and publishing.

There are more novels to write and a couple of plays just waiting to burst onto the stage. California is the perfect natural setting for such ventures. Its manicured golf courses and clear blue skies belie an undercurrent of mystery and intrigue and confusing lives. What more perfect setting for the creative mind and I get to swim right up the middle of it with pen in hand.

After another summer of discontent the healing has begun. A chapter has closed in our lives and adventures await. The warm sun beckons. The mountains are calling. The ocean is just over the horizon and I get to ruminate all those stories swirling about in my head. It’s all good.