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Inquirer obituaries
Re “A fate worse than death,” by Dan Rottenberg (Editor’s Notebook)—
Alas, no one can have the last word on obits! But as I keep a daily eye on my last contact with Philly, I’ve been struck by the growing political correctness of the subjects chosen. As if the circulation department had the last word on who rates a last word. Dan’s trifecta makes me wish he’d take over the Inky’s Last Word Department. But that, alas, would kill the BSR. Too high a price.
Patrick D. Hazard
Weimar, Germany
August 24, 2011
Institutional memory is an undervalued wealth. You’ve lived in our city and paid attention to good people stories for four decades. That’s institutional memory at it’s best. So because I’m a bit younger than you, and interested in different areas, I never knew any of “the rest of the stories” you published here. But I loved reading them.
I once worked at a large local media company on a TV show that purported to be “for” Philadelphians. As the only local Philly person on the entire staff, I was put down consistently for my parochial concerns and local sensitivities. Maybe that’s how those Inky obits got written that way?
Liz Matt
Cinnaminson, N.J.
August 24, 2011
Jerry Shestack was kind enough to review a first draft of the legal chapter of my book, Philadelphia Originals, even though he knew nothing about me. He didn’t like the draft but wonderfully gave me ten pages of notes on how to improve it.
Fortunately, he loved the second draft. It was a generous act on his part, and I’m very grateful.
Joe Glantz
Levittown, Pa.
August 26, 2011
Nice work, Dan. Very appealing substitutions for the Inquirer superficialities. How fine for you to note that your facts were easily available on Google.
Helen Buttel
Queen Village/Philadelphia
August 25, 2011
Editor’s comment: In fairness to the Inquirer, I should point out that I was well familiar with Elkins Wetherill and Jerry Shestack because I’d written about them previously. The Creed Black anecdotes, on the other hand, appeared in the New York Times obituary on the same day the Inquirer obit ignored them.
Marlboro mystique
“The Marlboro mystique: Pros and cons,” by Victor C. Schermer, makes little sense and seems to me to be all over the place.
How on earth does it wind up with Sonny Rollins after talking about Curtis and Marlboro and somehow irrelevantly and rather luridly suggesting that the wonderful violinist, Diane Monroe, was somehow kept from finding her own voice by such training? It’s an injustice to a wonderful artist who has the affection of a great many people in the traditional concert community, the New Music world, and most especially with her unique voice in the jazz world.
Andrew Rudin
Allentown, N.J.
August 22, 2011
Victor Schermer replies: Diane Monroe is one of the finest musicians anywhere. She told me of her struggles to find herself amid the rigors and demands of her classical training. That’s the only point I was trying to make.
Romanticism at Tanglewood
I respect Victor Schermer’s ideas about music and the fine prose with which he has expressed them for the Broad Street Review. But I must take strong issue with his comments about Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony (“Boston Symphony at Tanglewood”).
This is all a matter of personal taste of course, but I love the Fourth as much for its large-scale musical architecture as I do for its endless stream of wonderful musical ideas. The first movement is a marvelous late-19th Century version of large-scale sonata-form.
Schermer, in saying that “Tchaikovsky’s orchestrations and sonorities seldom rise above the orchestra pits of the Broadway show,” manages to simultaneously denigrate America’s greatest contribution to the musical world— the popular idiom of the mid-20th Century (for goodness’ sakes, has Schermer never listened to Nelson Riddle’s orchestrations?)— and one of the great masters of classical tone-color.
I suppose I should also confess that as hard as I’ve tried, I’ve never been able to warm up to Rachmaninoff’s music.
Dan Coren
Queen Village/Philadelphia
August 24, 2011
Victor Schermer replies: Personally, I find Tchaikovsky’s orchestration of the Fourth Symphony lacking in fullness and complexity, compared with, say, Brahms, whose work he ignorantly despised. I will grant you that not everyone shares my opinion.
Nelson Riddle wrote outstanding orchestrations for Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald and the like. He wrote little or nothing for Broadway, as far as I know. There are, of course, wonderful scores for Broadway musicals by Bernstein, Claus Ogerman and Rodgers, for example. The American musical theater at its best is an art form that of course Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff both influenced. My intended comparison was to the sort of mediocre stock writing that conveys emotion but contains little subtlety. Musical complexity is the vital ingredient that can redeem romantic music from that modernist criticism that it’s mere emotionality.
Anatomy of a heart procedure
Re: ”Anatomy of a heart procedure,” by Bob Levin—
Well, I know you are still alive, Bob, but as I read on, you had me sweating, wondering if you were going to survive.
I realize that car chases and shoot-outs provide the drama in many books and movies, but your heart procedure was certainly gripping. There is enough blood and gore and suspense to make a decent thriller: Stent Man Springs Into Action!
Write on! Right on!
Carol A. Alice
Vancouver, Wash.
August 26, 2011
Comic, grave, unflinching, compelling, masterful.
Robert Roper
Baltimore, Md.
September 8, 2011
Was the Civil War necessary?
Re “Eight questions about the Civil War,” by John Dowlin, and “Was the Civil War necessary?” by Dan Rottenberg (Editor’s Notebook)—
Interesting points, but both overlook one huge issue with regard to the outcome that ensued immediately after the war: the vitriolic tug-of-war between post-assassination Republicans and poor, ill-equipped-to-be-President Andrew Johnson. Who knows what the nation would have looked like without that ugliness?
And also don’t forget the disputed election of 1876 (kind of a precursor to 2000), the outcome of which laid the path for the unspeakable cruelty of Jim Crow. Slavery, Civil War, Reconstruction, post-Reconstruction— all are intertwined, convoluted and far too complicated for wishfully wondering “what if?”
Mary Lenihan
Hermosa Beach, Calif.
August 17, 2011
John Dowlin has posed the question of whether the South should have been permitted to secede peacefully from the Union in 1861. Legally speaking, it seems to me that the right of secession was implicit in an original compact of states. The very name by which our country is known, “The United States,” suggests this.
The Articles of Confederation conferred sovereign authority in most respects on the several states. The Constitution that replaced it was a high-level coup d’état imposed on the new country by self-appointed Founding Fathers whose legal commission was to reform, not replace the Articles. It was blessed by commercial elites who found the Articles an impediment to orderly commercial and territorial expansion— that is to say, to the conquest of the continent, bloody wars with Canada and Mexico, and the extermination of most of the Native American population. It also institutionalized slavery, until then the practice only in some individual states, on the federal level.
William Lloyd Garrison’s call for a secession of the North had the same legal basis as Southern secession, even if its moral posture was the reverse. Garrison’s call went unheeded, except by John Brown.
But suppose that the North, instead of insisting that Union be preserved at all costs, had in fact desired secession from the South? Suppose what the Supreme Court calls “evolving standards of decency” had made the yoke of union with slaveholders intolerable to the Northern majority? Would Lincoln have argued that the Union was inseparable then? Would we venerate him if he had?
Had the Civil War ended within weeks or months, as many anticipated, slavery would no doubt have remained the law of the land. The South doomed slavery by its successful resistance to Northern control in the first two years of the war. Had it fought less gallantly and well, a negotiated peace would doubtless have allowed it to retain its peculiar institution. Slavery, formally extinct in the Western Hemisphere by 1886, would have died a natural death, though doubtless some form of Jim Crow would have succeeded it.
Whether the African-American population of these still united states would have been better or worse off in the long run is a matter of conjecture. I am sure we would all be better off not having Planet Texas in the Union, with its priceless gift of statesmen from Lyndon Johnson to George W. Bush to Rick Perry. A Northern Republic would surely have joined the other nations of the Western World in repudiating the death penalty, one of racism’s few remaining legal redoubts.
Dan Rottenberg asks what the world would have been like had the U.S. not remained whole. I am sure that a Northern Republic would have remained attractive to immigrants; few chose to settle in the South during the high tide of immigration anyway. The Philippines would not have been blessed with a bloody liberation that cost 600,000 lives— as many as perished in the Civil War itself. World War I might have ended in a negotiated peace among the exhausted combatants. There would have been no Allied diktat imposed on a humiliated Germany, no Weimar Republic, and no fertile soil for a Hitler. There might have been no Bolshevik Revolution either. The Western Hemisphere might have been spared gunboat diplomacy and United Fruit. Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Iraq and Afghanistan would likewise have been able to forgo our tender mercies.
These are conjectures, of course. But the triumphalist view of the Civil War as a victory for mankind is not likely to help us understand the world, or ourselves, better.
Slavery was surely the greatest of human evils, and its removal by the most expeditious means— even a terrible war— has something to be said for it. But the war was a tragedy too, and insofar as it reinforced our national sense of destiny, it has done us no good. Lincoln, the reluctant but implacable warrior, understood the perils of self-righteousness. Too many of his successors have not.
Robert Zaller
Bala Cynwyd, Pa.
August 17, 2011
Editor’s note: For my thoughts about keeping Texas in the Union, click here.
While I value the “what if” speculations about our unCivil war, I’m much more concerned about the shadow slavery of blacks and browns overincarcerated for minor drug offenses whilst their white counterparts go scot free. Not to forget the zillionaire bankers who gamed the system with total immunity, blocking with cash bribes a real judge like Elizabeth Warren.
Nostalgic conundrums are silly when we totally ignore the fiscal slavery we allow without a whimper of dissent.
Patrick D. Hazard
Weimar, Germany
August 19, 2011
Civil War re-enactments
Re “Those Civil War re-enactments,” by Jackie Atkins—
This sandbox historiography further attests to the infantilization of median America. It reveals the high price we have paid for a sports/entertainer-dominated leisure. Not to mention the covert racism these pranks legitimize.
Patrick D. Hazard
Weimar, Germany
August 27, 2011
Philip Levine: Limousine proletarian?
Re “Philip Levin’s working-class credentials,” by Patrick D. Hazard—
The writer of this unconscionable piece is obviously an embittered and unhappy man with, at best, a superficial knowledge of poetry. When he says that Levine’s anti-Fascist stance in the time of the Spanish Civil War is “an affectation” and calls the men and women who were slaughtered at the hands of Franco and Hitler’s air force at Guernica “the losers,” he demonstrates, even if subconsciously, a repugnant mindset and a heart without compassion.
Bill Sherman
Margate, N.J.
August 17, 2011
Patrick Hazard replies: Until I read Levine’s “ought to biography” and his grandstanding remarks at being chosen laureate, I was a great Levine fan. I cited my years of university teaching only to give credibility to my sad belief that most of the poetry writing phenomena don’t give a hoot or a holler for those at the short end of the American cashocracy. I do. So did Levine.
Oh, come on Patrick, poets have always invented their personae. Think Edith Sitwell. Think James Whitcomb Riley, my Indiana hero.
What about Levine’s poetry? He was named poet laureate for it, not for his presumed working-class credentials, which after all are largely the emphasis of journalists who are always looking for a handle to write about poets, or artists of all kinds.
You will notice I do not list all the dirty or cushy jobs I had before I was rescued by the draft board and sent off to win a war.
Gerald Weales
University City/ Philadelphia
August 17, 2011
Editor’s note: The writer is a retired English professor at Penn.
Fifteen minutes as Shakespeare
“Bloomer boy,” Kile Smith’s account of his 15 minutes of Shakespearean fame amused me in an inspiring way. His wry article introduced me to the existence of Shakespeare Park, a site I look forward to visiting the next time I am in the city. Such action seems suitable to his words.
Craig Tavani
Phoenixville, Pa.
August 17, 2011
Orchestra on the brink
Re “Philadelphia Orchestra on the brink,” by Robert Zaller—
To an outsider, the Orchestra certainly seems to be in a state of crisis. Prospects seem dismal. The causes are many. I agree that the size of the board is one reason.
The solutions proposed by the board are mostly window dressing. More pop concerts and a relaxed dress code won’t induce me to buy a ticket. Nor will the Orchestra’s absence from The Mann.
Some of the problems feel insurmountable because they pertain to the Kimmel Center. Seats with less than good views or poor sound are chances that one takes when purchasing a ticket. So are surcharges that resulted in my paying more for these than the price of a ticket to a wonderful concert by the Curtis Orchestra.
Major concert halls around the world are inviting for their own sakes even as you approach those venues. Plunking down a fake piece of Paris in the Kimmel’s Commonwealth Hall was mostly an impediment to foot traffic.
Despite all this, I think a major solution has to lie with the programming. Concerts that offer music that is not available on disc and that benefit from a particular live experience do attract my attention.
Having said all this, I have to wonder what difference it would make in my life if the Orchestra ceased to exist. Perhaps laying down the whole enterprise would clarify how essential it is to me and to the region.
Arthur Waddington
Wynnewood, Pa.
August 17, 2011
Rape and Slutwalk
In “Rape and Slutwalk: A therapist’s view,” SaraKay Smullens writes:
"There is also the form of sexual abuse in which a male partner withholds all physical and emotional contact from a woman, so that she will beg for any semblance of contact and in this way be forced into submission.”
Actually no, there isn’t. Just as women have the right to say “No”, a man also has the right to say “No” if he is not getting what he wants out of a relationship.
If this is SaraKay Smullens’s idea of “forcing [someone] into submission,” I fundamentally question her understanding of abuse. At most, it might be considered “forcing” her to make a decision about whether to stay in the relationship or a passive way of trying to get her to leave.
Chris Smith
Logan/ Philadelphia
August 10, 2011
SaraKay Smullens replies: I think we are on separate pages. I am talking about committed relationships where one partner passive-aggressively dominates the other. I too believe strongly that if one person is unhappy or unfulfilled in a relationship, the appropriate approach talking about it openly, not being unkind and withholding.
Blogging schoolteacher
Re “The case of the blogging schoolteacher,” by Dan Rottenberg (Editor’s Notebook)—
Blogging the truth about undercivilized teenagers shouldn’t identify perpetrators who deserve private counsel. Our “Let it all hang out of the sometimes thoughtless Facebook culture” complicates the tuition of teenagers stumbling out of broken family homes and other wrecks. Our viral pop culture is corrupting many, including, I would speculate, teachers hungering for instant Internet fame.
It ain’t the high school I first entered as a teacher in 1952! Where the students were eager to be silently counseled. We’ve created the mess called Mass Culture. Now we must try to recivilize it. A grim future. (And how reassuring to discover Ronald James to persist in being harmlessly aggressive. Bless him— and Dan, for giving him his first perch!)
Patrick D. Hazard
Weimar, Germany
August 12, 2011
Individual public school students and their parents are not a teacher’s “clients,” as in the private sector. Rather, a public school teacher’s clients are the taxpayers.
Ron James
Wynnewood, Pa.
August 10, 2011
To Ron James (above):
I don’t think so. A “client” would receive the services directly? I think the taxpayers would be better described as “shareholders”— that is, people who have invested (taxes) in the “product” and expect some kind of return on that investment.
Rob Fennell
South Philadelphia
August 24, 2011
Ronald James replies: Whatever. The taxpayers pay the teachers. Therefore the teachers work for the taxpayers, not the students.
Editor’s comment: Methinks we’re splitting hairs here. Whoever the clients may be in this case, they have an interest in the creation of a welcoming and sheltering environment in which students can learn from their mistakes without fear of public embarrassment.
My pal, Rick Santorum
Re “Santorum and me”—
I loved Gerald Weales’s piece flagging Rick Santorum’s unwelcome friendliness. Loved that Weales reminded everyone that Rick equates gay sex with bestiality. But mostly I loved that Professor Weales was watching Pride and Prejudice instead of the thousand shrill alternatives.
Lew Whittington
Center City/ Philadelphia
August 6, 2011
Hard “G” Gerald Weales raps Santorum’s knuckleheaded ploys effectively. I’m reminded of the automobile insurance salesman in East Lansing in 1952 who immediately lost a sale by “Pat"-ing me as he unleashed his spiel. I’ve been “Patrick” by request ever since.
Pseudo-friendliness is an American weakness. Morton Cronin wrote a classical rebuke in The New Republic in the 1950s when he described the pushy boss who first-named his staff until they crossed him. He then expressed his power by last-naming them.
Patrick D. Hazard
Weimar, Germany
August 8, 2011
Surviving on the fringe
Re “The joys of life on the fringe”—
I was truly enlightened and delighted by Tom Purdom’s approach to supporting the arts. Celebrating fringeness and smallness and specialness and, most important, the very best quality (the elite)— these approaches make good sense to me.
I only quarrel with Tom’s notion of non-confrontation. Criticism is essential to maintaining high standards of all artistic expression. Criticism opens minds and leads to innovation. Criticism is exciting.
Where would we be if actors and musicians and painters didn’t have a chance to confront one another and be actively involved in communal exchange? Here’s where we’d be: bored.
Caroline Millett
Powelton Village/ Philadelphia
August 3, 2011
This is a great article.
One correction, however: Bach does need a mass audience. Not necessarily a large one; in fact it could be minor.
Allen Krantz
Mount Airy/ Philadelphia
August 4, 2011
Rembrandt and Jesus at the Art Museum
Re BSR’s reviews of “Rembrandt and the Face of Jesus” at the Art Museum—
The Supper at Emmaus is the picture that has stayed uppermost in my mind since seeing the exhibit yesterday, so it was particularly interesting to read Anne Fabbri’s review, each paragraph so much on point.
Terri Gordon
Upper Darby, Pa.
August 3, 2011
This is such a fabulous article. Anne Fabbri’s historical observation is very informative.
Pasquale Cuppari
Roselle Park, N.J.
August 4, 2011
Messages women send
Re “What messages do today’s women send?”—
Thanks, Margot Barringer, for speaking out and reminding us women to get back to ourselves… get back to the basics… get back to the business of being women!
Universally speaking, my generation has been brought up without any real battles to fight. Women of the past did that for us as they experienced real sacrifices and survived horrific traumas. They were the true warriors on the front line, paving the way out of bondage and living in the true spirit of womanhood.
Women of my generation skip down the yellow brick road of life, oblivious to what womanhood really means. Social etiquette, expectations and equality are the least of many of our concerns. With eyes wide open, so many of us have fallen into traps of false ideologies that have reduced women to sexual icons and second-class citizens.
Gweny Love
West Philadelphia
August 4, 2011
One cheer for Hooters
Re “The world’s most useless job,” by Dan Rottenberg (Editor’s Notebook)—
I must give credit for the Hooters idea to my wife, Betsy Alexander. Her father’s Alzheimer’s disease had caused him to become more and more inappropriate in his speech, especially when comments were directed toward female servers in restaurants. He’d always been friendly and complimentary toward the ladies. But now his comments were changing from “Your eyes go beautifully with the color of your uniform” to “My wife doesn’t give me sex any more. How about you and I get together?”
At first we considered not taking him to restaurants any more. Then Betsy came up with the idea of taking him to Hooters. The young women there loved him and fawned over him, sometimes even sitting next to him and holding his hand while they took our orders.
I had made sure beforehand that they understood his situation, and they handled his occasional sexually suggestive comment with grace and humor.
Once when I mentioned how beautiful the women were, he replied, “I’m only interested in them from the neck up. My heart belongs to Harriet” (his wife).
Even though his short-term memory was practically non-existent, it was not at all uncommon for him to ask me if we were going to that wonderful restaurant again.
Burnell Yowl
Fitler Square/ Philadelphia
July 27, 2011
Very funny! Are you talking Pop Tarts here?
Reminds me of an old Ann Landers column where she approved a paralyzed man’s sex therapy. With a hooker. Shocking!!
Young man, of course. Why must it be a young man? From a WayPastAdult POV, who cares?
Of course it’s more exciting if it’s taboo. Fear is a great aphrodisiac.
Reed Stevens
Campbell, Calif.
July 27, 2011
Is this where I’m supposed to say I only read BSR articles for the text and not for the pictures?
Joseph Glantz
Levittown, Pa.
July 31, 2011
Dan, if this assay is an effort to quiet the ruffled masses who asked the authorities to bust you for your glib rape analysis, it misses its markup. We regular BSR readers know you are a solid libertarian.
But I reject your Alzheimer argument. The pornofication of America has created a booboisie that cheapens male/female relations in a very destructive way. Even our best and brightest are hooking, turning a generation of women into degenerate, unpaid hookers.
Let’s make a clean breast of this contemptible scandal. Sex is for love and procreation, not kicks.
Patrick D. Hazard
Weimar, Germany
August 7, 2011
Michelle’s migraines
Re “Michelle Bachmann’s migraines,” by Joy Tomme—
John F. Kennedy suffered from Addison’s disease. Dwight D. Eisenhower had a heart attack while in office. Franklin D. Roosevelt was a paraplegic, and Abraham Lincoln was bipolar. Human beings become presidents; disease comes with the territory. I wonder if Ms. Tomme would object to FDR, Lincoln or JFK? Somehow I have a feeling that she would not forgive Ike for getting sick.
Jackie Atkins
Northern Liberties/ Philadelphia
July 26, 2011
Joy Tomme replies: This comment, while interesting, isn’t applicable to the discussion at hand. Jackie Atkins refers to eras when illnesses could be kept secret, and were. We don’t have that advantage (or disadvantage) now. We’re talking about a disease that was made public before the person runs for president.
Sickness will always strike randomly and suddenly. But migraines are no random illness. It’s a disease for which the medications don’t always work, and when they don’t, the sufferer is incapacitated.
Who needs concert halls?
Re ”Valentina Lisitsa: Who needs concert halls?”, by Dan Coren (January 2011)—
This is a very good article, capturing many attributes of the special persona of Valentina Lisitsa that blend into her unusual talent as pianist.
I use her as an epitome of the human brain that is capable of undergoing evolution not in thousands of generations but in her own lifetime. She belongs in the company of Einstein, Tiger Woods, and many other geniuses.
Shiro Matsuoka
Basking Ridge, N.J.
July 27, 2011
Editor’s mea culpa
Re “An apology about sex abuse,” by Dan Rottenberg (Editor’s Notebook)—
I am sincerely relieved to read your second apology. I appreciated your first apology, but I felt that you were still missing the point a bit. I’m sorry that you have had sleepless nights over this and am glad you are still writing for the Broad Street Review. Everyone says stupid things; you just happened to put it on a website for everyone to read. I’m glad you learned something, though.
Leanne Young
North Little Rock, Ark.
August 1, 2011
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