Bob Levin is an attorney and writer. His most recent book, Most Outrageous: The Trials and Trespasses of Dwaine Tinsley and Chster the Molester, was called “the most criminally neglected book of 2008” by Robot 6. He lives in Berkeley, California.
(Photo by Budd Shenkin.)
| Dylan at the White House |
February 16 2010 |
At the recent White House concert honoring the music of the Civil Rights movement, Bob Dylan again provoked controversy by refusing to hop on any political bandwagon. That’s the mark of great artists: They enlarge themselves and enrich their audiences by savoring the world’s ambiguities.
"In Performance at the White House: A Celebration of Music from the Civil Rights Movement." February 9, 2010. www.cnn.com.
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| Bar mitzvah boy (a memoir) |
January 23 2010 |
My father took pride in the way he’d assimilated in a hostile society. But he was ambivalent about having a Jewish son in a gentile school. In his mind, my bar mitzvah was non-negotiable.
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| You’ve got mail, 1961 (Memoir) |
January 02 2010 |
As a substitute summer mailman, I relished the fresh air and the freedom to set my own pace. I also learned how to game my employer, the federal government.
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| Peggy Maley: Hollywood castoff |
November 07 2009 |
In The Wild One, Peggy Maley delivered one of the most famous set-up lines in film history. Then she vanished, apparently forgotten forever by everyone, except me.
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| Memory, loss, and the '50 Phillies |
November 02 2009 |
A year after the Phillies lost the 1950 World Series, my younger sister died of leukemia. My parents did their limited best to cope with their loss, and so did the Phillies.
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| ’50s films that stoked the ‘60s |
October 26 2009 |
At movies in the ‘50s, nice middle-class Jewish kids like me learned patriotism and foreign policy from John Wayne. But the lessons that stuck with us into the ‘60s were the ones we learned from rebels like Marlon Brando and James Dean.
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| Two novels that changed my life |
October 13 2009 |
To an alienated teenager growing up in the conformist ‘50s, Warren Miller’s The Cool World and The Hustler by Walter Tevis were Bibles of hope that I clung to for survival. In retrospect, these novels served me better than they served their authors, who were far more troubled than I was.
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| Puddles: A Philadelphia memoir (c. 1950) |
September 15 2009 |
My childhood dog Puddles had a mind of his own, but he faithfully followed my disjointed relatives on their upwardly mobile climb from South Philly to West Philly to Overbrook Park. Did we do right by him?
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| The dawn of rock ’n’ roll (a memoir) |
September 01 2009 |
When my adolescent buddies and I embraced rock ‘n’ roll in the mid-‘50s, our parents assumed it would fade with other teenage fads. But we knew instinctively that we were on the winning side of a revolution.
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| Becoming a writer, c. 1964 (Part 4) |
August 15 2009 |
Unlucky in love, I relished my emerging hoodlum persona. Trouble is, I wasn’t writing. And my relatives (and the draft) were pressuring me to go to law school. Was I master of my fate, or its victim?
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| How I became a writer, c. 1962 (Part 3) |
August 09 2009 |
At Brandeis I was not very good with girls. And my grades as a politics major seemed likely to jeopardize my chances for law school. I seemed to lack the self-confidence to succeed at anything. But then I took a couple of risks and things started to fall into place.
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| How I became a writer, c. 1961 (Part 2) |
July 21 2009 |
No one in my extended family wrote or painted, sculpted or composed. My relatives were doctors or lawyers or schoolteachers. But a rebel stream had run through the 1950s sea of repression and conformity in which I’d grown up.
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| How the world works (Philadelphia, 1961) |
July 07 2009 |
After three decades of work for Philadelphia’s Democratic City Committee, my Dad prided himself on his ability to get things done. But now I was on trial before a cranky Republican magistrate. What to do?
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| How I became a writer: a 1960 memoir (Part 1) |
May 30 2009 |
“These papers are abominably bad,” said my freshman English instructor. “But one of you shows promise.” Now, who could that be?
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| A summer construction job, 1959 |
May 24 2009 |
The summer of ’59, when I was 17, I got a construction job putting up Hawthorne Square, a housing project at 12th and Fitzwater. It did me no visible good. I never worked that hard again. But the memory lingers on.
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| Hanging out in the ’50s |
May 09 2009 |
The thrill of hanging out in the ’50s lay primarily in that word “out.” “Out” meant away from the family. It meant away from the confining, conformist, predominant 1950s cultural attitude that scorned all non-grade-bettering, non-money-earning, devil-courting idleness.
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| Growing up at the Palestra, 1958 |
May 05 2009 |
In the days of Montgomery bus boycotts and Little Rock desegregation, Temple University fielded more black basketball players than Philadelphia's other city schools combined. It also had the Jews. As a 15-year-old fan who rooted out of his own discomforts and hurts and shortcomings, my allegiance was cemented.
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| Steak sandwiches B.C. (before cheese) |
April 25 2009 |
Enough, already, about the venerable Philadelphia cheese steak. Is there no one else still living who recalls, as I do, a time when Philadelphians relished steak sandwiches without cheese?
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