Tag: Mainly myself

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Dream Like Petrocelli

The presumably out-of-date with which I choose to concern myself in this journal cannot be expected to have an air of minty freshness about it; but by now broadcastellan is beginning to smell downright musty. Still, I cannot quite muster the energy to attend to the cobwebs in which this nugatory niche is shrouded. The state of neglect is owing to the dust that has enveloped my carcass of late. For the past three weeks or so, we have been engrossed in the project of renovating a late-Victorian house we intend on calling home in a few short weeks from now, or whenever the central heating and at least one of the bathrooms are installed.

Each day, it is becoming a little easier for me to see past the rubble and imagine myself lolling there, keeping up with past in the leisurely and blissfully inconsequential manner to which I have become so readily accustomed. Until that can happen, though, I shall have to go back, again and again, to scrape floors, strip wallpaper, and remove whatever trace we find of those who lived in there immediately before us, all the while uncovering the more distant past they deemed it fit to hide behind layers of outmoded modernity.

Aside from the dirt and the all too apparent signs of aging, the only thing I seem to have in common with this place is the state of being pre-occupied. It isn’t the work alone and the costs involved that weigh on my mind. It is my own history of habitation on which I feel compelled to dwell. I am reminded of the time when my father decided to get us out of that working class neighborhood whose drabness and influx of foreign workers must have seemed a stigma to him but that was to prepubescent me the only world I knew . . . and one shared by a great many kids my age.

Sure, the prospect of having, for the first time in my life, a room of my own was exciting; but the move, some fifteen miles from where I had grown up, came at a great price . . . including the loss of my ability to communicate, to make myself understood and others laugh (something that was important to me, being that I felt too short to be good at much else). Regional dialects were very pronounced back then in Germany; and moving even that short distance meant that I could barely follow what folks were saying, let alone lead them in laughter. I remember our neighbor asking my sister and me whether we had come to help our father build the house. “Yes,” I said, expectantly. I thought the man had just offered me a couple of peaches. That’s how it sounded to me, anyhow. Life wasn’t going to be a bowl of fruit.

For my parents, it was the picket fence dream coming true (without the picket fence, mind you, which is an American cliché). Still, being working class, no matter how hard we tried to come across otherwise, meant that the house was coming along only gradually—which is why my mother could relate to Petrocelli.

Petrocelli was a mid-1970s crime drama, and a pretty formulaic one at that. The action unfolded in flashbacks, from crime to prosecution; but it always ended in the present—and that present was a construction site. After each case, defense lawyer Petrocelli went to inspect the progress on his new home, the one his job helped to build. Week after week, there was little noticeable change, a state of incompletion that made it easy for my mother to identify with the frustrated ambitions of the titular character.

As for myself, I felt it difficult to relate to anything or anyone back then. Everything was unfamiliar and new (even the ledgers I had filled with pictures and stories had been discarded during the move), and apart from the promise of having that room to myself, nothing seemed worth the trouble of giving up so much of what had felt like home to me, no matter how it might have looked to a status-conscious adult.

To this day, putting tens and hundreds of thousands into a single project like building or doing up a house is troubling to me. Rather than the financial risk and the potential hardship it poses, it is the peril it can mean to one’s sense of home. You see, the house my father built was never to become our home. It meant the end of our family—the end of all family activities for which there was no money left in the budget, the end of my parents’ marriage and, ultimately albeit indirectly, my father’s life.

In retrospect, that new house—the dream of being a four-walled somebody—looks an awful lot like a Petrocelli flashback . . . a wrong move and a slow process of undoing.

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What You Might Find While Down in the Mouth

If I’ve been keeping my trap shut lately, it’s on account of some festering crumbs in my cake hole. Sure, I can jaw away about most anything, but I’ve got to have the mind and the mandible to do so. For days now I have been plagued by mouth ulcers that are putting a muzzle on my spirits—not the kind of oral culture I generally engage with in this journal. My gums are following economic trends, making me feel ever longer in the tooth. My left cheek, in turn, might lead you to believe that, in an effort to dodge the downturn, I managed to squirrel something away for a day on which I may mercifully hide my mug under an umbrella. Meanwhile, my taste buds have started to sprout and my lower lip, Angelina Jolied out of all proportions, is suggestive of a law suitable botch or a risk taken by the likes of Maxie Rosenbloom.

Always one to self-diagnose and over-the-counter medicate rather than to seek the professional opinion of someone who, like a satirist with a stethoscope, makes a career out of scrutinizing us at our most unsightly, I have been pondering my condition and its causes. Though I cannot rule out trauma resulting from vigorous brushing recently recommended by my hygienist, I am not inclined to blame my current state on the stress produced by our impending move; if I were quite so readily distressed, I would hardly have survived my previous transplantations. Besides, I have always resented being thought of as a mere tangle of nerves in need of careful rewiring.

I have a long history of allergies, though; and given that my symptoms began to occur following a dinner outing last week, it might well be that my sores are a reaction to something passing my lips that night. Heretofore, my catalogue of allergens has been limited to felines, grass, and dust. Now, that hasn’t kept me from cat-sitting, of which you can make a career in New York City, or from relocating to one of the grassiest spots on the planet; and it certainly did little to convince me to take out the feather duster more often than the snot rag or the inhaler.

I was told early on by the still extant half of the temporary connubial unit responsible for my coming into being—and for getting the heck away from whence I hail—that allergies are an aberrant mental state and that cycling to school through the cornfields or mowing the lawn were activities I could handle if I only put my mind to it. True, I have always been mildly allergic to physical labor; but that was in part due to the damage I saw it inflict on the body, the mind, and the spirit.

My father’s religion was social Darwinism, in the practicing of which he drank himself to death. It would have been futile to convince him that an undistilled grain could be as lethal as a distilled one and that what doesn’t kill you instantaneously does not necessarily make you any stronger in the long run.

I had not planned on delving into my personal history, medical or otherwise. As is often the case, such memories are squeezed out of me by the mere twisting of the dial. Listening to Fred Allen’s 1937 St. Patrick’s Day broadcast, I was reminded of the kind of book I would have liked to have thrown at certain parties aforementioned.

Fred Allen is always good for a few laughs, however painful their elicitation. Annotating his quips can prove more rewarding still. Well before the hosts of our present day chat shows, satirist Allen raided the daily news for his weekly radio programs. In his Town Hall News (“sees nothing, shows all”), Allen commented on the goings-on in New York City, on politics, the economy, on culture high and low. Here is the first of the 17 March 1937 Town Hall News bulletins:

New York City, New York. Dr. R. P. Wodehouse, speaking at the American Institute of General Sciences, claims that hay fever and asthma are increasing in this country. Dr. Wodehouse says clearing up of native vegetation and its replacement by alien plants will add to number of victims.

Allen’s reading of this news item is followed by a skit demonstrating the wide-ranging effect the predicted rise of allergic reactions might have on the afflicted urbanite. This time, though, I was more interested in Allen’s source than in his take on it. My curiosity being immune to ulcers, I soon caught up on R. P. (no relation to P. G.) Wodehouse and his endeavors to “win the secret of a weed’s plain heart” (a quotation prefacing his 1945 study on Hay Fever Plants).

I wish R. P. Wodehouse had been a household name where I grew up; but, as the good doctor reminds me, by quoting John James Ingalls, “grass” is the “forgiveness of nature.” I’ll have to learn to let it grow over my own family plot—and concentrate instead on finding out how to avoid another catastrophic invasion of my oral flora. To cure my foul mood, a generous dose of Fred Allen is indicated . . .

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Elbows and Audacity

Unlike my imperialist, Anschluss-eager ancestors, I am not anxious for Lebensraum, the supposed deficiency thereof justified many acts of ruthless expansion. If I lack living space, I tend to shrink-fit myself back into it; instead of elbowing my way out of a tight squeeze, I grab and ditch whatever the chosen niche cannot hold. The size of a pad has always been less important to me than its position or the pal who shares it. For much of my adult life I did not have as much as a closet to myself, let alone a room to call my own. Letting go of stuff has been both essential and elementary. True, I never possessed much that could not be replaced or that required ample room to place it in. A few photo albums, personal letters, and an old teddy bear—little else of mine has double-crossed the Atlantic as I, the disloyal Teuton, migrated from the Rhineland to the East River, from Manhattan to rural Wales.

Perhaps, it is this sense of freedom from dead weight, this longing be without belongings that attracted me to the theater of the mind. Back in New York, crammed into small quarters I knew I had to vacate before long, I began to collect the immaterial, the non-stuff that gathers no dust: plays written for the ear, tales unfolding on the air. Practically all of them are now stored on a single laptop . . . except for that impractical drawer full of plastic cases, the magnetic tape that can only hold so much and, of itself, so little attraction. Audiocassettes, I mean.

A mere decade ago, when I was writing my PhD dissertation (at a “desk” that doubled as a dining table), I had not yet caught on to the disencumbering economy known as mp3. Dozens of cassettes, purchased from various vendors of old-time radio recordings, were piling up in my digs, no matter how much I tried to preserve space by dubbing them from 60 to 120-minute tapes. To this day, many of those tapes still fill a large drawer, well out of earshot now that my Mac serves as my receiver, my library, and my annex.

Over the years, I have been able to replace many of them with digital recordings shared or sold online, albeit at a loss of fidelity. The ones that remain are of the rarer sort, the highbrow and experimental kind with which I set out to sell my study to academics reluctant to conceive of radio dramatics as literature. Most of these plays have been published on the paper that bestows upon them a watermark of distinction—a bias in favor of ink over air that bolstered my argument that the works of Archibald MacLeish, Alfred Kreymborg, Norman Corwin and Morton Wishengrad are indeed “oral literature,” an unfortunate oxymoron to which we resort when referring to the airborn(e) words whose life exceeds the margins of the printed page and the boundaries of the “wooden O.”

Along with music and poetry, the boxed-in cassettes encase the voices of old friends, the sounds of distant places and past lives. To get them out of their timbered limbo I recently downloaded Audacity, software that converts old tape to new files. For the past two weeks now I have done little else besides dubbing, editing, merging tracks, removing imperfections and changing the speed of recordings—all with a single-minded diligence that leaves little room for doubt: you just can’t get Germany out of this old boy.

And why save all this space now that we are about to move into a house roughly three times as large as the old one? Perhaps, I am not such a free spirit after all—just too lazy-boned to lug all that excess baggage. Could it be that what elbow greaseless me appreciates most about being at play in the theater of the mind is that it does not require the shifting of scenery? Be that as it may: I hope shall not long lack the time to make room for the stale air that is my element and the out-of-dating that is my métier.

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Re: Boot (A Mental Effort Involving Distant Cousins)

Like many a woebegone youth of my generation—once known as the No Future generation—I entered the crumbling empire of Evelyn Waugh’s fictions by way of that lush, languid serial adaptation of Brideshead Revisited. It wasn’t so much what I saw as what I had missed that made me pick up the book. Owing to my mother’s loyalty to Dynasty, which aired opposite Brideshead on West German television back in the early 1980s, I was obliged to fill whatever holes our weekly appointment with the Carringtons had blasted into Waugh’s plot. Even more circuitous was my subsequent introduction to A Handful of Dust (1934).

In keeping with the title—and in poor housekeeping besides—a tatty paperback of it had been cast to steady a wonky table in the community room of a nurse’s residence at the hospital where I carried out such duties as were imposed on me during the mandatory twenty-month stretch of civil service any boy not inclined to be trained for military action was expected to fulfill.

For twenty months, I, who ought to have been eating strawberries with Charles Ryder, served canteen slop and sanitized bedpans at a Cologne hospital. Was there ever a locality less deserving of the name it gave to the art of concealing our stenches, of which Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge once “counted two and seventy” in Cologne alone? My head was not held very high during those days, which probably led me to investigate just what propped up that misshapen piece of furniture. For once, though, I had reason to lament being downcast. A Handful of Dust turned out to be a rare find.

Counting the weeks to my release, I could sympathized with its anti-hero, the hapless Tony Last, trapped as he was in the wilds of the Amazon, forced to read the works of Charles Dickens to the one man who could have returned him to civilization but, enjoying his literary escapes, refused to release him—a scenario familiar to regular listeners of thriller anthologies Suspense and Escape.) Like Mr. Last, I had gotten myself in an awful fix—and up a creek that smelled the part.

So, when I think of Evelyn Waugh’s early fictions now, at a time in my life when I can more closely associate with his later Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, what comes to mind is the comparative misery of my youth and the pleasures derived from the incongruities at the heart of his late-1920s and 1930s novels, satires like Decline and Fall (1928), Vile Bodies (1930), and Black Mischief (1932). While not inclined to relive those days by revisiting such titles, I could not turn down the chance of another Scoop (1937), the first installment of a two-part adaptation of which is being presented this week by BBC Radio 4.

Ever topical, Scoop is a satire on journalism, war and the money to be made in the Hearstian enterprise of making the news that sells. Finding himself in the midst of it all is William Boot, whose sole contribution to the field of journalism is a “bi-weekly half-column devoted to Nature.” Decidedly not mightier than the sword, his pen produced lines like “Feather-footed through the plashy fen passes the questing vole. . . .” Not the rugged, muscular prose you’d expect from a war correspondent.

It was all a deuced mistake, of course, this business of sending Boot to report on the crisis in Ishmaelia, a “hitherto happy commonwealth” whose Westernized natives no longer “publicly eat human flesh, uncooked, in Lent, without special and costly dispensation from their bishop.” The chap who was meant and eager to go among them was William’s namesake, one John Courteney Boot, a fashionable novelist who “kept his name sweet in intellectual circles with unprofitable but modish works on history and travel,” works like “Waste of Time, a studiously modest description of some harrowing months among the Patagonian Indians.”

Absurd situations and wicked caricatures aside, it is Waugh’s prose—the pith of impish phrases like “studiously modest”—that makes a novel like Scoop such a font of literary Schadenfreude. “Amusingly unkind,” the London Times Literary Supplement called it. As it turns out, the joke’s on us once the narration is removed.

Condensing the wild plot in suitably madcap speed, Jeremy Front’s radio adaptation retains little of the narration, sacrificing not only wit but clarity to boot. What is left of the Waugh’s exposition may well lead the listener to believe that John, not William, is the central character. Indeed, like Waugh’s dimwitted Lord Copper, head of the Megalopolitan Newpaper Corporation, listeners are apt to (con)fuse the two.

Unlike Front, Waugh takes great pains to set up the farcical plot, dropping first one Boot, then another, and makes it clear just how the unequal pair are matched:

“The fashionable John Courtney Boot was a remote cousin [of William],” Waugh’s narrator informs us, but they “had never met.” Too eager to get on with the story, Front omits these line, relying solely on the juxtaposition of the two characters, who, during those first few minutes of the play, are little more than names to us.

However bootless the lament, I wish those stepping into the wooden O of radio today would put themselves in the shoes of their listener. Before experimenting with fancy footwork, they should consult a few classics to arrive at the proper balance between dialogue and narration. Otherwise, a potential Scoop can seem like such a Waste of Time—especially to those whose concentration is impaired by plot-obstructive reminiscences . . .

Related recordings
“The Man Who Liked Dickens,” Suspense (9 Oct. 1947)
“The Man Who Liked Dickens,” Escape (21 December 1952)

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Nostalgia and the Common Cold

If you were to ask me right now “what’s shaking,” I’d have to say “my laptop.” The lap in which it sits is an uneasy resting place right now. I am being seized by violent coughing fits, the kind that sets off such explosions in your skull, it shatters your equilibrium. Ever since that Halloween party—the first and probably last I condescended to attend—I have been suffering from the kind of cold that may be known as “common,” but that, to our relief, remains a disruptive exception to our everyday. Apart from all the pretty much useless over-the-counter medication I swallow, inhale or wrap my tongue around, I resort to any number of treats I know to be soothing in times like these. A return to Allen’s Alley, a helping of Chanograms, any combination of folds in the weathered phizog of Margaret Rutherford—whatever it takes.

I tend to return to established remedies, the kind of stuff I know to comfort and cheer me. In a way, I am warding off two sicknesses, all the while being in danger of contracting one. For whenever I am as miserable as I am these far from good old days, I am in danger of getting nostalgic.

Despite my appreciation of and frequent exposure to films, books and radio programs predating the 1960s, I am wary of this feeling. More than a sensation, nostalgia is a disease—a dis-ease—I am anxious not to catch; nor do I believe that am I generally prone to it. In a review of a friend’s book of short stories I once referred to nostalgia as the “fruitful reverie of a past whose text is a history of longing.” Now, even I don’t quite know what that means anymore, however smart it sounded at the time. The rotten apple in it is “fruitful”; although, in defense of the prose I have never managed to outgrow, I hasten to add that the sentence began with “If,” signalling that I merely offer for debate rather than wholeheartedly endorse the sentiment expressed. I vowed, years ago, never to write anything in which I do not believe. It is a proven prophylactic against much, though hardly all, pointless drivel.

True, nostalgia can and does bear fruit; but unless that fruit is intoxicatingly fermented it might be downright unfit to eat. It sure can give you an ache. Indeed, it is an ache. Literally, it is the ache to go home or the ache produced by the awareness of not being able to get there. It is a longing to belong, to return not simply to a place we once knew and loved, but to reach or build such a place from whatever scraps in the book of memory we can assemble with the paste that prevents us all from becoming unglued.

However rewarding such an imaginary retreat, it is a sense of the futility that makes the journey painful—the very moment along the way in which “what if” and “if only” turn to a bitter “as if!” An iffy a performance, in short. After all, how can you expect to find an effective home remedy for homesickness?

I wonder whether I tend to get childlike when ill because I (pictured above, with the horn of plenty that German children are handed upon entering school) was more ill than well as a child. As if anxious to stand out in a crowd of sick kids, I went out of my way to get scarlet fever twice. Not that “childlike” is used here to connote “innocent” or “carefree.” In my early days, I was subject to many more fears, doubts and ailments than the adult into which I somehow evolved—which is why I keep relying on those tried remedies, knowing them to have worked once and finding them working still.

Could it be that I love the movies, books, and radio plays of the past—a past predating mine by far—because I am stricken with the present, rather than just being presently sick? Good gosh, this might be a worse case of nostalgia than I thought.

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Feeling Strangely Animated

I had never been to a Halloween party; and the days of dressing up in more or less fancy costumes lay well behind me. It was with some reluctance and considerable misgivings that I accepted the invitation. Back where and when I grew up, there was no such blood red letter day as Halloween. Your parents might take you to the cemetery to see the candles lit for All Hallows’; but you could not expect to have a ghoulish old time. Such levity was unheard of even among those not attending church services (yet still paying their automatically deduced church tax in fear of social stigma or unemployment).

When first I saw the title character of Steven Spielberg’s E.T. being both concealed and paraded around with a sheet over his head, I had no idea how clever this disguise was; nor did I what “trick or treat” meant. And what about all those carved pumpkins! To me, dressing up was reserved for Carnival, the late winter revels preceding Ash Wednesday, while going from door to door, lantern in hand, caroling and asking for candy was a treat reserved for the feast of St. Martin’s. Who knew you could combine both festivities, have your candy and dress up to boot!

Your costume tells people what you really want to be, one of my school teachers told us. That may very well be true; but, as a pre-adolescent boy, you get uneasy when you look at yourself and others looking at you while dressed in skirt your sister , having raided the closets and not found anything resembling a costume, insisted you wear instead. It was my sister’s choice, not mine, I pointed out; but my teacher’s argument seemed more compelling to those around you (and, you secretly admit, even to yourself). It was this moment of public shaming that took the carefree joy out of fancy dress parties.

Fast forward to Halloween 2008. I am once again in costume. No wigs or dresses, if you please. There are plenty of ill-fitting garments; but little befitting the occasion. What to do? I certainly did not want to go to any great expense; being a good sport could come dear enough. To appear as my favorite comic strip character was a last minute decision, one for which my none-too-sharp pencil mustache had to be sacrificed.

And for what? Only very few people at the party guessed whom I was trying to impersonate, even though the by now nearly eighty year old boy reporter proved highly popular again when, last year, he toured Britain in a colorful stage production. It might have been the lack of preparation or my abject failure to capture this much traveled hero of my youth; and yet, I suspect that such a general shrugging of shoulders is just the kind of response that made it difficult for Spielberg to convince Paramount to green-light his latest project.

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An Ear Against the Blue Wall

I tire easily of Henry James and can countenance only so much blue. If I got a kick out of being cryptic, I’d say that about explains why this journal contains only a single reference to Dragnet, the influential crime drama that, between 1949 and 1957, caught the ear of millions tuning in to NBC radio. As much as I enjoy detective stories, I don’t warm readily to cop shows. Or cops, for that matter, the sight of whom is rarely a comfort to me. Let me give you a “for instance.” One sunny afternoon in September, I was sitting on a bench in Carl Schurz Park on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. It being the beginning of a new semester, and the beginning of my career as a doctoral student, I had a backpack full of books to pore over so as not to fall behind right from the start. I was—and am—a slow reader; and, when it comes to American and British fiction, a non-native one at that.

So, I took out the library copy of James’s Princess Casamassima, a tome so long and somnolent that I struggled to keep my eyes open. The next thing I know is that an officer addresses me from a police car several yards behind me, insists that I had broken a law, and hands me a ticket. I was very nearly speechless; but, after cautioning a few old ladies on the verge of dozing off over their cross-stitching that they would do so at their own peril, I betook myself, past the crowds gathered in the area for the annual German-American Steuben Parade, to the nearest precinct, where I protested against the treatment I had received. At that point I ran into what is commonly known as the blue wall. There was no alternative but to appear in court, a prospect likely to make the non-immigrant even more uneasy than the citizen.

However trifling, this experience made me think of those who had been abused in the name of the law, in the name of all the laws the breaking of which does not mean the least bit of harm or inconvenience to anyone, but whose enforcement provides those in uniform with the opportunity to intimidate, demonstrate their might, and put a few coins into government coffers. My case was ultimately dismissed; but the whole affair caused me no slight irritation. Is it any wonder that I prefer my Friday on a desert island?

Still, the chance of placing an ear on that blue wall and listening in on the workings of the force has an undeniable appeal. The one radio program to cater to spies like me was Night Watch (1954-55), billed as “the actual on-the-scene report of your police force in action.”

“You’re gonna ride with us tonight,” the narrator promised those tuning in to CBS on this day, 25 September, in 1954. “And remember, the people you meet are not actors. What happens to us, happens to you; because this is it. This is real. This is Night Watch.“

This early reality show was presented with the cooperation of the police department of Culver City, California, and took listeners straight to the scene of conflict. In the 25 September 1954 installment, the cases involve stolen motel towels and a disagreement between a mother and her fourteen-year-old daughter whose unrehearsed, unscripted words and untrained voices leave no doubt as to the authenticity of the recorded incident, careful editing notwithstanding.

While Night Watch did not feature the sensational crimes that listeners came to expect from fictional programs, the reporter accompanying the officers was attacked, shot and stabbed, on at least two occasions while serving as proxy witness to scenes of juvenile delinquency, prostitution, domestic abuse and suicide.

No matter how diligent, courteous, and compassionate the officers, the star attractions of the series are the average, anonymous folks of whose lives the audience gets an earful as if being handed a glass to press against the walls behind which dwelled the neighbors to whom our doors are closed. Having been kicked off that bench, I can meet them with something else besides idle curiosity.

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. . . but Grandmother Was a Radio

I am, in the words of a fellow webjournalist, “a child of television.” Being a latchkey kid, the TV set was a surrogate parent to me. It was around. It talked to me. And when it began to bore or annoy me, I had sufficient force in my little finger to evade its glare. True, during my early childhood, Germany had only two television channels (father and mother, you might say) and programming did not start until mid-afternoon; but it still came home earlier than my parents. At night, when I was assumed to be sleeping, I re-enacted what I had seen and played out stories with whatever I could lay my hands on. And those hands were greedy enough to grab at straws, or less.

When separated from my folks during a three-months stay at a sanatorium (I was a sickly child suffering from chronic bronchitis), I was so thirsty to satisfy my artistic impulses that I used saliva to draw images on the bed linen, for which offense I was rebuked by the nurses who, lacking both the imagination and the sense of humor to appreciate such spitting images, accused me of having wetted my quarters. I could have done that by crying; it was the only sound to penetrate the nightly silence.

Breathless as I was, I retreated into an inner world, imagining my ear to be a knob at the turning of which I could talk to the animals. Stuffed animals, that is. No sounds were made; we communicated without utterance. That way, I did not have to speak on their behalf, but could believe them to be responding without feeling quite so pathetically lonely. For the most part, my imaginings remained non-aural. I created motion pictures using rolls of adding machine paper my mother brought home from work; I invented cartoon characters and penned stories the moment I learned to make letters add up to words.

It was only after we moved into our own house, the house my father built for us, that I got intimately acquainted with that old-fashioned kind of television for which you supplied the picture. I got a radio. Not the enormous console that stood in my grandparents’ dining room, but a portable one with a built-in tape recorder. Soon I got carried away by sounds and thrilled to foreign voices.

I was not easily weaned off TV, though.  Once in a while, when I was assumed to be sleeping, I attempted to watch television through my binoculars (ours was an L-shaped house, and from my window I could peep into the living room); but gradually I learned to make the most of the wireless. Before my English was good enough to understand what was being said, I tuned in to the British Forces Broadcasting Service; I intercepted citizens’ band radio conversations and went dxing in search of faraway stations.

Yet what really awakened my love for the drama of sound was not the radio at all—it was a gadget my father insisted on installing in our house. It was an intercom. Now, our bungalow was hardly large enough to warrant such a device; but Papa was a professional electrician and avid hobbyist, aside from being somewhat of a show-off. While we were certainly not above shouting at each other, the family had to have an intercom (and, come to think of it, we had it before we got our first phone). It did not make us communicate any better; but it was certainly an interesting feature.

One night, when the wallpaper in my room (my very own room!) had not yet lost the smell of incomplete attachment, my father was ready to put the talking machine to the test it. He went into the kitchen, the control center from which we could all be summoned to the table and, I became aware later, monitored in our doings, provided we weren’t hush-hush about them or dared to switch off, suggesting we had something to conceal. Then he pressed a button and started talking to me as I was lying in bed. We chatted for a while; but, knowing my father close by and not being used to holding longer conversations with him, the novelty of the exchange soon wore off . . . until Papa hit on an exciting idea.

He went “off the air” for a while, during which time he rummaged through the kitchen drawers. I could hear as much through the closed doors; but my ear was fixed on that cream-colored box on the wall. Then it went on again; and the next sound I heard was not my father’s voice, but . . . what? The splank of a spoon in a pot, the sploshing of water in a glass, the swooshing of a tea towel being flung through space? Sounds. Mundane yet suddenly magical. And while I was invited to guess their origins, I also imagined their destination. I heard a church bell where others saw a pot, found an ocean in a cup, and saw, not a tea towel, but a dragon spreading its giant wings.

It was this little sound effects quiz that brought home a new world to me. Once I realized that there did not have to be a single right answer to those sonic puzzles, there opened up a realm of noisy possibilities. Sounds divorced from their maker, ready to be imbued with a new, almost independent life. Sounds waiting to be taken in like stray kittens, to be dispatched like carrier pigeons. Those were the sounds of latchkey child longing . . .

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Thank you for being . . . Sophia Petrillo

Today, 25 July 2008, would have been the 85th birthday of Estelle Getty, who passed away last Tuesday. Since I was unable to share my thoughts here on that night, I shall do so now. The actress was on my mind that very night, before I even learned about her death. There is nothing uncanny about that, though. I often think, talk about—even talk like—Ms. Getty and the Girls. As I have related here previously, I owe much to Getty and her memorable television character, the feisty octogenarian Sophia Petrillo. To commemorate the anniversary of her birth, I have been going through old diaries to determine just when Sophia entered my life.

Picture it. New York City. The summer of 1989. I was on a six-month visit designed to delay my return to what I feared might be a lifetime of office work for which I, despite a three-year apprenticeship, was entirely unsuited. It would take nearly another year before I finally found the nerve to pack my scant belonging and move to Manhattan. Anyway. The Golden Girls were already in syndication when, staying at a friend’s place, I happened upon the series one morning while channel-hopping onto the fledgling Fox network.

I was unaware then, but nonetheless sensed, that Getty was a gay icon. She had played Harvey Fierstein’s mother in Torch Song Trilogy. Sophia wasn’t quite one of the Girls, who went off with their assorted beaux, shopped for condoms at the supermarket, entertained a lesbian friend, a closeted gay brother, or faced an Aids scare in their very midst. There was hardly room enough for that “fancy man” of a cook in Blanche’s kitchen, even though he, according to Sophia, was “an okay petunia.” Initially, I even mistook Bea Arthur for a drag queen.

While at the very center of it all, the Sicilian spitfire was, for the most part, a bystander who poked fun at the crazy going-on around her. Unless, of course, there was a Japanese gardener around, or Cesar Romero stopped by. “I’m tired of being the Tonto of the group,” she complained. She was like me, in that respect, wanting to be one of the girls.

So, I woke up to those Girls every weekday morning, week after week, and learned about American culture, about Jerry Falwell and Harvey Milk, about Tammy Faye Baker and Anita Bryant. I will surely “sehr vermissen” the Girls when I’m back in Germany, I noted in my diary on 14 September, shortly before my return to the stultifyingly bourgeois world I was at once desperate and terrified to leave behind.

I recall the first time I got one of Sophia’s zingers. I was learning English back then and struggled with those one-liners, with words not in my pocket dictionary and proper nouns for which I had no image in my head, over which went many of the cultural references for the appreciation of which today’s viewers, like me back then, require a few footnotes. It was easier for me to pick up the odd noun watching Family Feud, which I did.

Zsa Zsa Gabor, after all, was still enhancing her dictionary by following the spinning Wheel of Fortune. The words and phrases I picked up watching the girls were far more rewarding than those to be gleaned from whatever “survey says.” Slut. Yutz. Queen. Botchagaloop? And “Floozy.” Inexperienced as I was, I lived in constant hope of warranting such a moniker one day.

“Get some Windex!” Sophia exclaimed. It was her response to the vain, delusional, middle-aged Blanche, who thought it was “just like looking in a mirror” to see her niece, an oversexed adventuress half her age. Luckily, I had just come across a bottle of Windex somewhere in the bathroom cabinet while trying to get the thick coating of Aquanet from the floor to which my socks had gotten stuck. In my native Germany, references to commercial products were not permitted, which made the sarcastic remark all the more startling and memorable to me. Not permitted? That woman could say just about anything! And did. Ahh, to have her mouth, I thought. And that perfect excuse for saying anything you like.

Watching the Girls at times takes me back to those days in 1989, when I was anxious to arm myself with a few choice words from Sophia so as not to be tongue-tied when confronted with the wolves roaming the Big Potato (okay, that was Rose). New York wasn’t Disney World back then. I can still “picture it.” Batman and Indiana Jones ruled the box office, an African American Democrat was about to make history by taking office, and I was glad not to be stuck in an office. Hey, it’s like looking in a mirror. I know, I know, “Get some Windex!”

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Audiophile, My Eye!

Has my ear been giving me the evil eye? For weeks now, I have been sightseeing and snapping pictures. I have seen a few shows (to be reviewed here in whatever the fullness of time might be), caught up with old friends I hadn’t laid eyes on in years, or simply watched the world coming to New York go by—all the while ignoring what I set out to do in this journal; that is, to insist on equal opportunity for the ear as channel through which to take in dramatic performances so often thought of requiring visuals. When. in passing, I came across this message on the facade of the Whitney Museum, my mind’s eye kept rereading what seems to be such a common phrase” “As far as the eye can see.”

It is the article that began to overshadow the empty nest below the dead eye of the cyclopean window in the austere façade, features that might well be to some what Roland Barthes referred to as the punctum—the point(s) to which the eye is drawn, the dot(s) that end up in the question marks we make of art that engages us.

What might that be, “the eye”? Are we to assume that one eye looks out into the world as any other, that the act of seeing is objective, divorced from outlook, range and perspective? Does “the eye”—untrained or jaundiced or unfocused—invariably begin to see things as it seeks what lies beyond perceiving, such as an imaginary bird returning to the nest of our senses?

A few days ago, I suffered an eye infection (come to think of it, the second one since my arrival here in late May), which brought the above picture back to mind. I am not sure just how it happened, but my right eye became alarmingly inflamed, my lid swelled up and my cornea buckled. It is still pounding now, even though there no longer exists any ocular proof of my discomfort. Perhaps, my eyes are aching for a break upon which they now begin to insist.

A day after the incident I ran into a former neighbor of mine. I had seen him only a few days earlier. This time around, he was wearing an eye patch. As I later learned, he had just lost his sight in one eye, yet too distressed to explain or share his grief. What would I do without my vision, imperfect as it has become over the years? I could not help pondering. Suddenly, my insistence on rooting for the ear as a sensory underdog began to sound rather hollow. I want to keep going out in public and see the world before I allow myself to be dragged away by the ear into the privacy of my inner visions . . .