Where Do All the Lonely People Belong?

“All the lonely people/where do they all belong?” sang the Beatles. Where do they belong? At the Club Hedonism or Club Med, at Sandals, at Beaches and if they are past their prime in retirement or assisted living communities? True some old age homes have problems with STD’s, but the question remains, where to put the chronically lonely? Tolstoy said, “All happy people are alike, but all unhappy people are unhappy in their own way.” And that  applies to the lonely people. All those people with tons of family and friends and lovers are alike, but the lonely people are the ones who insist on being different. Perhaps the solution is to put them all in uniforms so that they can at least identify themselves to each other. Maybe they should even be remanded to reeducation camps where they can learn to stop being lonely and different and start l behaving like everyone else. Donald Trump is talking about making America great again, but how can America  be great if it’s full of guilt inducing lonely people intent on marching to the beat of a different drummer? How can we be number #1 when we have all these people reading The Sufferings of Young Werther and feeling they're terminally unique? The growing population of homeless folks addicted to synthetic marijuana pose an even greater challenge, but if we can lick loneliness, we will be on our way to building a more cohesive society filled satisfied customers chanting  Handel's Messiah.  Some of the lonely people are obviously illegal immigrants who arrive without any friends. In their case, we will be doing them a favor by deporting them so they can be with people who they know.

Je Refuse

Emile Zola

There was Zola’s famous defense of Dreyfus, J’accuse, but now a new screed threatens to be the epitaph of an era, Je Refuse. Passed around the way banned Russian poetry or samizdat was during the era of Soviet repression, Je refuse has become a virtual manual for living or not living amongst denizens of New York’s, black attired, downtown, death absorbed underground culture. Just as Goethe’s The Sufferings of Young Werther provoked a rash of copycat suicides during the height of the romantic era, Je Refuse is creating a rash of revulsion at the pretension and hypocrisy of existence amongst would be literati, fashionistas and galleristas. Je Refuse is a collective scream of agony by these refuseniks at the pretension, grandiosity and narcissism that accompanies virtually every creative act. In particular the seemingly innocuous creative act is revealed to have addictive affects on the brain, flooding it as it does with serotonin--accompanied by an ensuring expectation of celebrity and fame. Such serotonin rushes only place the unwitting creative on a treadmill where he or she is constantly forced to produce new “work” which will in turn unleash the same self-centered expectations and hopes that feed what now has become a habit. Je Rufuse is unflinching in its condemnation of arts and creative writing programs which it calls crack houses, depending as they do on an endless supply of hopeful young artists, writers and fashionistas who are willing to sell both their bodies and their souls in order to satisfy their outlandish needs. This growing generation of art whores has grown so large and demanding that there aren’t enough easels in art institutes, cubicles in writing schools, not to speak of galleries or magazines sufficient to publish even a fraction of their work. Such a buyer’s market where supply so far exceeds demand has created an atmosphere of depravity that threatens to boil over into a caldron of resentment, making Black Friday, the day many American are trampled to death on their way into discount stores look like a cake walk. Signed by over 1000  fictional artists, writers and models, on the eve of a fall season of art openings, fashion events and book releases parties, this spoof which exists only in the feverish imagination of a solitary malcontent, takes on the excesses of creativity (weird clothes, eccentric behavior, terminal uniqueness, self-importance) the way Occupy Wall Street has attacked the inequities of capitalism.

Leader of the Pack

photo: Ralph M.  Newman

Margalit Fox’s recent Times obit describes Shadow Morton as being “almost singlehandedly responsible for the wild success of the Shangri-Las, the Queens girl group he introduced and propelled to international stardom”(“Shadow Morton, Songwriter and Producer , Dies at 71,” NYT, 2/15/13).  Morton was responsible for such iconic songs as “Leader of the Pack” and later produced Janis Ian’s “Society’s Child.” There was a haunting quality to Morton’s music. It was a mixture of doo-wop and The Sufferings of Young Werther. The dissonant riffs communicated an infatuation with a world pregnant with impossibility, one in which fantasy is prized over reality, with that which doesn’t exist trumping knowable things. Just like today you have East and West Coast rap. Back in the sixties, The Beach Boys presented the West Coast version of a similar sound in songs like “Don’t Worry Baby.”  The defiant James Dean character in Rebel Without a Cause prefigured Morton’s “Jimmy”in “Leader of the Pack." Fox’s obit pointed out that Morton possessed a “brazen, naive genius” epitomized by the fact that “he played no instrument, could not read music and wrote his songs in his head.”  According to Fox, “The nickname Shadow was bestowed on him by a Brill Building colleague to describe his habitually evanescent presence.” Morton’s bio makes him sound like a creature out of one his own songs, which is not implausible for an artist. Some writers and songwriters describe the life they’ve lived and others prophesy their own epitaphs. Morton didn’t turn out to die as young as the ill-fated James Dean, but he burned out quick, as far as music is concerned, crashing like the  “Leader of the Pack.” “Mr Morton,” Fox went on to say, “who underwent treatment for alcoholism in the mid-l980’s…remained sober to the end of his life” and “had a second career as a designer of golf clubs.”