How To Die

What does the How To Die cover of the current issue of Time says about the demographics of the magazine. This certainly wouldn’t be the cover of Vibe, Maxim, Esquire, Cosmopolitan or even the French magazine Paris Match for which the “companion” of France’s new president, Francois Hollande, Valerie Trierweiler, writes. Time and Newsweek are the two struggling old war horses of American magazine journalism and one can't help asking if the subject of pulling the plug, that's the substance of Joe Klein's cover story ("How To Die: What I Learned from the Last Days of My Mom and Dad," Time, 6/11/12) isn't a double entendre. Who the hell reads these dinosaurs anyway? At very least, that's obviously a question advertisers are apparently asking, when you look at the current waif of an issue weighing in at a mere 66 pages. There are only so many dental offices in America. Time is plainly a magazine whose time has come. Did the editors even realize that the cover logo itself was oxymoronic considering the name of their magazine. Or perhaps they were just trying to recapture the glory of the controversial "Is God Dead" cover of yesteryear (Time, 4/8/66). You don’t want to know “how to die” if you have “time,” though if it’s your time then perhaps you’d want to know. Perhaps the red was just left over from some old cover story about the days of China’s infamous cultural revolution? The magazine business is more competitive than ever with art and editorial directors trying to do something, anything to stanch the flow of losses, but is fire engine red, bleeding to the edges, really the way to go considering the audience that the current issue of Time (and Klein's otherwise heartfelt and insightful piece) is reaching out to. The post menopause, Flomax crowd may be discussing their “arrangements,” but they don’t necessarily want to see blood.

Say It Loud

The Sunday Times Book Review has been making some inspired assignments lately. First there was Clinton on the latest volume in Robert Caro’s biography of LBJ ("Seat of Power," NYT, 5/2/12) and this past Sunday the review assigned Al Sharpton to do James Brown (“Say It Loud,” NYT, 6/1/12). Back in the 70’s Don King had an office on the Upper East Side and Sharpton refereed a little scuffle that was going on between King and Brown right on the street in front of the office—the infamous self-promoter briefly sidelining a promoter out of control. Now Sharpton's cast in the role of another kind of referee in offering a judgment on RJ Smith’s The Life and Music of James Brown. If a review can be deemed any indication of the sensibility of the writer, then the one time walking agent provocateur has aged well. “People were often surprised at his relevance, but James never doubted his own significance, or the fact that he was a historic figure and an undeniably game-changing artist,” Sharpton opines. A few sentences later, he remarks, “James didn’t bring blacks to the mainstream; instead, he brought the mainstream to blacks and made them appreciate and internalize black music and culture themselves.” Those who might not always cotton to Sharpton’s tendentiousness in politics will certainly appreciate his literate punditry. Perhaps Sharpton’s true calling lies in book reviewing! Newsweek once did a survey about how Americans rated varying professions. Criticism was right at the bottom of the list, along with garbage pickup, but Sharpton has pizzazz and charm and rolls off words like a latter day Samuel Johnson. Sharpton’s review of the James Brown bio was a breath of fresh air. Those who follow the workings of TNYTBR will wait with baited breath to see what Sam Tanenhaus comes up with next.

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Rivers (Not Larry)

And Quiet Flows the Don was a novel by the Russian novelist Mikhail Sholokhov. Remember it. You’re likely one of the few. But rivers have been great sources of inspiration both to artists and plain folks. Moses was floated down the Nile and the rest is history. In a similar life saving intervention Romulus and Remus were sent down the Tiber and ended up founding Rome. The River Liffey running through Dublin was a source of inspiration to Joyce and "riverrun" is the first word(s) of Finnegan's Wake.  The Thames inspired Eliot’s Wasteland (“Sweet Thames, run softly, til I end my song"). The Vlatava river, the longest in the Czech Republic, would eventually carry Vaclav Havel's coffin. The Danube is so ubiquitous a source of inspiration that one hesitates, for fear of sounding obvious, to make the citations.  We have the temperamental Arno, whose waters flow down from the gentle hills which surround Florence and there’s the Hudson, without which there'd be no Hudson River Valley or Hudson River School of painting. A New Curve in the Ganges: Mohatma Gandhi’s Study of Hinduism was a book by Arvi Scharma and finally let’s not forget the Mississippi without which we probably never would have heard of a fellow named Mark Twain. 

Sicily Journal VII: Jasmine and Dung

Watercolor by Hallie Cohen

Jasmine and dung—these are the smells of Sicily. The spider’s web of wash lines hanging across the windows of Caltagirone, the vaults hiding the Terme baths under Catania’s Duomo, Scicli’s ancient caves dwellings or Chiafura, the Greco-Roman ruins of Siracusa. Everything in Sicily is layered; all the scents, sounds and sights have their own archeology. Driving into Siracusa or Ragusa’s rush hour traffic, you are rudely awakened from the past. The perfectly appointed landscapes, the picuresque farms with their bales of wheat give way to urbanity, though cows and goats still interrupt traffic on major thoroughfares, leaving their dung behind. This is the land of Etna whose volcano meted out huge destruction in 1693 and is always waiting to unleash its fury in the backyards of Pirandello and Verga. There is nothing as pure as a Proustian Madeleine and no brioche to let them eat. The bread is as hard as the people. You have to be tough to survive in Sicily and there is no escaping its pull as Alberto Lattuada’s l962 film, Mafioso so trenchantly demonstrated. Sicily helped to usher in the Risorgimento. Scholars speak of a Sicilian Risorigimento which paved the way for unification, but Sicilian towns and cities don’t partake of the modernity of Milan, Bologna, Modena or Rome. There’s something archaic and unconscious at work in the Sicilian sensibility. Even as you inhale the perfume in the air, you feel you’re being drugged. Think about it, what really is a Godfather? Isn’t there something almost sacrosanct about the word?

Born to Run

The Times Sports section ran a piece by Barry Bearak entitled “Caballo Blanco's Last Run: The Micah True Story” (NYT, 5/20/12). It has to be one of the longest pieces that’s ever appeared in the Sports Section of the Times and concerns Micah True, born Michael Randall Hickman, the mythic Caballo Blanco of Christopher McDougall’s best seller Born to Run. True was what might be called an extreme athlete in extremis running, according to Bearak, races “two, three or four times as long as marathons,” and often through grueling terrain. Bearak describes how True became fascinated by a tribe called the Raramuri, “loosely translated as the running people. They had retreated into the massive canyons of the Sierra Madre centuries ago to escape the conquistadors.” The Raramuri...ran in sandals and were “barely winded by the arduous climbs…(they) did not possess any locomotive secrets. They simply retained the ‘genetic cellular memory’ most human beings had forgotten.” Bearak quotes True as saying, “Everyone of us used to be a long-distance runner.” Actually Bearak’s piece is a jeremiad of sorts since it recalls True’s disappearance and death from what is suspected to be idiopathic cardiomyopathy, a heart ailment that’s sometimes transmitted genetically. Ironically, though it was good genes True was seeking, it was genes that may have killed him. Another irony of the piece was the way it describes how someone who loved ancient ways and who was comfortable living with indigenous peoples in the wilderness was a compulsive e-mailer who sought out a Wi Fi connection when he “drove east with (his) dog to the Gila Wilderness in southwestern New Mexico, one of his favorite retreats.” What a piece of work is man!

Sicily Journal VI: Mare Nostrum

Photo: Hallie Cohen

Mare Nostrum was what the Latins called the Mediterranean, Our Sea (a term reinvoked by 19th century Italians to associate the idea of unified Italy with the greatness of Rome). Nowhere is this more dramatic than in the natural harbor of Ortygia which still retains its ancient and ragged splendor. Only a few kilometers away lie the ruins of the ancient theater in Sircusa where a Greek Theater Festival is still performed today and where seeds of classic dramaturgy, which lie at the root of Western drama, were later refined by Roman playwrights like Seneca who storyboarded for the likes of Jonson, Marlowe and Shakespeare. But Siracusa’s famed port still miraculously exudes the shape and intimacy of its legendary past. It’s a place that Odysseus could easily have sailed into. Today Ortygia’s neoclassic Hotel des Etrangers is one of the charming tourist redoubts weary travellers retreat to for its terraced view of both the sea and the nearby squares whose churches and baroque architecture reflect the advent of Christendom and the great struggle of the Risorgimento. It’s astonishing to realize how much bigger the so called "Western World" has become. Sicily was once one of the great trading centers and the harbor of Ortygia lay at the seat of what would have been the equivalent of a combination of the Chicago Commodities market and the New York Stock Exchange rolled into one—during the thousand years of Rome that is.

Sicily Journal V: Gelato

Photo: Hallie Cohen

Only in Rome can you get out of the Metro at Piazza Dante and be told to take a right on Machivelli (by the way the subway stop is Vittorio Emanuele). You might then go to Via Petrarca 3 and eat at Trattoria da Danilo. Take another right out of the restaurant and then take your third right and you will come to a half block long store front on Via Principe Eugenio with Palazzo del Freddo inscribed at the top and then Gelateria Giovanni Fassi, under which is Roma, Seoul, Shanghai, and above in English “1880, the oldest Italian Gelato factory.” The Sicilian Procopio die Coltelli was reputedly one of the first purveyors of this manna for ice cream lovers , but Fassi's expansion is truly globalization for a gelateria that was started in l907! You get two scoops with panna, the Italian whipped cream for 3 Euros, which is cheap by Italian gelato standards. Walking back to Dante to get the Metro, you pass stops named Flaminia, Lepanto and Ottavian. The Rome Metro is a fairly new invention, but those stops have could have easily been the names of characters in some Shakespeare play, say you took a right or left at Seneca before reaching Dante and Machiavelli