WELCOME!
DON’T WORRY-BE HAPPY
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
John William Tuohy is a writer who lives in Washington DC. He holds an MFA in writing from Lindenwood University.
He is the author of No Time to Say Goodbye: Memoirs of a Life in Foster Care and Short Stories from a Small Town. He is also the author of numerous non-fiction on the history of organized crime including the ground break biography of bootlegger Roger Tuohy "When Capone's Mob Murdered Touhy" and "Guns and Glamour: A History of Organized Crime in Chicago."
His non-fiction crime short stories have appeared in The New Criminologist, American Mafia and other publications. John won the City of Chicago's Celtic Playfest for his work The Hannigan's of Beverly, and his short story fiction work, Karma Finds Franny Glass, appeared in AdmitTwo Magazine in October of 2008.
His play, Cyberdate.Com, was chosen for a public performance at the Actors Chapel in Manhattan in February of 2007 as part of the groups Reading Series for New York project. In June of 2008, the play won the Virginia Theater of The First Amendment Award for best new play.
Contact John:
MYWRITERSSITE.BLOGSPOT.COM
JWTUOHY95@GMAIL.COM
I'm a big big Fan of Bukowski
THE BEAT POETS
Beat
poetry evolved during the 1940s in both New York City and on the west coast,
although San Francisco became the heart of the movement in the early 1950s. The
end of World War II left poets like Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Lawrence
Ferlinghetti and Gregory Corso questioning mainstream politics and culture. A
Brief Guide to the Beat Poets | Academy of American Poets https://www.poets.org/poetsorg
at's in a name? That which we
call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.
Visit
our Shakespeare Blog at the address below
http://shakespeareinamericanenglish.blogspot.com/
HERE'S PLEASANT POEM FOR YOU TO ENJOY................
Quietly
by
Kenneth Rexroth
Quietly
Lying here quietly beside you,
My cheek against your firm, quiet thighs,
The calm music of Boccherini
Washing over us in the quiet,
As the sun leaves the housetops and goes
Out over the Pacific, quiet-
So quiet the sun moves beyond us,
So quiet as the sun always goes,
So quiet, our bodies, worn with the
Times and the penances of love, our
Brains curled, quiet in their shells, dormant,
Our hearts slow, quiet, reliable
In their interlocked rhythms, the pulse
In your thigh caressing my cheek. Quiet.
Kenneth Charles Marion Rexroth
(December 22, 1905 – June 6, 1982) was an American poet, translator and
critical essayist. He is regarded as a central figure in the San Francisco
Renaissance, and paved the groundwork for the movement. Although he did not
consider himself to be a Beat poet, and disliked the association, he was dubbed
the "Father of the Beats" by Time Magazine. He was among the first
poets in the United States to explore traditional Japanese poetic forms such as
haiku. He was also a prolific reader of Chinese literature.
I
Sing the Body Electric
“Be not ashamed women…You are the gates of the body, and you
are the gates of the soul.”
Leaves
of Grass
“Not I, nor anyone else can travel that road for you.
You must travel it by yourself.
It is not far. It is within reach.
Perhaps you have been on it since you were born, and did not
know.
Perhaps it is everywhere - on water and land.”
“Stranger, if you passing meet me and desire to speak to me,
why should you not speak to me? And why should I not speak to you?
“Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself;
I am large — I contain multitudes.”
“Resist much, obey
little.”
“This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the
animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the
stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue
not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off
your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely
with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of
families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your
ice, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book,
dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great
poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines
of its lips and face and between lashes of your eyes and in every motion and
joint of your body…”
“I am not to speak to you,
I am to think of you
when I sit alone or wake at night alone,
I am to wait, I do not doubt I am to meet you again,
I am to see to it that I do not lose you.”
“I swear I will never
mention love or death inside a house, And I swear I never will translate myself
at all, only to him or her who privately stays with me in the open air.”
“That you are here—that life exists, and identity;
That the powerful play goes on, and you will contribute a
verse.”
“Clear and sweet is my soul, and clear and sweet is all that
is not my soul.”
“…what is that you express in your eyes? It seems to me more
than all the print I have read in my life.”
“I celebrate myself, and sing
myself, and what I assume you shall assume; For every atom belonging to me as
good belongs to you. The atmosphere is not a perfume, it has no taste of the
distillation, it is odorless, It is for my mouth forever, I am in love with it,
I will go to the bank by the wood and become undisguised and naked. I am mad
for it to be in contact with me.The smoke of my own breath, echoes, ripples,
buzzed whispers, love-root, silk-thread, crotch and vine. My respiration and
inspiration, the beating of my heart, the passing of blood and air through my
lungs, the sniff of green leaves and dry leaves, and of the shore and
dark-colored sea-rocks, and of hay in the barn, the sound of the belched words
of my voice loosed to the eddies of the wind, a few light kisses, a few
embraces, a reaching around of arms, the play of shine and shade on the trees
as the supple boughs wag. Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess
the origin of all poems; You shall possess the good of the earth and sun,
(there are millions of suns left,), you shall no longer take things at second
or third hand, nor look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres
in books; You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me:
You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self.”
“This is what you shall do; Love
the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that
asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others,
hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the
people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number
of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with
the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of
every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church
or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh
shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in
the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and
in every motion and joint of your body.”
Were you thinking that those were the words—
those upright lines? those curves, angles, dots?
No, those are not the words—the substantial words
are in the ground and sea,
They are in the air—they are in you.
Were you thinking that those were the words—
those delicious sounds out of your friends’
mouths?
No, the real words are more delicious than they.
Human bodies are words, myriads of words;
In the best poems re-appears the body, man’s or wo-
man’s, well-shaped, natural, gay,
Every part able, active, receptive, without shame or
the need of shame.”
“Touch me, touch the
palm of your hand to my body as I pass,
Be not afraid of my body.”
When
I heard the Learn’d Astronomer
“When I heard the learn’d astronomer;
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before
me;
When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide,
and measure them;
When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with
much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;
Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.”
A
Clear Midnight
This is thy hour O Soul, thy free flight into the wordless,
Away from books, away from art, the day erased, the lesson
done,
Thee fully forth emerging, silent, gazing, pondering the
themes thou lovest best.
John
Steinbeck
“I saw in their eyes something I was to see
over and over in every part of the nation- a burning desire to go, to move, to
get under way, anyplace, away from any Here. They spoke quietly of how they
wanted to go someday, to move about, free and unanchored, not toward something
but away from something. I saw this look and heard this yearning everywhere in
every states I visited. Nearly every American hungers to move.”
“Once a journey is designed,
equipped, and put in process; a new factor enters and takes over. A trip, a
safari, an exploration, is an entity, different from all other journeys. It has
personality, temperament, individuality, uniqueness. A journey is a person in
itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are
fruitless. We find after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip
takes us. Tour masters, schedules, reservations, brassbound and inevitable,
dash themselves to wreckage on the personality on the trip. Only when this is
recognized can the blown-in-the-glass bum relax and go along with it. Only then
do the frustrations fall away. In this a journey is like marriage. The certain
way to be wrong is to think you control it.”
“I was born lost and take no
pleasure in being found.”
“In long-range planning for a trip, I think
there is a private conviction that it won’t happen. As the day approached, my
warm bed and comfortable house grew increasingly desirable…To give these up for
three months for the terrors of the uncomfortable and unknowns seemed crazy. I
didn’t want to go. Something had to happen to forbid my going, but it didn’t.”
“When I was very young and the urge to be
someplace else was on me, I was assured by the mature people that maturity
would cure this itch. When years described me as mature, the remedy prescribed
was middle age. In my middle age I was assured that the greater age would calm
my fever… nothing has worked… I fear the disease is incurable.”
“A sad soul can kill
you quicker, far quicker, than a germ.”
All conservatives are such from
personal defects. They have been effeminated by position or nature born halt
and blind through luxury of their parents and can Only like invalids act On the
defensive.
300
quotes from Emerson
To view more Emerson quotes or
read a life background on Emerson please visit the books blog spot. We update
the blog bi-monthly emersonsaidit.blogspot.com
MISH MOSH..........................................
Mish Mash: noun \ˈmish-ËŒmash, -ËŒmäsh\ A : hodgepodge, jumble “The painting was just a mishmash of colors and abstract shapes as far as we could tell”. Origin Middle English & Yiddish; Middle English mysse masche, perhaps reduplication of mash mash; Yiddish mish-mash, perhaps reduplication of mishn to mix. First Known Use: 15th century
Two survivors of the Battle of Gettysburg at the 50th anniversary reunion, July 1913.
What Love is…..
Your task is not to seek for
love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you
have built against it. Rumi
HERE'S MY
LATEST BOOKS.....
This is a book of short stories taken from
the things I saw and heard in my childhood in the factory town of Ansonia in
southwestern Connecticut.
Most of these stories, or as true as I recall
them because I witnessed these events many years ago through the eyes of child
and are retold to you now with the pen and hindsight of an older man. The only
exception is the story Beat Time which is based on the
disappearance of Beat poet Lew Welch. Decades before I knew who Welch was, I
was told that he had made his from California to New Haven, Connecticut, where
was an alcoholic living in a mission. The notion fascinated me and I filed it
away but never forgot it.
The collected stories are loosely modeled
around Joyce’s novel, Dubliners (I also borrowed from the
novels character and place names. Ivy Day, my character in “Local Orphan is
Hero” is also the name of chapter in Dubliners, etc.) and like
Joyce I wanted to write about my people, the people I knew as a child, the
working class in small town America and I wanted to give a complete view of
them as well. As a result the stories are about the divorced, Gays, black
people, the working poor, the middle class, the lost and the found, the
contented and the discontented.
Conversely many of the stories in this book
are about starting life over again as a result of suicide (The Hanging
Party, Small Town Tragedy, Beat Time) or from a near death experience (Anna
Bell Lee and the Charge of the Light Brigade, A Brief Summer) and natural
occurring death. (The Best Laid Plans, The Winter Years, Balanced and Serene)
With the exception of Jesus Loves
Shaqunda, in each story there is a rebirth from the death. (Shaqunda is
reported as having died of pneumonia in The Winter Years)
Sal, the desperate and depressed divorcee
in Things Change, changes his life in Lunch Hour when
asks the waitress for a date and she accepts. (Which we learn in Closing Time,
the last story in the book) In The Arranged Time, Thisby is given
the option of change and whether she takes it or, we don’t know. The death of
Greta’s husband in A Matter of Time has led her to the diner
and into the waiting arms of the outgoing and loveable Gabe.
Although the book is based on three sets of
time (breakfast, lunch and dinner) and the diner is opened in the early morning
and closed at night, time stands still inside the Diner. The hour on the big
clock on the wall never changes time and much like my memories of that place, everything
remains the same.
http://www.amazon.com/Short-Stories-Small-William-Tuohy/dp/1517270456/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1444164878&sr=1-1&keywords=short+stories+from+a+small+town
REVIEWS FOR "SHORT STORIES FROM A SMALL
TOWN"
The
Valley Lives
By Marion Marchetto, author of The
Bridgewater Chronicles on October 15, 2015
Short Stores from a Small Town is set in The
Valley (known to outsiders as The Lower Naugatuck Valley) in Connecticut. While
the short stories are contemporary they provide insight into the timeless
qualities of an Industrial Era community and the values and morals of the
people who live there. Some are first or second generation Americans, some are
transplants, yet each takes on the mantle of Valleyite and wears it proudly. It
isn't easy for an author to take the reader on a journey down memory lane and
involve the reader in the life stories of a group of seemingly unrelated
characters. I say seemingly because by book's end the reader will realize that
he/she has done more than meet a group of loosely related characters.
We meet all of the characters during a
one-day time period as each of them finds their way to the Valley Diner on a
rainy autumn day. From our first meeting with Angel, the educationally
challenged man who opens and closes the diner, to our farewell for the day to
the young waitress whose smile hides her despair we meet a cross section of the
Valley population. Rich, poor, ambitious, and not so ambitious, each life
proves that there is more to it beneath the surface. And the one thing that
binds these lives together is The Valley itself. Not so much a place (or a
memory) but an almost palpable living thing that becomes a part of its
inhabitants.
Let me be the first the congratulate author
John William Tuohy on a job well done. He has evoked the heart of The Valley
and in doing so brought to life the fabric that Valleyites wear as a mantle of
pride. While set in a specific region of the country, the stories that unfold
within the pages of this slim volume are similar to those that live in many a
small town from coast to coast.
By Sandra Mendyk
Just read "Short Stories from a Small
Town," and couldn't put it down! Like Mr. Tuohy's other books I read, they
keep your interest, especially if you're from a small town and can relate to
the lives of the people he writes about. I recommend this book for anyone
interested in human interest stories. His characters all have a central place
where the stories take place--a diner--and come from different walks of life and
wrestle with different problems of everyday life. Enjoyable and thoughtful.
I loved how the author wrote about "his
people"
By kathee
A touching thoughtful book. I loved how the
author wrote about "his people", the people he knew as a child from
his town. It is based on sets of time in the local diner, breakfast , lunch and
dinner, but time stands still ... Highly recommend !
WONDERFUL book, I loved it!
By John M. Cribbins
What wonderful stories...I just loved this
book.... It is great how it is written following, breakfast, lunch, dinner, at
a diner. Great characters.... I just loved it....
DON'T YOU JUST LOVE POP ART?
Robert Indiana
CYBERDATE
An award winning full length
play.
"Cyberdate.Com
is the story of six ordinary people in search of romance, friendship and love
and find it in very extraordinary ways. Based on the real life experiences of
the authors misadventures with on line dating, Cyber date is a bittersweet
story that will make you laugh, cry and want to fall in love again."
Ellis McKay
Cyberdate.Com,
was chosen for a public at the Actors Chapel in Manhattan in February of 2007
as part of the groups Reading Series for New York project. In June of 2008, the
play won the Virginia Theater of The First Amendment Award for best new play.
The play was also given a full reading at The Frederick Playhouse in Maryland
in March of 2007.
OTHER
PLAYS BY JOHN WILLIAM TUOHY............................
The CIA Puts Hundreds of Declassified Documents about UFO Sightings Online
Let down by the X-Files reboot? Maybe you never really dug the whole alien conspiracy thing with the bees and the black sludge in the first place. Maybe you didn’t need another convoluted, inscrutable, bonkers plotline. Maybe you wanted the truth. It’s out there. The CIA might know where it is.
In 1978, the agency known in some circles for masterminding nearly every world event since its inception declassified a vast number of files, “hundreds of documents… detailing the Agency’s investigations into Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOS). The documents date primarily from the late 1940s and 1950s.”
And since this past January the public has had full and open access to all of those documents on the internet. To celebrate the seriousness of this archive’s widespread availability, the Agency made two lists of five different documents each, to “highlight a few documents both skeptics and believers will find interesting.”
Who do you think they picked for their model skeptic and believer? “The truth is out there,” as the CIA is apparently fond of saying, “click on the links to find it.”
The Mulder and Scully lists serve as lighthearted introductions to the sometimes bewildering array of documents in the CIA’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) Electronic Reading Room, which hosts those several hundred reports, memos, etc., sometimes redacted or written in Agency code.
Then, of course, there’s this precious eyewitness testimony, from Mulder’s list, taken from a man in East Germany in 1952:
Now, the side of the object on which the holes had been opened began to glitter. Its color seemed green but later turned to red. At the same time I began to hear a slight hum. While the brightness and hum increased, the conical tower began to slide down into the center of the object. The whole object then began to rise slowly from the ground and rotate like a top.
If you’re seeing a description from a classic sci-fi radio drama or pulp magazine, read on. The craft becomes “surrounded by a ring of flames,” rises, and flies away. And, of course, the man had earlier witnessed men “dressed in some shiny metallic clothing.” It all sounds very silly except that many other unrelated people in the small town reported seeing something very strange in the sky that night. One witnesses’ overactive imagination does not invalidate the testimony of the others.
Or does it?
We’ve had many sightings of UFOs from astronauts and pilots in the last few decades (mostly debunked), and ordinary people on the ground have never stopped seeing lights in the sky. So we might wonder why all of the CIA documents on the site come from the 1960s and before? Is this a sign of increased activity in the years after the supposed Roswell event? Perhaps the alien conspiracy’s feverish, devious start?
Or, as GeekWire writes, was the CIA “worried about the potential threat that UFOs posed to national security… they assumed that the UFOs might be part of a Soviet weapons test program.” With the gradual warming of relations, then glasnost, the spies lost interest… (Or…?) … but we might wonder why the Agency used the new X-Files debut to draw attention to itself. Your conspiracy theory is probably as good as any other.
If CIA did stop investigating alien invasions, you don’t have to. The Agency has left it in your capable hands, publishing “10 Tips When Investigating a Flying Saucer” to guide you in your quest for the truth. Be warned: it’s a very skeptic-friendly set of guidelines; one that—were everyone to follow it—might virtually eliminate every reported UFO sighting. Curious that. What are they hiding?
Find the list below, and see the complete explanation of each tip (such times we live in) at the CIA’s website.
1. Establish a group to investigate and evaluate sightings
2. Determine the objectives of your investigation
3. Consult with experts
4. Create a reporting system to organize incoming cases
5. Eliminate false positives
6. Develop methodology to identify aircraft and other aerial phenomena often mistaken for UFOs
7. Examine witness documentation
8. Conduct controlled experiments
9. Gather and test physical and forensic evidence
10. Discourage false reporting
Again, to dig deeper into the CIA’s fascinating archive of UFO sightings, visit its FOIA UFO collection. True believers may want to know more, and they can, if they’re willing to follow the Byzantine research instructions on the UFO collection’s main page to find an Agency article about the “CIA’s Role in the Study of UFOs, 1947-1990.” Or they could just click here.
Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Why Did the Mayan Civilization Collapse? A New Study Points to Deforestation and Climate Change
A severe drought, exacerbated by widespread logging, appears to have triggered the mysterious Mayan demise
By Joseph Stromberg
SMITHSONIAN.COM
It’s long been one of ancient history’s most intriguing mysteries: Why did the Maya, a remarkably sophisticated civilization made up of more than 19 million people, suddenly collapse sometime during the 8th or 9th centuries? Although the Mayan people never entirely disappeared—their descendants still live across Central America—dozens of core urban areas in the lowlands of the Yucatan peninsula, such as Tikal, went from bustling cities to abandoned ruins over the course of roughly a hundred years.
Scholars and laypeople have proposed countless theories accounting for the collapse, ranging from the plausible (overhunting, foreign invasion, peasant revolt) to the absurd (alien invasion, supernatural forces). In his 2005 book Collapse, though, Jared Diamond put forth a different sort of theory—that a prolonged drought, exacerbated by ill-advised deforestation, forced Mayan populations to abandon their cities. That hypothesis has finally been put to the test with archaeological evidence and environmental data and the results published this week in a pair of studies.
In the first study, published Tuesday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers from Arizona State University analyzed archaeological data from across the Yucatan to reach a better understanding of the environmental conditions when the area was abandoned. Around this time, they found, severe reductions in rainfall were coupled with an rapid rate of deforestation, as the Mayans burned and chopped down more and more forest to clear land for agriculture. Interestingly, they also required massive amounts of wood to fuel the fires that cooked the lime plaster for their elaborate constructions—experts estimate it would have taken 20 trees to produce a single square meter of cityscape.
The other study, published by researchers from Columbia University and elsewhere this week in Geophysical Research Letters, applied quantitative data to these trends. Using population records and measurements from current forested and cleared lands in the region, they constructed a computer model of deforestation in the Yucatan and ran simulations to see how this would have affected rainfall.
Because cleared land absorbs less solar radiation, less water evaporates from its surface, making clouds and rainfall more scarce. As a result, the rapid deforestation exacerbated an already severe drought—in the simulation, deforestation reduced precipitation by five to 15 percent and was responsible for 60 percent of the total drying that occurred over the course of a century as the Mayan civilization collapsed. The lack of forest cover also contributed to erosion and soil depletion.
In a time of unprecedented population density, this combination of factors was likely catastrophic. Crops failed, especially because the droughts occurred disproportionately during the summer growing season. Coincidentally, trade shifted from overland routes, which crossed the heart of the lowland, to sea-based voyages, moving around the perimeter of the peninsula.
Since the traditional elite relied largely upon this trade—along with annual crop surpluses—to build wealth, they were sapped of much of their power. This forced peasants and craftsmen into making a critical choice, perhaps necessary to escape starvation: abandoning the lowlands. The results are the ornate ruins that stretch across the peninsula today.
The collapse is especially intriguing because it seemingly occurred at “a time in which developed a sophisticated understanding of their environment, built and sustained intensive production and water systems and withstood at least two long-term episodes of aridity,” says B.L. Turner, the lead author of the ASU study. In other words, the Maya were no fools. They knew their environment and how to survive within it—and still they continued deforesting at a rapid pace, until the local environment was unable to sustain their society.
One of the lessons of these complementary studies, says climate modelerRobert Oglesby of the University of Nebraska, who worked on the second paper, is that our reshaping of the environment can often have unintended consequences—and we may not have any idea of what they are until it’s too late. For a present-day example, we can even look to another region where the ancient Maya lived, Guatemala, which is undergoing rapid deforestation. “There’s a tremendous amount of change going on in Guatemala,” said Oglesby. “They may be that much more vulnerable to a severe drought.”
THE ART AND BEAUTY OF BALLET
John Vaccaro, Whose Playhouse of the Ridiculous Gave Anarchy a Stage, Dies at 86
By BRUCE WEBERAUG. 11, 2016
John Vaccaro, sitting, directed “Heaven Grand in Amber Orbit” (1969). The rock musical starred Ruby Lynn Reyner, left, in the title role, and Francis Dudley, who played a sideshow barker.CreditVernon L. Smith/Scope
John Vaccaro, a theater iconoclast whose avant-garde troupe, known as Playhouse of the Ridiculous, helped establish Off Off Broadway as a source of antic creativity and thumb-in-the-eye subversion of social and artistic conventions, died on Aug. 7 in Manhattan. He was 86.
The cause was complications after surgery for an aneurysm, said his sister, Barbara, his only immediate survivor.
A writer and occasional performer but mostly a director, Mr. Vaccaro made dozens of theater pieces of surpassing zaniness and barely controlled anarchy.
In his heyday, from the mid-1960s into the 1980s, he and his compatriots created what became known as ridiculous theater, borrowing (and twisting) plots from legend and literature and old movies and sending up political hypocrisy, social politesse and behavioral and sexual norms. Their motto, usually attributed to the writer Ronald Tavel, declared, “We have passed beyond the Absurd: Our position is absolutely preposterous.”
Playhouse of the Ridiculous staged productions, often musicals, in small theaters in Midtown and Downtown, including many in the Off Off Broadway hothouse La MaMa Experimental Theater Club.
The troupe shared a social scene with the denizens of the Factory, Andy Warhol’s studio — the back room at Max’s Kansas City, a once well-known nightclub on Park Avenue South just north of Union Square, was a shared hangout — and Mr. Vaccaro’s populous casts, many of them amateur performers, often included members of Warhol’s coterie.
Heavy on the glitter and makeup, broadly comic and shamelessly vulgar, sexually confrontational and terribly, terribly impolite, Playhouse productions bridged the wanly declarative, amused subversion of the ’60s Warholian aesthetic to the emergent glitter-glam and punk anger of the ’70s.
In effect, they created a genre of their own. At one point The New York Times described it as “the nonplay that is a pastiche of lines from Shakespeare, Aeschylus, 1930s movies, grand opera, TV commercials and comic books, in no apparent order.”
In explaining his aesthetic, Mr. Vaccaro often said that conventional theater was timid and dishonest in its unwillingness to depict its actual subjects — sex, for instance — and in its dependence on decorum and euphemism. By and large, his effusive works sought to reveal the uncensored chaos that exists in people’s minds. In a 1970 interview in Cue magazine, he described his company and his working method.
“My people are like what they do onstage in real life,” he told the magazine. “Few of them are different. They’re not actors. Few have had any training, and with those, I’ve had to destroy their grammar-school ideas of acting.
“What we’re doing I really couldn’t tell you.” he continued. “How it works between us I don’t know. I say things and they do them. But it doesn’t stop there. I give a detail and they build up a whole history behind the detail. Watch one of the shows three or four times; you’ll see it.”
One of the company’s shows, “Heaven Grand in Amber Orbit,” was a rock musical set in a bordello whose characters included a thalidomide baby, female conjoined triplets and a stump-armed princess. Jack Kroll of Newsweek described it in 1969 as “the wildest and in some ways the best show in New York” — “an explosion of pure theatrical energy unconfined by any effete ideas of form, content, structure or even rationality.”
Other productions were “Conquest of the Universe,” a frenetic intergalactic comedy by Charles Ludlam, who would eventually feud with Mr. Vaccaro and create a parallel, better-known, troupe, the Ridiculous Theatrical Company; “The Magic Show of Dr. Magico,” a Scheherezade-like parade of graphically erotic tales played against sophisticated original music and dancing; “Persia, a Desert Cheapie,” a cartoonish spoof of Arabian Nights movies; and “The Nutcracker in the Land of Nuts,” written by Mr. Tavel and directed by Mr. Vaccaro, a wicked Christmas-season alternative to the beloved Tchaikovsky ballet featuring a seven-headed mouse monster and other freakish creatures.
“As one of the farthest outposts of the New Theater, Vaccaro’s troupe affects people that way: They laugh themselves silly — and hate themselves afterward,” the critic and theater scholar Glenn Loney wrote in an introduction to the Cue interview. “That’s Vaccaro’s way of showing them how grotesque he thinks our lives have become.”
John Joseph Vaccaro was born in Steubenville, Ohio, on Dec. 6, 1929. His parents were Italian immigrants — Salvatore Vaccaro and Mary Gelato, whose names were changed when they arrived in the United States to Samuel Vaccaro and Mary Gillette. Sam Vaccaro owned a grocery and a tire shop. By his own account, John was confused by a Roman Catholic upbringing in “a town with nine blocks of whorehouses.”
He became a drug addict at 15, he said, and remained one until his mid-20s. Later, after a mental breakdown, he spent time in an institution, where, he told The Times in 1969, he realized the positive results of confronting “all the psychological things out in the open.”
He nonetheless served in the Navy and graduated from Ohio State University with a degree in English before moving to New York City, where he earned a living as an appraiser of rare books, a vocation he gave up to start working in the theater.
“When I first went into analysis, I was afraid to tell the psychiatrist all the things in my mind, things I thought no one had ever done,” he told Cue. “When I trusted him enough and finally told him, he was bored.He’d heard it all before. I was not unique! And suddenly I felt very human. Another burden, another monkey got off my back.
“I’m very free. And that’s the theme in all our plays: Freedom. Total freedom.”
HERE'S SOME NICE ART FOR YOU TO LOOK AT....ENJOY!
Young Girl and her Kitten reading by a Fireside - James Pelham 1800-1874
Winter, Vilhelms Purvītis
After all, I think that a poet
has maybe five or six poems to write and not more than that. He’s trying his
hand at rewriting them from different angles and perhaps with different plots
and in different ages and different characters, but the poems are essentially
and innerly the same. Jorge Luis Borges, interviewed in The Art
of Fiction No. 39
So, my grandfather was a baker
in the army. Yeah, he went into the war
… all buns glazing
… all buns glazing
Every night, let go of your
failures and successes, gains and losses. Carry nothing over. Begin each new
day at the beginning. From Conversations with Plato
The purpose of literature is to
turn blood into ink. T.S Eliot
I know I am but summer to your
heart, and not the full four seasons of the year. Edna St. Vincent Millay
Photographs I’ve taken
I live in Shepherdstown West Virginia,
the coolest art town in the US
Sculpture this and Sculpture that
Family Portrait 1995, glazed ceramic. Viola Frey,
David’s Ankles: How Imperfections Could Bring
Down the World’s Most Perfect Statue
My obsession with the flaws, reproductions and potential
collapse of Michelangelo’s masterpiece.
By SAM ANDERSONAUG. 17, 2016
Photo illustration by Maurizio Cattelan for The New York Times
Last
summer, early in the morning, I stood out in the main square of Florence to
watch the tourists come in. It was quiet. A Zamboni-like street cleaner drove
its rounds, leaving wet circles on the paving stones. A vendor unpacked
tarp-wrapped souvenirs from the back of his white van. When the crowds began to
arrive — tour groups from Japan, China, Germany, Spain — they seemed less like
people than like weather. They surged into the square, pooling and drifting.
They clicked selfies in front of the statues. A small herd of Segways rolled
past, one rider singing fake opera at the top of his lungs. I watched a tour
group from Arizona (clearly identifiable by their neck badges) approach the
white figure of Michelangelo’s David, towering on a pedestal in front of City
Hall. One of the tourists pointed to it and said, in a tone of amused contempt:
“It’s the most famous statue in the world, and they just leave it outside. No
big deal — just hose off the pigeon crap.”
The
implication was clear: Italy was a backward country, incapable of protecting
its cultural treasures. To be fair, the tourist was not the first person to
make this accusation. In his history “The Italians,” Luigi Barzini writes that
one of the basic pleasures Italy reliably provides for visitors is “that of
feeling morally superior to the natives.” I sometimes felt this pleasure
myself. The inefficiency of the Italian bureaucracy, whether selling you a
postage stamp or fixing a street, was often marvelous to behold. And indeed,
the statue the man was pointing at had obviously suffered from standing
outside: The marble was striped with dirt.
But
the tourist was, in one very important respect, wrong.
He
was pointing not at the actual David but at a full-scale marble replica.
Michelangelo’s real statue did once stand in this spot, but it was moved, for
its own protection, 143 years ago. The original is now in a museum across town,
shielded from the elements, perfectly safe.
Or
at least that’s how we like to think of it. We are conditioned to believe that
art is safe, beyond the reach of the grimy world. We don’t hang the Mona Lisa
next to an archery range. We put her in a fortress: walls, checkpoints, lasers,
guards, bulletproof glass. There are scholars, textbooks, posters — a whole
collective mythology suggesting that the work will live forever. But safety is
largely an illusion, and permanence a fiction. Empires hemorrhage wealth, bombs
fall on cities, religious radicals decimate ancient temples. Destruction
happens in any number of ways, for any number of reasons, at any number of
speeds — and it will happen, and no amount of reverence will stop it.
Few
humans on earth know this melancholy truth better than the citizens of
Florence. They are born into a profound intimacy with decay. The city was the
epicenter of the Renaissance — home to such art-history superheroes as Giotto,
Brunelleschi, Donatello, Cellini and Leonardo da Vinci — and the relics of that
period have been under siege, more or less constantly, ever since. In 1497, the
fanatical monk Savonarola sent his followers door to door to gather the city’s
nonreligious art, books, clothing, musical instruments, then piled it all 50
feet high in the central square and set it on fire: the infamous Bonfire of the
Vanities. (The spectacle was such a success that he repeated it the following
year.) In 1895, earthquakes shook Florence so hard that citizens, fearing
aftershocks, spent the night sleeping out in the streets. The 20th century
brought Nazis and Mafia car bombs. This November will mark the 50th anniversary
of the great Florentine flood of 1966, an inundation that overtook much of the
city center, killing dozens of people and destroying old masterpieces.
Today,
the perpetual engine of Florentine destruction seems only to be getting bolder.
Its latest target is its most ambitious yet: the mascot of the Renaissance,
shining ideal of the human form, one of the most celebrated artworks in this or
any other city — Michelangelo’s David.
The
trouble is the David’s ankles. They are cracked. Italians first discovered this
weakness back in the 19th century, and modern scientists have mapped the cracks
extensively, but until recently no one claimed to know just how enfeebled the
ankles might be. This changed in 2014, when a team of Italian geoscientists
published a paper called “Modeling the Failure Mechanisms of Michelangelo’s
David Through Small-Scale Centrifuge Experiments.” That dry title concealed a
terrifying story. The paper describes an experiment designed to measure, in a
novel way, the weakness in the David’s ankles: by creating a small army of tiny
David replicas and spinning them in a centrifuge, at various angles, to
simulate different levels of real-world stress. What the researchers found was
grim. If the David were to be tilted 15 degrees, his ankles would fail.
The
seed of the problem is a tiny imperfection in the statue’s design. The center
of gravity in the base doesn’t align with the center of gravity in the figure
itself; when the base is level, in other words, the David’s body is slightly
off-balance. There is, as the article nicely puts it, “an eccentricity of the
loads.” This places extra pressure on the David’s narrowest part: his ankles.
As long as the statue is perfectly upright, the eccentricity of the loads is
tolerable. But there is very little margin for error. If you tilt the base even
slightly, the stress on the ankles sharply increases.
Now
it just so happens that, for a very long time, before he was moved into his
protective museum, the David was leaning slightly. No one is sure exactly why.
He stood, for more than 300 years, in the spot where I saw the tourist from
Arizona scoff at the dirty replica. Popular legend says the lean was caused by
a thunderclap in 1511, part of a violent storm that Florentines interpreted as
a bad political omen, but more likely it was a result of the ground shifting
slightly, for regular ground-shifting reasons — something like the force that
tilts the famous tower of Pisa or the one that sucks constantly at the city of
Venice.
For
several hundred years, the David leaned at an angle of several degrees. That
doesn’t sound like much, but when you’re dealing with six tons bearing down
every second of every minute of every day of every year of every century, it is
plenty. Hairline fractures worked their way slowly through the stone. The right
leg is significantly worse than the left. As the tilt of the statue increases,
the stress will move higher and higher up that leg, until — at the moment of
failure — it will break off just below the knee.
But
what would make the David tilt? The big fear is tremors, tremors of all kinds:
traffic rumbling, the nearby construction of a high-speed train tunnel, the
steady concussion of tourists’ feet and — most of all — earthquakes. Florence
sits near several active fault lines, and every so often the city takes a
seismic hit. In December 2014, a rash of 250 earthquakes rattled the
countryside around Florence. Most were minor, and none hit the city directly,
but still — Florentines could feel the motion.
My
mind could not stop imagining it. An earthquake hits the center of Florence.
Liquid waves roll under the rigid city: The church bells ring out of time,
terra cotta tiles rain down from the Renaissance rooftops, priceless paintings
rattle off the walls of the Uffizi. Meanwhile, inside the Accademia Gallery,
the David’s pedestal begins to tilt. Slightly at first, just enough to shift
the statue’s gaze, so that he looks not at his old enemy anymore — the implied
Goliath off in the distance — but at a new one: the floor he’s been standing on
for 134 years.
As
the ground continues to roll, the David’s tilt accelerates. Five degrees, six
degrees, seven, eight, nine. Gravity begins to act not just on the top of the
David’s head but on his back, pushing him forward. Ten degrees, 11, 12.
Finally,
the compromised ankles reach their angle of maximum stress. They begin to slide
along the old microfracture faults — an earthquake within the earthquake — and
the David’s legs and ankles are crushed by the weight of the body above. He
begins to truly fall.
The
first thing to hit the floor is his bent left elbow, the arm that holds the
heroic sling, and it bursts along the lines of its previous breaks, old scars
left over from an incident in the 16th century involving an unruly mob and a
bench. Then the rest of the marble will meet the floor, and the physics from
there will be fast and simple: force, resistance, the brittleness of calcite
crystals, the shearing of microscopic grains along the axes on which they
align. Michelangelo’s David will explode.
When
I first saw the David in person, the only word that came to mind was “perfect.”
Why hadn’t anyone ever told me he was perfect? I was 20 years old, exhausted,
unwashed, traveling for the first time ever, ignorant of almost everything
worth knowing. “Perfect,” I know now, is not a terribly original response to
the statue, nor a very precise one, but in that moment it filled my mind. It
felt like a revolution — urgent, deep, vital, true.
Standing
in front of the David was, by far, the most powerful experience I had ever had with
a work of art. The statue is gigantic: 17 feet tall, three times the size of an
actual man, the height of a mature giraffe — another fact that no one had ever
told me. I had always assumed, based on the images, that the David was
life-size. To find otherwise seemed like a category error, like arriving at the
Taj Mahal to discover that it is actually the size of a walnut. There was an
existential snap in my brain, a sudden adjustment of the relative values and
proportions of every other object in the world, including me.
He
towered over me in his iconic pose: back foot flat, front foot tipped,
shoulders cocked, left arm raised to hold the sling, huge right hand hanging
down by his side, head turned fiercely toward the glorious future. He was a
giant marble god, except he wasn’t a god; he was a man, but then of course he
wasn’t really a man either; he was white stone — but the stone looked somehow
soft, like flesh, and the hard-soft marble curved and rippled into muscles and
veins, tiny and large, subtle and blunt, each feature easing inevitably into
the next, all the way around. My eye kept roaming, looking for imperfections,
not finding any. My mind ran in silly loops. The only word it would settle on,
again and again, was “perfect.”
I
stood there in my filthy Birkenstocks feeling a sense of religious
transcendental soaring: the promise that my true self was not bound by the
constraints of my childhood — by freeway exits, office parks, after-school
programs, coin-operated laundry rooms at dingy apartment complexes, vineyards
plowed under and converted into Walmarts, instability, change, dead dogs,
divorce. No. The David suggested that my true self existed most fully in some
interstellar superhistorical realm in which all the ideal things of the
universe commingled in a perpetual ecstasy of harmonizing trumpet blasts. If
such perfection could exist in the world, I felt, then so many other things
were suddenly possible: to live a perfect life creating perfect things, to find
an ideal way to be. What was the point of anything less?
Again,
I was 20. My girlfriend and I were in the middle of a six-week,
shoestring-budget grand tour of Europe. We slept every night in teeming
hostels, ate meat with our hands in public parks, frightened people with our
terrible German. But it was all worth it for moments like this — moments in
which I could truly believe that perfection was real, as real as a train
station a few hours away, and that my life was heading toward it.
A
huge crowd swarmed around the David, gawking and chatting, but I hardly noticed
them. My girlfriend and I stood in the museum for an extremely long time, until
the crowds began to thin. Eventually we left and moved on to another museum,
another city, and then we went home and — as the years rolled up their sleeves
and marched Americanly by — we got married, had children, found jobs. I
fantasized about perfection while crashing, again and again, into what I
discovered were the extremely solid walls of my own limitations. Just on the
other side of those walls, I knew, stood the David on his special pedestal: an
impossible destination that I was nevertheless determined to reach. But the
meeting between my head and that wall began to take up more and more of my
attention, and after a while I started to wonder if the perfection on the other
side actually existed, if there had ever really been anything there to begin
with.
The
David began, in 1464, with a mistake. Several mistakes, actually. In fact, so
many mistakes, and such serious ones, that the whole project seemed to be
ruined from the start. The source and precise extent of the mistakes have been
disputed over the centuries, but what we know for sure is that none of the
mistakes were Michelangelo’s fault, because he wasn’t born yet. The block that
would become the David was cut out of the mountains 11 years before its
eventual sculptor’s birth.
The
first mistake was the stone itself. The marble-cutting community in and around
Carrara was, and remains today, practically a sovereign nation, with its own
dialect and politics and lore and hierarchies of technical expertise.
Michelangelo was a native of the quarrying world, fluent in its ways, but the
sculptor who chose the block, Agostino di Duccio, was largely ignorant of them.
He had been selected by one of Florence’s most influential groups, the Wool
Guild, to carve a monumental marble statue of the biblical David. It would sit
high on the edge of the city’s great cathedral, the Duomo, to serve as a show
of strength, an artistic boast and a warning to the city’s enemies.
But
Agostino was in over his head. He had no experience carving marble on this
scale — nobody alive did. The block he chose was huge but flawed. The power of
marble, after all, is supposed to be in its perfection: a pure white chunk cut,
at almost impossible expense, out of the dirty, ragged mountains. But this slab
was marred by little holes, discolored by veins.
It
was not only Agostino di Duccio who was overmatched — the quarriers were, too.
The block was 18 feet tall and something like 25,000 pounds. No one had
harvested a stone this large in close to 1,000 years. The whole process was one
ordeal after another. Because statuary marble tends to form up near the tops of
mountains, it took months of labor to get it down to the quarry floor. The trip
from Carrara to Florence — an 80-mile journey that takes around two hours in a
modern car — took two more arduous years. There were teams of men, teams of
oxen, big ocean ships, flat river barges, inclement weather, monthslong delays.
At one point, the giant block fell into a muddy ditch and had to be laboriously
extracted. One scholar has speculated that this accident caused the cracks that
now plague the ankles.
When
the block finally arrived in Florence, it was greeted as a wonder. Its size, to
the public, would have been more apparent than its imperfections. It was
deposited in a courtyard behind the cathedral — a huge white apparition in the
middle of the small brown city. People came from all over just to stare.
City
leaders went to inspect the block, and they were dismayed. It had not only been
badly chosen; it had also been badly carved. Agostino, as was traditional, had
“roughed out” the block at the quarry — a quick whittling down to leave only
what was necessary for the eventual statue. In doing so, however, he had
compounded his previous mistake. The block had been strangely narrow to begin
with, and Agostino had made it even narrower. He created an awkward hole in its
middle. It was hard to see how this stone was ever going to become a plausible human
form. Some believed that it was ruined, that the city’s investment was already
lost.
Agostino
was fired. The block was abandoned. It sat there, on its side, getting rained
on, hailed on, fouled by birds, for more than 30 years. After a while, it became
a fixed part of the landscape of Florence. People and buildings changed all
around it, regimes rose and fell, but the monumental block never moved.
Residents began to call it, with some mixture of respect and mockery, “the
Giant.”
I
didn’t get back to Florence, after my initial visit, for nearly 20 years. When
I did finally return, it was as an adult man on the brink of middle age. I was
not quite 40 but felt, in many ways, older. My hair, once as heroically thick
as the David’s, had begun to thin visibly, and I felt sad about this, and I
also considered my sadness to be its own failure, because I wanted to be the
kind of person who didn’t care about superficial, middle-age things. Every
morning, when I stepped out of bed, my joints hurt, especially my ankles, which
a doctor had recently diagnosed with arthritis — they were 20 years older than
the rest of me, he said.
My
youthful pursuit of David-like perfection had gone, shall we say, not terribly
well. I had turned out to be a strange person, not anything like an ideal. My
life was littered with awkwardnesses, estrangements, mutual disillusionments,
abandoned projects. Recently, I had begun to notice an odd tic in my
interpersonal style — a problem with my gaze. I would be speaking with someone,
a friend or a shopkeeper, all very normally (how are you good thanks how are
you how’s your summer), and then, for no discernible reason, my eyes would dart
away from my interlocutor, urgently, right over one of his or her shoulders,
and the shift would be so sudden that the person would whip his or her head
around to see what on earth I was looking at — a policeman or an exotic bird or
a runaway train — but it would turn out that there was nothing there at all. My
gaze had been flicked away by a little spasm of social discomfort. And so the
person would look back at me, confused, and I would manage to hold his or her
gaze for another few seconds until the social energy built back up between us
to an intolerable level, at which point I would suddenly break the circuit
again by looking away — and the person would look, one more time, back over his
or her shoulder to confirm that nothing was there, and then our relationship
would be altered forever.
Perfection,
it turns out, is no way to try to live. It is a child’s idea, a cartoon — this
desire not to be merely good, not to do merely well, but to be faultless, to
transcend everything, including the limits of yourself. It is less heroic than
neurotic, and it doesn’t take much analysis to get to its ugly side: a lust for
control, pseudofascist purity, self-destruction. Perfection makes you flinch at
yourself, flinch at the world, flinch at any contact between the two. Soon what
you want, above all, is escape: to be gone, elsewhere, annihilated.
By
the time I returned to Florence, I had grown accustomed to spending solid weeks
in a state of high anxiety — my hands would turn freezing, like a corpse, and I
would sit at my desk wishing I could cry, and my wife would tell me, with
increasing urgency, that she was afraid I was going to have a heart attack.
Eventually, after many years of this, I was prescribed a daily pill intended to
stabilize an imbalance in my brain chemistry, and this solution has worked,
more or less. Yet I am still plagued by this eccentricity of the loads: an
impossible tension between the fantasies in my head and the realities on the
ground.
And
so, on my bad ankles and with my broken gaze, I returned to see the David.
Things in Florence seemed essentially the same. Crowds still waited for hours
in the brutal heat to enter the churchlike museum. Inside, the David stood
exactly as I last saw him. I experienced the same moment of revelation: the
sudden improbability of his size, his excellence. He still dominated the space,
still held the light on his impossibly subtle musculature. In fact, he was
looking better than ever, because in the intervening years he had been cleaned,
millimeter by millimeter, at great expense and with some controversy — the grit
and dust of 500 years scrubbed off. The marble seemed to glow. Once again, my
brain reached for the word “perfect.”
But
“perfect” no longer seemed adequate. Although I couldn’t see the cracks inside
the David’s ankles and legs, I knew they were there. I knew other things too:
that the marble of his face was pocked with holes, for instance, which
restorers had filled in, and that he was missing a small chip of stone from one
of his lower eyelids, and that his right little toe had been lost multiple
times, and that a crazy man had taken a hammer to his left foot in 1991.
Although the David’s maladies were mostly patched up over the centuries, you
could still see all the scars.
In
the year 1501, amid fresh political spasms, the leaders of Florence decided to
rehabilitate the Giant. But who could possibly save it? There was some talk of
giving the project to Leonardo da Vinci, the city’s (and Europe’s) reigning
genius. But Leonardo was an intellectual, nearly 50 years old, who openly
disdained the process of sculpture — that sweaty blunt hacking at stone. In the
end, the commission went to a less famous Florentine, Michelangelo Buonarroti,
a 26-year-old eccentric who had just made his reputation in Rome by carving a
marble Pietà for St. Peter’s — a statue of astonishing grace and maturity and
polish. Michelangelo hurried home to take the commission.
The
first step had been to stand the Giant up. This, in itself, was a production.
Once again, all of Florence came out to watch. The block had been sitting there
for 35 years, almost the entire life expectancy of a 16th-century human, and it
was now in worse shape than ever. Marble is best to carve when it is freshly
cut from the mountain. The longer it sits out, the more brittle it becomes. The
Giant was now thoroughly “cooked,” in the local parlance — dried out by decades
of sun. Some people said it was beyond salvaging. Many wanted to attach extra
marble blocks to it. They said it would be impossible to get a proper figure
out of the misshapen mess that was left. This would become one of the feats
that would elevate Michelangelo to mythic status: that he not only salvaged the
ruined block but also turned it into a masterpiece. As the Renaissance art
historian Giorgio Vasari put it: “And truly it was a miracle on the part of
Michelangelo to restore to life a thing that was dead.”
The
miracle took some time. First, Michelangelo decided that he needed to carve the
David in private, so workers came and built a roofless shed around the Giant.
For many months, inside his shed, Michelangelo toiled away unseen, using a
series of finer and finer chisels in an attempt to rescue every centimeter of
the stone. He was a savant of marble, so he would have understood everything
about the block, all of its grains and flaws and possibilities. The figure of
the David began to emerge little by little, as A. Victor Coonin puts it in his
definitive recent history of the statue, “From Marble to Flesh,” “like a person
being slowly revealed as water drains from a bath.”
When
the shed was finally opened for a public viewing, in the summer of 1503, the
David really must have seemed like a miracle. The dirty old cooked Giant had
become a smooth, enormous, naked man, paused just on the brink of heroic
motion. The young sculptor had not run from the odd dimensions of the block; he
embraced them, turning them into his figure’s signature elements. The block’s
narrowness yielded the lean, twisting body (as opposed to an overmuscled
superman), with its huge head and hands. Michelangelo gave the David a
grotesquely furrowed brow — a shelf of a forehead closer to a Neanderthal’s
than a modern human’s — because he knew that anything more “realistic” would
fail to scan for a viewer on the ground. The figure was unreal but real,
stylized but natural. It would come to define the city.
A
debate raged over where to put the David. The statue was so powerful, so
impressive, that it seemed a waste (and perhaps even impossible,
engineeringwise) to install it in its intended destination, way up on the
cathedral. Instead, after rounds of conferences among the Florentine intelligentsia,
it was decided that the sculpture would be installed in the city’s central
square, the Piazza della Signoria, where everyone could see it. A special
machine had to be invented to move it: a huge wooden frame inside of which the
David was suspended in a net of ropes, rocking gently, as a crew of men rolled
it across the city on greased beams. At night, it had to be protected by armed
guards from rowdy kids who were throwing rocks at it.
The
David’s journey took four days, at the end of which it was installed, to much
fanfare, out in the public square. It would stand in that same spot for the
next 369 years, a period during which it would be shaken by thunder, hit by
carts and smeared with bird feces. In 1527, a riotous mob tried to storm City
Hall, and another mob, in defense of the public order, threw heavy objects out
the windows: stones, tiles, furniture. A bench hit the David, breaking his left
arm in half.
Michelangelo
went off to Rome, where he painted the Sistine Chapel; designed the dome of St.
Peter’s Basilica, at the time the largest in the history of the world; and
eventually died, wealthy and famous beyond measure, at age 88. He would never
see his David again.
The
Giant continued its slow decline. Although the broken arm was eventually mended
and reattached, the statue remained outside, exposed to rain, ice, hail, wind
and vandals. Its surface began to visibly degrade. In the 19th century, the
statue’s restorers tended only to make things worse — they used wax, which
discolored the marble, and acid, which ate at its surface. Before long, the
David needed restoring from his restoration. A broken rain gutter on the
Palazzo Vecchio poured torrents of water directly onto the statue. Concerned
citizens began to agitate for him to be moved indoors. They built a protective
wooden shed over him, isolating him in a bubble of safety. This brought the
public life of the David full circle. He was carved in a shed; he was hidden in
a shed.
Eventually,
the statue’s protectors were able to move him, on train tracks laid laboriously
across Florence, to a custom-built room in the Accademia. But the room still
wasn’t finished, so the David sat inside a crate for years, growing colonies of
microorganisms like a huge piece of cheese.
The
Accademia attracts well over a million visitors a year, and they all end up in
one room: the David’s rotunda. I stood there, in the summer of 2015, watching
the crowd watch the David.
The
air in the room was perfectly still. The tourists fanned themselves with maps
of Florence. Guides, speaking directly into their followers’ ears via
head-mounted microphones, led large groups into the center of the crowd like
battalions into battle. I watched a woman take a short nap while leaning
against a stone column. A couple from Holland sat down next to me and fired
streams of Dutch at each other, the only word of which I could make out was the
English “six-pack.”
Most
of all, people took pictures. For almost its entire history, the Accademia has
been a strict no-camera zone, but the rise of smartphones made that impossible,
and now the phones have taken over. Tourists spend their time in front of the
three-dimensional David poking a two-dimensional version of him on their touch
screens. I witnessed the execution of many, many selfies: the jockeying for a
proper angle, the sudden dead-eyed smile, the brisk walk away. (There always
seemed to be something furtive, something almost criminal, about a selfie.)
Often, through a trick of perspective, the selfie-taker’s own head would appear
on the screen twice as big as the David.
The
most popular target for photographers was the David’s genitals. People were
obsessed with them. I watched a very American man (Tommy Hilfiger shirt, Oakley
sunglasses, BMW baseball hat) pretend to cup the statue’s testicles while his
wife took his picture — and then his wife pretended to cup the David’s
testicles while he took her picture. Two women posed for a photo pretending to
hold the David’s penis simultaneously, as if it were a trophy fish. A serious
man touch-focused his iPhone camera, with delicate precision, on the David’s
foreskin.
At
the back of the crowd, I found the David’s security guard. He sat sideways on a
folding chair, chin in hand, a model of relaxed uninterest; he seemed to watch
the room without even looking. When he spoke, his mustache moved over a mouth
that was missing several teeth. He was a native Florentine, and he told me
stories about crazy tourists (weeping, thongs) and about the great flood of
1966, in which his family’s house was underwater up to the second floor.
I
asked him if, after all this time, he had any personal feeling of awe left for
the David. He said he did not.
“If
you eat chocolate every day for 20 years,” he said, “you will get bored of it.”
If
looking at Michelangelo’s David is the equivalent of eating chocolate, then
walking the streets of Florence is like drowning in Willy Wonka’s gushing
chocolate river. The image of the David is everywhere. There are bookmarks,
mouse pads, T-shirts, posters, watches, key chains, mugs, ballpoint pens,
commemorative plates, pie servers, snow globes, sugar spoons, USB sticks and
Christmas ornaments. There are leather shops and pizzerias and even parking
garages named after him. Tourists can buy aprons that make them look as if they
have the David’s body: the lean, muscular torso, the naked little penis.
And
then there are the statuettes: a vast army of miniature imitation Davids that
stand in shop windows and on hawkers’ carts in all the famous piazzas. Near the
Accademia I found a store called, in English, “David Shop.” It was a
David-replica bonanza, more Davids than I have ever seen in one place before.
The smallest was the size of my pinkie, the biggest slightly taller than an
average Italian woman. I bought a postcard that was also a jigsaw puzzle
featuring the David’s penis wearing sunglasses and saying “Ciao!”
Next
to the Duomo, for an exorbitant price, I bought a bobblehead David; his giant
head, attached by a spring, waggled ridiculously as I walked. He waggled past
many other versions of himself — hundreds, thousands, infinity Davids. From a
distance, many of the replicas looked acceptably David-like, but up close most
of them were laughably bad. The replicas are like a systematic exploration of
all the possible ways to distort Michelangelo’s design. Their faces are
squashed, their heads are flat, their noses are pointed, they look like
goblins. Some of them seem to have breasts. Others have rib cages jutting out
in high relief, like cartoons of shipwreck survivors. One shop-window David stood
several feet tall and cost more than $200 — a serious investment that would
have taken up major space in any buyer’s home. Its face looked like a bug-eyed,
emaciated elf’s. Its muscles were lumpy and gnarled. Its feet were long and
bony, like the feet of an ancient witch in a fairy tale. Its hair looked like a
pile of spaghetti. It seemed more a parody of the David than a tribute.
In
the Accademia gift shop, I bought a sticker that read, simply, “DAVID MANIA.”
This, I decided, was the epitome of David souvenirs — a tribute not to the
actual David but to our mass enthusiasm for him.
Sometimes,
when I found myself fed up with Florence and its crowds, overwhelmed by the
kitsch, the heat, the vendors, the constant eruptions of Renaissance cosplay,
my walks took me across the river, away from the old bridge, toward a plain
yellow building with a stationery shop on its ground floor. Twenty feet up,
where no one ever seemed to look, was a small historical plaque identifying it
as the temporary home of the great Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky. This is
where he agonized over the writing of his novel “The Idiot,” which I was
rereading. Dostoyevsky was, in many ways, the anti-David: ugly, short, hairy,
awkward, nervous, ill, angry, a prophet of spite and self-sabotage. I found him
incredibly inspiring. He spoke to me beyond the kitsch, above the crowds, from
the other side of my old simplistic understanding of the David. He gestured
toward something more complex, more inclusive, more sustainable.
Dostoyevsky
moved to Florence with his wife in 1868, during a miserable swing through
Europe, and he detested the city at times with a degree of comic loathing that
only he could have mustered for such a beautiful place. He complained about the
humidity, the rain, the crowds, the heat. He never learned Italian, preferring
to sit in his room, alone, wrestling with his novel. He stayed, for nearly a
year, only because he was too poor to leave — he had compulsively blown much of
his money at the roulette tables of Europe.
As
I looked at the David, I thought about “The Idiot,” and as I read “The Idiot,”
I thought about the David. They existed at opposite poles, and yet they also
spoke deeply to each other. “The Idiot” was Dostoyevsky’s attempt to create an
ideal man, a modern Christ — what he called “a completely beautiful human
being.” He was forced to try to write this perfect book, however, in
humiliatingly imperfect conditions: isolated far from home, in intense poverty
and grief — the Dostoyevskys’ young daughter had died just months earlier — and
delayed by fits of epilepsy. Up in his cramped apartment above the paper store,
Dostoyevsky flogged his unruly book. “The Idiot” is full of wild crowds
bursting into rooms out of nowhere. Its plot is strange, lurching, unbalanced.
Its hero is seen by everyone as a fool, and his presence seems to cause trouble
wherever he goes. The book is, in both theme and execution, one of the great
artistic statements of the impossibility of human perfection. Rereading it
during the visit to Florence made me feel, somehow, spiritually itchy.
Unlike
Michelangelo, Dostoyevsky was missing from the official lore of the city — you
couldn’t buy postcards bearing his image or visit a museum devoted to his life
and work. This made him even more of a refuge, a small secret I shared with no
one.
One
afternoon I walked into a part of the Accademia that most people never see,
down a labyrinth of staircases and hallways, to a small office tucked into the
very back of the building. This belonged to Angelo Tartuferi, director of the
museum — the official protector of the David. The walls were hung with medieval
paintings. Tartuferi wore a green Umbro polo shirt. He was relaxed, animated,
candid; he spoke in long streams of Italian punctuated occasionally by roars of
laughter.
We
talked about the David’s cracked ankles, a topic with which Tartuferi was very
familiar.
I
asked him about the geoscientists’ terrifying paper. He rolled his eyes. It
was, he said, mainly a publicity grab: We have known about these cracks for
more than 100 years, he pointed out, and they aren’t getting any worse. The
David is now perfectly upright, and he is one of the most closely monitored
artworks in the world. There are maps not only of the cracks themselves but
also of every stain and blemish on the surface of the marble, of every repair
that has ever been made, even of the patterns in which dust tends to fall.
Visitors to the Accademia will notice a large, inelegant plastic brick mounted
behind the David to monitor all of its vital signs: temperature, motion, angle
of inclination. It is labeled “SMARTBRICK. New. Fast. Easy. Smart.”
Tartuferi
conceded, however, that he was still worried about an earthquake. Sometimes he
had bad dreams. All of that high-tech monitoring can only warn us — it can’t
protect anything. And while it seems to be true that the cracks aren’t getting
worse, they are not getting better either. As long as they exist, the David
will be vulnerable.
What,
then, is to be done? In fact, a relatively simple solution to the ankle problem
already exists. Although we can’t fix the cracks, we can mitigate the stress
that makes them dangerous. There is a special kind of antiseismic base that
allows a marble statue to move along with any tectonic disturbance. It’s
similar to the kind of technology you’d find under buildings in San Francisco.
Many less illustrious statues in earthquake zones are already protected by such
bases. They are not terribly complex and, considering the potential
consequences of leaving it undone, not terribly expensive: about 250,000 euros,
according to Tartuferi, a tiny fraction of the revenues the David earns the
museum in a single year.
In
2014, after the earthquakes rocked the countryside around Florence, after the
global media fretted about the possible destruction of the David, Italy’s
minister of culture said that an antiseismic base would be installed under the
statue within a year. But a year passed, and nothing happened. When I arrived
in the summer of 2015 — six months after that statement — I half-expected to
find men in hard hats working around the David’s pedestal. Instead, there were
only the usual tourists. The David, meanwhile, stood there in his old
precarious rigidity, vulnerable as ever to the tremors.
I
asked Tartuferi what was happening with the antiseismic base.
The
delay was only bureaucratic, he said. He had met, long ago, with a company that
did this sort of stabilizing work. Tartuferi had told the Italian press that
the job was underway. The base could, hypothetically, go in at any moment.
But
the Italian government, Tartuferi said, refused to allow him to install the
base. The nation was in the middle of an elaborate restructuring of its museum
system, and it was planning to put new leaders — some of whom would be known as
“supermanagers” — into Florence’s highest-profile (and therefore most
lucrative) museums. This made Tartuferi a lame-duck director, and the Italian
government was not going to allow him, on his way out the door, to execute a
project as important as saving the David. Italy, in the midst of its own
economic collapse, wanted to be the hero that stepped forward to save the David
from collapsing.
The
problem was that no one could say exactly when this power transfer might occur,
and — even after it did — if and when the base would be installed. When
Tartuferi departed, he told me, he was planning to pass the project of the
antiseismic base off to his successor. This, he said, is what the new director
would have to deal with first.
Meanwhile,
every day, the David would remain at risk. In fact, Tartuferi told me, the
high-tech monitoring device on the back of the David’s pedestal, the smart
brick, had recently been turned off. There was no point in monitoring anymore,
he said — everyone knew what needed to be done. Now they just needed to do it.
Tartuferi
was not the only one who told me a story like this. I met with a woman named
Contessa Simonetta Brandolini d’Adda, one of the most powerful figures in
Florence’s art world. Eighteen years ago, the contessa founded a nonprofit
organization called Friends of Florence, which has financed and overseen the
restoration of many of the city’s endangered masterpieces, from sculptures in
the central square to Botticelli oil paintings in the Uffizi to 15th-century
Mannerist frescoes in a popular local church. The organization fills a crucial
lack in Italy, helping to make up for the increasingly cash-strapped
government’s inability to take proper care of its decaying cultural heritage.
In 2004, Friends of Florence raised half a million dollars to help fund the
cleaning and restoration of the David, and they continue to pay for the
statue’s regular monitoring and upkeep. A family of spiders, Brandolini told
me, had been discovered living in the giant caverns of the David’s hair. Every
few months they covered his body with dusty webs that needed to be vacuumed
off.
Friends
of Florence would dearly love to raise the funds to pay for the David’s
antiseismic base. But the Italian government, again and again, has insisted
that the state will take care of it. It seemed they believed that an outside
organization rescuing the David would be improper. She was an even-keeled and
practical woman, but while relating this to me, she grew visibly frustrated.
There was simply nothing she could do against the overwhelming force of
official Italian national pride.
Destruction
takes many forms, not just the sudden apocalyptic crash or the long-term
degradation of rain and ice and wind. There is death by inaction, death by
neglect. There is also death by reverence, death by ubiquity, death by subtle
retail-shop humiliation. The David’s superfame struck me as another
eccentricity of the loads: the tension between the actual statue — the original
physical thing, unique in the world — and the statue’s ubiquitous image. The
thing itself was hopelessly outnumbered by its own reproductions. We knew the
David so well, and our own knowledge of our knowledge of that image, that we
could hardly see the David at all.
There
was a part of me — a part I never mentioned to the museum directors or the
contessa or anyone else in Florence — that was titillated by the possibility of
the David falling over. It was a perverse, adolescent, iconoclastic streak, a
dark troll that lived under the otherwise more-or-less serviceable bridge of my
conscious mind. It was something like what Freud called the death drive: an
urge toward failure and collapse, especially of the things we want most in
life. If perfection in life truly isn’t possible, croaked my troll — and it
isn’t! It isn’t! — then perhaps we should move on to the relative perfection of
destruction.
My
inner troll worshiped not the David but the cracks in the David’s ankles. They
were, as a fatal flaw, so deliciously humiliating — such a perfectly ironic
undercutting of the statue’s otherwise heroic stature. The David’s destiny,
said my troll, was not to stand but to break.
This
put me in mind, once again, of Dostoyevsky — the grumpy outcast seething in
Florence, the anti-David. My troll could easily have been one of his
characters. It could have been the splenetic narrator of “Notes From
Underground,” who recoils against the notion of rational utopia, of the
perfectibility of mankind: “Two times two is four is no longer life, gentlemen,
but the beginning of death.”
The
real power of Dostoyevsky’s work, though, is that despite all the misery his
characters endure, his vision is not actually miserable. It is redemptive,
celebratory, powerfully totalizing. Humans are compulsive, irrational and
petty, yes, but they are also selfless, intelligent and idealistic. In
Dostoyevsky, there is a radical acceptance that strikes me as, in its own way,
a new, more perfect vision of perfection: an envelope of understanding that can
hold the entire universe.
I
began to think of the David not as a traditional hero but as a Dostoyevsky
character. Like the Idiot, he was an ideal man with no real place in the world
— misunderstood, assaulted by crowds, drawn into all sorts of unheroic
shenanigans. There was, God knows, much that was insane about our relationship
to the statue: the compulsive selfies, the inertia of the Italian bureaucracy,
the DAVID MANIA. But as a character in “The Idiot” puts it: “To attain
perfection, one must first of all be able not to understand many things.”
As
I walked around Florence, I was exposed to hundreds and thousands of horrible
David replicas. At a certain point, I began to actually love them. They were so
awkward, so bad and so numerous, that they were, in the aggregate, somehow good
— a perfect tribute to Michelangelo’s strange genius, and to the gnarled
history of the statue itself. They were, themselves, little trolls: the David’s
imperfections made flesh, sprung fully formed out of the cracks in his ankles
and set loose upon the world.
At
home, on my mantle, I keep a small crowd of them: a green one, the bobblehead,
a white one that looks like an elf. One of them, a tiny keychain, recently fell
over and broke — his head cracked clean off. I keep its pieces there with the
rest.
A
month after I met with him, Angelo Tartuferi was removed from his position as
director of the Accademia. The antiseismic-base project, needless to say, had
not yet commenced. Tartuferi’s replacement was one of Florence’s new so-called
supermanagers, a medieval scholar from Germany named Cecilie Hollberg. I met
her in June, at a lush hotel bar overlooking the Arno River. I had expected
someone stern and formal, but Hollberg was, in fact, relaxed and unpretentious
and congenial, with a sly humor that rushed into all the gaps in our
conversation. She seemed perpetually amused to have been plucked out of her
small German town and imported to watch over the most famous statue in the
world. She referred to the David, jokingly, as her husband. We drank spritzes
and had a wonderful time.
I
asked Hollberg about her husband’s ankles. Had there been any progress, under
her watch, on the David’s antiseismic base? This was six months after Hollberg
took charge and a year and a half after the culture minister’s initial promise
to place the David on the base.
There
had not been any progress. Hollberg, in fact, seemed surprisingly calm. After
all, an earthquake was still hypothetical, and she had inherited plenty of
other, more pressing problems. There were holes in the museum’s roof that let
rainwater through. There were illegal vendors who hassled the tourists while
they waited outside in line. There was the problem of finding space, in the
clotted center of Florence, to expand the undersized museum.
After
her arrival, Hollberg said, people emerged from everywhere to tell her how to
save the David. Everyone claimed to be an expert. Everyone seemed to have
something to sell. But Hollberg wanted to take her time, to consider all the
options. She wanted the right solution, not just the fastest or easiest. At
some point in the future, she said, she would probably travel to Los Angeles to
consult experts at the Getty Center about how they protect their statues.
In
the meantime, Hollberg said, if a major earthquake were to hit Florence
directly, every museum in the city would endure some destruction, not just the
Accademia. I found this, somehow, not comforting at all.
AND HERE'S SOME ANIMALS FOR YOU...................
I think I got yelled at by a deer in my backyard yesterday
My dog and best friend, Bart the Dog
Hunter S. Thompson's widow returns antlers he
stole from Hemingway in 1964
For
years, Hunter S. Thompson had been sitting on a shameful secret. He had in his possession
a pair of massive elk antlers that belonged to Ernest Hemingway — antlers that
Thompson brazenly stole from Hemingway's Ketchum, Idaho home in 1964.
Thompson
had long felt a deep connection to Hemingway, and he would end up becoming a
large influence in his written work. It was in 1964 that Thompson decided to
drive out to Ketchum, Idaho, to visit the house where Hemingway had lived and
died. Hemingway committed suicide there in 1961.
Thompson
was also there to write a story for the National Observer about Hemingway's
legacy in Idaho. And when Thompson got to the home, it was empty. As he was
leaving, he noticed a massive pair of elk antlers hanging above the doorway —
and stole them.
"[Hunter]
made such a long journey to go and visit, and he just couldn't help himself.
And he was much younger then, and not as wise." Thompson's widow, Anita
Thompson, tells As It Happens guest host Laura Lynch.
"When
he would talk about it, he was embarrassed. Because Hunter is not a thief —
he's just so caught up in the moment. We planned to take a road trip several
times in 2003 and just quietly return them, but we never did," she says.
Unfortunately,
the Gonzo journalist would never get around to making that trip to Idaho. On
Feb. 20, 2005, Thompson — like Hemingway before him — shot himself.
Years
later, Anita Thompson came across the dusty antlers in the garage. And she
decided that enough was enough: She knew she needed to return them.
"The
antlers were hanging above the 1972 red Chevy Caprice, so they're a beautiful
compliment to the car — except they weren't Hunter's, so we had to return
them."
She
got in touch with the local library that managed the Hemingway House in
Ketchum, as well as Sean Hemingway, the author's grandson, who was "so
gracious, and pleased to have them back."
The
plan was to drive the antlers up to the Hemingway House in Ketchum. But getting
them there was a feat in itself.
"I
had to return them to the home in my Prius. They fit in the back with the seats
down. Putting them into the car, they were almost the same weight as I
am," she says.
The
antlers are now in the process of being delivered to the Hemingway family in
New Jersey.
DON'T YOU WANT TO SEE THE ENTIRE WORLD? I DO
Moroccan Blue, Chefchaouen, Morocco
MUSIC FOR THE SOUL
Wayne Shorter, Freddie Hubbard, Curtis Fuller, in 1962.
AND NOW, A BEATLES BREAK
TODAY'S ALLEGED MOB GUY
Interview with A Gangster
By John William Tuohy
(FBI Photo)
It started with the
shotgun slaying of an aged bootlegger on a dark and frozen Chicago street in
December of 1959. In some respects it also ended there thirty one years later.
That year, 1998, was when I completed research for my book about the life and
times of Roger Touhy, the prohibition era gangster who fought the mob over
control of Chicago’s criminal rackets.
On that
freezing December night the 61 year old Touhy, no relation to me, was ambushed
and killed as he entered his sister’s home at 125 N. Lotus Street in Chicago’s
Austin neighborhood. Just twenty days before he was killed, Touhy had been released
from state prison after a federal judge found that the mob had engineered the
gangster’s conviction on trumped up kidnapping charges.
Touhy’s murder was the last part of the book that I had researched and
by then almost everyone who had anything to do with the case had long since
died or vanished. In fact, the only two
people who were still alive who were related to the case were the eerily named ambulance
driver, a Mr. Stillwagon, and a world class hood named John Marshall Caifano. A
made member of the Mafia, Caifano was widely suspected of having been part of
the murder team that gunned Touhy down. The Chicago police picked him up on
suspicion a few hours after the murder but without evidence or witnesses, he
was released.
Caifano before the Crime Committee 1959
Even after I had finished the book, I was left with the nagging question
of why? Why murder an ill, fragile 61
year old who had been out of criminal circulation since the end of prohibition?
Was it a lesson killing, intended to send the message that the mob never
forgets and never forgives? Or was it a
revenge murder? Touhy’s suspected
killers, including Caifano had come up the ranks of the Outfit through the old
42 Gang and during the Touhy-Nitti wars fought on the back country roads of
Cook County, Touhy had slaughtered more
than just a few members of the 42.
But revenge
wasn’t the answer. The mob seldom, in
fact rarely, killed out of revenge, especially the well managed Chicago mob. In
1959 the boss was the capable and level headed Tony Accardo. He would never
sanction a revenge hit especially in light of the fact that since his release,
Touhy had become something of a media darling. No, revenge wasn’t the answer. The
mob kills for two reasons; money and self-protection. Nothing else really
matters in that world.
So the question remained,
why kill the old man? What was the
motive? He certainly had no money and he was in no position to harm the
Outfit. So what was it? Was there a
story behind the story that I had missed? I decided to find out and my only source for
that information was Marshall Caifano.
But it was more than Caifano’s involvement
with the Touhy case that intrigued me.
For crime writers, Caifano was the great white whale of organized crime.
He had survived seven decades in the mob. He had a front seat, or was privy to,
virtually every significant event in the storied history of the Chicago mob,
and the organization that once ruled the underworld from everything west of the
Mississippi river. At its height of power, the Chicago Outfit held sway over
the mobs in Detroit, Kansas City, and Los Angeles. It owned, outright, Las
Vegas, Miami and large parts of Cuba. It ran gambling ships in Iran, casinos in
London, and dope exports in Viet Nam and if legends are true, it once
controlled, through blackmail, the Attorney General of the United States of
America. And Caifano saw it all happen.
He knew, literally, where the bodies were buried.
When I asked
around about Caifano I learned that there were several accepted versions of him,
unusual in gangland. Former
Chicago Intelligence cop Andy Murcia said Caifano was a “gentleman among the
gangsters” and added, “yeah, I know the clichés like ‘live by the sword, die by
the sword’ and ‘there's no honor among thieves’. Well, in the case of Marshall
Caifano, it's clear to me why neither of those applied to him. I've always had
some respect for gangsters who only killed each other for good reason. I had seen him on numerous occasions,
socializing at the Ambassador East Hotel. He was always a first class gent with
impeccable manners. He was not a loud mouthed hood. Instead, he seemed
reserved, quiet. Despite all the stories of how he could coldly slit the throat
of another gangster, or issue a two fisted beating to some punk who needed it,
there was still gentleness about him.”
In 1992, I was
told by Bill Jahoda, an FBI informant and former member of Chicago’s notorious
Ferriola Street crew that, “Mr. Caifano was very professional, kind of distant,
like a businessman, reserved.”
When I asked John J. Flood, a retired Chicago
Intelligence cop about Caifano, he said, “Marshall was an animal. He was just
another hood in a thousand dollar suit. He thought he was different than the
others, (in the mob) but he wasn’t. If anything, he was worse than the others.”
Wayne Johnson,
former Chicago cop and chief investigator for the Chicago Crime Commission told
me that, “Caifano was a mob peacock. He dressed better, he spoke better than
most of them but he was a stone cold killer from start to finish.”
John Marshall Caifano, he preferred to be
called Marshall, was born Marcello Giuseppe Caifano in New York City on July
19, 1911 but was raised in Chicago’s once massive Little Italy neighborhood.
In the late 1920’s Caifano joined the
infamous 42 Gang, a violent street gang that counted three future Chicago mob
bosses in its membership. By 1929,
eighteen year old Caifano's arrest record included convictions for burglary,
extortion, larceny, and interstate fraud. Between 1928 and 1952, he was
arrested 20 times on various felony charges and ten times for suspicion of
murder.
Over the next fifty years, Caifano was
suspected in at least twenty additional mob related murders including the gory
killing of Estelle Carey, a dice hustler, prostitute and girlfriend of
syndicate hood Nick Circella, who had threatened to inform on the mob. On February 2,
1943, Caifano and two other hoods went to Carey’s apartment at
512 Addison Street. They tied the 34 year old Carey to a kitchen chair, beat
her about the face with ice picks, dosed her in gasoline and set her afire,
burning her to death. Circella was deported.
On April
10, 1946, Caifano was suspected in the shotgun slaying of independent
bookie Louis J. Laino AKA Tiny, as Laino sat in his car at 4701 W. 5th
Avenue in Chicago.
On January 5, 1946, Caifano was suspected
of killing a hood named Frank Quatrocchi (AKA Torpedo) as he
stepped from Burkeys Tavern at 34 South Clark Street in Chicago.
According to police intelligence,
on July 28, 1948, Caifano murdered Nathan
Gumbin (Gumbinsky), an executive in the scrap iron business, as he sat in his
car at 39th and Wallace
Streets waiting for a red light. Caifano and Battaglia pulled up
alongside him and killed him with two barrels to the head and then drove away.
On September 25, 1950, it was more than
probably Marshal Caifano who murdered William Drury, an ex-Chicago policeman who was
scheduled to testify before the Kefauver Crime Commission the next
morning.
A year later, on June 18, 1951, Marshal’s
brother, Lenny “Fat Lenny” Caifano was killed during an attempt to kidnap Teddy
Roe, the head of the black policy wheel on the south side. According to witnesses,
on August 4, 1952, Marshall Caifano, Sam Giancana and others murdered Roe as he
walked down the street.
Lenny Caifani
In April of 1953, an underworld character named Louis Strauss AKA
Russian Louie, tried to blackmail mob connected Las Vegas developer Benny
Binion. According to the FBI, Caifano
strangled Russian Louie to death and buried him in the desert.
A year later, on August 21, 1954, according to the Chicago Crime Commission, Caifano
killed Frank Maritote AKA Frankie Diamond, an old timer from the Capone
era. Caifano waited inside Diamond’s
garage at his home at 710 S. Keeler in Chicago and killed him with machine guns
when he opened the garage door.
On December
18, 1955, Caifano was suspected of murdering a hood named Alex Louis
Greenberg, a mob front man who had cheated the widow of Outfit boss Frank
Nitti. Greenberg was shot to death in
front of his wife as they were leaving the Glass Dome Hickory Pit Restaurant on
South Union Avenue and Twenty Eighth Street in Chicago.
By 1958 Caifano’s childhood friend, Sam
Giancana was running the Chicago mob. One of Giancana’s first moves was to send
Caifano west to be the Mafia’s enforcer in Las Vegas. Super boss Tony Accardo warned Caifano to
“Lay low, don’t make no noise and don’t do nothing to scare the fucking tourists.”
When Caifano got
to Vegas he changed his name to John Marshall, chucked the cheap suits and
replaced them with expensive, but loud, open neck silk shirts, bedecked himself
in gold chains, yellow pants and $500 imported European leather loafers.
And he continued
to kill people.
Police have long
suspected that it was Caifano who placed the bomb under the truck of informant
Willie Bioff and slashed Gus Greenbaum’s throat when the former casino manager
became a liability due to his cocaine addiction. For good measure he slashed
Mrs. Greenbaum’s throat as well.
It was about this
time that rumors and gossip about Caifano’s personal life started to make the
rounds in the underworld. The fact was that Caifano’s homosexuality was the
worst kept secret in the underworld, a subculture where
they’ll kill a man for being gay. In fact, it was around that time, in 1992,
that John D’Amato, a captain in the New Jersey-based
DeCavalcante family was murdered when he was spotted entering a Gay night club.
But Caifano
got away with it because he generally didn’t flaunt it and because street boss
Sam Giancana, who had his own series of rumors to deal with, protected him.
All of this led to
some interesting stories about Caifano. One of them was that he married a tall
and tough talking, shapely and boisterous blonde named Darlene who hailed from
the back mountains of Kentucky just like her idol Virginia
Hill, the gorgeous red head who was gangster Bugsy Siegel’s girlfriend. It was
generally agreed that Darlene was a cover for Caifano. In the meantime Giancana
was meeting Darlene on Friday nights in a hotel-casino-brothel that Giancana
owned, the Thunderbird, in suburban Rosemount.
Special Agent
Bill Roemer of the FBI was trailing Giancana and figured out that Giancana and
Darlene were having an affair, which was a direct violation of the few rules
the Chicago mob has. Roemer decided to use the information to see if he
could get Caifano to flip over to the FBI as an informant. Roemer stopped
Caifano one night on a lonely stretch of highway and told him about Giancana
and Darlene and then asked "So what do you think about that?"
“Caifano's face
lit up with a smile that went from ear to ear. He couldn't be happier.” Roemer
said later “He thought it was an honor.”
In early 1960, Caifano and others took
over the infamous Trade Winds Bar on 857
North Rush Street and the once renowned Black Onyx at 104 East Walton Street in
Chicago. The bars had belonged to a character named Arty Adler who owed
Caifano $1,000,000 in gambling debts. When Adler failed to pay on the notes,
Caifano took over his nightclubs. Adler threatened to go to the FBI. On March
28, 1960, city workers pulled what was left of Adler’s nude body out of a sewer
drain at 7601 South Chappel Street. He
had been dead for 3 weeks.
In late 1960 the state of Nevada drew up legislation that banned known
mobsters from their casinos by placing their names into the so called
"Vegas Black Book" (the book is actually green) that banned known
criminals from entering any casino in the state. The second name entered into the book, behind
Sam Giancana, was Marshall Ciafano. To the horror of the mob bosses, Caifano
did the unthinkable. He sued the state of Nevada to have his name removed from
the Black Book.
“I journey to Las Vegas frequently on business” Caifano told reporters
who gathered for a press conference he called “after the Black Book came out I
was always being followed everywhere and anywhere and always by the same police
officers and agents. We’ve gotten to know each other pretty well.” Caifano lost his suit but the episode ended
his career as a top flight gangster. The boss who replaced him as king of Vegas
with a slick hood named Johnny Roselli.
That same year, Caifano attempted to
extort $60,000 from an Indiana oilman named Ray Ryan. According to Ryan Caifano
told him “You’re one of the people we’re going to put in line. I know you know
a lot of important people, including Bobby Kennedy, but we’ll take care of that
too.”
The FBI moved in
and arrested Caifano for the attempted shakedown. They had him on tape demanding
the money and Ryan testified against him at the trial. However, the judge in the case declared a
mistrial because two Chicago newspapers referred to Caifano as “a criminal
syndicate hoodlum.” In the retrial,
Caifano pled guilty and was sentenced to 6 years in prison.
Of course, he was
lucky to get to trial at all. Word on
the street was, according to FBI agent Bill Roemer, that Chicago mob bosses had
considered murdering Caifano for pulling a scam in Las Vegas, the Mafia’s gold mine.
When
he was released, Caifano sent word to Ryan that he intended to kill him. Ryan offered him $1,000,000 in cash to spare
his life. According to Ryan’s daughter,
Rae Jean, on July 4, 1977, Caifano had sent word through Las Vegas casino owner
Benny Binion that he wanted $1 million “or steps would be taken to get even.”
Ryan, who was facing a $9 million dollar
federal tax lien, sent back his own message. “Fine,” he told Binion, “tell him
that he’ll have to get in line behind the IRS. When they’re done with me, he
can have whatever is left.”
Caifano told his crew boss Joey “The
Clown” Lombardo, “Let’s take the million and kill him anyway.” And that’s
exactly what they did. In October of 1977, Ryan was blown up in his car as he
drove away from his country club. No one was ever arrested in the crime.
Retired FBI agent Richard Eisgruber who investigated the case said, “The bad
guys got away with one, and that’s not good.”
According to J.
Kenneth Lowrie of the US Justice Department Strike Force, Caifano and his
nephews were suspected of setting up the 1973 murder of Richard Cain, a made
member of the Mafia who had also been the chief investigator for the Cook
County State’s Attorney. But otherwise, Caifano was out of power within the
mob.
Mob informant Frank Cullota has said that Boss
Tony Accardo busted Caifano down to the rank of street soldier, reducing the
hood to running common low dollar street
scams to earn his living, including shaking down porn theaters. It was another of those low level scams, transporting 2000 shares of stolen Westinghouse stock
certificates across state lines in 1980, that got Caifano put away for 20 years
in federal prison. (He would serve ten years of the sentence.)
Before he began his term, Caifano approached his crew boss,
Joey Lombardo, and asked for permission to murder a man named Joey Testa,
a millionaire builder and bank owner who laundered money for the Chicago
Outfit. Caifano claimed that he had grubstaked Testa in an international
gambling scan and now that Caifano was going to prison, Testa figured he didn’t
have to pay. But he did. On June 27,
1981 Testa was blown up as he started his car after a round of golf in
Oakland Park, Florida.
In the second year of his sentence, according
to informant Cullota, the justice department offered to cut Caifano’s sentence
to time served and tuck him away in the Witness Protection Program if he would
flip, become an informant, and testify against Boss Tony Accardo. Caifano
refused the offer.
In 1990, a year before my book reached publication, Caifano, then 79
years old, was paroled from Sandstone federal prison and retired to a modest
home in Southern Florida.
In 1992 I found Caifano’s name and address in the phone under the
listing “John Marshall.” It was that
simple. I sent him a long, polite
letter, explaining who I was and what I did and asked for an interview. He didn’t answer of course. Aside from an
aversion of dealing in the written word….according to his prison record Caifano
had virtually no education at all and was probably near illiterate……his
generation of hoods, the old school Mafia, didn’t talk to journalists and they
never, ever, under any circumstances at all, admitted to the existence of the
Mafia. I continued to write to him anyway. Persistance, I have found, opens
many doors.
It happened that my publisher had signed a
book deal with an interesting character named Joe Pignatello, AKA Joe Pigs. A
chef, Joe actually insisted on being called Joe Pigs. The publisher had pegged me for the book and
sent me out to Las Vegas for an initial meeting with Pignatello and we hit it
off immediately. Of course he was a
gregarious and loveable man and it would have been difficult not to get along
with him. The book we would write was tentatively titled “Recipes to Die
for.”
Joe was born and raised in Chicago. His
grandmother and Al Capone’s mother, natives of the same small village in Italy,
were friends and sold a specific type of Italian bread in the old Italian
neighborhoods. When he was 12 years old, Joe was delivering the bread to
customers when he was hit by a bus while crossing the street. With both legs crushed and rather than restrict
him to his tiny bedroom, Joe’s parents moved his bed into the kitchen, the
center of family life. For the next two years he watched and learned the
secrets of fine Italian cooking from the women who gathered around to cook and
gossip around the stove.
A few decades later Joe’s modest
neighborhood restaurant became a favorite for the Chicago mob, especially Boss
Paul Ricca, who, along with crew boss Sam Giancana financed Joe’s move to Las
Vegas in 1954 to open the city’s first, white table cloth restaurant, the Coach
& Four located where Circus Circus
stands today. Later, Joe opened another place, the posh Villa D’Este. His
partner in the place was gangster Tony Spilotro. Scenes from the restaurant
were used in the Martin Scorsese film “Casino”.
Joe handed me the phone and Caifano’s
voice came through on the other end.
“Is this John Tuohy?” he asked.
“Yes it is,” I said.
“How come you stopped writing?” he asked.
We agreed to meet in Florida that summer.
I
had an agenda for the subjects I wanted to cover with him but Caifano too, had an
agenda as well. He would only meet in a public place. I could bring a pen and
notebook with me to the interview but no cameras and no tape recorders. I was
to come alone and the interview would not to be relayed to any news outlet. We
were going to have, he said, an off the record interview.
As
we had agreed, on the morning of the interview, Joe Pigs called at my hotel in
Naples Florida. Caifano would meet in
twenty minutes at a McDonald’s just a few miles away.
I entered the McDonald’s and looked around
and not seeing Caifano anywhere I took a seat. A minute later, Caifano
approached my table.
“John?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said.
“Marshall Caifano,” he said.
I had heard that he was a slight man and
that the other hoods called him “Shoes” behind his back because he had lifts in
his shoes. But I was not prepared for how tiny he actually was. I guessed him
to be barely 5 feet five inches tall and weighing in at perhaps, perhaps, 150
pounds, maybe less. But what took me back, aside from his demure height, was
his big head. He was a
tiny little man with a big head.
He had a full head of white and silver
hair that was perfectly coiffed. He wore a gray and white long sleeved pull
over, shark skin pants, matching socks and some sort of suede gray slip on
shoes. The overall affect was a tiny little man made of silver. My impression was that if a natural fiber
touched his body it would die of loneliness.
He was visibly nervous. I stood to shake his hand and as he grasped
my hand, he moved his left hand across my left rib cage as though it was a
friendly gesture but we both knew he was patting me down for a wire.
“Why are you wearing a jacket?” he asked
with a wide grin. It was obvious the jacket, or what it could be covering, made
him nervous.
“No reason” I answered and removed the
sports coat, hanging it on the plastic green seat next to mine. We sat across the table from each other.
“So we have the same name, huh?” he asked.
I could not hear even a slight sense of the Chicago accent that is so distinct
to my ear. I misunderstood what he said.
I wrongly assumed he meant that Roger Touhy and I had the same name.
“No,” I said over the slight din in the restaurant.
“My name is John.”
“Yeah,” he replied, “My name is John too.”
Ah yes,” I answered. “John Marshal Caifano.”
I was slightly nervous. There was a moment
of mutual confusion, then a moment of silence and then a few moments of amiable
discussion about Joe Pigs and Las Vegas and Miller’s Pub in Chicago, an eatery
we both enjoyed.
It was at about this time that I jumped
the gun, so to speak. I asked about Roger Touhy but before I could finish the
sentence he snapped, “I have nothing to say about that. What are you stupid?”
“Then why do you think I’m here?” I asked.
He
shrugged in this sarcastic way and then went on a low key rant about Touhy,
noting along the way that the Irish were animals. He was trying to play me.
Everything he was doing was calculated to insult me. From his steadfast refusal
to look at me when he spoke to me to his sidelong glances, were all calculated
to show me who the big dog in the room was.
I’ve interviewed more than my share of mob
guys over the years and I’ve learned two things. One is that mobsters lie. They
lie all the time and they lie about everything. And I do mean everything.
The second thing I learned is that
mobsters will try to buffalo you, scare you for no other reason than to see if
they can do it. The only reply to their
veiled threats is to offer, calmly, to beat them up. At that, the game playing stops and it stops
immediately. It’s an ugly passage that has to happen. But I wasn’t going to
threaten an eighty-something year old man. Aside from everything else, it would
have reflected badly on Joe Pigs who had gone out of his way to set the meeting
up.
“Where
you from in Chicago?” he asked
“I’m
from Connecticut. I live in Washington DC,” I answered.
“Washington?”
he quipped “Nothing there but a bunch of faggots.”
I waited
and then reached over took my pen and notebook out of my jacket pocket and said,
“Yeah, let’s talk about that. About homosexuals. You want to discuss that for a
while? Or should I just use my research notes? I’ve been talking to people.”
He looked at me with wide eyes and his
mouth open slightly. What I had said, and what he heard was, “I can piss in the
tall grass too, so knock it off.”
Truthfully, this midget was seconds away from having me slap him across the room, mob guy or no mob guy.
Nothing passed between us for a few
seconds. I felt guilt ridden. He looked across the room at the menu and asked,
“You want something to eat?”
What he had said, and what I had heard was,
“Okay, I’ll stop. Put the pen away” and
I did. We walked over to the counter
together and I ordered something. He paid. I had to give him back the high
ground. I wanted this interview.
With
our unnecessary urinating contest behind us, things took a more relaxed tone. We
sat, sipped coffee and talked for three hours. He told me many things, although
not much of it was mob related.
He told me that when he was in his early
30s, he wandered into the Palmer House, an elegant hotel in Midtown Chicago.
Taking a seat in the hotel’s magnificent marble lobby, he said he watched the
hotel’s guests come and go, noting their expensive but low key clothing
style.
“They didn’t yell at each other,” he said.
“They talked. In calm voices. When they laughed, it was almost muted.”
He said that he sat there for hours
watching and listening and learning and that he went back there often to watch
and learn more. Giovanni Marcello Caifano was becoming John Marshall Caifano.
About two hours in, I felt safe to
approach the unspeakable.
“Do
you think some people,” I asked meaning the Chicago mob, “killed Kennedy?”
It was a
loaded question, no pun intended. In 1993,
a convict named Jimmy Files claimed that he was part of a Mafia hit team that
killed President John F. Kennedy. Files told the FBI that the team was made up
of seven members of the Chicago mob including Marshall Caifano. It is generally agreed that Files is, as the
FBI concluded “Not even vaguely credible.” However, Chicago mob informer Joey
Granata has verified the claim as did corrupt Chicago cop Michael Corbitt who
testified to a federal court that Caifano bragged to him that he was in Dealey
Plaza "when history was made".
Caifano considered my question, smiled,
shrugged and said, “Naw” and then, probably forgetting himself for a second
added, “But it’s great they think we did.”
I didn’t get it. His smile widened and he
added, “If they figure you can knock off the President of the United States,
and get away with it, no one is ever going to pay you late again.”
Before we parted he told me, without being
asked, that Touhy was killed because he had successfully used the courts to get
out of prison after 25 years and that he intended to use the courts again to
sue the state of Illinois and the City of Chicago for denying his civil rights.
This time he was threatening to subpoena all the wrong people, the bosses and
their front men and that couldn’t be allowed. So they killed him.
Caifano's handy work on Roger Touhy
I had what I wanted.
Caifano died in his sleep on September 12, 2003. He was 92 years old. Joe Pigs died suddenly and his book of magnificent
recipes was never written.
Note the text: Roger Touhy’s actual
name was Tewy. It was misspelled by Chicago newsmen who assumed the gangsters
name was the same as the long road that cuts through parts of Chicago and into
western Cook County. Roger Touhy, who paid reporters to stay out of the newspapers,
encouraged the mistake. Tewy is a distinctly different name from Tuohy. Roger
is buried under the name Tewy.
I LOVE BLACK AND WHITE PHOTOS FROM FILM
FDR, United States, Summer 1939
Germany,Summer 1939
WHY THE WORLD NEEDS EDITORS..........
THE ART OF PULP
THE ART OF WAR............
The Observation and Appreciation of Architecture
Fallingwater house designed by architect Frank L. Wright in 1935 in rural southwestern Pennsylvania, USA.
BLOGLAPEDIA’S
BLOGS
ARCHITECTURE
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for the blog of it
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THE ARTS
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Photography
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Music
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Sculpture
this and Sculpture that
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The
art of War (Propaganda art through the ages)
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Album
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FILM
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On
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FOOD
Absolutely
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The
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Good
chowda (New England foods)
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Old
New England Recipes (Book support site)
http://oldnewenglandrecipes.blogspot.com/
And I
Love Clams (New England foods)
http://andiloveclams.blogspot.com/
In
Praise of the Rhode Island Wiener (New England foods)
http://inpraiseoftherhodeislandwiener.blogspot.com/
Wicked
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Old
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FOSTER CARE
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HISTORY
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HUMOR
Whatever
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The
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IRISH-AMERICANA
A Big
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The
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When
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The
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LITERATURE
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Shakespeare
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The Blogable
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Holden
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The
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NEW ENGLAND BLOGS
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Old
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Wicked
Cool New England Recipes
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Emerson
http://emersonsaidit.blogspot.com/
The
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http://thenewenglandmafia.blogspot.com/
And I
Love Clams
http://andiloveclams.blogspot.com/
In
Praise of the Rhode Island Wiener
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Watch
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York
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Good
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NOSTALGIA
God,
How I hated the 70s
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Child
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The
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Music
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Elvis
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Beatles
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Year
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http://yearone1955.blogspot.com/
Robert
Kennedy in His Own Words
The
1980s were fun
http://the1980swereokayactually.blogspot.com/
The
1990s. The last decade.
http://1990sthelastdecade.blogspot.com/
ORGANIZED CRIME
The
Russian Mafia
http://russianmafiagangster.blogspot.com/
The
American Jewish Gangster
http://theamericanjewishgangster.blogspot.com/
The
Mob in Hollywood
http://themobinhollywood.blogspot.com/
We
Only Kill Each Other
http://weonlykilleachother.blogspot.com/
Early
Gangsters of New York City
http://earlygangstersofnewyorkcity.blogspot.com/
Al
Capone: Biography of a self-made Man
http://alcaponethebiographyofaselfmademan.blogspot.com/
The
Life and World of Al Capone
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The
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Guns
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The
St. Valentine’s Day Massacre
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Mob Testimony
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Recipes
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The
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The
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The
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The
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Roger
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Chicago’s
Mob Bosses
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Chicago
Gang Land: It Happened Here
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Whacked:
One Hundred years of Murder in Gangland
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The
Mob Across America
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Mob
Cops, Lawyers and Front Men
http://mobcopslawyersandinformantsand.blogspot.com/
Shooting
the Mob: Dutch Schultz
http://shootingthemobdutchschultz.blogspot.com/
Bugsy&
His Flamingo: The Testimony of Virginia Hill
http://bugsyandvirginiahill.blogspot.com/
After
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Mob
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support site)
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The
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http://timelineoforganizedcrime.blogspot.com/
The
Kefauver Organized Crime Hearings (Book support site)
http://thekefauverorganizedcrimehearings.blogspot.com/
Joe
Valachi's testimony on the Mafia (Book support site)
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Mobsters
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Shooting
the Mob: Dead Mobsters (Book support site)
http://deadmobsters.blogspot.com/
The
Stolen Years Full Text (Roger Touhy)
http://thestolenyearsfulltext.blogspot.com/
Mobsters
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Mafia
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Whacked:
One Hundred Years of Murder and Mayhem in the Chicago Mob (Book support site)
http://whackedonehundredyearsmurderand.blogspot.com/
Gangland
Gaslight: The Killing of Rosy Rosenthal (Book support site)
http://ganglandgaslightrosyrosenthal.blogspot.com/
The
Best of the Mob Files Series (Book support site)
http://thebestofthemobfilesseries.blogspot.com/
PHILOSOPHY
It’s
All Greek Mythology to me
http://itsallgreekmythologytome.blogspot.com/
PSYCHOLOGY
Psychologically
Relevant
http://psychologicallyrelevant.blogspot.com/
SNOBBERY
The
Rarifieid Tribe
http://therarifiedtribe.blogspot.com/
Perfect
Behavior
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TRAVEL
The
Upscale Traveler
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TRIVIA
The
Mish Mosh Blog
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WASHINGTON DC
DC
Behind the Monuments
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Washington
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When Washington
Was Irish
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FROM LLR BOOKS. COM
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AMERICAN HISTORY
The
Day Nixon Met Elvis
Paperback 46 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Day-Nixon-Met-elvis/
Theodore
Roosevelt: Letters to his Children. 1903-1918
Paperback 194 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Theodore-Roosevelt-Letters-Children-1903-1918/dp/
THE ANCIENT GREEKS AND
CIVILIZATIONS
The
Works of Horace
Paperback 174 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Works-Horace-Richard-Willoughby/
The
Quotable Greeks
Paperback 234 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Quotable-Greeks-Richard-W-Willoughby
The
Quotable Epictetus
Paperback 142 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Quotable-Epictetus-Golden-Sayings
Quo
Vadis: A narrative of the time of Nero
Paperback 420 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Quo-Vadis-Narrative-Time-Nero
CHILDRENS BOOKS
The
Porchless Pumpkin: A Halloween Story for Children
A Halloween play for young
children. By consent of the author, this play may be performed, at no charge,
by educational institutions, neighborhood organizations and other
not-for-profit-organizations.
A fun story with a moral
“I believe that Denny O'Day is an
American treasure and this little book proves it. Jack is a pumpkin who happens
to be very small, by pumpkins standards and as a result he goes unbought in the
pumpkin patch on Halloween eve, but at the last moment he is given his chance
to prove that just because you're small doesn't mean you can't be brave. Here
is the point that I found so wonderful, the book stresses that while size
doesn't matter when it comes to courage...ITS OKAY TO BE SCARED....as well. I
think children need to hear that, that's its okay to be unsure because life is
a ongoing lesson isn't it?”
Paperback: 42 pages
http://www.amazon.com/OLANTERN-PORCHLESS-PUMPKIN-Halloween-Children
It's
Not All Right to be a Foster Kid....no matter what they tell you: Tweet the
books contents
Paperback 94 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Right-Foster-Kid-no-matter-what
From the Author
I spent my childhood, from age
seven through seventeen, in foster care.
Over the course of those ten years, many decent, well-meaning, and
concerned people told me, "It's okay to be foster kid."
In saying that, those very good
people meant to encourage me, and I appreciated their kindness then, and all
these many decades later, I still appreciate their good intentions. But as I
was tossed around the foster care system, it began to dawn on me that they were
wrong. It was not all right to be a
foster kid.
During my time in the system, I
was bounced every eighteen months from three foster homes to an orphanage to a
boy's school and to a group home before I left on my own accord at age
seventeen.
In the course of my stay in foster
care, I was severely beaten in two homes by my "care givers" and
separated from my four siblings who were also in care, sometimes only blocks
away from where I was living.
I left the system rather than to
wait to age out, although the effects of leaving the system without any family,
means, or safety net of any kind, were the same as if I had aged out. I lived
in poverty for the first part of my life, dropped out of high school, and had
continuous problems with the law.
Today, almost nothing about foster care has
changed. Exactly what happened to me is
happening to some other child, somewhere in America, right now. The system, corrupt, bloated, and
inefficient, goes on, unchanging and secretive.
Something has gone wrong in a
system that was originally a compassionate social policy built to improve lives
but is now a definitive cause in ruining lives.
Due to gross negligence, mismanagement, apathy, and greed, mostly what
the foster care system builds are dangerous consequences. Truly, foster care
has become our epic national disgrace and a nightmare for those of us who have
lived through it.
Yet there is a suspicion among
some Americans that foster care costs too much, undermines the work ethic, and
is at odds with a satisfying life.
Others see foster care as a part of the welfare system, as legal plunder
of the public treasuries.
None of that is true; in fact, all that sort
of thinking does is to blame the victims.
There is not a single child in the system who wants to be there or asked
to be there. Foster kids are in foster
care because they had nowhere else to go.
It's that simple. And believe me,
if those kids could get out of the system and be reunited with their parents
and lead normal, healthy lives, they would. And if foster care is a sort of
legal plunder of the public treasuries, it's not the kids in the system who are
doing the plundering.
We need to end this needless suffering. We need to end it because it is morally and
ethically wrong and because the generations to come will not judge us on the
might of our armed forces or our technological advancements or on our fabulous
wealth.
Rather, they will judge us, I am certain, on
our compassion for those who are friendless, on our decency to those who have
nothing and on our efforts, successful or not, to make our nation and our world
a better place. And if we cannot
accomplish those things in the short time allotted to us, then let them say of
us "at least they tried."
You can change the tragedy of
foster care and here's how to do it. We
have created this book so that almost all of it can be tweeted out by you to
the world. You have the power to improve
the lives of those in our society who are least able to defend themselves. All you need is the will to do it.
If the American people, as good, decent and
generous as they are, knew what was going on in foster care, in their name and
with their money, they would stop it.
But, generally speaking, although the public has a vague notion that
foster care is a mess, they don't have the complete picture. They are not aware
of the human, economic and social cost that the mismanagement of the foster
care system puts on our nation.
By tweeting the facts laid out in
this work, you can help to change all of that.
You can make a difference. You
can change things for the better.
We can always change the future
for a foster kid; to make it better ...you have the power to do that. Speak up
(or tweet out) because it's your country.
Don't depend on the "The other guy" to speak up for these
kids, because you are the other guy.
We cannot build a future for
foster children, but we can build foster children for the future and the time
to start that change is today.
No
time to say Goodbye: Memoirs of a life in foster
Paperbook 440 Books
http://www.amazon.com/No-Time-Say-Goodbye-Memoir
BOOKS
ABOUT FILM
On
the Waterfront: The Making of a Great American Film
Paperback: 416 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Waterfront-Making-Great-American-Film/
BOOKS
ABOUT GHOSTS AND THE SUPERNATUAL
Scotish
Ghost Stories
Paperback 186 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Scottish-Ghost-Stories-Elliott-ODonell
HUMOR
BOOKS
The
Book of funny odd and interesting things people say
Paperback: 278 pages
http://www.amazon.com/book-funny-interesting-things-people
The
Wee Book of Irish Jokes
http://www.amazon.com/Book-Series-Irish-Jokes-ebook
Perfect
Behavior: A guide for Ladies and Gentlemen in all Social Crises
http://www.amazon.com/Perfect-Behavior-Ladies-Gentlemen-Social
BOOKS
ABOUT THE 1960s
You
Don’t Need a Weatherman. Underground 1969
Paperback 122 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Dont-Weatherman-Notes-Weatherman-Underground-1969
Baby
Boomers Guide to the Beatles Songs of the Sixties
Paperback
http://www.amazon.com/Boomers-Guide-Beatles-Songs-Sixties/
Baby
Boomers Guide to Songs of the 1960s
http://www.amazon.com/Baby-Boomers-Guide-Songs-1960s
IRISH- AMERICANA
The
Connecticut Irish
Paper back 140 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Connecticut-Irish-Catherine-F-Connolly
The Wee Book of Irish Jokes
http://www.amazon.com/Book-Series-Irish-Jokes-ebook/
The
Wee Book of Irish Recipes
http://www.amazon.com/The-Wee-Book-Irish-Recipes/
The Wee Book of the American-Irish Gangsters
http://www.amazon.com/The-Wee-Book-Irish-American-Gangsters/
The Wee book of Irish Blessings...
http://www.amazon.com/Series-Blessing-Proverbs-Toasts-ebook/
The
Wee Book of the American Irish in Their Own Words
http://www.amazon.com/Book-American-Irish-Their-Words/
Everything
you need to know about St. Patrick
Paperback 26 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Everything-Need-About-Saint-Patrick
A
Reading Book in Ancient Irish History
Paperback 147pages
http://www.amazon.com/Reading-Book-Ancient-Irish-History
The
Book of Things Irish
http://www.amazon.com/Book-Things-Irish-William-Tuohy/
Poets
and Dreamer; Stories translated from the Irish
Paperback 158 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Poets-Dreamers-Stories-Translated-Irish/
The
History of the Great Irish Famine: Abridged and Illustrated
Paperback 356 pages
http://www.amazon.com/History-Great-Irish-Famine-Illustrated/
BOOKS ABOUT NEW ENGLAND
The
New England Mafia
http://www.amazon.com/The-New-England-Mafia-ebook/
Wicked
Good New England Recipes
http://www.amazon.com/Wicked-Good-New-England-Recipes/
The
Connecticut Irish
Paper back 140 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Connecticut-Irish-Catherine-F-Connolly
The
Twenty-Fifth Regiment Connecticut Volunteers
Paperback 64 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Twenty-Fifth-Regiment-Connecticut-Volunteers-Rebellion
The
Life of James Mars
Paperback 54 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Life-James-Mars-Slave-Connecticut
Stories
of Colonial Connecticut
Paperback 116 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Stories-Colonial-Connnecticut-Caroline-Clifford
What
they Say in Old New England
Paperback 194 pages
http://www.amazon.com/What-they-say-New-England/
BOOK ABOUT ORGANIZED CRIME
Chicago Organized Crime
Chicago-Mob-Bosses
http://www.amazon.com/Chicagos-Mob-Bosses-Accardo-ebook
The
Mob Files: It Happened Here: Places of Note in Chicago gangland 1900-2000
http://www.amazon.com/The-Mob-Files-1900-2000-ebook
An
Illustrated Chronological History of the Chicago Mob. Time Line 1837-2000
http://www.amazon.com/Illustrated-Chronological-History-Chicago-1837-2000/
Mob
Buster: Report of Special Agent Virgil Peterson to the Kefauver Committee
http://www.amazon.com/Mob-Buster-Peterson-Committee-ebook/
The
Mob Files. Guns and Glamour: The Chicago Mob. A History. 1900-2000
http://www.amazon.com/Mob-Files-Guns-Glamour-ebook/
Shooting
the Mob: Organized crime in photos. Crime Boss Tony Accardo
http://www.amazon.com/Shooting-Mob-Organized-photos-Accardo/
Shooting
the Mob: Organized Crime in Photos: The Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre.
http://www.amazon.com/Shooting-Mob-Organized-Valentines-Massacre
The
Life and World of Al Capone in Photos
http://www.amazon.com/Life-World-Al-Capone
AL
CAPONE: The Biography of a Self-Made Man.: Revised from the 0riginal 1930
edition.Over 200 new photographs
Paperback: 340 pages
http://www.amazon.com/CAPONE-Biography-Self-Made-Over-photographs
Whacked.
One Hundred Years Murder and Mayhem in the Chicago Outfit
Paperback: 172 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Whacked-Hundred-Murder-Mayhem-Chicago/
Las Vegas Organized Crime
The
Mob in Vegas
http://www.amazon.com/Mob-Files-Vegas-ebook
Bugsy
& His Flamingo: The Testimony of Virginia Hill
http://www.amazon.com/Bugsy-His-Flamingo-Testimony-Virginia/
Testimony
by Mobsters Lewis McWillie, Joseph Campisi and Irwin Weiner (The Mob Files
Series)
http://www.amazon.com/The-Kennedy-Assassination-Ruby-Testimony-ebook
Rattling
the Cup on Chicago Crime.
Paperback 264 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Rattling-Cup-Chicago-Crime-Abridged
The
Life and Times of Terrible Tommy O’Connor.
Paperback 94 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Life-Times-Terrible-Tommy-OConnor
The
Mob, Sam Giancana and the overthrow of the Black Policy Racket in Chicago
Paperback 200 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Giancana-ovethrow-Policy-Rackets-Chicago
When
Capone’s Mob Murdered Roger Touhy. In Photos
Paperback 234 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Capones-Murdered-Roger-Touhy-photos
Organized
Crime in Hollywood
The Mob in Hollywood
http://www.amazon.com/Mob-Files-Hollywood-ebook/
The
Bioff Scandal
Paperback 54 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Bioff-Scandal-Shakedown-Hollywood-Studios
Organized
Crime in New York
Joe Pistone’s war on the mafia
http://www.amazon.com/Joe-Petrosinos-War-Mafia-Files/
Mob
Testimony: Joe Pistone, Michael Scars DiLeonardo, Angelo Lonardo and others
http://www.amazon.com/Mob-Testimony-DiLeonardo-testimony-Undercover/
The
New York Mafia: The Origins of the New York Mob
http://www.amazon.com/The-New-York-Mafia-Origins
The
New York Mob: The Bosses
http://www.amazon.com/The-New-York-Mob-Bosses/
Organized
Crime 25 Years after Valachi. Hearings before the US Senate
http://www.amazon.com/Organized-Crime-Valachi-Hearings-ebook
Shooting
the mob: Dutch Schultz
http://www.amazon.com/Shooting-Mob-Organized-Photographs-Schultz
Gangland
Gaslight: The Killing of Rosy Rosenthal. (Illustrated)
http://www.amazon.com/Gangland-Gaslight-Killing-Rosenthal-Illustrated/
Early
Street Gangs and Gangsters of New York City
Paperback 382 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Early-Street-Gangs-Gangsters-York
THE RUSSIAN MOBS
The
Russian Mafia in America
http://www.amazon.com/The-Russian-Mafia-America-ebook/
The
Threat of Russian Organzied Crime
Paperback 192 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Threat-Russian-Organized-Crime-photographs-ebook
Organized Crime/General
Best
of Mob Stories
http://www.amazon.com/Files-Series-Illustrated-Articles-Organized-Crime/
Best
of Mob Stories Part 2
http://www.amazon.com/Series-Illustrated-Articles-Organized-ebook/
Illustrated-Book-Prohibition-Gangsters
http://www.amazon.com/Illustrated-Book-Prohibition-Gangsters-ebook
Mob
Recipes to Die For. Meals and Mobsters in Photos
http://www.amazon.com/Recipes-For-Meals-Mobsters-Photos
More
Mob Recipes to Die For. Meals and Mobs
http://www.amazon.com/More-Recipes-Meals-Mobsters-Photos
The
New England Mafia
http://www.amazon.com/The-New-England-Mafia-ebook
Shooting
the mob. Organized crime in photos. Dead Mobsters, Gangsters and Hoods.
http://www.amazon.com/Shooting-mob-Organized-photos-Mobsters-Gangsters/
The
Salerno Report: The Mafia and the Murder of President John F. Kennedy
http://www.amazon.com/The-Salerno-Report-President-ebook/
The Mob Files: Mob Wars. "We only kill
each other"
http://www.amazon.com/The-Mob-Files-Wars-other/
The
Mob across America
http://www.amazon.com/The-Files-Across-America-ebook/
The
US Government’s Time Line of Organzied Crime 1920-1987
http://www.amazon.com/GOVERNMENTS-ORGANIZED-1920-1987-Illustrated-ebook/
Early
Street Gangs and Gangsters of New York City: 1800-1919. Illustrated
http://www.amazon.com/Gangsters-1800-1919-Illustrated-Street-ebook/
The
Mob Files: Mob Cops, Lawyers and Informants and Fronts
http://www.amazon.com/The-Mob-Files-Informants-ebook/
Gangster
Quotes: Mobsters in their own words. Illustrated
Paperback: 128 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Gangsters-Quotes-Mobsters-words-Illustrated/
The
Book of American-Jewish Gangsters: A Pictorial History.
Paperback: 436 pages
http://www.amazon.com/The-Book-American-Jewish-Gangsters-Pictorial/
The
Mob and the Kennedy Assassination
Paperback 414 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Mob-Kennedy-Assassination-Ruby-Testimony-Mobsters
BOOKS ABOUT THE OLD WEST
The
Last Outlaw: The story of Cole Younger, by Himself
Paperback 152 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Last-Outlaw-Story-Younger-Himself
BOOKS ON PHOTOGRAPHY
Chicago:
A photographic essay.
Paperback: 200 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Chicago-Photographic-Essay-William-Thomas
STAGE PLAYS
Boomers
on a train: A ten minute play
Paperback 22 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Boomers-train-ten-minute-Play-ebook
Four
Short Plays
By John William Tuohy
http://www.amazon.com/Four-Short-Plays-William-Tuohy
Four
More Short Plays
By John William Tuohy
http://www.amazon.com/Four-Short-Plays-William-Tuohy/
High
and Goodbye: Everybody gets the Timothy Leary they deserve. A full length play
By John William Tuohy
http://www.amazon.com/High-Goodbye-Everybody-Timothy-deserve
Cyberdate.
An Everyday Love Story about Everyday People
By John William Tuohy
http://www.amazon.com/Cyberdate-Everyday-Story-People-ebook/
The
Dutchman's Soliloquy: A one Act Play based on the factual last words of
Gangster Dutch Schultz.
By John William Tuohy
http://www.amazon.com/Dutchmans-Soliloquy-factual-Gangster-Schultz/
Fishbowling
on The Last Words of Dutch Schultz: Or William S. Burroughs intersects with
Dutch Schultz
Print Length: 57 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Fishbowling-Last-Words-Dutch-Schultz-ebook/
American
Shakespeare: August Wilson in his own words. A One Act Play
By John William Tuohy
http://www.amazon.com/American-Shakespeare-August-Wilson-ebook
She
Stoops to Conquer
http://www.amazon.com/She-Stoops-Conquer-Oliver-Goldsmith/
The
Seven Deadly Sins of Gilligan’s Island: A ten minute play
Print Length: 14 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Seven-Deadly-Gilligans-Island-minute-ebook/
BOOKS ABOUT VIRGINIA
OUT
OF CONTROL: An Informal History of the Fairfax County Police
http://www.amazon.com/Control-Informal-History-Fairfax-Police/
McLean
Virginia. A short informal history
http://www.amazon.com/McLean-Virginia-Short-Informal-History/
The
Quotable Emerson: Life lessons from the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Over 300
quotes
http://www.amazon.com/The-Quotable-Emerson-lessons-quotes
The
Quotable John F. Kennedy
http://www.amazon.com/The-Quotable-John-F-Kennedy/
The
Quotable Oscar Wilde
http://www.amazon.com/The-Quotable-Oscar-Wilde-lessons/
The
Quotable Machiavelli
http://www.amazon.com/The-Quotable-Machiavelli-Richard-Thayer/
The
Quotable Confucius: Life Lesson from the Chinese Master
http://www.amazon.com/The-Quotable-Confucius-Lesson-Chinese/
The
Quotable Henry David Thoreau
http://www.amazon.com/Quotable-Henry-Thoreau-Quotables-ebook
The
Quotable Robert F. Kennedy
http://www.amazon.com/Quotable-Robert-F-Kennedy-Illustrated/
The
Quotable Writer: Writers on the Writers Life
http://www.amazon.com/The-Quotable-Writer-Quotables-ebook
The
words of Walt Whitman: An American Poet
Paperback: 162 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Words-Walt-Whitman-American-Poet
Gangster
Quotes: Mobsters in their own words. Illustrated
Paperback: 128 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Gangsters-Quotes-Mobsters-words-Illustrated/
The
Quotable Popes
Paperback 66 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Quotable-Popes-Maria-Conasenti
The
Quotable Kahlil Gibran with Artwork from Kahlil Gibran
Paperback 52 pages
Kahlil Gibran, an artist, poet,
and writer was born on January 6, 1883 n the north of modern-day Lebanon and in
what was then part of Ottoman Empire. He had no formal schooling in Lebanon. In
1895, the family immigrated to the United States when Kahlil was a young man
and settled in South Boston. Gibran enrolled in an art school and was soon a
member of the avant-garde community and became especially close to Boston
artist, photographer, and publisher Fred Holland Day who encouraged and
supported Gibran’s creative projects. An accomplished artist in drawing and
watercolor, Kahlil attended art school in Paris from 1908 to 1910, pursuing a
symbolist and romantic style. He held his first art exhibition of his drawings
in 1904 in Boston, at Day's studio. It was at this exhibition, that Gibran met
Mary Elizabeth Haskell, who ten years his senior. The two formed an important
friendship and love affair that lasted the rest of Gibran’s short life. Haskell
influenced every aspect of Gibran’s personal life and career. She became his
editor when he began to write and ushered his first book into publication in
1918, The Madman, a slim volume of aphorisms and parables written in biblical
cadence somewhere between poetry and prose. Gibran died in New York City on
April 10, 1931, at the age of 48 from cirrhosis of the liver and tuberculosis.
http://www.amazon.com/Quotable-Kahlil-Gibran-artwork/
The
Quotable Dorothy Parker
Paperback 86 pages
The
Quotable Machiavelli
Paperback 36 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Quotable-Machiavelli-Richard-L-Thayer
The
Quotable Greeks
Paperback 230 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Quotable-Greeks-Richard-W-Willoughby
The
Quotabe Oscar Wilde
Paperback 24 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Quotable-Oscar-Wilde-lessons-words/
The
Quotable Helen Keller
Paperback 66 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Quotable-Helen-Keller-Richard-Willoughby
The
Art of War: Sun Tzu
Paperback 60 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Quotable-Confucius-Lesson-Chinese-Quotables-ebook
The
Quotable Shakespeare
Paperback 54 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Quotable-Shakespeare-Richard-W-Willoughby
The
Quotable Gorucho Marx
Paperback 46 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Quotable-Groucho-Marx-Devon-Alexander
