[Above photo: An unexpected sight as I walked to the bus stop for Portland. It revives the age-old argument: Is it moral to establish museums {generally for the wealthy} as long as we have child hunger, an underfunded educational system, and seriously ill Americans with no provision for medical care, for example?]
29 January 2023
New York fills me with such mixed emotions and conflicting thoughts. It is amazingly fun and yet wouldn’t exist without a struggling class of underpaid workers who do menial, often physically damaging, jobs to keep it alive. It is mostly hard surfaces, but allows a feeling of joy and renewal when the contrast of Nature is encountered in a park.
I had a remarkable time, seeing friends and going to a recital (Keyboard Conversations—Jeffrey Siegel), a terrific play (“From Riverside to Crazy”), two films that are each so much better than the Academy Award nominees (“Turn Every Page”, a documentary about the relationship of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb, his lifelong editor, and “Saint Omer”, a gripping courtroom drama about a Senegalese immigrant who killed her toddler), the Edward Hopper exhibit at the Whitney, and a pass through MOMA.
In addition to visits with old friends, I had supper with one of their children who is a jazz composer and performer. I haven’t seen him for years and he was a portrait of integrity—if that means being true to form, in his case meaning warm, kind, thoughtful, and quick of mind. I also took the Staten Island ferry and SI railroad to visit a Burmese Child Psychiatrist and her family for supper.
She left Burma after medical school for London, where she completed psychiatry training. When her husband, also a medical graduate who had been imprisoned after the 1988 uprising, was unable to pass the medical entry examination, he moved on to the US and started a series of sushi shops. She, with their daughter, later joined him, having to completely repeat her training in General and Child Psychiatry. They purchased a home on Staten Island and raised their daughter, San Su (after Daw Aung San Su Kyi).
The latter, who joined us for a delicious meal of Shan Khao Swe (a special Shan-style noodle dish) cooked by her mother, is a freshman at CUNY in the Macaulay Honors College with a full scholarship, teaching violin and viola on the weekends when she isn’t playing bass guitar in her rock group or playing first viola in the student orchestra. She is pre-med and wants an additional degree in public health. She is sweet and smart and has an incredibly lively mind. Ah, these scary immigrants with which the GOP tries to frighten their base! My only fear for her, as I have felt previously when seeing brilliant demonstrations of immigrant hunger, is can she turn it off and relax or are the dogs of success/failure nipping so hard at her heels that she must continue to sprint even after arriving at what would be a glorious destination for anyone else? A pretty long sentence.
Armed with a Senior Metro Pass, I travelled all over. Oh, I also spent a couple of hours at the Strand, sifting through their used books. I generally buy used books online from Thriftbooks but there is nothing like rummaging around stacks. I loved Moe’s in Berkeley, a 60 year institution there. Moe himself was a pretty difficult guy, argumentative but always stimulating. He used to poop regularly in the Claremont swimming pool early in the morning. A friend who swam there realized it after a while and, while sympathetic to Moe’s desire to relax in the pool, threatened to call the Public Health Department and Herb Caen at the Chronicle unless the Claremont forbade him to swim there. Moe allegedly had deep pockets and a fierce squad of attorneys, inducing fear in the Management. But they faced it and banished him. This is a true story. The Freudian in me can see his middle finger aimed at the wealthy Claremont clientele as inextricably linked with his anarchism and feisty temper. Lots of anger in there. Moe Moskowitz died in 1997. His daughter runs the bookstore now.
It will be interesting to see if Jim Jordan and the House Oversight Committee turn up any dirt on their revenge mission. I suppose everyone has something they aren’t proud of or wants to keep secret. I sense it will be a Dagwood-sized nothing sandwich, stirring up a lot of dust, wasting taxpayers’ money, and trying to distract the Public from seeing the fear, mendacity, and vacuousness in the GOP “platform”. Why, exactly, would the Rothchilds be interested in setting forest fires in California? I think they like money and power and it seems like quite a stretch, aside from their somehow having access to “space lazars”, to turn that into gold. Rumplestiltskin’s approach was more likely to yield gold than burning down the Sierra foothills. I don’t doubt that Hunter Biden traded on his father’s name to make some $. He seems a pretty troubled youngish man. But Joe cannot control his son, no more than any of us can. And why is George Santos still in Congress, Kevin?
Time for a walk. Ari and Jon may drop by tonight. I must walk off my desire to hiss and spit.
A Psychiatrist in Myanmar 