RUDIMENTS

RUDIMENTS, pt. 1,155 [In Pretty Much the Most Amazing Monolgue I'd Ever Heard] (a jazz story, Jimmy Goodenough, Aug. 1969): "Well that's an improvement" the old timer said, while he was sitting on a concrete and stone half-wall separating the lawn from the shaded people. It wasn't just the tone of his voice that caught my ear but it was also the accent and his demeanor - both very interesting. So I decided to stop right there and spend a few moments with him, as I had the time. I'd been working the last 6 hours or so with Cheng Dao Lee, known as Charley, an artist who had a huge apartment w/studio on w86th where he did his work. 'Oblique paintings of Chinese Hills,' we called them. On this day some of his large pieces needed crating and readying for transportation (to Rosencrantz Gallery, e57th) - which was simple enough work if one could be careful. It involved building protective transport-frames

RUDIMENTS, pt. 1,154 (transcript...) "...And then like some unsought-for pterodactyl he would suddenly seem to come to life and be around everywhere I went. Like some hillbilly in disguise with a flannel shirt for parents and two mud-boots for twin sisters, he'd just be there hanging around listening and misunderstanding and then misrepresenting things and talking out of turn and he'd never read a newspaper - he said - that he could believe and even the 'car ads were mostly wrong' but he'd sit around eating candy and hard rolls whenever he found them to be available and the crusty old people at the general store down the patch by the river-bend started taking to him and letting him in on rainy days and the like, and he'd become such a fixture at Bilobay's General Store that no one ever flinched anymore, even if he came in covered in concrete and cement dust and with big patches of dried stucco and p

RUDIMENTS, pt. 1,153 (the man in the blue coat) The guy with the blue coat said he  was going to send me something  but I always knew him to be a liar  so I never expected much and  he'd once told me he lived 'by  the water with the blue spruce  on the shoreline' and that  sounded too pat for me to  believe for I knew him to live  adjacent to the canal where  all the junk lumber had been  dumped and where people  dropped off washers and  bicycles and other crap  they didn't want and if he  thought that was any sort  of  paradisaical  existence for  anyone he was surely nuts.  In addition, I knew he drove a bus for the MTA. That was the sort of job people took for the benefits. It made all the abuse worthwhile - big salary, medical coverage, benefits and perks, union representation, 20 years and out, with some big pension always rolling in. I  saw  right through a lot of the  blowhard  stuff that he said. -