RUDIMENTS

RUDIMENTS, pt. 388 (a story of nyc to avenel, pt.1) My father was born at the west end of 42nd Street, at a section now all gobbled up by the Lincoln Tunnel ramps, roadways, and entryways. Also generally the area of the Javits Center. It's all still there, but his residences and all that are long gone. If I didn't tell you there was once something vital there, you'd never  know it.  There had been a real community there; and there was,was until recently, a large Mercedes Benz dealership there too. Some stressful striving for class, in a  way known only to New Yorkers, who need a car like they need a hole in the head. I suppose the tunnel was needed as well. The scene amounts to hundreds of cars waiting in traffic; horns, impatient people, buses. You'd never know it by seeing it now, but it was once a vital, large, and strong Italian community. There are cops around, directing traffic and stuff  -  but ba...

RUDIMENTS, pt. 387 (woodbridge lock-up) We used to cross Route One, Kenny Lackowitz and I, across the Cloverleaf Cemetery, to get to Iselin Jr. High. It was a bit of a walk, but we never cared. That was, and still is, one of the crummiest cemeteries around here. Flat stones, level with the ground, nothing sticking up. It thereby loses all the flavor of a heritage graveyard, seemingly connected to nothing, memorializing nothing and just a bared, grassy expanse along a sad highway. I always felt it was akin to putting a baseball card down on the flat ground to memorialize Uncle Jed. Not even worth it. Anyway, it would bring us out to about ten thousand little square homes, rowed and streeted, like they did then in those 'new' places about which everyone was supposed to get so excited. One million wartime soldiers their new families, looking for ground. Maybe in the Free-Soiler days, it used to be 'Thirty-acres and a...

RUDIMENTS, pt. 386 (116 eden lane, avenel) Long about 1966, I can remember a Summer-long daily reading on WBAI of a book by William Morris, entitled 'News From Nowhere.' It was out of the blue to me; I knew nothing of him, or the Pre-Raphaelites even, except for Algernon Swineburne and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, whose work I'd read  -  or tried to. They were both miserable failures, in my eyes, and anyway I never understood their entire beef, but on the other hand I always enjoyed their cultural criticisms of the way things were going. And then I detoured myself into a short study of 'Utopia' - the concept. Thomas More. 1516. In Greek, Utopia means 'no place,'  -  so the joke is that he knew it was unattainable. 'Sly, rueful self-acknowledgement resides within that idea.' By writing this, he did, in fact, create the odd template for later Utopias, which were always marked by two tenaciou...