My intellect has been begging me to also have its say about Avatar for weeks, so I’m finally, grudgingly, going to give it a little space. After all, it’s hung out with me all these years, and I’m sick of its whining:
          “First off the film is manipulative and you fell for it!”
          Hold on! Wait a minute, little intellect. It’s a work of art, it’s selective– that’s not manipulative.
          “It’s beautiful pictures without reality!”
          It’s the realest damn pictures I’ve ever seen, dude!
          “Will you let me talk!? It’s a pure appeal to the emotions, beautiful and simplistic. It’s like stupidly falling in love with a beautiful shallow woman!”
          Oh, intellect! What do you know– what will you ever know– about falling in love?
          ”And if you’d listened to me when you did you’d have avoided a hell of a lot of trouble!”
          Thank you, Spock.
          Okay, look. I loved the film. I don’t apologize for that. But I’m going to now give you one– that’s one– long paragraph– or two short ones– to have your say. Go! Now!
          “I can’t do it in that space! I need…”
          One long! Two short! Go!
          “Pandora is a fantasy world that can never be, and the Na’vi are pure fantasy also, and the way everything is presented is such a fantasy that it’s not worth respecting. The Na’vi aren’t aliens– aliens will probably look like crabs or cockroaches– they’re just exalted human beings, basically idealized Native Americans, who are so supernaturally beautiful and pure both physically and spiritually that I can’t take them seriously as beings. You think this world is realistic? Senses! Senses!? Where are the smells? Where’s the stinks? Where’s the death? Real death, not a few carefully staged plot-advancing movie deaths. They live in a rain forest where it doesn’t rain, they’re surrounded by monsters that never succeed in eating anyone, nobody’s ugly which means they must kill the “inferior” infants the way the Spartans or some Native Americans did, they’re hot-tempered and armed but we never see their wars, they tame flying monsters with ease that in real life would kill half of them…!”
          Time’s half up, friend.
          “Okay. Okay. Now the humans. The whole deck is stacked against them– us! This is what we’re supposed to believe: We’ve mastered fusion and antimatter power which means we have infinite energy already, our biogenetic technology is so advanced we can create actual bodies and then our science is so magical we can transfer minds between bodies which is a more spectacular trick than beaming up on Star Trek. So how about a little awe for the humans!? The Na’vi aren’t the only magic ones here. Yet we’re supposed to also believe that a civilization this advanced still wants or needs to tear up another world to get at some minerals! And that back home Earth isn’t prospering it’s dying! And a single corporation is given this world to loot! And back home a few corporations are doing the same to Earth! That’s nuts! There isn’t a single mention of government in the entire film. Any government. I thought Cameron was shallow before, but this is zero-dimensional– even in Imax! You’d never accept this kind of shallowness in a book or play, so why do…!?”
          Time’s up, intellect. Thank you. Let me call you Intellect.
                    _____________________________________________________________

          So look how impotent the intellect is. It says this can’t  be and that can’t be– but they all are. In a work of art, a creation with its own rules. If you don’t like it build your own! I can see it now. But how come nobody wants to spend three hours with it?
                    _____________________________________________________________

          “Ah, I got to you a little, didn’t I?”

                                        (WARNING: Ending Given Away)

          Living up to what I wrote in my first review, I don’t intend to fill up space just because it’s available, nor try to be bigger than this enormous work. My first viewing was in 2-D, so I could judge the picture’s merits without extra wow’s getting in the way. And now I’ve seen it again, in Imax 3-D.
          As a visual experience, the picture is beyond astounding; it is a near-miracle, the greatest pure visual experience in the history of cinema, and I’m confident in saying that without having seen every film that’s gone before. I flinched once from an object “coming” at me; another time I involuntarily reached out to touch something, I think a leaf, my mind put on hold by the film’s overpowering feel of reality. But more than that, these little instances of rationality’s surrender, was the overwhelming delight and awe at the bioluminescent beauty and lushness of this created world. And though I thought I’d be less interested in the story, having seen it just a few weeks back, I was even more gripped by it, the movie passing in what seemed an instant, and each scene taking on a sense of inevitability and forward momentum. This even included the (relatively) weakest part of the film, the battle at the end, which at times devolves into standard “action” cinema. I was too gripped to even resist this.
          And this second time around, I realized just how good and underrated the acting is, especially Zoe Saldana’s exquisite Neytiri, and the surprising depth in Sam Worthington’s ostensibly laid-back Jake.
          I’d say Cameron succeeded in whatever area he wanted to succeed at in this film. The area he didn’t succeed in is the area that doesn’t interest him– human depth psychology, and, overall, he shows disinterest in the human’s world (in fact, displays flat-out hatred of it). He expended so much energy to bring the Na-vi language to life, for instance– and not an atom of energy to bring the English of 150 years in the future to life: the language, the slang, is completely of the present; indeed, some of it is 1990’s. As are the clothes, the military etiquettes, etc.
          And in the end, what feeling does this amazing film leave us with? Awe at its execution, of course. But, as many have already written on the internet, a strange sense of depression as well. Our species is presented, with a few exceptions, as fundamentally insane, and monstrously evil. Demons, as some of the Na’vi declare. And generally shut off, by our fundamental nature, from a capacity for beauty and oneness. In the end, the Na’vi are saved  not through their own brave efforts, but by their God Eywa’s– against Neytiri’s understanding– taking sides against us. Even God, or a kind of pantheistic near-God, chooses to hate us. There were some cheers in the audience as the humans fell. We the monsters, yet the creators of this vision.

            This week’s insipid media hoo-ha is over Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s words about Barack Obama in 2008. Let’s see. Reid called Obama “light-skinned”. Since Obama is light-skinned, calling him light-skinned is an observation, like calling an apple red. The deeper subtext here? Not very deep, and recognized by everyone: Obama’s being half-White racially, and more than half culturally, made it easier for many White voters to warm to him. A similar recent phenomenon was America’ s love affair with the light-skinned Colin Powell, who probably could have been President himself if he’d had any drive, despite a mediocre record as little more than a good soldier Washington DC diplomatic-military  bureaucrat. The national love affair, now ended, with the less-than-half-Black Tiger Woods, is another page from the same book. All this is just Basic American Racial Psychology 101, not racist psychology. The empty and hypocritical yells of Republicans for Reid to quit, when they the Republicans, especially the media ones, assault Obama ten times worse daily (enemy of the Constitution, if not its destroyer, coward, tyrant, traitor, weakling, “Barack Hussein Obama” as if he wasn’t a Christian) and a hundred times worse daily in private– are beneath contempt.
          The second part of the Reid brief on Obama, that he was someone “with no Negro dialect unless he wanted to have one”, is clumsily put but true. Obama really goes out of his way in public to seem undramatic and emotionally-detached. Or maybe he just is. His clipped, passionless, metronomic speaking style, the way as he talks he hits down on the wrong syllables– which doesn’t happen when someone is emotionally caught up in what they’re saying– are the antithesis of swing or soul or style. Barack Obama speaks as if he was some Assistant Professor of Political Science at some community college somewhere, not President. When he does try to connect with his “Black half”, it can only be done self-consciously, along the lines of those stiff White politicians who try to put a sort of preaching cadence into their voices when speaking to Black audiences. That’s actually become a kind of American cliche. Don’t yell at me, readers! Obama himself has said “I know if I’m in an all-black audience…That creates a different rhythm in your speaking.”
          Again, it all comes down to Harry Reid, an experienced pol, sizing up Obama’s chances in 2008 of convincing needed White voters that: He Wasn’t A Scary Black. He Was A Good Black. (But Still Black Enough That You Can Feel Great About Voting For Him, And Assuage Some Of Your White Guilt.)
          So what was Harry Reid’s crime?
          Or is everything politicians say supposed to be a lie?

          James Cameron’s Avatar tells what happens when the humans, whose own world is referred to as “dying”, and without green, reach a paradise world– beyond unspoiled, magical– and its paradisiacal beings. There’s some brief mention regarding a kind of mineral humans lust for here– though with super-energy to travel the stars– fusion? anti-matter?– mankind could presumably transmute effortlessly any mineral into any other back home– with a technology so advanced the humans can actually create living alien bodies and move human minds in and out of them at will– the only explanation for their savagery (with a handful of exceptions) is that they– we– are innately demonic, driven by satanic DNA against beauty, against life itself. The movie very much says– without ever explicitly uttering the words– that this plague should be destroyed.
          We know the amount of truth in the premise– that holocausts have been– but it’s simplistically drawn here. Cameron’s films have never featured great writing or psychological depth. All that’s left to him are visuals, and whatever plot archetypes he can patch into the matrix.
          It is a measure of his genius– and in certain aspects of film-making Cameron unquestionably is a genius– that the visuals and the archetypes prove enough.
          Not to make a perfect film, but an overpowering and overwhelming one.
          I’m not going to let my intellect write this review: I walked home with it and it gnawed at me with its sparkling cogencies– but where was it when I sat there, and I’m not ashamed to say sat there with tears in my eyes at times, I was so awed, and moved to pity so. For plot and character he uses the simple. In another place I once wrote that there are only two plots, really: Will they love?, and Will they die? He works these well– and of course “they” dying means us, and the beauty he creates is a kind of snapshot from our lost souls, and dreams we’ve blocked out. I only wish, as he needed to end the work, he didn’t fall back on such conventionality. Surely he could have driven himself one last time higher.
          I’ve written a good deal of criticism, none of it published, a little bit e-published (on irawrites.com, if you wish) and I do think I’ve now learned a few good rules about being a critic: 1) Most art is routine, at best, and ranges down to garbage. If you as critic want to be the center of attention, that’s the art you should write about. Dip your ink in (justified) poison and go. 2) But always hold a heart-song in reserve, so in those rare times when the sky opens you can sing to the sun. 3) And in that case, don’t write as if trying to top the work with your words. And 4) Don’t fill the space available to you just because it’s there. If you have only a few simple but cogent things to say– and if they’re in praise, hopefully they will lead others to what you praise– be proud of them, say them, and get out of the way.
          (So as not to be overwhelmed just by the 3-D, I saw the work in 2-D. This beauty, these staggering visionary splendors– it almost makes me afraid to see the work in Imax 3-D. But in a few weeks I will, and that will be Review # 2.)

          9 decades ago a Second Avenue Subway was proposed for New York City, a great project involving service not just from the north of Manhattan to its southern tip but extensions to the Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens. Crippled by a kind of national impotence and paralysis when it comes to infrastructure, almost a century later we’re still just talking about it. As for the “Second Avenue Subway” that is currently being constructed– that’s not the Second Avenue Subway. It’s a little 2-track shuttle line that will go a few stops and then move its trains onto the current Sixth Avenue and Broadway lines, crowding out and crippling, if not in some cases eliminating, the already inadequate B, D, F, V, Q, R, N and W service. Call that the “Second Avenue Subway” if you want– and call a paper airplane a Boeing 747 while you’re at it.
          China is currently building subway lines in 15 cities, and planning subways in another 12. Guangzhou has 71 miles of subway lines. By the end of 2010 it expects to have 154 miles. Ultimately, Guangzhou will have a 500-mile+ subway/light rail system, plus high-speed commuter rail. As of 2009 Hangzhou had no subway. The Chinese government has announced it will build 8 lines totalling 172 miles there, with first service in 2010.
          In 1942 the fastest N.Y. to Boston train made the trip in 4 hours and 15 minutes. Almost 7 decades later many Amtrak trains on the route are no faster, a few are slower, and even the best are only around a half hour faster, meaning that even the best trains make the 231 mile trip at an average speed of around 65 mph. In America that’s called “high-speed rail”.
          China has just opened a new high-speed rail line between Guangzhou and Wuhan. Its trains achieve speeds of 245 mph, and make the 664 mile trip in 3 hours.
          It took 4 years to build it.
          In America we would spend 40 years talking about it, followed by 40 years succumbing to Congressional opposition, and lawsuits.
          In September China announced it intends to build 42 high-speed rail lines by 2012.
          Meanwhile, Amtrak runs one train a day from Boston to Cleveland.
          It goes 618 miles.
          It takes 15-1/2 hours.
          When it’s on time. (As anyone knows who’s traveled Amtrak long-distance [I have], their schedules outside the Northeast Corridor are a joke.
          Barack Obama has offered $8 billion as stimulus money for intercity rail service.
          That wouldn’t build more than a portion of a single high-speed intercity rail line.
          China’s announced it’s going to build 21,127 miles of new line.
          The immigrants and Civil War veterans who built the first transcontinental railroad in the U.S., working in the harshest conditions, with just a pittance of our technology, built miles of track a day. The record was 10 miles on the Central Pacific– it was April 28, 1869– 1 mile an hour.
          Where did that America go?

“The wise man loves, everyone else desires.”   –  The ancient Roman writer Lucius Afranius
You see God, and he offers you a bargain. With a catch.
Here’s the bargain.
If you can swat and prod a little white ball around a lawn slightly more accurately than some other guys, he will give you a billion dollars.
But here’s the catch.
You will have to agree to go home after your matches and only make love to your wife.
With a further catch.
Your wife will have to be a stunningly beautiful young Swedish model who loves you with all her heart.
You spit in God’s face.

_____________________________________________

Tiger Woods, and his game, have never interested me. My life has been filled with more interesting matters. Watching paint dry. And the grasses grow, all over the world. The cars passing in Death Valley. Play it? A bit of miniature golf. Fun. But I know guys get into it, sports. Me too, at times. You get attracted to personalities. But in this man’s case he doesn’t have one, beyond that blank, corporate-ready slate upon which companies scribble to their profit. Oh, okay, I’m being unfair. To the extent I’ve seen him, I guess I have noticed a few slimy tendrils of testiness, impatience and conceit shoot forth too. But basically he’s in that great present-day tradition, in sports-crippled America, of the Superstar Who Says Nothing– Tiger Woods, Derek Jeter, Eli Manning, Michael Jordan– they almost raise nullity to an art form– Who Then Gets Everything.
So why is the Tiger Woods story still of importance?
Because it shoots ultimate truths at us. And they’re tough ones to take.
1) America likes to fool itself, almost to the point of insanity. Whether it’s in regard to financial bubbles, global warming denial, Obama as Messiah, JFK as a good family man, Tiger Woods as a role model….And if the truth explodes in our face, somehow we’re always stunned.
2) Men are obsessed with beauty, but not loyal to it.
3) Related to 2): There’s a restlessness in the human male that drives him always from dark to light and then back to dark, so that the light is just a passing accident, just a rest-stop on a journey that’s instinct-drawn. I know there are exceptions, but I think there’s not enough of them to stop writing.
4) What this all says about women:
I think the reason the media is losing interest in the Tiger Woods scandal is that the women are so uninteresting, and so of a piece, you might say. Really, we’re reaching the point where a drug angle maybe needs to explode to give the story fresh legs. (Let’s mix metaphors, everybody!) Or at least an explosive divorce trial.
The women– his harem– are pathetic. Pathetic in the way they fool themselves, and lie to themselves. All these women actually seem to think they were having a “relationship”, maybe a lasting one, with Tiger Woods. Their relationship was that of a urinal to its user. Pathetic with their botoxed faces and injection-swollen lips, and how too much plastic surgery has made their faces as often skeletal as beautiful. Pathetic in their desperation– to land a man with sexual accommodation and looks– before they “age out”. In how pathetically they dress themselves, yet think they look stylish and “hot”. How awkwardly they now pose themselves and handle themselves in public– for fifteen minutes, anyway. The heart-breaking extent to which they desire to have someone love them, to the point they believe in what’s not there, and a man who isn’t there. (A “blank…slate upon which” to scribble.) The pity you feel for a Rachel Uchitel, who’s probably been forever unhinged mentally by the loss of her fiance on 9/11.  And the contempt you feel for this “hostess”– and can’t we finally dispense with those last five letters?– all those “hostesses” in his harem!– who, according to the N.Y. Daily News (12/13/09, 18-19), “played hostess to the stars….’and she’ll sleep with the celebrities, too, which is an added plus,’ says the club publicist.”
The whole thing makes you want to vomit.
5) Nonetheless, how guys envy Tiger. Articles and blogs not written. And every other Alpha Male who’s freed of the need to work women exhaustively, work women emotionally, to get them.
On To The Next Scandal!

          Perhaps I’m short of deserving a “GFY”. But go ahead and say it, if it’s what you really feel. Talk radio is currently the least domesticated of the big media– why shouldn’t its blogs be?– and then the comments on the blogs?
          As I say in my Nation profile, I’m a writer as well as a radio producer. I’ve written in other places on the internet, especially on the subject of global warming. There are things I’ve written that, in some cases, I’ve researched for years– the way, for instance, I’m now researching Islam, preparing for future writing– and if I hadn’t hunted down every dash and every dot to ensure that every “t” is crossed and every “i” is dotted in such work I’d be as upset with myself as Audrey, Joann Prinzivalli, Zoe Brain and Lynn Miller are with me on this subject of transsexualism. But I decided my writing on WOR Producer Writes would be of a different kind from the other– shorter, more informal, and spontaneous, unburdened by much research and unblessed by same. Like many talk radio hosts– here I shoot from the hip. Duck, take it, observe and enjoy– or return fire.
          Writing is a lonely and isolated business. (Be patient, I will connect this to the subject at hand.) Basically, you sit still at a desk or a table– I like my kitchen table– sometimes for decades– one hand twitches a bit– or if you’re typing the fingers flutter. Occasionally the shoulders move. (In truth, you’re moving more when you’re asleep and dreaming.) It’s easy, twitching and fluttering in solitary like this, to lose sight of what writing is, the collective work of the human race attempting connection. That’s what you’re trying to do, but it’s within your limitations of self, and when the other realities you’ve called to actually report in, it’s like an electric shock. (How many of us believe other people are as real as we are?) So I wrote something as flip as “Mike Penner, who in 2007 re-emerged as one ‘Christine Daniels’ “, as if a whole life prepared a joke for someone else, when in fact it was an enormous odyssey of despair and hope and then despair for Mike Penner/Christine Daniels– and after for friends. So it’s good, Joann Prinzivalli, your let-me-take-a-breath-and-restrain-myself-while-I-say-this-to-you, and what I imagine will be shocking-to-many physical detail by Zoe Brain is good. In symphonic terms, I offered a theme– the replies are the development. By my nature, I can only offer a theme on this. Joann, you speak of  me possibly “sort of feeling that you should have been a girl when you were little, but are suppressing it by wearing a more macho mask”. I don’t think of myself as particularly “macho”, and I know women don’t either, nor particularly un-macho, but I think I speak for most men when I say we’d love to spend a little time as a woman if only we were guaranteed a way back. (That’s why I wrote of what is such a scary thought about transsexuality to most of us men: “a one-way voyage from which there’s no return”.) Lynn, you ask “How about you make friends with one of the thousands of transsexuals, or their spouses, who have done such a transition?” I’ve had gay friends but not transsexual friends– I would feel too uncomfortable, why lie about it (even if it would gain me P.C. points)? Meeting Tiresias in real life is shaking. Zoe, the beginning of your comment
                         “I think it’s clear most men would choose death instead.
               “Men would. So if anyone does this voluntarily then….maybe, just maybe, they’re not men.”
                                                                                                         is both chilling (as just the first line is– and true too, I believe)– and it forces enlightenment.

          In a previous career as assistant manager of a succession of music/instrument shops in the Lincoln Center area, which I pursued simultaneously with my career as a radio producer– an unlikely dual role, I suppose, but one I did enjoy– I served an enormous number of musicians, some of them quite famous, some others on their way. One who was on his way big-time was a scholarly-looking 20-something then 30-something classical pianist named David Buechner. This was a masculine guy, almost always in suit and tie, even vest, straightforward in speech, talked sports, I think I remember him with cigars, and he was sometimes accompanied on his shopping trips by very pretty young women, often Asian. His career was upward-bound, with major concert gigs, CD’s, glowing reviews, academic positions. Some artists struggle. There seemed no struggle in his life.
          Then he dropped out of sight.
          And then I read in a paper that David Buechner was dead, but that from his ashes rose Sara.
          Wait wait– wait! Wait Wait!
          I read in a paper that David Buechner was “dead”, but from his ashes rose Sara?
          Apparently so. It wasn’t just a matter of climbing into a skirt. His brother had advised him, if he really must, to go ahead and cross-dress in private, but remain male. Among other considerations, David Buechner’s brother was thinking, rightly, of a potentially great career destroyed. But costume change wasn’t enough. David apparently went through the complete process– the hormonal treatments, and then the amputation. Followed by whatever crude physical reconstruction modern medicine is capable of.
          I think it’s clear most men would choose death instead.
          And then, for years, I read nothing.
          For some who do this, this choice– a one-way voyage from which there’s no return, no way to cry out to Nature and receive a do-over– ends very badly. A prominent L.A. Times sportswriter, Mike Penner, who in 2007 re-emerged as one “Christine Daniels”, two weeks ago, at age 52, killed himself. As Time Magazine put it, “it didn’t work out.”
          Yet in the N.Y. Times, Sunday Styles section, November 15,2009, page 2, there is David on the left. An old photo. Exactly as I remember him. And Sara’s on the right. And it turns out it worked out: “I felt it was a blessing to flush David Buechner down the toilet…” (”Anything He Can Do, She Can Do”) Even the career is picking up. He looks good as a woman, nice dress, longer hair, lipsticked I believe, seated at a piano. I see I couldn’t bring myself to write “She looks good.”
          I imagine how I would treat this story as a talk show host. If I was conservative enough, I might treat it as a nightmare, and a crime against nature. And I would work in the ancient Romans somehow, who we know were terminal with decadence. If I was a very good liberal I would rise to fabulous heights of tolerance, and celebration. But I notice in my Nation Profile I labeled myself “Pragmatic”. So how does a good pragmatist deal with this?
          Ira, be honest.
          Okay.
          There’s some feeling that this is wrong. But part of me is drawn in fascination and wonder. As if Tiresias, the mythic Greek prophet who lived,  by the will of the gods, as a man and then as a woman and then as a man again, has come to life.
          “Ms. Buechner and her partner of a decade, a Japanese woman…wed before 125″ in Canada, where gay marriage is legal, in 2005.
          But wait a minute. That means they were together in 1995, years before his change.
          Presumably then he has made love to her both as a man and a woman, and she too has an experience almost unique in human history, holding him in her arms and loving him and making love to him, continuing to hold him and love, even as he changed before her eyes, into a woman like her.
          What is it like?

          I was very lucky to be a friend of William Gibson, the author of  The Miracle Worker and some other very considerable work. I met him as a graduate student at Brandeis in 1972 in his playwrighting class, and we remained friends till his death in November 2008. Last Friday I was priveleged to be one of the speakers at his Memorial at the Actors Studio. He was a dear friend, almost a second father, and perhaps the most extraordinary human being I’ve known.
          I had never in my life spoken in public. Not really. I’ve spoken in classes. I’ve spoken up at business gatherings. I’ve been on-air a little. But I never stood before an audience. And this was a special audience– many of them able theater professionals– in a hallowed theater setting– with lighting– and it seemed out of my element. But it meant everything to me to do this well.
          I asked for three minutes. Though how can you relive a 36-year friendship in 180 seconds?
          But I wasn’t really worried about finding the words. I’m confident in my abilities as a good writer. Even the brevity– I have a good organizational mind– I could find the right details.
          Of course I rehearsed. I stood in my kitchen (where actually I do much of my best work).
          And there it was. My voice. That still adolescent-sounding, uncommanding voice– to my ears– at 62!– when I want  resonance. And that makes some callers, when I screen them, call me “young man”. Too high pitched. To my ears, a sort of New York drawl. Smart, bemused, not deep with emotion. To my ears. That gets me through life and work. Where you use only parts of yourself, and leash the deepest.
          It sounded all wrong.
          I remembered my first news broadcast at WBAI, where I was a reporter. After it was over, the engineer, who could care less if I succeeded or failed, or died I suppose, had a brief comment: “It was s___.”
          I rehearsed more in the kitchen. I tried “actorish”. It was ludicrous.
          Then I felt I was falling into a “patter” with it.
          Connected: A word on hosting a radio show.
          It’s hard.
          To overcome the hardness, many hosts run into a patter. Lots of sports hosts and DJ’s especially fall into this. Or hosts fall into a rat-a-tat-tat. Many political talkers fall into that. Obama Obama this Obama that rat-a-tat-tat rat-a-tat-tat. Not the best.
          This is not how you speak from the heart.
          Most men don’t speak from their hearts, anyway. Speak movingly? What does that have to do with everyday life, and its voice?
          I slowed up.
          Breathe, breathe, use the spaces between words, some silence is all right even as you speak, speak very clearly, don’t say “Uh”.
          It still wasn’t good enough.
          I’d break off midway, and disgusted with myself.
          Why couldn’t I get this right?!
          And what was wrong with me that I had to work this hard, and what was wrong with the way I normally talk that it wasn’t good enough now, and– what was WRONG WITH ME?!
          But eventually– it really was just a few hours before I left for Manhattan– I felt I finally got it. Memorizing had helped. Somehow I was reading before, now I was speaking again, as if the words were just coming to me. Somehow the heightening finally came together with the natural.
          This was so exhausting, so schizophrenic! Like me fighting me!
          But I had the voice I wanted. Not one I’d ever used at the radio station. It was a voice appropriate both to the heart’s truths and the words expressing them.
          After, a number of people there said I’d spoken eloquently, and it was moving and they appreciated it.
          The praise that meant the most to me was at the reception after, where Tina Packer praised me privately. She is one of the foremost acting teachers in America, and has helped the best. (And is a director herself, and known for her Shakespeare & Company troupe in the Berkshires.) Her judgment is nonpareil. And an actress told me what she most appreciated was that I spoke of another human being in terms of gratitude, which she said has become a rare emotion.
          I don’t write any of this to brag. I’m simply grateful I was…able. It was exhausting to me. But I felt I gave my best its voice, for once.

          Here’s what the Yankees should do for 2010: Very little.
          Let’s get this Let’s Get Younger And Faster thing out of the way.
          Since players began to puff and swell up in the 1990’s with their steroids, HGH, testosterone and– if you’re Manny Ramirez– certain feminine products– and, any anti-drug puritans out there, face it that these dark medicinals work, you become a better player, if you were going to be just good now you can be great– or pseudo-great like Alex Rodriguez– can you believe that Barry Bonds was once a skinny leadoff man who in his first four seasons in the majors averaged 21 homers?– then his head began to swell– well– he always had a swelled head– swelled more– WOR’s own Dr. Hoffman confirmed to me when I asked  that steroids can indeed enlarge the skull– since  hitters began to balloon up and strengthen the speed game has diminished in importance. You don’t need Rickey Hendersons anymore to steal 100+ bases for you, and there aren’t any.
          All you need now is five or six guys who can each steal 10-30 bases, and are fast enough to score from first on doubles and second on singles, and you want a couple of them to be able to play centerfield. You do need some speed, otherwise you get into a passive, luck-based, waiting-for-a-home-run-to-bail-us-out game. With some speed you can create runs, you’re more the master of your own fate, and it makes you more mentally involved in your own game.
          The Yankees have enough of the second kind of speed (five guys between 10 and 30).
          Younger? When the season starts the champions will be a few months older. In other words, they’ll be the same age.
          More important than any of the numericals is that the Yankees finally achieved personality balance. This means you have guys who other guys enjoy being with, and who can thus goad each other higher without creating enemies. But with enough spirit to charge a team that is always in danger of going corporate. The sullen Randy Johnsons and Kevin Browns have moved on, taking their dark clouds with them, as has the hyper, image-crazed Roger Clemens. A beautiful balance has been struck: You have the straight arrows (Jeter, Teixeira, Pettitte), the wack-job (Burnett), Everybody’s Friend (Sabathia), the party animal (Swisher), the Asian Man of Mystery (Matsui), the Diva (Rodriguez), the jittery (Posada), the unflappable (Rivera)– lots of interesting “types”, that magically meld. It would be sad to spit in destiny’s face and not let them win the second championship they have in them.
          Now. Regarding some specific players.
          Hideki Matsui has another outstanding year left. He’ll work super-hard for you in the off-season to be able to play a little outfield for you in 2010. Meanwhile, don’t start pushing Jeter, Rodriguez and Posada into more DH-ing. That’s two, three years off. Let Matsui handle it for another year. But if he gets greedy and wants a multi-year contract you have to let him go.
          Johnny Damon. Many people don’t seem to realize just how tremendous a player he’s been. He is, in fact, a marginal Hall of Fame candidate. He has a shot at 3,000 hits and an outside shot at 2,000 runs. They say he’s a defensive liability, but when I’ve seen him he did all right. Granted, the arm’s weak. Beyond the numbers, he brings gusto, joy and clutch to the game. But if he wants some sort of astronomical three/four-year contract you have to let him go.
          I don’t know if the Yankees realize how much intangibles they’re going to lose if they lose both guys.
          Throw some of your money at them. Just not years.
          But assuming they keep both, there is still one move, the only one, they need to do for 2010.
          Bring in, trade for, sign up, a good to excellent starting pitcher.
          This isn’t so important for itself as that it keeps Hughes and Chamberlain in the bullpen. Thus giving the Yankees,  potentially, a bullpen for the ages. Making every game 7 innings.
          Especially regarding Joba Chamberlain.
          The starter experiment has failed. This isn’t a baseball intellectual. This isn’t Greg Maddux or Mike Mussina, someone you want to have thoughts on the mound, someone who knows how to pace himself, to build a beautiful piece of art inning by inning. This is a thrower. So let him throw. Point him at two or three batters a game, tell him to forget he ever had a curve or a changeup, and blow them away with instinctive, mindless, steaming 98 mph heat and killer 88 mph sliders. He’s frustrating, as many great young arms are, and you have to be patient. Randy Johnson was a mess early on. 0-4 with a 6.67 ERA with Montreal in 1989 with 26 walks in 29-2/3 innings. Sandy Koufax and Nolan Ryan took years to get their insane stuff harnessed. Chamberlain is a potential Hall of Fame reliever. Trading him or misusing him– you’d have to be really Mets-stupid to do that. (The Mets traded the young Nolan Ryan away for essentially nothing. Not satisfied, they eventually did the same with an even greater Hall of Famer, Tom Seaver.)
          Add a starter. Otherwise– stand pat. Be inactive. Stay passive. Sleep late. Run in place. Win another.
          Then in 2010 you can sign your next Hall of Fame catcher, Joe Mauer. Just think how handsome he’ll look with stripes.
          And on the dynasty rolls.
          As I said before, I’m not a Yankee fan. A baseball observer only. But I have to admit they’ve somehow pulled me into a state of– admiration. I actually used to be a National League fan. I rooted for a certain other baseball team in the area– oh, forget it.