Running for Your Life: The Jazz Palace Post

It’s deep winter in the city, the five-day weather forecast as welcome as an elevator fart, and by my reckoning there’s been a rise in those, as social decorum frays under dreary skies with yet another Monday storm coming at you, right between the eyes.

That’s why it’s so important to think of . . . spring! And not Groundhog Day, six more weeks of winter, spring. But The Jazz Palace spring of 2015.

Do yourself a favor and clink on this link http://bit.ly/1u2XLhD. It will take you to another world. Have you ever seen such a beautiful object? And that’s just the beginning. The Jazz Palace by Mary Morris (full disclosure; Mary is my wife) is not only the novel of the spring, but the event of the spring.

The Jazz Palace tells the story of Benny Lehrman, Napoloeon Hill, the Gem Sisters. I’ve lived with these characters for years and to quote a friend, the one-of-a-kind drummer Jamey Haddad, they are hip cats, man. They lived the life in Prohibition America. This is a story of tragedy, race, friendship and love. Benny and Napoleon, they howl at the moon. Pearl and her mother, Anna, keep it real. Oh, and music. In deep winter, we need hot music.

So, are you tired of winter? Make The Jazz Palace Web site http://bit.ly/1u2XLhD you’re pre-spring destination. Make it a favorite, share and retweet these few words of mine. Come to the events when they come to your ZIP, or a ZIP near you. Oh, yeah, in April. When the book is available for sale, get the book. You won't be sorry.

Because it’s The Jazz Palace. You don’t want to miss it. Because it can’t miss.

Next: Running for Your Life: Mental Floss

Running for Your Life: On Reznikoff

From Charles Reznikoff’s “Rivers and Seas, Harbors and Ports,” published in “Testimony,” Objectivist Press (1934):

a cargo of sandalwood at the Fiji Islands and at Guam a quantity of beech de mer, betel nuts, and deer horns; ivory rings for martingales; a cargo of copper ore, shipped in Chile; sperm and whale oil, sperm candles and whalebone; pigs of copper; six seroons of indigo; pigs of lead, moys of salt, and frails of raisins; seal skins, prime fur and pup skins, from seals taken at the Falkland Islands; a cargo of tea, fresh, prime, and of the finest chop, quarter chests of tea, hyson skin and congo, with the present of a shawl from the hong merchant in Canton; cases, trunks, bales, casks, kegs and bundles

Here’s a big shout-out to Eliot Weinberger, whose “Poet at the Automat” piece in the London Review of Books, Jan. 22, 2015, introduced me to a writer I’ve known about for years – but have never read. This Charles Reznikoff (1894-1976) seems, in Weinberger’s smart and considered interpretation, a kindred spirit. Some reasons why:

“There was the legend of Reznikoff, the invisible poet, walking twenty miles a day in New York City, writing down his observations in a little notebook, meeting cronies who never knew he was a writer at the Automat, publishing his own books of perfect poems for more than fifty years. A sweet, elderly man who was maddeningly self-deprecating. George and Mary Oppen told me about a reading in Michigan, at the end of which the audience was on its feet, wildly cheering. Rezi, as they called him, was heard to mumble: ‘I hope I haven’t taken up too much of your time.’”

It is an aspiration of mine to be seen as a kind and self-effacing man like Charles Reznikoff, a writer who until his mid-sixties published nearly all his books himself, setting type for many of them on a printing press in his parents’ basement.

Charles Reznikoff is an American original, a writer’s writer. Please note: This is not an Amazon published writer. Rather, Reznikoof is a man who self-published and continues to be read and discussed in the most learned journals of today. After Weinberger's timely introduction (I am not yet in my mid-sixties!), I can’t wait to sit and read his work.  

Next: Running for Your Life: Mental Fitness

Running for Your Life: The Big Outdoors

Okay, so these shoes (see second last post) have changed everything!

Heretofore I’d been writing that winter running poses too many risks for a runner in his sixtieth year, i.e. icy pavements, black ice on asphalt, wet slushy corners, especially those of the calf-deep variety that come about in the too-soon thaws that follow a blizzard, leaving streets with gallons of mud-colored soup at the lip of every sidewalk cut made to advantage the disabled, who you have to wonder where the disabled have gone and how they’re faring in the days (weeks!) it takes for Brooklyn sidewalks to be clear.

Which means the big outdoors, cross-country skiing in Prospect Park, and running ! in my new shoes, the ones that promise sure footing and relaxed spring, that somehow, miraculously, have helped to calm the fat leg from my DVT I’ve been feeling in recent weeks, worrying me some but, then, in these new shoes ! the feeling is just as it should be, and I’m back, right where I want to be, floating along these hard and too smooth surfaces.

Back to looking around as I run in the cold and on the snow and ice, falling into meditation. Second winds coming when they should, actually back to the sublime idea that I will go on a run; in winter, or summer, the season doesn’t matter, all with that indescribable feeling that I could run forever.

Next: Running for Your Life: On Reznikoff

Running for Your Life: "Red Army" by Gabe Polsky

You don’t have to be a fan of hockey to like the movie “Red Army,” a captivating fill-in-the-blanks feature-length interview between filmmaker Gabe Polsky of Chicago and Slava Fetisov of Moscow, Soviet Union.

Watch Slava sit and watch the critical play-by-play segments of the astonishing Miracle on Ice triumph by the US men’s hockey team. The outcome wasn’t so miraculous for the Soviets. Players were purged and those who remained – Fetisov among them – were relegated to punishing training methods (where did they get the footage!) that would bring low the sternest Spartan warrior.

Watch how Slava snaps at Gabe, who chooses the word “power” to describe the sudden ascension of Victor Tikhonov to the helm of the Red Army, the Soviet men’s national ice hockey team, over beloved, fiercely dedicated to the players, Anatoly Tarasov. It is “system,” Fetisov scolds. Tikhonov was KGB. He is only an empty suit. A stooge. What power is in that?

Watch and marvel at the best top five that will ever – argue here if you will, but with the advent of salary caps and front-loaded contracts, you will lose – play the game. Kasatonov, Fetisov, Larionov, Makharov and Krutov.

Ah, Krutov. You will love him. If there is a man to limn the soul of ice hockey, the glory of the team above all else, it is Krutov.

Sense the no small bit of Putin in our Slava. This man who brandishes his cell phone like a gun, his easy arrogance, his withering glare at the inferiors around him. No Esposito showman, Beliveau nobleman, Howe great uncle. There is more than a little of the Russian dictator in this man who after hours of being interviewed by Gabe doesn’t show him the courtesy of even remembering where the filmmaker came from. As if a California boy, as Fetisov calls him, could have come up with what northern boy Gabe of Chicago has managed to do.

The Soviet Union may be dead, but it is very much alive here in the story of the Red Army and Slava Fetisov, in fact it smolders in the death-stare gaze of this amazing man who doesn’t stint in telling a story of great drama, a story that seems so long ago and far away but that crackles in the telling.

Next: Running for Your Life: The Big Outdoors

Running for Your Life: Karl Ove Knausgaard’s “My Struggle” Vol. II (and New Shoes!)

Volume I ends with the burying of the father, begins with a Proustian meditation on death.

Enter Volume II. Our hero doesn’t care what he eats as long as he has fuel for writing … then, with no explanation, he, a bitter-ish house husband, is planning and buying food at gourmet shops for elaborate meals. There are long, amazingly authentic sounding, all-inclusive literary, intellectual and philosophical eruditions between him and Geir, his close friend. Deeply personal, if not intensely intimate, details about the dark psychology of his one true love, his wife Linda. Being a parent. A bad one. Having one child and what she is about, how very early she is free and apart from him in her judgments and needs and preferences. There is a second child. A third. No wonder birth order matters. It has to. It’s “Your Struggle.”

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New shoes! New shoes! New shoes! I have been out for the second time in them. The first outdoors (Jan. 29) in the Asics Gel-Kinsei 5, a neutral bomb of a shoe!

You forget the difference new shoes make. Must mean I’m back in marathon-training mode. (Or could have as much to do with the Blizzard of ’15: I neglected to pack my running clothes and my old Brooks Bangers when I was tapped for an overnight emergency stay due to the surprise closing of the subways, and I bought them at an athletic-wear store not far from my Times Square area office building. Note to crowd haters: shop in the hours before a New York blizzard hits. The combined forces of a paranoid media and power-mad despot politicians keep people indoors. The usually jammed store was blissfully empty.)

Do yourself a favor and check out these beauties. If nothing else, just a walk around the shoe store floor. Asics Gel-Kinsei 5. This longtime Brooks believer is suddenly feeling like a convert!

Next: Running for Your Life: The Big Outdoors