07/29/2023
NEW YORK SNIP506 – Capra’s Heroes
https://vimeo.com/849557993
greetings
welcome to the 506th inward journey video-blog. bring on locusts, let there be poisons on the self-serving money-grabbing fossil fuel companies and poisons for politically influential climate-change deniers in congress and wherever they are. these heatwaves might finally break the puritanical underbelly of american mindset to bring nakedness into vogue privately & god forbid even on occasion publicly.
jan
July 28th, Friday
I am not stoned. The M trip I wrote about last Thursday was, as they say, a ‘one-off’ event resulting from needing to engage my brain for two hours into understanding a new audio-editing application with a live tutor, followed by an hour long collision with the local and foreign crowds in Chinatown in the futile pursuit of a men’s-specific charcoal skin conditioner that I like and I had some years bought there. Not to mention the up ’n down stairs of the subway system and snail’s pace of buses, for a 90-year old man. Me.
Dear friend, I promise that I will start right now to limit my usual rampant associative tangents to a respectable time frame knowing that the heat is taxing your concentration and your need to conserve energy is primary. I will make this a shorter than usual ‘unearth and articulate’ nearly every thought and feeling that emerges from the depths of my psyche.
No. I am still, hopefully, a rational man even in this heat that my 15 year-old air conditioner is struggling mightily to block. Ma*****na – none in ten months since mid October 2022, I have been without the psychical support against the ‘slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.’ Even William S. was invoking the troubles navigating through the seven stages of the human condition from birth to death in 17th century London. From ‘As You Like It’ about the stages which begin with these words’ shocking perspective on life: “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players…” and ending with “…the infant, the schoolboy, the lover, the soldier, the justice, the pantaloon, and old age.” The ‘pantaloon’ conjuring up the baggy trousers that a foolish old man wears having abandoning his faith in any future.
My 60 year-old daughters have not witnessed or do not yet want to recognize that changed stage of my attitude to life so they continue basically to treat me as ‘dad’ the always the healthy self-serving ageless authoritarian figure from earliest childhood, their 30 year-young dad. Dad the controller. Dad the invincible. I contribute to that myth myself – I try not to show too many of my frustrations with current technology, iPhone, or updated computer OSs, or my terror floundering in the AI driven underpinning structures of the Internet. I try not to mention the costs of all the medical tests and procedures and medications that besiege me weekly so as to not strike anxiety in them, fearing me incapable of carrying my own financial solvency. I don’t know what’s going to open their eyes. It’s inconceivable for them to imagine THEIR DAD IMAGE to be shattered by my current reality and increasing dependency on the kindness of others – last chapter in my life! Dad on his way out the door? C’est pas possible! Je n’y crois pas! Je ne peux pas le croire!
This unwillingness on their part and my own posturing as a still viable independent person capable of all tasks and problem-solving, has and does give me some sleepless hours speculating about how this stage of my life wouldn’t better be spent somewhere in Europe, realistically really only Denmark, and to maintain some semblance of my all-urban life-styles, it would have to be Copenhagen. I would in some ways be a tourist, although I was born there and nurtured there.
I can’t forget the two years I returned to Copenhagen in the mid 1950s with the intention of finishing my architectural training there. I did the training except for the final thesis needed to graduate. But the odd thing for me was that I was perceived as an American even though I had only been gone for ten years. People hearing my childhood Danish would cast me as a tourist trying to fit into the cultural life of the country, and would answer me in English. The clothes I was wearing was a visual clue even before I spoke.
Tourists experience Copenhagen as expensive in accord with Northern Europe prices for hotel, transportation and food. During the six days that I and my two daughters visited that city to celebrate, belated by one day, my 90th birthday starting April 1, 2023, I did not pay for anything. Food, lodgings and transportation was paid by them for me. Still, when I tried later to compute the conversion of the local Danish Kroner, contrast to the Swedish, Norwegian, and Icelandic Kroná, I randomly determined that the cost of living there in dollars was possibly 20% cheaper than say New York.
My half-brother has arranged for us three to stay in a local guesthouse, and in my attempt some months ago to estimate what it would cost me to be alone in one this local-friendly pension, I concluded that it would be considerably cheaper living in one room with kitchen and private shower, without the cost of electricity and television subscription, there than renting a studio in Manhattan, New York.
I can’t find my calculations based on what I did know my daughters paid for the two bedroom room apartment with kitchen and TV we rented for six nights, it might be in my audio-journals, which I do keep as frequently as my text-journals known as ‘NOW-JOURNALS’, at least 2 to 3 times per week. But I seem to remember having examined and calculated that a smaller 2nd floor one bedroom apartment, in this former 3-story residential building from the early 1900s, including electricity, could cost me $44 per day or $1320 per month. VILLA TÅRNBORG.
And just remember that during those six days I only heard one police siren and no ambulance or firetruck sirens, and I was out on the streets at least eight hours a day. I did not see one single policeman or woman, and only a select few officers carry revolver. Here in Manhattan, NYC, I hear two sirens every hour. Hah hah, and see if you can wrap your synapses around the following facts – “Denmark had 4,125 prisoners on an estimated population of 5.9 million at beginning of June 2022. Average length of imprisonment 4.2 months, incarceration rate of 72 per 100,000. Finally a homicide rate per 100,000 is 1.2 [person]. Prison density [an uncrowded] 103%.”
This would be like dead silence and tranquility compared to you know what’s here in the USA! Mayhem, murder, struggle, fear, far right coups, DT a would-be Hi**er, climate deniers, vaccine hoaxes, and myriad obstacles in dealing with city, state and federal governments’ delivery of humane services. One defense of New York life, of which there are admittedly many, and I was treated to one such on the subway a couple of days ago on my way to an orthopedic appointment midtown – the public address system finally works, being clear and AI automated for station now, next, and connections. It was a pleasure. And the train clean and AC well adjusted. Congratulations to this the most essential New York utility – MTA, the public transportation systems!
In deference to the heat & you I’ll stop here. Thank YOU for reading to this end.
Respectfully
Jan ‘the compulsive newYorker.’
check out my expressive black/white drawing website at www.jangero.com
the series ‘dream-journal’ is available https://vimeo.com/ondemand/dreamjournal
I have a 30 min cable TV series of The Compulsive NewYorker Saturday Jul 29 at 11pm on MNN5-HD culture, Spectrum #1993 – direct link https://vimeo.com/849554901
In search of the REAL ME. I offer to video-record YOU in my studio in New York. From this 30 min session I will edit a 10 min film that may help answer the question of the real YOU. Fee: $300 (all ages races genders) e: [email protected]
July 28th, Friday Dear friend, I promise that I will start right now to limit my usual rampant associative tangents to a respectable time frame knowing that the…
