A Chakra To The System

I could barely conceal my excitement when I saw the news that the
legendary Ravi Shankar was performing in May at the San Francisco Opera
House. It's been 35 years this month since I arrived in San Francisco
and stayed. I still don't know why. Intransigence? Poor judgment? My
residence here has had all the turbulence of a long love affair.
Sometimes living in San Francisco is like being locked in a bad
marriage with no sex. Other times, the city sweeps me off my feet. The
idea of seeing Ravi Shankar again stirred feelings in me that I thought
this old jade had lost forever. The same feelings I had when I first
saw this jewel of a town in June, 1970.

George Harrison described Ravi as "the Godfather of World Music." On
stage with him was his gifted, cool, beautiful daughter, Anoushka, who
is a sitar genius in her own right. You might know Ravi has another
accomplished daughter -- Norah Jones. That would be a great jam
session. With progeny just around the corner, it's likely Ravi Shankar
will also be the "Grandfather of World Music."

Seeing Ravi takes me back to my adolescence. He's always been a hero to
me. As a teenager, I was mesmerized by the Indian music that the
Beatles brought to their audiences. In New Jersey, I begged my mother
for the $200 to buy a sitar at the 4th Street Music Store in Greenwich
Village. Even Dylan bought his guitar picks there. So it was tabernacle
of coolness. My mother gave in. My heart was racing as I produced the
money for an amused fellow behind the counter who saw the sparkle in my
eyes. Awkwardly schlepping the long, lithe, beige instrument with the
large tuning pegs on top and a million strings that were stretched over
a gourd, slipped gingerly into a saffron-colored woven cotton bag, I
made my way to the subway with this oddly-shaped cargo tenderly
clutched in my arms and then on to the bus at the George Washington
Bridge Terminal. Crossing the Hudson River, (it was the Ganges that
afternoon), I took my treasure home to New Jersey.
"You're lucky to have such a beautiful instrument," my mother said with
some kind reverence.
I played and played that thing until after an interminable two months,
I felt I was ready for public performance. Never mind that I used a
flat pick (that's hopelessly gauche) or that a guru in New York told me
it was required of a serious student to learn how to sing all of the
literature in Indian music in a sort of solfeggio. Forgive me, but I
can't quite recall how the "do-re-mi" goes in the Hindustani system. To
learn this, I was told, takes about seven years. Only then you may pick
up an instrument. Seven years? You gotta be kidding.
I was ready now. "Now" is one of the prime words in a teenager's
lexicon. It usually is preceded by the phrase, "Give it to me." I got
my hands on a Manhattan Yellow Pages and called every Indian and
Pakistani restaurant in the directory and asked if they needed a sitar
player. Believe it or not, after only about forty toll calls, a man on
the phone said in a wonderful thick East Indian accent that I should
come see him. He sounded like Leo McKern as the renegade Indian fakir
in the Beatles movie, "Help."

I actually got hired at the age of 16 to play the sitar on weekend
nights at the Kohinoor Pakistani Restaurant on 2nd Avenue on the Lower
East Side. Yes, with the flat pick and made-up melodies that sounded,
well, Indian. I would wear a Nehru shirt and black dress shoes. All
these years later, I still marvel at the nerve of that 16-year old.
Wistfully, I only wish I had just a wee bit of it today. I think I
lasted four or five weeks at the gig. Let's be grateful for small
miracles.
"My sister-in-law does not like you and does not think you are very
good," the Kohinoor owner explained apologetically. (Cherchez le
sister-in-law.) "Perhaps you could learn 'Never on Sunday.' It was
Number One on the Hit Parade in Karachi." I went home, learned "Never
on Sunday," played it in the restaurant the next week about twenty five
times a night and got fired.
It's one of my favorite memories.
I got to meet Ravi Shankar twice, in the Green Room at Lincoln Center.
On the second occasion, I stood in line behind The Young Rascals --
also Jersey boys -- who meekly requested sitar lessons from the master.
Shankar politely -- even gently -- turned them down.

These memories were keeping me company as I took my box seat at the
Opera House, expecting a lovely, meditative evening. No so fast. I
forgot that San Francisco in many ways has become the Honyak capital of
The Coast.
And what is a "Honyak"?
I'm not sure -- but I know what a lummox is. He was seated in front of
me -- wreaking of dope and patchouli -- tweaking and squirming in his
box seat all through the performance. He actually waved his glass of
cheap red wine in the direction of the musicians and played "air sitar"
along with the master. My friend, Paulette Millichap, the publisher of
Council Oak Books in Pacific Heights, would call this behavior
"devolved." No respect for the "Godfather of World Music." Wordsworth
came to mind, "The world is too much with us, late and soon." I was
distracted from the concert and my childhood remembrances, of course,
and kept fantasizing about how I could nail this inebriated jackass
into a box of his own. Even at this stage -- Ravi Shankar turned 85
last month -- do people not have a clue that the master, Ustad Ravi
Shankar and his colleagues, Anoushka, and the great Tanmoy Bose on
tabla, provide serious classical music? Does anyone play "air cello"
along with Yo-Yo Ma? These days, they probably do.
I mentioned this annoyance to an usher. She said, "These are not opera
people here tonight. Opera people do not wave their wine glasses
around."
Well, it might be tolerated, even encouraged, during the raucous
drinking song in "La Traviata." Or during an Ouzo-soaked party where
they play "Never on Sunday."
But when it comes to a private, hypnotic, meditative excursion into
kundalini, let's keep the party polite.

Bruce Bellingham is the author of "Bellingham by the Bay" (Council Oak
Books, San Francisco). He's toying with the idea of retrieving his
sitar from the New York apartment of a friend and becoming a serious
pupil -- at his advanced age -- of Indian music. If Bellingham can sit
still long enough. Meanwhile, e-mail him at bellsf@mac.com.

Blogsite by kimberly kubalek, www.kubalek.com

Newsweek has a problem ...

... and the Pentagon seems to think the magazine's editors are trying
to four-flush their way out of a story that Newsweek now says was
partly inaccurate -- the one that alleged U.S interrogators flushed a
copy of the Quran down a toilet in order to rattle Muslim prisoners at
Guantanamo Bay.
Never mind linguists: the Army really need plumbers.
At least Newsweek explained that Koran is really spelled "Quran. I
guess that means the unhappy inmates at Gitmo are "Qurantined."
No one is happy with Newsweek's half-hearted back-pedaling. Many in the
Islamic world say it only comes from White House pressure to defuse the
tension. The Pentagon used strange language about the alleged
toilet-flushing episode. Spokesman Larry DiRita complained that
Newsweek did not actually issue a retraction. The magazine "tried
instead to water it down."
Isn't that how the trouble got started in the first place?

Let's Keep The Party Polite

I went to see the legendary Ravi Shankar last night at the San Francisco Opera House. George Harrison described Ravi as "the Godfather of World Music." On stage with him was his gifted, cool, beautiful daughter, Anoushka, who is a sitar genius in her own right.

Seeing Ravi takes me back to my adolescence. As a teenager, I was mesmerized by the Indian music that the Beatles brought to its audiences. In New Jersey, I begged my mother for the $200 to buy a sitar at the 4th Street Music Store in Greenwich Village. Even Dylan bought his guitar picks there. I played and played that thing until after an interminable two months, I felt I was ready for public performance. Never mind that I used a flat pick (that's very gauche) or
that a guru in New York told me it was required of a serious student to learn how to sing all of the literature in Indian music in a sort of solfeggio. That takes about seven years. Only then you may pick up an instrument. Seven years? You gotta be kidding.

I was ready now. I got my hands on a Manhattan Yellow Pages and called every Indian and Pakistani restaurant in the directory and asked if they needed a sitar player. Believe it or not, after only about forty toll calls, a man on the phone said in a thick East Indian accent that
I should come see him.

I actually got hired at the age of 16 to play the sitar on weekend nights at the Kohinoor Pakistani Restaurant on 2nd Avenue on the Lower East Side. Yes, with the flat pick and made-up melodies that sounded, well, Indian. I would wear a Nehru shirt and black dress shoes. All
these years later, I still marvel at the nerve of that 16-year old. I think I lasted four or five weeks.

"My sister-in-law does not like you and does not think you are very good," the Kohinoor owner explained apologetically. (Cherchez le sister-in-law.) "Perhaps you could learn 'Never on Sunday.' It was Number One on the Hit Parade in Karachi." I went home, learned "Never
on Sunday," played it in the restaurant the next week about twenty five times a night and got fired.

It's one of my favorite memories.

I got to meet Ravi Shankar twice, in the Greeen Room at Lincoln Center. On the second occasion, I stood in line behind The Young Rascals -- also Jersey boys -- who meekly requested sitar lessons from the master. Shankar politely -- even gently -- turned them down.

These memories were keeping me company as I took my box seat, expecting a lovely, meditative evening. No so fast. I forgot that San Francisco in many ways has become the Honyak capital of The Coast? And what is a "Honyak"? I'm not sure -- but I know what a lummox is. He was seated in front of me -- wreaking of dope and patchouli -- tweaking and squirming in his box seat all through the performance. He actually waved his glass of cheap red wine in the direction of the musicians and played "air sitar" along with the master. No respect for the "Godfather of World Music." Wordsworth came to mind, "The world is too much with us, late and soon." I was distracted from the concert and my childhood remembrances, of course, and kept fantasizing about how I could nail this inebriated jackass into a box of his own. Even at this stage -- Ravi Shankar turned 85 last month -- do people not have a clue that Ustad Ravi
Shankar and his colleagues, Anoushka, and the great Tanmoy Bose on tabla, provide serious classical music? Does anyone play "air cello" along with Yo-Yo Ma? These days, they probably do.

I mentioned this annoyance to an usher. She said, "These are not opera people here tonight. Opera people do not wave their wine glasses around."

Well, it could be tolerated during the drinking song in "La Traviata."

In a related item, I see that Judith Martin aka "Miss Manners" -- the official arbiter of good behavior -- is appearing before the Commonwealth Club but not in San Francisco. She come only as far as Mountain View, 35 miles south of San Francisco, at the Finn Center, on Tuesday, May 17. I wonder if anyone can do "air protocol."

Your Servant in San Francisco,

Bellingham

Cut To The Chaste

"Cut To The Chaste."

That's my suggestion to San Francisco Archbishop William Levada for the title of his memoirs as he is about to assume his new duties in Rome -- to head the powerful enforcement arm of The Church's theology, the Vatican Congregation to the Doctrine of Faith. His job will be to look of for cases of "heretical perversity." And to collect the payoffs from the local shopkeepers. "Heretical perversity."

The Church has such a terrific sense of the lingo. It metes out its reproach in a grand way -- the opprobrium that drips with contempt is almost a pleasure to endure because it is phrased so well. But historically, the consequences of "heretical perversity" went far beyond mere florid verbal admonishment. It was a whole different scene back in the 1500s when The Church let loose its doctrinal dogs.

"Is this the same outfit that used to burn the witches?" asked Levada excitedly at his Vatican interview with the mysterious Cardinal Anselm Penetratus.

"Well, they hanged more witches than actually burned," murmured the Cardinal.

"That's cool," Levada gushed. "Do you think we could bring back the wasps on the flesh thing, you know, in a quiet sort of way?"

"A Muttering Instinct,"I've used that phrase as a column headline before. I thought a good title for this alleged longer work I am allegedly working on. Now, I find myself in this fair Marina District, a most decorative cultural casket.

Minding matters grave, my friend, Ian Whitcomb, once a pop star in "the British Invasion," told me story about Boris Karloff, who, as a traveling thespian, missed the last train out of Carlisle or Manchester or some northern city like that.

Remember this story? He knocks on the door of a dreary-looking house that could be a bed & breakfast.

A dry voice, one that seems not to have spoken in a very long time, croaks, "Yes?"

"I find myself ensconced in your fair city this evening," Boris explains cheerfully. "Do you have rooms for the night?"

"Yes," growls the clipped, dry voice.

"Ah, and do you have special terms for actors?" asks Boris.

"Yes," snaps the dry voice behind the door. "And here's one: Fuck off!"

Rodney Sheratsky: More Than A Maker of Minds

As I watched scores of teachers gather outside the Ritz-Carlton Hotel atop Nob Hill in San Francisco in a protest against Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and the scandalously pathetic state of California schools, I could almost hear the voice of Dr. Rodney E. Sheratsky.

Inside, dinner guests were shelling out $100,000 per plate for the honor of having dinner in the same ballroom as the governor. Sheratsky might murmur, "Evelyn Waugh said it best, Bruce, 'This is all rather ill-making.'"

Rod Sheratsky was a treasure who lived atop the majestic outline of the sheer cliffs of the Palisades that hover over the Hudson River, framing the New York City skyline across the water. To me and to countless numbers of his students, he'll remain one of the monuments of the region.

My former English/Journalism/Film/Humanities high school teacher at Northern Valley Regional High in Demarest, New Jersey lived in nearby Fort Lee, just over the magnificent George Washington -- the bridge of my childhood. That's so he could always have quick access to his beloved New York. He'd regularly jump on the bus for Lincoln Center ... Carnegie Hall ... some off-Broadway play or a gallery in Soho, his wallet filled with membership cards to the MOMA, the Guggenheim, the Met and so on. His young students would marvel and sometimes snicker at this eccentric man who would take a Manhattan hotel room for two weeks out of the year so he could attend the New York Film Festival and see movies morning, day and night. Today that really sounds wonderful to me.

"I'm grateful now that I used to do that," Rod told me last year. "Today I couldn't do it physically."

Rod died in New Jersey on March 18, 2005. He was 71.

I never found out about that doctorate he had attained when he was so young. It must have had something to do with the arts or humanities -- but I figure it had more to do with humanity itself. He really was an expert at getting a kid to wonder about things -- to realize there is a
curious beauty behind the ordinary. And that there was irony and humor and intangibles that move us because they are spoken only in the heart.

We stayed in touch over the years. He was a one-of-a-kind peach who was always giving something to someone -- even when they didn't always know what was being passed along to them.

When Alan Dundes, the UC/Berkeley folklorist, died this year an obituary revealed that a former student was so grateful for all he learned from his teacher that he gave Dundes a million dollars. I wish I could have given Rod a million bucks. It would have been fun to see how he would've given it away. And he would have. I'm pretty sure he would've endowed at least a few libraries. When my book, "Bellingham by the Bay" was published, Rod scarfed up five copies and donated one to my high school library -- and one to the public library in my hometown, Closter, New Jersey. He also gave a copy to Uma Thurman, who was performing in an off-Broadway production just because he knew that would amuse me. I have no idea if it amused Ms. Thurman.

Sheratsky co-wrote a book about a British documentarian, "Humphrey Jennings: More Than A Maker of Films." Rod was certainly more than a teacher of students. One day, in the classroom (I was a freshman and this was the 1960s), I was in a snit about something. I think that's
when I got kicked out of Honors English for the usual dereliction of duty and, no doubt, dishonoring English in some way. Rod nonchalantly dropped a napkin on my desk. It was filled with sugar cubes that he had nicked from the cafeteria. You see, he'd read in the New York Times that the latest psychedelic rage with all the kids was to gobble up LSD-laced sugar cubes and embark on something called "an acid trip."

How could I stay mad after that? My teacher was a co-conspirator for my mischief. We chuckled privately for hours.

He tagged along with me when I, at the age of 14, had arranged for an interview with Allen Ginsberg at the poet's New York Lower East Side apartment. Knowing Ginsberg's notorious reputation for pot-smoking and pedophilia, Rod pretended he "just wanted to meet this man of letters."

We ran the interview as a full-page piece in the school newspaper, of which Rod was faculty advisor. Only later did I realize how much heat Rod had taken for such an outlandish expedition. This was 1966, the Viet Nam War was just getting really hot, the nation was beginning to
come apart, and we're running an interview with this Commie peacenik pothead fag? Rod was my protector and took the brunt of the criticism from the faculty. He also taught me to have the courage to stand by my work. When I told Rod that the football players had hanged me in
effigy, he was unrepentantly delighted. Years later, a famous actress, Mercedes McCambridge, imparted the same sentiment to me: "Only those who get themselves into trouble are worth the time of day."

Rod despised sentimentality and some of the drippy things that make up popular culture. He passed up the usual staid poetic works that clogged the curriculum in order to introduce his English classes to Walt Whitman's "To A Prostitute." On that occasion, he would tell a pupil,
"You'd better close the door before we get into this." He'd refer to the beloved Julie Andrews movie that gained an almost reverential status as "The Sound of Mucus." By the way, Rod adored Pauline Kael, who was fired from McCall's for writing a scathing piece, "The Sound of Music: The Sound of Money." For Rod and Ms. Kael, it was always open season for sacred cows that produced too much saccharine. "Those who get themselves into trouble ..."

I recall when Rod took our high school film class (hard to imagine we even had a film class back when the government really spent money on schools) on a field trip to see "2001: A Space Odyssey." But we HAD to see it in Cinerama, he said. That meant going all the way to Montclair, N.J. And sitting in the first few front rows in order to get lost in the movie. (That was to get a notion of Kubrick's own aesthetic cinema dimension, don't you know.)

Because of Rod, I saw my first opera, it was Puccini ... my first Picasso ... my first Ferlinghetti ... my first Bertolucci ... my first play by Strindberg ... my first Marx Brothers movie ... had my first ice cream soda on Washington Square. Last year, when I called him from Manhattan to announce I was taking the bus over the George Washington Bridge to Jersey to visit him, his
voice took on a disarming gravitas.

"You know that I am remanded to a wheelchair, Bruce," he intoned solemnly.

"Yes, Rod, I know about that."

"Well," he whispered with mock sincerity, "they used to call it syphilis but now they call it Parkinson's."

He never stopped being funny.

When he invited me to take whatever I wanted from his book collection, I knew it was a goodbye from him. It broke my heart. He could no longer hold a pen in his trembling hands so he had me inscribe the books to myself. That was so like him.

"One thing before you go," he said. "Can you show me how this thing works?"

Someone had given him a cell phone. I sorted through the package and found a number for it.

"Here, Rod," I instructed, "you hold this." Standing a few feet from him, I called his number from my cell phone.

It worked. Pretending to be startled by the call, he chirped into it, "Uh, hello? Who is this?"

"It is I, Rod," said I, standing next to him.

"Oh, all those years of teaching English grammar just paid off! You said, 'It is I.'"

Then he added, "I want you to know, Bruce, that I love you."

"I love you, too, Rod."

It was all very cinematic -- like a Godard movie -- actors closing a long distance in a small room. But after all this time, Rod was never really far from me. I can hear him right now, "Ah, but let's face it. We had some damned good fun."

Bruce Bellingham is the author of "Bellingham by the Bay" (Council Oak Books, San Francisco). He would like everyone to know that he has no plans to terrorize the local culture by taking up teaching.