THE BOYS OF 2ND STREET PARK

Don't know if any of you ever saw this. It's a documentary a few years old I caught last night on some cable network.

It's about a group of boys growing up somewhere around Brighton Beach, Coney Island area and playing basketball in this park as kids and the bond it created between them.

They're all Jewish, I think, or at least most of them, and several of them are good ball players. It tells the story of their playing in a championship game and almost winning during their high school years.

Then it follows several of them as they move on to play ball in college (Harvard for one, City College for another, while a third plays ball in Israel for a year) etc. and others drop out and into the 1960s counter culture.

What I dug about it, and I dug it a lot, is that as William Carlos Williams taught me when I was a kid just starting out as a poet and writer, if you get specific enough, concrete enough about the details of the local, the message becomes universal, as opposed to vice versa.

The details of these guys' lives begin to stand for all of our lives. the disappointments and triumphs, the lessons learned, some slowly some quickly, etc.

There's romance, adventure, insanity, tragedy, but most of all honesty. Another qaulity I love and loved in this flick and the guys interviewed in it. To watch a group of city kids, who could have been any ehtnic group of New Yorkers, but in this case mostly if not all Jewish, be street smart and wiser with the years, was totally compelling.

Movies like this (the 7-Up series of Brit documentaries by Michael Apted are the best example) make these people as alive in my inner life and memory as people I have known personally in my real life are. I feel like I know these guys now, and the few women in the film as well, and I care about them.

I think you will too if you check it out.