JUNE 1ST EVENT

 i don’t do poetry readings in person any more

or even go to them or other public events,

there’s too many challenges, physical (weak voice

and tightening jaw, muddling pronunciation,

urgent unexpected needs, etc.) and mental

(anxiety, confusion etc.) from parkinson’s

and that 2009 brain operation for the tapeworm

that got into my brain and died and they had to

go in and cut out (which I never explicitly named

to not put that image in my youngest’s child’s

and grandchildren’s heads, or other loved ones,

but now, with the kennedy revelation it’s in

everyone’s heads, so i can name it)

but

i was asked to take part in an event with my oldest son Miles

so

I’ll be doing my best to read some poetry of mine

(and  to make it more of a challenge)

with improvised music by Sound For

(featuring Wes Buckley, Brian Kantor, and Miles Lally)

Saturday June 1st at 5pm

at

Familiar Trees 

80 Railroad St.

Great Barrington, MA

01230

if you’re in or around the berkshires then

i’d love to see you there

NOWADAYS

 

Almost 81-year-old (in a week) eating a slice of pizza with arthritic-Parkinson's hand, i.e. very slowly, savoring every bite and grateful for every moment. Photo taken by my son Miles. [That's my sister Irene and me in the framed photo behind me.]

NEW FAVORITE OLD QUOTE

 "I never gave away anything without wishing I had kept it; nor kept anything without wishing I had given it away." —Louise Brooks (from a NewYorker article on her by Kenneth Tynan)

HAPPY B'DAY HOUSTON

 
Me and one of my favorite poets, music makers, and humans: Mello-Re Houston, at my poetry reading at Beyond Baroque in Venice CA in December 2018. Wishing her the happiest of birthdays today, August 25th. I totally identify with her commitment to making her life into her art.

PARKINSON'S AWARENESS

Just found out yesterday was Parkinson's Awareness Day. I don't even know what that's supposed to mean. I am quite aware I have Parkinson's, thank you. Hopefully if you have it, you're aware you do too. Okay, moving (disorderly) (it's a "movement disorder") on.

ELLA: JUST ONE OF THOSE THINGS and FEMINISTS: WHAT WERE THEY THINKING?

 
Moving documentary about an icon of "Black History" and "Women's History" and especially Black Women's history. And not just culturally, for her uniquely exquisite vocal expression and innovations, but for her social and political impact as well. And a righteous tribute to her overcoming challenges that would defeat most people. Just her teen years alone deserve a film, going from reform school and homelessness in early teens to recording star in late teens and never stopping her evolution to worldwide beloved musical genius. (Only thing that bothered me was occasional use of later decades performance photos and video over narration about earlier periods.) On Netflix, highly recommend.

Cleverly framed doc about a 1978 coffee table book of photos of second wave feminists and where some of them are today (or rather "were" when the film was shot a few years ago). Focused on NYC and LA it misses some major figures, but selects a representative group that covers a lot of the stories and perspectives of an impactful movement. I was surprised at how many people in the movie I knew personally, and was happy and moved to see dear friend the late Aloma Ichinose featured. It felt like a visit from her. It covers a lot of people so some critics felt it could have narrowed the focus to just a handful and thus been able to dig deeper. But as it is, it's a lively and well done introduction to vital history and a movement more relevant than ever. Also on Netflix and highly recommended.

THE TRAGEDY OF MACBETH and WEST SIDE STORY (2021 VERSIONS)

 
Joel Coen's take on "The Scottish Play" (it's considered unlucky in the theater world to say the real title) is receiving some high praise, but for my taste it drags a story that's a near complete drag down even further into the depths of cynicism. The production has been cited as "film noir" influenced, i.e. shot in black&white, set in spare confined spaces empty and gloomy even when outside, etc. I found all that even more depressing than the already depressing story.

And while I often admire and respect Frances McDormand's acting chops, to me she's miscast here as Lady Macbeth, her usual blunt and often cold characterizations overkill for this story. I kept being distracted by thoughts of other actors in the role. But Denzel Washington's performance as the title character had me accepting him as the tragically brutal, power-tempted, ultimately evil protagonist from his first moment on screen. Well worthy of awards nominations.

There's some other gems in the film, like the revelatory performances by Kathryn Hunter, but for my taste Coen gets a C grade at best.

This newest version of a much more loosely based musical interpretation of a Shakespeare play (R&J), repairs some of the failings of the 1961 version (actual LatinX actors playing LatinX characters and speaking actual Spanish etc.) but it changes some iconic scenes and settings from the '61 version in ways that left me missing the earlier takes (e.g. the "play it cool boy' scene and choreography).

I liked almost all the performances except Mike Faist as Riff, which veered between seeming miscast and mismotivated. But because the music is so great (to me, and I do have a personal connection to the original Broadway cast album that I heard as a teenager at a rich girl's house in 1957, before the movie version, and realized musicals and theater in general could do so much more than I had imagined possible) and the tragic story is so close to themes in my own past, I still found this new version often exhilarating and moving. B+.

TBT

A favorite photo of my best friend, Terence Winch, and me taken several years ago in Manhattan. He remembers us first meeting fifty years ago this month in DC (I thought we met earlier), so it's likely the 50th anniversary of our friendship for which I am eternally grateful. It was a while before we discovered that his mother came from only a few miles away from where my paternal grandfather came from in County Galway in Ireland. And decades before it was discovered that the maiden name of his mother's best friend in the Bronx, where Terence grew up, also originally from the same Irish village as Terence's mother, was Lally.

CATHERINE MARIE "SIS" FENNESSY LALLY R.I.P.

 
That's me in the floral shirt, my two oldest brothers, a Franciscan friar and a musician/high school music teacher, both WWII veterans, to my right, in front of them my third oldest brother, just leaving his life as a teamster to become a cop, leaning over his wife, daughter of a cop from the next street over, we all called "Sis," an independent working woman, my mother and her mother in front of me , in front of them my other sister-in-law, an Italian-American accordion player from DC who led an all women band during "the war," her firstborn on her lap, and my two sisters, the oldest with the then fashionable "pixie cut," the youngest about to enter the nunnery for a few years, and the only one in this photo besides me who's still alive (though she woke up recently blind in one eye and almost blind in the other), and our father, a seventh-grade-drop-out who had just started a home repair business and had installed that mirror to make our small living/dining room appear bigger.

I've known "Sis" since I was a kid, a tiny woman, deceptively tough under a sweet spirit. No matter how much my behavior might have made her uncomfortable she always treated me with honesty, tolerance, kindness, and love, with a little humor thrown in. I adored her and broke down when I heard the news that she had passed last night at 93, even though she's joined my brother, her husband and is at peace now. The Irish I grew up around, like her, always said to the families of the deceased at the wakes: "Sorry for your trouble" because they believed the departed were at peace, and it's the ones left behind who face the trouble each death presents. My heart goes out to all who knew and loved her.

[photo of Sis in her 90s]
 

MOVING

 
This was my street a week ago, just a few doors down from the old house my apartment is in. We weren't impacted much but these businesses were. I'll be moving to The Berkshires soon (my kids don't want me living alone anymore, especially with Parkinson's), so if you live near me now, call and come by to say later, and see if you want any books I'm giving away (or furniture and other stuff). Oh, and Happy Jewish New Year from this Jersey Mick.

THOSE DAYS

 
Labor day was traditionally the last day we spent down the shore in Belmar, New Jersey. This doesn't look like Belmar. My father leaning forward, cigarette in mouth, his youngest brother, my Uncle John, behind him in striped tee shirt, and the third guy most likely my old man's buddy, Rusty Zigler. Looks like the late 1930s or early 1940s. This is how grown men went to the beach when I was a boy in the '40s.

JOAN

 
Joan, another of the loves of my life, and me, in someone else's home. We lived together in Santa Monica for several years in the 1980s. I was a regular on the TV show "Berrenger's" when we met and she worked for a small film studio. Her mother was Brazilian, a poor teenager when she met Joan's father, a French Canadian seaman, who brought her to the USA and was mostly gone. Joan had a tough childhood and adolescence unlike anyone I ever knew, but she transcended the tragic through her own unique magic and was so easy to live with (which I think this photo inadvertently reveals in the casual ways her left hand rests on my shoulder and my right around her waist).

I had been raising my children mostly as a single parent for most of my adult life and they were teens when Joan and I got together. Joan never tried to be a stepmother but instead just a friend to them and declared she never wanted children of her own. But after a few years changed her mind. I resisted that idea and we eventually separated and she met and married a really decent kind guy and immediately got pregnant. Then found out she had an incurable cancer.

She passed when her child was still an infant, her life ending tragically, as it had started. But in between, she lived life on her terms and achieved almost all she had set out to, a happy warrior for love's transcendent power.

(C) 2021 Michael Lally

ONCE UPON A NOT SO LONG AGO

 
Me dancing at my 75th birthday party a little over four years ago. I had cataract surgery so didn't wear far sighted glasses for the first time in decades and could still finger pop (snap my fingers in both hands rapidly three times and end with a pop sound in the palm of one) as I had since teen years, but am back to full-time glasses again with right eye vision permanently diminished, and can't even snap the fingers of my right hand any more, but can still dance...

HAPPY...

Happy Easter, Passover, Holi, and whatever other holy days are celebrated by you in April, and Happy Spring to all my atheist and Pagan friends. 

ANOTHER LATE NIGHT MINI-MINI-RANT

So after Dallas does the NRA change their slogan "The only thing that stops a bad man with a gun is a good man with a gun" to "The only thing that stops a bad man with a gun is a robot with a bomb"? Cause there were a lot of good men with guns out there and they couldn't stop the bad man with a gun with their many many guns.

This is not a great precedent. When they can't capture or disarm a bad guy now, is sending in a robot with a bomb to assassinate him gonna be the new American "justice"? What if they have the wrong suspect? And I wonder if they would have done it if the gunman had been white?

ATTRIBUTION

I've been watching a quote go around Facebook the last several days that I thought originally came from me. But the more I encounter it and think about it and see it I'm thinking it sounds like something that's been around a long time.

But I remember writing it in the early 1980s. That's one of the challenges of being a writer, or any kind of creator I think, you come up with something you think is original and it turns out someone else has either already come up with it before or is coming up with it at the same time and if they get it out before you they get the credit. Or, if you get it out in a way that has a wider impact, maybe you get the credit and they don't.

It's like the guy from the Jersey Pineys back in the 1920s who invented a crude typewriter that he thought was a new idea. The Pineys back then was not just a backwoods area, but it was so inaccessible that people could live there their entire lives without much knowledge of the outside world, like this guy who brought his crude typewriter to the city to try and make money on his idea only to discover typewriters had been in existence for decades and had been improved way beyond his simplistic concept.

Or a couple of years ago when two movies about Truman Capote writing IN COLD BLOOD came out at the same time. Of course everyone has the experience of thinking of something that you're sure is a good idea and can make money or make you famous or whatever but you don't tell anyone beyond your spouse or friends etc. and then one day you see someone else has actually brought the idea to fruition and you think, damn, I should have followed up on that.

But even sometimes when you follow up the timing is off and, for personal instance, you're writing stuff that would be praised for being "transgressive" a decade or two later but at the time you bring it into the world it's just thought of as "x-rated" or offensive or "too raw" or etc. and years later you watch someone else basically do almost the same exact thing and become famous or successful or whatever...

I'm not complaining about anything here. I'm too old for that. Old enough to realize there's nothing personal about fate when it comes to the ways life unfolds and things overlap or coincide or miss their time or work out or don't.

I supposed the easiest way to see where the quote came from would be to google it. Maybe I'll do just that.