Glass Fish

04/01/80

The river water flaps sluggishly against the posts, rare, clean, see-through water in the country's most polluted river, glistening as if covered with jewels in the sun.
The rain and wind from last night's storm pushed and pulled at the sand here, leaving streaks across its surface that from a distance look like the petals of a large flower.
The tides have calmed overnight in me and the river.
I am left with the guilt of having used my poetry badly, as a weapon to hurt someone again.
I vowed once never to do it again after a scene in a bar with one of the bitches, who thought I loved her when I found her deplorable, me unable to handle the barfly mentality.
When I handed her the poem, she thought I was handing her a complement, and rushed out of the bar after she read it.
And now, I've done it again, to someone far less deserving, and some for whom I did care.
I have not learned the art of human relations; perhaps I never will.
I keep getting boggled down with the concept of truth. What it is made up of. How it must be shaped.
This time I gave the poem to Kathy, the girl who tried to kill herself after her affair with Franz, Terry and others on campus.
I keep thinking of the old oriental proverb, the one which says that if you save a life, you are responsible for it.
Yet, too many times of late my kindness has been mistaken for affection, and my caring mistaken for love. This is a fragile world with glass fish swimming. And though I can see their struggle, I cannot see mine. They seem transparent and without substance, while I see myself as firm.
Perhaps I am the one who is transparent and not them, making my noble search for truth less viable.
Perhaps, standing here beside the river, I only think I see the bottom, when I do not.

A big foot print

Big Pete and Rich Sarti

Friday, March 02, 2012

Teddy was wrong when he told me ten years ago at my mother’s funeral that we were the last two of the Sarti clan.
I was wrong for thinking when Ted died in 2010 that I was the last.
But now I am truly the last of the clan now that Uncle Pete (Big Pete) is gone.
He died Monday of complications from cancer – a cancer that should have killed him in the late 1990s, when doctors predicted he had only a few months to live.
He fooled them, he lived another dozen years.
Big Pete wasn’t really a Sarti. But he married so early into the clan he might as well have been the sixth son my grandfather never had, marrying Alice who was special to all of us.
His house became a center of family social activities, especially after my grandfather passed away in 1966. But he had already become deeply enmeshed in family functions from when he married Alice in 1958 when my grandfather’s house was the center of the Sarti world.
Big Pete was part of that 1950s vision of a bright new modern world and seemed to get his fingers around the bottom rung of success in a way none of the others of my family ever could, someone who lived out the full potential the post war America offered.
A first generation Italian immigrant, Pet came to America as an infant as his family settled into the Bronx. After meeting and marrying Alice, he settled into the second floor apartment of a two-family house off Valley Road in Clifton, where Alice gave birth to Little Peter and John, the first of their four children.
By the time Alice was ready to deliver their third child – Lisa – Peter was successful enough to afford their own house in Fairfield, where they and most of their relations from the Bronx moved, kids from a host of families charging across otherwise peaceful streets carrying trays of food.
I didn’t know until last night that Big Pete met my aunt, Alice at Curtis Wright in Lodi, where both of them worked at the time. He was working for a department that was about to be eliminated, while she worked as secretary to the boss.
Little Peter at the wake laughed about the meeting, saying that the boss did not want to upset Alice, so instead of laying Big Pete off as originally planned, the boss offered Pete a position in another department where he would work with computers.The boss didn’t want to hurt Alice by firing her boyfriend, Little Peter said.
The transfer put Big Pete on the road to success.
Like Michael Bloomberg, Peter would be learning to work with computers in the mid-1950s decades before computer technology became common item, and he would transfer those skills to Wall Street where he would rise in status to executive vice president of Kidder Peabody & Co. Inc. – though unlike Bloomberg, Pete never lost touch with his humanity or his dedication to family.
I once compared Pete and Alice to the characters in the Dick Van Dyke Show, living in a world that was then an exact picture of the American Dream.
Last night at the funeral home with the hundreds of people coming into to pay tribute to Big Pete, I was reminded of Alice’s funeral and the line of cards that stretched behind the hearse as it made its way from the Fairfield church to the Paterson grave yard – today, I saw a repeat of that, a stunning ride that had police cars holding up traffic as if we were part of a presidential motorcade.
Little Pete at the wake said his father had left “a big footprint,” a phrase he would use again today at the church.
He said his father had had numerous brushes with death over his 80-year life sp, staring back when as a very young boy, he fell off a hay wagon he wasn’t supposed to be on, and did not tell anyone until an infection settled into his ear and took him years to recover.
Raised in the Bronx, Big Pete visited the zoon and played in the neighborhood with his kin, a scene duplicated in the next generation when the family moved to Fairfield.
“It was as if our family had taken over Fairfield,” Little Pete said.
Once successful, Big Pete purchased a shore house down in Long Branch where the family routinely spent their summers.
Big Pete’s granddaughter said he loved listening to Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett, smoking cigars and sitting on the beach looking out at the sat.
But he also rode a bicycle and had a nasty habit of falling off. One time, he ran into a car door that was flung open in front of him. Little Pete got a call from Big Pete who said, “We got a problem,” a standard phase for when one of his schemes when haywire.
His granddaughter said Big Pete was completely honest, and recalled her efforts to learn how to cook. She said she liked his honesty because when he gave praise he really meant it.
One of the elderly priests at the funeral recalled the day Big Pete told him he was leaving the seminary – one of those life decisions that led eventually to his marrying my aunt, a kind of marriage that seems as mythical to me as a tale from King Arthur’s Court.
Little Peter said a lot of dogs passed through Big Pete’s life, all of them with the same name, “King.”
Another priest, who became a close friend of Big Pete’s , recalled when Big Pete and the kids took him into their home. This was after Big Pete’s mistaken second marriage, when his four kids from Alice, moved out and into a house on Hollywood Avenue, followed by Big Pete a short time later.
I briefly visited them at that house, hearing their tale of woe, heard that the priest was living there, but never met him.
The priest, however, recalled Pete’s rituals, putting on the coffee in the morning, getting the kids ready for school, before making his way to Jersey City and the search for a parking spot.
His granddaughter recalled a regular routine called “bagels and buns” and the trip to the store during which Big Pete sat one of them in his lap and let them steer. When they passed a police car, she was sure they would get pulled over, but Big Pete only laughed and said, “Don’t worry about it.”
Big Pet worried about very little, even though other people might have seen the pain his life – the loss of Alice in 1975, the pain he suffered from cancer. But he always helped people where he could, and according to Little Peter, left a foot print as big as his name.
The elderly priest remembered when he took his sister to Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center for treatment and while there heard Big Pete’s name called out, finding a frail version of the Pete he’d known.
“Six months ago, my sister died,” the priest said. “Now Pete is gone.”
But Little Peter said Pete’s legacy was in the people he left behind, his family and friends. He recalled Big Pete taking him to the office from time to time, but only realized later how the people in the office were like a second family to him, some of whom had come to the wake or the funeral.
Little Pete also recalled his father’s legendary pocket games with men from the neighborhood full of cigar smoke and healthy conversations. Now Little Pete continued those poker games with the sons of some of the same men his father had played with.
Big Pete’s granddaughter choked up before she could finish her tribute, which in that emotional moment was a tribute bigger than words, big enough even for Big Pete.
As I drove behind the hearse along the highway, as the police made way for us to pull into the cemetery where Big Pete would be reunited with Alice, the love of his life, I realized that nearly everybody who had ever helped me as a young boy were living in that same grave stone resort, people of the Sarti clan that had stepped up to the plate to help fill the space left by my lack of father, each taking their turn with me, each become a father for me, and in that role, Big Pete certainly played his part, and though I didn’t see him often, I had to see him at the last, to say good bye to a man whose life was bigger than life, and yet at the same time, never out of touch with the ordinary, small things having great meaning, his footprint big indeed, especially in my heart.

Uncle Pete is dead

Uncle Pete is dead
Although I haven’t seen him in a decade since my mother’s death, Uncle Pete is always in my mind – partly because he was someone who was always in the right place at the wrong time, or the wrong place at the right time. He dated my mother’s sister, Alice, in the mid-1950s at a time when my mother was in the hospital and Alice took it on herself to care for me – which meant she took me with her when she dated Pete. I remember how awed I felt at 8 years old when they married and how beautiful she was, and how happy he looked to have her as his bride.
In the 1960s, Pete became the other son my grandfather never had, someone so close to us that he might as well have been born into the Sarti Clan, indeed, we spent as much time at his new house in Fairfield as we did in ours.
It was Pete who greeted me on the front porch of our house that day in 1966 when he told me my grandfather had died. Pete and Alice took my wife in a few years later when I went to jail and the family needed time to raise the bail to get me out.
It was Pete who helped Alice’s brother Ritchie, even after Alice had passed away prematurely in the mid-1970s, and Pete, who continued on as part of our clan, even as faded away, providing cheer for us as moved by our loss as we were
In 2002, when my mother died, it was Pete who came to comfort me.
My mother’s brother Ted pulled me aside after that funeral and said, “Well, it’s only the two of us left from the old house.”
I thought so, too, especially after Ted passed away in early 2010.
But he was wrong. There was still Pete, and now, there is only one of us, and I’ll miss him greatly.
Pete Mastrangelo 1932-1912

Jane Paley's dog

These are from an appearance in Bayonne today. What a great animal.

Super 8: In the eye of the camera

Any film that deals with its own medium of film must ask the question of what is real and not real, and the film Super 8 with its focus on young filmmakers is more than a little complicated when it comes to this.
On every level, Super 8 is about death and resurrection, and this is also true when it comes to the process of filmmaking.
The group of kids is in the process of making a zombie movie, something that has been going on prior to the opening of the film, and the director/writer, Charles, is concerned about losing Joe – who does makeup and other behind the scenes roles for the film – because Joe’s mother has passed away.
“I bet Joe is not going to want to do my movie any more,” Charles said as he and his friends hover over the food table at the wake.
“Why?” asks Gary
“Why do you think why? The story, it’s about the living dead.”
“His mother’s not a zombie.”
“She’s dead, shit head.”
Charles and the others are obsessed with getting the film done, something that not everybody understands.
Joe’s father, Jackson, wants his son to go off to baseball camp if only to get him away from the zombie makeup, not that he dislikes the kids, it’s just… well, things have changed for the family now, and Joe’s mother, Elizabeth is dead.
The camera literally takes on a life of its own for this film, becoming its own character, seeing things that the characters of flesh and blood do not – such as when it continued to run at the train station even when a derailed train disrupts the shoot and sends the actors and crew scrambling for their lives.
It is the camera that catches the image of the alien escaping the train after the crash, a kind of resurrection of the dead after the alien has been held captive in a tomb-like military science lab for more than two decades.
In a film in which everything is about resurrection and returning to life, even the camera must play a role, broken at the train station, another camera takes its place when Joe borrows his father’s.
So the fact that the three day wait for developing the film wreck footage takes on new meaning, yet one more allusion to resurrection.
Joe’s mother is resurrected in one scene when the power comes on suddenly and the home movie made of her and him as a baby starts up again.
Joe tells Alice that his mother was always looking at him – the way a camera might, perhaps, the way the alien in the concluding scene does, taking everything in, making it all real.
The camera becomes the witness to what is real. The train crash doesn’t become real until the kids see it on TV.
Charles is constantly rewriting his script in order to find the heart and soul of it, even when he has great scenes like the death of a zombie.
But the death scene is not a story and since older boys are going to be entering the film competition, Charles writes in a love interest for his main character – although this borders on reality, too, since Charles invited Alice to do the role because he’s romantically interested in her.
She proves to be a remarkable actress, but also a disappointment since she falls for Joe instead.
This causes Charles to become disillusioned with the film, since what he wanted to become real did not, at least not for him.
Charles as artist is struggling to make his work become more and more real – seeking scenes with “production value” such as ones that use the backdrop of the train wreck or the military searching the house of their biology teacher.
Ownership of this reality also comes into question when Joe’s father, Jackson, takes back the camera Joe took to continue the movie, and Charles complains that while the camera might belong to Jackson, the film – the images, and content, belongs to Charles.
Film also becomes evidence against the military when it comes to the captivity of the aliens, as the military searches for the biology teacher’s research that includes reels from secret experiments in the early 1960s, films that show him being touched by the alien.
Still later, the clip of the alien slipping off the train because evidence for Joe’s father, Jackson, when he begins his search to find Joe, who the military had captured.
Real and unreal are blending into something nobody is completely comfortable with, just the way the boundary between living and dead gets blurred by the idea of zombies and the living dead.
This film with its internal filmmaking process because of search for reality, for the boundaries of life itself, as the lens captures images of something that may or may not be real, and gives evidence to the horror of not knowing where one ends and the other begins.

Super 8: forgiving yourself

A moment before the train crash that brought the alien onto center stage in Super 8, a handful of kids had rehearsed a newly-written scene for the as-yet-named super 8 zombie movie they were making at the train station.
This was a magic moment, because Charles, the director and writer, ached to find a story around which he could build in zombie movie, and believed that by introducing “love” into the film that he would achieve it.
This slight addition, however, resounded through the entire film because it said something about the characters on the other side of the camera, the cast of aching people to whom bad things had happened, and who needed to find a way to heal.
The wife – played by Alice – was saying good bye to her fictional reporter lover, telling him she did not want him to leave, how she hadn’t asked him to cease his obsession to hunt down zombies before, but clearly wanted him to stop.
No moment is so important in this film than this one in, as Alice seems to come up with real emotions which were unexpected from her when she was recruited.
Charles asked her to join the film not as a love interest for the character, but for himself – a pudgy boy, nobody loves, who doctors say will trim down soon – hopefully, but can’t stop eating, regardless of where he goes or what the circumstance.
The reporter tells the Alice character that he has to stay behind to investigate the murders,
“But I would think that it would be safer if you left town for a couple of days” he says.
“John, I don’t like it. This case. These murders.”
“What am I supposed to do? Go to Michigan with you?”
And though she tells him the place is beautiful this time of year, he insists that he has to stay.
“This is my job,” he says
“The dead, coming back to life? I think you’re in danger.”
“I have no choice,” he tells her
“You have a choice. We all do. John, I never asked you to stop, never ask you to give up, walk away, but I’m asking you now. For me. Don’t go. Don’t leave me. I need to know this is not the last time I’m going to see you. I just love you so much.”
“I love you, too,” the stunned reporter says.
This passage reflects the remarkable diversity of wounded and obsessed characters that make up the external film, from the Alice’s guilt-ridden father, who because he got drunk one day could not go to work at the steel mill, and was replaced by the Deputy’s wife, who died in a tragic accident. The Deputy’s son, Joe, clings to her locket as if expecting his mother to return from the dead. The Deputy cannot forgive the drunk, and even casts him out of his house when the drunk comes to ask forgiveness.
Each of these characters, the father, the deputy, and their children are living Zombie-like lives, clinging to something in the past they can’t let go of, and need some dramatic force to save them.
A moment after this scene, that miracle occurs as yet another obsessed character, the teacher from the middle school, drives his pick up truck onto the tracks in front of rushing military train to save the alien who is being held captive. In freeing that creature, the teacher begins a chain of reaction that allows each of the main characters to free themselves from their own personal pasts, and to let go and choose to live.
“Bad things happen,” Joe later tells the aliens. “But you can go on living.”
Joe, by this time, is completely in love with Alice – against his father’s wishes. The deputy held the drunk responsible for the death of his wife, right up until both father’s risked losing their children to the new threat, and it becomes clear that they have to work together to save what they still have. This, of course, gives the drunk an opportunity to express is sorrow to the deputy, who in the closing minutes of the film, forgives him.
The drunk, of course, was still wounded because his wife left him – something the Deputy’s wife seemed to understand before her death, but it took a train crash and escaped alien for the deputy to understand.
As in other classic Spielberg films, we are getting a lesson in fatherhood, what it means and how to “step up,” and become one – something the deputy had not yet learned. In some ways, this is a similar lesson we get in War of the Worlds, where the main character has to come close to losing his children in order to learn his own role as dad.
We get similar scenes in this film as we do in War of the Worlds.
The father in War of the Worlds seeks to feed his daughter a peanut butter sandwich, unaware that she is allergic to peanut butter. The deputy in Super 8 puts aside two slices of pizza to feed is kid, unaware that his police buddy ate them. This concept of feeding and protecting children is central to most Spielberg films.
In this film we have two fathers working towards resolution of the same issues, and by the end of the film, Joe can let go of his mother – by releasing the locket with her photo – because he has a parent again.
People need to make choices, what is valuable and what is not.

Super 8: If ET couldn’t get home

In many ways, Super 8 is very much right in being touted as the new ET.
It is the film that Spielberg could not make because he could never figure out how to do a sequel.
Although set during the same time period of the late 1970s, in many ways, this is much more modern versions of ET, and if there is any doubt about that, all you have to do is see the scene in which Joe and the Alien are staring at each other, and go back to the ending scenes in ET to see ET looking at Eliot, and doubt no more.
But this is a film that changes the story line, a tale of what might have happened if the guys with the keys and the off-road vehicles got to ET before Elliot did, holding the poor creature hostage, torturing him with their tests.
Super 8 is full of ironic twists.
In ET, for instance, Elliot symbolically rescued ET when he liberated the frogs from dissection in the biology class. In Super 8, we get a guilt-ridden biology teacher attempting to rescue the alien, after he – the AP biology teacher – tracks down the route the military will use to transport the alien to a new location.
Like ET, all the Alien wants to do is fix up his space ship and go home. Unlike ET, Super 8’s alien has a grudge to settle, and in some ways, resembles the War of the World aliens since this alien also feeds on humans, hanging them upside down in his cave like a spider might.
But the whole film Super 8 has been loaded down with images and details from ET that make it impossible not get an echo effect, especially in the concluding scenes where these build up to lend evidence to Joe as a symbolic Elliot and the new monster a frustrated grown up ET, capable of violence.
Some of these are small things such as the fact that Elliot’s brother did not yet have his driver’s licence and had only driven his family car to the end of the driveway until forced to drive the vehicle in helping ET escape at the end.
Alice, the love interest in Super 8, also drives without a license, driving her father’s vehicle to transport the super 8 film crew to the train station at a critical time – just before the train crash that brings them in contact with the alien and the secret troops.
As in ET (as well as Close Encounters) the TV becomes a vehicle for communicating vital information and instruction.
Even pizza plays a strange role in connecting the films. Elliott spoils the pizza when he first meets ET, Joe is deprived a pizza when one of his father’s workmates eats the last two pieces.
Both films are drenched in food imagery, which is strangely connected with death – the character Charlie never stops eating, even at Joe’s mother’s wake or when they are fleeing the military in an attempt to find the lair of the alien later in the film.
Both aliens are building some means of rescuing themselves, ET a communication device that will call for his parents to pick him up, the alien in Super 8 is seeking to rebuild his space ship.
Remarkably, both are stealing a host of materials – although Super 8’s alien is doing so on a whole sale level, although it is unclear as to whether he is trying to use the microwaves, car engines and other items as substitute pieces for the parts the military is keeping from him.
With the exception of War of the Worlds, most Spielberg related films have a dog in them, and this film like ET, has a dog the main character is supposed to be taking care of, but which flees when the alien comes into the neighborhood.
Joe like Elliot has only one slightly unattentive parent. Elliot’s mother is getting over a recent break up with his father, Joe’s father is getting over the death of his wife.
In both films, the military – once the alien is on the loose – is in a constant search, traveling around, searching for clues as to where the aliens went.
At one point, Charles makes reference to ET by saying he’s nervous about the use of walkie talkies saying, “They might be listening in,” as “they” were in ET, and as in ET, the military are everywhere using gieger counter to track down the alien.
While the kids in Super 8 tend to borrow rides from other people, they also use bicycles in a similar manner as in ET, although we don’t get any flying scenes in the new film, but in one chase scene, Alice is pursued by her father after a fight, and is abducted by the alien, leaving her father in a panic to find her, only no one will believe his tale.
While Zombies don’t figure prominently in ET, we get a few during the Halloween scene as ET peers out of ghost outfit as the passing trick-or-treaters. In Super 8, most of the adults and some of the children live Zombie-like lives, blind to each other, something of a reflection of the adults in ET, who do not understand and cannot see the amazing things going on in their lives.
Kids – especially in Charlie’s family – seem to be out of control (similar to the kids in Close Encounters, but also in ET.
When Elliot vanishes after ET gets sick in the forest, his mother calls the cops – we get a similar scene in Super 8 when a mother is looking for her daughter who disappeared while wearing rollers, although we also have the fathers of Joe and Alice in pursuit of their missing children.
While many of these references are designed to evoke a similar feeling of the 1970s Spielberg films, they are also part of a theme, deliberately included as metaphor to evoke a subtext we are not supposed to consciously be aware of, but becoming something filtering into us in the back of our heads.
It is no accident that the alien in Super 8 burrows in the graveyard, since this is a film about death, and cheating death, and the need to move on, just as ET was about dying and rebirth. The zombie theme is perfect since many of the main characters in mourning lost love one have become zombie-like, and this as with ET is a film about redemption and the process of letting go of sadness and pain so that the characters can get on with their lives.
As in the lines given to Alice to read at the train station, people have a choice, and this film as in ET, it takes an alien to make us realize our humanity.