Donald's Blog
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This old house was only a few blocks from the state Capitol in Madison,
Wisconsin. All the neighborhood cats lived in the basement during the
winter. The house has long since been torn down, but in 1972 there were
AR2ax speakers in the front room, and a lot of good music was heard there. |
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In the 21st century I am just as opinionated as ever,
and I now have an outlet. I shall pontificate here about anything
that catches my fancy; I hope I will not make too great a fool
of myself. You may comment yea or nay about anything on the
site; I may quote you here, or I may not. Send brickbats etc.
to: dmclarke78@icloud.com.
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July 14, 2010Louis Costanzo (1940-2010)
One of my oldest and closest friends has been killed in a car accident. Louis Costanzo and I met nearly 57 years ago at McKinley Junior High School in Kenosha. Another old friend from those years, John Sobott, wrote, "I remember Louis from band, and his clarinet. Always smiling and happy." In this picture we are clowning around in rural Wisconsin in the early 1970s, and he is uplifting me, as usual.
Louis and I had music in common. In Miss Jeffery's home room I discovered that Toscanini was Louis's lifelong hero, and he was impressed that I had a complete set of Beethoven string quartets (a box of 10 LPs by the Pascal Quartet, never reissued on CD, I don't think). We took records out of the library and spent a lot of time at each other's houses, listening to music. We never stopped joking about a 45 EP of Strauss waltzes played by Mantovani that we kept trading to each other, trying to get rid of it.
The Costanzos had a big console radio and on a good evening we might get WFMT from Chicago. Louis's mother's pizza was out of this world; his dad was quiet, with a friendly smile, and worked at American Motors, like almost everybody in Kenosha. Louis was the baby of the family. His sister Rita was (is) a doll; I kind of had a crush on her. His brother Michael was (is) the kind of man whose friendship is gentle and steady.
My friendship with Louis was in fact a connection to the large Italian-American community in Kenosha, and I got a refreshing perspective on it when I made my own first visit to Italy in the 1980s. I was then living in England, where, in the early evening, all the young people were indoors watching Australian soap operas on TV; in Italy all the young people were out in the street at that hour, promenading in their nicest casual clothes, and they were all happy, the sleek ones and the chubby ones alike, chatting, joking, flirting, having a coffee or a beer. The Italians in Kenosha were like that.
Louis was like that.
After high school we lost touch for a while, as I served my time in the car factory and he served in the U.S. Navy, seeing the world as a ship's photographer. But we both ended up in college in Wisconsin. In the house in the picture at the top of this blog page there was an old upright piano that Louis had donated; a couple of my flatmates played a little. We visited each other frequently. Louis had married Barbara Kotz, from Kenosha, and they had two daughters. For a while Louis taught high school, but hated it; then he worked for 3M (I think) in Minneapolis, then became a freelance technical writer, successful at that until he retired.
When I was visiting from England, we always tried to see each other. I remember my first visit to the home of Barbara's parents, Mr & Mrs Donald Kotz, just off Library Square in downtown Kenosha. It had been a few years, and when I walked in, a beautiful teenaged girl raced across the room and gave me a big hug: it was Lucia, who knew that her dad and I had been besties for a long time.
Barbara and Louis came to visit Ethne and me in England in the early 1980s, when we lived in Teddington, Middlesex. Louis always had a wonderful sense of humor; my poor mother-in-law, who lived with us, had none. She always liked to be the center of attention, and Louis did not pay her enough court. Louis had a beard then, and so did my brother; Tessa had no idea who Louis was, and had never met my brother, but she decided that my brother was the rudest man she had ever known, and Louis got a get-out-of-jail-free card!
We visited Louis and Barbara in Minneapolis; by then their girls were away at college. Later, when my father died in Kenosha, my mother and I were invited to the Kotz's house again, for a social evening that my mother deeply appreciated. Still later, when Ethne and I lived in Texas, one of Barbara's sisters came to visit us. Always there was a connection.
The years went by. We tried to cheer each other up when we had the middle-aged blues. I tried to turn him on to the symphonies of Robert Simpson; he tried to teach me something about computers; sometimes we were hopeless students, but we had each other. He was moving from Michigan back to Wisconsin when his car went off the road; just a few days ago he emailed that he was going to miss the radio stations in Michigan, and I was telling him about piano recitals at Muhlenberg College, walking distance from our new home in Allentown. I needed to ask him about Riccardo Muti, and if he ever heard Gianandrea Noseda conduct. But I can't, now.
This loss is affecting me more deeply that the loss of my parents, or of my brother. My son David has a nice line in hard-nosed understanding; he said on the telephone, "Well, you knew your brother was a crackpot, and we expect our parents to peg it sooner or later..." Now I know what it's like to lose a friend.
The funeral is this week, and I can't go. Can't afford an airplane ticket at short notice; my truck is probably not up to a round trip of 2,000 miles; Ethne is away on business and we don't even have anybody to look after the dog: all the kennels around here are booked up. So I am doing things around the house, working a few hours at Barnes & Noble, faced with all the ordinary banality of life, and I keep having this feeling that there is something terribly wrong, and about every ten minutes I remember what it is. Louis is gone. Grief is a fog of unbelief, yet I know that I cannot imagine what his lovely Barbara and their daughters, Lucia and Anne, must be going through.
Goodbye, old pal.
July 14, 2010Louis, Lucia, Anne, and Barbara
The Costanzos, once upon a time (seems like yesterday). The kids seem to be saying "Cheeese!"
There will be more happy times: Lucia is married to Ken Mennen, and they have two lovely kids, Alexander and Iris; and Anne is pursuing a career; they are just as beautiful now as they were when this picture was taken. And we will all have our memories of the irrepressible Louis. Long may the tribe increase!
July 14, 2010Obama, a Socialist? Get Outta HereThomas Frank's column in the Wall Street Journal today is one of the best opinion pieces I've seen for a long while. "Obama and the Pink Scare" is about a recent survey in which 55% of the people said that they thought the president was a "socialist". This is while a lot of Democrats complain that he isn't "liberal" enough, but of course most Americans wouldn't know a socialist if they saw one. Frank points out that if Obama were a socialist in the Western European sense, he would certainly have pushed for single-payer health care. Here's a money quote:
Many Americans, in my experience, think ["socialist"] means someone who supports basic welfare-state provisions like unemployment insurance, Medicare and Social Security--a standard by which socialism is immensely popular and most politicians fit the description.
There's no link, unless you subscribe. Which isn't a bad idea.
July 14, 2010Don't Applaud, Just Throw MoneyThere was an article in the WSJ the other day about greedy copyright holders, and there are some letters today from some of us. I am reminded that several years ago a lecturer in England wrote to ask me if she could assign my book, The Rise And Fall Of Popular Music (which you can read for free elsewhere on this site) to her students, and of course I was pleased and said yes, never thinking that I would be paid anything. But thanks to the Authors' Licensing & Collecting Society Limited, I have been earning several hundred dollars a year from it. I had forgotten that no school or library in Europe can copy or download copyrighted material without paying for it.
This of course is in "old" Europe, silly socialist Europe, where Mickey Mouse hasn't been copyrighted for centuries to come.
July 14, 2010News I Don't Have to Believe if I Don't Want ToFrom the Morning Call: "Diane Toomey of Allentown is one of five finalists competing Thursday in a national contest to build the best roller coaster made from Pretzels."