Posts Tagged ‘New York History’

        Growing up in the sixties and seventies, the Six-o-Clock News on CBS with Walter Cronkite formed the backdrop to almost every evening meal.  The sound of his serious, but reassuring voice and the drone of the helicopters coming from places like Saigon and Hanoi as Cronkite gave us body counts and explained to us all the quagmire that was Vietnam, formed the soundtrack to our lives as we went about the wonderful, terrible business of trying to grow up.
      Cronkite’s dignified demeanor seemed to embody all that was good and decent.
      His visible grief when President Kennedy was shot was moving, not only because he was expressing publically out own collective shock –  but also partly because of its restraint — in the effort he took to suppress it.
      His range was unprecedented.
     He covered World War II and the Nuremberg trials, moved onto Vietnam and Watergate and watched a man Walk on the Moon. “Oh, boy,” he said when the apollo spacecraft touched down on that heretofore mythical place in the sky. ‘Oh boy.”
    His Voice was that of the Decent Everyman.  When Walter Cronkite declared during one of his broadcasts that Vietnam War was at a stalement — that it was unwinnable and the United States should negotiate a peace treaty, President Lyndon Johnson famously declared: ”If I’ve lost Cronkite. I’ve lost middle America.”

   If you’re going to be around this weekend, check out the the Coney Island   Mermaid Parade  and the MakeMusicNY Festival  .  

    And Now, The Lament.

   Where Have All the Flowers Gone?

       Virgin Records on Fourteenth Street,  closed last weekend — another casualty in this city of a landlord’s lust for dollars. It’s demise seems to mark the end of an era where you could go to a record store just to hang out, peruse the shelves, find someone to talk music with — or just to listen.  Yes, there are other places.   
       But the Big Supermarket atmosphere of a Borders or Barnes and Noble  just doesn’t have the ambience, the joie de vivre, the sense of discovery that a great record store could offer.  The other Virgin Records closed earlier this year, and Tower Records is gone as well. 
     These music stores seemed almost like little communities unto themselves — and they are no more.  So, with the City losing another little piece of its soul, this speech  from Shakespeare’s ”The Tempest” comes to mind:

               OUR REVELS NOW ARE ENDED

     Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
     As I foretold you, were all spirits and
     Are melted into air, into thin air:
     And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
     The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,
     The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
     Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve
     And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
     Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
      As dreams are made on, and our little life
     Is rounded with a sleep.

     William Shakespeare
     From The Tempest, Act 4 Scene 1