Tuesday, June 13, 2006

BusterStronghart@Gmail.com

There is just a shallow truth in facts. Otherwise, the telephone book would be the book of books.

Werner Herzog
BusterStronghart@Gmail.com

:"You should say everything that comes into your head."

S. Freud. "On Initiating Treatment."


"I think that psychoanalysis is one of the great evils of civilization, even worse than the Spanish Inquisition. At least the Inquisition was about keeping something together. Analysis is only about taking someone apart."

Werner Herzog.

Wednesday, June 07, 2006

BusterStronghart@Gmail.com

My father was learned in pharmacy, of course, but also in race horses, boxing, baseball, gangsters, headwaiters, cards, good scotch, and fine women, of whom I assumed (wrongly) that my mother was only one.

There was a Saturday afternoon game high in the Majestic Apartments on Central Park West. Sometimes I was left on my own to play in Central Park, but my predilection was to sit quiet in a corner while cards and cash passed back and forth across green felt tables. Stories usually accompanied the sound of shuffling card decks and always my ears were perked to catch his voice flowing over the table telling a river of endless stories.

Clouds of cigar smoke hovered over the players, almost always men, though there was one woman, who occasionally came from Miami to play with her equals -- and she was recognized as such. Ann Baumwall was a squinty eyed woman with bleached blond hair and strings of pearls hanging from her neck. She liked to win from the boys, and she was the type that nobody minded losing to.

My father was modest and liked to say only that he "held his own" at the table, but the truth was that it was usual he that left with his pockets full.