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LET’S GET PHYSICAL

“Let’s get physical” is such a funny sentence. As if we’re not! “Let’s make ourselves materially manifest. I’m tired of all this ethereal immateriality already.”

Band practice last night. Singing is physical -- tiring and exhilarating and cathartic. I’m always hungry after a show or intense rehearsal.


FURTHER THOUGHTS ON NEW YORK NEW YORK

When I said yesterday that “I Happen to Like New York” is my favorite New York song, I wasn’t thinking about all the great Harlem songs, such as Duke Ellington’s “Drop Me Off In Harlem,” which Ella Fitzgerald sang so glowingly on her Duke Ellington Songbook album. I can’t repudiate what I said yesterday though.

My New Yorker friend Jay Sherman-Godfrey sent me some lines today from a poem by my main man, Walt Whitman, his poem “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.” Whitman is the shizzle.

I took “poetry writing” in college for a couple semesters. My teacher Ken Mikolowski turned me onto the great New York poet Frank O’Hara. Eyes and ears for New York and life, he had them; he showed how to use them and how to write it.


FROM THE ANNALS OF LIFE AND DEATH AND SHOWBIZ

Ira Gershwin was at his brother’s bedside when George died at the age of 38 or 39. The last thing George Gershwin said was, “Astaire.”