Listen to “Foolish Ignorance, Past and Present, or New York Revisited” on Spreaker.
Jonathan Gross comes to New York and has an experience of a lifetime, he shares it, including performing in Times Square for the International Day of Peace…..
On September 20, I travelled to New York to sing a song I wrote when I was 14. To be in the neon world of Times Square, with its flickering lights, and to project a stone slab from Byzantium, was, perhaps, too much even for my hubris.
So grateful was I (vanitatus vanitatum) that I repaid Paul Sladkus’ kindness by smashing up my Hertz-rent-a-car, leased only moments before. I’m an excitable person and the opportunity to play in Times Square for “Pause the World for Peace” was apparently too much for me. On 42nd and 5th I hit a truck, rear-ending the vehicle and potentially compromising the man’s neat aluminium ladder. (damages owed to Hertz?: $3000) I was jutting my elbow into Vince’s face to show him the New York Public library. “Look! Look!” I cried. “ Boom!!” Vince didn’t say a word, accustomed to my stupidities, but the truck driver jumped out of his car, ready to assault me. I smiled and apologized and raised my shoulders like a chimpanzee. To my left, Iranian protesters were commemorating a holiday, on this U.N. day of peace, showing grisly pictures of people who had been tortured. Near a newsstand a woman, with a preternatural smile, was selling beads on the street. Did I want one? No. I did not. I had already paid 5.00$ for a similar version. My drummer and I were headed to Elmont, New York, to visit my parents’ ancestors. This was at his insistence, I must stress, because I am a coward about graveyards. To show him around the town, I pulled up to Saddle Rock elementary school and almost got arrested on Rosh Hashanah for taking photographs. Three police cars detained us for an hour; they thought I had drugged Vince, he was so bored with the Rockford files meets Kojack routine they were running on us). It turns out there was a school shooting (averted) in Benjamin Cardozo, where my mother taught English for more than a decade. A 16 year old had a fully loaded glock in his locker and a facebook post that was not auspicious. We had just returned from the graves of my ancestors, shortly after my Byzantine moment in Times Square (singing an ephemeral song in front of a decidedly non-ephemeral slab of stone). Distracted, hungry, vaguely depressed, I wondered about the divine implications of my percussionist uttering a Buddhist prayer at my grandmother’s grave. In Great neck, later that day, I found that McMansions sprouting like mushrooms had replaced the 1970s houses I remembered, shrunken prune-like counterparts to these swollen houses, obese with pride; a cantor greeted me at the door of my former residence, the only street, perhaps, in the United States that boasts three temples. In my house there are many mansions.
Our house was a colonial affair, decolonized through lack of resources: my parents both taught English. We were a family of secular humanists (read “atheists and non-believers”), and would hide on Yom Kippur when the Iranian Jews kicked out of Tehran in 1978 made their way to shul to pray. Our house was up for sale, the Cantor told me. His house, he might have said, the one the temple bought for him. He was moving to Strathmore, a more lucrative village just down the road. My sister rued the K-Mart furniture and exercise bike. The children were confined to bunk beds, while the parents ran the roost. A true Long Island story.
Shortly before, in Times Square, as part of the Pause for Peace program, we performed “Byzantine”. Lofty as ever in our ruminations, we were struck by the lack of bathrooms in this most civilized of cities. It was a problem then (1977, when I grew up) and it’s a problem now (2025). Several performers discreetly made their way to the Disney store a few blocks away, exchanging masonic handshakes, wandering through the dresses devoted to Ariel on the second floor, to find their bladders miraculously transformed with the help of modern plumbing. When my percussionist had first mentioned the lack of facilities, in a true Don Quixote gesture, I winced with righteous indignation at Sancho’s impudence. How dare you expect that there would be a place to go to the bathroom? In this, the most civilized city in the world. 42nd street. Surely they had more important things to do than provide blue plastic port a potties!! What kind of philistine would expect a bathroom in Times Square, the land of prostitution now transformed into Disneyland. We arrived ready to play for Paul: a gorilla was dancing to the left us, promoting another store closure no doubt. Japanese hip hop dancers gyrated to no audience in particular: well dressed and youthful, stars of their own show.
We were a long way from Yeats’ “Sailing to Byzantium”. Or were we? Life passes by, like a Fellini film, and what remains? A stone from the Byzantium period, projected in pixels on a big white screen, while a 62 year old, middle aged man (that would be me) bleats out a song he wrote when he was 14. Luckily, it only had 3 chords. The poem, on which I based the song, is hard to understand. Is Yeats talking about visiting Istanbul? Ravenna? Apparently, Yeats visited Ravenna in 1907 and was inspired by the mosaics, to write his poem twenty years later. He didn’t visit Ravenna again (not to mention Istanbul) because he was afraid the bad air would kill him.
I knew nothing about Byzantium when I wrote the song, staring at a pine tree, a pint-sized depressive. I still don’t. AI tells us:
Byzantium is the original Greek colony that was founded in the 7th century. It later became the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire founded by Constantine; After the Ottoman Empire conquered the city in 1453, it was eventually renamed Istanbul. Ravenna was the Western Roman empire. Ravenna was the city Yeats visited in 1907 which inspired his poem.
I lived in NYC from 1985 to 1992; like most spoiled brats ( I. borrow the term from my mother), I did so on my parents’ largesse. When I would say something particularly stupid (e.g. I didn’t know there were two twin towers), my music partner would say: “How many years college?” Though I’ve taught in a college for 33 years, I remain as ignorant as the day I was born. Though I could do a learned sophistical dance in a college classroom, cobbling together the work of others, I ‘m not sure I can explain what Byzantium or Byzantine means, nor the meaning of Yeats’ poem (and my own song). I remain as ignorant of Yeats and my own song as I was the day I wrote it. Such is inspiration. “If the fool persists in his folly, he will become wise.” If that phrase has a good ring to it, that is because it is not mine but William Blake’s.
Day of the Dead, in Times Square with the Community & Leaders keeping Families Memories Alive