Rosenbush Cafe

Proud to be an American

Henri Shares His End of the Year Stream

For everyone who made it to the last day of two thousand and aught seven Happy New Year. We hope you enjoyed the Cafe in ‘07; our first full year in operation since the original Rosenbush Cafe closed in 1971. This was, for me, a year of epiphanies that were an even mixture of positive and negative and life and death. Simple in its clearly crystalline structure and for once I followed my instincts and fulfilled a death bed request from 1995.

My mother died of complications from Alzheimer’s disease September 23rd after a lengthy battle. She passed as quietly as one could pray for from this insidious illness that robs its victims literally of everything that constitutes self. In the end, she was at home where I promised my father before he died twelve years ago. I have detailed events in my category, Cool Side of the Pillow and in the coming months will allow three months of self introspection and short term retrospection.

Throughout the year I was involved in all manner of care and for my often tormenting days of verbal abuse from the woman who birthed me I was content when her last literal words to me were “Good bye.” She bowed her head and just let go.

Please do not take this as an incredulous remark but that brought peace in the end for both of us. Al, as I called it is tabula rasa revisited. John Locke may have thoroughly filled his blank slate paradigm but I would suspect while, being dogmatic for a milli, I have witnessed firsthand divergence from Carl Jung’s “Collective Consciousness.”

I know the empiricism behind Locke and his starting point for acquisition of ideas and the metaphors going back historically as far as Aristotle’s De Anima; ‘mind is in a sense potentially whatever is thinkable, thought actually it is nothing until it has thought.’

Once my mother lost the ability to articulate the simplest of thoughts into words instead engaging in steady consciousness streams defying logical verbal syntax with the non sequitur connections between them I was forced to adapt to the new speech. I began greeting the unseen with whom she conversed sometimes for hours. I became more respectful of the paranormal and I was already a believer in numerous phenomena and metaphysical and existential interests, inter-dimensionality, Surrealism and Dadaism having already forged much of my thinking from the late sixties into the eighties.
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Repartee

Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts indulge in some repartee after dinner as Amy Adams looks on in Mike Nichol’s outstanding ‘Charlie Wilson’s War.’ (Universal Pictures Photo)

Reviewed by Henry B. Rosenbush
Review contains some strong profanity and spoilers

In a holiday season filled with forged presidential documents, aliens and predators, colorful computerized mythical creatures and animated chipmunks it is refreshing to find an adult film capable of balancing a human story against the backdrop of war.

Not the Iraq War, but the Russian invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. Based on the amazing bestseller by the late George Crile, Charlie Wilson’s War is that rare film that, in the Frank Capra’s lone man against the world scenario, takes on seemingly overwhelming odds and triumphs nut in the end every will be as it was before.

Without giving away too much of the movie, I believe the oversaturation of television spots and trailers has dispensed with much of the sardonic wit on display, is a drama masquerading as a comedy; at times a blurry surrealism takes shape, especially when director Mike (The Graduate, Catch-22) Nichols juxtaposes real war blown up to grainy echoes of the superiority of the Russian planes and helicopters decimating villages, people and animals with modern day recreations and obvious computer-generated explosions and tracer trails.

Clips
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By Henry B. Rosenbush

While listening to David Bowie’s classic rock album Space Oddity recently I became emotional as I reminisced how my family helped shape my musical tastes. I know it is not an earth-shattering revelation that parents and relatives can inspire or transpire to affect their children’s predilections.

Dad introduced me to Glenn Miller as a young boy; my aunt helps familiarize me with Tchaikovsky via Swan Lake, but it would be my mother who shocked me with a plethora of anomalous choices. No one could predict that my first Hot Tuna LP, actually their second, would be purchased erroneously as my mother searched for the song Candy Man by Sammy Davis, Jr. which was a breezy ditty about sweets.

The live Tuna’s version was of a different candy; drugs, and the man was a pusher. I realized immediately it was not the Candy Man for which she searched. This 1971 piece of acoustic wildness added the legendary violinist Papa John Creach and drummer Sammy Piazza to join the group of Jorma Kaukonen, Jack Casady and Will Scarlet. Now, in addition to Hot Tuna I would begin amassing Creach’s ever growing collection of wonderful rock and jazzy LPs.

Creach was an original member of Jefferson Airplane, along with acid-rock guitarist Kaukonen; they both had success with the spin-off group of Hot Tuna.

This was, after all, the acid rock era and what better introduction than Hot Tuna. Not exactly what my mother wanted to learn, and it was years before I educated her as to the true nature of this version of Candy Man. In the meantime, I found the Davis version on 45 and purchased it knowing eventually she would want to hear it!

Hot Tuna was an acquired taste but my newly attuned taste buds were ready to savor a new hunger; acid rock. With hits including: Hesitation Blues, Uncle Sam Blues, Keep Your Lamps Trimmed and Burning and Keep on Truckin’ Hot Tuna became a guilty pleasure. I rarely found anyone who either knew who they were or enjoyed them when I first attended the University of Southern Mississippi in 1972 but as my enjoyment of rock grew so did others’ appreciation for my ever-growing album collection.
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Difficult to believe, but on this day in 1903, Orville Wright made the first successful flight in a gasoline-powered airplane at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. Little did the Wright Brothers realize what that few seconds of lift-off would mean years later; long lines, rude employees, planes stacked on runways, terrorism and lost baggage! Certainly frequent flyers will always better handle the stress of the airline experience while others will be stripped searched, humiliated and suspected of all manner of nastiness. Too bad that the real problem lies in the airlines themselves with too many flights leaving too many airports too often and millions of passengers stranded in the snow bound airports of the east and midwest.

College students sleeping on duffle bags, kids running down batteries on their I-Pods and the elderly having to prove the metal in their leg isn’t an explosive device. These are a few of the favorite things I will not miss.

Naturally, flying is still faster and safer than many other forms of transport but with Christmas a week off and snow covering the east coast expect delays, grumpy folks and the myriad problems associated with traveling during this season.

Safe journeys around the globe, everyone, and hopefully all flights will be on time and enjoyable holidays you get whereve you are headed.

I’ll be on terra firma working around the Henri Villas. Like airlines, the Cafe has experienced delays in updates thanks to numerous events; however, with everyone gone, including most of my tenants, few excuses will be offered, just updates.

December will be a busy month at the Cafe with writing, end-of-the-year inventories and naturally the holidayz. The Cats are gearing up for their political conventions and we will have a reporter covering it. All past promised updates will be posted over the coming weeks. Next up: immigration coming Tuesday evening. Come on by coffee, hot chocolate and hot tea are free during the month.

ROSA PARKS REMEMBERED: We take a moment to salute African-American Civil Rights Activist Rosa Parks (1913-2005) who, on this day, in 1955 Montgomery, Alabama refused to give up her seat to a white man, an act that lead to the Montgomery bus boycott and paved the way for a non-violent citywide protest against segregation. I was a mere child when this transpired but it was an inspiration to me growing up Jewish in another Alabama town in an era when racism and anti-Semitism went unchallenged for far too long. G-d Bless you Mrs. Parks for your courage and sacrifices in challenging the hypocrisy of fifties bigotry and through your actions brought blacks and whites together for the first time.