Culinary possibilities have enormously improved since I originally arrived in Munich (directly from two years in Paris yet) 56 years ago last fall. During my five Munich years my frustrated gourmet’s heart leapt up when the Guide Michelin itself, which I’ve sometimes thought of as perhaps the only incorruptible institution in la douce France, began publishing an annual Guide Michelin for Germany. Prior to that I’d regretfully concluded that only in England did one stand a greater chance of eating badly in an unrecommended restaurant chosen at random; after that, Michelin contributed importantly to many Germans’ revised attitude towards what I once saw referred to in a French publication as “les plaisirs de la table”. Because of all that I paid special attention to it when my email this morning brought me this morsel from Deutsche Welle, a kind of German equivalent of The Voice of America:

14.01.2008

German States Prepare to Do Battle over Dumplings

Two German states fighting over food?  It would be laughable if it didn’t happen every other month.  This time, Bavaria and Rhineland-Palatinate are getting all steamed up over a dumpling.

One of the best ways of celebrating your survival after completing a hair-raising descent of an icy Piste is to shed your skis or snowboard and get stuck into a Dampfnudel.  While literally translating as steamed noodle, it’s essentially a massive dumpling, served either in savo[u]ry or sweet form.  It can be the best way of reaffirming life after partaking of death-defying winter sports.  Combined with a bucketload of après-ski alcohol, the Dampfnudel makes everything good in the wintry world.

Such a culinary treat should be treasured, and the Dampfnudel is certainly championed as a fine example of German cuisine in the places where it is held most dear.  But, as with most things coveted by the many, it is fiercely defended by the few.

Instead of devouring the monstrous ball of dough with vigor – or with either mushrooms in white sauce or custard and jam, depending on your taste – the good people of Bavaria and Rhineland Palatinate are channeling their energies into slagging one another off over the origin of the Dampfnudel.

Arguments over food and drink are not a new thing in Germany.  Most recently, the Berliners have had to defend their Currywurst against covetous northerners while the people of Hesse almost came to blows with Brussels over their Apfelwein [a mildly alcohol potable made from apples].  So, apart from it all being rather petty and unseemly, what’s the deal with this new outbreak of culinary hostilities?

Bavarians stake claim on the Web

Well, as with most food fights it all stems from perceived ownership and the regional pride a particular food can instil.  The Bavarians have stolen a march on the Rhineland folk by proclaiming on the electronic oracle of all that is truthful (the Internet to the rest of us) that the Dampfnudel is a speciality of Bavaria.  The Rhinelanders fear that this will lead to their rivals to the south staking a claim for ownership of the dumpling at an EU level.

“We will not allow them to take the Dampfnudel without a fight,” proclaimed Rhineland-Palatinate’s Minister of Agriculture Hendrik Hering in a local newspaper article on the growing crisis.  He added that all judicial and diplomatic efforts would be employed in keeping the origin of the Dampfnudel associated with the Rhineland.

Rhinelanders expose rivals as culinary magpies

On first glance, the Rhinelanders may appear to be the antagonists here.  The Bavarians have done nothing other than stake a claim, rightly or wrongly, to something they believe to be theirs.  But on further investigation, it appears that Bavaria has form when it comes to snaffling other regions’ delicacies and calling them their own.

Glancing at the offending Internet site, “Food from Bavaria,” there are the obvious specialities from that most proud region of Germany: the veal sausage, Abensberger asparagus and Hefeweizen wheat-based beer among them.  But since when did Swabian Maultaschen, the oversized savoury-stuffed pillows from neighboring Baden-Württemberg, come from Bavaria?  How long have the Swabian Spätzle noodles been a Bavarian invention…?

Digging deeper, one can see that maybe the Rhineland has a point…

DW staff (nda)

DW staff (nda) | www.dw-world.de | © Deutsche Welle.

{And it will surprise nobody who knows me personally that I’ve gussied up these native-born Goddam Krauts’ Englisch before passing this tidbit along to you….}

[This afternoon at the Komische Oper zu Berlin, the American baritone Kevin Deas sang this captivating little song Aaron Copland adapted as one of his "Old American Songs", and when I got home I emailed him this addendum:]

Dear Mr. Deas,

as Berlin correspondent for www.MusicalAmerica.com I attended - and enjoyed - your concert this afternoon at the Komische Oper, and I have a footnote to Aaron Copland’s arrangement of “I Bought Me a Cat” that I felt a real urge at least to tell you about.  I decided against coming uninvited to the party that undoubtedly took place in the house Casino afterwards; I didn’t want to seem like a party-crasher.

In New York half a century or so ago, circumstances involved me personally in the birthing of that meanwhile famous arrangement Aaron made at that time - but when he himself played the piano part and (more or less) croaked the tune, he always, invariably, incorporated a gimmick I’ve never known any singer to use, but to my way of thinking it adds a final fillip that I find considerably enriches the song’s ending.

Oliver Smith had made a fortune in royalties for having designed that goldmine called “Oklahoma!” and he used that money to set himself up as a producer (of hits including another goldmine called “West Side Story”).  He had a plan to outdo “Oklahoma!” and at the same time bring High Art to Broadway.  With that in mind he bought the rights to Erskine Caldwell’s novel “Tragic Ground”, engaged Lynn Riggs (the born Oklahoman whose play “Green Grow the Lilacs” had provided the raw material for “Oklahoma!”) to adapt the book and write the lyrics, and Agnes de Mille, whose choreography for “Oklahoma!” had introduced ballet to the Broadway musical stage, to do not only the choreography but also stage the entire production.  My friendship with both Riggs and Copland got me involved in Aaron’s spiffy setting of “I Bought Me a Cat.”

Lynn Riggs could not read music but his apartment (at 1 Christopher Street) did have an upright piano, so I got turned into a sort of bilateral amanuensis for both him and Copland.  During early planning discussions, Lynn told Aaron that during his Oklahoma childhood he’d grown up with a local ditty Aaron might find worth incorporating into “Tragic Ground” - and proceeded to sing it for him: “I Bought Me a Cat.”  Aaron took to it immediately, and it apparently set itself, for very soon after that Aaron sat down at Lynn’s upright and both played and sang his arrangement’s official world premiere.

Aaron had had Agnes de Mille’s choreography and dancers in mind, so at the very end of each verse, he’d insert a brief hiatus to clap his hands, twice, before continuing with the final “My cat says fiddle-eye-fee”, doing what he intended to have Agnes’s dancers do.  However - and finally here comes the bug I want to plant in your own ear - at the end of the very last stanza (”I bought me a wife”), he’d clap his hands not the two times the listener expected but, all of a sudden, three times, with an emphatic accent on the third clap, and only then go on to the valedictory tagline.

I’ve always found that little built-in surprise a delightful way to startle an audience, and if you do, too, I offer you this tidbit with my compliments and best wishes.  As far as I know, you’d become the first singer ever to perform that captivating little song the way Aaron himself did.

“Tragic Ground” never did get produced - or, for that matter, even finished.  If you have access to Volume 2 of the memoirs Aaron wrote with Yale’s Vivian Perlis, you might find footnote number. . . .  DAMN!  I can’t at the moment find my own copy, but you can easily locate the passage I have in mind by checking the index for “Alone at Night”, the nearest thing to a conventional pop song Aaron contributed, which he optimistically thought (and for financial reasons hoped) just might have a chance to become a popular hit.

With sincere best wishes,

Paul Moor

[From my hard disk I've excavated some Stockhauseniana I put together in 1998, which has definitely not lost its relevance to this inordinately intricate personality:]

Although Karlheinz Stockhausen at 70 has probably become globally the most famous living German composer (his only rival: Hans Werner Henze), comparatively few people actually know his music.  During the early years after World War II he quickly attained rank with France’s Pierre Boulez and Italy’s Luigi Nono in the triumvirate that dominated avant-garde music, and half a century later his music remains almost as thorny and problematical as ever.

Time has made Stockhausen ever more reticent to discuss personal matters, so only in early biographical writings does one find details of a cripplingly traumatic childhood.  With few interruptions, he has spent his entire life in Germany’s Rhineland, where his parents came from farming stock.  By Karlheinz’s birth in 1928, his father had become a grammar-school teacher, but five years later (coincidentally the year Hitler’s Nazis came to power) his mother became incurably psychotic, committed to an institution from which she never emerged: the Nazis’ cynically misnamed “euthanasia” program murdered her eight years later.  At 13 he lost his father to the Wehrmacht - also never to return, officially missing in action, reportedly killed in Hungary.  At 13 Karlheinz entered a boarding school run by an institution in Xanten that trained teachers according to Nazi principles, which they undoubtedly force-fed him.

At six he had started piano lessons; in Xanten he also got instruction in violin and played oboe in the school orchestra.  He attended that school until 1944, when he got assigned to a field hospital at the front where he served as a stretcher-bearer until March 1945.  After World War II ended, he became a farmhand, but by the end of 1945 busied himself rehearsing amateur operetta productions, studying Latin at the same time.  In February 1946 he entered a Classically oriented Gymnasium in Bergisch Gladbach, and in March 1947 completed his Abitur (approximate equivalent of a U.S. junior college diploma).  He supported himself partially as a bar pianist, partially as an operetta rehearsal pianist.  At 19 he gained admission to Cologne’s outstanding Musikhochschule (conservatory), where his teachers included Switzerland’s Frank Martin - an influence one would never guess from the music Stockhausen soon started composing.  Simultaneously he studied philosophy, musicology, and German studies at Cologne University. Ever since, Cologne has remained the place most closely associated with Stockhausen and his activities.

   His earliest works date from 1950, his first marriage (which produced his first four children) from 1952, but his first musical epiphany came when he discovered the music of Olivier Messiaen, a devoutly Roman Catholic Parisian organist-composer early recognized as a post-war avant-garde pioneer.  Already Stockhausen had started composing “pointillistic” music, consisting of myriad individual, seemingly unrelated tones.  In 1952 he went to Paris for rhythmic and aesthetic training with Messiaen, also dabbling in the semi-electronic musique concrète composed by Pierre Henry and Pierre Schaeffer from material tape-recorded from almost infinitely varied sources.  Already in 1952 Vienna’s Universal-Edition, the uniquely adventurous publisher of a modern élite including Bartók, Berg, Schoenberg, Webern, Weill, et al., had signed Stockhausen to a contract any young composer would almost have died for.

In 1953 he joined the trailblazing new Electronic Studio established by Cologne Radio, which he headed from 1963 to 1977. His first major international breakthrough came in 1965, when he electrified the musical avant-garde with a work he called “Song of the Youths in the Fiery Furnace”.  Previously he had horrified Pierre Boulez with his expressed hope to compose an electronic mass for Cologne’s cathedral; after administrators there told him thanks but no thanks, that project became the world’s first generally acknowledged masterpiece of electronic music, the “Song of the Youths”.  Ever the insatiable experimenter, he also investigated the possibilities of new music’s aleatory pioneers, who introduced the element of chance into a work’s performance, theoretically making each and every performance of an aleatory score unique.  Between 1954 and 1956 Stockhausen continued his studies in phonetics and communication research with a pioneering professor at Bonn University.

Two avant-garde musical events in postwar Germany set the international pace: a cosmopolitan summer school sponsored by Darmstadt and a jampacked weekend festival in Donaueschingen, which continued a tradition that had called early attention to composers including Paul Hindemith and Kurt Weill.  By 1953, the Boulez-Nono-Stockhausen troika unassailably dominated Darmstadt, where Stockhausen taught from 1953 to 1974.  Universal-Edition added him to the editorial staff of its pace-setting journal Die Reihe (”The Row”, named after Schoenberg’s trailblazing principle of the twelve-tone “row”), a post he held from 1954 to 1959.

The world premiere of his super-aleatory “Piano Piece XI” in New York created a major esoteric musical sensation in 1957, and a year later he gave thirty-two concert-lectures at U.S. universities - the beginning of a more or less constant series of Stockhausen concerts over which he himself presides.  The University of Pennsylvania brought him to Philadelphia as a guest professor in 1965, the University of California at Davis in 1966-67.  In 1967 he married for the second time, the German avant-garde artist Mary Bauermeister, who bore him two more children, the six names of whom include Julika, Majella, and Suja.  (The more conventional others: Christel, Markus, and Simon; four Stockhausen children sometimes participate in paternal performances, most notably Markus, a brilliant trumpet virtuoso.)

Japan’s 1970 World’s Fair in Osaka brought Stockhausen’s finest hour to date when the Federal German government, then in Bonn, government sent him as its official cultural ambassador, climaxed by the global auditorium built to his own specifications for the performance of his own music.

Since 1977 Stockhausen has concentrated on the seven-part cycle he calls “Light”, subtitled “The Seven Days of the Week” - a heptalogy which when finished will dwarf its most massive predecessor, Richard Wagner’s tetralogy “The Nibelung’s Ring”.  By 2002, the date Stockhausen has set himself to complete “Light”, it will consist of seven full-length operas comprising some twenty-four hours of music.

Although a Biblically-based religion pretty much his own has never ceased playing a dominant role in Stockhausen’s life and music, he today marches to his own drummer.  Years ago he answered my question about him as a Roman Catholic with “I try to be”, but he divorced his two wives and today shares his life with two of his main expert performers: Clarinettist Suzanne Stephens (born in Waterloo, Iowa), who teamed up with him in 1976, and Flutist Kathinka Pasveer (born in Zaandam, Holland), who in 1982 made it a menage à trois.  Stockhausen has composed more than forty works for Stephens, plus a number of Pasveer, not to mention quite a number for both ladies together, one of which (”Ave”, a 23-minute duo for basset horn and alto flute - a scene from the “Monday” instalment of “Light”) formed half the birthday program in Cologne’s Philharmonie Monday night [in 1998].

From the beginning, Stockhausen has burned with a hard gemlike flame, with two adjectives - arrogant and messianic - applied to him with noticeable frequency.  He has a massive, handsome head, and large, burning eyes of an intensity many find intimidating. Two vertical furrows frame the bridge of his nose in an almost uninterrupted semi-frown perhaps indicating perpetual deep thought and total seriousness.  He has never suffered fools gladly - a tendency intensified by age, success, fame, and what long since became international cult status.  Even before Woodstock he had captured the attention and admiration of at least half the Beatles (John Lennon and Paul McCartney), who included his portrait in the montage of their personal heroes on the cover of their “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” LP.  Others on the record as Stockhausen fans include not only deadly serious young composers all over the world but also David Bowie, Allen Ginsberg, The Grateful Dead, and Frank Zappa.

Stockhausen’s acolytes hang upon his every word as the divinely revealed truth, slavishly carrying out his every instruction, no matter how seemingly incomprehensible.  In 1970 he began composing what he calls “cosmic music”, with an almost hour-long “Mantra” for two pianos, percussion, and electronic tape he describes thus: “The unifying construction of Mantra is a musical miniature of the unifying macrostructure of the cosmos, and it is at the same time an enlargement into the acoustic time-field of the unifying microstructure of the harmonic vibrations within the tone itself.”  That typifies Stockhausen in one of his simpler, more lucid descriptions.  Stephen Hawking’s book A Short History of Time enthralled him; so did the Hubble space telescope, which from space has yielded photographs Stockhausen calls “the most beautiful I have ever seen as stars - and for me, tones are stars.”

In 1971 Stockhausen composed a large outdoor work he called Sternklang (Starsound), and in its text referred to inhabitants of other stars, other galaxies, and his wish “to bid them welcome”.  As a gift to the USA for its 1976 bicentennial, the West German government commissioned a work Stockhausen entitled “Sirius”, an electronic opus involving four soloists, and since then Sirius - the brightest star in the heavens at certain times - has figured in writings both by and about Stockhausen.

Berlin Critic Volker Straebel quotes Stockhausen as claiming to have received his musical training on Sirius, cautiously adding that “such utterances soon made him suspect for intellectual discourse”.  Another Berlin critic, Gottfried Krieger, who opened his 70th-birthday laudatio with the question “Is this man crazy?”, lists some of the epithets frequently applied to him: a charlatan, a sect priest, characterized by traits associated with fascism, anthroposophy, and what hip Germans call Esoterik - the equivalent of the USA’s “New Age” movement.  Krieger continues: “Small wonder for someone who gives Sirius as his homeland.” Working on “Light” has led Stockhausen to a sort of overall plan he describes as a “superformula”, and once he has the days of the week polished off, he talks - always with his customary all-out enthusiasm - about going on to compose the individual hour, also the individual minutes, into what Krieger calls “a sort of structure in which the listener can assemble the most varied sonic seconds.  If that is crazy, then Stockhausen is surely crazy.”(Few writers go that far in even hinting at Stockhausen’s genetic maternal heritage.)

In 1969, Stockhausen broke away from Universal-Edition and set up his very own publishing house in the hilltop house he and his family occupy in little suburban Kürten, a forty-minute drive away from Cologne.  Its catalogue manifests awesome marketing techniques of not only printed scores but also compact discs, some in multi-disc sets - even Swiss-made music boxes: Stockhausen, long fascinated by not only legitimate astronomy but also the Zodiac, has composed a little sort of jingle for each sign, and for his 70th birthday Suzanne Stephens arranged a numbered Swiss music-box edition limited to forty of each, bearing the master’s notation of the tune with his signature, available until the end of 1998 for 495 Deutschemarks (c. $275), after that for 560 (c. $310).

[Here, dearly beloved, endeth our Stockhausen text for today.  Shall I continue? - because I can. . . .]

This afternoon I actually started a bloggery, skimming the cream off the many times over the past half-century when Karlheinz Stockhausen’s path and mine crossed, but eventually I gave up on it for what I’d originally thought of as a casual stroll down Memory Lane unexpectedly touched off such an avalanche of recollections, from locations including (inevitably) not only Donaueschingen and Darmstadt but also Warsaw - that I finally simply threw in the towel, unexpectedly swamped by all those still vivid recollections.

But I do want to turn loose one nifty, primarily because it contrasts so strongly with the oh so serious way Karlheinz almost ostentatiously took himself - and I hasten to make clear that I in no way intend this as chipping away at the monument he took such an important part in erecting to himself as - unquestionably - one of the most influential, if least enjoyed and enjoyable, composers of his time (1924 - 2007).

During his early glory days, his activities focused upon the Rhineland metropolis Cologne, for more than one reason.  He came from that region, as any aurally informed ear noticed as soon as he opened his mouth.  Of all the Federal German regional radio/television centers, the affluent industrial Rhine-Ruhr area’s de facto capital Cologne’s Westdeutscher Rundfunk had the most money, and WDR pampered Karlheinz even during his early years like an especially favorite native son.  If he suddenly one day (so to speak) r’ared back and proclaimed that for some new opus he had in mind he needed unprecedented electronic recording tape with not the customary two tracks but five - which automatically meant manufacturing such tape with an unprecedented width, not to mention the electro-mechanical apparatus necessary to record and play such tape back - Karlheinz got it.  WDR established its pioneering Studio für ektronische Musik primarily for him, and he in turn made it world-famous, starting with his trail-blazing Gesang der Jünglinge im Feuerofen (Song of the Youths in the Fiery Furnace), which interpolated a single, sonically “white” boy soprano’s voice, bereft of overtones, with accompanying sounds otherwise exclusively electronically generated.

Cologne’s thriving avant-garde scene in those days included not only Karlheinz, as its uncrowned king, but also a collage artist named Mary Bauermeister, who from the beginning took an exceptional shine to him personally.  Remember “Never underestimate the power of a woman”?  Well, the first step towards her displacing his first wife Doris and becoming the second lawfully wedded Frau Stockhausen came when she cunningly asked whether she, the collage artiste, could study with him, the composer, actually take lessons from him. 

During her premarital period she occupied a reportedly spacious studio that provided house-room for various sporadic avant-garde happenings (remember happenings?) of significant esoteric importance.  I never attended one, but my favorite will live forever in my memory on the basis of several vivid conversational accounts, some of them first-hand.  The serious artist of the evening in question had said the elaborate nature his happening necessitated an advance rehearsal, and one high point of that rehearsal came when he wound up and hurled an egg at the vast expanse of plane glass providing the studio’s primary daytime illumination, with the egg’s innards dribbling down the pane in fine serious-artistic fashion.

Like perhaps most serious artists, this gentleman had an evil-minded rival in the area, who got himself briefed about that rehearsal and then fiendishly set out to sabotage the main event, with the vicious intention of making a monkey out of the evening’s guest of honor.  He somehow snuck in and snaffled the designated egg away, replacing it with a reasonably accurate facsimile he had carefully pre-boiled to stone-like consistency.  The climactic moment for the scheduled hurling came . . . and Mary Bauermeister’s enormous plate-glass studio window shattered into a thousand shards - at a time when plate glass in Germany cost so much as to classify almost as a luxury item.

I never did manage to obtain any conscientious reporter’s obligatory confirmation that the serious artist reacted to the prevalent risibility greeting this development - mistaking it as part of the serious artist’s own planned happening - by turning upon the uncouth guffawers and denouncing them one and all as “Faschisten!“  I also can’t tell you whether Karlheinz himself attended that uniquely memorable event; I offer it here only as a peripheral descriptive footnote to the Stockhausen period in Cologne at that time.

(Incidentally, my eagle-eyed Knoxville blogfather Perry Nelson has jogged my memory to remind me that during an earlier phase of this playpen I’d reported another serious artistic event - in the air over the German town of Braunschweig - that did indeed personally involve Karlheinz, and in his accustomed stellar role.  Typing his surname into the Search window up at the very top of all this will lead you to those earlier bits of Stockhauseniana.)

Howard Pollack’s 690-page biography Aaron Copland: The Life and Work of an Uncommon Man documents in some detail (the index cites me seven times) one of my life’s most enriching friendships with that almost saintly man, which began soon after I emerged from the University of Texas at 19 as a brand-new Bachelor Musicae and returned to New York (where I’d previously spent a teen-age year at Juilliard until the money ran out) armed with a letter of introduction from another Aaron, the university’s Prof. Schaffer, Ph. D., chairman of the Department of Romance Languages, whom Copland identified to me as a lifelong friend and the first person to whom Copland as a mere boy had confided his ambition to become a composer.

My birthplace El Paso, Texas, where I spent the first sixteen years of my life, afforded rather restricted access to “classical” music of any kind, but the indulgent staff of the Tri-State Music Company contributed to my musical development more than any of them could ever know by permitting me to spend hours and hours in one of their two listening rooms, where I subjected their 78-rpm recordings on the Victor Red Seal label - the only label with an El Paso outlet - to the punitive friction of that era’s steel needles. Those life-sustaining treats included a two-disc album containing Serge Koussevitzky’s Boston Symphony recording of El Salón México, a title that immediately found resonance in me since from El Paso you could go to Mexico by simply walking across the bridge over the pusillanimous trickle bearing the grandiose Spanish name for Great River.

Since I knew nothing about that piece’s composer except for a mention I’d read somewhere of one of his earliest piano pieces, “The Cat and the Mouse”, I looked at the two syllables of his surname and for some time after that thought of him as the man with the funny name that combined Cop and Land. After our friendship years later got off the ground, I asked him one day how come people didn’t at least pronounce it the way it looked. He said he had no idea how that had happened, especially in view of its original pronunciation in Russia before the arrival of his immigrant parents. He then told me that story - which I’ve never, anywhere, seen in print, so this little footnote on the most recognized of all American composers of “classical” music might well qualify as a modest world premiere.

Both his parents had come from their native Russia - and heaven alone knows how his father came by his American name Harris Morris Copland, but probably through the same primitive linguistic Americanization that gave birth to that odd surname Copland.

They arrived, conventionally for that day, at Ellis Island, bearing the only documentation they had - naturally in Kyrillic letters, which might as well have confronted the Immigration official who processed them with similar documentation in Arabic or Chinese. He got it across to them that he wanted to know their surname, then wrote down, for all time, what his American ears heard: cop + land. Only some time later did it transpire that by rights he ought to have given them American documents with the correct transliteration Kaplan. One can only speculate as to whether a Jewish boy from Brooklyn named Aaron Kaplan would have had the exalted career Aaron Copland did.

At Stephen F. Austin High School in El Paso, my beloved music teacher Miss Congdon had a small collection of rolls for the upright Duo Art player piano that included one that introduced me to the American pianist George Copeland (1882 - 1971), an early champion of Debussy and the rest of the French school; over and over and over I listened in fascination to the pathetically inadequate Duo Art roll of George Copeland’s playing a piano transcription of Debussy’s orchestrally opulent “Prelude to ‘The Afternoon of a Faun’”. Naturally I eventually asked Aaron Copland whether any kind of family tie connected him with the considerably more famous pianist, and that question yielded me another biographical footnote.

In Aaron Copland’s early thirties, he had become fascinated by Mexico and the other Latin-American countries, and had also acquired considerable fluency in Spanish. When Washington belatedly woke up to the practical strategic importance of its southern neighbors and initiated what it called the Good-Neighbor Policy, with Nelson Rockefeller in charge, the prominent American artists they sent down there understandably included Copland.

He said that in one of the South American countries he visited, he had found himself received with noticeable apprehension, and after a certain amount of discreet prying he found out why. The pianist George Copeland had preceded him there, on a concert tour, and had run afoul of the local fuzz on what those days’ terminology euphemized as a morals charge. Once Aaron Copland convinced them that the two surnames did not coincide even in their spelling, they eventually relaxed and that State Department assignment proved one of quite a number of valuable diplomatic successes.

I cannot conclude this mini-memoir without adding what Germans call a drop of (presumably dry) vermouth. During those hideous years when Senator Joseph McCarthy’s pathological fear of communism held the entire country in thrall, Henry Luce’s second magazine “Life” published a two-page compendium of what it carefully called “Communist Dupes and Fellow Travellers”, punctiliously avoiding calling them flat-out communists, since New York state law made such unsubstantiated labelling punishable unless the accuser could prove actual Party membership. Those pages included tiny mugshots of such dangerous limbs of the red Soviet Satan as Albert Einstein, Leonard Bernstein, and . . . Aaron Copland.

The next time I saw Aaron after that, I asked him what effect he expected that to have for him in practical terms. With a rueful smile he said only that he hardly imagined the State Department would send him on any more of those wonderful junkets - and, as far as I know, it never did.

Young Mailer’s first novel The Naked and the Dead turned him into an overnight celebrity but it appeared early enough for its publisher to have serious problems with a pungent monosyllable that peppered the manuscript.  Mailer had written naturalistically about the robust young Americans in uniform he’d known during World War II, and for him to have bowdlerized the lingo he’d found himself personally immersed in would have largely castrated his powerful novel.  The publishers finally reached a triumphant compromise by merely replacing two letters with one and turning it loose in that only slightly castrated form - hoping and praying that even that wouldn’t land them in legal hot water.

According to the story I heard from Jerry Robbins - himself at that time (the late 1940s) a fairly new celebrity due to his smashing successes as choreographer of the ballet On the Town (expanded into the full-scale musical Wonderful Town), who in due time compounded his success and fame by taking an idea of his to Leonard Bernstein, who’d composed the music for both those works, who then collaborated with Jerry and a few more such exceptionally bright contemporaries (Betty Comden and Adolph Green plus Arthur Laurents, who wrote the script) in transplanting Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet into one of the tougher neighborhoods of that day’s Manhattan as the worldwide smash hit West Side Story.

As Jerry Robbins told it, Norman Mailer’s introduction to Tallulah Bankhead inspired one of her more memorable off-the-cuff ad libs: “Ah, yes - you’re that funny little man that doesn’t know how to spell fuck.”

The online magazine salon has scored some notable coups in the field of investigative journalism, but I recall none that’s so impressed and inexpressibly horrified me as this one, about the barbarous torture euphemistically called “waterboarding”, which the Bush-Cheney criminal conspiracy not only condones and practises but also inexorably defends as indispensable “under present circumstances”.

What in the name of all my erstwhile fellow Americans have always held dear has become of the country where I spent the first uninterrupted twenty-five of my meanwhile eighty-three years?  What more has to happen to get it across to Mr. & Mrs. Lunchbucket (to quote a CBS News editor who used to record my reports from Berlin) that post-9/11 measures in the Bush-Cheney USA more and more resemble the events that led up to Adolf Hitler’s becoming Germany’s Chancellor and perverting an entire highly civilised nation into the most flagitiously criminal fascist regime in modern history?

The salon article I wish every American who genuinely loves his country could read begins with this factual self-introduction by its author:

My name is Malcolm Wrightson Nance.  I am a former member of the U.S. military intelligence community, a retired U.S. Navy Senior Chief Petty Officer.  I have served honorably for twenty years.

While serving my nation, I had the honor to be accepted for duty as an instructor at the U.S. Navy Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (SERE) school in North Island Naval Air Station, California. I served in that capacity as an instructor and Master Training Specialist in the Wartime Prisoner-of-War, Peacetime Hostile Government Detainee and Terrorist Hostage survival programs.

At SERE, one of my most serious responsibilities was to employ, supervise, or witness dramatic and highly kinetic coercive interrogation methods, through hands-on, live demonstrations in a simulated captive environment which inoculated our student to the experience of high intensity stress and duress.

Some of these coercive physical techniques have been identified in the media as Enhanced Interrogation Techniques.  The most severe of those employed by SERE was waterboarding….

For a photograph of this retired but notably spruce U.S. Navy Senior Chief Petty Officer, in the uniform he at least once wore with such manifest pride, plus his unabridged whistle-blowing exposé of torture as officially condoned by the Bush-Cheney United States of America, click here.