I went to a private cardiologist for a check-up, 'cause since age 13 I've had an arrhytmia named after Woff, Parkinson & White. That misshapen ekg beat permits a short circuit within the heart so that a rapid mini beat occurs. During these palpitations, the blood circulates minimally; I'm sure it's much easier for the heart to enter into this little selfish beat, it's just that the rest of the body doesn't get the blood. The heart contains within itself the blood as it (merrily?) beats 240 the minute.

This is an old odd story to me, and, amidst the lessons we are learning daily, consider the following.

After a prescription renewal mix-up on the part of the (inefficiently run?) office of Dr. Mayer Ballas, in Forest Hills, renewing one prescription and not the other, and as a result of it, Dr. Ballas refused to speak with me, rejected his doctor patient relationship and withdrew as my doctor when I attempted to make an appointment with him.

He has been my doctor for 25 years.

His behaviour has impressed me. I forgive him on both a professional and personal level.

So I saw another cardiologist. One of the medications really doesn't need to be renewed. It causes arrhytmia. It's called Quinaglute. I've stopped taking it.

Once again, my only ailments are mental.

The Park Fests are progressing well.

Progress... My creative work exists under the name, Cinema VII, simply because it is exists apart from me, contained within a preserved medium. I am the source, yet I see myself as not always the source. In fact, I want my work to exist apart from me so that I can move on. I love the technology that permits us to be regenerated. Is there something missing in the regeneration?

I preserve what I've done and move on. Forgetting what we learned we keep learning.

Merce Cunningham, 50 Years of Forward Motion...

What a stupid post from July 11th! Regarding one's financial decisions, if I sold then the money I would have received would be 7,500 more than now. Oh, Roberta just brought in an email regarding bottle deposit return on Budweiser. A thousand dollar investment would have returned a coupl'a'hunerd.

What else is new, please?

I spent so far this year over thirty thousand dollars and if I sell the stocks and funds I own I will have lost another thirty thousand or nearly half their value. Boy, I had no idea I had that much money!

Prepare to Meet Your Maker, the surrealist musical mystery play, had its 29th performance, its history documented elsewhere on the cinemavii.com site. We performed the fifth of its six performances at the WAH Center, last night.

The Twenty-Ninth Performance of Prepare to Meet Your Maker went well. I participated with Drew Blood; we had taken over for Josh and Jason who dropped out last week, and that is when the phallus in Orin’s display went missing. The whole point of the story is the missing phallus; I mean the Isis Osiris story incorporated into ours.

Audience members included Bruce Brown and Enid, his wife, and Marc Baron and Cinti and her friend Candida, and two Hasidic boys, well garbed, in time for sundown since we began at 8:30.

We’re in the longest days of the year, so sunset couldn’t have been much later here in New York, along the same latitudinal meridian as Barcelona.

Our next performance features me at the piano. Tonight Kenny and Brian performed beautifully, with amazing dynamic variation, with that $200 Yamaha Keyboard, the best around. Please, it’s a quite unreasonably good sounding keyboard. Yamaha electronics have a superior musicality, my prior experience being with the QY10 and the original DX7.

Tony Hightower continues to achieve new heights of drama and entertainment, along with his splendid singing voice, this time as Quasimodo with Meghan Elizabeth Burns. The miracle here is that for the past four performances the originator of the role, Lisa Dery, returned to the role with some perspective and great charm. They both do wonderful unique interpretations.

Lisa Sredniawski (Lisa Shred) took over as Mathilda for Linda Kobylinski (who was needed in Sharon's Putnam which had its run extended at a new theatre.) I was backstage throughout our performance and it was always a pleasure to see Lisa smiling and enjoying herself. Kimberly Mossel continues to keep the show running, and doing a wonderful job as she improves her presentation skills and adjusts to the echo-ey surroundings. Seeing a performance by Laurel Hoffman simply sells you on Laurel Hoffman. Drew Blood, well, I directed the torment of his restlessness upon myself and he was helpful and dynamically unique, as Tyr Throne, the director, could not be there this evening.

Petris came by this evening; he's the Finnish director with plans to do a play about a boy named Lionheart. We look forward to seeing more from him.

The WAH Center third floor is resonant, wet, I believe, is the term, and naturally so, so it sounds great. The cast has learned to adjust. Rene Moreno, the artist who is often there at the Center, ran lights and even held a beautiful umbrella over Laurel and Lisa as they performed the Pokida/Samama scene.

July, 1938. Winston Churchill, in his speech on Civilization, defined it as a society based upon the opinion of civilians. In its soil grow continuously freedom comfort and culture! It is there that the traditions of the past are cherished and the inheritance bequeathed to us by former wise or valient men becomes a rich estate to be enjoyed and used by all. Unite to defend civilization, freedom and peace. Show yourself possessed of a constabulary power before which barbaric and atavistic forces will stand in awe.

Sharon Fogarty's play, "Putnam," considers the excesses of fame, providing its cast with the opportunity to portray the famous. There is a crossover between achieving fame and providing the world with valuable personal offerings. The untimely death element follows closely along the path to fame. Perhaps untimely death follows along all our paths, particularly those on the paths less travelled. In "Putnam" Sharon rejects the connection between fame and untimely death (Note: I have replaced the word "disaster" with the term "untimely death."). Her view was that the death was a ruse and that the "famous" faked their deaths to continue pursuing their life's purpose, whatever that might be. She considers the charged careers of Marilyn Monroe, Billie Holiday, Elvis Presley, John Lennon and Janis Joplin.

I will jump immediately to the pleasures of the play. John Lennon, the composer, the songwriter, was inspired. His work inspired others, and I mean that in a nearly technical way. There is a school of composition arising from his inspiration and Sharon furthered it by writing a beautiful song in his style. Al Quagliata gave a very pleasant performance seated with the fictitious Mr. Putnam as they drew with crayons on paper plates. The cast offstage did the "Ahhh" back-up vocals so typical of the dreamy side of John Lennon. Lennon did a beautiful job expressing love as a universal state of being and Sharon furthered it. This scene is a beautiful theatrical moment.

Rather than approach head-on the dramatic material put forth by Sharon, I will now list some John-Lennon-inspired breakthroughs, those of which I am aware, and these are highlights for the artists who did them. Billy Joel's "Laura," and ELO Adrian Lynn's "My Shangrila has gone away.... fading like the beatles on hey jude??? Judy Judy Judy..."

Putnam's Lennon moment followed a psychedelic Janis Joplin moment, convincingly created by Linda Kobylinski (She sings as Mathilda and Samamama in the Prepare to Meet Your Maker Soundtrack.). The feeling of nostalgia it created may simply be of the Strawberry Alarmclock cameo in the film "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls" (to some of you this reference will not be obscure). More recently, I attended a party in an abandoned building next to the Williamsburg Bridge, which means I have a real psychedelic '60's nostalgia that dates from a mere two months ago. Anyway, Mike Meyers has made this nostalgia his niche so for a dose of it you know where to go.

Hey, Mike Meyers is famous.

So riding on the wings of fame can provide the boost needed to fly on your own.

Sharon's play rides on the wings of the famous while providing a fictional character who lacks the iconographic mannerisms of the celebrity. Maybe if she assigned a real person, I don't know, like Bono -- who is actually one step away from nonentity in my mind, replaced by impressions of Brian Pilten covering Bono's amazing "One Love One Life Love is a something or other..., an ember, ... a temple?" It sounded like Bono's answer to Sting's "Every Breath... Every Move ... I'll be Watching..."

Bono. He's surely famous. Give Putnam Bono's iconographic mannerisms... Bono must have some magnetism, I mean, Werner Herzog attended to him, I think... In fact, seeing someone immitate Bono will increase one's appreciation of Bono.

The pleasure of the play is to see how well the cast's personal magnetism filtered through their "immitation" of the stars...

As for the folks they immitated, good thing they are famous because they can continue to inspire us. They inspired the cast...

I saw the Sunday performance of June 2nd, 2002.