Letters to the Editor: 05.08.97

The Grapefruit

East Hampton

May 5, 1997

Dear Ms. Rattray:

The first time the grapefruit was pitched in an artists' baseball game was in 1954. Thomas B. Hess was the first to write the story in the introduction of Fred McDarrah's "Artists' World":

"In the summer of 1954, in East Hampton, Long Island, the artists organized a Saturday afternoon softball game. Phillip Pavia, who had enjoyed the advantages of a regular Connecticut boyhood, was the best batter - a home-run specialist. His friends decided to counter this forte."

"A day before the game, Willem and Elaine de Kooning and Franz Kline, who were sharing the Red House, bought two grapefruits and a coconut. They worked until 2 in the morning sandpapering them and painting them to look exactly like softballs, with all the essential seams, cracks, chiaroscuro, and even a trade label, 'Pavia Sports Association.' "

"The next day, when the game was about halfway over, Harold Rosenberg came up to pitch. Pavia was at bat. Rosenberg pitched the first ball. Pavia swung, and it exploded in a great ball of grapefruit juice. There was general laughter and little shouts of, 'Come on, let's get on with the game.' "

"Esteban Vicente came in from behind first base (where Ludwig Sander was stationed with a covered basket containing ammunition); he pitched his first ball over easily. Pavia swung. There was another ball of grapefruit juice in the air. More laughter. Finally they decided that fun was fun, but now to continue play, seriously. Rosenberg came back to the mound. He smacked the softball to assure everyone of its Phenomenological Materiality. He pitched it over the plate. Pavia swung. It exploded into a wide, round cloud of coconut. 'Look, look,' shouted Pavia, as if he had always suspected that if you hit a baseball bad enough to break it, there would be coconut inside. Then, from nowhere, a crowd of kids appeared around home plate and began to pick up the fragments of coconut and eat them. They had to call the game.

Suddenly after the funeral of Willem de Kooning I read in local newspapers (not The Star) that Bill de Kooning was pitching to Ben Heller. Where is this story coming from? And one week later, Patsy Southgate repeats the same story in her New Yorker piece, "Remembering Bill."

The further we move from those classic years in American art, the more the actual occurrences of the period are reported wrongly or just plain buried under the embellishments of anti-historical writers and other persons who suffer from some kind of the Woodstock complex -if all who said they were at Woodstock were actually there, there would have been 50 million people in the audience.

Who knows, maybe in 20 years they will say it was Elizabeth Taylor pitching the grapefruit in the Artists-Writers Game, and a young Steven Spielberg was at the plate. (By the way, in The Star's 27 East a few years ago, your reporter Jack Graves did a whole article on this famous incident in the original unrevised form.)

Thank you,

PAUL PAVIA

P.S. Tom Hess was a leading critic and intellectual; also, editor-in-chief of Art News throughout the '50s and '60s to 1973.

A Lousy Deal

Melville

April 29, 1997

Dear Mrs. Rattray,

Your letters page bears a close resemblance to the old-fashioned New England town meetings, albeit in print, so I hope you will indulge me as you do so many others.

Back some time ago, Congressman Mike Forbes of your area decided he couldn't back Newt Gingrich as Speaker of the House and, to be honest, I didn't see the reason to do that.

However, just recently, Mr. Forbes beat the forces that opposed him and pushed through an amendment in the House of Representatives that protects small businesses, individual inventors, and universities like our own here on Long Island, from a lousy deal cooked up by President Clinton and the Republican Congress. Their scheme was to weaken the historic protections given to American ideas (intellectual property) through our patent system.

The fraudulently named "reform" bill taken up in the House of Representatives would have required every American who attempts to protect his unique idea by seeking a U.S. patent to publish his idea 18 months after applying. (Foremost, that's well before the patent has been granted). The whole world would then see his idea, and the forces of commercial espionage most likely would put the little inventor out of the game.

The Forbes amendment, fortunately, made it into the bill, thereby exempting our most vulnerable citizens - individual inventors, small-business men and women, and universities - from what would surely be the beginning of the end of American dominance in the global economy. Remember Eli Whitney and the cotton gin, Henry Ford and the Model A, or Thomas Edison and the light bulb? These "Horatio Alger" types defined America as the land of new ideas and new opportunities.

The patent "reforms," even with Congressman Forbes's valiant, winning effort to protect the little guys and gals who are brimming with ideas to enhance American lives in the 21st century, is a terrible bill.

As someone who took his idea to use water molecules in the human body to read patient's internal problems, I saw how strong patent laws made possible my efforts to bring magnetic resonance imaging to fruition and, thankfully, benefit millions of Americans.

The G.O.P. Congress and the President want to weaken U.S. patent laws so foreign countries will give us access to their markets. It's a bad deal by anyone's standards and deserves to die in the Senate.

Sincerely,

RAYMOND DAMADIAN, M.D.

Tax-Reform Junkies

East Hampton

May 5, 1997

To The Editor,

The Sunday Times Week in Review article on the world dominance of the United States economy was a frighteningly bizarre, eerie piece. Quoting Mort Zuckerman and a head honcho at Merrill Lynch (why not Daffy Duck and Milo Minderbinder?), it extolled the virtues of the deregulated free market system over the European and Japanese systems, the economic pre-eminence of the U.S. system, and the American way of life. The article also identified the negative fallout from the system and apologized for this fallout as unfortunate but necessary. Thus the frightening part of the story.

The essence of the story is that while twice as many people now live at the poverty level, real job creation is zilch, our education system is going down the tubes, and our inner cities are falling apart, it's really okay because business is booming, and profits are through the roof. The free market is working, even though more and more people are falling through the cracks. "If it's good for the company, it's good for everybody, because we are all part of the company."

The solution. Eventually these enormous profits will trickle down to the rest of the country. Meanwhile, government programs and tax reform will readjust income distribution.

The answer. The trickle stopped 20 years ago. What's good for big business is not necessarily good for the rest of the country. Tax reform is 99.99 percent garbage.

Tax reform. Our politicians are tax-reform junkies. They gotta propose it. It's like heroin to junkies, Prozac to the depressed, oral sex to the over-50's generation. It's safe, popular, and it never happens. It makes everyone feel they are getting something for nothing. The reality is, if you don't make a lot of money, tax reform means nothing. If you don't make any money, you don't save money.

Tax reform. Two legitimate reforms are lowering sales tax (regressive) and a steeply graduated income tax. Everyone pays the same sales tax regardless of income. How much money does someone need to live phenomenally? After a point it becomes obscene.

Capital gains. Pure scam. If the biggest boom economy ever generates few jobs and more poverty, what will reduced capital gains do? Give more income to people with lots of income. It's a tithe, a taking, a cadeau for the rich. "Because you are who you are." Who does the capital gains tax affect? Five percent, 10 percent, 15 percent of the population. What about the rest of us? We do all aspire to pay capital gains some day, and we must have our dreams. No?

So, we sit here depressed, in the middle of an economic boom. New jobs pay minimum wages, government programs are cut to the bone, and tax reforms are a joke. We are scared every way we turn, and they want us to like it. It feels like a Joseph Heller novel, and we are all pretending to be someone else.

NEIL HAUSIG