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Archive for the 'Goldberg' Category

Third time a charm?

April 1st, 2007

BY ED GOLDBERG

Today’s the day we’ll say “I do,” and we’ll never be lonely anymore….
—The Dixie Cups, “Chapel of Love”
(Words and music by Jeff Barry, Ellie Greenwich, and Phil Spector)

No one jerks off more than married men.
—Lenny Bruce

One woman told me that if we got married we’d always have a date for New Year’s Eve. So we did, and it was true. I have always had a date that night, just not with her. We had a big (200-plus people) wedding, rabbis, flower girls, my best man smoking weed in the crapper before the ceremony.

I’ve been married three times really, but only twice legally. You see, back in the dark ages of the 1960s, divorce was illegal in New York, owing to the gigantic influence of the cardinal who perched in St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Yes, in wicked, sinful New York divorce was not an option.

So, the usual sham substitute was an annulment based on breach of contract: Yes, your honor, she/he told me we would have children, but now she/he doesn’t want any.

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Posted by: The Editors
Category: Goldberg, All Marriage Issue | Link to this Entry

Monkey see, monkey do

March 1st, 2007

BY ED GOLDBERG

I recently saw a news photo in The New York Times of a miserably poor town in what was once a fairly prosperous Latin American country: tumble-down shanties, garbage and sewage in the streets, pretty grim. monkeyseemonkeydoBut that was not what grabbed my attention. Hanging from the electrical wires pictured in the photo were strings of sneakers. Now here in the USA, for at least forty years, there have been athletic shoes hung from the wires. I have no idea where or when this phenomenon started. Or why.

There are many explanations available, none of which makes much sense, except that it is a manifestation of bullying. (Not a gang sign or a marker for drug activity. The phenomenon existed long before the current gang/drug culture.) The weakest, dorkiest or fattest kid got his US Keds tied together and launched over the wires. With the price of sneakers what it is now, this can be a financial hardship.

(One small bit of civic pride. Here in Portland, home of high-quality eccentricity and creative nonsense, one may see conjoined spike heels or dog booties or baby shoes dangling from wires. No received wisdom here in Little Beirut. One town’s bullying is another’s artistic statement.)

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Posted by: The Editors
Category: Goldberg | Link to this Entry

You don’t have to S&D to have fun (ha-ha)

November 1st, 2006

BY ED GOLDBERG

I started smoking when I was twelve but waited another year to begin drinking.

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Posted by: The Editors
Category: Goldberg, All Smoking & Drinking Issue | Link to this Entry

Grab the antenna and stand over there

March 1st, 2006

thecontinental.jpgBY ED GOLDBERG

The Boob Tube. The Idiot Box. The Vast Wasteland. The Plug-in Drug.

All of these terms and more have been leveled at television and with justification. I’ll be surprised if one or more do not appear elsewhere in these pages. To say that ninety percent of everything on the tube is crap is to say nothing; ninety percent of everything is crap, except for poetry, where the number is more like ninety-six percent.

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Posted by: The Editors
Category: Goldberg, All Television Issue, Television | Link to this Entry

‘Tis the season

December 1st, 2004

BY ED GOLDBERG

I have always liked Christmas, but as an outsider I’ve had a peculiar relationship to it. Being a Jew in America, or a Zoroastrian for that matter, means being marinated in the larger Christian culture, like it or not.

Christians are oblivious to the phenomenon, as in the old conundrum: does a fish know it’s in water? These days, what with political correctness and the brother/sisterhood of all people, a perfunctory nod is given to ecumenicism, so we will see the odd Hanukkah menorah, Kwanzaa candelabra, or hear the mention of Ramadan.

Don’t mean nothin’, Clyde. Christmas is what’s happening.

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Posted by: The Editors
Category: Goldberg, All Christmas Issue | Link to this Entry

Hope and despair

September 1st, 2003

BY ED GOLDBERG

csablanca.jpgIn being asked to write on this topic, we were warned against a “laundry list” approach. But, naming one movie that changed my life is even harder than thinking of one book. What with Kubrick and Welles and Ingmar Bergman and all.

So I’ll cheat a bit.

In 1951 King Kong was re-released, and my mother took me to see it. It was the first movie that knocked me out, and it put me on the movie-slut road. The Marx Brothers laid the foundation for my view of the universe as essentially unknowable, but funny. The Wild One warped my social sensibilities; La Strada and The Seventh Seal introduced me to, ahem, film. And John Waters’ Pink Flamingoes became not just one of my favorite movies, but a test of friendship: if you sat through this movie with me and were still my friend, it was true love.

But, there are two movies — and they work as “films” as well — that informed my world view and politics more than any others: Casablanca and The Third Man.

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Posted by: The Editors
Category: Goldberg, All Movie Issue, Movies | Link to this Entry

Books aren’t life, but then what is?

June 1st, 2003

BY ED GOLDBERG

What books changed my life?

The Three Little Kittens, which is the first book I learned to read by myself. I’ve never been the same.

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Posted by: The Editors
Category: Books and Authors, Goldberg, All Book Issue | Link to this Entry

Author profile

December 1st, 2002

Ed Goldberg was born in The Bronx in 1943. After dropping out of college in 1962, he attempted to do stand-up comedy, unsuccessfully. He wrote for a few of the underground papers in New York. After moving to Washington, D.C. in 1973, he became a technical writer and wrote features and reviews for a monthly arts and entertainment paper. In 1991, he moved to Portland, Ore. and finished Served Cold, winner of the 1995 Shamus Award for best original paperback fiction. His third novel, True Crime, (as “Alan Gold”) was published in February 2005. True Faith was published in January 2007. He is currently working on a new book. His Black Lamb column is called The Bronx Zoo.

Posted by: The Editors
Category: Goldberg | Link to this Entry

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