High Anxiety

Notes on Shtick
by John Lombardi


Since Fast Eddie Feldman has seen fit to advise Jim Foster and myself on how to write our columns, I figured I'd return the favor, a little belatedly. That's because he's begun operating like a northern snakehead now, filing practically all the posts on the blog, answering most of the comments too, circling back on his own instructions about avoiding national politics and pop culture and so on, instead of sticking to the crucial backstage news of CHCA goofiness that he finally admits the Local isn't providing . . .

For you non-fishermen out there, snakeheads are awful fish from Southeast Asia that somehow got into Florida waterways and ate all the other fish out of their streams, then wriggled into more streams -- crossing land to do it, and sometimes dying in the attempt! -- just because they were frenzy-eaters, like running blues. Hogs, really, "chozzers" I'm told it's pronounced in Yiddish, though FEF may correct me as a mere goy who has no business using Jewish idiom . . .

In all candor I should report that I paid for Eddie's roundtrip air-ticket from Berkeley last winter, when I thought there was still a chance to fight the Exec Committee's slow strangulation of the Local. The remnants of the old Lawrence Walsh/Ron Recko gang were all worked up about the Jimmy Pack firing and the move to get rid of the Local's "Editor" -- even though I kept writing that he'd copped out shortly after heroically criticizing the Spring 2008 election. I thought Ed might juice him up again if he was around, yelling and sweating in the old Jerry Rubin/Ira Einhorn (pre-murder conviction) mode. It didn't work out that way.

There was a strong movement involving the most conservative folks in the CHCA, the CHBA, and, it developed as the winter slogged into pre-election spring, a concerted effort by Richard Snowden to unify the "pro-business", anti-journalism crowd -- who'd felt since my day (in 2000-1), that any sort of imaginative reporting should be shunned the way the sparrow shuns the hawk -- "negative" writing, all that blood, barking dogs, yechhh . . .

The provincialism of Chestnut Hill still amazes me sometimes. The sheer old-fashioned pettiness, love of gossip, religiosity -- though nearly all the old ladies whom I called "the Lloydettes" are gone now: Marie Jones, Helen Moak, Nancy Hubby and Mary Anna Ross (Cowper I believe she was called, in the end?) . . . blaming the ills of the Hill on rabble like me, Fast Eddie, Recko -- ethnics coming in and trying to change the old White Mischief colonial traditions of pointlessly long board meetings, Local Management meetings (as they were then called), and all the other uncoordinated groups treading on each others' toes, changing regimes annually, so that no courses of action were sustainable -- dense numbers of dysfunctional suburbanites with unhappy home lives barking at each other for three and four hours at a shot, then heading for Campbell's to slosh some beer and bourbon over the whole mess and keep on trucking . . .

Market forces are what undid the Hill, people. The Germantown Avenue Bridge repair, which lasted for years, changing Montgomery County shopping patterns by interrupting old commuter habits of visiting the "Village" between the Top of the Hill and the flower market near the Mt. Airy line, for cheese, hardware, shoe repair, antiques, fine prints, dry cleaning, haircuts, Caruso's, lovely, 19th century strolls . . . Given the Malling of America & Philly taxes, real estate rental along the Avenue grew too steep for realistic profit-making, and psuedo-businessmen like Snowden, Sanjiv Jain and Rob Remus screwed things up further, leaving empty storefronts (for tax writeoffs) that are beginning to resemble the Yosemite Gold Rush ghost-towns of the Sierra Nevada. And there is racial liebesraum--pushing from Germantown proper and the North Philly ghetto, too, which some Hillers are too hypocritical to talk about . . .

But what saddens me is the journalistic waste. The Hill and surrounding communities are full of smart readers with taste and vision who aren't members of, say, Carolyn Hausserman's former cast-iron committees, or the CHCA at all. No one's addressing them. They're not listening to foolishness like the Local's happy reports about how swell everything is; or Fast Eddie's baroque shtick on Snowden's "master plan" to force everyone else out of the picture so that he can build condos in the Hill parking lots, or start soft coal strip-mining operations in Pastorius Park.

The Hill's ideal readers know that Snowden, for one, is no real threat. He's just a rich dilletante. What corporation would employ a guy who buys buildings as tax writeoffs on a permanent basis? What's the profit margin there, bro? But Ed knits & purls this conspiracy stuff -- adapted from Lloyd Wells's old obsessions, by the way -- like a vaudeville trouper. His themes are Snowden -- about whom he hopes to write a book, without, apparently, doing any real research (if he'd just read the old Inky series on S's Germantown misadventures before he even got to the Hill, FEF would realize how futile a project that is, saleswise) ; race -- though he always leaves crime out; and character assassination -- he was recently sadistic on Len Lear and Walter Sullivan, just because he thinks they're vulnerable. And smarmy sex -- to prove, I guess, what a naughty boy he is: here's what he had to say about Rob Remus in "Curiouser & Curiouser" in this space, August 30:

"So Rob, who once told a gay man that he wanted to insert a body part into his body [sic], now offers, then denies, access to his children to me for some reason. He dangled his kids in front of me for a reason I can't even imagine."

Sure you can, FEF. It's just sick shtick.