Vienna (and getting lost in the hills of The Sound of Music)

(From The Last Word and The Weekly Press, 2011)

When the opportunity arose to visit the city of Mozart, Beethoven, Mahler, Haydn, Kafka, and Sigmund Freud, I set to work to orchestrate the best trip possible with the help of the Austrian Tourist Board in New York.


I arrived at JFK Airport on the rainy afternoon of Thursday, October 15 happy to have survived the reckless driving of a shuttle bus driver who had exceeded the speed limit in weather that can only be described as treacherous. The shuttle bus clanked and shook as the driver sped past Mac diesel trucks as large as small houses. I expected to arrive at JKF DOA as wind and rain pelted the shaky van from all angles.

On board Austrian airlines, air traffic control problems caused a one hour takeoff delay, however the seven hour flight went reasonably fast. It didn’t hurt that Austrian airlines has a policy of distributing free wine, positively the best remedy for soiled “traveler’s” nerves

At the Vienna airport, I hailed a cab driven by a helpful Middle Eastern man who reminded me that Western Europe in 2009 has become a melting pot possibly on the verge of boiling over. We drove to the Hotel Aldstat in Vienna’s 7th district, my temporary home for three days. (The City of Vienna is divided into 23 Districts).

The Aldstat is Old World grandeur. My suite consisted of two large rooms and a private rooftop garden. The staircase to the rooftop was nothing short of a precarious climb, three dozen or so small steps that zigzagged up to a small door that, once unlocked, led you to a fascinating postcard view of the city. In the United States, hotel steps like this would be prohibited because of potential law suits (the proverbial ‘what if’ accident), but here in Vienna occupants of the Otto Suite are expected to behave responsibly (and not tumble down the steps after too much Austrian wine). The suite also contained the largest roll top desk I’ve ever seen.

The weather, rainy and overcast, was just as it had been in New York, although the lack of sunlight created an overall feeling of poetic melancholy (think Goethe and ‘The Sorrows of Young Werther’). My guide Diane, a former au pair from London, suggested I put on an overcoat for our first venture out.

After an introductory walk around the 7th District and ride on the subway, Diane pointed out a mammoth bunker built during the WWII Nazi occupation. The multi- story edifice, or Esterhazy Park Tower now home to the Vienna State Aquarium, was built by the Nazis in the west end of the city to impede the flow of American and British bombers. The fascist monolith is an imposing structure, with odd-shaped semi circles jetting out on each of the building’s top four corners. Arterillery was once positioned on top of this huge block structure. “The Americans flew by day but the British had to fly by night because they couldn’t fly very high,” Diane told me, adding that smaller backup bunkers held generators, hospital beds, and doctors, or everything that was needed to back up the main tower.

During WW II, Allied bombers destroyed nearly 30% of the city during the 56 or so major air raids of the war.

We headed over to St. Stephen’s cathedral. The massive church with the multicolored roof was built on two earlier churches (the first was established in 1147). St. Stephen’s is known as the church of Mozart. It was here that Mozart worshiped and was married. “He never lived far from the cathedral,” Diane told me, “he was very religious, almost superstitiously so.” The cathedral was nearly turned to ashes and debris by retreating German armies in WW II but a local Captain ignored demands for its demolition. Unfortunately, restoration scaffolding currently covers the front of the cathedral but still in evidence are numerous bullet holes embedded into the stone. During the war, 90% of the cathedral’s 14th century Gothic glass stained windows were destroyed except for three long panels behind the high altar. Resistance fighters held regular meetings in the cathedral’s catacombs.

Viennese Catholic churches are epicenters of light. Clusters of candle operas, hanging chandeliers and votive candles give many of the churches here a Russian Orthodox look. The post Vatican Council stone altar tables positioned in front of the magnificent Romanesque-Gothic high altars in many of the churches I visited seemed comical and even out of place. Who needs these ‘Julia Child tables’ in front of such historical beauty? The cathedral is home to a reputed miraculous icon of the Virgin Mary with the Child Jesus. When the so called Maria Pocs Byzantine-style icon, painted in 1676, first shed tears in 1696, Emperor Leopold I had it moved to the high altar, where it remained until 1945. After 1945 the icon was moved towards the front of the church where it once again began to shed tears. A large number of people prayed before the icon as tourists made their way to one of the cathedral’s 18 side altars or formal side chapels.

“During the war, the whole roof collapsed, it was just burning for ages,” Diane told me, pointing skyward. She indicated where the new roof had been joined to the old one. The fire that nearly destroyed the church was a result of nearby burning buildings set by plunderers trying to make hay before Russian troops marched into the city.

Nearby, in the church of Saint Peter-- an Opus Dei parish as rich in ornamentation as the cathedral-- a wedding was in progress. Electric votive candles and hanging chandeliers framed a priest in old vestments reciting prayers in both Latin and German. The bride and groom, in a freeze frame that was its own kind of icon, knelt before the altar as incense wafted towards the door. Through it all a guard at a desk observed the heavy coming and going.

Inside a former Jesuit church dating from 1365 (but now given the generic name, The University church), we viewed what appeared to be the interior of the church’s huge dome. The so called dome, however, is really a work by Andrea Pozzo, painted in 1703. One does not perceive the dome as a work of art until one walks from the high altar to the vestibule. It’s then that one sees that the heretofore sky high ceiling is nothing but a flat surface

When Adolph Hitler roamed the streets of Vienna as a young man (1906 to 1913), he lived in several rooming houses but mostly he was homeless, sleeping on park benches or staying in homeless shelters. With hair down to his shoulders and a scruffy beard, the future German Chancellor was a vagabond nobody, spending all his time drawing watercolor postcards and attempting to hawk them to the affluent habitués of coffeehouses like Café Central, where Lenin and Trotsky once planned the Russian Revolution.

At Café Central (where we sat three tables away from Lenin’s perch), we had a Melange, or coffee with milk served on a small tray, a glass of water, a small spoon, balls of white and brown sugar and a small piece of chocolate, and imagined a scruffy Hitler going from table to table with his postcards. Coffee is a loadstar enterprise in Vienna. There are not only upscale coffee houses like Café Central and Cafe Imperial, but cheaper, bohemian cafes where full meals and desserts can be ordered.

Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard called Vienna’s addiction to coffeehouses the “Viennese coffeehouse disease.” The Viennese take coffeehouses so seriously that patrons are free to sit all day reading or writing (or staring into space). There’s no push to order a second cup, and free second, third and fourth glasses of water can be ordered at no extra charge. Try this in your average United States café and chances are you’ll be asked to order something, or head for the exit.

Coffee was the only positive legacy left to the Viennese by the Ottoman Turks, who attempted to conquer the city in 1529 and again in the 1600s. Had Vienna not resisted the Turks Saint Stephen’s would have followed the fate of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople. The threat of a second Turkish invasion in the 1600s (the first attempt failed because the Turkish cannons got stuck in the mud, the result of too much rain) forced the city to build impenetratable walls. The city fathers poured so much money into the walls they had to stop their pet project: rebuilding Vienna in order to make it the greatest Gothic city in the world.

“During the second invasion, the French were nasty because they were giving the Ottoman Turks all the support they could because they saw their chances. They thought, if Vienna falls, the Turks are going to need our help, so we’ll just help them take over the rest,” Diane told me, before we headed over to the Museum Quarter.

The Museum Quarter was built where the Hapsburg rulers of the Austria-Hungarian Empire had their imperial stables. Here one can hop from one museum to the next. Whether its architecture, the visual arts, dance or theater, the Quarter holds it all, including an abundance of cafes and restaurants. Later that evening, in fact, I headed out from my suite in Aldstat to the Café Restaurant Halle, the site of the former emperor’s Winter Riding Hall, and sampled a favorite imperial dish, Tafelspitz, or stewed beef and root vegetables, the favorite meal of Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph. .

From the steps of the Museum of Fine Arts, just outside the Museum Quarter, I soaked in a panoramic view of the stately government and cultural palaces (called the Holfburg) that had so enthralled Hitler. These were the buildings that Churchill wanted to bomb because he knew they were Hitler’s favorite. With so much history surrounding me, I imagined the eerie echoes of hundreds of thousands of cheering Viennese who, on March 14, 1938, greeted the Chancellor when he made his triumphal entry into the city. Hitler stood in Heldenplatz (or Heroes Square), an area surrounded by various wings of the Holfburg.

In Vienna, eye contact is easy, people are friendly, and a majority of people speak English, even the few who happen to be homeless. One day while making my way to the Museum of Fine Arts, I was approached by a youth (who looked as unkempt as Hitler must have looked in 1905) who said he needed money for food. In broken English he told me that he had just been released from prison. I gave him a handful of Austrian coins I knew I’d never use, but he scowled at them contemptuously, demanded two Euros, and called me “Stupid.”

The Austrian way, however, is one of friendliness, as I’d discover a couple days later when I rented a car and attempted to drive into the Wachau wine country for the second league of my journey. Driving out of Vienna can be a nightmare for anxiety-prone drivers, as exits are labeled in small discreet letters and numbers. There can be multiple exits beginning with the letter A for instance, causing the mind to play tricks with the eyes, and vice versa.

I was due to meet my second guide and take a small boat trip down the Danube, but I never made it because I got lost in the mountains. Driving through Black Forest like configurations and ‘Sound of Music’ rolling hills and mountains, it began to rain and sleet and finally there were glimmers of snow. Austrians drive fast, the speed limit is between 80 and 90, so most people were passing me except for the big trucks that would move up silently behind me and flash their lights.

As a lost soul, of course I was traveling at a snail’s pace.

Would I survive my Austrian adventure? Nervously, I thought of the icon in Saint Stephen’s and made the appropriate supplications. Shortly after this, miracle of miracles, I noticed a small restaurant supply house and café, the only building I’d seen for miles. I knocked on the door, explained my situation—a lost journalist with a dead cell phone—and was promptly invited inside for coffee or beer, my choice. Friends of the woman who invited me in (and allowed me the use of her phone) joined us for conversation until I was safely redirected out of the mountains, and arrived safely at the Loisium hotel some hours later.

My getting lost meant that I had missed a tour of the W.H. Auden house in Kirchsstetten, but once in the bosom of the wine country, my trip once again came alive. My wine country guide, Hans Christian, drove me to the famous Leo Hillinger winery, where we sampled some of the best stock, and where we met the winery master himself, Leo, who’s a celebrity throughout Europe.

We also traveled into Hungary, and spotted an abandoned Communist station house where thirty years before guards with guns took aim at Hungarians escaping into freedom. (Hans Christian told me that the Communists in Hungary were much nicer than the ones in East Germany, who’d shoot first and ask questions later.) At the Hungarian border we couldn’t resist the impulse to step out of the car and walk into the surrounding forest, where the ground beneath our feet holds countless dark, untold secrets.



Thom Nickels can be reached at ThomNickels1@aol.com

Organized Trash Picking:STAR column

On Saturday, April 2nd I finally did it. After writing about the trash problems in the neighborhood for a number of years, I put my muscle where my writing hand is and joined a handful of volunteers from the Olde Richmond Civic Association (ORCA) and spent a few hours cleaning up the neighborhood.

We met at 9 A.M. behind the Wawa on the 2400 block of Thompson Street where we signed waivers, received a pair of work gloves and then split up into teams of 2 or 3. Equipped with brooms, rakes, trash picking hand extensions and industrial strength trash bags, we set out like determined missionaries to rid the hood of debris.
What struck me first of all was how quiet the streets were on this cool, sunny morning. Do people really sleep this late?

Those of us with brooms got to work right away sweeping the curbs until we had significantly high trash piles. When a pile seemed sufficiently high we’d sweep another long stretch of the street and then make another one. It wasn’t long before our eyes became accustomed to food wrappers, iced tea bottles, half eaten sandwiches and discarded articles of clothing. Sweeping the streets you very often get a lot of dirt so the process isn’t as easy as sweeping your kitchen.

When my little group hit the area behind Wawa and Applebee’s restaurant—that stretch of green grass bordered by the East Thompson Street fence—we encountered a heavy concentration of trash.

The number of cigarette butts alone could very well have matched the plague of locusts that hit Salt Lake City during the great Mormon migration of the 1800s. Picking up individual butts with those E.T. extension arms would have taken all day; not only that, it probably would have had a deleterious mental effect on the picker. As a result, we decided to let most of the butts go. In the meantime, some of us had to dislodge large pieces of cardboard stuck into the ground from the Wawa and Rite Aide properties. But the big cinematic trash moment came when we cleaned Applebee’s backyard, an area that the Applebee’s General Manager told me later is regularly cleaned by his staff at least once or twice a week and then given an in-depth cleaning once a month. But more on Applebee’s later.

I don’t know what it’s like for everyone, but I went through a couple of different mental stages as I was picking up trash. The first stage is the reluctance to get started stage because of the daunting task ahead. The second is the “God awful!” stage when your eyes settle on something unusually disgusting or offbeat. It’s as if your hands, though gloved, were in full revolt at the mere thought of reaching out, if even by proxy, to the conglomerate of garbage. This stage soon passes, and suddenly everything changes as a ‘trash killing’ instinct kicks in. I compare it to going to the gym and experiencing muscle resistance for the first 5 minutes before feeling an all consuming adrenalin rush. Suddenly you and the rest of the volunteers are like synchronized dancers in some cosmic You Tube video, especially as you watch members of team throwing large cardboard pieces over the Wawa fence.

“You’re wasting your time,” a passerby snorted to one of the volunteers.
Had we listened to this advice we would have promptly given up and gone home and effectively killed any plans for future spring time cleanups. “Yes, you’re right, lady,” the ORCA volunteer could have replied, “This is a total waste. I switch my allegiance to trash.”

The plan was to cover as much of the neighborhood as possible. At first there was talk of going under I-95 but in the end we decided that that area was a day’s work in itself. We still stuck to the tributary streets around Thompson like the stretch to Richmond and then north to Cumberland Street and the Conrail tracks. But there was also Sergeant Street, Albert Street, parts of Webb Street, and of course the Vatican of Trash itself, Thompson Street behind Wawa, where most of this stuff seems to have mimicked evolution in its breeding capabilities.

The cleanest street was Salmon Street and parts of Edgemont. Give these streets the Gold Medal Award.

It’s hard to think of a family restaurant as being a magnet for trash, but when we tackled the backyard of Applebee’s, we got more than we bargained for. With Lisa, the volunteer in my group, I extracted a full set of wet, half decayed sweats—shirt, pants, undies—as well as an entire encampment of contemporary archeological finds: crack pipe, beer cans, condoms, half eaten Wawa wrap sandwiches, combs, suspicious plastic bags, and more condoms. If the early Native Americans could come back and compare our culture’s archeological findings with theirs, they’d regret that Penn Treaty deal with William Penn.

When I phoned Applebee’s GM after the cleanup and asked him what his take on the situation was, and if he could do something to help, I got good news.

“In the winter people camped behind the restaurant and drank beer all night, and sometimes things got rowdy when we would ask them to leave,” he said. “One night they even lit a bonfire. Unfortunately, much of the trash blows in from Wawa, and if we don’t clean it then it all blows into the parking lot. But I really want to work with the community,” he said. “I support your efforts.”
But the next time ORCA does a cleaning, let me know and we’ll arrange a free lunch for the volunteers at Applebee’s.”

That’s saying something in my book.

ICON City Beat Column, March 2013

ICON MAGAZINE, CITY BEAT COLUMN, MARCH 2013
   (Photo: The Franklin Inn Club Five months before the March Debacle.
                 As one FIC member noted (not pictured): "The Club should not
                  coddle poor members who cannot pay their dues." Story coming.)
         

While last month’s PAFA debate on gender and race in the art world was not as volatile as the NYC 1971 Town Hall debate on Women’s Liberation where panelists Germaine Greer, Diana Trilling, Jacqueline Ceballos (of NOW) and Norman Mailer watched fellow panelist Jill Johnston being dragged offstage by female friends who wanted to French kiss, the event did heat up an otherwise dull Sunday February afternoon. As PAFA VP of Marketing, Heike Rass put it; the panel’s aim was to discuss “how gender and ethnicity factor into how art is received.” The debate was called to address New York Times art critic Ken Johnson’s controversial comments on PAFA’s current exhibit, The Female Gaze: Women Artists Making Their World. “Sexism is probably a good enough explanation for inequities in the market, “Johnson wrote. “But it might also have something to do with the nature of art that women tend to make….Anyone with a theory about that will have a good opportunity to test it at PAFA.” PAFA invited Huff Post Founding Arts Editor, Kimberly Brooks, and artists Njideki Akunijcli and Joyce Kozloff to challenge Johnson at the standing room only event. Throughout the ordeal Johnson maintained a cool as a cucumber demeanor despite a history of slighting various minority groups in his reviews. Audience members questioned his chronic deference to men as the authentic inheritors of lasting artistic talent. To wit: Doesn’t your obvious bias help perpetuate a privileged all- boys club? etc., etc. “The Times view is just one opinion,” one panel member said in a scolding tone, a true enough statement in today’s world where paid criticism has been eroded considerably by that Op Ed Tower of Babel known as The Huffington Post. Both sides made valid points, even if Johnson was outnumbered and out voiced. In a fantasy scenario, perhaps a pro-Times ally like provocateur feminist Camile Pagila would have come to Johnson’s rescue. Temperatures got hotter when an inference was made that the word ’critic’ implied hierarchy and privilege (read: white male dominance) in what should be an egalitarian free-for-all art opinion market where no one voice, credentialed or non-credentialed, holds sway. We couldn’t help but think: Isn’t this “cultural communism” reminiscent of the time when teachers told students that everybody is an artist, and that anyone can be a Renoir or a Picasso if they just apply themselves? Bottom line: We admire the PAFA show and advise everyone to see it before it leaves the city in April, even if we admit that in a future theoretical exhibition there could be issues around what The Times calls “identity politics in art.” To wit: Should powerful critics in major publications be fearful of panning bad Feminist art, LGBT art, Scientology art, Jewish art, Greek Orthodox art or even Developmentally Disabled handicapped art, for fear of being labeled phobic? And: Should art be subservient to current political and cultural trends in the interests of equality? Mao thought that art should be “socialist in content and Chinese in style,” while Paglia throws the whole of modern art into the garbage can when she states: “Contemporary art has no big ideas left,” which might explain why we’re in this jar of pickled (Keith) Herring. What do you think? You owe it to yourself to check out The Female Gaze: Women Artists Making Their World and let us know.



Requirements for membership in Philadelphia’s Franklin Inn Club used to be that one had to have published a book, but today, as Inn member Dan Rottenberg likes to note, the only requirement is that you must have read a book. Inn members and guests have included Christopher Morley, W.B. Yeats, Bram Stoker, Ezra Pound, G.K. Chesterton, and (the very much alive) former US poet Laureate, Daniel Hoffman. Today the Inn is only vaguely literary, with most members being active (or retired) lawyers, physicians or business people. During our recent visit there we heard Philly architect/classicist Al Holm and Philly folklorist Tom Carroll, president of the John Kelipus Society, lecture on the Wizard of the Wissahickon, or What Led an Old German Pietist to build a cave by the Wissahickon to wait out the Apocalypse. We were glad that the Kelpius talk happened the same week that Richard II’s bones were discovered under a parking lot in London, and were made twice as happy when we received notice of Larry Robin’s Moonstone 100 Poets event (Poetry Ink 20123) which takes place April 7th. That’s when 100 poets get 3 minutes to read a poem to other poets. At last year’s Poetry Ink, a few naughty poets spent 5 minutes explaining their poem before reading it, which extended the list’s wait time considerably. FYI: Really, really famous Philly poets tend to skip 100 Poets altogether because they want audiences where there is ONLY one poet—them. Still, we think that the 2014 100 Poets event should be held at the Inn, which might help restore some of the Inn’s literary heritage as well as tame the overactive lawyerly impulses that continue to unwittingly push the Inn closer to some kind of Union League identity precipice.


We’ve been to The Mountaintop and met an angel that drinks and cusses—and it was good. The Philadelphia Theater Company’s production of Katori Hall’s play about Martin Luther King, Jr.’s last hours in Memphis had us cheering, even if there were no stagehands present to make the stage revolve the way it revolved when the work was on Broadway. Having an onstage reader exclaim, “Blast of thunder, lightning strikes, the room shakes,” not only encourages one not to take stage hands for granted, it sets the stage for other far flung unconventionalities, like a motel chambermaid who’s really an angel sent by God (a big black woman with Medusa hair) to tell Martin that he needs to prepare for a trip to the after life. Although the lack of sound effects was not totally bad---it added something existential to that (staged) lonely motel room in Memphis--- the strike did take its toll. Gone, for instance, was the post play PTC press reception, apparently a stage hands event, but even more importantly, when we retuned 3 weeks later when the strike was over, the talented onstage reader was still there, shouting “Blast of thunder, lighting strikes, the room shakes!” And so, with all due respect to the ever gracious Producing Artistic Director, Sara Garonzik, the stage hands do owe the press two things: a stage that revolves, and a party! .



There were plenty of words but no sound effects (except the ringing of phones) at The Wilma’s production of Assistance, a play by Leslye Headland, a look into the “hell is other people” workplace angst at a powerful Manhattan tech company staffed by sycophant careerists going crazy trying outdo co-workers and please a boss who’s never satisfied. As a snapshot of fanatical careerists (who will do anything, including murdering their first born, to ascend the corporate ladder) the play was on the money but came up short when offering solutions other than walking away in order to escape the insanity. After all, where does one go when so much of the world is filled with bosses who are never pleased?



There are no Ideal Husbands, anywhere, despite what Oscar Wilde says. The Walnut’s production of the Wilde classic was predictably lavish with a stage set that garnered applause, a rare thing in today’s theater world where stage minimalism a la Beckett has become the (yawn) norm. Still, we have to ask: are subscribers to the Walnut theater real theater people? While it’s true that we uttered a silent, “Wow,” when the curtain went up on a lavish chandelier-draped Victorian library living room, we would never think to applaud an arrangement of table and chairs, or marvel at how the luxurious ripples of a curtain tapestry frames a stage window The Wilde play, as Wilde plays go, was amusing, even if we did notice how the playwright contrived the ending in a pulp fiction manner. Oscar Wilde, you devil! We were reminded once again how you bent over backwards to entertain the very people who later stood in line to lock you up in Reading Goal.



We headed over to the Pennsylvania Convention Center to check out the Tattoo Convention and left feeling glad that we never came under the spell of Ink. Tattoo artists from all over the country waited in open stalls for passersby to offer their bodies: Large women in red undies lounging on their sides like Reuben or Cezanne models (making us think of the current show at PAFA); lithe young men, some tattoo virgins, sitting or lying on their backs with their shirts off on what looked like operating room tables, eyes closed, as tattoo surgeons drilled, inked, wiped, and then bored into their nubile skin. We heard no cries of mortification or pain as these fellows and ladies accepted mark of the beast brand names like Josh Fallon, Trueblue Tattoo, Jay Blondel, DNA Tattooing, and Bonedaddy’s. As for the tattoos themselves, there was a marked preponderance of skulls and funny horror faces--- even, we dare say, on the bodies of various parents, their tattoo-less kids in tow. Before leaving we bumped into Mike Allenbach (allebachphotography.com), a personable entrepreneur who told us about his specialty: photographing tattooed brides. We’re not talking about the Bride of Frankenstein or brides like the one in the Rocky Horror Picture Show but normal Presbyterian or wayward Catholics who may have overdosed on Ink.



If the University of Pennsylvania were to be suddenly swallowed up by Robert Smithson’s 1970 environmental sculpture, Spiral Jetty, located on the shores of Utah’s Great Salt Lake but propelled eastward on some Sci-Fi asteroid, there’d still be Arcadia University, or the University That Could. Penn does not rule all, as we learned when Arcadia put us on a shuttle bus with a contingent from the Fabric Workshop and delivered us into the hands of British-born Berlin-based artist Tacita Dean who delivered one of the most unusual art lectures since William Burroughs’ private monologue rampages in his New York City bunker apartment. We won’t attempt to explain Dean’s work in such a short space except to say that by the end of the evening we felt as if we’d been transported to some alien world, and then deposited back, our heads spinning. To check the whole thing out, go here: gallery@arcadia.edu.

Focus Point Global and the Paid Opinion Racket

The Local Lens


Published• Wed, Mar 13, 2013



While there may be no such thing as free money, in some instances if your patience exceeds that of a saint, and if you like to talk, there can be financial rewards.


I’m talking about Focus Pointe Global, an international organization devoted to qualitative market research. If you haven’t heard of Focus Pointe Global (FPG), this is how the system works: You sign up to receive screener questionnaires which ultimately determine whether or not a panel of experts finds you qualified to join a round table of paid people to give their opinions about social issues, an ad campaign, or new products like hair gel or breakfast cereals. Other FPG panels might deal with health and diet issues, non-prescription drugs, or exercise. FPG pays focus group participants for their time through funds provided by the companies pushing their products and services, while these same companies give FPG specific guidelines regarding the selection of focus group panelists.



Subscribers to FPG are sent several online screeners a week. The first part is a screener which determines your eligibility (age, income, where you work, and availability); next comes the verification process, meaning that if you pass Go, you get to speak with a FPG rep who confirms your eligibility by asking you additional questions. Next there is the confirmation process, where a select group of behind-the-scenes people will review you as a potential focus group panel member. If you pass this test, you finally get to join the focus group.


Focus groups, depending on their length, can pay participants anywhere from 50 to 150 dollars in cold cash, usually distributed at the end of the session in crisp new bills in an envelope with your name on it. It’s a great way to make money, especially if you are not afraid to talk and give your opinion about social issues, services or products.



Over the years, I’ve participated in a number of focus groups in Center City. Traditionally, the eligibility section has always been brief, but lately that has changed. Participation in a focus group used to be relatively easy with a few quirks along the way. Since one cannot expect to be selected for every group, a number of rejections are to be expected. On the average, it used to be considered good luck to be selected for a group at least once a year. Today’s ailing economy, as well as the changing demands of clients who pay FPG to arrange focus groups, means that you can consider yourself "lucky" if you get picked for a FPG group once every three years.



My last FPG group was almost two years ago. Since that time I have probably answered 150 to 200 online screeners to determine my eligibility. In all cases I was rejected. For starters, the eligibility section asks if you work (or have ever worked) in a number of jobs or professions, and very often one of the professions listed is journalism, as in TV, radio, magazines or newspaper work. To admit the truth and check a "Yes" on this box is usually an instant disqualifier, as corporate head honchos who pay FPG don’t want journalists or writers in focus groups. In eight out of every ten eligibility screeners that come my way, the newspaper-magazine-TV question is paramount. When I check "Yes" I am disqualified immediately.


I’ve gotten used to the rejections at this stage of the game, since a similar thing happens every time I receive a jury duty notice. The jury duty screening process always includes a pass or fail test by attorneys; when an attorney reads that you’re a journalist, forget it, you are rejected out of hand.



If lawyers and focus groups don’t want journalists on their panels or juries, why don’t they just come out and say so?


At one point things got so bad with the FGP screeners that I started to keep score of all the rejections I was piling up. Then I decided to conduct an experiment. I started to lie when filling out the eligibility screener, but even then I was rejected. I tried all sorts of lies and even stated that I was a pharmacist just to see if I would be accepted (I was not).


FPG sometimes gets slick and offers very long eligibility screeners that may take ten to fifteen minutes to answer. Sometimes the questions are real focus group survey questions, meaning that the company in question is getting their information for free (in the name of eligibility) with the added benefit of rejecting you in the end. If I could tabulate the time I’ve spent answering screeners in the last 24 months it would register somewhere near the four or five hour mark. All done for free, of course.


The focus group game has now become comparable to gambling.


I had a taste of victory recently when a FPG verifier called to confirm my answers to a screener, and then said I was to be included in a group. This led to dreams of that envelope filled with crisp cash, but five minutes later someone from FPG called and canceled my participation. No reason was given.



More recently I was selected for a health issues panel, passed both the verification and the confirmation process, and slated to show up at 8 AM the next morning for a 7-hour group. After rearranging my schedule so that I could attend, some four hours after being told I was "in" I received a call which said that the client has changed the criteria for the group, and that my participation wouldn’t be needed. "Good luck next time," the recorded message and email stated.


"Luck" like this is enough to make one paranoid. I called FPG to ask if I was on a blacklist. "I’ve done two hundred screeners during the last two years and was rejected for every single one of them," I said. "Statistically, this looks odd."



I was assured there was no blacklist, that my FPG standing was fine, and that my participation in future FPG focus groups was valued. But something seems rotten in Denmark. Could it be true that the information submitted on the "screener" surveys is the actual information that companies want, and that FPG turns around and sells those answers?

Saying Good-bye to Sally Starr

The Local Lens


Published• Wed, Feb 13, 2013

By Thom Nickels



I’m with my friend Stephen, the Ice Skating Cowboy, and we’re headed across the Betsy Ross Bridge for Berlin, New Jersey, to attend the public portion of the funeral for Sally Starr. The viewing is slated to begin at 5PM at Costantino’s Funeral Home ("elegant but affordable") on the White Horse Pike, but we’re on the road plenty early, expecting huge crowds.



We arrive before the crowds, help ourselves to a giveaway photo of Sally, and then proceed into one of the Costantino reception rooms where every tabletop has a Sally photo spread under glass. The entire funeral home, in fact, has been transformed into a Sally museum. The staff, all serious-looking older men in suits, seem a little tense, expecting quite a night and God-knows-what. After checking out the photos, we head into the receiving room where Sally’s mortal remains (in a closed casket) form a kind of altar shrine with a large image of Sally on the casket top alongside sprays of flowers, candles, Sally’s cowgirl hat and a small end table holding her boots.



It is still too early for Sally’s family to gather in the receiving line, so we sign the guest registry and take a seat on one of the many folding chairs lined up for the actual service, slated to begin at 8PM.



My thoughts drift to Sally: born Alleen Mae Beller in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1923; adopted the name Sally Starr in 1941; the second eldest of five girls but one of seven children; considered the first highly rated DJ in the country; a talented announcer, writer and producer; started the Philadelphia-based ‘Popeye Theater’ in 1955, a 30-minute channel 6 variety show that included cartoons, live acts, western shorts, The Three Stooges, and guests like Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, Chuck Connors, Jerry Lewis, Jimmy Durante, Nick Adams ("Johnny Yuma was a Rebel"), and Chief Halftown.



Events begin to move fast at Costantino’s. A line near the guest registry is already out the door as former fans and mourners approach the casket and greet family members. Most of the people seem to be about the same age: 50s, 60s, and above. In many ways they resemble salt-of-the-earth types, like characters in a Nelson Algren novel: men in baseball caps, polyester suits, work uniforms, Elvis jackets, and women with long bleached-blond hair who look like Sally Xeroxes.



They keep joining the line although overall it is not a sad affair. There’s lots of talking and moving around—yes, the spirit of Love, Luck and Lollipops has made this a happy place. Occasionally somebody will kneel or bow before the casket, but almost everyone has a word or two to say to Sally’s only surviving sister, a small woman in a 1950s-style "DA" hairdo who somehow reminds me (dare I say it?) of Popeye. While extending my hand to Sally’s sister I can’t help but notice how she laughs like Sally; a very sweet woman, really. Beside Sally’s sister is a young girl about 10 or 11 years old. I ask a woman standing next to the girl who the girl is and I’m told, "Sally’s granddaughter."



Did I hear that right? I didn’t know that Sally had any children. After all, wasn’t there a 1984 Daily News column by Stu Bykofsky in which Sally was quoted as saying, "Unfortunately, I had polio and it affected me in ways that prevented me from having children." Well, let’s chalk this one up to mystery.



Returning to the folding chairs, I notice Ron Joseph, or RJ, former friend of Dick Clark and host of ABC-TV’s WFIL channel 6 RJ’s Dance Studio, a big thing in the 1970s (think "You’re My Honey Bee" by Gloria Gaynor). I also spot Chief Halftown’s son.



Chief Halftown (1917-2003), aka Traynor Ora Halftown, was a Seneca Indian from upstate New York. He hosted the longest-running children’s show in the history of television, also on channel 6. The Chief preferred to use the word "Indian" when describing himself, rather than "Native American." According to the Broadcast Pioneers of Philadelphia website, the Chief began each show with "Ees da sa sussaway," Seneca for "Let us begin."



I notice the presiding minister and his wife standing by an open doorway. Culturally, these folks look very different than your average Philadelphian. It may sound like a cliché but they look like a younger version of Grant Wood’s famous painting American Gothic. I get a feeling of weirdness when the minister’s wife levels a steady gaze in my direction and then scans the room as if taking a psychological Polaroid. When Philadelphia jeweler Henri David walks in the room with his partner Paul Struck, Henri wearing a lavish mink coat, I notice that the coat is making an impression, but not in a Love, Luck and Lollipops way. It pays to observe people closely sometimes: as Henri exits the room a Constantino staff member whispers to the minister’s wife. I watch as the latter breaks into a smile rich in satirical intrigue.



From my folding chair I watch RJ work the crowd, at one point prepping for another photo-op in front of Sally’s cowgirl boots. I’m thinking, "Hey, appear on TV long enough and life and picture-taking become inseparable, but it’s all good." In a scene to end all scenes, a man dressed up as Sally Starr makes an appearance, a site for sore evangelical eyes and a visual sure to get the preacher’s attention. We decide not to stick around for the reaction but head into the other reception room where there’s a full-fledged Sally party raging: in one corner a news team interviews a guy in blue jeans while elsewhere people look through a Three Stooges book. There’s a lot of commotion and eye straining because almost everybody is trying to determine who’s who underneath the facial ravages of time.



"Is that—?" I hear on more than occasion. "Is that him—really?"



The Ice Skating Cowboy and I end the night in a Jersey diner, the perfect after-Sally event, and then head home where I tell people about the "viewing."



One friend, who used to work at channel 6 and who knew Sally well, tells me that the reason Sally left TV was because the station fired her for chronic lateness. "They had to put Chief Halftown in there or show cartoons until she showed up." Not long after this, he adds, Sally walked into his office selling Florsheim shoes.



But everybody, it seems, has a story about Sally. Somebody even informs me that she used to frequent the bars in Kensington.



Celebrity is no insulator when it comes to experiencing life’s ups and downs. Nobody escapes down times. Sally was every bit as much a salt-of-the-earth type as the people who came to Berlin to pay her homage, so if she frequented the bars in Kensington for a while, more power to her. It’s no fun being a lonely porcelain diva idol stuck on a home mantel in a celebrity deep freeze.



That’s why Philadelphia loves you, Sally.

Pope Benedict XVI, the Pin Cushion

The Local Lens

Published• Wed, Feb 20, 2013

By Thom Nickels



News of Pope Benedict XVI’s abdication traveled fast, but it didn’t take the chorus of those who have always called him a "Nazi" to jump in with more insulting one-liners. Suddenly, the field was crowded with anti-pope energizer bunnies spinning round and round with theories and predictions for the future.



In the Philadelphia Daily News, a regular columnist (a self-described fallen away Catholic) took the opportunity to offer herself as a candidate for pope. The sassy column was marked with all the predictable asides: as pope she would rock and roll, ordain women priests, throw out clerical celibacy, and lift a hundred and one other restrictions. From my point of view, a response like this is childish and reminiscent of an old MAD magazine "satire". The thing is, ex-Catholics either need to chill or go out and find good psychotherapists to help them stop spending the rest of their lives obsessing and being bitter about all things Catholic. The Daily News columnist wasn’t the only one to go over the edge. Everywhere you turned, whether on Philly.com, the Huffington Post, the UK Guardian comment site, or The New York Times, non-Catholics and ex-Catholics threw darts and arrows.



The publisher of Philadelphia Gay News weighed in with a blog on Philly.com, in effect calling Benedict XVI a "dishonorable pontiff". What is strange here is that the publisher was never an altar boy or a Catholic as far as we know, but in fact seems to take great delight in calling himself "old, queer, and Jewish," all fine things to be sure, but certainly not resume qualifiers when it comes to dabbling in Catholic theology or Church history. In his blog, the publisher arrogantly calls for the Church to reform and get its act together regarding its views on women and nuns. He also mentioned that the Church needs to do something about LGBT discrimination, which would be a good thing, but for me this was too little too late. He had already crossed the line when he stated, "This Pope leaves in disgrace not because of his religion, but because he is the single person in the Vatican who has been personally in charge of the vast Vatican cover up of child abuse for the last decade."



Is that so? Most experts pinpoint an earlier pontificate as doing little or nothing to stem clergy sex abuse, yet these critics never used the word "disgrace" or "disgraced" to describe the pope in charge then. Something like editorial damage control surfaces when the blog goes on to call Catholicism "an honorable religion", a necessary journalistic safeguard to ward off charges of anti-Catholicism. If this blog proves anything it is the continued demise of The Philadelphia Inquirer and Philly.com world into the murky world of B-grade tabloid journalism.



From another quarter came this comment: "He’s quitting because he’s afraid they’re going to come and get him when they finally see that all the clergy sex abuse cases are his doing." This is what the so-called Latin Tridentine ordained priestess Sinead O’ Connor had to say. Talk about an oxymoronic excursion into Harry Potter-ville! Then there are the people who have been calling this pope a "Nazi" since his election in 2008 because as a young boy, while living under the thumb of his parents (as children do), he was made to join a local branch of the German Boy Scouts which had a connection to the Nazi party. Does this make the pope a Nazi? The answer, I think, is obvious. Name calling is cheap and it does nothing to address real issues. It sort of reminds of some of the comedians of my parents’ era, insult humorists like Don Rickles, when the only way to get a laugh was to come up with clever ways to insult someone.



As a member of an Orthodox Christian parish in Northern Liberties, I still feel very much a part of western Christianity. I know that many other Orthodox do as well. Many Orthodox Christians, in fact, honor the pope of Rome as a leader in a "sister church". With that said, I am a bit mystified when I hear progressive Catholics talk about how Pope Benedict "isn’t as good as John Paul II" because he doesn’t have rock star charisma that makes people want to do jumping jacks. If John Paul II was all style, then Benedict is all substance, books and authorship rather than hand-waving and stage appearances.



One source chalks up the pope’s resignation to an accident he had while traveling in Mexico City last year. According to Turin’s La Stampa newspaper, the pope hit his head on a sink in Leon, Mexico when he got up in the middle of the night. The accident caused him to bleed profusely. The Vatican’s L’Osservatore Romano newspaper claims that the pope decided to resign soon after the accident. In the same report, La Stampa reveals that Benedict has a pacemaker and underwent a recent operation to replace the pacemaker’s battery. Critics have diabolically twisted this news to posit that it proves that secrecy lives in the Vatican because the Vatican didn’t come out and broadcast this information. They went on to ally this secrecy to twisted theories about clergy sex abuse. But why is the pope under any obligation to tell the world that he fell in a Mexican bathroom and hit his head? And why is the Vatican obligated to confess to the world that the pope got a pacemaker?



Progressive Catholics hope the new pope will be liberal and transform the Church into a "feel good" cafeteria where the Church and the modern world will be as one, while conservatives, like writer Christopher A. Ferrara, maintain that Benedict may have resigned because this means he will "avoid the dubious canonization of John Paul II and the simply absurd beatification of Paul VI."



Wow. Ferrara continues: "The steamroller driving toward those vexatious events, sweeping aside all reasonable objections, has suddenly been stopped dead in its tracks. Did the Pope abdicate, at least in part, to slow down John Paul II’s saint-making machine, which was threatening to canonize the Council of which Benedict himself (in his more candid moments) has been so critical? We may be permitted to think so." In a final wallop, Ferrara states, "At this very moment, the trickle of traditionalist critiques is becoming a torrent of criticism by respectable theologians of the mainstream, as the ‘spirit’ of the Council wanes while its disastrous effects become too obvious to explain away any longer."



People on the street are talking about the papal prophecies of Saint Malachy, which some theologians call a forgery but which others say have been eerily accurate. This prophecy indicates that the next pope, Peter the Roman, will be the last pope. Italian journalist Antonio Socci, whose bestseller The Fourth Secret of Fatima captivated European reading audiences for years, believes that the message of the Virgin Mary at Fatima in Portugal in 1917 revolves around a future pope who will be assassinated.



This is tough stuff, a far cry from the cheap summations of the axe-grinding "Don Rickles" columnists and bloggers.

All in the Family: Steve Bisciotti and The Ravens

The Local Lens

Published• Wed, Feb 06, 2013


 My father was a football fan (he was a quarterback for Kent State), and over the years he converted my mother to appreciate the game. My siblings are "iffy" when it comes to football, although I do have a sister in Florida who likes to plan huge Super Bowl parties. "Any excuse for a party," as the very late Pearl Mesta might have said.


In the past I have very been anti-football, which isn’t a very tolerant attitude, really. I took pleasure in castigating people who sit for hours watching helmeted figures move back and forth on their TV screens. "Couch potato" I think is the correct label here. This year, however, I wasn’t thinking of couch potatoes as much as I was hoping that the Baltimore Ravens would win Super Bowl XLVII.


Why and how did this happen?

Here's why I had a change of "football" heart: Steve Bisciotti, the majority owner of the Ravens, is a second cousin of mine. Steve is the son of my godmother, Patricia, who hails from my mother’s side of the family, the Irish Muldoon-Kelly-Tyrone County, Ireland-side. They were (and are) a huge Irish Klan that encompasses the Donohoe Funeral Home empire (yes, when you are a member of this Klan, your needs are taken care of pronto after death).


Anyway, some years ago there was random talk in the family about how relative Steve Bisciotti became a co-owner of the Baltimore Ravens. That was when Steve purchased 49% of the team in 2000, four years before he would purchase the remaining 51% and became majority owner. Since Steve has never been a boastful egomaniac type (he’s not about self-promotion), his Ravens partnership was mostly a quiet affair. Life being what it is, though, whenever anyone becomes prominent and powerful, "hiding" is rarely an option. Steve Bisciotti is now in the national limelight.


I don’t even think I met Steve until three months ago at the family funeral Mass for Patricia’s sister, Connie Davis, in Newtown Square, Pennsylvania. It was there, in Saint Anastasia’s church, that I was finally able to put a face to the name. When Steve walked in to the very crowded viewing before the funeral Mass and signed the guest registry, there was a noticeable but discreet buzz in the church. Since I had a special message I wanted to deliver to Steve I decided that I’d wait until the buzz died down—which it eventually did, of course. After all, we were in a church, and the Bisciotti family takes their Catholic faith very seriously, as was reported in a recent New York Times article on Steve and his family.



"…But it is at Ravens games that the full snapshot of Bisciotti appears," The Times reported. "He has attended preseason games in shorts and flip-flops, and his closest friends — many of them from his youth — mingle in his box with his mother and an occasional priest, a reflection of his strong Catholic faith and his support of religious charities."



Let me backtrack a bit. As a college student in Maryland, I visited Steve Bisciotti’s father, Bernie Bisciotti (Uncle Bernie) in a Baltimore hospital with my own father, Thomas C., when Bernie was fighting terminal leukemia. My father had come to Baltimore to drive me home to Pennsylvania where I could prepare for another life venture: going to Boston to work as a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War. Our visit with Uncle Bernie lasted just over an hour, but this was enough time to see that Bernie Bisciotti was an empathetic gentle giant of a man. As a nervous 19-year-old on the verge of doing something scary, I was used to untoward looks and disapproving comments from unexpected quarters (even from family), but not so with Uncle Bernie. In fact, the very opposite of that was true: Uncle Bernie’s attitude was one of real concern, support and acceptance. He seemed to be a listener, not a judger of "men." The fact that he was so calm and peaceful when he knew he was going to die soon impressed me as something rare.



When I approached Steve before the Mass, I told him about my meeting with his father so many years ago. I told him what I experienced with his father and how my memory of that visit has never wavered all these years.


I won’t bother to state Steve Bisciotti’s net worth (it is one huge fat cow!), but I will state that when people meet him they go away with the feeling that this is not a person who was born with a silver spoon. No family is perfect. There are "frailty sins" galore in every family, although the temptation to become "somebody else" when you become a major celebrity must be immense. In the end, however, I think that some of the stability in the Kelly-Muldoon Klan comes from the teaching ethic of its long-deceased matriarch, Nellie Kelly Muldoon, whom many family members continue to describe as something close to a saint.


Nellie’s story is too long for these pages, but I think you’ll understand when I say that the best teachers do not so much teach as show by example. The Bisciottis, thank God, are not the Kardashians.