Different Slants

© May 2009 by Robert M. Katzman

This true story was first published between May 21 to September 17, 2009, in 7 parts, posted periodically. I was advised that people didn’t want to read long stories, only short pieces of them, as was the internet custom. So, I went with it. Now, I no longer believe that. A good story is a good story and people will stick with it if it honestly captures their minds and hearts. This one will do that, if you all will give it another chance. 

I wrote it three months before my twenty-year-old Chicago-area collectible store was about to die in the terrible, small business killing Recession. It is a story about love, loss, tears, identity, witches, cops, coffee, aging, acceptance  and hope.  

And one truly mysterious and confounding Catholic Priest in a New Jersey airport.

So, find a comfortable chair, and come with me to New York City.  Some very strange things happened there, once upon a time. 

Part 1: Ethnic Bait, Offered and Taken

Twenty-two hours.

I had twenty-two hours to be in New York City, without a hotel room, to attend an annual poster convention and to visit an old pleasure I’d thought was gone forever.

All I took with me was a kind of narrow, over-the-shoulder, sling-like duffel I’d designed to hold jackets, sweaters, gloves and scarves when I went through the periodic agony of America’s airports so my hands remained free.  It was May, but NYC is by the ocean, so the weather could vary significantly in a day.

My silent Korean tailor, Ki Sook, was used to my eccentricities, but never failed to smile when I told her what I wanted her to do for me. And she always turned over a first-class result about a week later.

I also took another customized travel bag made of durable denim material that was light-weight with not too many pockets, but had a large central space to carry anything from a walking lunch (crusty Italian bread, grapes, cheddar cheese, and a brownie with some personality to it) to convention catalogs. It had good zippers, too.

A good strong zipper can keep things that seem to want to be elsewhere, from going there. A bad zipper can get you into all kinds of trouble.  I’m talking about travel here, no matter what you may be imagining.

(Read on …)

By Robert M. Katzman © June 29, 2013

 

Since the June 15th 2013 Chicago Tribune publicity about my Skokie, Illinois back-issue magazine store, people have been coming in from all sorts of places to check me out, but not usually from Shanghai.

 This man, his tall model-like daughter and his wife came in–I have no idea how he could know about what I do–and he asked me for whatever I had from 1874, because his company in China owns another company in Milwaukee which was founded on that date. I found five things for him. In five minutes.

 His daughter, about 18, said, “How did you do that without a computer?”

I responded, “I don’t know any other way to do it.”

(Read on …)

Brad Meyer:
IT’S FINALLY HERE!!! After months of planning, days of shooting, and over a hundred hours in post, my short documentary film, Out of Print, is finally complete! This is my second final short film. A huge thanks to Robert M. Katzman for being such a captivating man, and a special thanks to Sofia Kerpan for being a kick ass documentary partner: she deserves way more credit than I gave her. I kindly ask you all to take several minutes to indulge in the fascinating, emotional, and inspiring world of Bob and his collection in “Out of Print”. ENJOY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5sNxlgshryY

Robert M. Katzman My appreciation for your compassionate film about a topic and situation few people can understand, or worse, know about at all. Thanks to you Brad, and of course, to the lovely Prom Queen, Sofia.

I didn’t make this film, I was the subject. The filmakers are from The Columbia College Film School. It is the second documentary, the first visible on my Oldzines.com site made by DePaul University Film School. That one is 14.5 minutes long. People tell me they find them fascinating. To me, they are eulogies while I’m still here and very sad. I watch them and am reminded how powerless I am to be unable to effect change.

You won’t see it that way, so I hope you will look at them.  They are serious history of what is disappearing day by day in America:News printed on paper in America.

Robert M. Katzman’s Amazing Story:  http://www.differentslants.com/?p=355

© April 18, 2013

I used to write on another blog about Hyde Park, a southern part of Chicago six or so miles from the Downtown area, a diverse intellectual community containing many things but most famously the University of Chicago, its experimental K through 12 school, the Laboratory School and the Museum of Science and Technology.

Sometimes I responded to what another person wrote and sometimes that response was reprinted here, because it expressed reflections that might mean something to a larger group of whomever my readers are. How can I know you? Facebook is, illogically, faceless. So, Strangers, see if what I wrote matters to you, possibly in some other context.

There was a significant political person named Marshall Korshak, forgotten today, who was a Chicago Democratic Party powerbroker there in the ’50’s,’60’s and ’70’s. Not everyone loved him. I responded to that expressed feeling in his defense. Marshall, born in 1911, died at 85, in 1996. This is what I wrote about him:

I was reading this thread until I read the part about Marshall Korshak and some not so complimentary remarks about him. Everyone is entitled to their opinion. Me, too. But my relationship with him couldn’t have been more unbalanced.

(Read on …)

By Robert M. Katzman © August 8, 2012  

Amarillo Diner

Solitary Truck Stop

A ragged rusty sign with

Every other letter

Blackened, broken and dead

Like missing neon teeth

(Read on …)