5833. GUSTAV MAHLER IT IS

GUSTAV MAHLER IT IS

(music overhead)

The scarf around the neck is flamboyant enough

but the music really makes it. There's a lot of incendiary

strength in a foreword like that : dark matter, in music.

The girl at the dairy, where I am watching, she seems to

squirm around a little much. Adjusting this, adjusting that,

looking down at herself, as if to examine  -  breasts and shoes

together. A tug at the groin, where something is fitting too

snugly? Little kids, in the middle here, of Central Park, are

scurrying around for their free afternoon milk  -  a tiny little

waxy bottle of it, looking strange, but, they say it's milk and

it is. This little forest-looking shed was built a long time ago

just for this : dispensing clean, new, and cold, milk to the

captive city kids. The Milk Dispensary, the cow barn. Up 

until the nineteen- teens there was even a little cow farm 

and field attached in the meadow where the milk cows

grazed. It was  -  all of this  -  thought to be a grand

form of social relief. And it was. Much like the old

tea-water pump down at what became Canal Street

and Broadway, about 1860, this was an authentic

effort, for free, to aid the sorriest of the city's cases.

good intentions, for all to see. I liked it very much.

It doesn't work so well today, at all  -  they'd rather

sell maps and tea-cups for money, while

Gustav Mahler plays overhead.