September 1970. Eisenhower High School. I can’t get into the teen spirit of the Hopkins High pep rally. Purple Power! Youth Fever! Sieg Heil! Makes me sick.   I put out a comic book with some other freaks that is sold in the hallways for a dime. The Daily Planet. My mom gets a call from a concerned parent who’d said she’d already had enough trouble with her son without this pornography inciting him to take drugs. Lady on the phone said I had to be on drugs to do the awful things to her s…

“On November 16, 1989, I phoned the Soviet embassy in Paris and asked to speak to Mr. S. The switchboard operator did not reply.”

It was the warmest Oct. day out that I ever saw today, so we skipped practice (Tony and Yogi and I) and we decided to take a little ride down to the ferry and over to Staten Island. After polishing off a hero at LUCY’S we hopped on the back fender of the 2nd Ave. bus and rode down to the ferry basin.

  “I am a composer,” Ned Rorem once said, “who also writes, not a writer who also composes.” His music—hundreds of ravishing art songs and instrumental scores, one of which won the 1976 Pulitzer Prize—has brought him fame. But it is his diaries that have brought him celebrity. The first of them, The Paris Diary, covering his stay abroad from 1951 to 1955, was published in 1966. Its pithy, elegant entries were filled with tricks turned and names dropped (Cocteau, Poulenc, Balthus, Dali, Paul B…