An Open Letter to “Kasie” Hunt:
Day before yesterday, Kasie Hunt personally invited me, right there on her “Way Too Early” morning show, to email her and tell her why I’m up this early — right now, her show is just starting — I’m missing part of it because I came out here to the office to get this up on my blog page, and here it is:
Hunt. Your last name is “Hunt”. I only mention it, because there was rampant speculation that, after your “D.C.” program, nobody knows your last name. Well, in at least one case, that’s not true.
Now that we’ve got that over with, Hi, Kasie!
Like the London gardener in “Beyond the Fringe”, I’m always up around nine-ish, planting oats and carrots for the night-fighters. I’m a writer, artist, jazz musician and teacher of all those and more, and have always been a night-worker, the kind you don’t see in the shadows. I burn the Midnight Oil — always have, always will.
I’ve never been a believer in any one single skill or career lasting an entire lifetime — I’ve had an unusually wide variety of highly skilled professions, and as a quick casual glance at google will reveal, I’ve had more than my share of fifteen minutes’ fame, although I’ve never sought it.
I’m now 79 years out of port, and the dock is well in sight. In my dotard, I’ve been teaching music classes in guitar, flute, recorder, clarinet, sax, bass, jazz piano and pop song-writing. I have dozens of albums on the market with Jimmi Accardi and Bob Bachthold.
I didn’t come by the songwriting naturally. My best friend was Harry Nilsson, who taught me what he knew, which was plenty. I’ve retained at least ten percent of that, and gotten away with it for years. I guess I should mention that Pete Seeger was my music teacher for ten years when I was a kid. I have some 14 hours of unseen Harry Nilsson video footage here at my house.
I also teach stage magic, which means grand illusions, plus club magic, and street magic, handy for busking, which I’ve done, many times, with my students.
The magic I learned from family friend Orson Welles. My Mom was a well-known dancer in show business, starring in her own Billy Rose Broadway shows in the 1940s. She was also assistant director of MoMA’s Children’s Art Carnival for five years and I had the opportunity to learn art from the masters — my portrait of my friend Herbie Hancock is in the National, and my JazzArt was used by IAJE for over a decade of exhibits, shows and events. My hand-painted fine-art backdrops have been used by Herbie, and by all the great Marsalis kids, and many more, so now I teach not just painting — anybody can learn to paint, and I can prove it — but SELLING (pardon my caps, I did mention that I’m an old fart, right?) your art is the key to doing it every day. If it piles up in a garage, you’ll eventually stop painting.
Jewelry is also a specialty. My creations were once featured at ISIS Gallery on Rodeo Drive & Wilshire Boulevard, selling at around $35,000 apiece, featuring ancient stones and beads, crafted in solid 18k and 22k gold. These days, I teach kids how to make $1,000 worth of jewelry from a roll of copper wire, either bought or recycled. I show how to make rings, bracelets, necklaces and pendants and much, much more, all for free, at Gorby’s Free University.
Most of my classes are in ZOOM and, as a pro author and editor (my Dad Horace was founding editor of Galaxy Science Fiction Magazine, and I used to get paid a dollar a word from OMNI, was a feature writer for Tiger Beat and Monkee Spectacular, so naturally, I also teach creative writing, editing, proofreading and peddling your output.
Did I mention that I’ve made a living searching and selling rare coins? I teach that, also, along with skills at identifying and mounting meteorites and other gemological specimae.
I’m still a very active dealer in antiquarian books, a lost art when you have to explain to your grand-daughter what a book is — or used to be.
Lessee, did I leave anything out? I should mention that I have some skills in the social media field, although acquired only recently, and teach that, as well. Anybody can learn how to exploit, but it’s hard to learn how to actually help, which is what I’m here for.
God, you’re amazing — you’ve held out this long, and I’ve just gone on and on, but I really should mention just one more thing … knowing myself, I’ll bet dollars to doughnuts that it isn’t the last item in this missive –I’m one of the original pioneers of biofeedback and computer-enhanced meditation, with my colleagues John C. Lilly, M.D., Claudio Naranjo, M.D., Reb Zalman Shachter-Shalomi, Lee Lozowick, Herschel Toomim, M.D., Ven. Thich Thien-An, Tim Leary, M.D., Fritz Perls, M.D., Ven. Tarthang Tulku, Rinpoche and my NYC buddy, Swami Rudi.
As a result, I became a 3-D game writer, working on Quake, Team Fortress and other well-known games, plus my own lesser known nonviolent teaching games, of which I’ve made hundreds. Try to market a non-violent game and see how far you get — I’ve been trying since 1987 — my first games were made on the Amiga platform, which went unexpectedly belly-up, and we had to re-write the engine for PC. One game got 3 million downloads the first day, and was played by the King of Norway on CNN.
I’d give my games away by the millions, but we haven’t the money to get them written in a smart-phone engine, so it’s just for PC at this time, and we’ve sold dozens of them over the past several decades. The shooters and blowing up games sell just fine, as you’d expect.
It’s not among my evening occupations to write letters, but I wanted to take the time to thank you for your service — it’s every bit as front-line and dangerous as any med worker, and I was always aware of the risk for broadcasters. Yes, I’ve worked in a newsroom, too — KNX and KNX-TV Hollywood, 1964-65 — I wrote continuity for the Bob Crane morning radio show, and worked with my friend Dickie Dawson at KHJ-TV, on the “Tempo” show. I wrote gags, and appeared several dozen times.
There are studio promotional photos of me with lifetime friend and neighbor Jose Ferrer, Leonard Nimoy, Bill Shatner, director Joe Pevney and hundreds more, indicating that I either worked in the industry or I had a lot of personal photos snapped at studio expense.
Like I said, I’m always up at this time. Feel free to give me a ring. If you’d like a copy of my latest book, “Trump is a Four-Letter Word”, I still have several copies out of the 50 copies I had printed. I’m not interested in marketing myself, just helping kids get some skills. I can also ship it as a PDF, of course — that’s where you get the color pictures.
If you want to hear some senior bitching, I’ll send you a CD of my Protest Songs, created the way Pete Seeger taught us to do, crafting the song and making it sound good as well as stir up the thinking parts.
Wow, I’m convinced that if I didn’t have this nagging feeling that I’ve taken up too much of your time, I could probably go on for an hour or more with additional personal drivel, but I wanted to give you a sense of what can be accomplished online by an old codger for the sake of the youngsters coming up the line and having not a clue what’s in store for them.
Guess I’ll mosey over to my jewelry desk and make a pair of earrings for you, the kind I teach how to make. I’ll send them to the station, if that works for you — I think it’s best sent there, but how shall I mark it to indicate that it goes to you? “In Care of” okay?
I’m good at getting stuff through — I sent truffles to the Clintons every couple of weeks, and they still have the copy of “Goodnight Moon” I hand-painted for Chelsea.
Yours in gratitude,
Ex-PFC Clerk-Typist Trainee 006 AIS/ASA E.J. Gold, (RET.) Yep, that’s right — I was a Cold War spy, too. Fact is, I just can’t keep a job.