A LEN LEVY STORY (nyc, 1969)

208. A LEN LEVY STORY - (Corporal Agarn in High Fiddle), nyc, 1969:

Len Levy was a legendary guy in his own small circle and a fellow - it should be mentioned - with enough gall and chutzpah to sink a ship single-handedly and he did have another name too which he used and it again was as outrageous as any other thing he did : he called himself Lenny Akaya whenever it suited him which was as crazy a name for a swarthy Jewish guy as if an American Indian had decided to call himself Fozzy O'Mannion or something but Len said he took the name from some old tribe of American Indians called the 'Akaya' tribe - known as the Akayas I think and probably an actual tribe even though I really think he picked it up from watching 'F Troop' or something - an early 1960's TV show about some bunch of frontier soldier misfits with warring Indian tribes like Kiowas and Arikawas and the rest - a barely scrutable twisted history made for TV factuality and not much else but Len said it was the name he used when he was dealing with people he knew he'd not meet face-to-face (which was probably a good thing) so all his phone contacts and secretive darkened meetings were always done as Lenny Akaya and I once mentioned to him 'mightn't that be construed as a bit Japanese also?' he said he really didn't care what they thought of him and for all he cared they could think he was a blind lame oriental Aleutian as long as it got him where he was going but that was how crazy all this stuff was getting to be as the mid-sixties droned on and became the later sixties when the bottom essentially had dropped out of everything and there was a near-panic in the streets and anarchy at home with wildness anger and fierce but false individualisms running rampant and the Beatles had discovered irony - which instantly ruined them - and then it went from them to everyone else there to there and all over the airwaves movie-screens and stage no one was to be taken seriously as they were all suddenly IRONIC PARODIES of themselves and what they'd purported to be and that great nervous edginess which had taken over everything meant that each person as a foil could NOT be simply serious but instead had first to cover it in a veneer of irony parody or extreme self-awareness about what they were doing (as in 'ah come on go with me on this one WATCH what I do') and it was all OK for about five minutes but petered out badly really quickly and you had twenty-year old assholes wearing military suits and moustaches and hair like girls and Beau Brummel fashions and androgynous sexuality and it all seemed to have started maybe slowly but then ran off with itself and took fire until hordes and thousands upon thousands of kids - college high school and beyond - had gone absolutely stark-raving mad over themselves and their own effusive little dipshit society and then to make it all worse they started demanding their own solutions to things they'd only little thought out and they chanted and paraded and protested and said outrageous stupid-shit things ALL DONE as performance and parody and soon enough NOTHING ever got done and everything started falling apart and just when the country needed a hammer and a stern fist it got clown cars and rubber mallets handled by Bozo the Clown and make-believe philosophers and everyone somehow wanted to be Corporal Agarn but turned out to be Red Buttons.