My parents knew that it wouldn’t be an easy life when I told them that I wanted to be Detective Dietrich when I grew up.  There was something extraordinarily funny about this guy, and I felt right at home in the presence of his aloofness and sarcasm, and I kept watching week after week.  My whole family did, because Barney Miller was one of those shows that had a heart and a pulse, and it wasn’t easy to find these things on tv.  It’s still not very easy, and you have to really look for signs of life and intelligence to have any hopes of finding them.  For me, it’s always kind of thrilling still to hear some comedian making a reference to Lacan, or reading a blog where it sounds like the writer has heard of Deleuze.

There are many cultural critics who lament the death of the intellectual, and there are many intellectuals who write about the death of intelligence.  There are also those who say they have no time for fancy book-learning, and they seem to be growing in number with every generation.  Maybe it’s nothing new, because I seem to recall reading similar laments in Aristotle, Voltaire, and excerpts from a rare interview with Pliny the Elder.  The New York of Barney Miller had room for everybody.  That’s one thing that show taught me.  In Manhattan, accommodation is available to all, even intellectuals.

My pre-teen brain understood that deep thinkers have trouble fitting into this world.  So when Dietrich talked to Barney about how he had a long record of switching careers, I had a feeling this was in my cards as well.  I also wanted to be a lumberjack and a bee-keeper.  And I wanted to study philosophy.  I never did get the degree I started out looking for, and I never did get to work with bees, but there are enough parallels that I think I’m living the life I am supposed to be in.  Sometimes my New York feels like the one Steve Landesberg inhabits, and someday, if we ever do get to meet, I wonder if the universe will implode or we’ll just have coffee.

Landesberg in Manhattan is a post from: Pub In The Park

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