Monthly Archives: December 2013

Why So Many Kids in Slums Get Shot

We live in a society where a monetary value is placed on every life.  The lives of those who are born wealthy are placed on a much higher level than the lives of those who are born poor.   Better health care for their pregnant mothers, better places to live, better schools, better food.  When the kids are teenagers, the children of the wealthy are firmly on one track, the children of the poor are on the other.  

It becomes clearer and clearer to those born in slums that life in America is not necessarily a meritocracy where anyone can win the lottery.  They learn quickly that there are winners and losers, and the odds against them winning anything are maybe 1,000 to 1.  Kids start to give into despair: drugs, making as much money as possible on the streets, carrying guns, getting pregnant, shooting other kids who they perceive as disrespecting them.

We can say that it has always been so, but rarely has the difference in outcomes been so stark or the violence and hopelessness kids in poverty face so brutal.  The children of the poor have less opportunity than they did 40 years ago while the children of the rich, as a group and individually, are fantastically richer.

I don’t know where Jay Z grew up, but I know he is married to one of the most beautiful and famous women in the world, is a millionaire many times over and recently started a side business as an agent to the stars.  His first client Robinson Cano, recently signed a $240,000,000 contract to play second base for the Seattle Mariners.   Jay Z defied the experts in securing this huge ten year contract for his 31 year-old client, who had been offered more money per year by his team, the Yankees.  Jay took his percentage of $240M instead of a piece of $175M.  In the American schema, he won big time, got his client what nobody thought he could, a contract many feel will become an albatross for the team that committed to paying a 39, 40 and 41 year-old $24,000,000 a year for his services.

I saw the clip of Robbie at a news conference in Seattle, looking hurt, explaining why he didn’t sign with the Yankees, his first choice to play for.   It took me a couple of days to make the connection, and then to begin shuddering anew at the horror, the goddamned horror, of the society we live in.

“I felt the Yankees disrespected me,” said Cano, looking truly sad about it.

The Yankees as an organization have always been jerks, big time, more often than not they act like the corporate assholes they are.  But I wondered about a raise from $15,000,000 to $25,000,000 a year being a sign of disrespect.   Then it hit me.  Jay Z.

That’s how an agent wins, getting his client the biggest contract, period.  Jay needed to make a splash in his new business.  If his net worth is, say, $50,000,000, you can understand why he’d want to add some zeros to that as quickly and publicly as he can– it’s a matter of respect.  (I just googled my man’s net worth– the bitch is worth $500,000,000 according to Forbes– same thing applies about adding zeroes, he’s only halfway to being a billionaire, after all).

“Nah, Robbie, they don’t respect you, man,” I can hear Jay Z telling the impressionable Cano as the negotiations started.  Jay Z and his Yankee hat, Jay throws the hat on the floor.  “True, and I’m sad to say it, you know I love the Yankees, but Ellsbury for virtually what they are offering you?   Are they pulling our dicks, Robbie?  Ellsbury for Cano?  Really?”  Jay is no doubt a persuasive man with a story, hitting that note of disrespect like the master Hip Hop producer he is, and at the end of the day, as they say, he was cashing his share of $240M rather than the insulting $175M the star’s current team was offering.

Now Robbie will cash a winning two million dollar lottery ticket every month for the next 120 months, instead of just for the next 84.  Big difference, right Jay?

The principle of the thing makes me want to holler, like whenever I see a great actor on a TV commercial.  The guy made $15,000,000 on his last movie.  “Oh, but he probably got a million bucks to make this 30 second spot, it took him an hour, and he gets a check every time the commercial airs.  Why wouldn’t he do it?”

The only reason I can think of is to send the message, no matter how quietly, that not every person who has talent and becomes rich is a whore.   Or maybe to send the message that one can be content to win the lottery every few weeks, without making an extra million on the side whenever possible.  Or, I don’t know, because so many kids in the slums are killing each other because we live in a society with only one value— get as much as you can and don’t worry about losers calling you greedy– and they ain’t never going to amount to much by that vicious bottom line.

Pitch

wehearyou.net uses animation, and careful listening to children’s ideas, to get students working and learning together.   The workshop serves New York City public school children who take to it like ducklings to water.   
 
Kids get to draw, sing, invent, sculpt, improvise, drum, plan, produce and refine their ideas.   They are supported by helpful adults.   They master all technical aspects of stop-motion animation: lighting, framing, photography, staging, sound recording and editing.   The group organically organizes into small teams that solve problems as they arise.   
 
Working in a creative beehive run by their own imaginations, they think they are playing.   And, of course, they’re doing that, too.

 

No Surprise, Really

Yesterday, when the ten year-old began flashing several singles and getting other kids to chase him I put a soft hand on his arm and asked him to please not start acting like a hyena.  He laughed at this, naturally, and was for the most part unable to subdue his inner hyena.   I took him aside when we got upstairs and explained his importance, as the main editor of the animation, and how I needed him to focus and fix some badly cropped frames from the previous session.

He focused in spurts, while blasting the soundtrack over the tinny computer speakers.  I set him up with headphones, which momentarily decreased the ambient racket in the room.  Then, with the cans on, he got inspired and began screaming into the mic.   I was determined to record interviews with kids to use as part of a promo I am going to make today, come hell or high water.  

I took the first kid into an empty classroom across the hall where he answered some questions in a very clear and articulate manner.  The only improvement he could think of to the workshop would be less yelling.  He clarified that he meant the yelling of the children and, as if on cue, the loud barking of the hyena-boy, arguing with the other adult, in the hallway right outside the door.  “Case in point,” I said and the boy nodded.

I went into the hall and gestured for the angry kid to come in, to the relief of the adult who was trying to reason with him.  He came into the room howling about how much he hated her, how he was going to get her fired, etc.  I asked him to sit down and try to relax, I had other interviews to do and needed it to be quiet.  I began the interview with the next kid, his best friend.  As the interview progressed I saw it was hopeless, the interviewee insisted on answering in a series of funny/stupid voices and kept looking at his wild buddy to see if the funny voices were working.  The hyena rattled a box of pencils, muttering, trying not to be distracted from his misery. 

I asked him to stop, he couldn’t.   I moved the pencils away from him and told him I was going to interview him next, and he was fairly quiet for the remainder of the short, useless interview with his pal.

When the two of us were left in the room he was sulky.  “You said you would only interview me,” he insisted, out of the blue.   “Everybody says I’m not special,” he complained.  

“Nobody who knows you could say you’re not special,” I said.  “You’re one of a kind.  Don’t listen to anyone who says you’re not special.”

“My teacher told me again today that I’m not special,” he said.

“She probably meant not special in the sense of being treated differently from everyone else.  Special has different meanings, you know.  You’re quite special, and she knows it, but at the same time, she has to treat all her students the same way or people would start saying she was being unfair,” I said.

The interview didn’t go that well, but he was more subdued by the end.  “Did you crop those frames I asked you to fix?” I asked him as I took him back across the hall.

“Yes…” he said with annoyance.

I did another interview.  When I came back in he and his buddy, and another ten year old, were screaming with headphones on, some noise I later eliminated from the soundtrack.  I scrolled through the animation and found the second batch of frames I’d needed him to crop.

“Oh, I forgot those,” he admitted.

“When you’re done I want to show you that app I was telling you about,” I said and took a very articulate ten year-old across the hall to interview.  Her answers deserve a little promo film of their own.

By the time I got back I realized it was useless to try to interview anyone else.  I took the editor out in the hall, handed him his headphones and showed him an app on the iPad.  I spent no more than 40 seconds demonstrating how to create a drum track, bass part and melody line by moving a finger around the ingeniously designed screen.  The app is called Figure and it’s intuitive and a lot of fun.  I told him I was not 100% clear on how to use it with Audiobus, which I’d set up, and I left him to figure it out.  (He basically did, by the way.)

When it was time to go I went over to get him and said “nice program, huh?” and he seemed quite happy.  When I pulled the headphones out of the iPad, a full musical track was playing and I couldn’t easily shut it off.  It took me a moment to silence the orchestral chaos.

Then the usual struggle ensued to get the room cleaned up, and it eventually was, and the other adult left with half the group and I was putting the last few things away as first the editor and then his best friend asked for my help with their shoes.  The editor’s lace had come out of the eyelet, and there was no way to shove the frayed lace back through to tie his shoe.  Fortunately for him, he’d given this problem to a problem-solving adult who took a pair of tweezers out of his keychain Swiss Army Knife, managed to pull the lace through and tie it within a minute.  Then it was his friend, with knotted shoelaces on the boots he’d kicked off on entering the workshop.  Over my shoulder I asked the other stragglers to pick up this or that, tuck those chairs in, throw that in the garbage, please.

At 5:05 I put on my coat, my heavy pack, picked up my duffle bag and headed to the door.  I passed the candy wrapper I’d asked the editor to pick up.

“Why didn’t you pick up this wrapper like I asked you?”  I said, picking it up.

“I didn’t hear you, when did you ask me?” he said, distractedly.

“When you were ignoring me,” I said, to a round of bright smiles from the other three young stragglers.

And, of course, when I later heard the music track the kid had made, I was quite blown away.  Very restrained bit of playing, a lot of space between the drumbeats, the bass line and the odd, frenetic, poignant little melody.

I hate to agree with the haters

OK, admittedly, this country is a little bit messed up when it comes to health care.  Health benefits for most Americans are tied to their employment, ideally, unless your employer is big enough, or small enough, to avoid paying into it.  Employees of Walmart, America’s largest retail employer, qualify for Medicaid.  Is this a great country, or what?

But it’s beyond that, Americans pay by far the highest price for health care with very mediocre health outcomes.  45,000 Americans die every year of treatable conditions undiagnosed until the ER docs tighten their lips, shake their heads.  Millions of Americans with preventable diseases are treated at a cost of billions of dollars a year, 75% of US Health Care costs go to treating complications of obesity, gluttony, poverty, stupidity.   Insurance companies don’t like to pay for preventative care, why would they?

Many believe that the gigantic federal government is the problem. Forget the many problems the federal government has historically solved, like a century of lynching of blacks in the former Confederacy.   Like the terror of a penniless old age, solved by Social Security, medical bankruptcies for old people ended by Medicare.

And yet the wealthiest and greediest continue to beat the drums that tax is evil and the government is the enemy of the people, a libidinous rapist poised to have its way with good, honest, God-fearing, dumber than shit Americans.   Air pollution?  A lie.  Man’s contribution to global warming?  Commie twaddle by disloyal Americans who hate our freedom.  The Affordable Care Act?  The most destructive legislation in U.S. History, we are told over and over, without elaboration.   The facts speak for themselves, after all.  Say them often, and loudly, enough and they start to sink in.

The president was elected after a brilliant advertising campaign financed by tens of millions given to him by people like those who hired the drafters of the Affordable Care Act.  The woman who was the prime author of the ACA left government to return to a multimillion dollar job in the health insurance industry.  Change you can believe in.  The most transparent administration in history was promised, but whistle blowers and journalists were prosecuted under the 1917 Espionage Act.   Nobel Peace Prize for our articulate president, even while he authorized collateral damage killing of children and other mourners at funerals.  Obamacare was met with much fretting — but don’t worry, if you like your insurance you can keep it.  Unless your insurance carrier sends you a letter terminating your insurance effective 12.31.13.  In that case you go to the website, which NPR tells you is now, after a disastrous roll-out,  working perfectly.   There you will see this (and don’t bother calling that number, it’s a robot):Image

Suspended Animation

I always got a kick out of Walt Disney, after his death, being frozen in time in a cryonic vat.   Thinking of the animator of Mickey Mouse and Goofy in suspended animation always gave me a small kick.  But, I realize now, suspended animation is nothing to smile about.

That smile frozen on my face, reminiscent of a nauseated Woody Allen displaying existential dread, is like the expression they warned you about in school– if someone slaps you on the back your face is gonna stay like dat!

It’s not as if I’m putting all of my chips on this next roll of the dice, not as though not creating a winning ad to raise a substantial sum of money to hire the people I need to turn my program into a business will end this dream.  OK, it will pretty much end this dream, but that’s life, right?

Ted Williams, that tall, thin, angry perfectionist, is in two cryonic vats in a facility in Scottsdale, Arizona.  His head is in one, waiting for the day they can revive it and grow a new body from his cells.  His trunk is in another, waiting for I know not what.

A Shameful Business

I am, I have to admit, in the manner of my father to the end of his life following the fortunes of the Detroit Tigers, a NY Yankee fan.  Leaving aside the obvious idiocy of drinking the Kool-Aid of organized sports in the first place, rooting for the Yankees goes against the rest of my worldview.  The Yankees are the professional sports franchise that exemplifies empire, privilege, corporate snobbery, true, but it’s a childhood thing not amenable to analysis as anything but childish preference and misplaced loyalty.  

My dad rooted for Hank Greenberg, the Jewish Babe Ruth from the Bronx, a Detroit Tiger during most of his Hall of Fame career in the 1930s and 40s.  “How’d the Tigers do?” my father would ask, half a century after Greenberg retired, if the subject of baseball scores came up, which it sometimes did.  I never had any idea how Detroit did, why would I?  I suppose I’m that way about the Yankees because of Mickey Mantle and being eight years old when baseball came into my world.

The last few seasons my main interest in baseball has been checking the box scores to see how Robbie Cano had done.   Another 3 for 5, two doubles and a home run, Robbie on a tear, ten RBIs in the last three games, raising his average another six points after being in the doldrums for a week or two.  It made me feel good, for a few seconds, whenever Robbie was putting up Cano numbers.  To the millions who don’t give a rip about this sort of thing, I understand completely.  It’s how I feel about something called a Hat Trick.  No idea what it is, no interest in finding out.

The point of the shameful business is not that a grown man might distract himself by checking the graphed statistics of a man making fifteen million dollars a year to play a game boys love, or that thousands of people are employed in a vast industry paid to make sure these stats are charted in real-time and available on the internet.  

The point of the shameful business is what goes on with men making fifteen million dollars a year to play this game at an elite level.   Robinson Cano will be playing second base for Seattle under the terms of a ten-year contract he recently signed with them for $240,000,000.   The Yankees were offering basically the same yearly pay, about $24,000,000, but only for seven years– until Cano turns 38, well past the prime of most baseball players.

Well, Cano would be a fool to leave $70,000,000 on the table.   It’s been said often, he’d be foolish to let sentimentality dictate a business decision.  Why would anyone leave $70,000,000, or a penny, for that matter, on the negotiating table?

Except, can anyone tell me the difference between earning $15,000,000 a year and earning $24,000,000 a year, or career earnings of $330,000,000 or $260,000,000, except in a society sick to the death with relentlessly competitive greed?

“Justice is Dead!”

His parents gave him a virtue name, Justice.  When Justice was a baby he was diagnosed with lymphoma.  There are pictures of him as a less than two year-old, bald round head, undergoing chemotherapy, methatrexate.  He’s now ten and a vigorous kid.  When he’s in a good mood he can be very funny.  Once early on he asked me to get him a gun so he could shoot himself, a glimpse of what he and his parents have been through already in his short life.  You can see a short video of his heartwarming story here.

His friends Natalie and Noelle co-produced the brilliant “The Evil Witch on the Second Floor”.  In one scene, in the Evil Witch’s classroom, a flight of hidden stairs in a closet leads to her secret torture chamber.  Another flight takes us to the death chamber below, the chamber of doom where the Evil Witch shackles her victims as they lay dying.  The faces of the Evil Witch’s other victims are crossed off in their framed pictures on the wall.  

Two of the witch’s slaves carry the coffin of a newly dead kid, it says “R.I.P. Justice” on the side.   They toss the casket into a chute marked toxic.  I didn’t notice Justice’s name on the coffin when I passed by when they were shooting it.  I was disturbed by it when I edited the animation that night.

When the group sees the finished footage a week later, Justice’s best friend shouts out “Justice is dead!” as the coffin is trotted across the screen.  “Yeah,” I say “what does Justice think of that?”  and Noelle immediately yells out “he liked it!”

And Justice, who has a raspy voice for a small ten year-old, when I ask “Do you like having your name on a coffin saying R.I.P.?” says “yeah, I like it. The Evil Witch can rot in hell.”  I understood later that maybe these young friends were celebrating a peer’s survival, giving the finger to Death in the most direct way they knew how.

Meanwhile, in an expensive home in the suburbs of Boston my old friend may already have gone over the precipice, falling into the pit of relentless cancer.  Nothing anyone can do for him now, but call him again tomorrow on the land line, in case he feels like picking up.  

Justice is alive, an inspiration to the rest of us, and a reminder– spend your life well.

Advertising Machine

I am, truly.  No reason to be shocked, life is all about the sell.  Why else do people smile?

You see, it is serious business, and wonderful business.  No reason to look at it like it’s some kind of brutal, stinking thing dead of rabies, or worse, still alive, foaming jaws working sharp, glittering teeth.   Advertising is not like that mortally wounded German soldier creeping toward his gun as the heroic American turns his attention to saving the life of his comrade. No need for the audience to clench, ready to scream “watch out, Sarge!” as the Kraut wearily but determinedly raises his Luger.

Think of it this way: ads don’t only sell poison, they can just as easily sell things worth selling.   Democracy?  A beautiful thing, why not an ad to sell it?   Generosity? A wonderful value, sell it with a heartwarming ad.  You see what I’m saying? And if the ad works, and millions see it and are moved by it to take some action, kick in ten bucks, say, you have a flourishing business to advance the original terrific idea.  Many employed working to make the dream a reality, all because of an ingenious ad machine, like me, somewhere in the picture.

Nothing whatsoever dirty about being an advertising machine, and I mean that sincerely.  In fact, I’d be willing to wage an unlimited war against everybody in the world, and kill all of them, to prove how sincerely I believe in the human’s God given right to influence fellow humans through advertising.  In fact, I’m going to create a life-affirming ad right now, as soon as I get this other important business squared away, and shower, shave, eat, wash the dishes.

God bless.

It’s Always Been There

Took a walk yesterday, from Sekhnet’s to the house where I grew up and back.   Less than two miles.  It was a crisp early evening, nice for a stroll.  On Union Turnpike, half a block from where I’d turn to walk up the small hill past what used to be the family home, two young guys stopped to ask me where they could find a deli.  As I thought, I pointed at the corner store, now a Dunkin’ Donuts, and unhelpfully informed them that it used to be a deli.   I asked what they were actually looking for, turned out they were trying to break a fifty.  I gave them a few ideas and turned to walk toward the corner where I’d hang my left and BANG!!!

A metal knife blade, rooted in the cement and poised at shin height, tried its best to cut my leg off.  I fell backwards away from the impact, on to my back, my feet actually shot up into the air as I hit the sidewalk.   Two other young men saw this and asked if I was all right.  I stood up immediately, nothing broken, and glared at the sleek aluminum bench that tapered to edges like butter knives.   If it had been in my power I would have destroyed the ugly futuristic menace on the spot.  I grimaced and asked the two men where the hell the bench had come from.

Seeing that I was fine, they seemed to relax.  “It’s always been there,” one said with a little smile, thinking, perhaps, what kind of clueless idiot walks into a bench so hard it slams him on to his back with his feet up in the air?

“I grew up on this block, and I’ve never seen it,” I told them, pointing around the corner toward what once was my block.

“Oh it’s been there a long time,” said the other.

“It’s been there about three months,” said the first.

I don’t remember saying anything, I may have said “first time I’ve seen it…”, but I was surprised at the absence of pain as I walked past my old house.  It was about a mile back to Sekhnet’s, and I had no problem at all, until I reached down to the spot where the metal had kicked my shin and felt, through the pant leg, a knot the size of a fist and what seemed to be liquid.  I imagined blood running down into my sock and decided not to investigate then and there.  I didn’t understand why there was no pain, but I didn’t mind.  

It was only when I got back, elevated the leg and iced the bump that the aching started in my back, my arms, every joint that had been pounded when I fell on the concrete.   Every place, ironically, but the barking shin that had been assaulted by the treacherous metal bench.   The upper back is chiming in now, loudly, reminding me where I landed hard on it yesterday, reminding us all how slender the string we are all hanging by in this life actually is, and also, how resilient, most of the time.

Time to call my dying friend, whose once resilient string is poised to snap forever.

Missing Kitten

We’ve named him Underfoot, this affectionate feral kitten who appears a few times a day in the backyard for a feed.  Poignantly, more than a feed, the young cat wants contact and affection.   He rubs against Sekhnet’s pant legs as she shoos him off, lest Skaynes get a whiff of the young male cat marking Skaynes’ woman.  As she works in the garden he tangles himself under her feet.  He lets people pick him up, he’s happy to be hugged and carried around.

“He’s dying to be somebody’s pet,” Sekhnet commented.  And it’s true.  He’d be a great pet.

Haven’t seen him the last few days.  Could mean a little boy or girl picked him up and said “daddy, can we keep him?  Can we?  Daddy, can we keep him?  I want to keep him.  Look, daddy….” and daddy seeing the adorable, cuddly pair smiles and nods, reaching for his camera phone, and the kid screams in delight and waves the kitten in the air.

Could mean what has happened to several generations of feral cats we’ve known, fed, played with and watched grow up — a tiny body lying somewhere. These cats in the wild don’t seem to live more than a year or two, many of them don’t make it that long.  Hard life out there on the street.

(two hours later)

I saw the little scamp hop over the fence, from the top of the compost bin.  I went out and called him and he came bounding over, leaped another fence.   Did his dance around my feet until I picked him up.  He purred as I rubbed his face.  Then I opened a can of food and put it out in the chilly late afternoon, he ate a few bites and then was rubbing against my pant legs again.  Picked him up for another few pets, then left him to eat.  

Looking out the window just now I saw his food bowl almost untouched, then I saw him, by the garage next door, chowing down studiously on something the neighbor had put out for him.  Had the thought– only in America, where millions of children go to bed hungry every night,  do neighbors compete to feed doomed stray cats their favorite flavor of cat food.