Author Archives: oinsketta

All I Want

I think I can put this simply and accurately: a dialogue.   What do I want that dialogue to be about?  That’s secondary.   

The main thing is that everything said is heard and digested and what is said back relates to that thing, expands the subject we’re talking about, leads to further understanding, even insight.   Too often the subject and the discussion are circumscribed by many factors. 

If a family member is in a cult, for example, a full discussion of that cult is impossible.  The family member may insist that it is not a cult at all, “cult” being an ignorant and pejorative label imposed by outsiders, but reality in its purest form.  A detailed and open dialogue on the subject is not in the cards, no matter how much mutual goodwill is present.   Often people join cults as a response to a need to be accepted that is not fulfillable anywhere else.   It is not productive to point something like this out to someone who follows a true path laid out by a superior being.

I can think of many situations where an honest conversation is not ever going to happen.  My best hope for that is often here, setting my thoughts and feelings out with as much clarity as I can muster.  Sad, in a way, this ongoing conversation with myself and an imaginary reader, and a great blessing in another way.  I will take the blessing any day. 

Sadness is part of every sentient being’s lot here, and so be it.   A blessing, my friend, is a blessing, and I will take a blessing every day of the week, including today, a day when I am late to get about my rounds.

So if you’ll please excuse me…

Cutting Contest

Sekhnet took me to see the incomparable Tommy Emmanuel at Town Hall last night.   He put on his usual great show, playing with virtuosity and joy throughout.   It’s a unique experience being moved by some beautiful and complicated playing and at virtually the same instant laughing at some offhand shtick the guy does at the same time.   The man is that good.   If you ever get a chance to see Tommy live, just go see him.

It’s clear watching him play how much he loves what he is doing.  He got that good because, in addition to the talent that God gave him, he loved what he was doing enough to do it for a million hours over the decades.  His joy and sense of how much fun he’s having is infectious.   After his opening number I turned to the guy next to me, another guitarist, and said “damn, he just keeps getting better!”  My neighbor agreed.  “Like a fine wine,” he said with a satisfied smile.

It was something the guy next to me said before the show that inspires what I’m thinking about now.   We were discussing guitarists we admire and at one point I mentioned some younger blues players I’d heard for the first time in recent years, including a passionate player named Jonny Lang.   He nodded and told me I should check out the youtube of Lang and Eric Gales trading riffs.  He’d started the conversation telling me about Gales.   

“At one point the crowd is urging Gales to cut Lang, and you can see the results, I mean Lang didn’t have a chance ….”

I stopped him to say I never got the point of cutting contests.  We didn’t get a chance to pursue the subject further, because Tommy Emmanuel took the stage and that was that.

You can read about cutting contests going all the way back.  A great trumpet player came to town, there was a jam session after the show.  The local trumpet king would bring his horn and proceed to try to out-blow the star trumpet player.  It was like gunslingers, making a name for themselves by outdrawing the fastest gun in the west.   It always struck me as an idiotic misuse of talent, an ego-driven exercise in being an asshole.  Or a killer.

As a guitar player I’ve found myself in these situations a few times over the years at jam sessions.   The session is, to some guitarists, not about playing the best music we can invent, it’s about proving who is the best guitar player.  To me the best guitar player is the one who always plays exactly what you want to hear in the music.  Nice inversions of chords set perfectly against what the singer is singing.  A little bass riff that sets up what another instrument is doing.   One note, vibrating plaintively against a series of harmonies.  Sometimes it’s playing your ass off in tandem with another instrument, riffing off what the other player is doing.  I never see it as a contest and if I’m in a room where others do, it can sometimes be a long session.

A cutting contest has nothing to do with tasteful collaboration.   It’s about showing off.  It is a no holds barred competition for who is top dog.  I never understood that shit.  I know that professional musicians are often egotistical and competitive, that’s how they get to the the top of their game.  I suppose the cutting contest has some place in that world, though I’m pretty sure not everyone in that world engages in cutting contests.

But in a group of pissants renting a practice room to make some joyful noise? I mean, seriously, what the fuck?   Who is the best pissant guitarist?  Really, this is a question you think should be answered now?  Determining matters of dominance and submission instead of pursuing the highest quality musical interaction we can come up with?   

Ranking professional guitarists is dumb in any event, it’s largely a matter of taste.   Vying for supremacy with other amateur guitarists is useless at best.  You can play with virtually anyone unless they play out of tune, off time, too loud.    If you don’t like the way they play you don’t play with them anymore.  But a cutting contest among pissant guitarists?  This really how you want to waste our precious time?  Figuring out who will get to solo and who will hold down the rhythm part?

Tommy Emmanuel told a story that illuminated the issue beautifully.   His mother loved to sing and strummed a guitar and later took up lap steel guitar.   She needed an accompanist for her lap steel playing and, around the time Tommy began kindergarten, she taught him a few chords on guitar and he became her rhythm guitar player.   He couldn’t wait for school to be over so he could run home and play rhythm guitar for his mother.    His older brother Phil soon thereafter took up guitar, and he too wanted Tommy to play rhythm behind him.   He did it happily, for years.

The guitarists I love best, and I think mainly of Jimi Hendrix and Django Reinhardt in this regard, were brilliant rhythm players.  Jimi said all guitar playing is rhythm guitar playing, and it made a big impression on me.  Django could play an accompaniment like nobody’s business, hard to imagine anyone doing it better.  If you can’t play the rhythm part to one of Django’s tunes, you have no hope of playing any other part of it.

When I was learning to play two guitarists would take turns playing rhythm guitar and lead guitar.  Think of the Beatles in their early rock ‘n roll days, John banged out the rhythm part that moved the band, along with the bass and drums, and George played the cool fills and riffs and took the solos.  We’d take turns.  I became a pretty good rhythm player, and I took pride in playing a solid rhythm part.  Sometimes another player would be so inspired by the solid rhythm part I was laying down he’d solo forever, which soured the whole thing for me.

I don’t know how much of the cutting contest mentality is a result of a capitalist mindset that endlessly compares endlessly competing entities and how much is just homo sapiens nature.   We are, after all, largely powerless, and often pissed off, and trying to unsee the terror we know awaits each one of us at the end of our mortal days.  Maybe that fleeting feeling of supremacy when we step on somebody who’s a little weaker is the best we’re going to get that day.   Count me out of that shit.  I’m busy trying to complete a reasonable written accounting of myself while I’m here.

By the way, I enjoyed the clip of Jonny Lang and Eric Gales.  Gales is great.  I don’t think anybody is cutting anybody here.  They are making a joyful noise.  If you like rock and blues guitar, check ’em out (no idea what’s up with Lang’s hairdo, or Gales’ for that matter).  Here you go.

The Smartest Man in the Room

My old friend Andy was a very clever fellow.   Only he, Antonin Scalia and James Woods, for example, ever scored perfect 1600s on their Scholastic Aptitude Test.   He clearly had a facility for math and abstraction, demonstrated by his perfect 800 in Math, but his verbal skills were, clearly, equally well-developed.  He spoke well, wrote well, was a highly critical reader.  This was partly because much of what he read he could probably have written better. 

We used to joke about his red ginsu, the razor sharp one he used to parse, slice and vivisect paragraphs.  I don’t know that all of his corrections were for the best, although I know he felt unshakably certain about every one of them.  His occasional howls at the way a line was written were a giveaway, I always thought.   From time to time they’d lock him up in a ward somewhere until he calmed down, so there is also that.

The smartest man in the room, someone who takes the sketchy title seriously, is rarely impressed by other people’s cleverness, it seems to me.   If he is impressed, he keeps it to himself.   It’s as if he’s sure the clever remark is something he could have easily delivered better, he was simply thinking of more important things at the time.  I find myself mulling this over this on a frigid day, this cold trait of some very smart people I have known.    

I once knew a very bright professional writer, a former journalist.  He was a good storyteller and a true literary craftsman,  He also turned out to be loathe to compliment, or even comment on, writing that was not currently for sale.  He had a pragmatic orientation, for one thing.  Writing for oneself was just that, and no further commentary was necessary.  Writing for pay was a job, a craft, work, every sentence open to debate and revision by the buyer.  It was two different worlds to him, I surmise, presenting an idea for publication versus masturbating at length (or even succinctly) in the privacy of one’s own notebook. 

To increase the odds of having a piece published the writer must proceed pragmatically.   What subject will the publication want written about?  What kind of prose does the publication usually publish, what is their editorial point of view, what style do they prefer?  How much of the personal is acceptable in a personal piece and how much of the private is expected to be suggested with discretion?  What tone do they buy?   How many words? 

You take these factors into consideration, and the taste of the person who buys the pieces, if you are able to find out, and craft your piece accordingly.  All of this is sensible to keep in mind while writing for pay.   Follow these steps while writing as well as you can and you increase your chances of selling the piece.

Here’s a harder part.   Suppose someone sends you chapters of an ambitious manuscript of a book he’s trying to write, a personal biographical project you have discussed with him at length.   It is unlike most straightforward memoirs you’ve read.   It would be hard to put it into a marketing slot, or imagine what shelf to put it on in a bookstore, if it did become a book.   It’s a kind of creative nonfiction, a reimagining of a difficult life, a sometimes poignant wrestling match between anger and acceptance, set against huge historical backdrops.  Some of it is, admittedly, moving, and it takes an occasional nice leap from apparent reality to pure conjecture, but in the end, what the fuck is it?   Best to say nothing.

The writer’s ex-wife will later angrily defend the writer’s continued silence on the several chapters of the ms. he was sent.   According to her, he was unable, or unwilling, to write that way, with the creative leaps and the wildly reimagined confrontations, the deeply personal stuff.  He simply wasn’t built that way, not in his writing, not in his personal life.   It was unfair, she said, to judge him harshly because he was not able to write that way.  Unfair to bring up that he’d expressed interest and offered feedback on the pages and then never sent any feedback.   “What do you fucking expect him to fucking say about something he himself couldn’t do, you fucking self-absorbed fuck?” she added, a bit gratuitously, I thought.   

Eventually, when the subject was gingerly raised and discussed between the writer and the would-be writer, the published author told the unpublished one that he had been raised, by a supremely successful grandfather, to always compete.   This was as close to a plausible explanation as the unpublished writer would ever get from the pro.   

I get to wondering about this, a man who no longer keeps a journal, outside of the words that find themselves here.  Maybe I delude myself, judgmental bastard that I also am, that I always try to nurture the creative efforts of people I encounter.   Somebody sends me a beautiful photo, I send back “beautiful”.   It takes a few seconds and it feels right.   Perhaps it means nothing to the other person, is like a single “like” on fucking Facebook. 

Maybe I’m largely the same way as these paragons I describe above, oblivious about the many times I don’t even send “well-done” when a virtual tear runs down my virtual cheek after reading something that moves me.  I mean, unless the writer is a needy, vain, weak person, why do they need me to tell them that what they wrote made an impression on me, right?

When I write now I scrutinize every sentence and the whole before I hit “publish”.   I’ve polished my style by this exercise of preparing these pages to be read by a stranger in Malaysia, or Saudi Arabia or, today, Slovakia.  I picture anyone in the world reading my words, and picturing this reader, I strive to make what I am saying as clear as possible.   

I read this top to bottom, numerous times, as I write, flashing my own ginsu over any word that casts a shadow over the clarity of its neighbors.   Writing clearly is a kind favor to the reader, and to ourselves.   We write to be understood, to express thoughts coherently, to make our feelings felt by others, to connect.   We strive to write without a thought for who is the smartest baboon in the room.  At least I think we do, though, it also must be noted, I am clearly not the smartest baboon in the room.

Essential Image for The Book of Irv

My brother-in-law, who used to like to argue with my father, described his father-in-law’s effortless fighting style.  He painted the picture of my father, lying on a couch, reading the paper, a sword in his other hand, nonchalantly parrying each point and, whenever he chose, driving his rapier home.   It is a wonderful image.   

We can forget, for a moment (jury, please disregard what you are about to hear) that my brother-in-law generally employed an emotional style while his father-in-law’s was cool and analytical.  It’s a particularly apt image of my father fighting my brother-in-law, who my father regarded as an intellectual lightweight, but it’s also a great image of the old man’s almost bored comfort with argumentation.

What about when he felt he was being opposed by an intellectual foe closer to his own powers?  I got a chance to witness this up close, two years before he went to meet his maker.

In the den of his Florida apartment, confronted with a piece of evidence he could not talk his way past, by a son who not was only a lifelong adversary but now a trained lawyer as well, I saw what he could do when cornered.

Granted, he had almost nothing to work with, would two years later, as he was dying, admit as much.  But watch how nimbly he moves, up on his toes, cunning, hyper-alert, constantly moving.  His eyes dart left and right as he improvises.   He dances like Slobodan Milosevic in front of the World Court, with the adroitness of a brilliant but demented ballerina.  He’s got nothing, but still he fights, back to the wall, battalions nipping at his flanks.   There is virtually nothing left to argue, and he is completely surrounded, but this does not stop him.   He holds off the enemy with ad hominem attacks since he’s got nothing else to fight with.   Then, exhausted by it all, he goes for the kill.  And in that moment loses the long war, but that does not matter to him in that moment. 

He’d deeply regret this behavior when he was dying, but while he was alive he felt there was nothing he could do about it.   The essence of tragedy, really.

Joe Frank on the advantage, to a writer, of not avoiding pain

The late, great Joe Frank [1], who died recently at 79, was memorialized by radio superstar Terry Gross.   She played an interview she did with him in 1989.  You can hear the whole interview, illustrated with tasty slices of his radio shows, as well as read the transcript from which the following was clipped, here.  The entire twenty minutes you will spend to hear the whole episode is time well spent.  (IMHO, LOL!  ROTFLMAO!)

At one point Terry asks him a question that yields what struck me as profound answer.   The answer resonated with my experience, I guess is what I’m trying to say.   Those of us who work on writing thoughtfully about our condition here should have a look at Joe Frank’s answer about personal fears and insecurities. 

GROSS: You know, a lot of your more personal shows deal with fears and insecurities – ones that, you know, we can all relate to. But I wonder if when you take your own insecurities and put them in a kind of persona and make them into an hour radio program, if they’re easier to deal with than they are, say, when you’re lying awake alone in the middle of the night.

FRANK: Oh, yeah. As a matter of fact, by using those experiences for radio programs, you transcend them. You almost look for bad experiences or painful experiences. Whatever tragedies might befall you, you can always, right away, think, well, that would make a great story for radio. And so that whatever happens, even if it has a great negative content, even if it’s painful – because you can then tell it on the radio and share it with many listeners and move people or entertain people, it then takes on a positive value.

And I remember distinctly that – coming to that revelation a number of years ago when I realized that I no longer wanted to avoid pain – that I could use it in a way that was very productive so that it was easier to experience whatever suffering came my way.

 

[1]  

 

What we learn from the torture debate

(Sekhnet, sticking to her guns, found this post to be more bullshit.  No defense I can offer will justify that sick, misleading shit I posted yesterday, according to her.   Her real horror, I think, is that not only did I describe a truly ugly scene, I presented myself as a merciless bully and a brute, two things I have dedicated myself to not being.) 

The main thing we learn from the torture debate is that humans are capable of justifying virtually anything, in the name of something else.   It is particularly true if the thing we are justifying is a total abstraction to us.  If something doesn’t touch us, if we never see it, hear it, or smell it, it remains completely hypothetical.  

If we’re forced to look at something truly, unbearably ugly, and not allowed to turn away, we might be sickened by it, probably will be.   As long as it’s unseen, far-away, abstract, a matter of principle or wartime strategy, something we personally will never experience, well, that’s not so bad.  We can easily deal with any discomfort a mere idea might raise, make arguments that sound quite reasonable in support of how easily we can dispose of such hard questions as “is it right to torture?” and “isn’t it just your own tough shit that you’re a poor, powerless asshole?”

We can use powerful hypotheticals to support our hypothetical beliefs.  In support of torture we have a great one.  You’ve captured one of the terrorist bombers who knows where the ticking time bomb is hidden.   You see this on TV and in movies from time to time.  We’ve seen the evildoer planning this, grimly laughing about it, planting the bomb, we all know he’s the guy, and then, against all odds, Jack Bauer captures him.  Bauer knows the rules, put in place by privileged, high-minded legalistic pussies, but he also knows the stakes.   He knows he has a duty to do whatever it takes to get this evil bastard to tell him where the bomb is that is going to blow up thousands of innocent people.  He breaks the guy’s nose, for starters, to show he’s serious as cancer about saving those children.  Who could blame him?

In the real world this “ticking time bomb” scenario is very unusual, having the guilty terrorist shackled to a chair with hours or minutes until the bomb he planted goes off virtually never happens.   Yet, the “ticking time bomb” hypothetical is convincing enough for most people to reason “hey, they hate our freedom, they’ve already killed thousands of us, are currently beheading and crucifying others of us… better to err on the side of caution.  Sometimes you have to go to the dark side and do unthinkable things to protect higher values, and innocent lives.”

I always picture the “Worst of the worst” in Gitmo, most of whom have been quietly released over the years.   I imagine the ugly smirk on the face of the longtime enemy of the sixty year-old Afghani pediatrician as he walks away counting the $25,000 in tip money the Bush/Cheney Administration doled out from a huge wad of bills to those who turned in terror-related bad guys.   He is picturing his old enemy stripped naked and doused in piss, in a freezing cell, denying, ever more weakly, that he has any connection to Al-Queda or the Taliban or anyone else they are harshly questioning him about.   The laugh of that cynical, mercenary weasel who gave false witness against his neighbor is what I picture when I think of many of the people America tortured recently.  

Again, the “ticking time bomb” rationale is  good enough for those who feel due process is not due to bad people, or people we strongly suspect may be bad people, or people somebody said are bad.  It’s more than good enough for people who never need to think about  things like due process in the first place.   If the person is innocent, he has nothing to worry about while he’s being tortured, right?   Besides, we have a million other more pressing problems than what’s being done in our name, to protect us, in secret sites around the world.

I decided in the previous piece, duly objected to by Sekhnet who raised a loud alarm (she’d been a victim of a sick sibling’s bullying as a girl, doesn’t tolerate bullies and urged me to take down the offensive post), to show in action how easy it is to torture anybody you have the power to torture, if you have no qualms about doing it.  

The narrator believes he is making a point worth making by any means necessary.   I would argue that the narrator’s treatment of his guest was far less harrowing than a similar session at any of the “black sites” where people suspected of being America’s enemies were roughed up far worse.   Nonetheless, it was undeniably a horrific breach of one human’s duty of decency toward another, in its quiet, sick, immediately identifiable way.  I mean, everybody’s got to urinate after they drink a lot, that’s a pretty universal human need.  I, personally, would never do it to anybody, but I can clearly see it, and exactly how it would turn out.

As I wrote to Sekhnet: 

The point I was trying to make in the piece is that if someone is determined to be brutal, and is stronger than the other party (or well-armed), an individual, with all the best arguments in the world, with right completely on his side, cannot resist that brutality.   It’s that helplessness against inevitable violence that is the corrosive heart of torture.

The fictional wealthy lawyer who was subjected to this cruel psychological experiment would be rightfully filled with anger and hatred towards someone who could pose as his friend only to win a stalemated argument by forcing him to piss himself.  Totally unfair!  Inhuman.

Exactly the point I was trying to make about the cruel, merciless heart of torture.   Once you go to the dark side, and justify it with highflown moral arguments, hell’s the limit.  No?

The Torture Debate

Disclaimer from Sekhnet about this piece:

“I hated it.  ‘I hated it’ was an understatement.  I urge you to take this down, people will not realize it’s fiction.   They will think this is something that really happened, you acting like a complete asshole.  It’s horrifying, and very realistic, it’s plausible to people who never met you.  It seems to have been written from life.  They will think this is an actual story from your life, and it’s a sick story.   And the connection between the narrator’s torture debate with his colleague is not made to what the asshole narrator does to his guest. It’s just plain stupid.”

Enjoy.

Rest assured, this is a harmless work of complete fiction:

The Torture Debate

A classmate of mine from law school I hadn’t heard from in decades, a striving type who’d gone to work for “the man”, and “done very well”, called to check in with me, the great idealist.   Our career trajectories could not have gone much differently.   He was very wealthy, loved the new tax cuts, I was still idealistic, and paying off my student loans on the drip, drip, drip plan.   I got a couple of laughs out of him before he turned serious, began talking politics.

It wasn’t long before we found ourselves coming from our respective corners, the then-contentious subject of torture reared its ugly head, specifically the issue of Americans and foreign partners collaborating in the torture of terrorism suspects.   His points were predictable: the human right of one particular individual, or hundreds, not to be handled inhumanely did not equal the human rights of a little blonde girl not to get blown up by a fanatic on her way to school.

We eventually “agreed to disagree,” with appropriately fake phone smiles, about things like whether a stress position, forced enemas, a freezing cold cell or prolonged sleep deprivation were actually torture or merely forms of tough, but perfectly legal, ‘coercion’ to get vital information to save the lives of those innocents whose deaths from a terrorist’s bomb were imminent.   After we reached this lawyerly agreement I thanked him for calling and told him I had to get going.  He said he’d be in town the following week and asked if I’d be free to meet him at some point.  He cheerfully accepted my invitation to come by for a drink.

He liked the drink I served him very much, the last of a bottle of 12 year-old MacCallan’s.   We drank a toast with that lovely single malt, followed by a round of Johnny Walker Black, also good.  We chased the whisky with small glasses of cold seltzer and, being both suddenly thirsty, found ourselves musing over the peculiarly unambiguous American use of the word “drink.”

“I haven’t had a drink in ten years,” I said, setting up the old gag.

“Boy, you must be thirsty!” he said, smiling like he’d spiked the winning shot at the Canker, Boyle and Whitehead annual volleyball tournament.

“If you are, in fact, thirsty,” I said, “I can get you a delicious drink I just re-discovered.  I think you’ll find it quite refreshing.”  I brought him a tall, frosty glass of fresh squeezed pink grapefruit juice, very sweet, spiked with a splash of ice cold seltzer.  I had one too.  The delicious combination of the sweet liquid fruit and the cold bubbles really hit the spot.  He liked it very much, too.  I offered him a refill and he smiled, thanked me and drank that also.

When I came back from the bathroom I asked if he’d like one more.  Best to avoid dehydration while drinking whisky, I reminded him.  With a slightly sheepish smile he said he wouldn’t mind one more, if I had enough.   I assured him I did and brought him another tall, frosty drink.  We had another shot of whisky, too.

When he got up to go to the bathroom I stood, put a firm hand on his shoulder and restrained him.  

“No,” I said.

Unable to dislodge my hand he quickly became indignant.  He started using his words.  Being stronger than him, and determined, I was not obliged to pay the slightest attention to his arguments.   I would remain, for purposes of this particular dispute, the proponent of argumentum ad baculum, which the internet informs us is the fallacy committed when one appeals to force or the threat of force to bring about the acceptance of a conclusion

We were locked this way for over an hour, maybe two hours.   Every time he tried to get up, I’d press down with force.   The futility of this exercise of trying to stand, once it became clear that I was determined to argue like a “Might Makes Right” asshole,  finally overwhelmed him.   

After the ignored legal and moral arguments came the cursing and the attempts at intimidation.  When the cursing was done, the appeals to my common decency, the ethical standards of our shared profession, to our long ago friendship, began.  The consciences of my dead parents, who he’d met at graduation, were eventually dragged into his shameless appeal.  The appeal got so personal I had to stop looking at him.   Eventually, he was quiet.  

It took a moment before I realized my work was done.  His chair was in the middle of a dark lake.   His ride home would be embarrassing, his tailored leisure pants would need a dry cleaning and his expensive shoes appeared to have been ruined.  

Then the tears began, which was horrible to see, really.   Hosing down the tile floor afterwards, I knew that my old classmate now had every right not to call me next time he comes to New York.  Worse, I’ll never get to find out who won that long-running debate between us about the exact nature of torture.