Author Archives: oinsketta

Graveside Service

Today is the 59th birthday of an old friend who died last January 2.  A few days later I joined an amazingly large group of people who went out to the necropolis, snow-covered that day but generally looking like a golf course with a few trees, to help bury a very likable man.

Tomorrow, if the determined widow’s July 21 email requesting a favor and mentioning the date is still accurate, is the unveiling– the Jewish custom of returning to the grave about a year after the funeral and pulling a veil off the engraving that memorializes the departed’s life.  In this case, because of this particular burial ground, it will not be a tombstone unveiled, there are no raised markers there.  A plaque at the head or foot of Steve’s grave will be revealed, and his oldest friend, a rabbi and wonderful speaker, one of the best, will read the inscription and say a few words.  As our friend speaks the large crowd will nod, and sigh, and smile, and cry, and laugh, and they will go somewhere to eat and catch up and then, in their comfortable cars afterwards, life will continue on.

I didn’t agonize long before deciding I won’t be making the trip to the unveiling, outside Boston.  There are a variety of reasons, I suppose.  For one thing, nobody reached out to invite me, outside of the demanding widow’s slightly unreasonable July email requesting that I write, within the next few days, not about any specific memories from the time her husband and I actually spent a lot of time together, but about our conversations in the months before he died, after not seeing each other for decades.  At a loss, and unable to pull something together in the sudden and arbitrary four day window I was given, I didn’t write back and haven’t heard a peep since.

I think of their wedding, and how my friend stood next to his bride and sobbed as the rabbi performed the wedding ceremony, and I remember mumbling to a friend “it is the right of every man to choose the noose into which he slips his head.”  As far as I can tell Steve’s thirty year marriage to this demanding woman was a very happy one.  Though both were amputees from their respective cancers, they continued to have sex right up to the end.  I think that detail I’m probably not supposed to mention speaks remarkably of their love and devotion to each other. 

None of our small circle of old friends has contacted me about the unveiling, on the theory, I suppose, that I could just as easily contact them.  Fair enough.

An objective case could me made that it is difficult for people to reach out to me these days, as most people are reticent in the face of tragedy.   Steve and I once talked briefly about how many people were unable to call him during his decline, or, if they did call, talked of everything but his cancer, although he remained consistently upbeat and much more cheerful than anyone could have expected through the long crucifixion that was his cancer death.  I suspect something similar operates with me, though I feel like I’m as personable as I ever was.  Lurking, behind my deft evasions about how I’m doing, is the unmistakable and terrible tragedy of someone doomed to not truly live in the same world as everyone else, despite having all the tools to flourish in that world.  Like a dying man, the things I am wrestling with are not the carefree playful ones a hard-working, productive person likes to be surrounded with on a day off.

So, happy birthday, Melz.  You were a good man and I salute your success, your many talents, your loving wife and your two beautiful, talented daughters.  In other circumstances, I’d pay a call tomorrow.  But you, as well as anyone and better than most, know the deal, old friend.

Standing on the edge of the ditch

In a sense, my father, who once cried about the murders of our family but always denied its relevance to our lives, was right.   I never stood, nor did anyone I ever knew, on the edge of a ditch waiting for a murderer’s bullet.  Not when I was an eight year-old with a terrifying imagination and first learned of it did I actually stand on the edge of a ditch with the rest of the family waiting for the order to lie down and be shot.   Much less fifty years later when I am that much closer to my own natural end, after standing beside the open graves of loved ones many times now.  

To be truthful, these things happened thirteen years before I was even born.  I’ve never been machine gunned, or shot with even a small caliber gun, never been tied up with ropes or even been hungry for more than a few hours.  For crying out loud, I’ve never even been whipped in the face or beaten bloody.  My father took the manly stance that his dramatic young son was just sniveling, looking for pity in the echoes of the murder of our family back in some far away Ukrainian hellhole more than twenty years earlier.   Some of us never get over anything, it would seem.    

If I’d been a Black kid it would have been the fucking slave ships I’d have been whining about, the millions crowded below decks in airless holds, chained, driven insane, thrown to sharks if they grew too indignant.   Then I’d have been worked up about the hundreds of years when I could have been sold, whipped, sodomized like any flesh robot you could own.  It wouldn’t have soothed me to hear that life here for the former slaves was better after the Civil War, or that not millions, only thousands, of former slaves were ever beaten, raped or killed for being indignant.  And probably less than ten thousand, total, who were ever burned to death or hung from trees while crowds laughed and whooped and had picnics, sold body parts and photos as souvenirs.

My father would have said “for Christ’s sake, son, they put those Klansmen on trial in Mississippi for what they done to those boys down in Meriden.  The country is changing, for the better, it has changed a lot in your lifetime.”  It would have been peevish to tell him only one of the murderers of those Civil Rights workers would ever see the inside of a jail cell.  Or that sixty years after the Supreme Court ordered an end to segregation, schools would be as segregated as at the height of Jim Crow.  Hindsight, you know what they say about it.

“Is this really what you are thinking about at 4:36 a.m.?” asks a concerned voice.

“No, not at all.  I was thinking about this hours ago, but couldn’t shut off that great documentary about how they did the animated life of Graham Chapman I’d seen earlier…”

“Drawing again, I heard the scratching of your pens….”

“Yes, Sekhnet wandered in like a zombie, saw the animation on TV, looked at the drawings on the couch and said ‘Oh, God, he’s generating more papers…'”

“You can see her point.”

“Yes, I can certainly see her point.  These twenty thousand fucking drawings are a plague.  I do myself no favor drawing them.  But listen, do you mind if I get back to what I was thinking about?”

“Who are you asking?”

“Good point,” I say.

It was an accident of birth, and dumb good timing, to be born in a place and era when I was not forced to lie face down on top of dead bodies and wait for a bullet to end my life, as all of my grandparents’ families were.   Pure luck not to be living in a 2014 slum without sewers or any kind of toilets, where babies die by the truckloads from ragingly contagious excrement borne diseases that basic sanitation prevents.  Good fortune not be born in a place where children are dragged from their homes and forced to kill, or are ‘collateral damage’ statistics in drone attacks, or fated to live in neighborhoods where human predators attack, or if the criminals don’t get you the cops will.  A blessed accident of birth to be born wearing this face instead of one that invites real kicks and blows.   The kicks and blows I receive are gentle indeed compared to real ones.

“No hour is ever eternity, but it has its right to weep.” [1]  The pains we are given to deal with are painful enough for each of us, unbearable sometimes, though they’re not as painful as many more terrible things countless people are enduring at this very moment.  It doesn’t give us perspective, sadly, not to be standing on the edge of a ditch waiting for the order to fall in and be executed.  In a sense we are all standing on the edge of a ditch in a world where ditches for mass graves are dug all the time.

“Take this shovel, dig a hole deep as you want to be buried and stop crying and farting about it,” is about the worst thing any of us can hear.  In that childhood nightmare where Nazis in storm trooper uniforms were slicing through the screen of the back porch of our house to get at us I remember thinking “a lot of good those screens did” a second before I woke up with my heart pounding in terror.

That no idea, no matter how good or well-presented, can be sold in the marketplace of ideas without properly calculated marketing?  A female mosquito landing on your shoulder for a drink.  That unscripted candor has no place in a salesman’s pitch?  Please.  That’s as self-evident as the fact that all men are created equal and endowed by our creator with inalienable rights that may vary, according to circumstance, history and financial situation.    The world is just the world, although it is not always easy to keep perspective when the world is chanting something loudly and continuously enough to drown out all other thought.  

They were apparently banging drums and making a racket on the hill by the ravine to the north of Vishnevets those days in August 1943, to mask the cries and other sounds of the massacre.  The noise of the drums and lusty screaming, as you can imagine, was a fearful sound to the remaining ragged, starving citizens of Vishnevets, waiting their turn at the lip of the ravine.  

The world of competitive commerce and war constantly and insistently beats the drums, to drown out the silence that might lead to forgetting about the drumbeat of commerce and war and allowing people to recall matters of a deeper nature, to gain a more humane perspective.  

It’s possible, I suppose, that these two lusty drummings are only comparable in the mind of a madman.   Then again, many things in our world are the work of madmen.

 

 

[1] Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

Flick My Bic

Back when cigarette smoking was much more prevalent, still cool and not as sneered upon by society, there was a commercial often shown in movie theaters, oddly enough.  Before the movie started you’d have a jolly ad designed to drive you to the concession stand to buy fantastically expensive drinks, popcorn and candy.

Then, in a quick companion commercial, two Bic lighters would walk stiffly up to each other on the giant screen, poised like two rectangular plastic erections.  As each spoke the top of their metallic head would burst into flame.   The ad’s tagline was a jaunty “flick my Bic!”, and the distinct cadence of “suck my dick!” was not lost on any of the fifth grade boys in the audience.

I think not of the geniuses who came up with that memorable ad campaign but of the French genius capitalist who first realized you don’t need to make fine products that people will own with pride and take care of.   His breakthrough, which led to a vast fortune, was understanding that you could make a lot more money selling cheap disposable plastic pieces of shit to people increasingly addicted to convenience.  

Bic pens, a revolutionary skipping ballpoint refill in a clear plastic tube, were crap, sold by the billions, used briefly and simply tossed into landfill — no problem.  Bic later made disposable razors, sold a billion of them in no time.   Ditto the Bic you could flick, hold up flaming at the end of the concert to ask for an encore — when its fuel was done, toss it into the gutter.  You could flick all the Bics, actually.   Soon every capitalist in competition with Bic was making disposable products out of the cheapest plastic they could find — the race was on.    Sixty years later it’s hard to buy a pen, or anything else, that’s not disposable.

The philosophy was incredibly simple, liberating and lucrative.  Use the disposable piece of crap a few times and don’t worry about it — no need to refill or reuse it — just toss it in the garbage when it’s done and take the next brand new one from the pack.   Life is too short to be sentimental or worry about a future featuring millions of tons of indestructible plastic in landfills and oceans, or the loss of a sense of design, craft or pride in one’s product!

I would like to go back in a time machine to meet this genius, Marcel Bich, in much the same way, when I was ten, I used to fantasize about meeting Hitler.   Not to shake his hand, you understand.

The old Brooklyn baseball fan’s dilemma:  you are in an elevator with Stalin, Hitler and Walter O’Malley, the guy who moved the Dodgers from Ebbets Field in Brooklyn to LA.  You have a gun with only two bullets, what do you do?

Answer:  shoot O’Malley twice, make sure he’s dead.

Unfair joke, really, since it turns out O’Malley did everything possible to keep the team in Brooklyn — he got screwed by Robert Moses, an evil bastard who probably deserves to be in that elevator more than O’Malley does —  and finally took the team to greener pastures in Los Angeles rather than give in to Moses and relocate to Queens.

But I digress, and although it’s probably just as unfair to blame Marcel Bich for the devastation his billion dollar idea led to, I can only say:

Fleek my Beek, Baron Bich.

 

from Wolfgang Saxon’s 1994 NY Times obit:

Baron Marcel Bich, whose inexpensive Bic disposable pens, lighters and razors made him wealthy enough to sustain an 11-year quest for the America’s Cup, died on Monday in Paris. He was 79 and lived in suburban Neuilly-sur-Seine.

After fixing up a leaky shed in Clichy, a northern Paris suburb, after World War II, Baron Bich and a partner, Edouard Buffard, began turning out inexpensive penholders and pencil cases. Later he obtained the patent rights to a ball-point pen invented by a Hungarian, Ladislas Biro, and formed Societe Bic in 1953. (The baron’s name and the pen’s are pronounced beek in French.)

The inexpensive pens proved irresistible to consumers, beginning with the French. The corporation rapidly expanded, with factories in many countries turning out billions of pens sold singly or by the carton. Later he produced disposable razors and lighters. Annual Sales of $1.1 Billion

 

 

 

 

is the bass too loud?

The recurring cackle is by Robin Williams, from a 2010 interview during which Marc Maron, the interviewer, elicits this reaction.  I have remixed this improvised track several times.  Is the bass too loud on this mix?

NOTE:  You might want to disable or block the cookie monster at soundcloud.  If you’d like details, they are here — and please let me know if the details are complicated and if there’s some way I can block them on my end:

from soundcloud:  To find out more about cookies, including how to see what cookies have been set and how to block and delete cookies, please visit http://www.aboutcookies.org/.

embed experiment

Experimental embedding of an audio file.  Check it out, the opening scene of Shagsbee’s Julius Caesar, with a bit of crude improvisation by one of the rude mechanicals, and then some page flipping for a random soliloquy and some other chance dialogue.   Apparently recorded on July 3, 1998.

Welcome to our virtual world

Some kind of spambots, which are now ubiquitous, diverse and ingeniously specialized, land on my website from time to time and leave me comments, designed to get me to click on links they send me.   Posing as appreciative comments about my writing, the kind of comment most people are tickled to receive, they’re sent to generate hits on the sites they are promoting.   Many of the rare “likes” I get for these posts lead me back to enterprising web entrepreneurs who describe how wonderful it is to write from Bali, Copenhagen, Goa, Prague, Florence as they make excellent money working when and where they want, writing for the internet.  

All you need to do is create a blahg, a squeeze page, I think they call it, with affiliate links, backlinks, sidewinder links, they write using a jargon alien to me, but apparently very simple to master.  They will teach you everything you need to know.  Master this surprisingly simple craft and you can sit on a beach, or hotel room or in a cafe, anywhere in the world, and spend a few hours a day writing and watching substantial amounts of money flow into your electronic bank account.  A few changes of underwear, your laptop and international chargers and power cords and you’re on your way.  You will also find yourself losing weight, flab turning to muscle, meeting cool people, having tons more sex, laughing more, eating better, sleeping better, waking refreshed to have breathtaking adventures every day. 

Funny or not, I get almost no direct comments on this blahg but several every week on the blahg for the upstart nonprofit I am trying to start up.  The spambots for some reason home in on that mission driven nonprofit site rather than this gratuitous one.  Many of their comments are in laughably machine-translated non-English advertising some very weird and specific products involving commercial concrete removal, aluminum, real-estate, diet pills.  But I’ve had variations on this one a few times now, usually in response to posts of pictures or videos that have virtually no written content on them:

Comment:

I read a lot of interesting content here.

(Actual interesting content on this one was:  

If he doesn’t start long jumping right away, click on him.   

This neat leap was animated on 3-10-14  by a ten year-old at the Ella Baker School in NYC, using the amazing reference photos of Eadweard Muybridge taken in the 1880s.)

Probably you  spend a lot of time writing, i know how to save you a lot of time, there is an online tool that creates high quality, google friendly posts in minutes, just search in google  – k2seotips unlimited content

Think of the hours I could save!   I could use those hours to learn about and master affiliate marketing and try my program, untroubled by any funding concerns, two or three weeks at a time, in Africa, Asia, Iceland, spend the hours every day learning languages, mastering new musical instruments, collaborating with local musicians on every continent, working on my six pack abs.  While high quality google friendly content is generated for me to maximize my audience and lead to my almost instant success in anything I try.  What an increasingly wonderful world it is!

Perhaps my favorite recent comment is one I saw on the site of a business woman who occasionally has a spambot send me a message letting me know that she thought my thoughtful post was awesome and that I should check out what she’s up to.   Clue number one on her site is her description of how the free site had been taken down once because she had violated the terms of use by promoting her businesses on the site, and that she had figured out a beautiful workaround she was generously sharing for others who wish to use the free platform for free, and powerful, advertising.

A commenter on that post referred to her, perhaps not entirely unfairly, as a “cunt”.  The next commenter took that first one to task for saying something so harsh about someone who was trying to do something good.   The first commenter wrote back, not without a certain hard humor.  Other commenters joined, but after a while it was only the first guy, the one who’d called the scheming businesswoman a “cunt”, who was answering everybody.  

Since high quality google friendly content (the post you’re reading now, actually) was being generated for me by robots of my own, I had the leisure to read the entire string of comments, and eventually came to a wonderful exchange that made the entire exercise worth more than I can say.  I share it here:

A man who identified himself as a pastor wrote to the woman who’d thought his post was awesome and had invited him to visit her site.  The pastor thanked her humbly and profusely for her appreciation of his writing.  It was a wonderful thing, he said, to have one’s poetry and philosophy appreciated and she was clearly a bright and discerning woman and also, in his humble opinion, the creator and keeper of a very interesting and rewarding site that he would be visiting again soon.  And a fine writer herself, if he might say so.

The next comment was from the clever trollish commenter who was the only one answering anything directed to the site.  It is perhaps the best comment on this whole blogging business I’ve seen:

Look, “Pastor”. I’m the only one reading these comments and responding. There is no blogger here anymore. She set up an automated system that goes around and clicks LIKE on people’s wordpress posts. And, let me guess – that is how you found this blog. I’m sorry to disappoint you, but no actual people read or like your posts.

 

 

 

Uncanny Echoes of Babel

The following are from survivor accounts in the Vishnevets Yiskor book. They sound uncannily like the characters and narrators in Isaac Babel’s wonderful, terrible tales (in the incomparable Walter Morrison translation). Many of the worst, and the best, of these finely compressed little stories are set in benighted, bloody little towns like Vishnevets.   

My grandmother fondly recalled the Red Army men who were billeted at her family’s home in Vishnevets.  I think she said they were Cossacks, who were generally White and not Red, and rarely friends of the Jews. Babel’s Cossacks fought for the Revolution, and eventually came to tolerate the Jewish Babel, though occasionally raping or killing Jews here and there.

This doomed pregnant woman’s plea is right out of Babel, who may well have been in Vishnevets with the Red Cavalry at some point during the Revolution.  
 
“Vasye,” she said. “Look, Vasinke, look at my condition. I’ve never harmed you. Have mercy on me and my baby, have mercy, Vasinke.”  
 
(Vasye did not have mercy)
 
And this grimly poetic narration, right out of Babel, by a nameless survivor: 
 
One day I stood by the window looking through a crack and saw a young man around the age of 17 returning from work. He left the group, approached the fence, and threw a package over into the ghetto.

A Ukrainian saw it and grabbed the youth – the boy. And the boy didn’t realize that he had seen him. I knew the Ukrainian; he was a reptile but not one of the worst. I called him.

He came to me, and I said to him, “Vaske, what are your intentions?”

And he said to me, “He’s done something that deserves punishment by death.”

I asked him to give him a fine. Punish him with money and let him go, strongly warn him, and in this way, he would satisfy his “conscience” as keeper of the law. But he held on his own and explained to me in a beautiful way:

 “You have to understand, he doesn’t have any money. If I punish him with a fine, he’ll have difficulty paying it. Why should I enforce something that will make his life more difficult and cause him trouble with the Germans? It’s better for me to kill him. It’ll be a lot better for him.”

   
 

And so it goes

When I was in High School my father clipped out a very short piece by Kurt Vonnegut published in the New York Times.  It was about how to write, and it was excellent.  He began with the advice to always give the thing you are working on a title.   This is the first step in framing what you want to say, and I have found it helpful.   I don’t recall much else from his excellent advice, but that was help enough.

(Spent the last half hour searching the web in vain for that piece.  If I ever turn it up, I’ll post it here.)

I have been reading a biography of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. called “And So It Goes”.  Engaging tome.   I am reading about how diligently Vonnegut worked at his craft, how tirelessly he pursued a paid writing career.  In passing I learn that he apparently played the piano well enough to execute Chopin’s Funeral March as the new owners walked up to the decrepit house he was selling.  This is the second mention of him at the piano as an adult, with no explanation of how he knew how to play.   During a time he should have been finishing a novel he’d long ago gotten an advance for, and when he was still completely unknown, he took a few days to build an 18 foot sculpture at a Boston International Airport restaurant.  Huh?  He took time to add many creative touches to his home in West Barnstable.   We have no inkling where these skills came from but we learn that he was handy, he could build things, he had many creative interests.  But mostly, he wrote.

I am reading about his struggles, including his bouts of depression, and trying not to think too hard about my own struggles.  I tell myself there are lessons to be learned from Vonnegut’s life, things I can use.

“One thing you could use is his discipline and drive,”  a voice announces, “the ability to soldier through terrible moods, fear, rejection, and keep producing something you can SELL,” a voice announces.  “He wrote every day from 6 a.m. to 10 a.m., no matter what.  When he worked full time, he woke up early to write and wrote at night.  Another thing you should keep in mind:  you are no Kurt Vonnegut.” 

True enough.   Vonnegut was, from the beginning, a writer with his eye on making a living.  He wrote what he could sell, changed his ideas, often grudgingly, to sell short stories to glossy magazines at a time when selling three or four stories could provide a decent year’s income.   It was decades before he was able to write what he really wanted to write. Decades before he got any respect as a writer, something that troubled him immensely during those long years.  He was, from the beginning, a working writer, struggling to put food on his family, as a former president once observed was a challenge many Americans step up to.

Write with an eye for what the market will pay you for.

Write to one person — the one who loves what you have to say.  Come to the point, don’t waste a second of her time being clever.   Write what will touch her heart, make her laugh, and then, cause the tears to flow.

And so it goes.

 

Fair Play

My sister, raised in the same war zone I came up in, vowed that her children would not grow up to be fearful people.   Her conscious goal was to instill confidence and agency in them.  They both seem to be doing fine in that regard.

She expressed the great terror she felt recently blinking at the prestigious job offered to her daughter through the lens of learned maternal fear.  She reported that her “fear-based” worldview left her paralyzed, nauseated, blinded to the many auspicious facts about this prestigious job offer.  I reminded her of her goal with her kids and how it seems to have worked out well.   I predicted her daughter would do fine in that 100 year-old Florida magnet school with the award winning jazz band and debating team, that they wouldn’t have offered her the job if they didn’t intend for her to succeed.

“I want to thank you so much for what you said the the other day.  I can’t tell you how much it meant to me.”   I told her that anyone looking at the facts, and knowing her, could have said the same.  Apparently nobody did.  I was glad my comment made her feel good.

We commiserated about how aggravating, and gallingly common, it is not to have even a cursory response to something we’d put time and effort into.

“I don’t know how you can continue to do what you are doing, with no pay and, especially, with no appreciation for the hard work you do,” she told me sympathetically, before promising to look over the last few things I sent her, particularly the curriculum, and give me some feedback.

“I have a day off tomorrow and I’ll check gmail and look at what you sent me, and I’ll send you my two cents,” she said.

That’s what she said, a couple of days ago.