Author Archives: oinsketta

A Riddle

Began a second round of workshops today in school number three, a place where we worked in the fall.  It was bitterly cold out, and only a handful of kids showed up, but they were happy, and calm, and eager to animate.  Within moments they were “in the zone” as my assistant put it.  The energy in the room is very calm, yet alert, everyone is coming up with ideas, trying things, helping each other.  It’s a lovely thing to be part of when the kids are working that way, which they often are.

The director came in, watched the speeded up 10 hours of animation in three minute clip I’d put together and felt moved to give a little speech.   She told the kids how proud she was of the work they’ve been doing in animation.  She said that since they’d had such a good time, and done such cool work, they had asked Mr. Eliot back for the spring term and that she was looking forward to the great things they were going to do.  It was very touching and it came across without a whiff of falseness.   When I told Sekhnet what she’d said, Sekhnet told me I ought to write her a note and tell her how much I appreciated it.  I should, I shall.

But here’s the riddle for you.   I am not happy about the calm, productive session, the new kids jumping right in and animating, the experienced kids showing them how to use the camera, etc.   I have a sick feeling in my stomach from a voice mail I had as I reached the session today.   Thinking it might be from my assistant, who hadn’t shown up yet, I listened to it.  

Voice of the absentee director of the program at the other school, the first place I did the workshop, the place I am hoping to add a post-production workshop in a few weeks.  The voice of a caviling, quibbling person who has never been in the workshop to observe how it runs.   She went on with a list of things I need to do better: supervise the kids in the lunchroom before the session begins and make sure they don’t leave a mess, don’t let the children use the materials of the teacher who is obliged to give over her room to the workshop on Thursdays, she’s very tidy and has been complaining about this and that every week, even though I have an assistant it doesn’t mean that she is responsible for making sure the kids behave, that she knows I love the kids’ creativity but that the school has standards and that discipline must be maintained at all times, that she understands there was a fist fight in the workshop and that I must intevene when such things take place… the message went on for three minutes in this vein.

And I have a sick feeling in my lungs, a kind of fight or flight reflex.  Gone are all the good feelings of today, all that remains is the fussy bullshit of a clueless person making demands that are, in most cases, ridiculous.   There was no fist fight in the workshop, I saw a kid starting to jump ugly with another kid and immediately intervened to calm things.  I don’t let the children use the materials of the fussy teacher whose room we invade every Thursday at three.  I don’t leave a mess, and this woman’s administrator and my assistant can both attest to these things.

This sick feeling in my lungs is clearly an injury from childhood.  Being unfairly blamed for things that are none of my fault.   Sickens me, even as an adult on the edge of old age.   I think about the odds of such a person being in charge of whether or not my program moves ahead or not– the odds are pretty good.  Most adminstrators are like this woman, demanding, unreasonable, eager to fix blame wherever they can.  

In a sense it’s the reason I launched this program, to give a kid somewhere a fighting chance of spending a few hours not supervised by someone like this.   Allowing a few breaths of air into the lungs of a kid being pumped full of exhaust all day, fed Ritalin so he can sit still, punished for not being able to abide mind-numbing boredom and the heavy boot of factory-style conformity.   The heavy boot of factory-style conformity is the order of the day, to be sure, but it is a very fucked up order that leads to very little good and a great deal of bad.  

The riddle abides, why can I not shake this feeling of doom?

Ahimsa is a struggle, no doubt about it

On the ahimsa front, it often seems like thankless work, except in looking back on how much worse it might have been without the attempt to stay mild.  

It is always better not to put the other person on the defensive.  Defensiveness makes a person prone to lash out, rattler-like, and catch you with a fang.  This, in turn, leads to the reflex to crush the serpent’s head, to their countermove, to your ass getting bitten again.  

So even if you kill the provoker, you need to get to the emergency room pronto, Tonto.  There is no winner in such a game, though it is played out countless times every minute around the world.

I am glad every time I’m able to avoid a confrontation with some asshole who desperately needs to have their ass kicked and their face shoved into it.  But it’s hard work, Brownie, for sure, and seems thankless much of the time.  It’s like water dripping and making an impression in stone, the progress imperceptible, except looking back over a long period of time.

That said, it may be the most valuable work we can do, for ourselves and for the world.

The Corporate State

I have been fond, in an involuntary, Tourretic kind of way, of stating that the Nazis won World War Two.    There is a convincing argument to be made, the Nazis were, after all, on the forefront of many of the innovations now routinely used by those who rule the world today.   I would back this up in a scholarly paper, if there was time, if there wasn’t so much else to do.   (Similarly, there’s a scholarly paper on the shameful history of not only American slavery, and genocide, but the more than century long continuation of these things, under different names, during a reign of violence and mayhem slyly winked at by the Supreme Court.)

Please stop me if I told you this already.    Adolf Hitler, one of the most famous mad men in history, wrote a seldom read (but often purchased) manifesto called My Seven Year Struggle Against the Lying Race Poisoning Traitor Jews and Acchhhh! the Burning Slaver on my Rabid Dog Tongue! Fuck You, I’ll Kill you all, You Fucking Niggers… shortened, by a savvy editor, to “My Struggle” or Mein Kampf.

I tried to read it once.  Each sentence is a page long, with the verb at the very end.  Some sentences are longer and more convoluted.  If a dog with rabies could dictate its thoughts to an idiot with pen in hand (a loyal believer named Rudolf Hess, imprisoned with the future Fuhrer in Landsberg Prison after an unsuccessful putsch in 1923), the book that it produced might be Mein Kampf.  Hitler is reputed to have written a short crystal clear primer on propaganda, included in Mein Kampf, and I began combing through the lice and maggot infested prose to find it.

Et, voila.  The Fuhrer wipes the foam off his lips, takes a breath, and proceeds, in ten or fifteen cogent pages, to tell exactly how it should be done.   Frighten people, appeal to their desire to be protected, tell whatever lies are needed to make them hate, enrage them, focus their rage on enemies they can then be sent to destroy.   His right hand in propaganda, Josef Goebbels, Reich Minister of  Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, was very much down with the program, and an innovator in his own right.

First thing: control every organ of mass media.  Newspapers, radio, film, literature, theatre, put a Nazi sympathizer in  control every where, to root out all non-Nazis.

Second thing:  repeat the bullshit over and over and over.  Where there is no other voice, your explanations, no matter how lame or demonstrably false, will generally carry the day.

Third thing:  find and root out anyone who does not buy the stinking tissue of lies you are selling.  Take these people and make grotesque examples of them.  Nothing like a little dramatic public violence against them to get the attention of other would-be heroes.

I know, you are thinking it is a big, simplistic leap from a group of madmen with a murderous agenda to the super-wealthy leaders of our modern global corporate world.  Certainly the leaders of the oil industry, the financial sector, the global corporations that drive the world economy are not comparable to Hitler, Goebbels, Himmler, Goring.  Certainly.  Only a hyperperbolist would compare Dick Cheney, let’s say, to Hermann Goring.  If thousands, or even hundreds of thousands, are killed and millions displaced violently advancing the goals of corporations, it’s not as if they PLANNED to murder all these people or did it deliberately.  Big difference, no?

But here’s the thing:  you have a society that values only one thing, they call it “free enterprise” or the “free market”.  The only thing free about it is the freedom of those on top to keep most of the profit it produces.  So instead of a vision of a pure world polluted by those who must be destroyed– Jews, Communists, Freemasons, Homosexuals, Gypsies, People named Dave, you have a vision of a world of abundant but limited resources where the few are entitled to own everything they can acquire, and it is nobody’s problem if most of the world is dispossessed, if children die of hunger, if preventable disease kills millions, if the world itself is destroyed by pollution.

What does the mass media show?  When it presents the issue at all — freedom vs. tyranny and our American Exceptionalism.    Our mass media features distraction, stylized zero-sum competition and advertisements.  The news features stories that excite passion and resist reasonable discussion.    Every view, no matter how idiotic, is presented as being of equal value, thus real debate is stymied in the name of an absurd version of “fairness.”  And then, in case you are actually thinking about any of this,  a loud, attention grabbing word from our sponsor.  While you are watching one show there is an animated crawl on the bottom of the screen, an ad for another show you should watch, but there is no time to squeeze it in with paid advertising, so you cram it into the bottom of the show other sponsors are already paying for.  Lack of campaign finance laws?  No problem, political ads are a boon to television stations that are supposed to serve a public interest function for the privilege of having a broadcast license.  A quaint notion nobody gets excited about any more.  There’s too much money to be made!!!

What happens to those insiders who, at great personal risk, expose the details of and decry the unjust, illegal state of things?  These are no longer considered whistle blowers performing a valuable service to democracy.   We try them as traitors under a 1917 statute created to smash dissent as Woodrow Wilson was gearing up for America’s entry into World War One.  A statute that carries the death penalty.   Nothing gets the attention, or chills the blood, like the possibility that if you lose in court, you will be killed by the state.

I believe it was Dr. Goebbels who stated that the man of the future would be the ‘corporate man.’   A kid in the animation workshop, seeing a picture of Woody Guthrie playing a guitar with the words “This Machine Kills Fascists” painted across it, asked me what a fascist was.   “A facist is someone who wants to control everything that you do,” I told him.  I think that’s right.  Fascists know Best, as the sitcom of the fifties made clear.

I am clearly in a foul mood, otherwise why would I be sputtering this way?   Still, there is something to ponder in this:  we are living in a corporate state with all that entails.   President Obama has said from the beginning that it will require millions pushing him to enact any kind of progressive agenda.  What he didn’t say, because he is a smart man and a skilled politician, is that it will require many, many millions to push back against the prerogatives and privileges of those very wealthy persons and entities who funded his insanely expensive election campaigns.  How much say does your $20 contribution buy, compared to a plate that cost someone $5,000?

As every citizen of a corporate state knows: you get what you pay for.  Sometimes.

Cracked Vessels

We are sturdy and loyal, sometimes, and do each other great turns once in a while.   We are dependable, sometimes, when we are around, and attentive, and we can do a lot of good for each other with very little effort sometimes.   We will not always save your life at the moment you need it, necessarily, and we will die ourselves.  We do the best we can but we are cracked vessels.

An impatient, immature God, picking me up for some use, exclaims “cracked vessel!” and unhands me like I was a scalding hot tea cup with no handle, before I can burn the minor diety.

“You are a scalding hot tea cup with no handle,” Sekhnet pipes, like the constantly singing bird she is.    (“Oh, no,” thinks Sekhnet, “leave me out of your weird fantasy scape”)   I thnk of each one of them, each vessel I’d lift to my dry lips for a drink– cracked.  

Makes me love them no less, these old vessels, but at the same time it fills me with unspeakable sorrow.

Breathe

Though events and feelings may mercilessly conspire, pressing in, it is always a good practice to remember to breathe.   Not the breathing we do automatically, autonomically, but a slow, deep, deliberate breath through both nostrils deep into the lungs and out like the one I’m going to take a moment to draw right now.  

It is often forgotten, and I had to check on-line just now to be sure, that one of the meanings of inspiration is drawing breath into the lungs.  Nothing, I believe, is more inspiring than that.

in·spi·ra·tion     noun

1.  an inspiring or animating action or influence: I cannot write poetry without inspiration.
2.  something inspired, as an idea.
3.  a result of inspired activity.
4.  a thing or person that inspires.
5.Theology

a.  a divine influence directly and immediately exerted upon the mind or soul.
b.  the divine quality of the writings or words of a person soinfluenced.
6.  the drawing of air into the lungs; inhalation.
7.  the act of inspiring; quality or state of being inspired.
When things are heaviest, and darkest, pause to take as many slow, life giving inspirations as you need to keep going up the treacherously slippery hill that is life sometimes.

Scoundrel’s Refuge

I’m fighting here, back to the wall, pen in hand, as always, and feeling a bit desperate as I am unable, day after day lately, to catch up on my sleep.  Eyes pop open after a couple of hours and nothing I do seems to get me close to a good night’s sleep.  I wonder idly why I am writing here, to what end do I post something like this to a website?   Maybe it’s because it forces me to focus and write as well as I am able.   Damnfino.

What do I have to write?  Nothing at the moment, eyes unfocused, legs restless.  But I am thinking of a tiny soul winging its way upwards against the immenseness of a million universes, a billion, and wondering about our lives down here.  The only answer might be music, and that tightens my throat, thinking about decades of music unplayed.

When my friend’s father was dying of cancer that ravaged his once strong body, my friend gave this supremely practical man a book called “Sing Your Song” or something like that.    The thesis of the book was that one needs to sing one’s song, and that not singing it leads to bitterness and cancer.   My friend agonized after giving his father the book, which he felt his father might interpret as blaming him for his cancer.  Then a call came from his father.

“Mike, I read that book you gave me,” he said, as my friend braced himself.  “He’s right.  I’m going to sing my song.”   A few days later they were on a fishing boat in Florida with their father’s old friend, his father sick as hell, and happy.

There are silver linings everywhere, for those with the life talent to extract them.   For the rest of us, shapeless misery that dogs us as we grieve.

Bereft

Hard to imagine, in a fog of sorrow that sucks hope out of sight, that a day will come when everything will appear again in its place.    

A too fast turn at a tricky juncture on a slippery road led to a steering column through the chest and instant death to a man younger than I am now.  This was decades ago.  A poet named Tony Velona wrote to the widow:  everything is in its place.  The poem:

All is well.
All is as it should be.
the universe is always in perfect order.
 
All is:
The merest molecule,
the mightiest mountain,
subject to change.
 
We rejoice.
we weep.
Okay,
we care.
 
We will endure.
We will flourish.
 
We are made strong
We belong– 
each
to the other.

The Whole Person

In death, for the first time, generally, we can see a person’s life for what it truly was.   The journey complete, the entire life emerges more clearly than it can ever be seen while it is in progress.

Melz, it becomes clear after his death, was the remarkable individual that none of his friends had ever seen angry, or bitter, or speaking badly of anyone.   I only knew one other person, Howie Katz, who this could be said for.

Melz was uniquely talented, and unassuming, something of an introvert, and possessed a rare grace.   He played the piano as easily as we the living breathe, like a fish swims or a bird flies.  He coaxed beautiful music out of the keys with Fred Flintstone fingers.  

That much we all knew when he was alive, but the ethereal gracefulness of that thick fingered, heavy limbed man is what remains with me now.

A Question of Framing

Look at it this way: either she saved my life or almost fucking killed me.  Or both.  All a question of framing.

A friend had emailed me, just before we left snow covered NY heading for snow covered Boston for Melz’s funeral, urging us to be careful on the road.   I thought little of the warning at the time, seeing traffic on the Grand Central Parkway traveling at its normal speed and the service road dry, responded glibly that I’d ask the driver to keep it to 80 mph.
But, lo, only a few hours later, after a stop for lunch in a Connecticut diner, I had reason to ponder the prudence of his concerned comment  after S, at 80 mph and accelerating, hit a sheet of nicely camoflagued ice in the lane next to the HOV lane and did a donut next to said HOV lane on interstate 84, which is 5 lanes wide at that point, miraculously missing the white car in front of us as we swerved back into traffic, about a foot away as we went into the spin, we stopped for a nanosecond facing the oncoming traffic before S veered to miss one oncoming car, we swiveled again, maybe 180 degrees, somehow no horns blaring as this bullfight at 80 mph went on, no time for that, and then managed to lunge across the last two lanes of fast moving traffic to the shoulder.  Closest to death I’ve ever been.   Thank God none of the oncoming drivers were texting or studying their GPS screens at the time.  
 
S later told how her father, insane ex-Marine Murray, used to take S and her sister to frozen parking lots to practice over and over what to do when you accelerate and hit ice, how to get out of a skid, how to stay cool when you need to have every bit of focus on your survival.  He did this at least 10 times, til he was satisfied both girls could do it.  “We owe our lives to Murray,” I concluded.  There is no other explanation for how we survived.
 
On the way back I saw on southbound 84 that not only was it a miracle and testament to Murray’s effective training and S’s reflexes and instincts that we survived, and extreme good luck, the hand of Ha Shem, and Melz’s hand, but that S, in a hurry for no earthly reason, (we could arrive any time between 5 and 8 and she’d picked 5 to obsessively aim for– we arrived at 5:06), had been an insane idiot the moment before and, accelerating to illegally enter the HOV lane across an unmaintained lane (unmaintained because of double white lines and herringbones, under the thin coating of snow over a sheet of ice five miles long) at roughly 85 mph, had almost killed all of us.  
 
No wonder she was so shaken today and kept hugging me.  They left right after the burial, I drove back with other friends after the shiva call on Melz’s family.  It guess it must have dawned on her more and more overnight that it was not a case of “you saved my life. It’s a miracle!” as I had constantly been framing it, nearly as much as “you almost killed me on the way to a funeral, you fucking asshole!” which is probably a much more accurate assessment of what actually happened.  
It is all a question of framing, I suppose, and how much mercy we employ while putting things into frames.

From the Mouths of Pishers

I got the news of Melz’s death just after noon on Thursday January 2.   At 3:02 I was sitting on the floor in a circle of boys, ages 8-10.  As I calmed them and opened the laptop to show them three, yea, three new pieces of animation, I mentioned that if I seem sad or not myself today it’s because I got the news three hours ago that an old friend had died.
 
“I’m sorry,” said Amza, 8.
 
“How old was he?” asked someone else.
 
“He’d just turned 58,” I said and a chorus of children said “that’s young!”
 
From the mouths of pishers…