Author Archives: oinsketta

Peak Experience

We experience countless things each day.  A person with a great memory, which I am often reputed to have, might remember a few grains of these experiences.  Certain experiences are unforgettable, when they involve our senses directly.   This cuts both ways, great memories and terrible ones, both enduring.  But when things are exciting, fun and spontaneous they inspire us, they stick in our memory.  That is because these are the moments when we are most fully alive.

Your soul is on fire, poet, but there is nothing we can do for you but throw spears.

Peak experience is when you operate intuitively against the beat, chose notes and flavors that have not been tried before.   Seasoning a new dish with fresh herbs from the garden, a different combination, delicious.   Hitting the cowbell perfectly against the side of the beat.  The colors spread thickly in a perfect brushstroke gradient, that succulent array of sunset blues going dark.   The spatula of a hand, bending supplely against beats from the Indian Ocean.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, please send me an email.   I will in turn send you a rhythm track to improvise to.   You can then send me the youTube link and I’ll add an animation to it.   These times are in many ways hellish times, but the technology is getting fucking amazing. 

Q & A for TED Fellowship application

How would being a TED Fellow directly help you in your mission?

I’m glad you asked!   I am in the strange position of having a program that works very much the way I drew it up, as long as I am doing 99% of the necessary work, much of which I have no experience in.  Children are really engaged with it, I’ve simplified the process so that children can work quickly, and the possibilities of the program are vast.  But unless I meet the right cohort of people to help me expand the program, the entire project is on very thin ice.  In addition the project is wearing a Hawaiian shirt and cargo shorts, with no shoes.  Try sliding around on thin ice in that outfit, TED.  I imagine that I will be energized and inspired by my contact with other TED Fellows and might, directly or indirectly, meet the people I need to meet to let this successful program expand and begin working with its target kids.

Why are you typing instead of going shopping for food before you have to go to a funeral?

While I don’t believe this is strictly a question for the TED application, it is the best one to ask at the moment.  I would have to think about this one.   A conundrum, a riddle wrapped in an enigma.  Damn.  Funny as hell, as shit, as enhanced interrogation and root canal.  Funny as the party line, as idiocy itself.  I have no answer for this.  It is a symptom of something much more serious, something I dare not consider.

Any more questions, wise ass?

Not at the moment.  No, ma’am.  I’ve got about 15 minutes to get ready to get out of here.

People Are Funny

Art Linkletter had a show of that name back in the 1960s,  Who is he?  Ax Wikipedia.  I remember what he looked like, but little else about him.  Except that he had a show called People Are Funny and also a daughter who took acid, lysergic acid diethylamide and, while on an LSD trip, jumped to her death out of a window.  You can imagine her believing she could fly and smiling as she took off.

People are funny, I have noticed the same thing.  My grandmother, while she was dying of cancer, got a call from an old friend who’d been avoiding her.  She gushed like a little girl talking to this woman.   “I miss you!  Come over any time, sweetheart, I’d love to see you.  You know, cancer is not contagious, you can’t catch it.  Please, come, I’d love to catch up with you.”   I didn’t hear the woman’s replies, I’m sure she was telling my grandmother how delighted she’d be, how she was looking forward to it.  My grandmother chirped a few more things and hung up the phone.  As she slammed the phone into the cradle she said “I hate the guts from that woman!”   I had no doubt about that.

You hurt most the ones you feel the most comfortable with, isn’t that funny?   Few abusive people go out and abuse strangers, it’s generally those in their lives who will take the abuse, one way or another, that they prey on.  If I act like an asshole to someone who loves me, well, there’s much less chance of being punched in the face, for one thing.  But why do we do it?

Because, get ready for it, get ready for it—- People Are Funny!  Maybe not ha-ha ROTFLMAO funny, but funny as hell itself.  Funny as hell.  That’s pretty funny, eternal damnation and endless torture!   Whee.  I have a friend who says “funny as shit”, which is another good one.  Nothing more hilarious than a nice pile of shit next to you on the couch!

I had more things to write here, but you must excuse me, I’m feeling a little funny.

 

Living In My Own Head

An imaginary application to participate in TED talks as a 2013 TED Fellow:

TELL US ABOUT YOURSELF

We take this portion of the application very seriously. Please take the time to answer the questions thoughtfully, with enough detail to help us understand who you are. 

All responses are limited to 1500 characters except where noted.

What is your current primary activity? *

 

I am the facilitator of a child-run animation workshop and the Creative Director of the nonprofit wehearyou.net.  Our mission is to carefully listen to the children’s ideas and concerns and to encourage them to express these things in animation.   And they do.  The children set up the camera stand and lights for each session, create the animation, shoot all the frames, input them to a computer, edit the frames, make the soundtrack.   There is virtually no creative input from adults, whose role is to keep an eye on the clock and make sure things run smoothly.  Being this hands-off is hard work, too, and requires a high degree of calmness, alertness, discipline, attentiveness and humor.  Also, perhaps most importantly, flexibility on the fly.    

In addition to my work as lead facilitator of the workshop I am also the organization’s Director of Development, recruiter, fundraiser, corresponding secretary, trainer, marketing and branding officer, writer, webmaster, social media director, head of outreach, bookkeeper.   I also do the final edit of the weekly animations and mix the soundtracks.   (1,068 characters)

 

What are you best known for? *

Oddly enough, cool under fire, sang froid.  I’m aided in this by an overdeveloped sense of irony acquired during constant warfare in the contentious family of my childhood.   I am known for several skills and talents that I’ve made no efforts to exploit financially, to the puzzlement of many.  I am considered an inventive draftsman, I play guitar and keyboards and arrange, I’m a clear, concise and sometimes moving writer.  I am also known for dreaming and my many ideas, which I have never hesitated to share.  Also for a sometimes uncanny memory. 

In the professional realm, I am best known for variations on the above.  As a subsistence lawyer I was probably best known for my deadpan style, quickness of tongue and odd grace dancing before judges, especially when they were being disrespectful.   As a teacher I was probably best known for my easy rapport with children, candor and quickness of retort.  I also gave a high priority to the students’ creativity and took pains not to pour water on any idea they expressed.  Parents and colleagues often remarked on how creative my classes were.

As a young man I was probably best known for my angry words.   I have been transforming myself into a more deliberate, milder person.   A quick, cutting response may be fun to make, and satisfying in the moment, but one learns (with luck) that it does little to advance a real conversation.  I am known for being someone you can have a meaningful conversation with.  I place a high value on real conversation.

 

What other achievements (not only academic) would you like to share? *

As hinted at above, my achievements are difficult to quantify, in worldly terms.   My biggest achievement to date has been my ongoing dedication to my beliefs as embodied in wehearyou.net.  My creation of and involvement with this program, which I consider radical and sorely needed, has necessitated many positive changes in my thinking and action.  

I’ve come to understand that most people are mostly preoccupied most of the time and that the modern attention span is very short.  I’ve had to learn things I’d never thought about.   I’ve had to learn, for example, that most people don’t give a rat’s ass about whether or not poor children in Harlem make animation.   I am, after a long digestive period, able to keep those perceptions in mind without letting them deter me or slow my progress.

My mission is to encourage people to listen to and respond to each other gently.  It’s a life-affirming thing for a child to be listened to attentively by an adult, to have a moment to dream out loud uninterrupted.  While this is a sadly rare thing (for anyone of any age) in our hyper digital world of virtual connection and overloaded distraction, the program and I have made some very encouraging first steps in this direction.

 

Beyond your work and studies, what are you passionate about? (e.g. hobbies, causes, activities, issues — please do not talk about your work in this section) *

I am passionate about playing music, listening and preserving the spaces in music that are where the action is.   I am passionate about improvising and helping to bring out the creativity of others.   I play the guitar, mostly, and am always most pleased when another musician comments on how much space I leave for other people’s ideas.  I also enjoy accompanying singers.

I am passionate about justice, which is one reason the law was such an unappealing detour on the road of my life.  Justice in America is largely the justice you can afford to purchase.   I can point you to the relevant provisions in our constitution which obliquely say as much.  The gulf between what is legal and what is right is an enormous, stinking crevasse.  My powerlessness in the face of recent injustice,  “the war on terror” and its related excesses, the widespread,  crippling criminality of the financial sector, led me to imagine a program that would encourage children to plan, stage, critique, problem-solve in groups.  To help them become informed, effective citizens of a democracy.

I dream of helping create articulate young citizens who are able to inform themselves about issues, argue them and organize to change intolerable conditions in our democracy.  I plan to give a digital megaphone and increased sense of agency to children, particularly those society has decided get all the help they need from programs for “at-risk” and “underprivileged” kids.   

I am passionate about letting the larger society, the one busy piously acquiring wealth, see what is in the minds and hearts of young people who are seen, if at all, as profitable widgets for privatized prisons. 

I am passionate about drawing, writing well and, whenever possible, having deep conversation.

 

Share an example of something you have been a part of (including created, led, or joined) that you consider unique, even if no one else does. Why do you think it is mould breaking? (Limit 2250 characters) * 

Not to harp on wehearyou.net, but I consider our approach unique and mould breaking.   Here’s the idea, with illustrations at the end.  The creative potential of young children is increasingly discounted.   When children are allowed to choose their projects, &  control all aspects of production, remarkable things emerge.  Week after week children ages 7 to 11 create, in the chaos of a free-form workshop, surprisingly inventive animation.   I am amazed by some break-through just about every session.

The great Sugata Mitra demonstrated children’s ability to self-organize, learn and teach each other things they are passionately engaged with.   Mitra used a computer embedded in a wall and documented the progress of illiterate children, as a group, who mastered the technology with no outside help.   Wehearyou.net is using the canvas of animation to help demonstrate the rich creative lives of children who are increasingly forced into ever more restrictive learning environments where most of them will learn failure rather than any kind of success.

In the test-prep age of No Child Left Behind children are seen as passive vessels to be filled with information and skills geared to standardized tests rather than as partners in their own education.  Kids are capable of learning much more than most educators give them credit for, particularly if license is given for their creativity to enter the classroom.

8 year-old with cut-out and three foil coins asks how to make the little character juggle.  I tell him I have no idea, see what you can do.  Within moments the little cut-out is juggling, the kid is already on to the next thing, with barely a backwards glance.  Two seven year olds create a guitarist and drummer.  Passing by I suggest they cut off and move the guitarist’s arm to make him strum.   A short while later they shoot a sequence where the two tiny musicians play perfectly in sync, the guitarist strumming then flipping his guitar in the air to catch and strum it on the beat.  The drummer, meanwhile, flips his drumsticks in the air, catches them and, bam!, exactly on the same beat.  How they did it, truthfully, I have no idea.

Idea Girl, nine, with five ideas a week she is too distracted to carry out, describes sequence where character will take part of his stomach, make a basketball backboard and hoop out of it, dunk a basketball, turn a somersault, pick up the backboard, eat it, get fat and then turn into a ball.   I ask if she’ll do this with clay.  She nods.  A few hours later, when first looking at the frames they shot during the session, I am amazed to see the frames, which needed no editorial improvement, doing exactly what she described.  (2732)

 

What questions should we have asked, but didn’t? Please write them down and answer them! (in other words, tell us something about yourself that we don’t know yet). (Limit 2250 characters) *

(I’ll get back to them on this one) 

Can you share a memorable anecdote from your life that will give us a further sense of what makes you tick?

My father was brilliant and very funny but also brutally defended at all times.   I learned, at age 40, that he’d been the victim of atrocious abuse from his mother, whippings as soon as he was old enough to stand.  Learning this unspeakable secret, from Eli, an older cousin, gave me great insight I could never have had without knowing about the abuse he’d endured.

My father and I had a life-long debate about whether people could change.   He argued that only superficial things could be changed, that deeper personality traits were ingrained and set.  I said changes in response were the first step toward making the deeper changes.  He angrily denied any insights I may have thought I’d received from Eli, pointing out that his cousin was a problematic historian and tyrannical father.

At 1 a.m. on what turned out to be the last night of my father’s life I visited him in the hospital.  His first comment: “Eli hit the nail right on the head, only he didn’t tell you the worst of it.”  He hadn’t recovered from being whipped as an infant.  This brilliant man remained somehow convinced he’d been the dumbest kid in town.  He told me I was right about change.  He wished he’d had the insight to try to change himself.  “I imagine how much richer my life would have been if I had not seen it as a zero-sum war.”  

As sun set the next evening he breathed his last, I closed his eyes. The profound gift of these last moments with my father remains with me, and sustains my beliefs.  (1476)

How did you hear about the TED Fellows program?

I don’t recall exactly.  I think I stumbled on a TED talk on youTube and have watched many since.  I also subscribe to the podcast on WNYC.   Several friends, it turns out, are also great fans of TED (how can you not be?) and I have done some evangelizing and turned a few others on to these remarkable talks.  I probably learned of the Fellows program on the TED website.

 

Have you participated in TED before? If so, to what extent? (e.g. you watch TEDTalks, you’ve attended / hosted / spoken at a TEDx event, you’re a TEDTranslator, etc) 

Only to the extent of being inspired by many of the talks.  The inspirations have been too many to list in 1,500 characters, but for purposes of wehearyou.net, the talks of Sugata Mitra, Ken Robinson and Seth Godin cannot be praised enough.

Another word about the so-called IRS Scandal

As always, the truth is a bit more complex (dare we use that freedom-hating word nuanced?)  than the headlines.  The headlines in mass media are often framed by the more aggressive, better financed, more media savvy group.   The apparent spinelessness of our cringing majority party aside, there would seem to be something to this assertion:

No one was singled out. The IRS net for possibly political organizations caught some 300 applications. Of these, no more than a third were “conservative” or “tea party” or “right-wing.” The rest were something else, including “liberal” and “left-wing.” None of the so-called conservative group applications were denied. Some were delayed, deservedly so, but a group can function as a 501(c)(4) with an application pending, so it’s hard to see how much damage a delay would do, if any.

You can read the rest of the discussion here

 

NYC Summer makes an appearance

Hot, yes, but also humid as just inside an elephant’s asshole.   Take a shower and feel your skin a moment later– clammy.  The sinuses fill with some kind of pressurized liquid, a dullness behind the eyes.   Dog piss steaming up from the concrete.

Not enough coffee in the apartment to wake myself up today.  Going to go for a strong Dominican cafe negro, if I can summon the strength.

Open the book

I’m talking to myself.  The book is the notebook I made a list in on Thursday, on the way home from session 16 and a long dinner with my two assistants.  It was a very pleasant dinner, I thought.   The heavy bags I’d struggled with rushing to the session in a downpour (my pancho and ziplocks were indispensable)  were much lighter walking from the restaurant.  When I put on my backpack with the laptop, cameras and stands and picked up my duffle bagI thought I must have forgotten to pack something when I left the classroom.   My bags were much heavier when I set out, they were lighter when I hefted them to leave after the session and a nice dinner with these two intelligent women I hope to expand the workshop with.

On the train Thursday evening I made notes of calls I need to make, emails I must not forget to write, follow-ups, most of them, things to push the program forward when the school year ends in three weeks at our current site.  I was leaving for a long weekend, everyone was and I’d take care of all business on Tuesday when the business week resumed.    Only Tuesday found me staring at the cracked walls, the buckling ceiling and the missing tiles on the unwashed floor.  I remember thinking “what the fuck?”   I thought it many times, but I did not open the book to look over the checklist of my tasks.   At 1 a.m. I took a bike ride.

Today was Wednesday for me.  Some will call it Thursday, since it is 2 a.m. and technically they are correct.  It is 2:11 a.m. Thursday.  But for me it is still Wednesday, the day I woke up to 14 or 15 hours ago.  I could not open the book.  Did not open it.   Poetry may have spilled out of it like a delicious drink on the sandpaper tongue of a parched man, face and facade about to crack, but nothing could tempt me to open it.  I would not, did not.   I wrote a pleasant email to a lovely polymath, the inventor of many things scientific who has in recent decades turned his great mind to the problem of educating primary school children.   You may have heard of Sugata Mitra, I hope you have.  If you’ve been paying attention you have heard me go on about him.  Wonderful man, I wrote him a pleasant email today.  It took a very short time.  My small committee, two excellent writers who read these kind of letters for me and fire back their comments, both wrote back quickly to say it was just about ready to go.  I made one quick pass, trimmed a few sentences, sent it off to Mitra in Newcastle, found his personal email address, shot a copy across the pond to him over there too.

But I did not open the book with my list of important reminders in it.  It was as though I didn’t want to be reminded of the steep uphill climb.   I walked to Target in the Bronx, bought t-shirts and a pot to cook in (I have one to piss in).   I found cauliflower for $2.50 and bought a head, took it home, reduced it to a bowl of florets, chopped garlic, ginger, jalapeno peppers, made suki gobi out of it in the suddenly humid NYC summer.  Listened to the Yankees get stomped by the hapless Mets and then took another bike ride, working the heart and lungs.

But I did not open the book.  No force in the world could get me to reach on to the chair, extract it from the open blue bag and pull back that heavy cover.   The cover of that book weighs I do not know how many metric tons. 

Social Welfare Nonprofits 501(c)(4)

A friend and I started a 501(c)(3) nonprofit a little over a year ago.  True to our charter, no profits whatsoever have been made.  Any money we do one day raise, over $25,000, I think, requires us to file what I’ve heard is literally sixty pages of paperwork with the IRS to show that we have complied with the complex laws that govern charities.

Part of the application for nonprofit status with the IRS was promising that we would undertake no political advocacy of any kind in connection with our educational activities.  Fair enough, I thought, I don’t support any of these political candidates anyway.   Obama’s voice has become as foul and disturbing to me as Dubya’s, as Rumsfeld’s.  My only political aim is a much broader one— let children think, voice their opinions, teach themselves how to learn what they need to know.  Don’t be sheep jerking your knee in a Rockettes like chorus line of high stepping party line robots.

That’s what 501(c)(4), the Social Welfare Nonprofit, is for– political activity disguised as charity.  Why they put it into law is probably the same reason a dog licks its privates.  Check it out.  You can raise millions for political “education”, even spend tens of millions on direct political advertising (as was done in the last election), as long as you are coy and couch your activities as educational.  For example, Karl Rove raised and spent tens of millions on political TV commercials with his 501(c)(4) Crossroads GPS or whatever the non-profit 501(c)(4) analogue to his for-profit political money machine is.  Those commercials were for educational and social welfare purposes first, influencing the outcome of elections second.  And that urine running down your leg is really rain, pure mountain rain.

Was it wrong for the IRS to target right-wing sounding 501(c)(4) groups for extra scrutiny?  Yes, it was wrong.  Heads rolled, apologies were made.  Calls for prison time for the authors of the nasty questionnaires the IRS sent out were made by the man with the strange orange suntan.   It’s not time to compare the crimes of the two criminal conspiracies, Democratic and Republican, that vie for control of our great nation.   One reason is that I don’t have ten hours to spend listing the most recent ones.  Another is that it’s like arguing about who is worse, Mao or Stalin.

But here’s my question– why are the targeted 501(c)(4) groups so outraged that the IRS sought lists of donors?   Transparency is desired by everyone but the criminals opacity protects.   If you give money to a nonprofit, why is that a secret protected activity in an arena where money supposedly equals speech?  I have no idea.  But I do have another idea.

Get rid of 501(c)(4), it’s complete bullshit.   If you want to teach your children that God created the world in six days, rested on the seventh and that all this was 5,000 years ago, go right ahead, God bless you.  If you want to teach your children that homosexuals should be put to death in a hail of fist sized rocks, it’s your right as a free citizen.  Just don’t demand the right to raise millions in tax-exempt money from secret donors to influence the outcome of elections and call it Social Welfare.   

Two minute drill

If no consequence is attached to evil practices such practices will continue.  If you don’t raise an eyebrow when your predecessor redefines torture to allow it to be practiced at will, nobody should be surprised when you do the same.  If you find remote control killings of enemies and innocent alike preferable to boots on the ground, you’ll do it.   If you’re cool with a government that prosecutes whistle blowers and tries them in secret, well, you’re cool with it.  It doesn’t make you a bad person, necessarily, to wink at evil, but don’t put your arm around me, brother.