Author Archives: oinsketta

Lucky Bum

Stop me if I’ve told you this one already.

Babe Ruth was always coy about whether he actually called that famous home run in the 1932 World Series.  The pitcher, he insisted, had quick pitched him– illegal but the ump called it a strike–strike two.  Charlie Root, the pitcher, smirked, the bench jockeys screamed and howled and Ruth stepped back into the batter’s box, steaming.  Ruth points his bat over the pitcher’s head (or directly at Charlie Root’s head, depending on your POV) into the hooting Chicago crowd in the bleachers and hits a tremendous home run right there on the next pitch.  
 
There’s a great shaky 30 second film of it on youTube and an 80 year debate on whether he was pointing his bat at the pitcher or at the spot where he hit the famous called home run.  It was the last of the long-time record number of World Series homers the great Ruth hit during a mythical career.  (Consider it took Hank Aaron almost 7 full seasons of at bats to eclipse Ruth’s career total, Bonds only had an extra 1,448 at bats.  Not to mention that no great hitter ever had the brilliant pitching career [94-46 2.28 ERA] 
Ruth did before turning to hitting full time.) 
 
A sportswriter friend of his, shortly before Ruth died, said “Babe, if you won’t clear up whether you called that shot, at least tell us what you were thinking as you rounded the bases.”
 
“I was thinkin’ ‘Babe, you lucky bum, you lucky bum!'”  And one imagines the hoarse laugh of the cancer-wizened Babe at the end.

Mark But This Flea

Back in an early writing course at City College the professor, a young, dynamic guy with the torso of a stocky man and the lower body of a powerful goat, read John Donne’s famous poem The Flea.  His eyes glittered during his excellent reading of the flirtatious poem, as he no doubt took a survey of the new young women in his class.  He explained to his impressed students that he was originally an actor, had become a novelist and then a college professor.  He was an inspirational teacher and a great reader, and he brought the wooing words to memorable life as he began:

“Mark but this flea, and mark in this, how little that which thou deniest me is”

The line rings in my head today as I ponder how little the smallest things we deny each other actually are.  Invisible to the naked eye, these tiny, crucial things.

The Oshpah Pit

I don’t know the exact meaning of “aspah” (phonetically OSH-pah), but I can tell you about the Ashpah Pit.    It was in the woods, at the end of a long muddy road that would shine with small puddles after the rain.  It was lush there, and smelled of earth and trees, until you got close to the pit that guys with a bulldozer and a dump truck had dug.   This pit was huge, the size of an amphitheater, and filled with the summer time garbage of a small community of a few hundred people.

It was at the end of a long dirt road cut through the trees.  For days after it rained it was impossible to walk as far as the ashpah pit without getting your feet wet.  Your clothes would be damp too, the air was always moist and clammy under those dense trees.  It was paradise for the mosquitoes who bred, thirsted and lived their short lives there.  Born at dusk by the millions, and feeding, courting, mating and dying throughout the night, they were looking for whatever action they could get as time ran out.  

These mosquitoes were so voracious, and so desperate, that they would land on you as you slapped at them, sometimes five or more at a time, the others hovering, singing their horrible songs of desire.  And they were tenacious, these strapping young mosquitoes.   You could slap at one, narrowly miss, and the insect would do a little somersault, literally turn a tiny circle in the air, land back directly on the arm, or neck, or your face.  Meanwhile, another would be sucking lustily at the back of your neck, near your earlobe.  You could try to keep them away by smoking, and back then many of us did smoke, but it was best to complete the business at the ashpah pit quickly.   Dump the garbage and get back down the road.

There’s the famous story of how I met my old friend Meefs, a story for another time and another place, the story about his deadpan slyness and those two long walks to the ashpah pit and back.  But what I want to point out is that the mosquitoes at the ashpah pit are the strongest examplars I know of that fierce, wildly energetic desire to live, and somehow dominate, in a world of death where the odds are a billion to one against you living out the night.

Doesn’t mean I’d invite any of them to my house.

Letter to Walter (draft 2.2)

Dear Walter:

I’ve been reading your books since my mother recommended Devil in A Blue Dress to me a few decades back.  I admire the story-telling as much as the running themes of the power of imagination to change the world and the gentleness that is at the core of even your most hardened protagonists.  

Reading Twelve Steps to Political Revelation not long ago I was struck by the section calling for changes in how education needs to work to ensure a more creative, critically thinking, multi-lingual populace.  I agree that the generations coming up now are the last, best agents for the change needed to avert the looming disasters we face as a planet.  You gave a great example at the Moth recently, those two young gay strangers on Christopher Street retooling the ugly word “nigger” into a shorthand for their brotherhood.

Cheekums baboon

In the wake of Cheney and Bush I thought up my best bet for helping to bring about the kind of change we need to see.  I’ve started a not-for-profit student-run animation workshop, called wehearyou.net, to listen to young children’s concerns and help them show the creativity that is so often ignored in our testing-obsessed prison-prep factory schools.  

My hope is to have young kids produce works that will shame the more liberal of the Job Creator types (currently chafing at a theoretical 0.03% stock transaction tax) enough to fund what I envision as a grassroots movement to change the landscape of urban education, starting in the worst public schools I can find in NYC.  I worked in one in Harlem for several years, so I’m intimately familiar with the challenges kids in those schools are up against.

Cheekums1

I invite to you have a look at some of the kids’ work at wehearyou.net, along with my descriptions of the program   I hope the potential of this program, directed and produced by young kids working as teams of creative problem-solvers, lights up your imagination.   I would love to speak to you about the program.   You can send me an email or call me at (… ellipsis added…).   On my dream team of people of vision and action to work and brainstorm with, you’re very high on the list.  

Yours sincerely,
[name withheld at request of ‘author’]

A Funny Thing

Outside the roofs nearby are white, a flutter of snow has been swirling around ineffectually for the last few hours, dancing over the St. Patrick’s Day parade wending its way down Fifth Avenue, I suppose.  They say it will turn to rain after a while, I can hear cars splashing in it as they pass outside.  But the roofs look nice and there’s a dusting of white over parts of the garden.

Somewhere a lion yawns.

A clever woman in law school wrote a student note for one of the scholarly journals, discussing the then frontiers of the internet, dubbing cyber space Cyberia.  I don’t know if that was her coinage or not, but it seemed clever to me at the time.  One reaches for things like cleverness as a law student; I recall one project we had that first year was called “Treasure Hunt.”  The treasure in question was a bunch of tricky to find statutes, case citations and even some dicta.   Fond of drawing as I am, it was hard to resist, during Torts or Contracts, drawing a scandalized guy pointing at a steaming pile of shit, flies buzzing around it, saying “Hey! That’s not treasure!”  The girl next to me, who was beautiful, smiled and wrote an approving note on the bottom of it when I slid it over to her.

A wildebeest passes gas.  “What’s gnu?” the punster asks blandly.

On a day like this, and outside the flakes are now fat and fluffy, falling in a great 3-D display, alone in Cyberia, it seems pointless to dream that my plans will ever be more than the distant daydream they are now.   More than pointless, really.  Without money you might as well (insert your favorite substitute for the vulgar phrase about taking a lustful leap after a rolling donut).

“Your best words, my friend, not worth the air it takes to expel them, even though that air is CO2 and useless to anything but a vegetable,” says the tired voice of experience.

And, sad to say, it’s true.  A word to the wise will suffice, but the best words in the world, addressed to inanimate objects, or immovable ones, or ones prone to silence, or to multitasking or….

“Pipe down, man,” says the voice of experience.  Right again.

Bullies, Manipulation and Unintended Consequences

We live in a society that produces bullies, as much as large segments of our society hate bullies and try to prevent the spread of abusive behavior.  How does our society produce bullies?  By its values, or lack of same.   Flip the channels, one zero sum game after another where one individual wins everything while all others lose, often humiliated in the process.   Our prisons are overcrowded with largely petty criminals while criminality, on an enormous and destructive scale, proceeds at a record pace for a class that is never held accountable for their third party abuse of the rest of us.  

Those who spent careers working for Enron and got screwed out of their pensions by the greed and malfeasance of Enron’s executives, remember them?  The tip of the iceberg, as it turned out.  Those folks at Enron were merely the vanguard of the millions whose lives and dreams were plundered by the most rapacious among us.

Blah blah blah.  Yes, my grandmother was a leftist, a lifelong trade unionist, she celebrated when the Czar fell and for a while it looked like the People were seizing control of Russia.  She was a girl during the Russian Revolution and can be forgiven for excitedly believing the best, though she wound up bitter in the end.  There is nothing inherently wrong, one could argue, with one person owning 100,000 times more than the next ten million people have.   Our society rewards success, hard work, risk-taking of the right sort, drive, ambition, inherited wealth and social class.  

Anyway, my point is about bullying, and the background is that it’s institutionalized in a competitive society that extols the mythic rugged individual above all else.  Paris Hilton, for example, is one such rugged individual.

I am working with a group of children that has recently changed composition.  Five children from the original workshop now work together with five new participants.  I am focused on improving the program, making soundtracks during our limited time together, improving the quality of the animation, getting kids to buy into the idea of refining their work.   I noticed some tension, the new kids not integrating seamlessly, and set on an idea I thought would help.  I needed a creative and often disruptive kid from the original group to buy into helping others.

I dislike manipulators almost as much as I hate bullies.  It serves me right, in a way, what happened when I decided to deliberately manipulate this kid, though others would suffer for my action.  I saw how important it was to this guy to feel appreciated, so I took him aside, told him how important he is to the workshop, that he’s a natural leader, that he’s the best animator in the group.  I asked for his help.  He was flattered and immediately responded by changing his attitude.  He began to lead the clean-up effort at the end of the sessions and has been a big help.

Last week one of the new kids was lying on his back, the front of his shirt wet, foam all over his chin.   I asked if he was OK and he began laughing, told me he was fine.  I gave him a napkin and he wiped away the drool, then drooled again.  Soon he was lying in the hallway, crying inconsolably.  I couldn’t glean exactly why he was so upset, he wouldn’t say.   It turned out he was a victim of blow-back, the unintended consequence of my manipulative intervention.

The nine year-old I’d taken aside for special attention has, it would be appear, been crowing over the recognition he’d long been craving.  He became, according to three or four different sources, an insufferable prick to his classmates.  Lord of the Flies!   He’d been mocking this kid, who has trouble using a pair of scissors bordering on a kind of phobia.

I must start each session, as I did last term at a certain point, with the reminder that everyone is there to have fun.  And that you can’t have fun if somebody is bothering you or being mean to you.  We are doing animation, something with a lot of moving parts, parts that require looseness, concentration and teamwork.  The workshop doesn’t work unless people are helping each other.   If you can’t help, don’t hurt.    Simple to say, a little hard to do sometimes, but essential.

Unlike in the real world, I have the ability, in this group, to swoop down and gently but firmly intervene.  I can stop a bully in mid-attack, if I see it happening.   The worst bullying often happens behind the scenes, where the deals are made, and merciless rules are set that insure the bully will never be accountable for the pain he causes his victims, karma or no karma.   Playing God in this little group, I will nip this in the bud, as the cliche goes.  Nip it, I say, in the hideous bud.  Watch.