Author Archives: oinsketta

Five minute reminder to self

The burdens we carry and the obstacles we face are often the only ones we can really feel.   The struggles of others have an air of unreality, do not seem as substantial as the things that hang over our tired backs, have us in their teeth.   This is obvious, self-evident, as my man The Author of Liberty used to say.  Who can tell what burdens and obstacles that great man faced, with his inherited wealth and hundreds of human chattel depending on him as he birthed the glorious ideas of Democracy and Freedom?

Bitterness is not becoming, and so let’s let it fall by the wayside, whatever and wherever that may be.  My point here is that any of us can give a laundry list of the reasons we are struggling to carry the heavy bag that is ours to carry.   If we can stop yawning long enough as we listen to somebody else’s list we may realize that we are not the only one feeling overwhelmed at certain times.  

To me the worst of it is the feeling that this uphill path, with the heavy load on the shoulders, is endless, while our strength and life are limited.  That combined with everyone else chatting about everything else, as we soldier on alone, pretending all’s well, you know what I’m saying?  

The true fact is that we are capable of way more than we allow ourselves to try.  In a sense the human mind, properly engaged, is unlimited.   It is the hundred limitations we impose that is a big part of the tragedy, the crap we accept instead of vital, technicolor life.   That and the fact that, except on rare occasions, it’s really hard to give more than a passing fiddler’s fart about the catalogue of other people’s persistent, amorphous struggles.

Bitter Dogs, Very Bitter Dogs

Rodney Dangerfield, when he was a young comic, did a Borscht Belt-style routine about how hard he had it coming up in his early years in show biz.  He followed two terrible precision dancers, a horrible singer, and, while he did his act, the final act on the bill, a group of rabies infested performing dogs, heckled him mercilessly.  Very bitter dogs, bitter dogs, kicking around show biz for years.   In a mocking bitter tone:  “Lassie didn’t get where she is on her talent, you know… Rin Tin Tin… heh heh heh…”

Nothing funny about spoken comedy delivered without jazz trio timing.  Its deadpan, hairpin turns of voice and face that get the laugh, not humorous concepts on paper, which may or may not bring a smile.  I don’t mention those bitter dogs for yuks, they’re an illustration.  I had a good howl over a friend’s assessment of a certain deli-owner (“too bitter”) back when we were trying to sell beef bi-products to bodegas and delis in the Bronx.

My partner came back to the car carrying the case of beef sticks, smiling but also shaking his head to show me it was no sale.  “Nah, he immediately recognized the product, and said he’d sold hundreds of them, that it was a great product, he made good money with it.  But the old distributor never came back, left him high and dry, and he was too bitter to try the product again.  He was actually a very nice guy, and he was on the fence, but I couldn’t convince him, he was just too bitter.”

 And when he said “bitter” I laughed, and it’s still funny to me twenty-five years later, just not so gleefully.   At my mature age I know the taste a bitter person actually gets in the back of the throat.  Back then it was still just a hilarious abstraction to think of someone as bitter.  

I’m thinking of all the things I have to feel gratitude about, and I take stock of them periodically.  Today I’m thankful for my general calmness under fire and my patience, especially with young people.  And also for my general physical and creative robustness.

In a busy animation workshop my attention is sometimes called for by three kids at once, while at least one other is running wild.  I have to convey instantly to two that I’m sorry they’ll have to wait, attend quickly to the other and get back to them.  Often, by the time I do, the problem will already be worked out, another kid calling me from across the room to come help them with something else.  The workshop is running at about 80% efficiency now, which is amazing if you consider that it’s an after-school session, Thursday, at the end of a long week of school.

I get home from the session after a meditative subway ride, fire up the macBook and see what the young editor has put together during the session.  This is the first time I am seeing much of the animation.   The editing is about 90% done before I first see the material they’ve shot that day and there is very rarely any call to censor anything they’ve shot.  The bulk of the inputting of frames and editing and titling the animation is done by one of three fifth graders, which is amazing, if you think about it.  

Lately I’ve also been able to get an improvised soundtrack done by the kids each week, featuring their percussion and voices.  Nearer by two or three big steps to working out how to get really good soundtracks than I was only two or three weeks ago.  

Once the week’s sound and the picture are mixed and adjusted and I’ve sufficiently tweaked the final result, I will pump my fist, turn and give a high five to my shadowy, imaginary partner.  “We did it!” I’ll say, and laugh, to see how mischievously it is all going exactly according to my long-shot, hard to describe plan.  

“We vugging did it, man!” the imaginary partner will shout, proffering a fist for a heartfelt fist bump.  And I’ll give a good bash, and pump my fist again.

Creativity (the 12 minute version)

Doing things creatively is like being an acrobat, you have to leap with grace, lightly, without a shade of hesitation.   Doubt will stop you between trapezes, time will seem to stand still for a blink, as the audience, sickened and thrilled, waits for the splat.  (Almost two minutes to say that).  

Our time here, maybe it would be better measured in tiny spoons rather than with a ladle of unlimited size and scope such as the one we use without thinking of moments.   Rushing around can take up a lot of time, you got something important to get done give it to a busy person, blah, blah, blah.   Still, the hardest work is the work you have to do to have the grace to float between trapezes.

I don’t know what I’m talking about, except that I’m tired, and waiting for this tiredness to completely overwhelm me.  Into the bed then, under the soft, warm covers, a cold breeze rattling through the window, cozy in my almost weightless sleeping cap.

And in the dream I will not recall in the morning I am at the guitar and I play one note.  And that note, laid succulently against the beat, can be shimmered, until it is like an ocean, let’s say.  On that ocean light plays, and the salt evaporates off the brilliant water with that bracing smell, and there are fish, some leaping, others beautifully colored, just under the magical surface.  There is a universe in a raindrop, and billions of them in a bucket of sea water.  There is no bucket that can hold all of those universes.  Your mind can skip over them, use a machine to see under the sea, but everything about it is a mystery.  The next  beat, and the next, it is a human heart, the most primal sound available, we memorize it before we are even born, breathing through gills and then through a cord attached to our mother.  The whole arrangement is pretty amazing, though we forget most of the time.  

Creativity seems like a luxury, something rich people pay a premium for.  But free spontaneous creativity is what gives life its color and its flavor.  You cannot convince me otherwise, particularly when you laugh, surprised that something so crude and stupid arose so quickly and unexpectedly.  And see here, my left hand never left the neck of that dream guitar with its infinite sustain.  And what beautiful teeth you have, and how lovely to see them not biting but framing those odd sounds barking out, as your eyes crinkle and your head bops like a coconut on the waves of that ocean of endless possibilities.

Twelve Minute Drill

Going to stretch out a bit here, twelve minutes instead of ten.  You know, what the hey?  But to make things more interesting still the timer is counting down three minutes.  Then I’ll leap up, put the frozen pierogies in boiling water and then do the last nine.  I’ve wasted a minute telling you that.

I’m thinking about a friend who was a huge fan of Howard Fast’s.  So huge a fan, in fact, that she actually arranged a meeting with Fast to see if she could assist him in his work.  Fast was hostile when they met, and she left him after a short, disappointing meeting, but her admiration for him and his work was undiminished by the sobering display of misdirected anger.

Howard Fast is a name like Woody Guthrie to me, or Zero Mostel, or one of those talented people who were around and dreaming big dreams of changing the world. (The water is boiling, pardon me)   (At the risk of overboiling my pierogies I’m back for the next nine minutes)   The system we have here, Capitalism, offers freedom to anyone who can afford it.   One bi-product of Capitalism is a permanent underclass.  It is nothing we’re proud of, it’s nothing we want, but there it is.  If you speak of a more fair way to distribute work and wealth you are called a Communist and a hater of freedom.  As Fast was called, and Woody Guthrie, whose guitar was labeled a machine to kill fascists, as was Zero Mostel and countless others.  

Here’s the puzzle I’m puzzling over.  How does someone so idealistic she’d arrange to meet Howard Fast change her views so completely that, although politically independent, she defends Sarah Palin against unfair liberal attacks and recommends Glenn Beck as a reliable source for information on Woodrow Wilson, a man he apparently reviles?   Wilson did some terrible things, including his White House screening of “The Birth of A Nation”, D.W. Griffith’s rewriting of the post Civil War period that cast the Ku Klux Klan in a heroic light.   “Wilson was a member of the Klan,” more than one black person I’ve talked to about this has told me.  

The thing I’m puzzling over, as the game clock dips under 4 minutes, is how a person who believes in brotherhood, freedom, civil rights, justice, civil liberties and the perfectability of society and the individual can support things like Operation Enduring Freedom in Iraq and the torture, or at best extreme mistreatment, of those captured person’s subjected to Dick Cheney’s lawyerly-nuanced ‘enhanced interrogation’.   I suppose it is a mystery I will ponder as I go to stir the pierogies, and stop the clock with my final time-out at 1:49.

Man, those pierogies smell good.  They are filled with potato, spinach and feta cheese.  They are steaming now as I approach the one minute mark.  Soon fans will begin filing out, as the game is all but over, and I will make my way to a spot on the floor where I can stretch at full length, do a few push-ups, wipe the dust from my hands and tuck into those delicious smelling Polish raviolis.  Fifteen seconds to the buzzer and…. game time!

Where You Been?

“Is there some reason you’re avoiding me?” he asked, after a long hiatus in their conversation.

“No, not you in particular, I’m avoiding all of them,” his old friend said.

“Whoa, ‘all of them‘?  Is it really like that?” he asked, more than a little aghast.  

“I cannot say if it is like that or not, because this is a world of illusion.  Your illusions are not mine and you can’t see what I do.  The questions you ask me are in your mind, a mind that asks itself no questions.”  

“I don’t like where this is going, Mr. Koh-Ann… if that is your name,”  he said.

“Who are you to like where this is going?”  The face on his old friend was like the finely chiseled face on a statue of Sekhmet.  It was the nonchalant face of the eternal cat.

The thought occurred, but remained unspoken, these old friends had not seen each other in several months.    

“I am what I am,” he said, realizing it was probably too late for philosophy or an appeal to his old friend’s sense of friendship.  

It had always been an exceedingly hard world for his cat-faced friend.   Everything made sense, but it was still terrible.

You Don’t Need Feedback

It’s the craziest thing, in a world where we buy entertainment and consume sponsored culture in paper cups, that anyone could expect to move forward in a creative business without a good focus group, marketing and branding experts, plenty of street smarts, energy, drive and ambition.  If you have enough money, none of this matters, I suppose.  But for everybody else, selling and funding is the life or death of the creative project.

You send the babies out into the world, but don’t expect too many smiles at those babies, unless you’ve been skillful enough to find the audience that really cares.  The world is a very noisy place, and smiling at babies is low in the pecking order.  The reasons are many.  Some are Zen masters, of course, and float above the world of desire and pain.   Some are being chased by too many things to look back, to pause and smell a flower.  Some truly, and to the bottom of their hearts, don’t give a rat’s tutu.

Myself, I don’t like babies very much.  Yet when somebody holds up their baby, with that proud, expectant look on their face, I have to say something.  “Cute!” I’ll say, trying my darnedest to make it sound genuine.  But that’s just me, too much time on my hands, so I wind up being like that, I guess.

  

Peekskill USA

My father and my uncle grew up in Peekskill, NY, a once-prosperous river town on the Hudson River.   As times changed, and transport by riverboat faded from memory, the town lost its most lucrative business and its luster.  It took on the haunted quality it possesses to this day.   By the time my father and his then infant brother arrived from the slums of New York City, just in time for the Great Depression, the town was probably a pretty hopeless place.   The father and sons who ran the hardware store were, according to a cousin who punched one of them in the face on his first day in town, proud members of the Ku Klux Klan.

In August of 1949 there was a Paul Robeson concert scheduled for a picnic area just outside Peekskill.  Robeson’s likeness is on a U.S. postage stamp now, but at the time this scholar, college football star and opera singer was considered by many to be a dangerous Communist sympathizer.   Eventually he would be forced to leave the country.  A powerful, outspoken Negro at a time when black people were supposed to be content with their second-class lot and play semi-comical servant roles in movies, Robeson spoke out against wars of aggression, against Jim Crow, against racism, against police violence, against the exploitation of workers and the unbridled materialistic greed of our money worshipping culture, against so many things that patriotic men like J. Edgar Hoover stood for.  It’s small wonder there was a riot in Peekskill in August of 1949 when he came to do a show there with Pete Seeger and other idealists who, at the time, were regarded as a fifth column, fighting for Stalin under the false banner of “brotherhood”.  

It’s easy to get stressed out people to support the fight against an enemy once that enemy is properly demonized, Hitlerized, Stalinized.  Particularly if the people supporting the war don’t have to endanger themselves in any way, they will support the war effort fervently.  And if they get a chance, as they did on a summer evening in Peekskill in 1949,  to kick some mixed race Commie ass in an ambush where they outnumber the race traitor Commies twenty to one, so much the sweeter.

My father was a World War Two veteran attending Syracuse University on the GI Bill in 1949, if I have my chronology straight.  He had grown up in grinding poverty (a phrase he uttered through gritted teeth when tersely summarizing his own childhood) on Howard Street in Peekskill.   A lifelong student of history and current events, in his early years he aligned himself politically with men like Robeson and Seeger.  He was an idealist who’d been in the army fighting fascism and he was passionate about righting injustice.  He wanted to see the world become less fascistic, rather than more so.  He believed in brotherhood,  civil rights and civil liberties then and for decades after.  He also acted on these beliefs, enduring catcalls and rotten vegetables as a spokesman for the integration of NYC schools after Brown v. Board of Education and its “all deliberate speed”, among other things.  I believe he returned to Peekskill for the concert that turned into a riot when angry white mobs overran it.

My father is gone now, as is my uncle, so, unfortunately, there is no way to verify whether he was there or not.  But visiting my aunt the other day for her 85th birthday I spotted a book on her shelves called “Peekskill USA” by Howard Fast.   I recall that my mother admired Howard Fast (although she acknowledged he was probably not a great writer), and hearing from her that he’d been blacklisted by the House UnAmerican Activities Committee and also thrown in jail during the anti-Communist witch hunts of that time.

“Peekskill USA” is Fast’s eye-witness account of events in Peekskill on August 27th and September 4th, 1949.  The first one a riot, the second one an actual concert, as far as I can tell so far.  Published by the Civil Rights Congress Press in 1951, and printed in the United States of America (as it states on the copyright page) the book is a collector’s item.  My aunt was reluctant to let it go, though she certainly has not opened it in decades, if ever.  I understood her reluctance and promised to read it quickly, take good care of it and send it back to her soon.

I started reading it this morning.  The forward states that the events in Peekskill 1949 are destined to live forever in the memory of all who oppose fascism.  It was a hope, like many back then, that was swallowed whole during the so-called Cold War.   I often look around at the assumptions that underlie our singlemindedly materialistic society, like the one that says extremely wealthy criminals must be treated under a different, more forgiving, set of laws than petty criminals, and wonder about the actual winners of the Cold War.  

It seems they are the same winners as ever, the wealthiest citizens, casually united by common interests to preserve their sometimes hard-won prerogatives.  So much of the business of the 1% is amoral that it seems churlish to judge it as harshly as I do.  It’s not as though the richest among us want 45,000 Americans to die of treatable diseases every year for lack of health insurance, or want our wealthy nation to have the infant mortality rate of a third world country, or millions of hungry, malnourished, abused American children, or a permanent underclass and the largest prison population in human history.   These are surely forgivable externalities.  In order for some to have 100,000 times the wealth of others, certain sacrifices must be made.  It is only common sense, after all.

I have often thought, with that characteristic uncharitableness of mine, that Fascism prevailed at the close of the Cold War, disguised as Democracy, which, from the beginning, used phrases like “all men are created equal” with a certain puckishness.   The forces of reaction, inherently anti-humanist, amplified through the largest public megaphones, are always behind the status quo.  Why would it be otherwise?

So, if high ranking Nazi spooks were recruited after World War Two and hired by the American OSS, and their extensive anti-Communist knowledge and techniques incorporated into the CIA and used to undermine and eventually defeat the evil totalitarian system of Communism, why should I even mention this, at best, footnote coincidence, here?  If the same baldly manipulative techniques pioneered by Woodrow Wilson’s Committee for Public Information to drum up American support for unexplainable (except in terms of how it enriched certain already rich people) World War One were refined by Josef Goebbels and his Ministry of Public Enlightenment a generation later to drum up support for the war to cleanse the world of the Jewish virus and its Communist spawn, and if those techniques are still largely in use today by those who promote wars of every kind, why should I draw any negative conclusions?  Why bring Fascism into it?  After all, “collateral damage” is so much better than “murder of innocent civilians” and “Freedom is on the March” is so much better than “what are you going to do about it, asshole?”

I’ll report back on Howard Fast’s account of the Peekskill riots in Part Two.

What We Do Not Say

My mother’s last trip to her oncologist was a perfect example.  The doctor retired soon after the visit, shortly before my mother died.  He looked sort of dazed most of the time, sometimes lost key details of the patient’s particular cancer during an examination.   He acted like too many patients dying on him might have taken their toll, though he was trim, polite and ran a flourishing practice.  He could have been the sort who retires and dies a week later chasing a tennis ball.  But that day he was as focused and straightforward as I’d ever seen him, and so was my mother in her way.

“What’s the good news?” asked my mother with a cheery, girlish inflection.

“I’m afraid I don’t have any good news today,” said the shifty eyed oncologist.

“Then I don’t want to hear it.  I don’t want any more bad news!” she said.  The oncologist deftly shifted the conversation to other subjects and what was left unsaid was never said, until my mother looked at Sekhnet from her hospice bed and asked “how can I say goodbye to such a sweet face?”

And so it seems to be with this gentle, brilliant man we spent a few days with this weekend.   He looks shockingly bad, much worse than he did two and a half months ago, and he looked horrible then.  It is the darkness around the mouth that is most disturbing to me, but many aspects of his looks are disturbing.   He is weak but determined, in pain but uncomplaining.  Sekhnet kept asking if he wanted help and he kept telling her he didn’t, though things were difficult for him and it was also hard to watch him struggle.   It was important for him to struggle, and we could easily see this.  This struggle is called life.

“His memory is perfect and he’s brilliant and still remarkably mild and kind,” you could say, and you’d be right.  He was telling me about a baseball stadium trip he took with his son-in-law, a man with Asperger’s Syndrome, as far as we can tell.  It’s hard to gauge an expression, looking at the son-in-law.  He is the proverbial two eyes, a nose and a mouth.  He looks vaguely sad all the time, and he speaks very little.  A brilliant guy, from what I hear, and he and the man we visited, who looks like Death walking painfully as an exhausted but resolute man, grew very close.  In 2002 they set off, during inter-league play, to catch baseball games in 8 cities: Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Milwaukee, Detroit, Toronto, Chicago, Minneapolis… I’d have to look at the map to give you the eighth.  3,700 miles in ten days, they saw 15 or 16 teams play, there may have been one repeat, he doesn’t recall off-hand a decade later, and, really, what difference does it make?

It was apparently not hard for this pair of shrewd baseball fans to map their journey.  They took the schedule, inputted the games and locations into a spread sheet and tweaked it a few times.  It took under an hour.  And then they were off.  Hard to imagine their conversations during the average 370 miles driving a day, but knowing the man we visited and his almost limitless range of interests, I’m sure they had plenty to talk about.  One bond they had was their love of the man’s oldest daughter.  The future son-in-law lived in their house for a year or more before the wedding.  He was clearly the son the man had never had, growing up with his hard-working wife and three daughters.  The two are very close.

“We may do it again this August during inter-league,” the man said with an almost imperceptible smile playing across his wasted face.  Then he looked off slightly and said “maybe we won’t…I’m not sure yet, ” and his voice trailed off just a little.

3:46 a.m.

Mind pondering a dozen interlocking puzzles, it would take a stronger will than mine to get to sleep.  A passing thought about the winning combination of mildness and great intelligence of our dying host, the comfortable bed might as well be a trampoline, but not because our host appears so near the end.  Sekhnet is taking in and whooshing out the deep, puffing breaths of exhausted sleep, I’m  out from under the covers, doing a little staccato tapping, trying to get some thoughts arranged here, and out of my head.

Unleashing creativity is blessed work and I hope one day it will pay a few salaries (with a health plan) and spread from kid to kid, skills mastered and taught to other kids.  Proving what every adult knows, but so often forgets– kids are capable of many amazing things- and all of their creativity will be needed to avert the impending many-headed disasters that loom and leer, while greed gloats, and amasses weapons to defend its prerogatives. Meantime, how to get them to really care about their creations?  They are like the wanton gods in Shakespeare who create with indifference and tire quickly of their playthings.  Some call out for more structure, others need less.  My faith in their powers makes me forget sometimes that this one is only 7, that the oldest is only 11.  That they are also childish is something I need to not forget.  How to nudge them the right way, get them to refine their ideas and collaborate while leaving them free to invent and run things is one piece of the puzzle I turn like a kid playing with a loose molar, pushing it every possible way.

The most essential puzzle now is how to get a key number of bright, undistracted adults into the room with these animating kids and afterwards help me to make this delicate new being into a sturdier creature that will walk this troubled world with a light and whimsical step, stomping hard when necessary, but never causing harm.