Author Archives: oinsketta

Ten Minute Drill

My aunt turns 85, I think it is, today, is turning so as I tap.  We are going to surprise her with a call, one of our madcap turns on Happy Birthday, wherein I follow Sekhnet’s voice sometimes in falsetto and other times in my most profundo basso.   The victim usually makes a clever remark about the rendition, my aunt will probably just say thank you.

Her husband, my recently departed uncle, was a bit tyrannical with her.   Surprising, really, since he seemed such a mild-mannered man.  You have to watch out for seemingly mild-mannered men, I reckon.  I recall one such man, a Housing Court judge, quiet, affable, bookish and a complete vicious prick.  Enraged complete vicious prick.   My uncle could be this way to my aunt, apparently.  Maybe this is why my mother couldn’t stand to be around them, they bickered constantly about who had interrupted whom first.

But I have already used up half of my allotted time, and to say what?  To speak ill of the dead?  To make a passing comment about my octogenarian aunt?  Well, no.  We have to call my aunt, who identifies herself as my grandmother now when she misses me call and leaves me a voice mail.  She’s increasingly confused.  It’s as if she’s worn out by how difficult and irrational the world is and she’s longing for things to be simple and nice.   Her personality has changed accordingly.  

She no longer fights or protests.  Instead she hums to herself.  She may have a hard time choosing her food at the restaurant where we’ll take her tomorrow evening, if all goes well and we make our 230 mile drive to pick her up at the assisted living facility.   Fortunately, when we order for her, a dish that we know she loves, she will tuck into it with gusto and say “yum!”.  She’ll eat half, be amazed at how full she is and have the rest for lunch tomorrow.

I think of the sorrows of this world and maybe it is not a bad thing that my aunt can’t recall most of them.  She seems to live more and more in the present, with less and less complaint.   I look around at the present I live in and say “damn!”

Thirty seconds on the clock, only time to heave up a desperation shot at the buzzer and….. it’s off the rim.  Damn!

Empathy and its absence

Lack of empathy, one finds, is epidemic in our modern rat race world.  It’s a defining feature of our terminally distracted times, I would say.   Flip the channels, virtually every station features competitive zero sum games with one winner and everyone else losing.   An inadvertently dismissive or hurtful comment often comes from the same distracted place:   I’m telling you how it looks to me and I’m too overwhelmed by my own problems to consider how my observation will effect you, how it would effect me if someone offered it in response to my situation.

 
There are a hundred examples of our culture’s lack of empathy.   A true horror like the shooting at that Connecticut elementary school has everyone momentarily aghast while, off the news, kids are shot dead regularly in our nation’s poorest neighborhoods, while the tiniest kids the same age in Pakistan and Yemen live with drones flying over them daily that suddenly and without warning blast a group of people and send body parts flying.  Talk about instilling life-long PTSD!  
We rationalize why this “collateral damage” is necessary, but the exercise does not involve the slightest empathy.  Leave aside the deadly problems of our permanent underclass, as is always done, and let’s look at the drone program for one concrete example.  Suppose we really are killing many of the worst of the worst with drones, people who are actively plotting to come kill us.  The seven year-old and her five year-old brother who occasionally get blown up is a tragedy as big as a seven year-old middle class child getting blown up here, as devastating as a child’s death in the ghetto.  But we can’t grasp that any more with the drones and there’s no serious conversation about it.  We accept the false choice: it’s this drone program of targeted killing or American soldiers, with their boots on the ground, getting maimed, killed and, if they survive, coming home with PTSD of their own.  It comes under the heading of “shit happens, pass the roast beef, please”.
 
My closest friends often have the reflex to explain why hurtful behavior was not meant to hurt, and why one shouldn’t take it personally.  I’ve been trying to get them to at least pause to acknowledge that I feel hurt, and have a right to feel that way, and only then to offer the Perry Mason-like defense of why the other person didn’t mean to accidentally take my eye out with a stick and how bad they feel, worse than me, really, and did I stop to consider that an accident means it wasn’t done on purpose, and you know he’s preoccupied and why would you expect him, of all people, to be more careful with a sharp stick in a dark room, and some people see better in the dark than others, and maybe you won’t completely lose the sight in that eye when the bandages come off, why are you always so negative, you’re like your mother, the glass is always half full…. blah blah blah.
 
We all know these types, I guess.  The worst of it is, most of the time most of us are these types.  Living overwhelmed in an overwhelmingly demanding world.

Love Alone Should Sustain You

Of course.

But as I often was obliged to say to the black robed political appointees I used to shuffle for, “‘Should‘ is a word one should not use in connection to (acronym of inept city agency here)”.  This sometimes drew a sour smile from the person in the black robes.

Love of a thing will only take you so far, though it should, of course, always sustain you.  After a while, as Picasso pointed out, without some real world payment– which may come in a variety of coins– you will eventually reach the point… oh, never mind.

Vhy Wampires Don’t Bronounce W

I have no idea.

But as my mentor in the writing program at City College observed, I have never been a good reader of my own written words.  I render them as lifelessly as the prose itself is lively.  OK, fine, maybe not lively, but not as dead as they sound when I read them aloud.

As an experiment yesterday I read two paragraphs in a wavering caricature of a Transylvanian accent, based on a mixture of Bela Lugosi and Peter Lorre, born Lazlo Lowenstein, and not a Transylvanian at all.  To my surprise, and perhaps too much delight, I found that the reading was much, eh, livelier.   Wasting no time, I set it to music and added a few light sound effects on another track.  Then, upon hearing it back, I made like the mad narrator of Edgar Allan Poe’s great Telltale Heart, and I laughed.

For those who might fancy me a bit eccentric for telling this, let me reassure you.  The disease has only sharpened my senses.  You will laugh too, I tell you, when you hear how wisely, indeed how sanely, I then proceeded…

How It Was Done

It’s funny (though my smile is only half crocodilian today), in this age of social networking and internet marketing and branding, the difference between a good idea and a flourishing business is a catchy message and sufficient traffic on the web.   Once critical mass is achieved, and the message finds its way into the right hands, the landscape changes.   People excited by the product carry the business  forward.  

The customers so far are happy with the portable animation workshop.  It can be set up in three minutes and kids can begin animating five minutes after that.   Children learn to work in small teams when they see how much easier it makes things.  The students are startlingly inventive, they run virtually everything in the workshop.   The program has been a complete success so far.   Our first fundraiser reached its goal and we’re in financial position to expand to other sites.  Now it’s time to recruit two or three necessary people and launch the organization to the public.  

And that was how it was done.

How Does This Story End?

Which, for example, is the voice of reason?  

One says, very convincingly, that this idea of mine, creating a place where kids can talk and play, and be listened to, while working on complicated projects that require them to work as a team, has great value and is exactly the right thing for me to be working on.  The program has the ability to rescue some kids, the invisible collateral damage of a society that doesn’t blink when millions grow up doomed in our wealthy nation.  It really seems to be what I should be doing, personally.   After all, it calls so many of my skills and talents into play and challenges me to master skills I don’t have.  I am also probably the ideal adult to help the kids, and show others how to,  I can help with every aspect of it: talking, listening, drawing, editing, playing music, making jokes, etc.   Plus, I am calm and reasonable and quick on my feet.   It is only a matter of time, fine-tuning and recruiting a few good people and this program could really take off.  It could help a lot of kids and demonstrate a lot about intrinsic motivation, the power of the imagination, creativity on learning,  inventing and solving problems.  And, tragically, these crucial abilities go largely untapped in a world that has never needed them more.

Every other day another voice speaks just as convincingly and tells me, with no equivocation, that my idea is a day dream that I, personally, have no hope of being able to flesh out enough to bring into the world as an ongoing program or business.   Yes, the kids often have fun, sure they’ve occasionally done some very promising animation, but that only makes me a good day camp counselor and not any kind of social entrepreneur, educational theorist, Founder or businessman.

Rarely do these competing voices compromise.  Although the truth will turn out to be full of gradations, and colored by both of these points of view, in this internal debate it’s often all black or it’s all  white, just like the real world, as argued about by partisan idiots.  Both points of view are categorical– one saying “if you will it, it is no dream” and the other snorting.  “Right, quote Herzl, idiot.  If you dream it, it is a dream.”

The answer is, strictly speaking, neither of the above, and answering it correctly will require a steady struggle.  If I believe steadfastly enough, and work hard enough (and the work is hard, no debate there), and take satisfaction and inspiration from every small advance, learn enough key things I don’t know now, it is quite possible that the program could grow into something like what I envision.   If I am fearful enough, and distracted enough, and dogged enough by the often sorry history of unrealized things I’ve dreamed of, well, certain failure is no fear, it’s guaranteed.   A man without a smiling face should not open a shop.  If you can’t say something nice about someone, don’t say anything.  The best throw of the dice is to throw them away (found in a cookie at Hop Kee, circa 1974).  I know you are, but what am I?

“You always covered your ass,” my mother observed once, in a conversation about risk we had when I was already a grown man, not entirely approving of her son’s general caution, displayed consistently since I was a very young child.   Our society rewards the boldness of daring risk-takers, so does nature.  Going out on a limb can be an expression of boldness or fear, it depends on how or why it’s done.  The limb can break and you may too, chasing something just out of reach or falling into deadly jaws while clinging desperately one small step ahead of a predator.

The title of this post is also ridiculous.  Nobody knows how the story ends.  The only certain thing is that they’ll throw dirt over a box containing your remains, or store you in a vase, or sprinkle your dust to return to the dust from which you came.   Or bag you and toss your bones.  Or some other variation on what the world does with a dead person.   If you lived right, and touched people in a loving way, rather than being mean, selfish, petty and greedy, your memory will be a blessing.  Otherwise, what can you say?  A thousand people at his funeral, including reporters, many sobbing.  As for the guest of honor?  He can’t even sigh.

Dominic, the indomitable dog hero of the great William Steig’s book Dominic, met an alligator headed woman, a fortune teller, at a fork in the road, not long after he set out from his nice home seeking the adventure of his life.  The witch told him that one road led to things she could describe to him, pretty good things, it seemed.  The other road?  She really couldn’t say, beyond that it would be an adventure.  Our hero did not hesitate, nor seek to find out what was behind door number one, he went down the second road.

And the rest, as they say, is history. 

The Entrepreneurial Spirit (and the Dead Guy)

Some people wake up excited about the challenges that lie ahead of them each day, I am told.   Opening their eyes on another day of infinite possibility they use their precious time wisely and keep their eye on the bottom line.  This line can be measured in money coming in, return on investment.  If they have an online business they are launching, the metrics for success are at their fingertips and can be quickly taken in with the morning coffee and a healthy breakfast, after an hour at cardio and a hot shower.  They remain focused and undistracted while they work, and then they play hard.

I have some of that single-minded entrepreneurial spirit, and always have.   This may not be the best example of it, but about 30 years ago I still had dreams of being Picasso.  That these dreams were largely my grandmother’s had not started bothering me yet.  Back then I thought it only a matter of time before I could draw on the linen table cloth of a fancy restaurant by way of treating a table full of my friends to a sumptuous meal.   The owner and chef would beam from ear to ear as I did this, the staff also looking on, elbowing each other playfully as I drew.

After buying some art supplies from Pearl Paint, still packaged back then in rough brown paper bags, I walked up through SoHo where an image outside a gallery caught my eye.  I went in and saw an exhibit of the art of a persecuted Laotian mountain people called the H’mong.  Some H’mong, a small South Chinese ethnic group, had long ago settled in Laos where they became valuable and loyal allies of the United States in our secret war against Communism in Laos, a neighbor of Viet Nam.  When the U.S. withdrew from Viet Nam the Pathet Lao had a bloody score to settle with the H’mong, many of whom were killed, thousands herded into “re-education” camps in Laos and thousands more fleeing to squalid refugee camps in Thailand.   Most of my family had disappeared under similar ruthless circumstances in muddy Eastern Europe in the freezing winter of 1942, so there was a personal connection, and a visceral one.

There was one image in particular that stopped me in my tracks, transfixed me.  A H’mong boy, naked and skeletal, lying on his side, regarded the camera with the stoic expression of one who had never known hope.  The light in the photograph was stunning, the doomed boy was rendered like a sculpture.   Photograph means “drawing with light” and that’s what this was, a three dimensional space rendered palpably on a flat surface.  

Without taking my eyes off it I quickly drew the boy in black ink on the brown bag.   The drawing was only a few pen strokes, but it caught the pose and the boy and a thick stab of ink made a convincingly deep shadow under his pitiful body.   I took a small dab of white gouache out of the tube and smeared the light over the boy’s skull, rib cage and legs.  The image jumped off the bag.  I later made a two color silkscreen of it, with my name brushed Picasso-like beneath it, along with the date, some time in 1980 or 81.  

At the time I thought, somehow, that this was a huge step in my evolution as an artist, the ability to react vividly and instantly to a visceral experience.  One friend I showed the silkscreen to, a plainspoken young man decades from his terrible uphill fight with a rare and particularly vicious form of cancer, said “what’s with you and the dead guy?”   I couldn’t explain it then.  It seemed to me it required something like the hip Louis Armstrong’s answer to the square who asked him what jazz was.  “If you’ve got to ask, Daddy, you ain’t never gonna know.”

Finding An Audience

Webinar, not long ago, reminded me of something I often forget.  The well-known entrepreneur, for years a main spokesman and marketer for Apple, described publishing an e-book as a powerful way to reach a particular audience.   You don’t do it, he said, for money or fame, that won’t happen.  You should do it out of a passionate interest or belief, and you do it to reach, educate and involve others who might share that passion.

The point is, you have to do some research first.  He sent his initial research query to his mailing list, 5,000,000 people.   In the end he got 49 willing to help him out.   Made me feel a little better about the 5-10% response rate I get from my much smaller mailing list.