Category Archives: musing

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.

 

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

 

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. 

12 Minute Run

Wind sprints, baby, run with it.

20 years ago I was amazed to see a restless class of third graders enthralled by a tape of a 1950s radio show with guest star Bela Lugosi as murderous pyromaniac Nick Segeden.   In the end he solemnly reminds children, after cops shoot him, non-fatally, “Crime Doesn’t Pay,” which may also have been the name of the show.  He draws the words out like a melodramatic high camp vampire.  The kids loved the radio play, wanted to hear the whole thing again as soon as it ended.

Point is– you can make a great radio play with kids, add sound effects, a podcast.   You want a story?  Hard to animate, animation is for fun ideas, quick, lively, unexpected.  Maybe the podcast is the way to go, what chu think?

I do not think, 8:45 left on the timer.  Why so chipper?  An old friend is struggling with the anaconda of soft tissue sarcoma which has cost him large chunks of his body.   Cancer wants the whole thing, my friend is fighting.  I think of calling him three or four times a week, but I’m scared.   What a good friend I am.

Do not think, 7:15 left on the timer, panned left, my voice imitating Bela Lugosi, panned right, and on three separate tracks, I’m the cops trying to apprehend him.  

In the left ear, Lugosi” “not so fast, gentleman…. I have a bottle of gasoline… and a ra-a-a-a-a-g!”  Pop, a gunshot, wings Segeden, he drops the bottle before he can set the rag on fire.  He cries.

“Relax, Segeden, it’s only a flesh wound.  You’ll live to fry for what you’ve done,” I say as one of the cops in the right ear.

I want you guys to write a script for a radio play.  OK, fine, improvise a story.  We need characters, a setting, a problem, a complication and some kind of weird, funny solution.   Yee hah.  Damn, it’s going to be fun!

What are you looking at?

3:51 on the clock, keep running, son.  

OK, there’s this.  Whatever is implanted in your mind that can hurt you will find the best possible time to leap out and do its darnedest.  Take this:  sure, you’ve been doing this successfully for six months, sure every step has been forward, you’ve proved it can be done, and probably scaled up into a business.  But, wait for it, wait…. “YOU SUCK!”  

Whenever the voice talks to you like that, ruthless and unfair, smile and nod.  “I do indeed suck, at this straw immersed in my milkshake.  And, uh, none for you, my merciless old suckless friend.”

1:33 and that’s really the best example you can think of?  

It so would appear.  Self rah rah sessions become mandatory in a tone-deaf world of worried sphinxes.   These sphinxes have a hard enough time without your problems, without mine.  They can barely help themselves, so go easy on them, would you?  

0:18  I most certainly will.

Forward Momentum

It doesn’t roll uphill by itself, the heavy rock, I can tell you from personal experience.   Instead of working to move the boulder up that slippery slope at the moment, I find myself reading a book about the biological imperative that makes us hesitate when the going gets hard, apparently a fear center deep in the brain called the amygdala.  This primitive reptile structure enabled our survival by letting fight or flight overrule all other processes in a nano-second.  

I imagine that if you walk a familiar path straight to work every day, and get paid, and go home to leisure, you might have an easier time moving yourself forward than if you’re trying to invent a situation where you can be most productive and help the most people.  

But I’m only imagining that, so many people drag themselves to work, full of dread and loathing, no matter how much they get paid.

Love, Death and the Bottom Line

A one minute video of a kitten having a nightmare and being comforted by her cat mother gets 51,640,359 views because it’s cute (it is, check it out) and because it adorably shows us what we all want– someone to calm our fears in the middle of the night.  Love is the only thing that really matters, on the way to death, though we live in a world obsessed with the “bottom line”.   Love and the “bottom line” are often at odds.  Guess who usually wins?  The result is sometimes a heavily armed “gunman” acting out unbearable pain.

It will surprise nobody to learn that Antonin Scalia’s brilliant lawyer son, Eugene Scalia,  is the lead lawyer attacking Dodd-Frank’s weak-ass, loophole ridden attempt to regulate the super-lucrative government backed gambling house banks, too big to fail, that enriched themselves enormously while sucking almost every drop of blood out of the economy that sustains it.  Eugene Scalia skillfully drives a tank through the loopholes in the law that require a thorough “cost/benefit analysis” before the government may place any limitation on these monster profit machines.  After all, shouldn’t masters of the universe be able to pay themselves whatever they like?  And why is it their responsibility if people are stupid, sign contracts and lose their homes or their pensions?

You can be sure Justice Scalia is very proud of Eugene, probably hugs him warmly at family gatherings.  Is that not love?

Would it surprise you to learn that the lead attorney for Monsanto, a bland, mild-mannered but deadly mongoose, is Dick Cheney’s son-in-law?  I’m sure the two are very close, share drinks and jokes at family gatherings.  Probably shot a few quail together, I’d wager.  Neither man feels responsible for the enormous damage their actions create because they are following the noble creed that is woven into the American Dream:  prevail.

But this is not the kind of love I’m talking about.  This kind of selectively blind love is closer to death.   The love I’m talking about does not abide the suffering of others.   It is rare, and the key to a calm and productive life, and it spreads like your proverbial wildfire when it touches a person.  That’s the love I’m going for.

The Power of Calmness

Easily lost and essential, this is the power that makes difficult things possible– the calm, patient force that facilitates the organization of chaos, enables the overcoming of great obstacles.   Try doing a stunt requiring coordination, creativity and daring without the necessary calm and witness how easily the neck can be broken.

Simba Perkins, at eight or nine, seeing his third grade teacher, me, about to get into his car, calls out and waves, balanced on a railing four feet above the cement.   Without any hesitation, and to my horror as I see what he’s about to do and hold out my hand to stop him from forty feet away, he springs backwards into the air, flips neatly upside down and with his head pointed straight at the deadly concrete, whips his body, catlike as Bruce Lee and lands lightly on his feet.  I exhale, smile, get into my car and drive off, impressed as hell even now, twenty years later.

A friend has long been working on an idea that could become a very engaging and interesting TV series.   He comes up with a solution to a long-running impediment– how the characters all meet in the first place and come to interact.   The elusive organizational device that will set his idea into motion week after week.   He excitedly describes his breakthrough to his wife.  His wife tells him it’s a stupid idea.

I laugh when he tells me this.  “What the fuck does she know?” I ask him, telling him I think the idea is ingenious, which it is.  He laughs too, because, truly, his practical and brilliant wife doesn’t know shit about this particular thing– creating something wholly from one’s imagination.   He tells me her comment stopped him in his tracks and he was unable to move the idea forward for days after she told him it was a stupid idea.

Today, in Costco, a friend who worries about my lack of business savvy, of worldly success, of my proven history of dreaming, spinning out ideas and talking a great game without actually ever getting paid for any of it, does the same thing to me that this guy’s wife did to him.   He certainly had no intention of doing it, but here’s how it’s done.

I’m Simba Perkins, standing on a railing, about to do the Bruce Lee backflip.  This guy is me, but instead of helplessly gesturing hesitation from 40 feet away, manages to make a superhuman leap and grab an ankle as I take off, trying to prevent my idiot backflip and frantically talking sense to me as he lunges.  “You can’t do it on concrete!  You’ll get paralyzed for life!”  Only the lunge and ankle grab don’t manage to save me, and his worst fears for me come true.

“I’m the guy,” he says, putting himself in the place of the powerful executive he’s managed to get me a business meeting with “and I have no idea what you’re talking about, exactly.”

So I calm myself, in my sleeplessness in a strange house where I’m taking care of yet another lonely dog for someone who’s away.  Here’s what I’m talking about, exactly.  You set up a business meeting for me with a very powerful and accomplished producer, entrepreneur, billionaire.  You want to know how I will pitch it.  I’m walking in Costco when we speak and I tell you over the phone that I will keep it short and sweet, describe my program in sixty to ninety seconds, show him a clip or two and ask him for his ideas.

“That’s too general, you should ask him something specific, as we discussed,” you say.

“I will tell him at this point, as I expand and try to fund the program, that I am looking for people with the expertise to help me get it to the next stage of development.   I know there are experts who can tell me the best ways to do things now that will take me months or years to learn on my own.  I will learn to do these things, as I’ve learned everything that’s taken the program this far, but a couple of people who know business, outreach, recruitment, funding and so forth would be a huge help and speed things up greatly.”

“I have no idea what you just said,” he tells me, “and I’ve been there with you from the beginning on this project.”

What I hear is the opposite of soothing calmness.  I hear, “why do you think you can do this spontaneously with an important stranger when you can’t even do it with an old friend?”  “you’re not ready”  “your presentation is going to fall flat”  “you’re going to embarrass me and my painter friend who set this meeting up” “you really don’t know the first thing about business meetings with busy billionaires” “you’re being cavalier” “I don’t think you’ll make a coherent pitch without a carefully crafted speech, in writing and memorized”  “did you even think of what you might possibly want from him?  We talked about this a week ago? have you given it no thought?”  “why are you so determined to fail?”  “why do you imagine you’ll be quick on your feet in this high pressure business meeting with a very busy and successful man when you just failed at improvising it coherently with me as you walk through Costco?”  “Why won’t you let me help you?”

Here’s why I imagine I’ll be quick on my feet in this high pressure business meeting with a very busy and successful man.  I speak well and am quick on my feet, I know the program and its philosophy intimately, can present it quickly and show the man charming examples of what I’m talking about.  I can also give the man as much detail as he likes.  I don’t see this as the high pressure business situation that it also is.   I’m playing with house money, there is truly nothing lost if this chap doesn’t see the point of the program, there is a fantastic upside if he gets it.  If he’s excited by the program I don’t need more than that– he will find a way to help.  If he doesn’t like it, the best script in the world won’t sell it to him.    I can explain and evoke it.  He will get it or not.  What do you not understand about this?

“I don’t understand anything you just said,” you will say, and I will smile, imagining I am not in a strange apartment, sleepless and far from my toys, but where I always am when I dream– in exactly the right place for blessings to fall gently on me like soft rain on a flower in Sekhnet’s garden.  

Rather than, bien sur, writing this to nobody at 4:53 a.m. to calm myself enough to sleep, instead of being up to have breakfast with old friends a mile away who are up and at ’em at 6:00 a.m. on Saturday because they are up and at ’em, baby.

Figures a do-nothing dreamer would sleep til noon, doesn’t it?  Couldn’t he dream just as well from 11 to 7?  No doubt, no doubt about that.

What I sent her instead

Well, you know what they say about statistics, particularly when spun by partisans like this NRA speaker.  If you throw in every third world sink-hole, countries in poverty with violent gangs, repressive governments, a lot of guns and low value on human life, yes, the US looks relatively OK.

 
Compared to other wealthy nations, not so good, as a glance at the attached chart compiled by the UN will show you.
Image

Doing Something Impossible

Why impossible?  I ask myself as 11:46 shows on the countdown timer.  Once the impossible thing is done it is shown to be clearly possible.  There are a million examples, like enormous, heavy hunks of metal flying through the air filled with people and luggage.  A video phone in your pocket.

Technology is what comes to mind first, but the impossible things I’m thinking about are massive changes inside individual hearts, inside our collective heart.   We are raised inculcated with certain truths, facts about us and the world that seem immutable.  I argued with my father for decades over whether people can fundamentally change themselves.  I believe we can, and don’t discount how difficult and sometimes painful it is.   My father always argued that we can change only the superficial parts, our outward reactions perhaps.   To him, the impossibility of healing deep wounds was a psychological fact.  At the very end, with his last breaths, he regretted that he’d fought me all those years instead of doing the hard work to have a more joyful, generous, loving life.

I set out to do something impossible, set up a network of children’s animation workshops.  To inspire children to show adults what children can do– to inspire change in the way things are done in schools, in our ass-backwards educational system.  I take my inspiration in this from people like Sugata Mitra, Ken Robinson, Seth Godin, Vandana Shiva, people I’d never even heard about six months ago.   I take courage from discovering new things that continue to help me as I go.

Is what I’m trying to do impossible?  I can’t concede that, though the odds against me are pretty impressive.  Is it impossible for one person to do alone?  Yes, that is clearly impossible.  So to gather a small group to help me push the project ahead I have to not only be inspired, I have to inspire them.  I cannot complain, I can’t hesitate, must be calm and confident at all times.  Hard!  As annoying as it may be when a kid screeches into a microphone with headphones on, thrilled to be hearing the echo in his voice, I have to show no annoyance, realize the bigger picture is about letting children feel these thrills.   Easier with children, to keep this philosophical stance.  It is the adults.  Man, the adults are the hard part.