Category Archives: musing

The Error of My Ways

I’m going to try to reconstruct this post, wiped away as though it never existed when I decided to ponder and revisit it, thinking a draft was saved (he said, the passive voice used).   Only the title was saved, as if to mock me.   Another reminder, boys and girls:  when writing on a computer, save your work often!

I had three big ideas for books to write over the course of my life, all of them misguided.  I point out at the start that nobody ever needs to write a book, really, although many people often think:  somebody should write a book about this. Sometimes they do and the book moves, informs, enlightens or entertains readers.  Other times, eh.  Few books change lives, though many who write books probably start off believing their’s will.

The first book I attempted to write was called Me Ne Frego [1], the story of an idealistic narrator’s inevitably losing battle against a soul-crushing bureaucracy, embodied in the unreasonable person of Minnie Frego.  The reader knows how the story ends long before the naive, somewhat sympathetic narrator does.  It’s part of what makes the manuscript so hard for me to read now, more than twenty years after posing as the tough guy narrator.   The manuscript served as my thesis for an MA in Creative Writing, so there’s that.   The letter I got from the one publisher I sent a sample to informed me that, although nicely written, it was not suitable for their house because the main character had not undergone the kind of dramatic personal transformation that apparently drives every great tale.

About twenty years later I had another big idea:  Bird Wins [2].   The idea was given to me by a literary agent, actually, although the title and the subject matter were mine.   In Bird Wins the occasionally droll narrator observes countless one-sided battles between powerless people and a soul-crushing bureaucracy, embodied in the people for whom our hero carries a bucket into which, after  lifting their long robes, they relieve themselves.  These thousand mini-tragedies are set against the backdrop of the narrator’s mother’s slow death from cancer.  I was told by the literary agent I’d regaled with some of the interlocking stories that it was a natural.  “If you write the pitch just the way you told it to me now, I can sell it,” she said confidently, flashing a winning smile.   I believed her, though my attempt to recreate it was nowhere near as engaging as what I’d improvised for her and her son.  Nothing came of it in the end but a few disjointed chapters.

In the decades in between I periodically worked on a manuscript I unfortunately called Get Outta Here, Melz, taking the surname of my fictional alter-ego from an old friend who not long ago died of a rare and vicious disease.   At that time he was alive and well, as far as I knew.  In that story there is no relentless, soul-crushing bureaucracy for the narrator to fight a losing battle against, but, in a refreshing change of pace, Benedict Melzer is eventually chased by a torch-wielding mob of his former closest friends who form a posse in the mistaken belief that he has seduced and run off with one of their teenaged daughters.  They find a seemingly incriminating correspondence between the self-righteously noble Benedict and the, at one time, slightly infatuated girl, but their suspicions could not have been further from the truth.  The last letter the girl writes to BM, coldly denouncing him as a hopeless, pathetic, self-important idiot, which the readers see, is not found by his former friends among the papers.  At the time they take off after him, the girl is in another state with a young man and Melz is far away, alone, on the run from himself and his life.  It was intended as a comedy of errors, although, ideally, a comedy is funny.  I never made much progress with the book, though thinking about it now, and the unfortunately named BM’s all-consuming, impractical, slightly mad belief in the supreme importance of spontaneity and creativity, I find it tricky to escape the psychic ripples of it as a certain alienated desperation dogs me like a hellhound in the uncomfortable silence of just about everybody I know.

As I jotted uncharitably in my former gratefulness journal the other day:

My first two attempts to write a book, Me Ne Frego and Bird Wins, were ass-backwards, spectacularly unmarketable efforts.  Each featured a brave, unquestionably earnest narrator describing a detailed crucifixion, gesticulating stoically from his crude cross as the life dripped from his body.

Another equally compelling book could be written from the POV of a precocious child dying of dysentery in a toxic slum in Lahore.  The world has billions of such books, unwritten by the losers of a billion small, infinitely brutal, rigged games.

The books the world wants, and it’s hard to blame them, are stories of a remarkable individual’s miraculous triumph over the relentless machine that grinds us all down at varying speeds.  The paying world goes, by and large, for moving triumphs or dramatic, fully justifiable revenge stories, a Hollywood ending.  The world, where the scales are so often false and weighted, loves the rousing story of an honest count, against all the odds, or failing that, a good ass-whupping.  Stories by those on the wrong end of the ass-whupping do not sell as well as the other kind, as any marketing expert will tell you.

 

NOTES:

[1] “I don’t give a rat’s ass!” an Italian expression of contempt and bravado famously used by Benito Mussolini.

[2] named for the unbeatable tic-tac-toe playing chicken in the Chinatown Arcade on Mott Street, (the bird always went first, so you figure it out…) may she rest in peace.

 

 

 

 

 

Animation by several creative adults

Animation created by several inventive women in four July 2014 sessions at the Creative Center, NYC.  Beautiful stuff.

with thanks to Django Reinhardt (1910-1953) (I’ll See You In My Dreams, Low Cotton– with Barney Bigard on clarinet) and Paul Greenstein (glistening glissentar on my track “Now Before I Go”)  Although this not for profit use is “fair use” I should get permissions from whoever currently owns the rights to Django’s genius…

Encouragement

Notice how the word “courage” is the center of that word.   To encourage is to give courage.   Courage is the most important tool we need to forge through difficulty. Being discouraged is the end, temporarily or permanently, of one’s ability to soldier on.

Usually, weighed down with our own troubles, distracted by many distractions, we don’t notice how easy and essential encouragement is.   We may think that nobody encourages us, and we do fine, so what the hell?

I get a call from an old friend whenever his wife, an active volcano, erupts.   She broke the stained glass window of the room he rents to escape from her wrath.   I hear the story, try to be sympathetic, but do I really encourage him?   I give him advice about his strategy, tell him why answering her rage with his own anger may not be the best approach.   He gets slightly defensive, and it’s hard to blame him.   He called for encouragement, he got a bit of possibly helpful, definitely unwanted, advice.

“You are in a war, unfortunately, and every war is different.   I think you’re doing a great job finding ways to hold your enemy at bay.   I commend you, and strength to your arm,” would have been a more encouraging response.

When I told a friend recently that I, with an idealistic and so far unpaid program to save doomed children, am like the man on the falling plane exhorting others to put their oxygen masks on before helping others– while not wearing my own, I secretly hoped he would disagree.   He nodded sadly, thought the image was very apt.    It had the opposite of an encouraging effect, no matter how realistic the image might have been.

When a friend is engaged in a difficult or even impossible quest, do we encourage them or do them more of a favor by gently trying to bring them back into the real world, unacceptable as that real world might be?    Silence, of course the most obvious option, generally does little to advance either of these mercies.

Magical

“It’s hard to know what to say to you, how to start a conversation with someone in your perilous situation,” she said.

“That’s understandable,” he said, trying to distance himself from me. “What do people talk about? Not their terror, too scary. Not their inner feelings, way too uncomfortable. I have no idea what people actually talk about, I don’t talk much these days.”

A long moment of silence, and swallowing, seemed like it might never end.

“Death, there’s something else we don’t really like to talk about, except maybe for which really bad people deserve painful forms of it,” he said, after a while.

In her struggle to get him off depressing, dead-end subjects, she suggested that there was hope. An introduction had been made by email to a possibly congenial collaborator. “I heard she wrote that you were ‘magical’,” she said hopefully.

“Yes, she did, that was the word she used. Said I was ‘magical’ with groups and individuals,” he said brightly. It would only be a second or two, she knew, before he’d manage to turn even this glowing compliment to the dark side.

“Who was it who wrote ‘The Year of Magical Thinking’? If I had a smart phone I could tell you in a few taps, hang on, let’s pretend I do: Joan Didion. You remember that phrase? Magical thinking is a kind of irrational, superstitious belief that if you do things a certain way a bad outcome will be averted. Like Didion thought at one point that she couldn’t get rid of her dying husband’s shoes because if she did he wouldn’t have shoes when he came back from the hospice. By holding on to the shoes she believed she was magically preventing his death, somehow. Grief, derangement, insanity, all very terrible, desperate things, and part of the realm of the magical, you know.”

“What?” she said. “How do you get from a compliment about your ability to turn a group of strangers into a creative, collaborative team into Joan Didion’s meditation on the insane thinking caused by grief and impending loss?”

“It’s really a simple step,” he said, “nobody knows what to say about my program, which nobody, also, really grasps the potential and present reality of. I have seen it at work many times now, how organically my idea works over and over, and I have a few participants who can vouch for how well it works, but to the rest, and everyone I know, absent a compellingly creative and engaging commercial pitch, you have to take my word for it. My word, in a word, magical thinking. You know, if I meet a rich person who generously supports the idea, get the idea to a philanthropic foundation who can picture the vision I present and pay to help make it real in the world, if I can work in the shittiest schools in the city and produce work far better than anything I’ve had them do so far, if… you dig? My word for the odds of success here was ‘miracle’. That’s what it would take for one person to succeed at what I am trying to do alone. Another word is ‘magical.’ The guy is a miracle worker, magical.”

After a moment she said “do you realize how hard it is to have a conversation with somebody like you?”

“Absolutely, I do,” he said, and smiled, after a fashion. He thought suddenly of a man he once met at a friend’s parents’ party. The man was slim, and shy, and had a beaming smile on his face almost the entire night. Every time he looked over the man was grinning like the happiest man in the world. The woman the smiling man was standing next to for most of the evening, also happy looking, was his sister, it turned out. He learned later that they lived together and that the beaming man had died of complications of alcoholism.

“What should I have done at that party?” the ghost of the smiling man asks, “sobbed and wailed about how fucking unbearable my life was? I had one card to play, and I played it, went home and got shit-faced and then, soon after, I was dead. Finally.”

“Whoa,” she said, “that transition was kind of magical, but in a very dark way.”

“Believe in magic and you have to believe in dark magic too,” he said darkly.

“You’ve been painting the floor of this room we’re standing in and we’ve been backing up step by step and now the only door is far across that field of wet paint,” she said, pointing at the tiny door a long way off.

“You’re only now noticing this?” he asked.

“I’m trying to go along with you here,” she said. “You are not the easiest person in the world to talk to, you know?”

“I know, it’s true,” he said softly. What did they tell him at school about writing with adverbs and qualifiers? Fuck if he could recall.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “There are no rules in this world, and nothing is for certain. We stand on legs that will be swept from under us one day, under a light that will go dark and never come back on. We are controlled largely by our fears, and most people do what they feel is the safest thing to do. It is much easier to go to work and come home with money than to stay in a room with your thoughts and wavering beliefs as your existence becomes more and more marginal. On the other hand, you have a dream, even a noble one, and it is very hard work, and you’re not young and energetic any more, but you should either be grateful for your passion and your slow but forward progress or give in and find a way to make a living, however meaningless. If your Plan A is too hard, do Plan B. And I have no idea what Plan B would be in your case.”

“I like that!” he said. “And you said it was hard to talk to me!” He patted her arm, the paintbrush hanging down by his side in his other hand as the two stood in a tiny circle of dirty, unpainted floor. She smiled, and shook her head.

“Now, if you will excuse me,” he said, “I have to paint this last bit of floor.”

Random

“Yeah, I said it. What?!” some writers will come at you, bam! pugnaciously engage you, grab your shirt front. Make the job easy for the reader? Not interested, these types will say, I am making a statement with my art, doing something that’s never been done. It’s a matter of style, I suppose, how one goes about it.

Style is somewhat random, like finding yourself in the apartment you moved into when you were nineteen. “Is this a fucking dream?” you might wonder, eyes wandering over the detritus of almost forty randomly dreamed years. Everyone else you know has moved a number of times since then, many into fine houses they now own and will pass on to their children some day. An AARP eligible adult still living in the apartment he rented while dropping in and out of college is suspect. “What do we suspect?” she asked suspiciously.

“Wake up!” the voice yells as a train rumbles through, making the floor of this old apartment shudder.

Random, like I said. And an argument can be made, and sometimes is, that this entire enterprise, the time spent here searching for meaning between being born and moving on, is a somewhat random sequence of events, some pleasant, some not. We are ants, a friend’s father told me once. Crawling over the earth, trying to make the best of our short time here. Some thinking they would like to do something good for the world, some actually doing good things, whenever they can.

Randomness itself random. Randomly picking random thoughts, random. The pickled randomness of a randomly plucked random thought? Randomly pickled, no doubt.

Slight Nausea

Some days slight nausea is the best choice from a menu of worse options.  Today, for example, I prefer it to the Full-Blown Existential Dread.   I pondered the Bang Your Head Against the Wall entree, thought for a moment of asking if I could get it a la carte, but thought better of it.

Slight nausea it is, though I’m wondering idly how much you tip for this sort of thing.

Another Way of Viewing Things

It’s hard to know, sometimes, whether your view of a situation is colored by the lens you view it through or if the situation simply is that color.   The same situation can be perceived very differently by those who are in it.   She was focused, direct and professional; she was hard-edged and ambitious to the edge of ruthlessness.  She was pleasant and good humored; she was superficial, forced and impatient.  All of the above also may be true.  All of the above may also make no difference one way or the other, if her offer is of value.

I throw another style of viewing things into the mix: the wishful thinking view.  A disadvantage of this style is that it is based in best case scenario thinking rather than on a practical, unemotional evaluation of actual likely outcomes.  An advantage of the wishful thinking viewer, for those so inclined, is how easily it can be converted into a whip, already in hand and poised closest to where it will hurt the most.

This is not meant in any way to contradict the wise idea that it is far better to look at a thing without fear, and with compassion.  It’s clearly better to be in the moment as much as possible and not distracted by the many thoughts that may be pressing their way in.  

The best way to look at things is as you would like to be looked at yourself, as you would like to consistently see yourself.  Hard, yes, and finding your way there without a good map or recipe, good luck.  Sadly (or happily) I have no map or recipe, other than throwing things into the mix and trying to see clearly, and act accordingly, as often as I can.

 

Better Way to Think About A Situation

A situation is what it is, good and bad and also, seen dispassionately, just what it is, with no inclination either way sometimes.  Wise people teach us that the way we look at things makes them appear good or bad. As we look, so shall we see.  When we look with fear, we see reasons to be afraid.  When we look with compassion, it is easier to play nice.

I have a meeting tomorrow that could result in some good things at a time when the signs, laid out like the entrails of animals read by soothsayers at the time of Caesar, would appear to foretell mostly doom. I can tell this, in part, because my friends are at a loss when I myself am at a loss to enthuse about this unusual plan I am pursuing, with modest practical skills, that seems so at odds with the times we live in.

I realize there is no reason to see this meeting in a few hours as a high stakes poker game, though there will be some negotiation.   If it is such a game, I could say, I am playing with house money.   But that is only a way to rationalize, make myself feel more comfortable at a time when I feel challenged.

Here is a more important thing and a much better frame to look at it through: the energetic assistant of a very successful economic and ecological entrepreneur, based again in the impoverished neighborhood where she grew up, visited wehearyou.net and was excited about what she saw.  A meeting was arranged.  Tomorrow is the meeting.

I can think about my program, and present it, like this: I have been programming and refining the simplified animation workshop for almost two years now, have worked with around 80 public school kids, in seven or eight workshops, for a total of maybe 140 hours on a once a week basis.   It is not a gigantic sample size, but it’s enough to know that every place we do it kids respond enthusiastically and creatively.   This is not surprising, it is designed to let them play and learn in a fun, interactive, collaborative setting.

The workshop is non-hierarchic, everybody there is a participant, treated with the same respect, including the adults who are on hand to facilitate.  The adults are not teachers, they’re time keepers, organizers, assistants, enthusiastic supporters of the animation the children make.   That learning takes place without teachers systematically presenting material is a radical but also very natural notion, play leads to discovery, wanting to do something leads to invention and mastery of the skills needed.  Young animals of all kinds play, it is how they master many things they need to know how to do.   Human kids are no different, if given the chance to, they love to play.  Give children musical instruments, they will begin to play a kind of music.

In the typical American school play, invention, improvisation, dreaming up ideas, is secondary, if it is encouraged anywhere but at recess — the main work is learning to master the materials tested on standardized exams.  Exams designed by large educational corporations in a way that ensures many young humans are destined to fail.

I have the animation made by a relatively small sample of kids done in a short once a week time format, so far, and you can find many inventive and enchanting moments in that highly original animation.   But what I’ve assembled until now is merely a glimpse at the potential of the program.   I am looking for a few places where my philosophy and methods can be worked week after week, over time, where kids can make real progress in animation, teach each other, work on more sustained stories, if they like, really master the technical aspects to the extent that they extend the boundaries of what kids can do.   I want people to be amazed, the more cynical among them shocked, at what children can create on their own, with their creativity as motivation and just a little guidance.

People are doing this work here and there.   A brilliant and charismatic educational theorist, Sugata Mitra, embedded a computer and track pad in an outside wall of slums in remote Indian villages and illiterate children organized themselves to learn a functional English vocabulary and were soon surfing the internet and playing games.   Mitra calls many of the things that happen when a group self-organizes to learn “emergent”.   Emergence is the appearance of things not previously thought to be part of the system.

Collaboration, invention, increased attention span, peer-teaching and group problem-solving, are not usually thought of as express goals of a school day or even of an art workshop.   Our society stresses individualism and competition and children don’t often get a chance to work together collaboratively over time.   Teamwork is needed in  team sports and encouraged in that context.   It is also necessary for animation.

Children in the animation workshop begin working in small groups very quickly.   We encourage it and like it when the teams shift players regularly.   Animation is made by a small community of interrelated teams working together.  It calls for the integration of many talents and skills, and requires a good deal of learning and peer-teaching to accomplish.

Deceptively simple, what I have tapped into.    Now what it needs is fertile ground to plant the seeds and demonstrate the things it can grow into.   Tomorrow I may find one such plot in this remote community in the South Bronx.    Someone is interested in listening, and I will be interested in listening too.

Four Cruel and Predictable Koans

While walking a man paused periodically to scrawl these in a small book.

Do you hear the man on the plunging plane exhorting his fellow passengers, with no oxygen mask on himself, to put their oxygen masks on before trying to help other passengers?

In that same man’s defense:  he’s excellent at several different hobbies.

Wishful thinking makes no more than a wish.

Stopping to note a thing doesn’t make it noteworthy.

A little more love for Florence

I wrote to thank Florence’s children and grandchildren for a wonderful and inspiring celebration of a remarkable and brilliant old friend.  I’d been moved and distracted yesterday, when I spoke briefly at the memorial, during one of the breaks in the string ensemble’s performance of some of Florence’s favorite pieces, and wanted to make sure to add these thoughts:

Florence was an inspiration to many people, and to me in particular.  Her embrace of every aspect of creativity, and her nurturing of creativity in others, had a deep influence on me.  Her gentleness, her wide-ranging intellect, her humor, her love of life and her art work exerted a subtle but strong transformational force.  I attribute much of the best of who I am today to her generous, kind, whimsical influence, and her love.
 
Her beloved little brother told me, under a gentle interrogation, that she took some piano lessons for a while but never got that far on the instrument.  Still, this most musical painter’s love of music, and understanding of the underlying geometry of Bach’s music, was so profound that she could effortlessly put a counterpoint melody in exactly the right place against and among the beats and notes in a two part rock guitar jam.  It delights me as much now, remembering it, as it did when she sang that invention in real time late one night in the living room on Aberdeen Road, not long before her 90th birthday.
 
It could be said that her art deserved to be more widely known, and that she should have had some measure of fame and financial security from her brilliant, deep and masterfully executed paintings and other works.  Though she would have no doubt liked those things, I don’t think it bothered her very much as she went about her life and work.   She had more substantial things on her mind.   As Russ pointed out (and as she described in that wonderful piece about the creative benefits she derived from smoking), all of her many interests and loves seemed to focus themselves more and more into that hard to describe source of light and life energy that emanated from and flowed into the center of many of her paintings and her octamandalagons.  I watched happily as the mysterious force that Russ described shone out of the images in the slide show, as her favorite music was beautifully played and she was present, smiling, in that room.
 
I wrote this shortly after she died, and I meant to share it as well:
 
a few more words of gratitude about Florence
 
and two links to Florence’s work and words
 
two Florence links– wonderful stuff