Category Archives: musing

More Than One Person Can Do

Teams usually struggle to do what I am trying to do alone.  I know this.  It is sad enough to break a man with a vision that is already coming true.  The things I see every day in the animation workshop make me realize how powerful the tool I’ve created can be.  I watch kids transformed by the process of working together creatively.  Competition dissipates, short attention spans expand, kids unable to sit still focus to get something right on the computer.  I hold the children to very high standards in producing their own work, although in sly and sneaky ways.  It is sometimes amazing what goes on in there, the startlingly original animations that such young kids produce.

The jobs I am doing can probably not all be done by one person.  I am exhausted, often swimming in icy water that is also very deep.  If I can’t exactly see the other shore, I know the direction.   If I stop moving forward, I’m sunk.  So I keep going and try not to waste energy crying about how much easier it would be if someone with a motor boat, a rescue blanket and a hardy spirit would pass by and let me climb aboard.   Can’t wait for that at the moment, the water is bone chilling.  But there is warm sun on the other shore, I can practically feel it on my face.

Keep on pushin’, as my man Curtis Mayfield used to sing.

What They Didn’t Teach Me At Home

My parents saw the world as pretty much black or white.   “Love me, love my dog,” their favorite cousin used to bark, when complaining about assholes who wouldn’t let his Boxer, or later his Husky, come into their houses.  He’d have nothing more to do with people like that. My parents were the same way, dividing the world into kindred souls and people to avoid.  My mother was a bit more flexible, my father quite a bit less, but both drew a strong line.

And so I was left to slowly, haphazardly, learn about nuance, and things besides loyalty and reflex.  I had a lot to learn, and, truthfully, didn’t learn much in my first five decades.  Here’s one just occurred to me, something I wish I’d have learned in time to help me make a living.

When I practiced law I participated in a program that provided paid legal counsel to clients of the NYC Department of Aging.  I represented a few senior citizens in various cases, for a flat fee of maybe $1,000 a case.  The seniors didn’t have to pay, several were very nice, and grateful, a few others were demanding and nuts.  Then there was the octogenarian interior designer who lived on MacDougal Street.

He’d been there for about fifty years, on the top two floors of a now very desirable building in Greenwich Village.   You entered his apartment on the fourth floor and to get to his bedroom, as one imagines others sometimes did back in the day, you climbed a steep flight of dark wooden steps through a door-sized opening cut in the floor of the apartment above.  It was a very nice pad, and rent controlled.  He paid a few hundred dollars for the two apartments.  Each one was now worth at least $2,000 a month to the landlord, if they could get the old interior designer out, close up the floor, put in new fixtures.

His mother had died and, as the only child, he inherited her house in Pennsylvania.  The landlord learned of this and decided to try to evict him on non-primary residence grounds.   They served the eviction papers on him and he freaked out.  I was appointed his lawyer.  It became clear that his landlord was taking a shot in the dark, hoping to scare the skittish old man and buy him off cheaply.  The landlord had no case.   The indicia of primary residence are things like: address for all correspondence, where you vote, the address on your drivers license and passport, ties to the community, the fact that the apartment you rent is your main home and that you are there for the majority of the year.  Every factor was in the old interior decorator’s favor.  The apartment was his primary residence.   The attempt to evict him was a cruel thing to do and he was anxious, angry and beside himself to be hauled into court by his long time landlord.

Once he calmed down, it emerged that for the right price he was prepared to retire to his ancestral home.  The ordinary buy-out is calculated on the difference in rent over five years.  If he paid $400 a month and the landlord would be able to get, say, $4,000 a month, you’d get the difference and multiply it by 60 months, in this case $3,600 X 60 or $216,000.  Every month after that, in perpetuity, the landlord would be collecting gravy.

The landlord’s attorney was a vicious scumbag, the kind of lawyer that gives the profession such a bad smell.   He puffed that the era of six digit buy-outs was long in the past (it was not) and that $50,000 was a fair offer (it was not).   He conducted interrogatories and a deposition, which took me and my client many, many hours to comply with.  I should have put my foot up this lawyer’s ass– beaten him at trial and then told him to pay up if his client wanted the apartment so badly.   I was thinking that way, too.

One evening I sat in the bank with my client waiting for the bank to produce some records we needed to give the landlord’s attorney.   “Can you believe we are sitting here on a Friday night waiting for papers to give to that fucking Jew bastard K___?” he asked me.   I gave a blank look and shook my head.  I am Jewish and don’t like to hear that kind of talk,  In fact, I have so rarely heard it that I am unprepared to respond each time I do.  I tried to let it pass, agreeing that the lawyer was a bad man, but he was determined.

“That fucking filthy, Eastern European kyke…” he hissed, and this time I didn’t look at him at all.

We settled the case for $50,000 and I took a third, my biggest payday as a lawyer, but a fraction of what I should have made.

Rewind in light of nuance and perspective:  I could have said “Jimmy, I share your distaste for K____, he’s an anti-Semite’s caricature of a Jewish lawyer, no question.  But I’m Jewish and that ‘filthy Eastern European kyke’ business doesn’t sit well with me, old boy.   I’d expect a bit more sensitivity from someone who, walking lightly in his loafers in a day when one could be beaten or killed for it, should know what it’s like to be a member of a despised minority.”

I have no doubt he would have taken pains to apologize.  He would have put on a great show of being mortified.  Then I’d shake his clammy hand and we’d vow to take the piece of garbage to the cleaners if he wanted his damned apartment back.

Instead, I said nothing, thought “fuck him” and spited myself by taking a fraction of what we both should have been paid– and letting that filthy Eastern European kyke have his way with us both.   Another proof that I was never cut out to be in business for myself as a lawyer.

Pitch

wehearyou.net uses animation, and careful listening to children’s ideas, to get students working and learning together.   The workshop serves New York City public school children who take to it like ducklings to water.   
 
Kids get to draw, sing, invent, sculpt, improvise, drum, plan, produce and refine their ideas.   They are supported by helpful adults.   They master all technical aspects of stop-motion animation: lighting, framing, photography, staging, sound recording and editing.   The group organically organizes into small teams that solve problems as they arise.   
 
Working in a creative beehive run by their own imaginations, they think they are playing.   And, of course, they’re doing that, too.

 

Suspended Animation

I always got a kick out of Walt Disney, after his death, being frozen in time in a cryonic vat.   Thinking of the animator of Mickey Mouse and Goofy in suspended animation always gave me a small kick.  But, I realize now, suspended animation is nothing to smile about.

That smile frozen on my face, reminiscent of a nauseated Woody Allen displaying existential dread, is like the expression they warned you about in school– if someone slaps you on the back your face is gonna stay like dat!

It’s not as if I’m putting all of my chips on this next roll of the dice, not as though not creating a winning ad to raise a substantial sum of money to hire the people I need to turn my program into a business will end this dream.  OK, it will pretty much end this dream, but that’s life, right?

Ted Williams, that tall, thin, angry perfectionist, is in two cryonic vats in a facility in Scottsdale, Arizona.  His head is in one, waiting for the day they can revive it and grow a new body from his cells.  His trunk is in another, waiting for I know not what.

A Shameful Business

I am, I have to admit, in the manner of my father to the end of his life following the fortunes of the Detroit Tigers, a NY Yankee fan.  Leaving aside the obvious idiocy of drinking the Kool-Aid of organized sports in the first place, rooting for the Yankees goes against the rest of my worldview.  The Yankees are the professional sports franchise that exemplifies empire, privilege, corporate snobbery, true, but it’s a childhood thing not amenable to analysis as anything but childish preference and misplaced loyalty.  

My dad rooted for Hank Greenberg, the Jewish Babe Ruth from the Bronx, a Detroit Tiger during most of his Hall of Fame career in the 1930s and 40s.  “How’d the Tigers do?” my father would ask, half a century after Greenberg retired, if the subject of baseball scores came up, which it sometimes did.  I never had any idea how Detroit did, why would I?  I suppose I’m that way about the Yankees because of Mickey Mantle and being eight years old when baseball came into my world.

The last few seasons my main interest in baseball has been checking the box scores to see how Robbie Cano had done.   Another 3 for 5, two doubles and a home run, Robbie on a tear, ten RBIs in the last three games, raising his average another six points after being in the doldrums for a week or two.  It made me feel good, for a few seconds, whenever Robbie was putting up Cano numbers.  To the millions who don’t give a rip about this sort of thing, I understand completely.  It’s how I feel about something called a Hat Trick.  No idea what it is, no interest in finding out.

The point of the shameful business is not that a grown man might distract himself by checking the graphed statistics of a man making fifteen million dollars a year to play a game boys love, or that thousands of people are employed in a vast industry paid to make sure these stats are charted in real-time and available on the internet.  

The point of the shameful business is what goes on with men making fifteen million dollars a year to play this game at an elite level.   Robinson Cano will be playing second base for Seattle under the terms of a ten-year contract he recently signed with them for $240,000,000.   The Yankees were offering basically the same yearly pay, about $24,000,000, but only for seven years– until Cano turns 38, well past the prime of most baseball players.

Well, Cano would be a fool to leave $70,000,000 on the table.   It’s been said often, he’d be foolish to let sentimentality dictate a business decision.  Why would anyone leave $70,000,000, or a penny, for that matter, on the negotiating table?

Except, can anyone tell me the difference between earning $15,000,000 a year and earning $24,000,000 a year, or career earnings of $330,000,000 or $260,000,000, except in a society sick to the death with relentlessly competitive greed?

“Justice is Dead!”

His parents gave him a virtue name, Justice.  When Justice was a baby he was diagnosed with lymphoma.  There are pictures of him as a less than two year-old, bald round head, undergoing chemotherapy, methatrexate.  He’s now ten and a vigorous kid.  When he’s in a good mood he can be very funny.  Once early on he asked me to get him a gun so he could shoot himself, a glimpse of what he and his parents have been through already in his short life.  You can see a short video of his heartwarming story here.

His friends Natalie and Noelle co-produced the brilliant “The Evil Witch on the Second Floor”.  In one scene, in the Evil Witch’s classroom, a flight of hidden stairs in a closet leads to her secret torture chamber.  Another flight takes us to the death chamber below, the chamber of doom where the Evil Witch shackles her victims as they lay dying.  The faces of the Evil Witch’s other victims are crossed off in their framed pictures on the wall.  

Two of the witch’s slaves carry the coffin of a newly dead kid, it says “R.I.P. Justice” on the side.   They toss the casket into a chute marked toxic.  I didn’t notice Justice’s name on the coffin when I passed by when they were shooting it.  I was disturbed by it when I edited the animation that night.

When the group sees the finished footage a week later, Justice’s best friend shouts out “Justice is dead!” as the coffin is trotted across the screen.  “Yeah,” I say “what does Justice think of that?”  and Noelle immediately yells out “he liked it!”

And Justice, who has a raspy voice for a small ten year-old, when I ask “Do you like having your name on a coffin saying R.I.P.?” says “yeah, I like it. The Evil Witch can rot in hell.”  I understood later that maybe these young friends were celebrating a peer’s survival, giving the finger to Death in the most direct way they knew how.

Meanwhile, in an expensive home in the suburbs of Boston my old friend may already have gone over the precipice, falling into the pit of relentless cancer.  Nothing anyone can do for him now, but call him again tomorrow on the land line, in case he feels like picking up.  

Justice is alive, an inspiration to the rest of us, and a reminder– spend your life well.

Cancer getting the upper hand

My friend seems to have come to that cliff at the end of cancer, when things accelerate and it becomes more and more an exercise in keeping the agony of approaching cancer death at bay.  It’s hard to know what I will say when I call him the day after tomorrow, the day after he gets back from radiation to hopefully shrink the tumors now growing in his lungs.

His wife has been heroic, loving, hiding her terror expertly as she changes the dressing on his grievous wounds sometimes twice a day.  The doctors have been cutting away at him for some time now.  The futility of their efforts reminds us of the relentlessness of what humans are up against when it comes to the killing powers of the universe.

My friend’s wife doesn’t talk about selling the house where he is dying, after he’s gone.  He knows it’s the only equity they have.  Their daughters are coming by for a last belated Thanksgiving-type meal tomorrow, the day after that it’s off to the hospital to have his lungs irradiated.  The day after that I’ll call him in the afternoon, which seems to be the best time for him to talk.   It would seem easy enough to call him and check in from time to time, but it isn’t, even as I know how little it is for me to do, that it is all I can do (he lives 200 miles north and doesn’t want visitors), and that it may make him feel marginally better for a moment or two to get the calls.

Does my friend’s situation give perspective on my own challenges?  Surprisingly little.  All of my grandparents and both of my parents died of cancer, as well as two close cousins younger than me.  The odds are high that I will die of cancer too.  Does it remind me that we are all candles in the wind and urge me to get on with the important business of living well? Not so much.

It sets me to rattling the keys in the middle of the dark night, and wondering about things really too terrible to think of.  It should make me grateful for my strength, Sekhnet, the things I love to do, the people I enjoy.  It really should.

Edit (exercise in using the fewest words)

Among the boys I grew up with, their oversized heads on necks like flower stalks, I was considered an athlete.  In their presence I never had occasion to fight, or act tough, though it was within me. 

In my early twenties I spent a couple of seasons in the Bay Area where I had a peripheral acquaintance named Joey.  Joey had a small white car, perhaps a convertible, and was ahead of his time with a vanity license plate.  The plate announced: JOE OUI.

We played touch football one day on a huge field of grass, two on two.  It was a close game, the teams evenly matched, and Joey and I ran full speed for hours going out for passes or trying to intercept passes meant for each other.  The cool afternoon turned to dusk and then into a chilly evening.  When it got too dark to see the passes, and our legs were burning with the cold and fatigue, we called it a day.   As we walked to the car, bone tired, Joey playfully launched himself into the air and tackled me from behind.  I did not take hitting the ground hard very well.

Joe Oui seemed shocked at how quickly he was on his back, an angry maniac on top of him, forearm pressed against his throat like a piece of wood.   The maniac’s eyes were merciless as Joey’s face changed color and panic began to show in his eyes.  In time, the maniac stood wearily and let him breathe again.   He clutched his throat and muttered something about a complete overreaction. 

I practice ahimsa now, but nothing about that story makes me feel sad.

I Recalled this While Walking Tonight

I grew up among boys who had oversized heads on necks like flower stalks.  I was considered an athlete among these boys, though I was no athlete compared to many of the boys in the tougher classes, kids who were not absurdly labeled “Intellectually Gifted Children” and assigned to the IGC class.   These boys in my class from grades one to six all grew up to be wealthy men, I’m certain of it.  In their presence I never had occasion to fight, or to be very tough, but that side was dormant, I suppose.

There was a guy in California named Joey, I knew him peripherally when I spent a few months out there in the mid-seventies, while all the flower stalk necked boys were working towards advanced degrees and promising careers.  I found myself making drawings in spiral bound drawing books, looking out the windows of the bus as it made its way from New York to the Bay area.  Joey had a small white car, perhaps a convertible, and was ahead of his time with a vanity license plate.  The plate announced: JOE OUI.

We played touch football one day on a huge field of grass, two on two.  It was a close game, the teams evenly matched, and we all ran for hours on a cool afternoon that turned into dusk and then a chilly evening.  When it got too dark to see the passes, and our legs were burning with the cold and fatigue, we called it a day.   As we were walking to the car, bone tired, Joey playfully launched himself into the air and tackled me from behind.  I did not take it well.

I think Joe Oui was shocked at how quickly he found himself on his back, with me on top of him, leaning on my forearm pressed against his throat like a piece of wood.  I continued to apply pressure until his face changed color and real panic began to show in his eyes.  Then I stood wearily and let him get up.   He clutched his throat and muttered something about what he considered my overreaction, I said nothing.

A stone killer.

TDD (Temper Dysregulation Disorder with Dysphoria)

At a luncheon recently I mentioned, intending to share my skepticism about the evolving DSM and its 5,000 new categories eligible for lucrative psycho-pharmaceutical medications, Angry Baby Syndrome.  I smirked as I brought up the newly minted diagnosis: Temper Dysregulation Disorder with Dysphoria, a proposed addition to the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), among other things the guide for what insurance will pay for by way of pharmaceuticals.  

One of the strangers at the table, a woman with some professional familiarity with these matters, immediately nodded knowingly.  “Yes, it’s a real condition, there are some babies who just start off angry,” she informed us and the conversation drifted quickly from where I was trying to steer it.  In truth, though I am opinionated, I had no real interest in steering this particular conversation, I was merely stroking one of my pet peeves– the madness and brutality of runaway capitalism.  I worked on my vegan lunch plate, smiling neutrally as I chewed, and let my mind drift in and out of the talk around me.

I’d read a great article, given to me by my friend the now retired judge, about the meteoric rise of mental illness diagnoses.  The article was a review of several books on the boom in psychopharmacology, I’ll find it for you.  A long review, but fascinating, well-written and worth a read.  Marcia Angell begins:

It seems that Americans are in the midst of a raging epidemic of mental illness, at least as judged by the increase in the numbers treated for it. The tally of those who are so disabled by mental disorders that they qualify for Supplemental Security Income (SSI) or Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) increased nearly two and a half times between 1987 and 2007—from one in 184 Americans to one in seventy-six. For children, the rise is even more startling—a thirty-five-fold increase in the same two decades.  Mental illness is now the leading cause of disability in children, well ahead of physical disabilities like cerebral palsy or Down syndrome, for which the federal programs were created.  

(click here to read the article)

I can’t help thinking of TDD, Angry Baby Syndrome, in the context of a story my parents told, and believed, until the end of their lives, a myth I always took pains to demythologize.  At ten weeks old I became red and rigid, my little fists clenched, with a look of rage on my face that no amount of concerned staring or direct questioning from my frightened parents could wipe away.  With great anxiety, they rushed me to the pediatrician.  The good doctor took one look at me, began to laugh and said: “this child is having a temper tantrum!  I’ve never seen it in a baby so young, but this is definitely one angry baby!”  I recall thinking “fuck you, doc.  I’ll live to laugh at your fucking anger some day, you articulate, quack prick.  Just wait until I can talk, assbite.”  By ten months old, according to my proud mother, I was talking, though neither at ten months nor at any time after that did I bother to track the cavalier pediatrician down.

The point of this story to me was always that rather than figure out why their child was so unhappy as to be having a temper tantrum, the two young parents took comfort from the quack’s diagnosis that the kid was just irrationally enraged.  The expert confirmed my parents’ fear that their baby was just one of those born pricks– adversarial, angry, vindictive, challenging, defiant, hating all authority.  Who knew a ten week old could have the worldview to make all these judgments?   I have to believe it helped set the course of my adversarial childhood, this expert’s glib diagnosis that did not extend past a relieved chuckle.  He concluded, essentially, that this baby suffered from nothing more than being an enraged little asshole.  Kind of funny, in a way, no?

I always thought a good doctor might have felt the kid’s little fists– said to the parents, “I’ll be damned, even though it’s August, feel how cold this little guy’s hands are… maybe he’s pissed off because nobody has made sure he’s warm enough.”  Indeed, my mother reported that I always immediately calmed down whenever she gave me a warm bath, but of course, it was impossible to carry around the baby bathtub full of warm water to bathe me whenever I started becoming irrationally enraged.  

But my point in writing this is not to wonder whether TDD with Dysphoria is not a perfectly good diagnosis (why not give a pill to a young child who is just an irrationally angry bastard all the time?) or to muse about whether or not that pediatrician 57 years ago did anyone any favors, or to belatedly defend my, admittedly, infantile behavior.   

I replaced a roll of toilet paper backwards just now.  I noticed it and calmly removed the roll, reversed it, snapped it back into place.  This struck me as a great moment.  The calm fixing of a minor problem was unaccompanied by any sort of snarl, curse word, smirk, clucking of the tongue.  I still fly into a Tourretic rage when I’m leaving the house in a hurry and my ear buds are violently yanked out of my ears as the cord whips around a doorknob, or the long horn bicycle handlebars.  Part of my rage is at the randomness, seeming cruelty and absolute regularity with which these little delaying things always seem to happen, as though the universe is giving me the finger when I most need its silent cooperation.  But with today’s toilet paper tragedy, I was happy to notice myself fixing a minor problem as calmly as the Buddha.  

I took a breath and thought about the progress I’ve made from that vicious little ten week old I once was, the raging TDD poster baby.  It made me think of my father’s terrible temper, and his insistence, until right before the end, when he smartly reversed himself, that people are what they are programmed to be, by genetics and upbringing.  He always dismissed as delusional the idea that one can consciously change this programming.  My dad’s reflex, when a mistake was made by himself or anyone else, was to become instantly enraged.  I spent decades being mad at myself when I did something careless, or stupid, things that earthlings do all the time.

Follow if you can: you are snipping the ends off string beans, nipping the stem off and a bit of the tip on the other end. In one bowl the prepped beans that will be steamed or sauteed, in another the ends you will be discarding.  One after another, bing, bing, bing, the stems into the little metal bowl, string beans into the strainer.  Then, bip! stem into the string beans, whole string bean into the bowl of ends.  One would expect, at most, a little smile and head shake, a plucking out of the stem, an extraction of the string bean, and quickly restoring them to their desired places.   It would be hard for many people to understand the reflex to a paroxysm of rage when the stem gets flipped into the wrong bowl, but it is there for some.

Did my father have his face whipped all through his early childhood, and the angry course of his life irremediably stamped on his little soul, because he had undiagnosed TDD?  Did his mother, an insane little bitch, as far as I can make out, suffer from untreated TDD?  Is the reflex to be enraged carried in the DNA?  If this reflex is then reinforced by infallible repetition, can the programming to react this way be undone by mere mindfulness and a desire to not react with rage to every frustration, no matter how minor?  

Let us not underestimate the practice of mindfulness, working in tandem with a strong enough desire to change a painful reflex.   I’ve been trying to apply this principle to my dealings with others, with some success.  I have remained fairly mild in situations that would have provoked me to major unmildness before.  Imagine my delight to find myself the recipient of this forgiving gentleness in the moment of realizing how maddeningly idiotic my placement of that roll of toilet paper had been.  Noticing these small, valuable steps is a great gift we can give ourselves.

Or, an old reflex suggests, the wishful thinking of a fucking idiot.  Though I think not, whatever my father or a respected doctor might have once said to the contrary.