It is a loss for me, having nobody, restless, like a phantom limb. The illusions of connection in a world of illusion, never mind. I suppose one should feel satisfied with a random cluck now and then. The sun pries its way through the blinds. Now the birds are out there, with all their idiotic opinions in the airless morning.
Category Archives: personal
Cancer
My mother, always a large and heavy woman, was, for the last few years of her life, almost gaunt. She’d been a fat baby, there’s an oblong portrait of her as an infant, she’d had it blown up and put into a gilt frame. In the photo her eyes are black, she looks like an apple cheeked glittering-eyed Italian bambina. She was overweight for most of her adult life, but for the last few years, gaunt. Cancer and the Widow’s Diet, as she called it, did that for her.
Her mother had died of cancer, a terrible, painful, wasting death we all watched up close. When it was finally time for my grandmother to die, she couldn’t go. Her eyes turned huge, and black, and she screamed. My grandmother was not in there any more, just the will to live. It was dreadful to see.
My grandfather was gone over a year when she died. He had survived lung cancer and the removal of a lung. This all happened when I was a baby, he lived until my 24th year. Although an ideal weight for his body his whole life, he was terrified of living alone without his mate and started cutting down on his calories. He went on a low salt special diet with his cancer-stricken wife, although there was no medical reason to do it. There was no practical reason either, they had always prepared and eaten different food every meal anyway. My grandmother used to scream at him that he was an idiot, that he should eat what he always ate. He was stubborn. He lost a couple of pounds, carried too many bottles of seltzer back on a bus one 90 degree, 90% humidity Miami Beach afternoon, had trouble catching his breath when he came into the apartment. Died not long afterwards of a heart attack. Not to say that cancer wouldn’t have killed him too, it had already tried and almost succeeded once.
My father felt like crap the last two years of his life. Looked terrible, had no energy, went to a cardiologist, endocrinologist and a hematologist regularly. They tried a B-12 shot, which didn’t do much good. One day he woke from a nap, paralyzed and yellow. In the emergency room there was no doubt among the doctors and nurses there, he was clearly in the final stages of undetected liver cancer. He didn’t keep his appointment with the hematologist the following day, he had only one pressing appointment to keep after that. He was dead six days later.
His parents, my grandparents on my father’s side, both died young of cancer. My first cousin, Ann, died of cancer before the age of 40. Another cousin, Emily, same thing, dead of cancer around 40. Emily’s father, my father’s cousin Gene, now 85, fought cancer as valiantly as my mother had, for more than twenty years. He plays tennis and feels good. He’s a tough bird.
About five years ago I had skin cancer removed from my nose and my arm. A year or two later more cancer removed from my nose, a few millimeters from the first site. “It’s a hot spot,” explained the dermatologist, taking another biopsy.
I’m not bragging about all this cancer, please understand.
But it’s the background, explaining, in part, why this call to my old friend tonight has been tormenting me so much. Soft tissue sarcoma is rare, the exact kind he has is a rare form of soft tissue sarcoma. They’ve been cutting at him, assured him they got the whole tumor when they removed a buttock and part of his leg, but cancer is a cunning little fucker and it made liars of the doctors and their assurances. Nerves were removed from his leg, most of the sciatic nerve on one side, recently the foot on that leg stopped working. The doctors gave no guarantee about the surgery helping. It was a good thing about the no guarantee, because the surgery didn’t help. Chemo, the only game left for him, has been hit or miss, largely miss. They are blind men throwing darts at a theoretical dart board in a room with no floor.
I found myself talking like a nattering fool after getting his frank update tonight, blindly changing the subject at one point, the way I’ve heard others talk to people with end-stage cancer. Tap-dancing, self-conscious, trying to be sympathetic, and helpful while feeling helpless against a horrific futility. So, nattering on about everything else. It made me sick to hear people do it to my grandmother, my mother. It was more sickening still to hear me doing it. My friend gently interrupted, it was time to change the dressing on his latest surgery, get some sleep before his doctor’s appointment tomorrow. He was hoping to feel up to a visit soon, but no guarantees, he has been feeling pretty shitty.
I walked in the humidity trying to hold on to my new habit of cultivating happiness. Might as well have tried to hold a fart in my hands in the merciless New York City night.
Living In My Own Head
An imaginary application to participate in TED talks as a 2013 TED Fellow:
TELL US ABOUT YOURSELF
We take this portion of the application very seriously. Please take the time to answer the questions thoughtfully, with enough detail to help us understand who you are.
All responses are limited to 1500 characters except where noted.
What is your current primary activity? *
I am the facilitator of a child-run animation workshop and the Creative Director of the nonprofit wehearyou.net. Our mission is to carefully listen to the children’s ideas and concerns and to encourage them to express these things in animation. And they do. The children set up the camera stand and lights for each session, create the animation, shoot all the frames, input them to a computer, edit the frames, make the soundtrack. There is virtually no creative input from adults, whose role is to keep an eye on the clock and make sure things run smoothly. Being this hands-off is hard work, too, and requires a high degree of calmness, alertness, discipline, attentiveness and humor. Also, perhaps most importantly, flexibility on the fly.
In addition to my work as lead facilitator of the workshop I am also the organization’s Director of Development, recruiter, fundraiser, corresponding secretary, trainer, marketing and branding officer, writer, webmaster, social media director, head of outreach, bookkeeper. I also do the final edit of the weekly animations and mix the soundtracks. (1,068 characters)
What are you best known for? *
Oddly enough, cool under fire, sang froid. I’m aided in this by an overdeveloped sense of irony acquired during constant warfare in the contentious family of my childhood. I am known for several skills and talents that I’ve made no efforts to exploit financially, to the puzzlement of many. I am considered an inventive draftsman, I play guitar and keyboards and arrange, I’m a clear, concise and sometimes moving writer. I am also known for dreaming and my many ideas, which I have never hesitated to share. Also for a sometimes uncanny memory.
In the professional realm, I am best known for variations on the above. As a subsistence lawyer I was probably best known for my deadpan style, quickness of tongue and odd grace dancing before judges, especially when they were being disrespectful. As a teacher I was probably best known for my easy rapport with children, candor and quickness of retort. I also gave a high priority to the students’ creativity and took pains not to pour water on any idea they expressed. Parents and colleagues often remarked on how creative my classes were.
As a young man I was probably best known for my angry words. I have been transforming myself into a more deliberate, milder person. A quick, cutting response may be fun to make, and satisfying in the moment, but one learns (with luck) that it does little to advance a real conversation. I am known for being someone you can have a meaningful conversation with. I place a high value on real conversation.
What other achievements (not only academic) would you like to share? *
As hinted at above, my achievements are difficult to quantify, in worldly terms. My biggest achievement to date has been my ongoing dedication to my beliefs as embodied in wehearyou.net. My creation of and involvement with this program, which I consider radical and sorely needed, has necessitated many positive changes in my thinking and action.
I’ve come to understand that most people are mostly preoccupied most of the time and that the modern attention span is very short. I’ve had to learn things I’d never thought about. I’ve had to learn, for example, that most people don’t give a rat’s ass about whether or not poor children in Harlem make animation. I am, after a long digestive period, able to keep those perceptions in mind without letting them deter me or slow my progress.
My mission is to encourage people to listen to and respond to each other gently. It’s a life-affirming thing for a child to be listened to attentively by an adult, to have a moment to dream out loud uninterrupted. While this is a sadly rare thing (for anyone of any age) in our hyper digital world of virtual connection and overloaded distraction, the program and I have made some very encouraging first steps in this direction.
Beyond your work and studies, what are you passionate about? (e.g. hobbies, causes, activities, issues — please do not talk about your work in this section) *
I am passionate about playing music, listening and preserving the spaces in music that are where the action is. I am passionate about improvising and helping to bring out the creativity of others. I play the guitar, mostly, and am always most pleased when another musician comments on how much space I leave for other people’s ideas. I also enjoy accompanying singers.
I am passionate about justice, which is one reason the law was such an unappealing detour on the road of my life. Justice in America is largely the justice you can afford to purchase. I can point you to the relevant provisions in our constitution which obliquely say as much. The gulf between what is legal and what is right is an enormous, stinking crevasse. My powerlessness in the face of recent injustice, “the war on terror” and its related excesses, the widespread, crippling criminality of the financial sector, led me to imagine a program that would encourage children to plan, stage, critique, problem-solve in groups. To help them become informed, effective citizens of a democracy.
I dream of helping create articulate young citizens who are able to inform themselves about issues, argue them and organize to change intolerable conditions in our democracy. I plan to give a digital megaphone and increased sense of agency to children, particularly those society has decided get all the help they need from programs for “at-risk” and “underprivileged” kids.
I am passionate about letting the larger society, the one busy piously acquiring wealth, see what is in the minds and hearts of young people who are seen, if at all, as profitable widgets for privatized prisons.
I am passionate about drawing, writing well and, whenever possible, having deep conversation.
Share an example of something you have been a part of (including created, led, or joined) that you consider unique, even if no one else does. Why do you think it is mould breaking? (Limit 2250 characters) *
Not to harp on wehearyou.net, but I consider our approach unique and mould breaking. Here’s the idea, with illustrations at the end. The creative potential of young children is increasingly discounted. When children are allowed to choose their projects, & control all aspects of production, remarkable things emerge. Week after week children ages 7 to 11 create, in the chaos of a free-form workshop, surprisingly inventive animation. I am amazed by some break-through just about every session.
The great Sugata Mitra demonstrated children’s ability to self-organize, learn and teach each other things they are passionately engaged with. Mitra used a computer embedded in a wall and documented the progress of illiterate children, as a group, who mastered the technology with no outside help. Wehearyou.net is using the canvas of animation to help demonstrate the rich creative lives of children who are increasingly forced into ever more restrictive learning environments where most of them will learn failure rather than any kind of success.
In the test-prep age of No Child Left Behind children are seen as passive vessels to be filled with information and skills geared to standardized tests rather than as partners in their own education. Kids are capable of learning much more than most educators give them credit for, particularly if license is given for their creativity to enter the classroom.
8 year-old with cut-out and three foil coins asks how to make the little character juggle. I tell him I have no idea, see what you can do. Within moments the little cut-out is juggling, the kid is already on to the next thing, with barely a backwards glance. Two seven year olds create a guitarist and drummer. Passing by I suggest they cut off and move the guitarist’s arm to make him strum. A short while later they shoot a sequence where the two tiny musicians play perfectly in sync, the guitarist strumming then flipping his guitar in the air to catch and strum it on the beat. The drummer, meanwhile, flips his drumsticks in the air, catches them and, bam!, exactly on the same beat. How they did it, truthfully, I have no idea.
Idea Girl, nine, with five ideas a week she is too distracted to carry out, describes sequence where character will take part of his stomach, make a basketball backboard and hoop out of it, dunk a basketball, turn a somersault, pick up the backboard, eat it, get fat and then turn into a ball. I ask if she’ll do this with clay. She nods. A few hours later, when first looking at the frames they shot during the session, I am amazed to see the frames, which needed no editorial improvement, doing exactly what she described. (2732)
What questions should we have asked, but didn’t? Please write them down and answer them! (in other words, tell us something about yourself that we don’t know yet). (Limit 2250 characters) *
(I’ll get back to them on this one)
Can you share a memorable anecdote from your life that will give us a further sense of what makes you tick?
My father was brilliant and very funny but also brutally defended at all times. I learned, at age 40, that he’d been the victim of atrocious abuse from his mother, whippings as soon as he was old enough to stand. Learning this unspeakable secret, from Eli, an older cousin, gave me great insight I could never have had without knowing about the abuse he’d endured.
My father and I had a life-long debate about whether people could change. He argued that only superficial things could be changed, that deeper personality traits were ingrained and set. I said changes in response were the first step toward making the deeper changes. He angrily denied any insights I may have thought I’d received from Eli, pointing out that his cousin was a problematic historian and tyrannical father.
At 1 a.m. on what turned out to be the last night of my father’s life I visited him in the hospital. His first comment: “Eli hit the nail right on the head, only he didn’t tell you the worst of it.” He hadn’t recovered from being whipped as an infant. This brilliant man remained somehow convinced he’d been the dumbest kid in town. He told me I was right about change. He wished he’d had the insight to try to change himself. “I imagine how much richer my life would have been if I had not seen it as a zero-sum war.”
As sun set the next evening he breathed his last, I closed his eyes. The profound gift of these last moments with my father remains with me, and sustains my beliefs. (1476)
How did you hear about the TED Fellows program?
I don’t recall exactly. I think I stumbled on a TED talk on youTube and have watched many since. I also subscribe to the podcast on WNYC. Several friends, it turns out, are also great fans of TED (how can you not be?) and I have done some evangelizing and turned a few others on to these remarkable talks. I probably learned of the Fellows program on the TED website.
Have you participated in TED before? If so, to what extent? (e.g. you watch TEDTalks, you’ve attended / hosted / spoken at a TEDx event, you’re a TEDTranslator, etc)
Only to the extent of being inspired by many of the talks. The inspirations have been too many to list in 1,500 characters, but for purposes of wehearyou.net, the talks of Sugata Mitra, Ken Robinson and Seth Godin cannot be praised enough.
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.
The Best Friend To Have
is probably one who can silence the noise in her head while you are talking about something that troubles or amuses you.
My Father’s Death
When I arrived in Florida, a few days after my father’s sudden hospitalization with undiagnosed end-stage liver cancer, a couple of days before he died, my father told me “you’re the only one who knows what’s going on.” Although everyone around him knew he was dying, and the look on the Emergency Room doctor’s face had made that unmistakably clear to my sister, who urged me to get on the next plane, he was somehow trying to give me credit he’d often withheld.
“I want to talk to you, I’m gathering my thoughts,” he told me a while later, and I bought him a tiny digital recorder to speak into, if he was moved to speak when nobody was around. He was beyond writing things down, and though he was an excellent writer, he rarely put pen to paper when he was able to.
We were fortunate to have that conversation, the thoughts he gathered were impressively organized, clearly expressed in that scratchy voice he had at the end. I don’t know if anyone could have written, edited and delivered those thoughts better. He always was an excellent speaker, and spoke virtually without notes. Lucky for us both I have always been a night owl and when I drove over to the hospital at 1 a.m. he was awake and waiting to talk. Turned out to be the last night of his life, he died before sundown the following day.
I am thinking about my father’s death because of something he said right at the end, it may have been the last thing he said. We were sitting around his hospital bed, he’d become agitated, grabbed my sister’s hand, and mine, and when he let go I got the nurse and convinced him to take a mild sedative, an anti-anxiety pill, atavan, that a friend of mine is fond of. I assured him it was fast-acting and would only take the edge off, since he was always very concerned with remaining in control and had never had so much as a beer, let alone a mind-altering pill. Reassured, and feeling desperate perhaps, he agreed to take it and quickly composed himself.
“I’m feeling much better,” he announced a few minutes later, sounding like his old self. “Why don’t you all go down and take a break and have a bite to eat downstairs, you’ve been sitting here a long time. Elie can stay with me, it’s OK.” My mother, sister, uncle and brother-in-law all got up and went down to the cafeteria. It was dinner time and outside the sky was turning into a beautiful painting of a Florida sunset. I recall the silhouettes of palm trees outside the hospital windows becoming more vivid as the light slowly began to fade.
Two nurses were in the room and one of them said to me “it’s almost time.” She pointed out that my father’s fingers were turning blue under the fingernails, something to do with the blood no longer delivering enough oxygen to the extremities, apparently a sign that Death is close by.
“If you pray, now is the time to do it,” said the other nurse. I told her we were not religious and she took it on herself to sing a Jewish tune she knew. The African-American woman sang a chorus of Dayenu, a song from the Passover service that indicates we’d be thankful for any fraction of the many blessings God has laid on us. Thinking about it now, the snippet of song was as good a prayer as I could have thought of, though it seemed a bit surrealistic at the time. She had a nice voice, and carried the tune well, but I remember thinking at the time that it was bizarre.
They helped me take down the railing at the side of the bed so I could sit closer to my father, then silently left the room. My father looked at me helplessly and said “I don’t know how to do this…” I assured him that nobody does, that it was OK. I sat close as he breathed a bit faster for a minute or two, maybe five, perhaps fifteen, and then breathed his last. His eyes were open, I closed them with two fingers of one hand, like playing a simple chord on the guitar or piano. It was eerie how natural the movement was. The nurses returned a moment later and I took the oxygen tube out of my father’s nostrils. “He won’t be needing this,” I said softly, handing it to them. I took his glasses and put them in my baritone ukulele case, where they are to this day.
I was amazed at how simple and graceful my father’s last moments were. I’d been told a day earlier that death by kidney failure, the way terminal liver cancer actually kills you, is an accelerating sleepiness that ends in a usually peaceful death, but it was striking how peaceful that final struggle was. A friend who read Jewish scripture for years quoted a line from the Talmud, I think, that stated it poetically and true to my father’s death: the moment of death is like lifting a hair off a glass of milk.
“I don’t know how to do this….” rang in my head just now, as I thought of the mountain I am trying to climb, an impossible one, really, for anybody but an exceptional being who is able to recruit exceptional helpers, and I thought to myself, with a sinking feeling “I don’t know how to do this.” Same phrase. It struck me. Now, the same mercy I gave the old man, I extend to myself, if such a thing is possible– “nobody does, it’s OK.”
Either way, there will be the last breath and then darkness. I’ll be happy to meet angels, and the souls of loved ones who have passed on, but I’m not expecting to. The only thing to see between now and then is how exceptionally I can climb in whatever time remains for me to climb.
Bitter Dogs, Very Bitter Dogs
Rodney Dangerfield, when he was a young comic, did a Borscht Belt-style routine about how hard he had it coming up in his early years in show biz. He followed two terrible precision dancers, a horrible singer, and, while he did his act, the final act on the bill, a group of rabies infested performing dogs, heckled him mercilessly. Very bitter dogs, bitter dogs, kicking around show biz for years. In a mocking bitter tone: “Lassie didn’t get where she is on her talent, you know… Rin Tin Tin… heh heh heh…”
Nothing funny about spoken comedy delivered without jazz trio timing. Its deadpan, hairpin turns of voice and face that get the laugh, not humorous concepts on paper, which may or may not bring a smile. I don’t mention those bitter dogs for yuks, they’re an illustration. I had a good howl over a friend’s assessment of a certain deli-owner (“too bitter”) back when we were trying to sell beef bi-products to bodegas and delis in the Bronx.
My partner came back to the car carrying the case of beef sticks, smiling but also shaking his head to show me it was no sale. “Nah, he immediately recognized the product, and said he’d sold hundreds of them, that it was a great product, he made good money with it. But the old distributor never came back, left him high and dry, and he was too bitter to try the product again. He was actually a very nice guy, and he was on the fence, but I couldn’t convince him, he was just too bitter.”
And when he said “bitter” I laughed, and it’s still funny to me twenty-five years later, just not so gleefully. At my mature age I know the taste a bitter person actually gets in the back of the throat. Back then it was still just a hilarious abstraction to think of someone as bitter.
I’m thinking of all the things I have to feel gratitude about, and I take stock of them periodically. Today I’m thankful for my general calmness under fire and my patience, especially with young people. And also for my general physical and creative robustness.
In a busy animation workshop my attention is sometimes called for by three kids at once, while at least one other is running wild. I have to convey instantly to two that I’m sorry they’ll have to wait, attend quickly to the other and get back to them. Often, by the time I do, the problem will already be worked out, another kid calling me from across the room to come help them with something else. The workshop is running at about 80% efficiency now, which is amazing if you consider that it’s an after-school session, Thursday, at the end of a long week of school.
I get home from the session after a meditative subway ride, fire up the macBook and see what the young editor has put together during the session. This is the first time I am seeing much of the animation. The editing is about 90% done before I first see the material they’ve shot that day and there is very rarely any call to censor anything they’ve shot. The bulk of the inputting of frames and editing and titling the animation is done by one of three fifth graders, which is amazing, if you think about it.
Lately I’ve also been able to get an improvised soundtrack done by the kids each week, featuring their percussion and voices. Nearer by two or three big steps to working out how to get really good soundtracks than I was only two or three weeks ago.
Once the week’s sound and the picture are mixed and adjusted and I’ve sufficiently tweaked the final result, I will pump my fist, turn and give a high five to my shadowy, imaginary partner. “We did it!” I’ll say, and laugh, to see how mischievously it is all going exactly according to my long-shot, hard to describe plan.
“We vugging did it, man!” the imaginary partner will shout, proffering a fist for a heartfelt fist bump. And I’ll give a good bash, and pump my fist again.
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.”
Dream
I had taken my mother to see some kind of play in the Bronx. It was after the play and we were in a large old fashioned looking, and down at the heels, pizza parlor. It seemed to be about 2 a.m. We’d been there for what seemed like hours when I suggested we get the D train to a place where we could get a cab. My mother, dead now going on three years, nonchalantly dismissed the idiotic idea and told me to call a car service, that she could afford it.
Later, Mayor Bloomberg, not a person I admire in any way, was holding a news conference to announce that a rat that had been at large in City Hall, black and very cute, with foxlike ears, had been found. The rat was wandering calmly on the table between Bloomberg’s hands, and Bloomberg petted it as he spoke. “It all depends on how you handle a rat,” he told the camera. “If you’re gentle with them they are very nice, this little fellow is very silky.” I reached my hand into the frame and petted first the black fox-like rat and then the more common grey rat with the scary tail. Both were indeed silky and practically purred under my touch.
What We Take For Granted
Quite a few things, it turns out. A president who is clearly intelligent, thoughtful, articulate and seemingly caring must be granted certain allowances for what might be called moral or political failures. For example, if a cleric in Yemen speaks out against Al Queda, risking his own life, and then meets with his adversaries to debate, and is accidentally killed along with the terrorists by a US drone, the cleric is collateral damage, you know? The president’s spokesman today called the targeted killing by drone program “legal, ethical and wise.”
If we like the president we can say “bad shit happens in war.” Or we can all agree that collateral damage is terrible. The last thing we’d do is call for the return of the Nobel Peace Prize he received for not being a torture-endorsing, pre-emptive war waging faith-based cowboy. On the other hand, if we dislike the president we can say just about anything, there are a hundred things that spring to mind.
I know, I know. The world is complex so let’s just agree that it’s OK to disagree and that we also must hunt down and kill our enemies wherever we find them, by any means necessary. And while killing them other people will be killed and that killing also produces consequences. OK, OK.
How, for example, does it benefit anyone if I once more observe that Thomas Jefferson, the Author of Liberty and one of our most revered idealist presidents, a man who inherited a fortune and died deep in debt because of his love for imported luxury, was tormented as he neared death that his debts prevented him from freeing hundreds of human beings he owned? After all, it was Mr. Jefferson who so famously stated the self-evident truth that all men are created equal. Why carp over the fate of a few hundred he held as property in perpetuity, or their descendants, some of whom, it turned out, were his own flesh and blood? I carp, I carp, I carp. Carpe diem, better that than this fish mouthed carping of mine.
Why this envious need to attack true greatness? Sure, Jefferson had many slaves. Sure, he went bankrupt because virtually everything on his inherited estate was imported from Europe and he had expensive tastes. Sure, it must be admitted, almost two hundred years after his death, he did own a beautiful slave named Sally, the half-sister of his beloved wife who died young, and he had at least three children with her over a period of many years. Why this envious need to attack true greatness?
I don’t know, I take it for granted. Like the fact that the rich will get richer. Thus it has always been and thus it will ever be. Why this foam on my lips when I read that Bank of America paid nothing to the U.S. treasury in 2010 and received an almost two billion dollar “tax rebate” that year? What can I do about this? Why do I take the word of an avowed Socialist on this issue when everyone knows Socialism is a short step away from Communism, a proven evil? These people hate our freedom. Do I hate our freedom?
What we take for granted, I suppose, is that this is a rational world where things are done for thoughtful and sincerely debated reasons, reasons that lead to the greater common good. If a drone is sent to kill someone thousands of miles away, or down the block, for that matter, there is a good reason for it, most likely. It’s better than putting the lives of our young men and women at risk by placing them in war zones, right? If Bank of America, or General Electric, pays no tax on billions in profit it is because they are creating jobs, or some equally compelling good reason. What next, disputing the right of their executives to be paid millions of dollars a year? Just because Thomas Jefferson had a long sexual affair with a woman he owned, and treated their children kindly as preferred house slaves, that doesn’t mean he believed any the less the self-evident truth that is a beacon to the world and a keystone of human liberty and democracy.
For my part, clearly, I spend part of almost every day tormented about things I am helpless to influence. The things I can influence for the good often remain uninfluenced as I fret about other things, as I am fretting now. I tap the keys, glance at the screen, correct typos and other mistakes. I reshape the sentences until they become clear and strong enough to stand on their own spindly legs. If I march the proper sentences into a good paragraph it feels like a job well-done. This too is an illusion. No matter how well I put them together, make them flow one into the next, create a stream of thought and feeling a reader can paddle in, there is no job done without pay, only a hobby horse giddyapped on by a willfully blind man letting opportunity in the real world fly past him.
I wonder if the young Thomas Jefferson, who most biographers note made a daily practice of whipping his riding horses bloody, the only outward show in his life that this thoughtful, soft-spoken patrician was not the complete master of his passions, whipped his hobby horse as a lad. Practice makes perfect, one notes, as I rattle on here. I suspect he may have. Not that I judge him, mind you. I probably would have done the same, if I’d been him.
The only alternative to this life of sour contemplation is a life of action. After all, am I not the fellow who showed a nine year-old how to operate garageband and left her, with no further instruction, with a seven year-old to spontaneously create a music track? And did they not, with only slight post-production help from this same adult, come up with a very neat little exuberantly improvised soundtrack within a few minutes?
Yes, yes, I know it’s like writing that is truly nothing until monetized, but still, it should not be taken for granted. After all, not everyone is trying to be the change they’d like to see in the world. What we take for granted is the right to take a bow. It is not time for any bows yet, nor is there any stage nor anyone to curtsy modestly before as the cheers descend.
gratuitousblahg 