Category Archives: slice of NYC life

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.

 

No Surprise, Really

Yesterday, when the ten year-old began flashing several singles and getting other kids to chase him I put a soft hand on his arm and asked him to please not start acting like a hyena.  He laughed at this, naturally, and was for the most part unable to subdue his inner hyena.   I took him aside when we got upstairs and explained his importance, as the main editor of the animation, and how I needed him to focus and fix some badly cropped frames from the previous session.

He focused in spurts, while blasting the soundtrack over the tinny computer speakers.  I set him up with headphones, which momentarily decreased the ambient racket in the room.  Then, with the cans on, he got inspired and began screaming into the mic.   I was determined to record interviews with kids to use as part of a promo I am going to make today, come hell or high water.  

I took the first kid into an empty classroom across the hall where he answered some questions in a very clear and articulate manner.  The only improvement he could think of to the workshop would be less yelling.  He clarified that he meant the yelling of the children and, as if on cue, the loud barking of the hyena-boy, arguing with the other adult, in the hallway right outside the door.  “Case in point,” I said and the boy nodded.

I went into the hall and gestured for the angry kid to come in, to the relief of the adult who was trying to reason with him.  He came into the room howling about how much he hated her, how he was going to get her fired, etc.  I asked him to sit down and try to relax, I had other interviews to do and needed it to be quiet.  I began the interview with the next kid, his best friend.  As the interview progressed I saw it was hopeless, the interviewee insisted on answering in a series of funny/stupid voices and kept looking at his wild buddy to see if the funny voices were working.  The hyena rattled a box of pencils, muttering, trying not to be distracted from his misery. 

I asked him to stop, he couldn’t.   I moved the pencils away from him and told him I was going to interview him next, and he was fairly quiet for the remainder of the short, useless interview with his pal.

When the two of us were left in the room he was sulky.  “You said you would only interview me,” he insisted, out of the blue.   “Everybody says I’m not special,” he complained.  

“Nobody who knows you could say you’re not special,” I said.  “You’re one of a kind.  Don’t listen to anyone who says you’re not special.”

“My teacher told me again today that I’m not special,” he said.

“She probably meant not special in the sense of being treated differently from everyone else.  Special has different meanings, you know.  You’re quite special, and she knows it, but at the same time, she has to treat all her students the same way or people would start saying she was being unfair,” I said.

The interview didn’t go that well, but he was more subdued by the end.  “Did you crop those frames I asked you to fix?” I asked him as I took him back across the hall.

“Yes…” he said with annoyance.

I did another interview.  When I came back in he and his buddy, and another ten year old, were screaming with headphones on, some noise I later eliminated from the soundtrack.  I scrolled through the animation and found the second batch of frames I’d needed him to crop.

“Oh, I forgot those,” he admitted.

“When you’re done I want to show you that app I was telling you about,” I said and took a very articulate ten year-old across the hall to interview.  Her answers deserve a little promo film of their own.

By the time I got back I realized it was useless to try to interview anyone else.  I took the editor out in the hall, handed him his headphones and showed him an app on the iPad.  I spent no more than 40 seconds demonstrating how to create a drum track, bass part and melody line by moving a finger around the ingeniously designed screen.  The app is called Figure and it’s intuitive and a lot of fun.  I told him I was not 100% clear on how to use it with Audiobus, which I’d set up, and I left him to figure it out.  (He basically did, by the way.)

When it was time to go I went over to get him and said “nice program, huh?” and he seemed quite happy.  When I pulled the headphones out of the iPad, a full musical track was playing and I couldn’t easily shut it off.  It took me a moment to silence the orchestral chaos.

Then the usual struggle ensued to get the room cleaned up, and it eventually was, and the other adult left with half the group and I was putting the last few things away as first the editor and then his best friend asked for my help with their shoes.  The editor’s lace had come out of the eyelet, and there was no way to shove the frayed lace back through to tie his shoe.  Fortunately for him, he’d given this problem to a problem-solving adult who took a pair of tweezers out of his keychain Swiss Army Knife, managed to pull the lace through and tie it within a minute.  Then it was his friend, with knotted shoelaces on the boots he’d kicked off on entering the workshop.  Over my shoulder I asked the other stragglers to pick up this or that, tuck those chairs in, throw that in the garbage, please.

At 5:05 I put on my coat, my heavy pack, picked up my duffle bag and headed to the door.  I passed the candy wrapper I’d asked the editor to pick up.

“Why didn’t you pick up this wrapper like I asked you?”  I said, picking it up.

“I didn’t hear you, when did you ask me?” he said, distractedly.

“When you were ignoring me,” I said, to a round of bright smiles from the other three young stragglers.

And, of course, when I later heard the music track the kid had made, I was quite blown away.  Very restrained bit of playing, a lot of space between the drumbeats, the bass line and the odd, frenetic, poignant little melody.

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.

It’s Always Been There

Took a walk yesterday, from Sekhnet’s to the house where I grew up and back.   Less than two miles.  It was a crisp early evening, nice for a stroll.  On Union Turnpike, half a block from where I’d turn to walk up the small hill past what used to be the family home, two young guys stopped to ask me where they could find a deli.  As I thought, I pointed at the corner store, now a Dunkin’ Donuts, and unhelpfully informed them that it used to be a deli.   I asked what they were actually looking for, turned out they were trying to break a fifty.  I gave them a few ideas and turned to walk toward the corner where I’d hang my left and BANG!!!

A metal knife blade, rooted in the cement and poised at shin height, tried its best to cut my leg off.  I fell backwards away from the impact, on to my back, my feet actually shot up into the air as I hit the sidewalk.   Two other young men saw this and asked if I was all right.  I stood up immediately, nothing broken, and glared at the sleek aluminum bench that tapered to edges like butter knives.   If it had been in my power I would have destroyed the ugly futuristic menace on the spot.  I grimaced and asked the two men where the hell the bench had come from.

Seeing that I was fine, they seemed to relax.  “It’s always been there,” one said with a little smile, thinking, perhaps, what kind of clueless idiot walks into a bench so hard it slams him on to his back with his feet up in the air?

“I grew up on this block, and I’ve never seen it,” I told them, pointing around the corner toward what once was my block.

“Oh it’s been there a long time,” said the other.

“It’s been there about three months,” said the first.

I don’t remember saying anything, I may have said “first time I’ve seen it…”, but I was surprised at the absence of pain as I walked past my old house.  It was about a mile back to Sekhnet’s, and I had no problem at all, until I reached down to the spot where the metal had kicked my shin and felt, through the pant leg, a knot the size of a fist and what seemed to be liquid.  I imagined blood running down into my sock and decided not to investigate then and there.  I didn’t understand why there was no pain, but I didn’t mind.  

It was only when I got back, elevated the leg and iced the bump that the aching started in my back, my arms, every joint that had been pounded when I fell on the concrete.   Every place, ironically, but the barking shin that had been assaulted by the treacherous metal bench.   The upper back is chiming in now, loudly, reminding me where I landed hard on it yesterday, reminding us all how slender the string we are all hanging by in this life actually is, and also, how resilient, most of the time.

Time to call my dying friend, whose once resilient string is poised to snap forever.

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.

The Bossy Type

There is a personality type whose fondest wish is to be in charge and able to punish and fire people who oppose their will.  The thrill they extract from being the decider is somewhat alien to me, but there are literally millions of this type walking around the earth.   They are bosses, leaders, experts of every stripe, many of them more or less complete assholes.  I have never had much sympathy for the “my way or the highway” type, but recent events give me, if not sympathy, a bit of understanding.

I have a little program I’m running.  I don’t say “little” to disparage it or minimize its potential importance.  It is a great program that should have about six to eight people working on it by now– it could really be a bright, hot new pilot light on this rusty but essential stove outgassing here in the stinking global kitchen.  It is little because I am the only person working on it, trying to do the jobs of a half-dozen dedicated people by myself.  The program is currently exactly as big as I am, which is big enough, especially if you factor in imagination, talent and persistence, but for purposes of a program, quite little.

I recently spent great effort planning and attempting to hold a productive meeting to raise funds so I can hire some bright experts help to move the program forward.  I’m told the meeting went well.  After all, I managed to hold my tongue for the most part when the carping began, when I was called a hypocrite for calling the organization wehearyou.net yet not being willing to listen to an avalanche of criticism from well-intentioned people doing me a favor, supporters whose help comes largely in the form of opinionated criticism, frank and unvarnished, and, thoughtful or not, strictly for my own good.  

The results of the meeting I spent hours working on could have been revealed to me in an email from the people who deigned to attend: your website sucks and has to be redone before you can think of mounting a crowd funding campaign.  Of course, I had virtually no replies to any of the emails I sent any of the attendees, before or after the meeting, so I guess it was worth the $100 I spent to buy everyone dinner to get that great insight.

I pay a couple of people to help and they spend as much time looking at their smart phones and drawing their own pictures as helping do what I pay them to do, namely working with the children.  I thank them as I hand them their checks, smiling, and thinking as I do “you stupid, fucking useless bastard.” This thought applies as much to myself as employer as to them, since I have not figured out how to extract what the program and I need from the mercenaries I’ve managed to recruit.  Or how to recruit people who are willing to work as devotedly as I do.

And so I get the first inkling into why someone would be a prick boss as I ponder this:

The young man misspells the name I sign to every email and writes:

I’m applying for another social media position and they are asking for people who can vouch for my social media skills. Would it be alright if I listed you?
 
Thanks,
I decide, for the time being, to apply the tonic that has done so much for me: silence.  No need to rush to reply to this guy.  I’ve paid him about $500 for what appears to have been a total of about six hours of work.  His rate was $15 an hour, and I suppose he figured, since I didn’t press him to do any of the things I asked of him that he didn’t do, since I’d be in the lurch if he walked and I had to conduct the Monday workshop by myself, since I seemed easy going, that it was better to get $90/hr. than $15 and made adjustments accordingly.   The first week he was on the job there was a huge spike in social media, 500% increase as his friends checked out the various sites.   The next four weeks the spike was less impressive, 0%.  After paying him for weeks I told him truthfully that the corporate coffers were almost empty and I could no longer pay him for “social media”.  
Yesterday I paid him to help at the original workshop so I could interview kids one on one for a promo I need to make very soon.  Yesterday was actually my last chance to do this in time for the timeline I’m desperately aiming for.  He was 5% better than useless and I was unable to interview anyone, since I was the only one of three adults in the room actively helping the kids throughout the workshop, then cleaning up alone at the end.  No sound bites for the promo.  I suppose I could write:  
Think carefully about what I could say about your social media skills and work ethic.  After an impressive increase the first week, the arrow went straight down to zero every week after that. Tasks I asked you to do were never done, or were done sloppily and uselessly.  Your checks from me were always on time, and you were quick to ask the one time I delayed by a day to pay you, yet you don’t take a moment to spell my name right when asking me for a favor.  A favor, moreover, revealing the almost imponderably large size of your testicles.  
 
So I say this both as a fellow human being and a prick boss: think carefully about how my honest appraisal of your work might help your chances of finding more employment.

They Had A Vision

I dragged myself to the workshop in a state of exhaustion this afternoon, half blind with fatigue for reasons too tedious to detail.  I arrived first, five minutes before the session was supposed to start.  Tim got there a few minutes later.  Luckily, the kids didn’t arrive until five minutes after they were scheduled to arrive.  It was an odd day, slight underwater feeling, everybody sort of floating around jellyfish-like.  I don’t think more than 20 frames were shot all session, the usual number is two or three hundred frames.

I called two kids over, gave them headphones and the three of us began making a soundtrack. I couldn’t get the wonderful new Audiobus interface to work, but I gave them a taste of the cool sounds and after a few minutes of futility, apologized for not having had time to learn it well enough before the session.  I shut it down and switched to garageband, which I know well, and which neither of these kids had used.

Within moments Lily was moving her hands purposefully on the touch-screen.  They recorded an adorable track of childish bickering, but neither of them liked it much.  I deleted it as they watched and they did it again, less contentious and still adorable.  They still didn’t like it.   I told them to leave it, we could mute it.  Lily dragged a drum loop they chose into the track.  I told them to listen to the beat and play along.  I urged them to play only a bit, since they could always add more on the next track, and it was impossible to subtract if they otherwise liked the track.   They pulled up another mic and began pounding the table in time with the drums.   They played a piano together.  I took my headphones off and walked over to see what the animators were up to, after muting the piano at their request.

When I got back I saw they’d deleted their adorable vocal track, along with the piano.  I was dismayed, and told them so.   They were too busy to pay much attention to my dismay, another girl was with them now, drumming on the table.  I put a pair of headphones on her and walked away to start cleaning up, as Lily’s twin brother laughed, headphones on, pounding the table.

As we were leaving I said to Tim, “that’s what happens when you let the inmates have complete control of the asylum, you get no input into the output.”   Tim commented that kids always find their own voices weird and distasteful when they first hear them played back, and that’s probably why they’d wiped out the adorable tracks.

I walked a good way with the heavy pack on my back, and a duffel bag hanging at the end of my arm.  I was actually too tired to stop walking, and as the temperature began to drop I paused to pull my hood over my head.  I sat on a bench.  I ate a slice of pizza and took Excedrin.  I eventually got on the subway and listened to Bill Moyers when I was not nodding out, and when I was.

Made it up to my apartment, took my clothes off and got under the covers.  Charging the iPad I decided to listen to the track, see what they’d wound up with.  I’ll be damned, they had a vision.  They weren’t going for adorable, it was the percussion they were after.   Two tracks of poly-rhythmic table banging, along with the drum track.  They had an idea they were going for.  I was impressed.  They hadn’t opted for any of the fancy gimmicks they’d tried in garageband, they were going for the real thing.   Playing the only instrument they had, the table, they jammed, creating a convincing jungle of percussion.

Mike Gets It

One of the after school programs where we do the workshop provides a helper, a counselor, a guy we’ll call Mike (since that’s his name).  Mike came in the first time with a drill sergeant demeanor, herding the kids, telling them sternly to stay in their seats and be quiet.

This was not really the vibe we need in the workshop, the first rule is move around to where you’re comfortable, keep moving if you like.  The second is to talk about what you’re planning to do.  

There was a minor clash that first time, the second time was a little easier.  By the third session Mike felt no need to discipline the kids, since they were all busy and involved with what they were doing.  Last week I pointed something out to Mike.

“Damn…” he said, and I nodded.  Four kids were animating at the animation stand by themselves, two moving the things on the animation stand, two photographing.  

“And in the full two-hour workshop another couple of kids would be at the computer editing and working on the soundtrack while the other kids were animating,” I pointed out.   He was impressed.

This week Mike was animating.  Sitting by ten year-old Jacob, the two of them enthralled by a Muybridge sequence I’d shown them,  Mike said “I’ll help you,” and was soon diligently working on a sequence of a running man.

By the end of the session Mike was as giddy as many of the kids sometimes get after a session of animation.

“Lily,” I called out to the girl who was trying to get her book back from Mike, who was holding it just out of her reach, “leave Mike alone.”

And Mike, rather than barking at the kids to stay in their seats, threw his head back and laughed.