The Oshpah Pit

I don’t know the exact meaning of “aspah” (phonetically OSH-pah), but I can tell you about the Ashpah Pit.    It was in the woods, at the end of a long muddy road that would shine with small puddles after the rain.  It was lush there, and smelled of earth and trees, until you got close to the pit that guys with a bulldozer and a dump truck had dug.   This pit was huge, the size of an amphitheater, and filled with the summer time garbage of a small community of a few hundred people.

It was at the end of a long dirt road cut through the trees.  For days after it rained it was impossible to walk as far as the ashpah pit without getting your feet wet.  Your clothes would be damp too, the air was always moist and clammy under those dense trees.  It was paradise for the mosquitoes who bred, thirsted and lived their short lives there.  Born at dusk by the millions, and feeding, courting, mating and dying throughout the night, they were looking for whatever action they could get as time ran out.  

These mosquitoes were so voracious, and so desperate, that they would land on you as you slapped at them, sometimes five or more at a time, the others hovering, singing their horrible songs of desire.  And they were tenacious, these strapping young mosquitoes.   You could slap at one, narrowly miss, and the insect would do a little somersault, literally turn a tiny circle in the air, land back directly on the arm, or neck, or your face.  Meanwhile, another would be sucking lustily at the back of your neck, near your earlobe.  You could try to keep them away by smoking, and back then many of us did smoke, but it was best to complete the business at the ashpah pit quickly.   Dump the garbage and get back down the road.

There’s the famous story of how I met my old friend Meefs, a story for another time and another place, the story about his deadpan slyness and those two long walks to the ashpah pit and back.  But what I want to point out is that the mosquitoes at the ashpah pit are the strongest examplars I know of that fierce, wildly energetic desire to live, and somehow dominate, in a world of death where the odds are a billion to one against you living out the night.

Doesn’t mean I’d invite any of them to my house.

Letter to Walter (draft 2.2)

Dear Walter:

I’ve been reading your books since my mother recommended Devil in A Blue Dress to me a few decades back.  I admire the story-telling as much as the running themes of the power of imagination to change the world and the gentleness that is at the core of even your most hardened protagonists.  

Reading Twelve Steps to Political Revelation not long ago I was struck by the section calling for changes in how education needs to work to ensure a more creative, critically thinking, multi-lingual populace.  I agree that the generations coming up now are the last, best agents for the change needed to avert the looming disasters we face as a planet.  You gave a great example at the Moth recently, those two young gay strangers on Christopher Street retooling the ugly word “nigger” into a shorthand for their brotherhood.

Cheekums baboon

In the wake of Cheney and Bush I thought up my best bet for helping to bring about the kind of change we need to see.  I’ve started a not-for-profit student-run animation workshop, called wehearyou.net, to listen to young children’s concerns and help them show the creativity that is so often ignored in our testing-obsessed prison-prep factory schools.  

My hope is to have young kids produce works that will shame the more liberal of the Job Creator types (currently chafing at a theoretical 0.03% stock transaction tax) enough to fund what I envision as a grassroots movement to change the landscape of urban education, starting in the worst public schools I can find in NYC.  I worked in one in Harlem for several years, so I’m intimately familiar with the challenges kids in those schools are up against.

Cheekums1

I invite to you have a look at some of the kids’ work at wehearyou.net, along with my descriptions of the program   I hope the potential of this program, directed and produced by young kids working as teams of creative problem-solvers, lights up your imagination.   I would love to speak to you about the program.   You can send me an email or call me at (… ellipsis added…).   On my dream team of people of vision and action to work and brainstorm with, you’re very high on the list.  

Yours sincerely,
[name withheld at request of ‘author’]

A Funny Thing

Outside the roofs nearby are white, a flutter of snow has been swirling around ineffectually for the last few hours, dancing over the St. Patrick’s Day parade wending its way down Fifth Avenue, I suppose.  They say it will turn to rain after a while, I can hear cars splashing in it as they pass outside.  But the roofs look nice and there’s a dusting of white over parts of the garden.

Somewhere a lion yawns.

A clever woman in law school wrote a student note for one of the scholarly journals, discussing the then frontiers of the internet, dubbing cyber space Cyberia.  I don’t know if that was her coinage or not, but it seemed clever to me at the time.  One reaches for things like cleverness as a law student; I recall one project we had that first year was called “Treasure Hunt.”  The treasure in question was a bunch of tricky to find statutes, case citations and even some dicta.   Fond of drawing as I am, it was hard to resist, during Torts or Contracts, drawing a scandalized guy pointing at a steaming pile of shit, flies buzzing around it, saying “Hey! That’s not treasure!”  The girl next to me, who was beautiful, smiled and wrote an approving note on the bottom of it when I slid it over to her.

A wildebeest passes gas.  “What’s gnu?” the punster asks blandly.

On a day like this, and outside the flakes are now fat and fluffy, falling in a great 3-D display, alone in Cyberia, it seems pointless to dream that my plans will ever be more than the distant daydream they are now.   More than pointless, really.  Without money you might as well (insert your favorite substitute for the vulgar phrase about taking a lustful leap after a rolling donut).

“Your best words, my friend, not worth the air it takes to expel them, even though that air is CO2 and useless to anything but a vegetable,” says the tired voice of experience.

And, sad to say, it’s true.  A word to the wise will suffice, but the best words in the world, addressed to inanimate objects, or immovable ones, or ones prone to silence, or to multitasking or….

“Pipe down, man,” says the voice of experience.  Right again.

Bullies, Manipulation and Unintended Consequences

We live in a society that produces bullies, as much as large segments of our society hate bullies and try to prevent the spread of abusive behavior.  How does our society produce bullies?  By its values, or lack of same.   Flip the channels, one zero sum game after another where one individual wins everything while all others lose, often humiliated in the process.   Our prisons are overcrowded with largely petty criminals while criminality, on an enormous and destructive scale, proceeds at a record pace for a class that is never held accountable for their third party abuse of the rest of us.  

Those who spent careers working for Enron and got screwed out of their pensions by the greed and malfeasance of Enron’s executives, remember them?  The tip of the iceberg, as it turned out.  Those folks at Enron were merely the vanguard of the millions whose lives and dreams were plundered by the most rapacious among us.

Blah blah blah.  Yes, my grandmother was a leftist, a lifelong trade unionist, she celebrated when the Czar fell and for a while it looked like the People were seizing control of Russia.  She was a girl during the Russian Revolution and can be forgiven for excitedly believing the best, though she wound up bitter in the end.  There is nothing inherently wrong, one could argue, with one person owning 100,000 times more than the next ten million people have.   Our society rewards success, hard work, risk-taking of the right sort, drive, ambition, inherited wealth and social class.  

Anyway, my point is about bullying, and the background is that it’s institutionalized in a competitive society that extols the mythic rugged individual above all else.  Paris Hilton, for example, is one such rugged individual.

I am working with a group of children that has recently changed composition.  Five children from the original workshop now work together with five new participants.  I am focused on improving the program, making soundtracks during our limited time together, improving the quality of the animation, getting kids to buy into the idea of refining their work.   I noticed some tension, the new kids not integrating seamlessly, and set on an idea I thought would help.  I needed a creative and often disruptive kid from the original group to buy into helping others.

I dislike manipulators almost as much as I hate bullies.  It serves me right, in a way, what happened when I decided to deliberately manipulate this kid, though others would suffer for my action.  I saw how important it was to this guy to feel appreciated, so I took him aside, told him how important he is to the workshop, that he’s a natural leader, that he’s the best animator in the group.  I asked for his help.  He was flattered and immediately responded by changing his attitude.  He began to lead the clean-up effort at the end of the sessions and has been a big help.

Last week one of the new kids was lying on his back, the front of his shirt wet, foam all over his chin.   I asked if he was OK and he began laughing, told me he was fine.  I gave him a napkin and he wiped away the drool, then drooled again.  Soon he was lying in the hallway, crying inconsolably.  I couldn’t glean exactly why he was so upset, he wouldn’t say.   It turned out he was a victim of blow-back, the unintended consequence of my manipulative intervention.

The nine year-old I’d taken aside for special attention has, it would be appear, been crowing over the recognition he’d long been craving.  He became, according to three or four different sources, an insufferable prick to his classmates.  Lord of the Flies!   He’d been mocking this kid, who has trouble using a pair of scissors bordering on a kind of phobia.

I must start each session, as I did last term at a certain point, with the reminder that everyone is there to have fun.  And that you can’t have fun if somebody is bothering you or being mean to you.  We are doing animation, something with a lot of moving parts, parts that require looseness, concentration and teamwork.  The workshop doesn’t work unless people are helping each other.   If you can’t help, don’t hurt.    Simple to say, a little hard to do sometimes, but essential.

Unlike in the real world, I have the ability, in this group, to swoop down and gently but firmly intervene.  I can stop a bully in mid-attack, if I see it happening.   The worst bullying often happens behind the scenes, where the deals are made, and merciless rules are set that insure the bully will never be accountable for the pain he causes his victims, karma or no karma.   Playing God in this little group, I will nip this in the bud, as the cliche goes.  Nip it, I say, in the hideous bud.  Watch.

Five minute reminder to self

The burdens we carry and the obstacles we face are often the only ones we can really feel.   The struggles of others have an air of unreality, do not seem as substantial as the things that hang over our tired backs, have us in their teeth.   This is obvious, self-evident, as my man The Author of Liberty used to say.  Who can tell what burdens and obstacles that great man faced, with his inherited wealth and hundreds of human chattel depending on him as he birthed the glorious ideas of Democracy and Freedom?

Bitterness is not becoming, and so let’s let it fall by the wayside, whatever and wherever that may be.  My point here is that any of us can give a laundry list of the reasons we are struggling to carry the heavy bag that is ours to carry.   If we can stop yawning long enough as we listen to somebody else’s list we may realize that we are not the only one feeling overwhelmed at certain times.  

To me the worst of it is the feeling that this uphill path, with the heavy load on the shoulders, is endless, while our strength and life are limited.  That combined with everyone else chatting about everything else, as we soldier on alone, pretending all’s well, you know what I’m saying?  

The true fact is that we are capable of way more than we allow ourselves to try.  In a sense the human mind, properly engaged, is unlimited.   It is the hundred limitations we impose that is a big part of the tragedy, the crap we accept instead of vital, technicolor life.   That and the fact that, except on rare occasions, it’s really hard to give more than a passing fiddler’s fart about the catalogue of other people’s persistent, amorphous struggles.

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.

Creativity (the 12 minute version)

Doing things creatively is like being an acrobat, you have to leap with grace, lightly, without a shade of hesitation.   Doubt will stop you between trapezes, time will seem to stand still for a blink, as the audience, sickened and thrilled, waits for the splat.  (Almost two minutes to say that).  

Our time here, maybe it would be better measured in tiny spoons rather than with a ladle of unlimited size and scope such as the one we use without thinking of moments.   Rushing around can take up a lot of time, you got something important to get done give it to a busy person, blah, blah, blah.   Still, the hardest work is the work you have to do to have the grace to float between trapezes.

I don’t know what I’m talking about, except that I’m tired, and waiting for this tiredness to completely overwhelm me.  Into the bed then, under the soft, warm covers, a cold breeze rattling through the window, cozy in my almost weightless sleeping cap.

And in the dream I will not recall in the morning I am at the guitar and I play one note.  And that note, laid succulently against the beat, can be shimmered, until it is like an ocean, let’s say.  On that ocean light plays, and the salt evaporates off the brilliant water with that bracing smell, and there are fish, some leaping, others beautifully colored, just under the magical surface.  There is a universe in a raindrop, and billions of them in a bucket of sea water.  There is no bucket that can hold all of those universes.  Your mind can skip over them, use a machine to see under the sea, but everything about it is a mystery.  The next  beat, and the next, it is a human heart, the most primal sound available, we memorize it before we are even born, breathing through gills and then through a cord attached to our mother.  The whole arrangement is pretty amazing, though we forget most of the time.  

Creativity seems like a luxury, something rich people pay a premium for.  But free spontaneous creativity is what gives life its color and its flavor.  You cannot convince me otherwise, particularly when you laugh, surprised that something so crude and stupid arose so quickly and unexpectedly.  And see here, my left hand never left the neck of that dream guitar with its infinite sustain.  And what beautiful teeth you have, and how lovely to see them not biting but framing those odd sounds barking out, as your eyes crinkle and your head bops like a coconut on the waves of that ocean of endless possibilities.

Twelve Minute Drill

Going to stretch out a bit here, twelve minutes instead of ten.  You know, what the hey?  But to make things more interesting still the timer is counting down three minutes.  Then I’ll leap up, put the frozen pierogies in boiling water and then do the last nine.  I’ve wasted a minute telling you that.

I’m thinking about a friend who was a huge fan of Howard Fast’s.  So huge a fan, in fact, that she actually arranged a meeting with Fast to see if she could assist him in his work.  Fast was hostile when they met, and she left him after a short, disappointing meeting, but her admiration for him and his work was undiminished by the sobering display of misdirected anger.

Howard Fast is a name like Woody Guthrie to me, or Zero Mostel, or one of those talented people who were around and dreaming big dreams of changing the world. (The water is boiling, pardon me)   (At the risk of overboiling my pierogies I’m back for the next nine minutes)   The system we have here, Capitalism, offers freedom to anyone who can afford it.   One bi-product of Capitalism is a permanent underclass.  It is nothing we’re proud of, it’s nothing we want, but there it is.  If you speak of a more fair way to distribute work and wealth you are called a Communist and a hater of freedom.  As Fast was called, and Woody Guthrie, whose guitar was labeled a machine to kill fascists, as was Zero Mostel and countless others.  

Here’s the puzzle I’m puzzling over.  How does someone so idealistic she’d arrange to meet Howard Fast change her views so completely that, although politically independent, she defends Sarah Palin against unfair liberal attacks and recommends Glenn Beck as a reliable source for information on Woodrow Wilson, a man he apparently reviles?   Wilson did some terrible things, including his White House screening of “The Birth of A Nation”, D.W. Griffith’s rewriting of the post Civil War period that cast the Ku Klux Klan in a heroic light.   “Wilson was a member of the Klan,” more than one black person I’ve talked to about this has told me.  

The thing I’m puzzling over, as the game clock dips under 4 minutes, is how a person who believes in brotherhood, freedom, civil rights, justice, civil liberties and the perfectability of society and the individual can support things like Operation Enduring Freedom in Iraq and the torture, or at best extreme mistreatment, of those captured person’s subjected to Dick Cheney’s lawyerly-nuanced ‘enhanced interrogation’.   I suppose it is a mystery I will ponder as I go to stir the pierogies, and stop the clock with my final time-out at 1:49.

Man, those pierogies smell good.  They are filled with potato, spinach and feta cheese.  They are steaming now as I approach the one minute mark.  Soon fans will begin filing out, as the game is all but over, and I will make my way to a spot on the floor where I can stretch at full length, do a few push-ups, wipe the dust from my hands and tuck into those delicious smelling Polish raviolis.  Fifteen seconds to the buzzer and…. game time!