Keeping On It

I'm in the final throes of completing my semester project in Character Animation. I do wish to extend a hearty and profuse thanks to Joey Jones, my mentor this semester. The graph editor is now truly my friend. Still so much more to learn, but now greatly enhanced by enjoying what I'm doing in this software environment.

I wish to reform as an artist. I want everything around me to become art. I don't care if it's shit. I just want it to be art.

The Distancing Dance

Folk and friend,
Here's a few words from my dear comrade Dr. Aryeh Cohen. I'm pleased that he has contributed this fine piece to the Urinal Puck. I hope you enjoy it.
-Chaim

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What is it about Jewish comedians that makes them feel as if they need to throw up all their self loathing Jewish stuff all over their audience?

The other night I saw one of these comedians. She was the poster child for the richuk campaign. You know there are all these organizations that are interested in keiruv, a Hebrew word which means bringing closer and has become a term of art for Jewish evangilizing to Jews. The most sought after person in the Jewish community is the unaffiliated Jew. The Jew who doesn't care about his or her Judaism, the Jew who doesn't belong to a synagogue or has any other Jewish affiliation-hence unaffiliated. This is the person that all Jewish organizations slather over. They literally get hot and bothered just thinking about getting these Jews into their synagogues, boardrooms, living rooms, social justice organizations, temples etc. They sit in a room full of interested and yet, miraculously ignorant Jews talking about how important it is to get those people who don't want to be in that room into that room. The people in the room remain in their blissful Jewish ignorance, yet they all come up with plans to get all the hipsters who couldn't give a damn into the room.

Anyway, the opposite of kiruv is richuk. It is also a Hebrew word which means distancing. It is not yet a term of art. There are no grants that magically appear by telling the foundations that you will leave all these Jews who have chosen not to care about their Jewishness alone. -I am thinking of starting an organization which might just make richuk into a term of art. My working organizational title is "Get the fuck out of my bes medrash." This might be a bit strong. Maybe I should just call it "I'll leave you alone and you don't mess with my religion."

I went to a wedding recently of a family friend. They were both Jewish by birth and both wonderfully unafilliated. Neither of them really cared about Judaism. She had spent her whole life wanting to be "normal". That is wanting to be white bread American. He had spent his whole life not thinking about Judaism for more than two or three minutes.

The wedding was on a Saturday. The officiant was a Unitarian Minister who came with the hotel, and did a great job of making believe that she didn't know anything about religion either. So everything was going along swimmingly-it was eighty degree Arizona in the middle of the winter, what could be bad? They had done an amazing job accomodating my family's observant tendencies-they had ordered kosher food for us and everything.

At the reception, the DJ was playing everything you expect a DJ to play at a wedding‹danceable music from the last three decades. All of a sudden somebody decides its time for the Jewish dance. The bride and groom have to be planted on chairs and hauled above our heads so that we can dance around to some Hava Nagila song. This was supposed to make me happy. Did I miss something here? Was I co-opting your religion? Did I put on a piece of triangular cardboard and prance naked in the freezing cold rooting for some overpaid group of thugs that gets paid more than many countries' GNP? Did I? Then why are you messing with my religion?

So I saw this "comedian" who can be the poster child for the whole richuk movement. In her act she touched on all the aspects of her Jewish identity-loudness, New York accent, the catskills and the Holocaust. If she had just sung Hava Nagila she would have scored a perfect ten. Its not that she wasn't funny. Well, actually, it is also that she wasn't funny. The problem is that she thought she was both funny and edgy. As if five decades of comedians haven't done Longisland jew jokes.

As a follow-up, this vanguard of Jewish vaccuousness also took a courageous stand for the Holocaust. She defended the Holocaust. No, she didn't defend the killing of six million Jews, but she did defend the honor of the Holocaust, or at least took a stand against people making fun of survivors of Auschwitz. Now that was ballsy. I am sure she is also against infanticide and the random shooting of the elderly.

So what is this? What is it that drives people to see these people? How screwed up is it that 99 people get in a room to reaffirm their Jewish identity by announcing their loathing of their Jewish identity? There is a symbiotic psychosis at work here. I make fun of me. You laugh at you. We both make fun of each other. We make believe its hip and edgy because it trashes something we are supposed to care about. But we don't. So, actually, its not.

The Heavens and The Earth - And Ears

Folks,
I'm pleased to post (with the author's permission) a recent D'var Torah by Rabbi Bradley Shavit Artson. I hope that it provides you with as much inspiration and food for thought as it does for me, especially for those moments when food's not an option.

May I also add that even though the title of this blog is not so reverent, my intent is not to defame but rather to raise the sparks. Shana Tovah.

-Chaim

By: Rabbi Bradley Shavit Artson
from the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies

Shabbat Parashat Ha'azinu
October 15, 2005 - 12 Tishrei 5766


The Heavens and the Earth--And Ears


Torah Reading: Deuteronomy 32:1-32:52
Haftarah Reading: 11 Samuel 22:1-51


What is the essence of human nature? Are we really creatures of spirit and mind, capable of forming ourselves at will to correspond to the highest conceptions of humanity possible? Or are we, rather, little different than the animals of the field and forest, driven by instinct and whim, incapable of modifying either our behavior or our aspiration?

The question of whether we are little lower than the angels or simply a standing, naked ape has preoccupied poets, philosophers, and sages from the dawn of time. In every age, cogent defenses of both positions volley forth from vociferous advocates, each deaf to the merits of the other's position or to the flaws of their own.

On the one hand, it is remarkable what marvels humans have accomplished. With only the power of our minds, we have erected buildings that stand across the millennia and stretch up to the very skies. We have turned the desert into farmland and found ways to link people separated by thousands of miles through a vast array of communication and transportation, so that flying from Los Angeles to New York City takes less time than driving from Washington, D.C. to Boston. Having conquered a long list of malignant diseases, our scientists seem on the brink of winning the battle against illness, even as our educators perfect methods of conquering illiteracy. We are truly reflections of the divine, able to create worlds through our will and our words.

And yet...

Even as our accomplishments loom so large, our failures assume an even more terrifying posture. Our scientific advances threaten to poison our air, render our water unusable, and leave our land blighted. Even as medicine advances, we grapple with plagues that reminds us of our continuing frailty and our devastating impotence. Despite our tremendous wealth, the illiterate and unemployed, the outcast and the hopeless loom ever larger, making a mockery of our smug self-satisfaction. Women are still underpaid, and subject to assault. Terrorists and floods catch us ill-prepared. Blacks and Latinos are still underemployed, and subject to assault. Gays and lesbians are still despised, and subject to assault. Maybe we really are animals after all.

Jewish tradition rejects this simple dichotomy, a false attempt to force humanity into the role of either paper saint or preprogrammed bug. Both angel and animal, human beings are unique precisely because we have the potential to develop in either direction, often both at once.

Our Torah portion opens with Moses' stirring words, "Give ear, O heavens, let me speak; Let the earth hear the words I utter." The Talmudic and geonic rabbis asked themselves why it was that Moses felt impelled to mention both heaven and earth. Wouldn't one have sufficed as a witness?

In Midrash Devarim Rabbah, several answers all point in the same direction: Rabbi Tanhuma said "Because God will redeem Israel only through the agency of them both." Another explanation posits that "the Torah was given only through the agency of them both." Or that "manna and the quails were given through the agency of them both." Or finally, that "God compared Israel to the stars of heaven and the dust of the earth."

Each of these answers insists that salvation comes only through the combination of heaven and earth, of the mundane and the spiritual, of the ideal and the concrete. Both lofty goal (often unattainable) and repair of the world (often prosaic) are necessary for the redemption of humanity and the establishment of caring community.

Without a goal of complete social justice, our communities and the family of man cannot attain a better world. But without a willingness to look after the little details--the individual homeless, poor, sick, or hungry--the goal will remain elusive and ethereal.

Without a sense of the mitzvot as a goal--seeking to incorporate God's will and a sense of the sacred into our lives--there is little hope of elevating our souls. Yet holiness can only enter our lives when translated into practical behavior--shaping how we eat, study, pray, rest, and how we celebrate.

Our destiny as a people, as the House of Israel in the modern age, integrates that same stubborn balance: A flesh-and-blood people still wrestling with an angel in the night, still insisting that holiness is possible, that righteousness must flow like a mighty stream.

By holding on to our own physical nature, we can hope to elevate the material world into something higher. By retaining our dreams, our vision, and our faith, we provide a direction for otherwise pointless business and dreary years.

All it takes is heaven and earth, and the ability to listen. It hasn't changed since Moses first sang to us his song of love.

Shabbat shalom.

Reese Pecked

So he looked in the mirror and saw some residue still there; a leftover of that mask of attractiveness a woman had seen one minute ago. It was fading fast; a freckled tan in September. He talked to himself when he pee'd. He muttered to himself that it wasn't the type of person he wanted to be. He looked at his flaccid penis, and he was reminded of a pubescent dream, one where he was orally copulated by a woman while standing at a urinal. Unlike players in some other dreams, this woman was actually an acquaintance, but up to then hadn't contemplated her in a sexual way. She looked him in the eyes as she slowly, moistly took him into her mouth. It soothed him for 20 years. When he saw her again in the halls of the synagogue, she didn't known of any dreams, and he didn't see anything in her eyes. His dreams were like an annoying cancer trying to take hold of his thoughts. It was really too bad, he thought, that he was so emotionally resilient. It would have been much easier to break like a twig, and ask her to follow him into a bathroom and risk the consequences. He felt informed by some vague or distantly understood set of values. So what good were the values, he thought, if he couldn't even articulate them. Again it came to mind; that's just not the type of person he wanted to be. It wasn't enough that he wanted some sort of earthly reward for his propriety and restraint. No. He wanted a trophy for his silence, for his good heart. The goodness of his heart had after all prevented a toothy and reprehensible, smiling, fat, groaning monster from taking him away into fantasies realized. A tincture of goodness was all that was left. And it ripped away the curse of smoothness and likeability - that thing, melting away in the mirror.

How can the thing which makes you likable be the source of your folly at once. It's just cruel. A cruel mistake of the creator. Pleasing proportions, everything arranged nicely, not even perfectly, but even pleasing was so much better than the dog-faced ugly creatures who roamed the world. With their horsy smiles, sharky noses - nostrils lifted upward revealing the awful dank cilia inside - and the mother fuckers all smile. He wanted to snap their heads off. Strangle them. Why did they get the gift of blissful ignorance? Ah, their ugliness was his reward. Better now that he remembered all the fine balance in creation. His silence had become an armor and their lies bounced off him. His goodness was both his enemy and the very sword that would slay his nemesis. Cruel God.

There was a third person inside him - the one that could see both. It floated detached, sucking on a mint, observing and commenting, wincing at its choice of the wrong words to describe the absurd scene unfolding before it. It too had the potential to metastasize yet another thousand voices. It was getting pretty crowded in there. The first thing he thought of was the plaza around the grand Temple in Jerusalem - with all of the pilgrims of Israel who had come to supplicate before God on the holiest day of the year. Voice upon voice. Some uttered in unison - God full of compassion - compassion the lengths of exponential infinity and favoring compassion and truth. At other times just personal screams to save an ox, a harvest blighted, a son deformed, a spouse strayed. The marble below their feet polished and trodden from centuries of feet. And behind a curtain in front of them stands a man praying for himself.

Anyone who doesn't believe in God must have some solid explanation for the cruel joke that this whole thing presents. It was true, he thought, what the sages had understood and distilled into one single shot of deep and eternal wisdom; that axiom which sees each person as a universe. Not only of the families upon families and friends, students, enemies, cashiers and lovers which encircle the individual. But did they also reference in their exalted moment of clarity about the nature of humans, the eternal and ceaseless cast looming inside every mind - the casual game of host that each of us plays, doubting one voice not so popular while giving reinforcement to another. Sometimes like a cheap talk show; the moderator with a wireless microphone running from the black woman in the fluffy sweater to the college guy in flip flops, soliciting views, opinions and passions from his audience. At other times cranking some knob to spice it up with canned laughter or applause - the audience has gone home, to give voice to their own galaxies of bit players.

The man remembered - he once thought of the word respect. In some pedantic moment of revelation years ago, that it, the word respect, had multiple meanings and therefore needed to be recorded in the annals of some disheveled diary or collection of sugar potent stupidity. Respect in fact had to do with time. Seeing the surface and not rushing to note the adjoining facet, but rather forcing oneself to be at one side, to observe it until it was fully or at least adequately understood. Yes, perhaps this realization wasn't of the same quality of the majority of flotsam which he had uncovered in all his other years. After all, it might hold the key to unlocking the serenity which he so desperately sought. Respect. No, it's not a Hebrew word, but still English does have its moments. Again, one can respect an opinion, for instance. But in order to have that capacity or knowledge, one must first have the patience to sit and hear the alternate view expressed. Or one could say, from this respect I understand thus and such in a different way. Angles, like facets of a jewel, often adjoin not at perfect opposing directions, but instead in very subtle divisions. Like roads diverging at not exacting rectangular intersections, rather splitting off, with the original path slowly diverging for miles before it sways off into its own distant sequence. He wondered what it would have been to stay on that road. He agonizes whether or not to tease himself into yet another rage, or instead to quietly regret. And yet one must still turn the precious stone in order to respect each side - to allow the light to shine from it - to have its due in the sun, under a lamp - to serve as a mirror. Even if it is the wrong side.

GO JOE!! YOU DA' MAN!

Please send your emails of support to Senator Biden. Even if you don't agree with every position he's taken - now is the time to let him know that his role in the confirmation hearings of Judge Roberts is essential in keeping vigor and critique central to the democratic process. While the Republicans tinkle over their darling nominee, Senator Biden played some very hard ball this morning and I was cheering him on. But my steering wheel doesn't care, so perhaps you all will.

-C

http://biden.senate.gov/newsroom/details.cfm?id=245583&

Pete Townshend Becomes a blogger

Hi all, I'd like to alert your attention to a new blog by my good ol' buddy Pete Townshend. He's going to blog a novella using the very same domain as I. Here's the link. I'm sure it will be very thorougly read and analyzed.

Best,
-Chaim
http://www.boywhoheardmusic.blogspot.com/

Important Message from Michael Moore

Hi everyone,
here's a link to Michael Moore's information page regarding aid to victims of Hurricane Katrina (and government incompetence - read below). Yasher Koach to Micahel Moore.

-Chaim

http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/message/index.php?id=184"

Human Nature: Tribal

Government Impotence: Inexcusable

The Latest Rant by Yours Truly

The monetary cost of rebuilding areas of the gulf region destroyed or damaged by Hurricane Katrina will be in excess of one hundred billion dollars. Many hundreds, if not thousands of lives have been lost in the wake of this disaster, both directly related to the storm, but also from hunger, dehydration, lack of proper medical attention, and crime – just to mention a few. It is possible to conflate hunger, dehydration and crime into one category – that would be labeled 'direct and immediate results of governmental negligence.’ The tragedy of lives lost due to the lack of sanitary facilities, food and safety - all begs a question; How many lives could have been spared had there been proper resources, both human and material in place prospectively, before and immediately after the storm did its thing?

I was a victim of a crime earlier this week. A person or group of persons somehow got hold of the number on my ATM card as well as my PIN and began siphoning money out of my account over a period of about 4 days. I usually don’t check my balance that often so basically my account showed a balance of 0$ by the time I saw it. I wasted a day of work dealing with this, not to mention burning precious gasoline driving to Fullerton California to file a police report. I’m stressed, angry, and also scared. I fear using plastic money for any purpose, or in any setting. I fear that the crooks actually still have access to my account and are just waiting to pounce again.

I know that while my fears are justifiable, they are probably not entirely rational. After all, I needed to and was ultimately able to get on with my business. Am I going to carry a couple hundred dollars in cash around with me wherever I go? Yeah, our parents probably used to do that when we were kids; when credit cards represented a different class, when Visa and Diner’s Club were basically it, and credit was something earned via personal integrity, or at very least by being one heck of a good player.

Stealing a stranger’s money can in fact be rational. If your goal is to have enough money in your bank account, to own a car and fill it with gas, have a place to live and food to eat, then finding some way of acquiring money is simply essential, and practically all means are born out of rational decision making. Yes, I think I was taught either through explicit lessons, i.e. teacher said “don’t steal because bla bla bla . . “ or I saw Hawaii five-O and guys who stole got the crap beat out of them by Danno. All in all, I pretty much figured out that stealing was a bad idea. Although I did steal The Rutles 'All You Need is Cash' (a vinyl LP) from a church carnival about 24 years ago, so I didn’t learn very well. Or perhaps I learned with caveats, like if you’re going to take something, then have a solid reason. Mine was that I REALLY wanted that album, and so even my feable attempt at winning the toss-it game or whatever before snatching the record from behind the stall somehow justified my desperate act. So my snake brain stole, and my cerebrum rationalized it.

I think it became more about stealing and not getting caught, as opposed to ‘stealing is bad.’ By and large I’m not a big thief, but there are shades of gray between career criminality and the perfect citizen, i.e. not informing the cashier that he gave you too much change. I don’t do that, but I’m not sure I would consider it outright theft either. In such a scenario, does having driven 5 blocks or from the store absolve you of the need to turn the car around for all of 50¢ ?

Stealing is on the spectrum of deviant behaviors, like peeing in public, or flicking a cigarette butt out the window. But is it deviance if nobody sees or cares that it’s happening? Is it deviant to loot from an abandoned store if the authorities recognize that looting is the only means of survival? Of course there are degrees. Stealing 50 cents from a payphone change slot and purposely dumping a bucket of urine on Rodeo Drive are two very different acts. Who decides, and when, that the rules are suspended? Is that a sub-section of rules included in the social contract we signed at birth? Forget for the moment about what is punishable by statutes because lots of things merit punishment while other things only warrant it.

Shooting at a rescue helicopter both merits and warrants immediate and severe punishment. If you don’t agree with that, then don’t bother reading more because we’re on different planets. Looting for profit in a zone of great devastation is reprehensible. It symbolizez a complete abyss in the values that our systems of education and faith are supposedly there to teach. It too merits punishment and warrants a response worthy of the act. However there are urgent needs that aren’t being met right now. And our president is appointing his predecessor and his daddy to raise private funds for victims. Hundreds of billions of dollars have been allocated toward shock, awe, the spreading of liberty, and the buttressing of a crony regime while Bush Senior and Clinton have been sent out to conduct the equivalent of a bake sale to help mitigate the suffering in our gulf region.

Theft is an act whereby an individual is deprived by another of property, money, means, rights, or to life itself. I posit that this administration has deprived the already needy and impoverished masses of people living in the wake of Hurricane Katrina to their basic rights. It’s as if they’ve been handed a copy of the Constitution with sentences blacked-out. Many have been abandoned by authorities, herded into badly planned refugee housing, or simply left to die without basic means of survival. And yet this very same administration has ordered a ‘zero tolerance’ policy (see my previous entry entitled Zero Tolerance plus One) regarding looting in the devastated areas. In my opinion, it is high time that the masses in this country begin to immediately demonstrate zero tolerance for a government which has completely upside-down priorities regarding the welfare of its citizens.

A country with inestimable wealth, medical technology par excellence, superior means of transportation, and the strongest fighting force on the planet cannot seem to muster the necessary resources to save its citizens after a storm. Suddenly we need telethons, private charity dinners, and grassroots-internet efforts to help these masses get to some degree of equilibrium. Children are dying. People are wading in their own waste and garbage FOR DAYS, without hope or any indication of when the help is going to arrive. Hundreds of billions are being spent on an unpopular, un-winnable war overseas. And our president is sitting in front of us with that all too familiar deer in the headlights expression (the same one he had four years and a few days ago when he was reading Pokey The Goat). He doesn’t know what to do, or how to do it. Perhaps he should declare war on poverty. But no, he’ll just declare war on the looters. He'll siphon off resources from victim relief to fight looters. He’ll stupidly proclaim that nobody had any idea that the levies would fail while earlier this year a huge government-sponsored commission met to study “Hurricane Pam” - a hypothetical disaster in New Orleans - and guess what folks – that’s right - the levies were breached in hypothetical “Hurricane Pam.”

I must say that the single largest revelation has been watching the footage of all the unfortunate people victimized by the storm, left like the storm flotsam itself by their governing, elected officials. An overwhelming percentage of victims seem to be black people. Say it isn’t so. This isn’t just classism (as if ‘just’ isn’t bad enough).

One last thing. Bill Clinton should publicly come to a podium and declare that he has every intention of marshaling human and material resources to benefit and save the victims. In the same breath he should then point a finger straight at the White House and ask the nation where its leader is. Where are the tax dollars being siphoned? Where is the corporate welfare pissed away? Where are the helicopters, the shock and awe of Americans coming to save other Americans?!?! But he probably won't.

Ball of a Few Days

Deborah, Adinah and I drove up to Napa last week. A trip of any distance and to last some duration of minimal significance requires the cargo carrier to be mounted on the roof of the Forester, as well as the bike hitch to be snagged onto the rear. When we travel in this car we look like we’re running away from home. It’s like the dust bowl or something and we’ve stuffed every earthly possession into the deceptively small (don’t buy a Forester) rear of the car and the rest sorta clumsily into the surfboard shaped photon-torpedo on the roof. Frankly it looks stupid. I hitched the bike incorrectly the first time and about two miles from home it collapsed onto National Boulevard and I moronically dragged my bike for about fifty feet. My handlebars were bent and the wheels got fouled up too. I wasn’t about to turn the car around and put the bike back, so I re-hitched it and all was well after that. I hadn’t noticed the damage until we arrived in Napa anyhow and lo and behold the bike was still road-worthy despite the thrashing.

So we get to this place in Napa; The River Pointe Inn. Sounds posh, and in fact it’s quite nice. It’s like a make-believe little neighborhood of vacation cottages, all protruding from their lots (or slots), perfectly parallel, but each at a diagonal. The whole place is well coiffed and very clean – but get this – the cottages are freakin’ trailers. And this is coming from a person who’s worked in double-wide trailers for the last 10+ years; you’re not supposed to know you’re in a trailer when you’re in a trailer. At my place of employment, they raise them off the wheels with these metal pylons, and then strap the steel beams underneath directly to the parking lot. It’s like being in a house. It’s solid and secure. The River Pointe Inn apparently has plans to put the whole operation up on pontoons and head for the high seas at a minute’s notice because these buggars are still on their wheels. So you’re in this nice, albeit narrow little cottage with a couple of TV’s and a whole kitchen and a full size frig and dishwasher – the works. And it wobbles. Yes, you read it right. When my wife was coming down the hall, I knew it. At first I thought this was our first Northern California seismic excitement. But nothing so glamorous. I almost went to the front desk, demanded our money back and hauled the whole Singer-Frankes vacation caravan back downstate to LA at that moment.

I had just finished my time at Siggraph – the big annual computer graphics convention where the very hungry for work and attention meet the very geeky and hungry for attention and everyone has a big look-at-this-neat-thing moment together. So I had an interview with a major animation studio only to learn that they were looking for more “senior” people in that specialization. So I was feigning joy on my vacation – having stayed up hours for months finishing my animation piece, only to have my expectations farted upon by men who looked tired and finished with their careers. But hey, I had an interview. So someone must think I have something to offer. Cue violins and break out the handkerchiefs.

So when I got into this glorified trailer unit, which waggled and wobbled with each stride and nobody else had called me for an interview, and it was the nine days before Tisha B’Av – it was just a pesky pile of things which made me pissy and short-tempered. I was feeling some relief, but I was also seeing a big dark depression looming just around the soft tires of this trailer and with each creak of the floor, my life was on uncertain ground. So I biked to the Trader Joe’s, stuffed a bunch of good grub into my knapsack, grilled up some really fresh steak and chicken, had some nice local grape nectar and things began to get better. Amazing that the TJ’s in Napa has Aaron Rubashkin’s rib eye steaks. I guess we weren’t the only Yiddin’ vacationing in wine country. Still ahead was biking up the Silverado Trail to the Mumm winery where I was to sample some very special Pinot Noir sparkling beverage. Nice. The iPod is an amazing invention. It was made for bicycling. It’s too good to have the Napa Valley in front of you, sun shining, a bike lane on a lovely road, and your personal radio station playing in your ears. It just doesn’t get better – truly.

One man from Tarnopol tells of his parents’ divorce. Odd, sort of not culturally in my scope of mythology, that is for people originating in Eastern Europe in the interwar period. But people obviously did get divorced in those days, in that place too. His uncle, who took him under his wing; enjoyed playing cards. The man, now in his seventies, recalls, like ritual, in the dark off to the side of his bed finding the glass of milk with a chocolate bar placed on top, each night – a gift from his uncle. Another person, a different survivor, one who survived massacre and horror at that infamous factory of hellish memories near Katowice, Poland – that place whose name has become synonymous with the Holocaust itself; that place whose name I will not type today. Just one day without typing that name. She lost her daughter in 1979, to a blood clot in the brain.

Today I tried, at least with some semblance of dignity, to assist in hauling a box (one heavy pine box) containing a perished person to her final place. I managed to do so without allowing the pinching pain in my palms and wrists to weaken me to the point that I would actually drop my corner. I felt very much at one with the earth. I had some pebbles and stuff in my loafer when I entered Starbuck’s later to get my green tea frappucino. And I had just a touch more patience with the barista when she got my order wrong.

My brother Izzy released a new CD of his latest songs, entitled "Fall of a New Day." My personal favorite tracks are “Mind The Store,” and “Solitary Kiss.” I wish I was there sometimes, to help him mind the store.

Lavatory Review: The Surfliner

My very first usage of the toidy on a train was back in 1986 when my buddy Shalom and I were traveling from Albany to Atlanta. We ultimately went on to Ft. Lauderdale, though the balance of that trip was by bus. The review of amenities on that road-based conveyance are for a different time. Let me just suggest that it was totally and completely upsetting. The bathroom on our 24 hour choo choo trip from Albany to Atlanta on the other hand was quite pleasant. It was an older train and there was even a small cordoned off lounge area at the end of our car where we lit Hanukkah candles. They were actually birthday candles, but it was about fulfilling the ritual. We used the bathroom to light other things. "Piksher yerself on a train in a stashun . . "

About a week ago I had the pleasure of taking the Surfliner from Los Angeles to Oceanside, Ca. This was a vista, double-decker train car. The seats reclined very nicely and there was even a 120V outlet at the seat. I wish I'd have known this since I would have brought my iPod to charge - having noticed it was dead before I departed, I left the thing at home. Anyhow after a couple cans of Pepsi I needed to access the grand throne. I just realized that this has the set-up and feel of a Penthouse Forum article, so let me assure you that it's only about the subject at hand. Not that I've read Penthouse Forum. Not recently, at least. We've all experienced puberty. No winky winky on my blog.

Anyhow I descended the stairs in Car #2 and found the restroom at the bottom of the steps. The doorway was a curved, sliding-on-a-track jobby, which when unlatched revealed a surprisingly spacious and sparkling interior. The floor was unfortunately made of linoleum, and that would automatically downgrade the level of quality in any bathroom, regardless. The pattern was unassuming; that quasi-mosaic pattern you see in lots of people's homes. It was curling where the floor met the wall, and again I have to say in such a form of transportation that a metal or solid plastic floor would be greatly preferable. I do understand that other materials might be heavier and that weight is certainly watched closely where fuel costs are involved. In this case I was willing to overlook the surface beneath my feet. The toilet was much like those found on any commercial airplane. I've not been on a private jet so for all I know they have porcelain thrones with warm water bidets. Upon flushing it made a sweeping suction sound which I have heretofore only associated with pressurized high altitude travel, and so my supposition that the suction thing actually had something to do with flying at 37,000 feet may have just been rendered incorrect. I have been known to be wrong occasionally. Very rarely. Sometimes.

The soap dispenser, too like a Southwest jet, was positioned at an angle just above the basin. It offered a nicely scented cream, though the variety of fragrance was not memorable. The sink had hot and cold water handles, and surprises of surprises - there was an electric hand drier! I was amazed, and yet when you consider the costs, it's probably cheaper to operate something like that than it is to deal with the waste and fuss of all those paper towels. Where are you gonna throw all that paper on a long trip? What, dump it off the train indiscriminately in a field or something? This all made sense. Someone had his or her thinking cap on when this service room was designed.

Later on the train, some folks were watching a DVD of some TV show on their computer. I wanted to steal the computer. But they looked like they were in a gang or probably knew gang members or something so they probably would have killed me. I didn't know that gang people took the Surfliner. Gang People. Boo.

Another train bathroom was one I used when traveling between Budapest and Krakow. At least it used to be a bathroom. It was more like a booth with a hole or something. It looked like someone very angry had decided to take a baseball bat and maybe an axe to it some years before, and whichever government just didn't have the funds to rehabilitate the damn thing. That whole train trip was another thing entirely. There was barely anywhere to sit, and awakening at 5 a.m to someone in a thick accent shouting "Auschwitz! Auschwitz!" was just not my idea of a happy morning.

The Surfliner bathroom gets a solid rating (no pun intended) of 3 rolls of toilet paper.

Happiness at least.

A Pop, a Prick and a Whole lot of Blood

Horrors of horrors. Brentwood's claim to fame heretofore (at least in my mind) has been in connection with the slaying of Nicole Brown Simpson and her boyfriend whose name escapes me at the moment. Was it Ron something? Oh yes, and Ben and Jerry's on San Vicente, along with late night walks with my wife that we used to take up there some years ago. Anyhow, so my friend was walking down Wilshire Boulevard near his office during busy mid-day traffic and CRACK, he heard something strange. A moment later he looked down and saw a blood spot in his pants, somewhere north of his knee. He immediately thought "I've been shot," and then tried pulling up his pants cuff to reveal the wound. He quickly realized that he would need to lower his trousers to examine it so began running toward his office building, and his car in the parking garage below. When he finally got a look it didn't appear too serious, but he drove himself to Cedars Sinai. He'd been shot, drive-by style with a b-b gun. Just weird, no? Apparently another guy had been shot, but the other victim was lucky to be toting business cards in his shirt pocket which blocked the shot from breaching his skin. My friend will have a b-b lodged in his thigh muscle henceforth.

So his wife telephoned mine and they rather seamlessly implemented a child-care plan, just to situate the kids until such time as we knew all was back to semi-normality. Yeah, normal. A guy's flesh is pierced by a projectile in broad daylight on a major metropolitan thoroughfare with no apparent rhyme or reason. Normal? My wife and his were joking "this now concludes the Los Angeles portion of our lives," as if to say 'okay, we're outta here." I have to say that although my logical mind (yes, sometimes it rears it's boring head) sees this as random, there's something more creepy about it lurking in my irrational blogger head. This somehow straddles the line between random and, well, not.

The pinprick focus of events; the confluence of occurrences and incidents and accidents and intentions - all makes me feel very out of control. Perhaps the shmuck who fired that b-b at my buddy's leg yesterday was attempting to arrest control in his or her world (why do I assume that a "his" did this?) Maybe he was out on parole but couldn't resist the urge to just be naughty. Or maybe my friend's kippa was just too offensive to him and he had to assert his dominance as a whatever over him at that moment. Or perhaps this was a trial run for some bizarre, upcoming mass shooting spree, Washington DC style. Perhaps Al Qaeda has turned to b-b attacks in Los Angeles. Seems they haven't found the West Coast on any map yet, but I should probably be counting my blessings. They certainly know where the London Tube is.

Utter pandemonium across the pond. People turned toward walls, weeping on cell phones. Smoke rises from an Underground stairwell. The smell of burnt rubber and hair and flesh fill a tunnel. Lives lost. Families lost. Property ruined. A bus is ripped apart like a cardboard happy-meal prize. Fingers in trees. Spouses and lovers forever separated. Moms and dads who will never see their children again. Businesses damaged. The leader of the world's most powerful nation seems to not be able to ride his bicycle and tumbles off - right into a policeman. Sorry, but that last one's kinda funny.

It's easy to pop a human being. I've heard casual banter among gangsters on the streets of Los Angeles referring to shooting as "popping" someone. That's the sound of the gun? Or is it the fact that each of us is kind of like a balloon filled with stuff that just pops when you prick it? Tens of thousands are popped in Iraq. A bus explodes in Jerusalem or London. pop pop pop pop pop pop pop pop pop pop pop pop pop pop My friend has a hole in his leg. Pop. That word seems to undervalue all the things which occur in its wake. It's not nice to reduce all those important, sacred and beloved things to a three-letter pop, is it. It belittles the suffering and the worries and chaos left in its wake.

Last night I felt a whole other sensation regarding the impact of Nasa's little probe on Comet Temple 1. It was a big pop. More like a smash or a boom, probably. We're touching other worlds, and in the meantime our own is falling apart. Eighty three million miles away. Everything we've ever known, cared about or thought about is after all just a star from far away. Sinai, Hiroshima, and the birth of my daughter. A pinprick of light. Some little bacteria on my friend's leg experienced his host's b-b shooting as a major cataclysm. George Bush should remember that he's just a prick on pinprick.

Zero'd Out!

Post Script to my last entry:

I'm very glad to announce that Kevin Francois (the young man named in the article below) has been reinstated to his regular school schedule. This after an overwhelming volume of emails in protest were directed at the school administrators. It pays to stand up.

Zero Tolerance plus One

Zero tolerance seems quite contradictory to the principles of an ostensibly Christian society. As a Jew I know very little about Christianity. But the aesthetic I've come to know is one of togetherness, family, quiet time, listening to one another and mutual respect. But let's say for argument's sake that instead of a body politic uniformly decent and fundamentally good, what we have in today's America is a corrupted social order and a crest-fallen mantle of values and priorities. Something which needs change. A place where the music of the ghetto receives adulation and Columbine-type killing is written off as an increasingly common exponent of a 'child on overload,' Don't be confused for this is also the America where abortion doctors are shot and the nominee to the UN Ambassadorship position is avowedly opposed to the very principle of a UN. Yet we pay taxes to a government buttressed by the notion that the family and church values need to be more fully realized; that faith needs to play a more important role in the lives of our children, in school, in the home, on the TV set. This is a political climate which precipitates calls for the overthrow of so-called activist judges while Christian supported law schools are looking to raise the next generation of crusaders in the culture wars. We are witness to some manufactured, reactionary notion that there must be zero tolerance for guns or illegal drugs in the schools, for underage sex, for homosexuality taught as a viable alternative lifestyle, for flag-burning, for removing references to God in the Pledge of Allegiance. Remember that the term "zero tolerance" has its roots in fighting crime.

Among the widely perceived threats to America is any inkling of tarnished patriotism. The result is an absolute and complete marginalization of any person or group that does not fully support the war in Iraq. 'Support Our Troops:' that fairly ubiquitous yellow-ribbon magnet affixed to so many rear bumpers, is not only a message for unconditionally staking personal and national pride on our mission to eradicate terrorism. It doesn't read "I support Our Troops," or "Please Support Our Troops," but instead "Support Our Troops." The sentiment is quite simply as one commentator put it, a military order; to be carried out. There will be no tolerance for any other stance. You're either fighting the problem or a part of the problem. In other words, if you don't support the war, then by implication you do not support the troops, you do not support the idea that we must fight the terrorists, you do not support the government - that any variance means perhaps you are a terrorist.

Today a student in Columbus Georgia was suspended for 10 days as penalty for speaking to his mom on his cell phone during school hours. That school has a zero-tolerance policy regarding cell phone usage in class. The boy's mom began serving a one year tour of duty in Iraq four months ago. What we have before us is a clash of zero-tolerance policies. The child, likely misses his mother deeply. Could it be construed he felt that because answering a long-distance call from his mother, Sgt. 1st Class Monique Bates with the 203rd Forward Support Battalion, was tantamount not only to following a biblical axiom, but indeed to "Supporting Our Troops," that he probably concluded a lapse in lock-step compliance with the cell phone policy at that moment to be acceptable, given all the circumstances? When confronted by a teacher, he refused to hang up on his mother. He became distraught. He used profanity in his protest against the rule. What would anyone else have done? Picture it: "Sorry mom, I know you might be blown up today, but there's a no cell phone policy in school. Bye."

AM radio is rife with pundits who have no patience with unpatriotic behavior, for insubordination to the ideals of that "America First" and "..Love it or Leave it" zealotry put forth in the post 9/11 era. These same ideologues hail the zero-tolerance policies set before our youth in schools. And now the two courses, adhered to with practically unyielding silliness, and no regard for context or perspective have come home to roost quite poetically in this incident.

The familiar scholastic aroma of books and pencils again fills the air. If only for a moment it would be so wonderful for our national dialogue to cease its pubescent and prurient obsession with Paula Abdul, the runaway bride, Paris Hilton, and other fictional TV-inspired, sugar-fat absurdity to instead converge on the truly profound confluence of extremes meeting, again in front of the blackboard. Ah, the justice. Where our leader learned of the plot to bring America to its knees, is the same setting where a young man extended the love for his patriot mother by cell phone; both images evoking the supreme urgency of duty. Our leader waited seven minutes to respond to his call. Seventeen year old Kevin Francois answered the call - without considering anything other than the finest principle - that of "honor they mother . . ." His mother should be proud. Support Kevin Francois.

Petra Haden Sings The Who Sell Out - Review

Through many hours, pondering ways in which I could pay tribute to my favorite music, the notion of doing songs or whole albums a cappella has crossed this mind more than once. No, it’s not my invention. Bobby McFerrin is a genius at it. For me it was a natural extension of my own curiosity, especially given my propensity for mimicking people, instruments and sounds. I’ve probably come within minutes of booting my old Mac and pulling up Pro-Tools to attempt on my own what Petra Haden has ultimately achieved with naiveté, sexiness and grace. Another most essential component of this particular effort is the fact that a woman has with great aptitude and originality appropriated music that is inarguably oriented by and for those with a penis.

According to the liner notes for "Petra Haden Sings The Who Sell Out," a San Pedro California-based radio host, Mike Watt, gave Petra (his close friend and past collaborator) a Tascam 8 track recorder. He dedicated track number 8 to the original Who album for Petra to reference the music and lyrics. Furthermore Watt contends that Petra was not previously familiar with the album. The endearing richness and detail evident on this CD would render such an assertion of dubious legitimacy, were it not for her absolutely silly cases of mis-heard and misunderstood lyrics. While these little foul-ups are forgivable, they are about as idiosyncratically weird as is this homage in totality. They codify the gloriously innocent but widely pervasive syndrome of confused rock lyrics. It’s the “excuse me while I kiss this guy,” or “revved up like a douche you know the rowner in the night” type thing. In short, either Watt or Haden herself would have done well to reference the correct lyrics for these songs, which are widely available on the internet. I am mystified by such obvious blunders as “I can’t remember” being mistaken for “I danced with Linda,” in Maryanne With The Shaky Hands, other than the fact that both phrases share equivalence in syllables.

There are some jarring moments where the edits and transitions are sloppy and ill-attended to. Some clue to this peppering of neglect in production may lie in an interview Watt conducted with Petra on his web-based show. Petra comes off as an extremely casual and dispassionate artist; sort of a stoner for lack of a better term. No indictments. There is a genuine charm, albeit momentary distraction in all these snags of cogency and continuity; wrinkles which could’ve easily been remedied by allowing a fan to listen before the J-cards and discs were printed – yikes! But regardless, the confidence with which these songs are rendered, screw-ups and all, ultimately fuels the likeability of Ms. Haden, and this CD.

Petra’s ample vocal range is evident throughout the piece as she ambitiously employs complex and meticulous over-dubs and lots of funny babbling to achieve both the vocals and instrumentals of the Who classic. At times she employs an ethereal whispery call; while at others summons an almost dazed or brooding affectation, colored with chocolaty timbre. Her falsettos are sometimes hauntingly reminiscent of John Entwhistle’s fruitfully youthful voice on the original album. She fancies herself a talent of mimicry. At once she strives to perfectly imitate the precise rhythms present on The Who Sell Out with disarmingly cute and unabashedly, almost childish wow-wow-wow-ing and dubbi-da dubbi-da dubbi-da vocalizations. She has fun emulating the studio tricks (originally achieved with the now famous “twiddling knobs” as immortalized in the film *The Kids Are Alright) - resulting in the musical gossamer which Pete Townshend along with Who producer Kit Lambert undoubtedly spent days inventing back in 1967.

Characteristic of taking on a project of this size, are the inevitable and impossible-to-satisfy expectations and unforgiving ears infecting each seasoned Who fan. However one must neither underestimate nor dismiss this work as an imperfect copy of the Who album. The ages have seen manifold interpretations of classic music and art. It’s possible that Petra’s tour de force is the most appropriate testament to the understated and unsung importance of The Who Sell Out as part of that very particular genre of pop psychedelia. After all it was a neighborhood inhabited by the likes of Pink Floyd’s "Piper at The Gates of Dawn," The Beach Boys’ "Pet Sounds" and the inimitable 'Sgt. Pepper.' Yet for many of these now defunct bands applying their musical prowess as means to find their way around a world torn by social revolution, war, or commenting on the advent of commercialized rock, by contrast this was not The Who’s swan song. Rather it was a harbinger of such opuses as Tommy and Who’s Next. The sounds and spirit present on Sell Out are interminably and shortsightedly misunderstood through superficial critiques on the usage of actual commercials on the album. The truth is that The Who was practically ready to call it quits and came up with the idea of utilizing their sponsorship as a creative medium. The notion of painting an A.M. radio-like big top tent on vinyl was a tip of the cap to pirate radio on a dial otherwise monopolized by the British government. It was also a vehicle for some of Townshend’s finest writing. If you've never heard the original album, you are missing something great.


On a recent trip to the john I found myself, whistling the tune to Silas Stingy, and so it occurred to me in a veritable thought bubble appearing over the stall, "yes, The Who Sell Out done as multi-tracked whistles!!!" Back off man, it was my idea! I felt the same way after about 30 seconds watching the animated feature “Waking Life,” when I realized that someone else beat me to the goal of achieving a novel form of computer-aided rotoscoping on the big screen. I had spent several weeks on such tests, using the aforementioned old Mac a couple of years before I saw that film, and my results were strikingly similar. It’s okay AND I digress.

Make no mistake: Petra Haden has taken a casual challenge to copy a classic specimen of late ‘60’s rock eccentricity and re-ignited a carnivalesque journey, with results fresh, unexpected, and even tear-jerkingly fabulous.
-Chaim Singer-Frankes
2/24/05

It also occurred to me to test this idea of over-tracking my own voice while watching my brother Izzy lay down dubs on his Tascam. Ah the Tascam – that phenomenal device which has provided a path to easy multi-track recording, fortunately or not for both the able, *talented musical limners as well as those incompetent, know-nothings with a little too much time and spending money on their hands.

*Yes, Who fans, the twiddling which Pete discusses with Russell Hardy are those in which he and Kit engaged whilst recording “A Quick One,” however given the period, the spirit of such experimentation was certainly not limited to any particular album.

*Izzy is among the talented ones – pouring his heart with honesty and flare into his material.

Musky Wood

A sound blurries away, seemingly constant, as background noise. My brother used to get that look on his face - that look of earnesty, mixed with mischief, "that's the sound of the venus probe, he told me." Then he'd get a smirk. We laughed. It was funny because we were both thinking the same thing. He once told me, "some guy took a radio and mixed it with an old Philco TV and got signals from Nasa in his livingroom." I believed him. I wanted to believe that I could do that too.

I once sat with a beverage can, molding a battery to the top with some silly putty. I applied layer after layer of yellow paper glue, vigorously rubbing the glue into the putty with my index finger. I told my parents that I was building a robot which would do the dishes and my homework, and would make my mom's life easier. It was just the type of conflicted hope and despair present in my home. On the one hand I was fabricating a fantasy out of just stuff. On the other, my mom was harping about dishes and chores and I was saving the day by mashing a battery into a can with clay.

The sound in the background was one of the three or four shortwave radios in our home. As my dad finely tuned the dial, looking for Kol Yisrael (the voice of Israel), he passed over many strange and exotic frequencies. Pitters of noise, warping and waving sounds which seemed to emanate straight from Lost in Space - and a collage of languages, bits and pieces of news, story and music from a hundred nations. That's what my brother called the venus probe. When my dad's hand found the Israel broadcast, it was as though he had arrived home.

There was a big shortwave in my parent's bedroom - a Grundig, console stereo, with stainless steel push buttons. It opened in front to a record player and space for storing records - my parents shoved old photo albums inside it, instead. The flywheel tuning dial was heavy and plodding. I would throw the dial in one direction and watch the red needle skate across the band, backlit with small yellow light bulbs. I loved that stereo. Another was a portable, grey plastic radio which had AM, FM, two or three SW bands, and something called MB, which I was told was military band. When I played with that radio, I never heard anything on MB, even though I tried it every time I turned it on. It was like a ritual. I cannot adequately describe the sounds that come out of a shortwave radio. Electronic chirps, whirring, fluctuating notes - screaches, and the ever-present slapping sound. It sounded like a helicopter's blades in your kitchen, but slowed down. My mom would inevitably squeal, "oy, tachlish et zeh," (turn that down!) They stay with me today, enmeshed with the smell of decaying leaves, a chill in the air, the dread of homework languishing unfinished, and blue dusk over my street.

Restroom Review: Culver 12 Cinema, Culver City Ca.

Recently my wife and I enjoyed a very delicious meal at Annapura, a vegeterian Indian restaurant on Venice Boulevard. Usually I sample one of the more, shall we say unique beverages offered at these places, and that night I tried something, the name of which I can't recall. It was compellingly, I don't know, strange. It tasted like a mix between a rose blossom and a brand new cassette tape. I must say, I liked it. I sucked the thing down and didn't think much else of it for the balance of the evening. We rushed on to the theatre close by to catch a late showing of Pixar's The Incredibles. The film was wonderful, though I should add that it's too intense for the kiddies, so don't be fooled by cute aesthetics; this is a movie for adults. Anyhow, somewhere during the epilogue I began to have the oddest sensation in my gut. It was as if someone had implanted a methane gas spigot in my peretoneum and then proceeded to light the thing. Within no more than 45 seconds from the onset of this episode I broke out in a cold sweat I felt like I was going to explode - or die whichever came first. The crazy thing was that I simply didn't want to miss even one minute of this film in order to go to the bathroom, but yet I really felt an emergency of a sort I simply had not sensed at any time in my 38 years on this planet. It felt like nausea coupled with explosive farts and I simply thought I was going to lose it right there in my seat. I knew it was the beverage. Just remembering it gives me an urge to visit the can.

There are sadly few establishments, public or private which offer single room lavatories for guests and employees. Apparently a measure of efficiency in construction dictates the level of privacy and comfort that can be accorded to commode users. I must convey a kudos to the people who designed and constructed the Culver 12 Cinema, in Culver City California. The bathroom was one of the singularly clean, one-toilet, one sink lavatories I'd been to. It is similar to the bathroom in the 580 building in the DreamWorks Complex on the Universal lot, though the latter is a bit cleaner and has an aromatic hint of cedar. The cinema bathroom was fully tiled; a prerequisite in my opinion for anything to rate three bathroom tissue rolls or higher. It is absolutely spacious, appointed with chrome fixtures, as well as a Koala changing station for tots. Nothing of any high incident or interest happened in that bathroom, even given the level of emergent need I felt, but that had nothing to do with any issues of sanitation or privacy - both of which were really top notch.

Additional comments: Bullet style garbage can, somewhat overflowing (it was probably not emptied yet for that day). Pleasant smelling soap.