Doodles from 12/24

I just finished the audio version of Steve Martin's newest book, "Born Standing Up."  It's interesting.  Kind of pathetic and depressing.  I think he should stick to making movies and writing plays.  Knowing the story of his life, and having him read it aloud makes me think that all these celebrities are ridiculous, and don't quite fully appreciate how ridiculous they sound. He's actually quite bad at doing himself.  But still he does have integrity, and I don't think he's completely asleep.  The little banjo interludes are good. And yet, I just can't relate to him. He's so goyish; yeah maybe that's it.  But it's all about integrity.  Yeah, integrity.  Fuck.

The Razor's Edge

As I embark on my 42nd trip around this medium-sized, yellow star known affectionately as "Sol," I reflect upon the last 492 months of my life outside the womb. To begin with, without being excessively weak, and hopefully avoiding overly emotional sentimentality, I would like to acknowledge all those people who have had a lasting effect upon my hair. I will get to the rest of my organs some other time, but it seems good begin with the most profound symbol of aging.

Barbers
Over the decades, I have been fortunate to know thickness of hair, lustrous, brown, and even semi-flaxen in hue at times, after vainly rubbing freshly squeezed lemon juice into my scalp, steeping in sweat, enveloped in prickly Negev warmth. When I was small though, dad would pile the trio of Singer boys into his Belvedere wagon and drive the four blocks to Forest avenue for a snip snip at the hands of Joseph Brandman; a latvian Holocaust survivor. Curls of thick Tipparillo smoke lazily crept from his mouth and nose around the bare bulb and grommet chain that swayed above me. My flabby tush overflowed off the top of two old phone books, stacked onto a wooden bench.

Brandman, referred to by surname only, with the "a" pronounced as a schwa ə, was a smiley guy. He had a thin moustache over his lip, and a perfect row of no more than 43 long hairs combed over his shining bald skull. Come to think of it, he looked like Gregory Peck's rendition of Joseph Mengele in "The Boys From Brazil." Brandman's basement was the barber shop. An empty bag of Munchos potato chips lay somewhere on top of a pile of magazines. The bag was always there. My dad would never have bought Munchos - not if a gun were at his head.

Descending the staircase from Brandman's eternally summer kitchen, the smell was a combination of musty wood, cigar smoke, and brill creme. The basement was a sort of interrogation room; a naked, yellow incandescent bulb barely illuminated the work space. A squat table sat against the cinder-block wall, behind the "customer's" seat. That was where Brandman laid out his black box of torture implements: various scissors with the little finger hook for his pinky, different sized combs, and a pin-striped silken wrapping cloth kept everything neat. He swung the tall case up and onto the vinyl covered table, and deftly slid the buttons apart - the burnished brass hasps snapped up and vibrated, sprudududud, like flippers on a pinball machine. As if he was reciting from a script, he would ask "Ya vant a herrkut ?" Or he might quip, "You need a herrkut, you look like a Beatle." There was something comforting about his reference to the British mop tops - a compliment. Like the bag of Munchos - he was hip to a label.

I don't know if Brandman was formally schooled in cosmetology. If he was trained at all, I imagine that at some vague juncture he happened into a vocational landscaping course geared for immigrants, and settled, then and there that methods accorded to bushes and weeds were dually applicable for grooming the children of fellow camp survivors. With slender thinning-shears, he "layered" the sides of my scalp, moving up from my ear toward the top of my head with a predictable rhythm, tzik-tzikah,tzika-tzika-TZIK! tzik-zikah, tzika-tzika-TZIK! He certainly was consistent, but I think he didn't quite know what to do when my hair was particularly thick, because at some point he would grab clumps of hair and go at them, digging in with the scissor, kachika! kachika! kachika! Frankly, I don't think he really knew what he was doing at all because this action just plain hurt. It's not supposed to hurt at the barber.

When I was around fourteen or fifteen I started going to a place called Cutting Corner Hair Designers, at New Scotland and Quail in Albany, New York. They charged eight or nine bucks, but that included a shampoo. Then some buxom babe would cut my hair, her soft bosom occasionally grazed my shoulder. Gives me goose bumps still. Once she said, "ooh, you've got the hair." As if to say, "that's where my hair went," or maybe she just liked running her fingers through my hair. I don't know. My dad was pretty angry when I started going there. It was a statement. On my part, it meant getting my hair cut the way I wanted, by people who listened to what I wanted, without my dad muttering instructions in the barber's ear in Yiddish, nullifying my request to keep a little "over the ear." This was about independence. For my dad, it was "a vaste of money! Vut, Brandman izn't good enuf? You need sumvun to pat yer herr nicely?" Come to think of it, well, yes it was nice for once not to have my head chopped at with a pair of blunt hedge clippers.

What this all boils down to is, well, I don't worry about this anymore. Half the time these days I cut my own hair, because in fact, I don't have hair anymore. Life. Age.

You'd Think I'd Just Woke Up

The genius of those who trade in oil is their realization of oil's two-pronged value. A piece of art, while inspiring, even well-rendered, cannot have more than a speculative value. The price of, say, "The Potato Eaters," by van Gogh is based upon the perceived value of the piece. If a collector is prepared to spend seventy-five million dollars to acquire that painting, then the painting is worth seventy-five million dollars. Tickets to a Hanna Montana concert recently sold for upwards of three hundred dollars. The retail price of those tickets was somewhere between twenty-six and fifty-six dollars. Their worth cannot be calculated in objective terms. Child A is willing to pay one price, while Child B can only afford the retail price. Unless Child B is willing to be first in line when tickets go on sale, Child A is the one going to the concert.

It's also crucial to point out that a Hanna Montana ticket is not a requirement to sustain life, neither can it provide transportation nor home heating. The experience of a Hanna Montana concert isn't something I can place in my gas tank. Yes, it can be taped and broadcast, or sold at Target or on iTunes, and so it has a shelf-life for those who can profit from its commercial potential. However the ticket price, speculated five or more times above its asking price was not based upon a rational assessment of its value. Rather, it was based upon the ephemeral value (if any such exists for this artist) which attendees of her concerts can take away. No fixed price can be placed upon that. Last year, Woman III, a painting by Willem de Kooning was sold by media magnate, David Geffen, for one hundred forty-plus million dollars. I love de Kooning's work - it moves me to tears. But I could cut it up, put it into a blender for 10 minutes, and then pour it into my gas tank, and it wouldn't run my Subaru any better than the tears which I shed over it's beauty.

What is the value of crude oil? I assume it's based upon some complex calculus of factors such as prospecting, the cost to pump it from the ground, transportation, port fees, current supply, and probably over a hundred other things. However, included in that is probably how Hugo Chavez or Ahmadeenejad feel when they wake up tomorrow.

Let's examine what oil is. Here's a short extract from Wikipedia (not my favorite source, but it's not my oracle for a full, comparative abstract on Homer or The Song of Songs, so I'll consider this entry to be more or less accurate - who the f _ _ _ cares, it's my blog!)

Petroleum is used mostly, by volume, for producing fuel oil and gasoline (petrol), both important "primary energy" sources. [2] 84% by volume of the hydrocarbons present in petroleum is converted into energy-rich fuels (petroleum-based fuels), including gasoline, diesel, jet, heating, and other fuel oils, and liquefied petroleum gas. [3]

Due to its high energy density, easy transportability and relative abundance, it has become the world's most important source of energy since the mid-1950s. Petroleum is also the raw material for many chemical products, including pharmaceuticals, solvents, fertilizers, pesticides, and plastics; the 16% not used for energy production is converted into these other materials.

Amazing, no? Oil is used to make just about everything, from the clothes on my back to the car I drive, and what fills its tank. Now that's market coverage. What's further amazing is not how pricey gasoline is these days, but the fact that it's still so relatively inexpensive!! Neither the finest washing machine nor the biggest ruby can power my Subaru. If and when a means for producing something that rivals or exceeds oil's astounding spectrum of uses, and ease of procurement, then the nations whose economies rely on oil production will be in trouble. Or, they may cause trouble in order to sustain the value of their commodity for as long as possible.

In the meantime, oil is it. What's more - it has both intrinsic and speculative value. Yes, other resources claim this dual value, but something like a diamond, for example, hasn't nearly the same scope of usage. In fact, right now, the only other thing I can fathom with value that straddles a line between objective and ephemeral, actual and perceived, is human consciousness. Perhaps it is best to reduce this consciousness thing simply, to human life. Human life can't be replaced, well depending on who you ask and for what purpose, but for the moment, if I get flattened by a truck today, nobody can replace the very essence or uniqueness that is me. It appears, due to the agglomeration of experiences, education, artistic talent, charm, humor, and humility that make up what is known as Chaim, some people may be willing to invest a few bucks per year to sustain. *B'ezras Hashem. Inshala. Fingers crossed. ptooee ptooee . . . But in order to get some entity to give up cash, if say, I and that big truck do happen upon one another in some unfortunate turn of fate, that would be known as a lost gamble. Speculation. In other words, I'm nearing forty-one, I have no major health problems (see starred section above) and so it's a good bet for an entity such as State Farm to "sell" me a policy that I probably won't "buy the farm" soon. If I was sick(er) or old(er), it would cost me more, i.e. it's a worse bet for the folks at State Farm if I'm in a wheelchair or have asthma or something.

But oil? Hell, if I were to strike oil in my backyard and prove a consistent flow of twenty five barrels a day for a week, you could safely say I wouldn't need to worry about much in terms of, well much of anything. It would not only be the value of the actual oil I would sell, but my personal value would then be scaled against the average value of such backyard wells in Southern California, the world market prices, and whatever else. Just as a note, I can't legally drill for oil in my yard, 'cause someone else, someone I don't even like, owns the oil and mineral rights to the chunk of terra crust under my house !!! When we were purchasing our house, the seller wouldn't even consider placing the oil and mineral rights on the table, because as she said, "you couldn't afford it." I have no doubt. Oil may not be very nice for the atmosphere, but it makes a hell of an anti-depressant, and one spiffy pair of pants too.

There may be no accounting for taste here, but if it's light and sweet, it'll get you off the doll.

Competing Voices

Go, make a cake
Find
My bed is full of water
The floor has mud
Pebbles, dried like black beans

So pull up her pants.
Laughter
I don’t have sugar and flour
You can’t have

And then, a doctor, a comic chemist
Look up.
Receivers can pick up a new traveler on their way up
Nose down
Not just upon land
Eyes up
Maybe

What if you’re sad?
You want sad?
The funeral is on the radio
What
What
And now, you’re a gardener?
Prove it, with years

Drink all the coffee you want
It’s the wrong funeral.
Deeper, like the tunnel where the princess was flashed to death
I know what you want

Turn over
White bath of sheets
A lover.
Dryness broken, with bile and sweet saloon
Bitter, coffee lips meet
Streaks of black hair, and oil, and lace
Nostrils filled with tears and sexy crows’ feet
Have the cake

I didn’t know you were in my bed
Yes, put plastic under the sheet
Really, I didn’t know.
The flowery blanket
Cut shapes
The beans have grown like supernovae.
Cut shapes!

And then, a mother
Finished
My family in a grotto
Lit with tungsten, and furnished like a summer home on a coniferous island
But still, finished
The floor has mud

A parade descends the stairs
There were stairs.
What if there were stairs?
And my pants keep falling
That’s really dangerous.

You really cannot.
And I’m not sorry
I’m sorry, I’m just not sorry
Have it -
You can turn away, and laugh, and commit crimes, and learn from a limping dwarf
But I’m sorry,
You just can’t.
Sometimes, there’s science and math.

Old Red Whine

There's finally something that's making me happy, outside of those moments, of course, where I marvel at my child or the love that our cat, Tiny, has for my wife.  It's like walking into a forest with a cathedral - canopy of trees hanging over the green stinking mist of forever. Don't really know how to talk about it.  But anyhow, my damn, shameful obsession with The Who is once again brought to the surface because of this new film that came out a couple of weeks ago.  It's called "Amazing Journey - The Story of The Who," and really, it's several films woven together. 

But I don't want to say much about it because it's all about feelings which, if you're not a fan of The Who, these feelings are like something insipid or foolish uttered in a mockumentary.  So, well just fuck that, and you know, it's all silly.  With the wisdom, ahem . . ahem. . . of nearing forty-one, and that jaded eye, quivering with caffeine and sprouting crows' feet like cracks in the L.A. sidewalk, I look askance at my history of wasted time, money and tears over this shit.  But this is my life, after all, and if you don't give a shit, then don't keep reading.  But really this document that the film is, well, it just makes me happy.  Happy in a way that a good workout used to make me happy.  I don't cry.  I haven't cried since I stood at my father's graveside, and in the toilet on the ElAl, and this film doesn't make me cry.  But it would have.  Now it's just about seeing stuff in a very inside-out kind of way; these people who make up the band, or rather the remnants, Pete and Roger.  Of course, members of their crew, family members, and famous members of other bands who were influenced by the band, like Sting and Noel Gallagher pepper the film with opinions and smiles. But this is a painful document to watch.  

Watching it sober, in more ways than one, is at once raw and transcendent.  It's quite definitive for my taste, at least, and I don't really give a shit what other more seasoned or critical fans are saying that the film is lacking or leaves out some performance, or how it strays, or fuck knows what else.  The theme of chapters presented as "tracks" of a vinyl album is effective.  It reminds me of them old good days.  I like it.  Enough said.  Now go and buy it or try to catch it somewhere in a theater or borrow it from me.  

I'm having a really tough time and it's just making me happy and giving some needed distraction.  It stinks like an ashtray, and vomit, and gin, and it sounds like a party.  And I'm glad to be alive with it. 

Vision

Today I have learned of the untimely passing of Rabbi David Zeller, a grand soul of spirit and vision. May his family find comfort among the mourners for Jerusalem. I dedicate this to him and his students.

There was a profoundly touching program last evening on "Talk of The Nation" on NPR. The guest author wrote about a man blinded at an early age by an accident. This man had been offered restoration of his sight through a breakthrough medical procedure. The man risked cancer and even death through this surgery and the drugs that would be necessary retain his vision. It was in line with the ethical conundra presented on my undergraduate public policy final exam. In short that test posed an essay question of how to institute control (public or private) over a hypothetical machine which could transport an individual over massive distances in a split second. In the fantasy scenario, the machine made a piercing screech every time it was used which would instantly render deaf, anyone within a hundred mile radius. I loved the question. I believe that I wrote an argument for public control over the device, and further advocated to have it permanently dismantled.

The benefits to a person suddenly given sight after many years blind, were to me at least quite evident; to finally know the green of a forest, to explore the work of Van Gogh, Rothko, and Vermeer. To hear the sun with ones eyes. Images. I am numb at the potential for eternal rediscovery. The author on last night's program did much research into the little known area of people "cured" of their blindness. Apparently there are no more than 20 such recorded cases dating back to antiquity. In so many cases the result for the patient was the same; despondency, depression and even self mutilation. It appears that the brain grows accustomed to the means and the signals which it is given to perceive and make sense of the landscape around it, even if those messages are, at least to us in the sighted community, clearly and obviously diminished when one is blind or otherwise afferently incapacitated. The deaf learn to read lips and grow ultra-sensitive to vibrations. The blind can know the presence of a friend just by her footsteps or from the mix of sweat and perfume. What a gift I thought to be granted a new pallette with which to enjoy and understand the world. But instead it seems that a life spent learning through alternative means, magnifying and developing abilities as variants to the damaged sensory receptor, is not only a compensatory set of responses, but may indeed be simply natural.

The brain is not only a computer that stores and recalls events, people, or sensations. Yes, its job is to help us learn and identify the difference between the likes of fur and sandpaper, of course. However it is also a creative universe of buried and dormant lenses. I've heard musicians and writers go as far as to say that they cannot be responsible for their creations; that they tune in on something, and become the conduit for that thing. It is as if they are mute and rigid ducts through which an understanding or influx of meaning can flow from one dimension to the next. Nice idea, especially if their art either stinks or really angers a whole lot of people. Not to digress really, because the converse of that affective response to their role in society communicates a singular and important humility. I had an art professor who once said, "in this painting, you can see the artist smiling." Some sort of pure heroine-like substance flushes my brain when I even consider that state of creativity. Click, brightness, nirvana.

The brain is also a cognitive tool that seeks to make connections from what it knows to what it now sees, and I use the latter sense as a metaphor for all senses. The blind person with newly restored sight can in fact be granted better than 20/20 vision. Amazing. It is said that his perception of color and movement is more crisp and vivid than for those with unfettered and perfect vision all their lives. Yet there is a down-side associated with the gift. Apparently for those of us in the sighted community, our ability to discern the subtleties involved in relationships concern a lifetime of studying and interpreting facial expressions. It's a secondhand skill for the majority. Those with newly restored sight often cannot make sense of the human face. It is an enigma, a puzzle; a new form of blindness with which the patient now must contend. Context is broken and an alien set of stimuli need to be assimilated, if possible. And it's not always possible. Suicide is a very real and not uncommon outcome.

This reminds me of the story of four scholars who enter the proverbial "Pardes," (Hebrew for grove) an allegory for new meaning, the Garden of Eden, knowledge of the eternal. In this story, one sage dies upon his encounter. Another scholar becomes an apostate, and yet a third goes mad. The last one exits with the mission to open an academy of learning. Those who learn the mystical texts and discover the science and the supernal wonder of the infinite gain one, if not a million profound insights, among which is the realization that the more one knows, the less one really knows. With true knowledge also comes a humility, not just a smack across the wet nose to the uninitiated, or an impatience born of exile in an ivory tower. To know that world is to know this world more. To see the presence of God on that side, is to see her all the more on our side. To the blind, being granted "sight" can be an overwhelming, maddening, and frightening prospect. For others it is a charge to untie a difficult knot. Imagine having all that you know, all that with which you find comfort and routine, summarily moved aside - even just a bit. You would face a terrifying unfamiliarity. You would be as one could say, deaf, dumb and blind. We're on our own, cousin.

Uncertain Girl

Hi everyone,

I thought you might like this lovely tune that didn't make it onto The Who's latest album, Endless Wire. On this YouTube video, you'll see Pete demo-ing it for Rachel and Mikey. It's ethereal, disturbing, and just another example of why I think this guy is a musical genius.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9EF33vIbbc

Do You Get It?

"From the horror and heroism of Monday's campus massacre, stories emerge of 32 extraordinary lives ended on a spring day at Virginia Tech. .... families, friends, colleagues and classmates share poignant memories of the victims of the deadliest shooting in U.S. history. The people these stories speak of were characterized by great promise and outstanding achievement."

That's a quote from CNN.com, 8:50 am, April 19th, 2007. I, like some significant chunk of the western world, have been mulling over this horrific event since the first shots cracked out of a student's gun, down the endless wire into my various computers. Endless wire, just for the record, is Pete Townshend's term of art for the internet. Pete Townshend invented the internet, of course when in 1970 he wrote, "from tree to tree, from you to me; traveling just as fast as any freeway. Every single dream, backed up in the scheme - we all get carried on the Relay."

Anyhow, back to 2007 where 150 can get mowed down or have their throats systematically slit in a suburb of Baghdad in one single day. That story by the way, will hit the front page for about 15 seconds and then I'll take a sip of hot coffee and think about a good shit I took a few minutes earlier. But this thing in Virginia, where a pathological, probably abused, flatlining, sugar-brain with too much access to ammunition, with nobody interested in "managing his case" from the outset, goes and shoots up a quiet eastern university; and we're rightly obsessed. The story is everywhere. It's unthinkable that a civilized society wouldn't be shocked into picking the event apart in the same way a ninth grader carefully dissects the innards of a grasshopper with grotesque fascination. If I were the parent of a victim, I would descend into an abyss of grief for a decade. If I were a friend of a victim, I would weep quietly in the morning and drown my sorrows at night.

Right now I am a citizen of this country and I have the physical, emotional and intellectual detachment which lends me the privilege to comment, using this web log without more than 20 minutes of my morning lost to tapping out some thoughts for whomever wishes to peruse them. My observations are clouded by a blissful if not totally deluded sense that this cannot happen to me. But having been immersed, albeit filtered through a flat screen for nearly 12 years, in the happenings of the second World War I cannot fathom some sort of picture that doesn't include mobile killing squads, gas vans, slave-labored populations, hangings, and systematic starvation, just to name a few. And as I have been typing away, some reporters for CNN have busily done their jobs, cranking out copy, assembling photos or combing through the murderer's vitriolic, scattered diatribe which he placed in the form of Quicktime movies. Isn't it interesting that we know what brand of video he used? If he had saved his messages using Windows Media Player, would we know that too? I have to say that the reason Mr. Cho's final messages to the world are being coined by the press as Quicktime movies is only because the computer of the first person to play these movies had Quicktime set as the preferred application for playing media files. Quicktime is such a nice and neat little term. It would be a shame if it were to do any harm to Apple Computers to have their video player forever tied to a massacre.

There's so much with this thing and I want to focus on the irony that I see. This series of shootings at Virginia Tech is being called the deadliest, or worst, depending on who reports it, shooting in U.S. history. Given the specific context, I suppose there's some accuracy to that. Shootings with a gun, on American soil, not related to any war; the drug war included; well I just don't know enough to know. Regardless of how that notion was crafted, one thing for certain is that we all have the distinction to live in an age in which the deadliest shooting in U.S. history has occurred. Just like that. I suppose it's like when some really big movie comes out and everyone can say that he remembers seeing it for the first time when he was 9 or something. How special that was. I remember holding my baby daughter in the Spring of 2003 when the first shots were fired into Baghdad, precipitating the war in which the U.S. is currently embroiled.

A student, like the one described in a rock song by the Boomtown Rats, "I Don't Like Mondays," lost all sense rational thinking, now takes the cake for being the biggest offender to all our decency, morality, white bread goodness and shiny post-9/11 "just shop and travel" happiness. Deadlier and different than Kent State. Bloodier than the Manson killings and worse than the Tuskegee Experiments. I quote here from President Bill Clinton regarding the latter: "The United States government did something that was wrong—deeply, profoundly, morally wrong. It was an outrage to our commitment to integrity and equality for all our citizens. . . . clearly racist. —President Clinton's apology for the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment to the eight remaining survivors, May 16, 1997" If you want to learn more about that by the way, you'll find that 399 black, mostly illiterate men suffering from syphilis were used as unwitting guinea pigs for a cruel and frankly Joseph Mengele-like form of medical treatment between 1932 and 1972. In all the intervening years the U.S. government, its agents, foreign and domestic never did anything quite as bad, bloody, deadly or "mean," as one of Cho's professor's puts it, on Monday April 16th, 2007.

I can punctuate with words like "senseless violence" as the press does too. But all violence is senseless. Violent is missiles, planes used as missiles, small missiles fired out of guns, as is violent cold science, or that done in the name of national security. War isn't senseless? I do get it by the way. There's clear distinction between U.S. soldiers defending themselves against improvised explosive devices and that perpetrated by a weirdo, crazed student on a Spring morning in Virginia. But it gets foggy when a police department firebombs a whole neighborhood in Pennsylvania, doesn't it. It loses its punch when U.S. soldiers or contractors are ordered to keep driving their massive trucks through war zones, even when little kids are under their wheels - and that happens too. But yes, I do get it. Don't you?

Triplets Separated at Birth?

Tasteless? Perhaps, but compelling nonetheless. Terrorist and all around butcher par-excellance Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Pornstar Ron Jeremy & late humorist John Belushi. You decide if their lineage has some common thread . . .

Cream Cheese

I walked down the hall and there was a tray of scant leftovers from the breakfast which the institute provided to some photographers who were doing a shoot here today. The black plastic platter was littered with crumbs and a half-cut miniature muffin over an oil-soaked paper doily. A pitcher stood off to the right with the dregs of orange juice, and next to it were two coffee carafes and a stack of plastic handle mugs. Then there was this smallish bowl with single serve packages of jelly and cream cheese. I thought about taking one of the cream cheese tins into my office and scooping it out with a disposable knife – eating it alone, without bread or anything. Pure cream, on top of the cigarette I just smoked. If the cigarette wasn’t enough, I was about to trowel thick milk fat down my throat which would in a few minutes, meet up in my blood stream with the gazillion chemicals from the Camel Light, embracing like two long lost Mafioso’s. There the combination would decide what direction to take, perhaps directly to some prime artery only a few years or months from clogging, or maybe to my brain where the now freshly stimulated blood would surge right to an insipient aneurism, knocking me dead right there in a dusty sunbeam. They’d find me slumped over, the right-hand clutching my temple, a stain of feces soaking into the cloth seat, and my pale face with a look of total and utter surprise in my eyes.

I decided to cram a stale slice of Big Red gum into my mouth instead.