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Terror cannot be defeated with military action, no matter how powerful or how well equipped the military that takes the action. Terror, let us not forget, is a feeling. Terror grips us when fear strikes in such a way that neither fight nor flight is an option. Unable to find a solution to an adrenalin spilling situation, the mind gives up on problem-solving and devolves into the screaming, head-hiding, pants-soiling emotion we call terror. Terror causes us to act irrationally. It causes us to lash out, to over-react or to misdirect our impotent feelings of rage in misguided efforts to find security in a world made suddenly unsafe. This is terror.

A feeling like this cannot be bombed into silence. It cannot be shot at. I cannot be quieted in the roar of jet engines. No. These only serve to fuel fear. Terror cannot be countered with shock and awe, it can only be propagated.
If one truly wishes to quell terror, one sings soothing songs, reassures the afflicted, provides a sense of calm.

Nor can a war be won on terrorism. Terrorism is a tactic, not an enemy. If we can say that we are waging war on terrorism, than we must also accept the idea that our enemies are not at war with us, they are at war with insurgency suppression, or with occupation. They are at war with gunfire and drone attacks. They are at war with no-fly zones. Seen from this perspective, it becomes absurd. A war is waged on a nation, a state, a people. It cannot be waged on a tactic.

Already, I can hear people muttering an objection that this is merely a semantic argument. Surely it would be easy to write such people off as anti-semantic bastards, but I think this imagined counter to my argument bears a strong response, otherwise I wouldn’t have posed it to myself.

Semantics are important. The language we use defines our perceptions, it defines our actions, it defines our culture, it defines us to our very cores. While there is no worldly difference between “collateral damage,” and “the slaughter of innocent men, women and children,” the perception is vastly different from one to the next. People who would be aghast to think that they conspire in the killing and maiming of school children are willing to tolerate acceptable civilian losses in the execution of a military operation. While few of us would sanction targeted assassinations, we have grown comfortable with the idea of surgical strikes. By changing the semantics we protect ourselves from the horror we inflict.

Conspiracy theories abound as to the real reasons for our ongoing involvement on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan. Some say it is a war for oil. Some say it is about water. Some say it is about Israel Some say that ongoing war is necessary simply to fuel the incomes of those who make their living in the manufacture and sale of military equipment and supplies. I do not know the truth of the machinations behind the conflicts in which we are currently engaged except that at their heart they are the same machinations behind every great conflict in history. The wealthy and powerful decide that something is worth killing for and then set about convincing the poor and desperate that it is worth dying for.

The terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in 2001 gave a magnificent focal point for such conviction. We were so angry, so afraid, so impotent in our rage and horror that we would have done anything to feel secure. We were, in short, terrorized. Rather than calming us and offering us the sense of security that had been taken away, our leaders provided us with an impossible mission of vengeance upon an intangible enemy. Trusting our leaders in our own moment of senselessness, we as a society followed them into an ill-advised conflict with ambiguous goals.

As time passed we realized the horror of what we had done. In Abu Ghraib, in our air attack that massacred Iraqi journalists, in our treatment of underage prisoners at Guantanamo Bay we saw that we had come to devalue life so completely that not only had we stopped treating our enemies humanely, we had stopped treating them as humans. When attempts are made to right even these most obvious and specific of wrongs, opposition rises up, dismissing the wrongdoings as the work of a few bad apples, justifying the dehumanization of entire cultures by reducing those who disagree with our foreign policy to evildoers.

It is always difficult to admit a mistake. It is particularly difficult to admit a mistake when it means accepting responsibility for the repercussions of the wrong-headed actions. Yet here we are, a nation that considers itself the greatest, most noble, most righteous in the history of civilization, at a crossroads.

Shall we continue a path that has led us to torture, to mass murder, to blood-letting, to a long-lasting and wasteful conflict against an enemy we dare not even properly name? We continue in a war we claim to be waging on “terror” or “terrorism” because we would be too ashamed to admit that we are at war against the Islamic world because for a moment we were too blinded by xenophobia to realize that the percentage of blood-lusting fundamentalist Mulsims is probably about the same as the percentage of blood-lusting fundamentalist Christians or Jews or Capitalists. Shall we continue killing because to stop would be to admit that it was an error to start killing in the first place?

I say it is time to cease firing and live with ourselves. If we are uncomfortable with the truth of who we are it is time to do the hard work of changing who we are by changing our behavior, changing our habits. It is time to recognize that when we went to war we were acting out of irrational fear. The terrorists cannot lose until we stop behaving out of a sense of terror. Let us bring home our young men and women. Let us care for our wounded, our damaged, our loved ones. Let us begin to heal one another with soothing songs and reassurances. Let us prove our righteous nobility, as a national community, by coming calmly to our senses.

TweetYesterday I heard a person-on-the-street interview on CNN in which the interviewee said that a mosque should not be built near ground zero because she considers that land to be sacred. That’s right. She feels that sacred land is no place to put holy ground. Well, not that kind of holy. Only the holier-than-thou kind. Or, as I like to call it, the ass-holy kind.

Let me take a moment to point out that what is being described in the mainstream media as “a mosque at Ground Zero,” is actually an Islamic Cultural Center a few blocks away from the place where the World Trade Center once stood. I would be interested to know just how large a perimeter around the site my freedom-protecting fellow Americans would like to cordon off against the free expression of beliefs other than their own. Maybe we should only allow Christians to live South of 14th Street. And I’m not talking about Catholics, ’cause that Saint-worshiping stuff smacks of paganism and Mother Mary comes awfully close to being worshiped as Goddess. How wrong would that be, to have people praying to a woman within miles of the sacred site where once stood a huge structure dedicated to global commerce?

Just a couple of weeks after the attack on the World Trade Center in 2001, I came out of a Trader Joe grocery story to find a man putting little paper flags on the antennae of the cars in the parking lot. He was just moving to put one on my car as I approached. I asked him not to.

He said, “What’s the matter? You don’t love your country?”

I said, “I do love my country and I’m fond of the flag. But right now the flag is being flown in rage and as a call to violence and vengeance and I’m not comfortable supporting that.”

He turned bright red and raised an angry finger at me, saying, “Hey! This flag is a symbol of peace and the freedoms we hold dear and I should kick your ass just for talking about it that way.”

They say the first victim of war is the truth. I think the first victim might be a cultural sense of irony.

The goal of terrorists is to destabilize a perceived enemy by creating fear and anger that will overwhelm reason. The stability of our society is built upon a constitutional foundation. We started with a document that lays out a governmental structure and ten amendments thereto, collectively called the Bill of Rights. Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Religion and Freedom of Assembly are all included in the very first of these amendments.

I would tend to say that if we begin restricting First Amendment rights based on a sentimental attachment to a particular plot of land, the terrorists will have won.

I’m sure some people will call me a crazy liberal for seeking to protect parts of the constitution that don’t involve the right to carry a gun in a Wal-Mart, but that’s okay. Everything I say is pretty easy to dismiss. I’m obviously not a patriot. If I loved my country I would prove it by letting strangers decorate my car to their liking.

(originally written and recorded for broadcast on KYCY Radio and kyouradio.com)

It came as a great relief to me when I learned that my wife and friends receive the same spam in their e-mail inboxes that I do. For a while there I put myself to sleep at night concocting complex schemes whereby I might learn who had put me on the small penis list.  Somewhere, I thought, there must be a spreadsheet on which I am identified as a person interested in lowering his mortgage, meeting lusty, half-naked young women and sustaining better erections.

Recently, amongst the mortgage offers and Viagra promotions, I found an e-mail from a friend of mine who had just heard a piece I’d recorded for the radio. The recording made extensive reference to Proust and she told me that Salon.com had just run a piece about Proust that dealt with his work in much the same way I had in my essay. She also said that both my piece and the piece on Salon.com were reminiscent of some things she’d been writing in her personal blog.  When I read both her work and the article she’d referred me to, I was shocked at the similarity in thinking that underlay those writings and mine.

Amazed at the Jungian synchronicity, I suddenly remembered a fleeting thought that I’d had years earlier.

_______________________

I lived briefly with an insane woman just after I moved out to Los Angeles from New York. To give you a sense of what kind of person she was, she once told me that she could guess, within five thousand dollars, a man’s annual income just by hearing the sound of his shoes on a tile floor. Not only did she believe that this claim was true, she believed that it was the sort of ability about which it makes sense to boast. She joined a Buddhist group not because she loved Buddhism or sought enlightenment but because someone had told her they didn’t get upset if you chanted for a BMW. She burned candles and did made-up spells in an attempt to draw money to her and misfortune to those who cut her off in traffic or experienced greater success than she did.

We attended a new-age festival when we were romantically involved. It was the year I got my first 14.4 modem with the screeching log-on noises and the ten-minute download for a grainy photograph of a sheep dog that could then be rendered to the page entirely in shades created by the characters available on a standard keyboard. I received an e-mailed flyer for the Los Angeles Festival of Spirituality and – something – Airy-Fairiness. I don’t remember. This was before I knew there was any such thing as spam, possibly before the word had been coined. I assumed that the flyer had been sent by someone I knew and because it wasn’t the sort of thing I’d be into, but was the sort of thing Sarah would be interested in, I assumed that it had been sent as a suggestion that I take her to the festival. Which I did. Which she took as an indication that I really loved her and we were tuned in to the same wavelength.

For me, mostly, it was just a pleasant day among the chubby wiccans and the scowling, tattooed, self-styled Satanists. I walked from booth to booth and looked at occult talismans and erotic lithographs and hand-carved walking sticks. In the early afternoon, though, we heard a speaker whose ideas stuck with me. A young woman stood on a small stage and spoke into a tinny microphone. She spoke of the Gaia Principal.

Mostly she was promoting her book on the topic but her love of the subject and her commitment to her ideas made her riveting. She talked about the Earth as a large, single, living entity. She spoke of humans and animals as cellular parts of the larger creature.

She started out by drawing parallels between human activities and the activities of the blood stream. She spoke of the millions of people who go about their daily lives and do not realize that as a group we are collecting sugar, processing it, and then distributing it. She spoke of us converting oxygen into carbon dioxide. She built up a picture of humanity as a functional subsystem serving the great beast’s body.

She talked about our addiction long before “addicted to oil” has become a political catch-all, used to promote anger against Arab nations and a sense of environmental awareness. She said the addiction was a sickness, causing the planet to run a fever and I leaned over to Sarah and said, “Or at east making the planet gassy.” Sarah did not find that funny at all.

The woman said she believed humanity was on the verge of a psychic breakthrough that would allow us all to connect consciously with the Jungian Collective Unconscious, that when we reached this new level of awareness the planet itself would come into its own as a thinking, evolved being.

I thought, as I listened to her, maybe not. What if this internet thing keeps growing? What if that network becomes the synaptic system the planet needs, a physical container for the great, shared awareness Jung wrote about? I wondered, in my own spiritual, airy-fairy way, if it was that burgeoning global consciousness that had sent me the e-mail to bring me here to experience this realization.

___________________

As I read the Salon.com article and my friend’s blog entries, I realized that we’d all tapped into the same idea almost simultaneously and had all immediately moved to share the idea online. I took in a sharp breath as I remembered that thought from fourteen years ago.

My half-musing prediction seems to be coming true. The collective unconscious is manifesting in the vast webwork of the internet. The planet is beginning to have thoughts – recurring thoughts – flickering across the international matrix of electronic synapses.

Sadly, though, it has only fleeting dalliances with intellectual ponderings like those of Proust and Jung. If we’re lucky, it might turn out to be a phase, some sort of global adolescence, but for now  the great Gaia Earth Organism seems to be wallowing in an unhealthy obsession with penis enlargement, barely legal girls and cheap prescription drugs.

CHARMED LIFE

In 1994, when Nancy and I were about to get married, we took a trip to the East coast so that she could meet my family. She gets very nervous on planes. I assured her that we live a charmed life, but that didn’t help. To distract her from the fact that we were hurtling through the air at hundreds of miles an hour, I used the flight time to teach her the basics of poker and to tell her about my grandfather. I was seventeen when he died and he was the one member of the family she would not get to meet. I told her how he taught me gin rummy first and then poker. I remembered – I remember still how serious he became over the card table. He admonished me to remember that poker is not a game of luck, it is a game of psychology, not the cards but the finances. It’s not about who gets dealt the best cards, it’s about who takes the chips.

In many ways, the timing of the trip was perfect. My Grandmother was in the very early stages of Alzheimers. At this point, the disease had only affected her enough to turn every conversation into a surreal nineteen seventies game show. “I went into that place with the buildings and the smell.”

“Manhattan?”

“Yes! And I was on forty-third street with that annoying woman.”

“Aunt Sarah?”

“No! Bad breath! Long boring stories!”

“Your best friend Katie!”

“Yes! And we saw that man! He used to horrible in New York and then he was horrible all over the country and now he’s going to be horrible from Space.”

“Howard Stern?”

“Yes!”

Congratulations, Grandma, you’re moving on to the dementia pyramid.

Her decline had made my mother hyper-aware of the genetic crap shoot she was facing. She pulled me aside and said, “Dylan, you have to promise me that if I ever start to show symptoms you’ll tell me so that I know when it’s time to take my own life.”

I said, “Mom, we just had this conversation twenty minutes ago.”

In order to defray the cost of the trip, I had arranged to have a stand-up gig in Atlantic City, a gig that was supposed to take place Friday and Saturday, pay about half of what I’d spent on airline tickets and that would provide me and Nancy two nights in a fancy hotel for romance.

When I called to do my final confirmations, though, I was told that the job did not, in fact, include a hotel room. Saddened by the turn of events, but still wishing to do the shows and collect the check, I made reservations at a cheap motel and my wife changed her flight plans so that she could fly home from Laguardia airport that evening.

She went to the airport for a seven thirty flight. I drove to Atlantic City for the gig.

My feature act was also disappointed to find out that he was not getting a hotel room. We were both disappointed to find out that this was due to a dispute between the show-runner and the hotel and that we would not be performing in the swanky hotel bar. We would be performing in front of a big vinyl banner hung on a wall of the parking lot in front of an audience that would be sitting in plastic folding chairs. Irritable waitresses took elevators to and from the bar to provide very slow drink service.

The show did not go well. The emcee, the feature act and I all found it difficult to maintain our rhythms what with the exhaust fumes and the occasional passage of cars searching for parking and slowing to stare in confused wonder at what appeared to be a performance art installation involving grumpy people seated in a parking garage and staring sullenly at morose, disillusioned, poorly lit public speakers.

After the unpleasant Friday evening shows, the man who had booked the show, the man who was in a dispute with the hotel, the man who had claimed never to have said he would provide a room for me or the other acts, screamed at me for ruining his show. He blamed me for not being funny enough to fully overcome the circumstance. I told him that I would not be performing a second night in his lovely Atlantic City garage. He told me that he would not be paying me for my services.

I considered sticking around for the night, seeing if I could make up for the lost income at a poker table but instead I went to the Motel Six, checked out, and drove back Laguardia airport to see if I could switch out my ticket for something sooner.

I was able to get a ticket for a flight that would take me home the following morning. I turned away from the ticket counter, planning to find my departure gate and sleep on the floor. As I turned, in the midst of this vast, bustling airport, I saw Nancy. She stood, a little confused, looking down at a piece of paper. Her flight had been cancelled. She’d been pushed back to a morning flight, the very one I was booked to take. She had been given a voucher for a room. In a very nice hotel.

It was a romantic night. There was a sense of destiny, of serendipity, of having a run of bad luck and still living a charmed life.

As we were leaving in the morning for our flight, my wife grabbed the two cans of Pringles from the honor bar. I asked her what she was doing. I told her there would probably be food on the plane. She said she didn’t care. She said it was in honor of my grandfather. After a week that had felt like a bad deal, she thought he would like it if we left with all the chips.

(Originally published in The Intermountain Jewish News)

In 1969 my family moved into a small town in upstate New York.  We drove all night long in a big pink Plymouth, an enormous vehicle from which, in time of national emergency, smaller cars might efficiently be launched.  At the age of five my reading skills were already strong enough that I was able to read by dawn’s diffuse illumination the sign that said, “Welcome to Schuylerville,” and then, below that, “population 984.”  According to my father, that afternoon, in a Norman Rockwell moment, the old white-haired mayor himself drove out to the sign with a bucket o’ paint and added on, “and some Jews.”

I know my mother believed in some sort of traditional, Caucasian bearded deity but she rarely mentioned this around the house for fear of sparking a lengthy diatribe from my father whose only deity was Broadway director Harold Clurman to whom he attributed any thought he considered wise or insightful enough to play better as a quotation. Troubled by school bullies I would turn to my father for advice and he would say, “As Harold Clurman says, ‘The hell of it is, they have their reasons.’”  While we were Jews by blood and by culture we were not Jews in practice.  My mother made wonderful breaded pork chops which we sometimes washed down directly with milk.

Nonetheless my parents felt it was important that my sister and I have some sense of cultural history and tradition so they did what they could to provide it despite their lack of spiritual enthusiasm.  Every year, for instance, they would try to celebrate Channukkah with us but they never really knew what day it started.  We frequently wound up burning extra candles to make up for lost time.  Lacking the proper Hebrew, they would invent the prayers as they went along.  Dad would solemnly touch the lighted end of the master-candle to the others as he carefully intoned, “Abracadabra alacazam.  We light the candles; we don’t eat ham.”  By the eighth night, it would just get ridiculous.  “We will not eat it in a boat…  we will not eat it with a goat.  We will not eat the gentiles’ ham.  We will not eat it . . . l’–chi-am.”  When pressed for an explanation of the holiday’s meaning my father stammered briefly and allowed himself to go the traditional route of self-loathing deprecation.  “Well,” he said slowly, “at Channukkah we celebrate the fact that, many centuries ago, some of our ancestors got a really good deal on some lamp oil.”  Then he chuckled at this little stereotype-based witticism, paused for a moment — I suspect he was deciding whether or not to attribute the line to Harold Clurman — then he shrugged as if he was forgiving himself for some small faux pas committed years ago against a college friend whose name is only half-remembered.

In 1979 I was a sophomore at a well respected Massachusetts prep school.  It was a single, co-educational institution spread out over two campuses (I used to delight in making teachers wince by calling them “campi”) which had once been separate schools, one all male, one all female.  By the time I attended, though, the campuses, separated by about three miles of deep-country road, were fully integrated gender-wise.

Over Thanksgiving break that year I visited my grandfather in Lakewood, New Jersey.  He asked me, with a genuine tone of concern, if I wouldn’t consider wearing a yarmulke.  At this moment I flashed on a recurring nightmare in which I was chased through the woods outside Schuylerville by angry Christians intent on doing me harm.  (I have always attributed this dream to a particular incident in 1975 when a group of angry Christians chased me through the woods outside Schuylerville intent on doing me harm.)  I told him that, no, I would not feel comfortable wearing a yarmulke around the campae and was pleased that he smiled, getting the word-joke, rather than wincing or correcting me.  It seemed to me, I said, that at this mostly gentile school, a yarmulke would seem very much the same as a star of David pinned to my shirt.  Patiently, and without taking offense, Grandpa explained to me that the purpose was not to identify me as a Jew but rather to hide my identity from above so as to make me equal to all others in the eyes of God.  Would I be willing, he asked, to wear a nice hat of some sort if he bought me one I liked?  I loved my grandfather and this was clearly important to him so I agreed.

From amongst a store-full of expensive hats, most of which I could not imagine anybody wearing un-selfconsciously, I picked a fairly simple Greek fisherman’s cap that was on sale near the cash register.  I watched my grandfather banter wittily for a moment with the cashier whose left pinky bent inward at an odd angle.  On an impulse he grabbed a small, clip-on koala bear and added it to the purchase.  Accepting the receipt and offering a quick, “No bag.  No box,” he put the hat on my head, clipped the koala onto the brim and gave me a wink that remains for me the wink of Santa in “The Night Before Christmas.”

Some months later I missed a bus back to my home campus and wound up trapped on the school’s other campus for dinner.  I had never been questioned in any way about the hat so, without thinking twice — without thinking once, really — I passed through the line, piling goulash and tater tots onto an industrial-weight ceramic plate.  I sat down opposite a close friend and popped a tot into my mouth.

As I chewed, a man appeared just behind me and to my left.  In memory he was eight feet tall, though I suspect this is one of those inaccuracies that comes with time like the distortion of the sixties so prevalent these days that would have us believe the Summer of Love was the product of nine pot-heads in their teens singing about peace while everyone we know was far more sensibly laying the foundations for a current career.  It is a revisionist fantasy designed to make the dreamer more comfortable with his own past.  The man’s voice was deep, that of a talking walrus in a cartoon.  “Who do you think you are and where do you think you are?”

Already developing my sharp and ready wit, I replied, “What?”

“You don’t say, ‘what,’” the giant walrus growled.  “You say, ‘I beg your pardon,’ or ‘excuse me, sir.’”

Try as I might, I can not recall whether it was true bafflement or simple smart alecism that led me to reply, “What?!?”

The grip of the grown-up squeezed my upper arm like a blood-pressure gauge and I felt myself jerk away from the table.  “Someone get that,” the man said, gesturing at my upturned chair.  He hustled me to the door scolding continuously.  “You have got to be the most impolite person I have ever met.  I don’t know where you were raised but here, in polite society, we do not wear hats in the dining hall.”  With his free hand he pushed the door open and snatched the hat from my head.  He hurled me outside and threw the offending headwear after me.

I picked it up, kissed it and returned it to my head. Rather than waiting for a scheduled bus I walked back along the country road, over the bridge in the chill, dark night, with tears streaming warm on my cheeks and then cold along my jaw line, to my own campus.

My roommate wore boot-cut jeans over sneakers.  He wore a plaid shirt open at the neck to allow a bluish-white tee shirt to peek out.  He asked me what was the matter.  I told him that I had been thrown out of the dining hall.  I told him why the man had thrown me out.  I told him the man had torn off my hat and thrown it to the ground.  “So?” he said.

I did not want to tell him why the hat was important.  I did not want to tell him about my grandfather.  I wanted the hat to remain a personal trademark, not a religious icon.  I lied, saying, “Do you know how expensive this hat is?”

He shook his head in an affectation of disbelief.  “Is that all you people think about?”

I’m certain he was startled as I jerked my head around to stare at him, silent.  My ears burned with shame and rage.  I had, in truth, chosen this hat because it was the least expensive in the store and it had been on sale; I feared suddenly that I’d made this choice because I was a Jew.  For weeks that hat was all I could think about.  I thought about how I’d been wronged.  I thought about how — in my adolescent mind — I’d been persecuted.  I told nobody more about the incident.  I believed I’d been thinking like a people and I didn’t want anybody to see that.

I did not know that I was not at fault.  I had no way of understanding the complex conflicts of tradition, prep school manners against my grandfather’s religious paraphernalia against my own silent self-loathing.  I had no way of seeing the ways in which we were all hostage to our own frames of reference, our own systems of belief.

None of this came clear to me until quite recently when I had occasion to visit my old prep school.  I stepped into that dining hall.  The event, in all its subtlety, flashed across my mind in a contained explosion of emotion and intellect, experience and analysis.  Shackles seemed to fall away.  I viewed the moment of my persecution through the cold lens of time, the warm tones of nostalgia.  I felt a tension in my jaw line release.  Layer upon layer of darkness gave way like the veils of an Eastern dancer until beauty flashed naked before me.  Traditional shame peeled away in perfect grace, in proper time.

And somewhere in the back of my mind I heard Harold Clurman say, “And there was light.”

END

IN DEFENSITY OF SARAH PALIN

Former Vice Presidentiary candidate Sarah Palin recently twat about her desire to see Muslims “refudiate” the actions of their violentistic brothren. When challengers predeigned to question her verbial usage, she proclared herself an inventress of words, colining herself with no less auspecial a wordsmith than Shakespeare.

Read the full article HERE

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I spent several hours one afternoon listening to Dar Williams’ OUT THERE LIVE album over and over again and weeping.  It had not been my best week ever.

It was 2004 and my literary manager called to tell me that one of the other people who worked at her company didn’t like anything I’d ever written and she had to drop me from the roster.  So, once again, I found myself an underemployed Hollywood writer without representation.

In the midst of this, I had done only a rough draft of a piece to record for broadcast that week.  Succumbing to the hollow despair of the middle-aged man in a career crisis, I began to feel that rewriting and recording for no pay was a sort of punishment for my own lack of success.  Instead of working on the piece I had intended to record, I listened to Dar Williams and wept and wrote an ancient zen parable which I will present now.

As Jin Sun Ki emerged into the chill morning air, the low hung sun reflected off the dewy grass and the stone steps.  His morning’s meditations left his senses keen, his mind alert.  He noticed the scuffmarks on the stones at once.  Although he would cultivate a frown over the discovery later, his first reaction was to smile lightly at the evidence of misbehavior.

He adjusted his course to take him around to the wide training lawns.  The younger novices stood in neatly ordered rows.  Having finished their jumping jacks and their sit ups, they now engaged in toe-touches, their arms spread wide and their movements unsynchronized.  Jin Sun Ki adopted a look of serious concern as he stepped up in front of the assembly.  He raised his voice effortlessly to spread over the field reaching every student all the way to the back.  “Apparently,” he began without preamble, “despite my specific words to the contrary, somebody here has decided to use the steps and pathways at the rear of the temple for skateboarding practice.”  He paused for a moment letting the words soak in as though the matter was incredibly weighty.  Then he went on.  “Would anybody here like to tell me anything about this?”

Sheepishly, one boy raised his hand.  It took only a glance for Master Ki to acknowledge him and give him the floor.  “It was probably Mark,” the boy said.

“Shut up,” Mark sniped.  “It was not.”

The first boy shrugged, his ears reddening.

Jin Sun Ki put up a calming hand, palm forward.  “Let me rephrase.  I am not interested in finger-pointing or accusations.  Does anybody want to take responsibility for having done this?”  He left a respectable pause in which the boys remained silent except for a bit of shuffling and weight shifting.  “All right then.  Following your morning training, you will all gather at the back steps.  Continue.”   He walked away and left the students to finish their exercises.

At ten a.m. the kids showed up at the back steps, sweat soaked and wobbly from the early workout.  Half a dozen buckets awaited them and in each bucket, several hand-brushes soaked in watery cleansing solution.  Jin Sun Ki stood at the topmost step and gestured silently toward the buckets.  His meaning came through clearly.  With a bit of a shared groan, the students took up the brushes and knelt on the cold, stone floor.  They began the laborious process of scrubbing the stones clean, eliminating the dirt and the scuffmarks from the wide space a bit at a time with their rough brushes.

Shortly after noon a twelve-year-old boy named Thomas unbent his back.  Raging against the injustice of the world he strode up the steps to the place where Master Ki now sat on the stones reading a mystery novel.  He waited for the master to notice him.  Jin Sun remained focused on his reading.  Thomas breathed loudly, hoping the master’s attention would be drawn to the sound.  He cleared his throat.  The master did not look at him.  At last he said, in a voice that trembled just a little bit despite his efforts to keep it steady, “Master Ki?”

Master Ki set aside his book and looked at the boy.

“Master Ki,” the boy repeated, “I don’t think this is fair.”

“No?”

“No, sir.”

“Why not?” The master asked him.

“Well…” the boy slowed, having believed his thought would be obvious.  “The thing is, I didn’t skateboard on the stones.  I don’t even have a skateboard.”

“Uh-huh…?” Master Ki said, encouraging him to go on.

“Well, I don’t see why I should be punished when I haven’t done anything wrong.”

“You haven’t done anything wrong?”

“Nothing.  I didn’t mess up the floor.  I didn’t even try to tell you who did mess up the floor.  So, I didn’t do anything wrong and still I’m being punished.  That doesn’t seem fair, does it?”

Jin Sun looked out at all the boys, bent over the stones with their brushes.  He turned back to Thomas.  “If you’ve done nothing wrong,” he said softly, “then you are not being punished.  You’re just cleaning a floor.”  He grinned at Thomas for a moment.

Then Jin Sun Ki returned to his reading.

Thomas returned to his task.

I wrote this with the Dar enhanced tears streaming down my face.  When my wife got home from work she could hear the music coming from my office.  She knows I’ve been having a rough time lately.  She called up to me, “Hey, Baby!  You doin’ okay?”

There was a young master who taught Tae Kwon Do for a while at the studio where I study.  One night, a long time ago, before I was a master, before I was even a black belt, but not long before – brown belt, red belt, in there somewhere – advanced enough that he expected a great deal of me, Master Seo asked me how I was and I said, “Eh…  I’m tired, sir.”

This twenty-six year old became very stern and ordered me into the office.  He had me sit down.  He stood behind the desk and lectured me.  He said, “Dylan, never share your weakness.  Everybody is tired.  Everybody is scared.  Everybody has enough weakness of their own.    You are a martial artist.   You share your strength.  Tired?  I don’t care.  Scared?  I don’t care.  You, all the time, say ‘yeah!  I feel great!  I feel good!  I feel strong!’  You share your strength, your good feeling.  Makes everybody feel better, stronger.  Soon to be black belt.  This is your job.   Your responsibility.”

So, I was sitting in my office weeping and my wife shouted, “You doin’ okay?”  and I thought of Young Master Seo.

I shouted back, “Yeah!  I’m fine.  I’m just. . .  cleaning the floor.”

Since my office is carpeted, she shouted up the stairs at me, “Do I know what that means?”

“Nah,” I yelled.  “Just . . .  I’m writing a new piece, I think.”

“Oh, good!” My wife said.  “How’s it coming?”

“It feels good,” I said.  “It feels strong.”

“Excellent!”  She said, appearing in the doorway of my office.  “I like to hear that.”

When my wife smiles, it is very difficult to hang on to much sadness.  It occurred to me that for perhaps the five-thousandth time, the martial arts had saved me from sliding into depression.

She took a book that she’d left open to mark her page and went downstairs to continue reading.

I returned to my task.

Click for the JK Taekwondo Website

{INTERESTED IN STUDYING martial arts?  I would urge you to check out JK Taekwondo with locations in Burbank, Reseda, Glendale and Lamont}

A few months ago, I had the tremendous honor of being asked to perform at the New York Public Library’s tribute to George Carlin.  The evening was extraordinary and now the video is up on line.  I urge you to watch the whole thing.

Click to see the NYPL Live Tribute to George Carlin hosted by Whoopi Goldberg, the video is available HERE

In case you want to skip ahead to particular segments or performers, here’s a quick rundown (I’ve done recommendations in orange of a few of my favorite segments from the show if you’re looking to hit the high points):

Paul Holdengraber opens the show

5:10 or so Whoopi takes the stage

8:00 Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara take the stage and they bring Ben and Amy up a bit later at about 17:30

23:34 Lewis Lapham takes the stage and reads an extraordinary essay about George  (WATCH THIS SEGMENT)

30:11 Whoopi brings up the very funny Kevin Smith

41:15 Kevin brings me up (If you jump right to my segment, stick with it until Whoopi comes back to the stage, ’cause she does a really sweet callback to my story)

51:00 Whoopi Brings Kelly Carlin and Tony Hendra to the stage.  Kelly talks about her father’s love of words and then they read from BRAIN DROPPINGS

57:50 Kelly leaves Tony to speak about George and to plug his book and talk about the process of writing it

1:00:33 Patrick Carlin takes the stage and talks about the sense of his brother’s presence, their relationship and the like and to read from the book

1:07:40 Kelly takes the stage to read a wonderful story of life as George’s Daughter (WATCH THIS SEGMENT)

1:16:50 Floyd Abrams takes the stage to speak about the first amendment, George Carlin’s effect on the law and the dangers of censorship

1:34:30 Kelly introduces Louis CK who does an incredible set that is less funny than he has been asked to make it and much better than it would have been had he complied.  (WATCH THIS SEGMENT)

A CALL TO ARTS

By

Dylan Brody

When I was a child, my father taught a film course at Skidmore College.  Every Wednesday he would bring home a movie to screen in our living room so that he could make notes and plan his lesson before taking the boxed reels to the campus for Thursday’s screening and Friday’s class.  He ran each term chronologically so the course would start with a silent comedy and silent drama, move on through the Marx Brothers, a nineteen thirties romance, usually a Fred Astaire musical, a Hitchcock picture, a fifties musical.  A representative of the European auteur tradition always closed out the course.  While kids at school discussed last night’s episode of Happy Days, I reviewed Breathless in my mind’s eye.  With subtitles.

Those were heady nights for me.  Before the advent of On Demand downloads, before TiVo, before DVD stores, before laser disk came and went, before that first consumer VHS machine with the switch-lever that clunked clockwise to the “play” position, in those long ago days when a plastic knob on the television snapped past snow-filled bandwidth toward the next of three available channels, my father set up the projector in the living room and the history of cinema flickered by on the bare white wall.  I watched them, laughing, weeping, fully engaged.

After each film, my mom and dad drank coffee and I listened to their conversation.  They would start out by discussing aspects of the film-maker’s craft.  The editing, the pace, the shooting style.  Then they would move on to the part of the conversation that they clearly found more important.  They would piece together the underlying message of the film.

I was very young.  This part of the conversation almost always came as a surprise to me.  Although it came to this every week, I was like the audience in a comedy club, fooled each time into believing that this time the comic really means it when he says, “but seriously, folks.”  How could my favorites, the laugh-aloud comedies possibly be examined for an underlying message, as if they were the same as classic literature?  Sure, with some of the politically charged material I could see it, Battleship Potempkin, even Stalag Seventeen with its wartime self righteousness wrapped in suspense and mystery, but the surreal antics of the Marx Brothers?  How could Buster Keaton’s pratfalls or Charlie Chaplain’s adorable tramp possibly have been constructed to convey something of real importance?

Inevitably, as they discussed and examined the story and structure, a through line came to light.  Once it was pried loose of the trappings, the message was obvious and I felt a childish shame at how easily I had been taken in by it.  I had been fed an idea and I had internalized it without even realizing that it was imbedded in the material, woven into the fabric of an emotional experience.  Chaplain, Keaton, the Marx Brothers all taught about the plight of the underclass, the struggle of the immigrant, the power of humor to undermine fatuous authority, the absurdity of social convention, the dangers of blind obedience, the potential for greatness that lies in the least of us.  Viewed through the academic lens, films that had seemed to me to be pure entertainment slipped into a new focus and revealed a complex artistry, a multi-textured fabric woven as tightly and as meaningfully as those medieval tapestries whose images hold carefully plotted morality tales.

At first I feared that such examination of the work would ruin it for me, but seeing the joy of my father as he laughed through the comedies, the enchantment as he watched the musicals, it became apparent that the analysis did not undermine the aesthetic experience at all.  It enhanced it, deepening the impact and further drawing the viewer into an active engagement with the material rather than a passive reception.

Exposed to this process from an early age, I developed habits of critical thinking in my role as an audient.  I developed an ethical, almost moralistic approach to writing and performing my own work.

Often, this put me in an uncomfortable position, voicing my thoughts, my ideas, my view of the world to people with whom I disagreed, people with whom I stood at odds.  I felt that my only hope of survival and success was to be so funny in performance, so skilled in wordsmithery that the work would be enjoyed for its aesthetic value and that the underlying messages could come through as subtly as the anti-war message buried brilliantly in the hilarity of Duck Soup. I knew that whatever I presented, a message would be in there somewhere.  If I did my job right, it would carry on the frequency of laughter to an unknowing audience.  If I let the seams show, though, if the message overpowered the aesthetic, my work would become didactic and uninteresting.  I strove to ride the delicate balance despite the fear, the vulnerability, the natural anxiety of the creative process.

Like so many artists, I traveled to Los Angeles to set up shop.  I believed that as a skilled artist with talent and a growing body of work I would surely find support for my endeavors in this city at the center of cinema and broadcast media production.  It never occurred to me that my experience at the cinematheque living room was unique, that my approach to the crafts of writing and performing was entirely my own.

I have often said that “entertainment” is a word people use when they don’t want to take responsibility for what they say through their art.  I have come to believe that, while pithy, this is a bit unkind.  I suspect that people who strive to create “mere entertainment” actually do not realize that they are saying things through their work.  Comics who say, “it’s just a joke,” to excuse racism or cruelty or outright lies do not realize that jokes have power and resonance and consequence.  They do not act with any malicious intent, they simply act out of ignorance.  The Entertainment Industry into which I plunged expecting to be recognized and rewarded for my artistic excellence is not in the business of soothing the egos or funding the dreams of visionaries.  Quite the opposite.

The Entertainment Industry — as its name should have told me had I been paying attention — is an industry trading in entertainment. It is a profit-seeking construct selling the product of craftsmen.  Writers, actors, comics, dancers and so on, all serve to provide materials for widespread release and high-margin sales.  Men and women in offices choose multi-million dollar projects that will generate more in sales than they cost to produce.  They are not equipped to judge an aesthetic or to unravel stories to find the underlying messages.  They certainly are not geared to handle the anxiety of the creative process.  Gambling with magnificent budgets creates a whole different sort of anxiety.  They cannot help but seek out a level of confidence and reassurance somewhere in the mix.  These executives pick up that slack by seeking formulae that they know will sell, by making and remaking scripts and updates of scripts and sequels to updates of scripts that have sold well in the past.  They do not  hate art or fear new ideas.  They do not know that they trade in art.  They do not know that movies and TV series contain ideas.

Artists, seek approval to ease the anxiety that comes with creation and self-expression.  Believing that the money of the studios represents approval and success, we  allow ourselves to be turned into entertainers.  We set aside our visions, our ideas, our commitment to craft and aesthetic in hopes of getting a green light from men and women who say things like, “It’s not show art. It’s show business.”  We rewrite scripts to make them more “edgy,” or more “whimsical,” or more of whatever the buzzword of the year is.  We forget that this is the buzzword of the year because it is the way a critic described the unexpected independent hit of last year.  We hear the irritating aphorism, “If you want to send a message call Western Union,” and we think we should write more vapidly, not more cunningly.  Don’t be fooled.  Improve the aesthetic and the message will sing in the undertones.  Feign pointlessness and you make points you do not intend, you find targets at which you do not aim.

As the tramp swings at the cop, laugh.  But also remember that Charlie Chaplain faced fierce opposition from wealthy fascists and Nazi sympathizers in the American west.  Remember that the Marx Brothers worked the road, the stages of New York, honing and refining every sketch-scene to hair-trigger comedic precision so that they could say, “we know this will slay ‘em,” in order to get their subversive brilliance on the silver screen.

Develop your craft diligently.  Refine your vision scrupulously.  Dissect and edit and examine your work ruthlessly.  Share the best of yourself and stand naked in the light protected only by the knowledge that if you are judged harshly, at least you are judged on your own, unfiltered essence.

Do not seek out representatives of the Entertainment Industry in hopes that they will validate you with a green light and a paycheck.  Rather, seek them out with a plan to use their money well.  Seek them out with an offer of happy collaboration.  Seek them out with the work you know to be of great value and the intent to see it paired with the investment they can make in its distribution.  Seek them out and give them the validation they need.  Instill in them the confidence that can only come when you deem them worthy of a position on the team that brings your work to light.  Then do the work that shines.

Let us usher in a new Golden Age of the lively arts in this Golden Age of new media.  Some day, all of the celluloid, all of the video, all the old-timey DVDs and hard drive data will be transferred to nano-memory micro-crystals.  College students will down-draw us from the archives.  We will perform in awkward two-dimensionality on their retinas through optical in-feed implants.  Our EQ balanced voices will play oddly rich and pure through their aural-cortical stimu-brackets.  Let their professors say that we were brave.  Let them expose young minds to the back story in terms of our courage, the courage to speak truth to power, to mock bigots in a time of xenophobia, to promote acceptance in a time of exclusion, to encourage peace at a time when peace is derided as cowardice, as surrender, as treason.  Let the professors praise us in retrospect for revealing our intellects even as intellectualism came to be vilified by an increasingly Palinized nation.  If we do our job right, the students will rankle a bit.  They will stiffen.  They will resist such critical examination, saying, “Sure. But at the end of the day, they were just so good.  They were just so funny.”

END

A Very Smart Cat

I am addicted to the voice of the drastically clever — at once self-deprecating and aggrandizing — edge of the baby-boom poster child, Dylan Brody.

Brody’s two new CDs, Brevity and True Enough, expose a splendid storyteller and a Swift-Twainian ethicist. He is never didactic, never comes off ass-holier than thou, never seems terribly concerned that the world is full of bullies and idiots, but he does mention these things in passing, as he hypnotizes his audience with yarns, tall tales and new-age legends.

<READ THE FULL REVIEW HERE>