I Am For An Art by Claes Oldenberg

I am for an art that is political-erotical-mystical, that does something other than sit on its ass in a museum.

I am for an art that grows up not knowing it is art at all, an art given the chance of having a starting point of zero.

I am for an art that embroils itself with the everyday crap & still comes out on top.

I am for an art that imitates the human, that is comic, if necessary, or violent, or whatever is necessary.

I am for all art that takes its form from the lines of life itself, that twists and extends and accumulates and spits and drips, and is heavy and coarse and blunt and sweet and stupid as life itself.

I am for an artist who vanishes, turning up in a white cap painting signs or hallways.

I am for art that comes out of a chimney like black hair and scatters in the sky.

I am for art that spills out of an old mans purse when he is bounced off a passing fender.

I am for the art out of a doggys mouth, falling five stories from the roof.

I am for the art that a kid licks, after peeling away the wrapper.

_____________________________

The above poem by the artist Claes Oldenburg inspired the song Manifesto (1979) by Roxy Music. Enjoy.

Manifesto

(Ferry/Manzanera)

I am for a life around the corner

That takes you by surprise

That comes, leaves, all you need

And more besides

I am for a life and time by numbers

Blast in fast 'n' low

Add 'em up, account for luck

You never know

I am into friendship and plain sailing

Through frenzied ports o' call

Oh shake the hand to beat the band

With love is all

Or nothing to the man who wants tomorrow

There's one in every town

A crazy guy, he'd rather die

Than be tied down

I am for the man who drives the hammer

To rock you till the grave

His power drill

Shocks a million miles away

I am for the revolution's coming

I don't know where she's been

For those who dare because it's there

I know I've seen

Now and then I've suffered imperfection

Studied marble flaws

And faces drawn pale and worn

By many tears

I am that I am from out of nowhere

To fight without a cause

Roots strain against the grain

With brute force

Oh you'd better

Hold out when you're in doubt

Question what you see

And when you find an answer

Bring it home to me

The Time of Loss

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Goodbye old friend,

it's not just us:

It's the time of loss.

The tree I pruned last spring 

has shed all its leaves,

the lawn underneath dotted 

brown and wet.

The first snow fell

two weeks ago

on Remembrance Day

when we gently dropped 

red poppies

on the tomb

of the unknown soldier 

the snow is melting,

even as the mercury 

plummets;

The night comes sooner,

the day recedes faster.

The slippery politicians lie

and lie

about prices

coming down,

as the bread lines,

the tent cities,

and picket lines grow

like ground frost,

the situation is grave,

very grave,

democracy teeters -

and it's not just here,

they lie 

about peace

on distant shores, 

as bombs reverberate,

buildings crumble,

and helmeted crews 

scour the mounds,

count the dead

lying somewhere inside 

crypts of rubble.

The Blessing of Being Leaderless

There are many things that distinguish Judaism from other religious traditions, but the one that stands out to me these days is how profoundly leaderless we are.

Of course we have leaders in the ordinary sense—people elected or appointed to fill necessary roles. But I mean leadership in the grander, spiritual sense. Jews have no representative of the Divine on earth, no equivalent of a Pope. We have no model of divinely-sanctioned human behavior—no Jesus, no Muhammad, no Buddha. And that's been our blessing.

Our biblical leaders—Abraham, Moses, David—were remarkable, inspired figures, but they were also deeply flawed and recognized as such. Their stories are as much about failure as fulfillment. They made serious mistakes even while carrying out their divine assignments, sometimes precisely because of those assignments. Almost none of them wanted the job in the first place.

This has given Jews a healthy skepticism of leadership and a realistic view of human nature. It may also be one of the qualities that has irritated others about us for centuries. Paired with our spiritual self-regard as a “chosen people,” our refusal to bow down—even to ultimate authority—has not always endeared us to the nations.

It’s hard being a leaderless people.

Some modern Jewish movements have tried to soften the disadvantages of this leaderlessness by creating their own leaders. Hasidism is the clearest example. Founded by the Baal Shem Tov in the 18th century, Hasidism responded to the political upheavals, intellectual elitism, and assimilation pressures in Eastern Europe.

The irony is that the Baal Shem Tov himself seems to have had no interest in becoming a leader. His teachings emphasize the holiness of ordinary life and the spiritual capacity of every individual. He believed that divine understanding was accessible not only through sacred texts but through the simple act of living with a full, open heart. If anything, he preached the opposite of perfection: humility, commonness, the sacred everyday.

And yet stories proliferated—of miracles, healing, mysticism. Over time, the pedestal formed. In several Hasidic groups, the elevation of rabbis to quasi-messianic figures took on a life of its own. Lubavitch, for instance, met the challenges of modernity by embracing a vigorous, outward-facing messianism centered on Rabbi Menachem Mendel Shneerson.

Historically, we find messianism in Judaism ascendant in times of political crisis and spiritual upheaval. The original form of messianism in Judaism evolved into Christianity at the time of the Roman conquest of Judea and the destruction of the Second Temple. There were other moments of messianic fervor such as the so-called false messiah Sabbatai Tzvi who developed a personal following in response to the Khmelnytsky Massacres, which reportedly killed tens of thousands of Jews, and devastated the Jewish world. 

When messianism is on the rise, you know we're in deep trouble. 

The core message of Judaism, though, is that no one is coming to save us. Responsibility rests with each of us individually, and all of us collectively. If Judaism has a hero, it isn’t a king or a prophet; it’s the people themselves, the ragged, imperfect multitude that stood at Sinai and has been wrestling with what it all means ever since.

Whenever we place our faith in a single leader—even a charismatic or comforting one—it signals desperation and a retreat from personal responsibility. And whenever a leader tries to convince us that someone else is to blame for our problems, we should remember this: Living life is a profoundly lonely and mysterious individual experience, but we’re all in the same boat. So at the very least, we have each other.

Nostalgia

As we get older, more of life lies behind us than ahead, and what remains to look forward to isn’t always inspiring—unless one counts hemorrhoids, lower-back pain, and menopause as perks. The reality of aging is that loss begins to take center stage. We lean more on memory to make sense of our feelings and the world around us. The sadness of losing family and friends becomes tempered by warmth and comfort; grief softens into recollection. We become nostalgic.

The word "nostalgia" combines the Greek "nostos" (homecoming) and "algos" (pain). It captures the ache for what has passed and the yearning for the comfort, security, and innocence we associate with “home.” Nostalgia plays on fundamental human needs. We all access the past to soothe ourselves, especially when the present feels unstable. It is powerful, and it can be triggered—sometimes manipulated—with Pavlovian precision.

One of my favourite online public intellectuals, Vlad Vexler, recently made a fascinating observation about nostalgia and its political uses. Drawing from his childhood memories of the Soviet Union, he uses ice cream as a symbolic entry point into a broader phenomenon: nostalgia as a political balm. His argument hinges on the idea that political nostalgia sells a past that never was and promises a future that will never be.

Authoritarian regimes have always understood this. Nostalgia is deployed to make older citizens feel good about themselves at moments when conditions are, in reality, quite grim. It pacifies and depoliticizes. We see this plainly in the propaganda machines of Putin’s Russia, Kim’s North Korea, and Xi’s China. But it is also at work in Western democracies drifting toward illiberalism—Orban’s Hungary, Farage’s UK right, Le Pen’s France. In its most extreme form, as in Nazi Germany, nostalgia emerges out of acute social, economic, and political disarray and becomes the foundation of a new/old moral order.

The United States is hardly immune. You could argue that part of the genius of the American political system was its ability to harness nostalgia in constructive, relatively benign ways. The system’s traditional balance depends on a kind of dialectic: a backward-leaning conservatism in the Republican Party, which thrives on one form of nostalgia (a nativist, frontier experience), offset by a forward-looking progressivism in the Democratic Party, which offers a different variety (the refugee immigrant experience).

Viewed this way, today’s political imbalance reflects a failure of Democrats to offer a compelling narrative that counterweights the Republicans’ nostalgia. As Vlad notes, “If you suppress the benign forms of nostalgia, the malign forms will come to get you.” The myth of the American Dream once served as a benign national nostalgia. It is now being displaced by the malignant nostalgia of White Christian Nationalism.

Political nostalgia almost always intensifies during periods of technological upheaval. It is no coincidence that the myth-soaked fantasies of Nazism flourished alongside the revolutionary new medium of radio. Likewise, the rise of social media—and its tendency to isolate and atomize—has coincided with the ascent of MAGA. Nostalgia is, at bottom, a longing for connection in a hyper-individualized world. It is also a search for authenticity, which is why memories of the past become so idealized.

The antidote to this surge in political nostalgia is reality: the reality of what actually was - not the gilded, soothing version we prefer to remember - and the reality of the present, unfiltered and undistorted. Admittedly that is a tall order in a post-truth age, especially when nostalgia itself is now algorithmically amplified and fed to us as content.

The first step is simply recognizing that nostalgia is not always benign. Sometimes it signals that we may not be prepared for tough times, and we need to re-calibrate.

The News

In a few years, G-d willing, I’ll be telling my grandchildren about something called "the news."

“The news,” I’ll say in that rambling, affectionate way grandfathers do, “was once gathered and delivered by skilled professionals called 'journalists'—people trained to separate what mattered from what didn’t.” I’ll compare them to miners extracting gold from the dross, or farmers sifting wheat from the chaff, the way people used to back in the olden days. And I’ll explain what “dross” and “chaff” mean.

“But how could those—what did you call them? Journalists?—how could they know what was important to you?” my granddaughter will ask.

And by you, she’ll mean me personally. Because she will have grown up in a world where “important” is whatever pleases her in the moment, served up by a perfectly calibrated personal feed. The idea that other people once chose what everyone needed to know will strike her as bizarre—as archaic as people tapping out telegrams in Morse Code.

I’ll try to explain that some events were important to everyone, or at least to most of us. She’ll look unconvinced.

And I’ll be thinking about the time when we arranged our evenings around the 6 PM or 10 PM broadcast. A time when the morning paper on the doorstep was more than information, it was a unifying force, curating not only facts but shared priorities. It told us not just what happened, but what mattered. It helped shape our sense of place—our community, our country, and the wider world. It offered a kind of moral framework, because we were all drinking from the same fountain, imagining ourselves as part of the same story.

How do I explain such a thing to a child whose world is a constellation of self-contained narratives, each one tuned to the desires and impulses of a single person?

Maybe I’ll bring it down to something she knows.

I’ll ask her whether someone who only tells you what you want to hear is a real friend. Or whether a true friend is someone who tells you the truth—even when it’s uncomfortable, even when it’s something you’d rather not hear. If someone only ever tells you what pleases you, I’ll say, they don’t really care about you. They care about being liked.

And somewhere in the back of my mind, I’ll realize that this is exactly what our technology has been doing to us. Not empowering us, like other inventions. It's doing the opposite. Disempowering us. Infantilizing us. Turning us into children—which might explain why so much of public discourse sounds like the schoolyard.

I won’t say that part to my granddaughter. But I suspect she’ll understand anyway. After all, we’re all at her level now.

In Praise of Laggards

A long time ago, when I was in my late teens and working as a part-time ticket-taker at a repertory movie theatre, I had a co-worker who was unusually enthusiastic. By “enthusiastic,” I mean the sort of person who would line up outside McDonald’s before opening so he could be among the first to taste the McRib.

It was 1981 and I still remember the day he showed up to work carrying a warm McDonald’s paper bag filled with McRibs. The expression on his face as he took that first bite—pure bliss, as though he were communing with something sacred. And I remember thinking: who exactly lives for the privilege of being first to try the latest lab-tested addition to the McDonald’s menu? Who sees a processed meat patty shaped like a pork rib and thinks, finally, my moment?

Apparently the same kind of person who will stand outside Starbucks at 5 a.m. for a limited-edition green-and-red Hello Kitty holiday mug. That would be a colleague I work with today. She arrived at the office this week triumphant, Starbucks bag in hand, and within minutes half the team was gathered around her desk as she unboxed the thing like it was a Fabergé egg.

This one, at least, had a certain logic behind it. The mug had sold out immediately and was already doubling in price online. I looked it up myself. Meanwhile the McRib—discontinued in 1985, resurrected in 1989, cancelled in 2005, and now inexplicably back again in 2025—remains the fast-food equivalent of an unemployed couch-surfing buddy making the rounds.

I don’t understand any of this. I hate crowds. I hate standing in line even more. At bar mitzvahs I remain seated until everyone else has hit the buffet, on the theory that there’s plenty for all. Admittedly, I have eaten more than one piece of brisket that looked like it was carved from the heel of a hiking boot.

It seems there are “adopters” and there are “laggards.” My McRib and Hello Kitty colleagues are adopters. I am, without question, a laggard. Adopters love new things because they’re new. They need to be first. They live in a perpetual state of FOMO (fear of missing out) like someone plagued by migraines.

Laggards prefer the tried and true. We prefer the sweatshirt that has a familiar smell that never comes out in the laundry over the latest fashion, and the refrigerator we got twenty-five years ago that hums in the basement over the shiny model upstairs. Newness doesn't usually mean better, it means more complicated, more expensive to fix, and less reliable.  

Culturally, adopters get all the flattering adjectives: bold, visionary, entrepreneurial. Laggards are told, “You snooze, you lose.” Which is convenient for people trying to sell you something.

But lately I’ve started to wonder if maybe laggards like me are finally having our moment. This early bird does not want to catch the worm, because the worm seems to be infected with a brain-eating parasite. 

I'm talking about the parasite that infects through technology. With information pouring into their heads through their devices, like water from a broken hydrant, the brains of adopters are turning soft and mushy. Meanwhile, we laggards—by virtue of our god-given skepticism and natural reluctance to embrace anything 'latest' or 'improved'—may be in a better position to survive this period of history with our sanity and perspective intact.

Being a laggard, it turns out, is no longer just a personality trait. It's the future. I can live without the newest McRib. My coffee tastes just fine in the stained mug I've been using for the last 20 years. Actually it tastes better.

Seymour Blicker z"l (1940-2025)

One of the great blessings I have had in my life in the last 20 years or so has been getting to know the great Montreal novelist and playwright Seymour Blicker, who passed away at his home this past Friday. 

Seymour made a name for himself in the late 1960s and 70s with the publication of three novels, Blues Chased a Rabbit (1969), Shmucks (1972) and The Last Collection (1976). I wrote about Shmucks in an earlier blog post. In the 1980s and 90s, Seymour went on to write screenplays, television scripts and plays. He is perhaps best known for the play "Never Judge A Book By Its Cover" (1987) which I know was still being performed internationally a few years ago, and the film script of The Kid (1997). 

It was Shmucks that brought Seymour and I together. The novella was mentioned to me by my friend  and co-author Seymour Mayne. He said that he had recently re-read it for consideration to be put on a syllabus for a Jewish Canadian literature class he was teaching at University of Ottawa, and found that it had stood up surprisingly well. I immediately tried to find a copy, locating a used hardcover edition on Abe Books. I loved it. It was funny, poignant and clever. I wondered whatever happened to Blicker. A bit of online searching revealed that he had continued to write plays, taught in the creative writing department at Concordia University, and had moved up north in the Laurentians. I was intrigued by his apparent reclusiveness. And there was something else that caught my interest, his work in television, particularly an episode he had written for the police comedy Barney Miller. When I was growing up I was a fan of that show, and one episode in particular had stuck with me. It's possibly the most famous Barney Miller, when a man comes to the station claiming that he's a werewolf and asks to be incarcerated before midnight when he transforms and wreaks violent havoc. It's a masterfully written story. I remember the anticipation of waiting until the very end of the episode to find out if he actually becomes a werewolf. Unbeknownst to me Blicker had written that memorable episode.

Mayne put us in touch, and the two Seymours and me (they called me an honorary Seymour) met for coffee in Cote-Saint-Luc. By that time Blicker had moved back to the city. I felt giddy (and honored) to meet him. That was the first of many coffees with Seymour. We stayed in touch, regularly exchanging emails and meeting every so often at the local McDonalds. The last time was about a year ago I think. We had planned to get together for coffee last spring and at various points over the summer but something always got in the way. He'd had health difficulties for many years but somehow always mustered the energy to meet. It was apparent now that his health was declining more quickly. By the end of the summer he was messaging that he wasn't feeling well enough for a visit but would let me know when he was up for one. I had a feeling I wasn't going to be seeing him again. 

It's a terrible shame that Seymour has not received the acknowledgement that he deserves. In around 2019 when Seymour was approaching his 80th birthday I contacted some people I knew at the Concordia creative writing department to see if they would be interested in organizing a public literary event to celebrate his birthday. I also brought the idea to the Jewish Public Library where I know there is an archive of clippings on his career. I received polite but unenthusiastic responses. Busy in my own life, I didn't press harder, which I now regret.

Seymour had undoubtedly been a talented and ambitious writer in his prime. In the mid-70s he packed up his family and moved to Los Angeles in the hope of establishing himself as a writer for film and television. It didn't last very long. I asked him what happened. He said, LA was no place to raise a family. I got the impression it was culture shock for him.

By the time I got to know him he had mellowed, maybe even become disillusioned. Like so many writers who felt they deserved more recognition, he now seemed to have become ambivalent about it. In truth, I think Seymour had acknowledged that the culture had moved on. You might say that he was a casualty of the times: Novelists, playwrights and even filmmakers were no longer held in the same esteem as they had been. 

Every time we met I asked if he'd been writing, working on a new play or short story. He'd say he had ideas, but was finding it harder and harder to focus enough bring his ideas to fruition. At one point he travelled to Vienna to see the opening of one of his plays, which he found gratifying. And he was excited when his novels were re-issued by his publisher as e-books. At one point, I suggested to my publisher Vehicule Press, who specializes in publishing classic forgotten Montreal novels, to consider buying the rights to publish a new edition of Shmucks. The literary industry being what it is, it's doubtful that this satirical novel, which has comic elements that are decidedly 'unwoke', will have a new print edition too soon unfortunately. Even the novels of Mordecai Richler have been taught less and less in the years since his death. 

I look forward to the day that Blicker is back on the syllabus alongside other great Montreal literati Richler and Cohen, where he deserves to be. Sad that he won't be here to enjoy the accolades.  

Bonus: My brief online review of The Last Collection, a novel which didn't get close to enough attention when it was released.

Absolutely hysterical and thoroughly enjoyable. Canada is not known for its satirical novels, but in Shmucks and The Last Collection Seymour Blicker proves himself to be equal to the masters of the genre, especially the Jewish sub genre, which has it's own style and flavour. This novel is especially reminiscent of Woody Allen's wackiest. Memorable characters include a particularly neurotic psychiatrist whose office features tropical decor and a remote controlled recliner chair that spins and rises to the ceiling, and a Jewish thug with a soft spot. Blicker does what all the best authors do, he turns the tables on the characters and at the same time on the reader. The cons get conned, and we can't ever really be sure who is the genuine article. And therein lies the deeper resonance of this novel, as in all superior satire, the layers of truth and deceit are revealed. The last collection referred to in the title is not only collection on a debt, or the mental illness of hoarding and greed which afflicts the protagonist and which gets him into debt in the first place. But it also cleverly refers to the collection of moral sins that one party wants to atone for and the collection of guilt that the other party wants to liberate themselves from.