The Way My Father Suffered

for Randy and Dean

The only time I remember 

seeing my father suffer

was on an airplane.

Mother would dress us up,

my brothers and me, 

for the Boeing 747 flight to Miami 

where we flew twice yearly 

(Christmas and Easter)

our seats were in the smoking section

back when airplanes had them.

You could not see my father's suffering 

in his eyes

but I could tell he suffered

inside his head

when he squeezed his palms together

in front of his face

made a steeple of his fingers

like he was about to recite a prayer

and blocked his nostrils

with his thumbs

as the jet engines rumbled 

and the nose of the fuselage rose

with all the vacationing families 

locked into their seats,

gaining altitude;

for my father there was no escaping

the pressure building 

inside his head

and he would seal his lips

puff-up his cheeks 

like Miles or Dizzy 

and blow an invisible horn

that made no music

sounded no alarm

(but made me giggle 

under my breath);

because my father was born 

with only one ear

which was why 

my mother used to say 

he only heard half

of what she told him.

My father never said a word 

about his suffering 

when we flew

or what he was thinking

and I never heard the tiny explosion,

the pop in his head

that released the pressure,

and then one day

he was gone.

When Blacks turned the musical (turn)tables on Whites

Still thinking about Dylan, and also about the relationship between African American music and the way it has influenced white music, in a sort of colonial way. Black music grew out of slavery and the hardscrabble life of sharecropping, and the whites essentially exploited and marketed it. One question that nags is the one-way street aspect of that relationship ie. that it's black music that has influenced white music and not the other way around. In fact, as one friend asked, can you name a single black artist who has been influenced by a white artist? Take the most influential white songwriter of the post-war period, Bob Dylan. Virtually every white singer-songwriter of note has been influenced by him, but can you name a single black songwriter or performer who has? The answer is, if there are any, they are most certainly the exception that proves the rule. In fact, has there ever been a black songwriter or performer of any importance, or a poet, or a novelist for that matter, that was influenced by a white? It's hard to think of any. The cultural influences of blacks have been blacks, and what has inspired them is exclusively the black experience. 

And then it hit me, rap duo Run-DMC doing Aerosmith's mid 70s hit 'Walk This Way'. I remember the first time I heard it. I hated it. Thought it was garbage, a joke. In fact, the story goes that the duo themselves thought it was a bit of a joke. Rick Rubin (white, Jewish) co-founder of Def Jam records, had the idea. The duo had heard the infectious powerful 'Walk' beat cause it had been widely 'scratched to' in the dance clubs for years. But they had no idea who Aerosmith were, and had never heard the song's lyrics, later calling them 'hillbilly jibberish'. "Me and Run thought Rick (Rubin) and Russell (Simmons) were trying to ruin us," said Darryl 'DMC' McDaniels. Well, he could not have been more wrong. The collaboration was a smash hit, and even managed to resurrect Aerosmith's floundering career. So what does Run-DMC doing Aerosmith's 'Walk This Way' have to do with anything? It's a watershed moment in American culture is all: a black rap duo taking a white song, which of course derived from R&B, and turning it back into a mega-hit rap song that opened rap music to a broad white audience. The move heralded the beginning of black artists appropriating and exploiting white musicians (who had exploited and appropriated black music) to sell their music to whites. The practice of sampling 'white' songs, including everyone from Steely Dan (Kanye West, De la Soul) to Led Zeppelin (Ice-T, Schooly D, Puff Daddy) subsequently became popular with rap and hip-hop artists. 

So why do I think this is a watershed moment (if a moment has to be pinpointed, in truth it was probably an evolution)? It signified more than just blacks turning the tables on whites. I think it represents a cultural (even a political and economic) shift - blacks transitioning from a community in crisis due to segregation and oppression to a community being culturally accepted, even embraced, in mainstream white society, which in turn precipitated another sort of 'crisis' among black artists. This new 'crisis' elicited the expression of ambivalence in their music about acceptance by whites. I am thinking now about the way hip-hop artists rapped about the symbols of wealth, status and fame. I perceived in that a discomfort with these symbols of white society. Under the guise of celebrating the money and power they were achieving, they also seemed to be asking what it meant. At the same time that they celebrated it, they satirized it. So the struggle for cultural acceptance shifted to the struggle about it. Many hip-hop artists took a step back and started singing about experiences that were much closer to the 'traditional' ones, gang life, oppression by (white) authorities, ghetto poverty, exploitation etc. To be influenced by white culture would be tantamount to identifying with the oppressor, and this became very problematic for some. That was in the 80s. These days the era of the singer-songwriter is long gone. Hip-hop music is the predominant, most profitable and most influential music of our time. It is now the de facto mainstream of the industry, unless you're talking about that 'hillbilly jibberish' music. 

On the day they legalized weed

for Kelp

On the day they legalized weed

finally

after decades of lobbying

I bought the company stock

because weed grows like weeds

and stalks grow in the sunshine

and even if money doesn't grow

on trees (as they say)

a mind works

metaphorically

and I imagined a lush garden 

and beauty

and that I'd become rich

from all the potheads getting high

as the government collected its taxes

and everyone would be happy

(from the potheads to the bureaucrats)

and so would I 

cause this time 

I didn't miss the bus,

the train hadn't left the station,

the ship hadn't left port

without me onboard

and for once

I didn't feel alone.

Dylan (part 2)

Dylan - the singer-songwriter who spawned a hundred books, and will no doubt spawn a hundred more. The singer-songwriter who has inspired a million young singer-songwriters to write a million bad songs because they thought they could change the world with their music. To be fair Dylan, it has to be acknowledged, has also inspired plenty of good songwriters too, even some great ones. Dylan is unquestionably the single most influential songwriter since WWII. I can't think of one (white) songwriter who hasn't credited Dylan with being a main influence, from Joni Mitchell to Bruce Springsteen to Kirk Cobain. The 'white' caveat is extremely important, because I don't think Dylan has had nearly the same influence on black musicians and performers, and in fact, it's the black artists (the blues and gospel singers of the 20s and 30s) who influenced Dylan. But if you are going to credit Dylan for the good, you've also got to blame him for the bad, and there's been a lot of bad. By 'the bad' I mean all the half-baked, incomprehensible pop songs that take themselves way too seriously, the heady songs that aspire to 'high-art'. By bad I mean the thousands of pop music critics who got stars in their eyes under the misguided notion that they had something 'important' to say when they wrote reviews of pop music albums, Dylan's and other ones. By bad I mean the hundreds of academics who love Dylan, write about Dylan, and even teach Dylan; the so-called 'Dylanologists' (the term makes me cringe.) Academics, in particular, love Dylan to demonstrate why Dylan is 'important'. I recently listened to one lecturer, a classics professor from Harvard no less, (classics scholars in particular seem to have a thing for Dylan), who was positively giddy in comparing the work of Dylan to Homer. Even if Dylan sees himself as a modern-day Homer, most people don't care, either about the Greek one, or Simpson. I guess if some people like Dylan, for whatever reason, it makes them feel extra justified if they can connect him to the classics. By bad I mean Dylan fans, the 'aficionados' who are obsessed with deciphering what Dylan is 'saying' and tracking his career 'periods' (a la Picasso). But the average pop music fan doesn't care about that stuff. Dylan's 'significance' doesn't matter. They love the music because it makes them feel good, or makes them want to dance, or offers them a bit of comfort. The one thing, maybe the only thing, I understand about pop music, is that the notion of 'importance' is utterly antithetical to the very essence and spirit of it. Any effort to remove popular music from its common, humble roots is to my mind utterly absurd, like putting a urinal in a museum and calling it art. 

But separating Dylan's music - which is sometimes good and sometimes bad - from something we might call the 'Dylan phenomenon' for a second, by which I mean all the extraneous noise that surrounds Dylan's music. Here's another way of looking at it, and why we might even be a bit wary of all the fuss. It relates to what I pointed out earlier, that Dylan owes much of his inspiration and craft to the black singers of the pre-war period. Dylan pilfered from black artists, and he makes no bones about it. In this respect Dylan is one of thousands of white artists who derived inspiration from black culture. They pilfered because black culture possessed something that they lacked, an honest and genuine means to express an authentic experience. It reminds us that black culture has penetrated the culture of white society, but the inverse is not very true. Black culture has been absorbed and subsumed in white culture with the lion's share of the benefits (both cultural and financial) accruing to whites. In this light, one may consider the cultural apotheosis of Dylan in popular white culture, with academics providing the legitimacy of 'importance', an example of the way cultural colonialism works. 

Dylan

It's taken me about 55 years, but I've finally started appreciating Bob Dylan. So what took me so long? The answer my friend is 'blowin in the wind' whatever that means.

I think Dylan is derivative, an impostor, a fraud, and that's his best quality because he's sincere about it. He's a poseur, in the way that we're all poseurs, it just takes some of us longer to admit than others. He can't really sing, but he sings, and doesn't much care that he can't sing. He doesn't play guitar all that well (or piano, or harmonica) but doesn't much care, and keeps on playing. As for the songs themselves, the musical structure and arrangements? Well they're repetitious and rudimentary. People who've worked with him in the studio say he doesn't come in prepared with much more than a musical scaffolding in mind and the rest gets improvised. Take a song like "Like A Rolling Stone" or "The Hurricane", for example, and you realize that this is obviously the case. In 'Rolling Stone' it's Al Kooper's improvised organ lick that makes the song musically interesting and catchy, in 'Hurricane' it's Scarlet Rivera's plaintive violin. I guess you've got to give Dylan credit for relying on the real musicians to make the music work, and recognizing what works musically when they hit on it.

As for the lyrics - Dylan doesn't know what his songs are about and he's said as much publicly. When asked, he answers that the songs are about whatever you want them to be about. He just writes them, and whatever comes out, comes out. I don't think he's being cute or evasive. Read his lyrics, and the only conclusion any reasonable person can draw is that Dylan is telling the truth. He has no idea what he's writing about, or maybe he has some vague idea. The words he uses are nothing special, by design one can suppose they're ordinary, because he's writing in the folk narrative or blues idiom. Sometimes his words are more narrative, and sometimes more 'poetic'. When they are on the poetic side, what he comes up with is often opaque gobbledygook, a hodgepodge of images and metaphors vomited out, that may or may not amount to anything much. Sometimes, cause he uses so many words, like an archer shooting arrow after arrow, he hits on something that sticks, a few of those arrows even strike gold. One thing is for sure, Dylan likes words, really likes them, and his songs are full of them. He writes a lot of songs, and a lot of long ones too. So chances are he'll occasionally put words together that seem to mean something. The one amazing innate talent that Dylan unquestionably has is a memory for words. It's quite impressive that he can remember all those lyrics when he performs. 

Bob Dylan was born Robert Zimmerman in Hibbing, Minnesota. From the beginning it was all about adopting a persona, or rather several personas. He's worn more than a few of them over the years; the Woody Guthrie-esque dust bowl balladeer, the Billy The Kid-esque outlaw individualist, the gospel singing born-again Christian, persona after persona, each one in its own way embodying an aspect of the American myth. Meanwhile he was always really a middle class Jewish kid from the northern mid-west. But his most enduring trick, the trick of being derivative, reminds us that we're all derivative, we're all poseurs, and being a poseur is the very quintessence of being an American. The entire culture is derivative, and most Americans have themselves fled a past, a former country, shed a former identity to adopt a new one. The very quintessence of the American myth is that our identity is whatever we want it to be, that's what makes America great, that's what freedom actually means. It's not that you can become rich in America. It's that you can become someone else entirely. A Napoleon in rags, whatever that is.

As for whether he should've gotten the Nobel Prize for Literature, in case you're wondering? Not a chance. They should go back to giving the Nobel to authors most of us have never heard of before. Everyone's heard of Dylan. And give it to actual authors of literature, not songwriters. I mean can Kazuo Ishiguro win a Grammy? 

The 'idiot box' and the thrill of serious discussion

My recent interest in the physics of time has led me to the time-machine of our time - YouTube. 

Specifically, I've taken to watching on YouTube old broadcasts of Firing Line, the show hosted by William F. Buckley Jr. that aired on PBS from the mid-1960s until 1999. I'm sort of addicted to it. The reasons for this are many, but primarily, because it's refreshing to hear articulate thoughtful people discussing a prescient and (sometimes) contentious matter on television. Buckley's roster of varied guests included great writers, artists, scholars, activists and politicians. And the discussion was always penetrating not superficial. Initially I was drawn to it because I wanted to see how the time we live in was reflected by the politics of earlier decades. How, for example, the BLM movement of today had its roots in the civil rights movement of the sixties, or how Watergate led to the Trump presidency. My continued interest went beyond simple nostalgia, the more I watched the more I appreciated the fact that the television was not in fact the proverbial 'idiot box' that my parents said it was back when I was an adolescent. A lot of it was thoughtful, instructive and even inspiring. The 'idiot box' is what television has become in the intervening years. A result of the competition for viewers in the 1000 channel universe and the internet. It has reduced much of what is seen on television to garbage like Big Brother, The Bachelor, and the Real Housewives of Malibu. For those like me interested in current events and analysis, news programming is filled with 'Breaking News' every 15 minutes and nightly punditry with indignant hysterical hosts and aggrieved politicians trying to score political points with their audiences. Yes, there is Discovery, History and the National Geographic channel, but who has the patience to wade through the abundant weeds? I don't need the drama or the fake outrage to get my kicks, just give me the thrill of serious discussion.   

Buckley always treated his guests respectfully. His sharp mind and incisive style demanded that his guests be their most thoughtful and articulate, whether they were Muhammed Ali or controversial Nobel prize laureate William Shockley who was on his show attempting to promote a racist philosophy and public policy he called 'dysgenics'.   

It's been most interesting for me to watch Buckley's interviews with the famous and the infamous, including Mark Feld, who would decades later be revealed as the informant 'Deep Throat' during Watergate, together with disgraced lawyer (and donald trump mentor) Roy Cohn discussing 'Subversion and the Law'. In another program from the late 70s Buckley's guest was G. Gordon Liddy (who died last week) and they talked about whether he had any regrets about not ratting out Nixon. On another show from the late 60s Buckley talked with activist Ed Sanders, scholar Lewis Yablonsky and author Jack Kerouac about 'The Hippies'. Kerouac is clearly inebriated during his appearance, making bizarre unpredictable outbursts which Buckley never fails to handle with grace. One show from the early 70s featured arguably the most influential psychologist of the last 50 years behaviorist BF Skinner and his colleague Leon Festinger, famous for developing the theory of cognitive dissonance, arguing about whether people genuinely have free will. Another intriguing show featured a very young Alan Dershowitz together with hardcore porn film star Harry Reems who at the time was defending himself against conspiracy to traffic obscenity across state lines charges related to his film Deep Throat. Of course, shows like these have increased interest seen though the prism of the present and with the benefit of hindsight. 

Buckley also delighted in conversations about culture. For instance, he spoke to the author Tom Wolfe about his books Radical Chic and The Painted Word, both of which spawned quite a bit of controversy in the art world at the time of their publications. But less controversial, two of my favourite shows were about music, one in which Buckley talks to JS Bach scholar and master harpsichordist Rosalyn Tureck (it turns out that Buckley himself was an accomplished harpsichord player) and another with Jazz pianists Billy Taylor and Dick Wellstood about why Jazz music is being neglected.

One of my favourite shows from the mid 70's had Buckley talking to the novelist Anthony Burgess. Burgess wrote my favourite novel as a high-schooler, A Clockwork Orange. On the show Buckley and Burgess discuss the ignorance of the youth of today, because Burgess, who is British, had been teaching in New York and had recently published an article in which he expresses his feeling that his students were self-centered and deficient in basic skills and knowledge. Burgess argued that young people were too focused on the latest trends, and bemoaned their lack of interest in history and literature, as well as their poor writing and language skills. Burgess's manner of speaking during the interview is utterly charming. He is haltingly careful, seemingly unsure, and frequently prefaces his opinions with 'I may be wrong about this'. He always seems to be testing out his ideas as he is expressing them. At one point he talks about the arrogance of American youth culture, saying that there was a time when young people were really just adults-in-waiting, and that's how they were treated by their elders (he doesn't mean this in a bad way). For their part, children couldn't wait to grow up to become full participants in adult life. These days, Burgess says, the opposite is true. In the rebellion of young people, the counter-culture and rejection of their parents' generation, there is a sort of cult of youth - remember he is talking about the mid-seventies. There is a romanticizing of youth. Of course, nowadays youth culture has completely overtaken popular culture and commercial enterprise. Adults have become infantilized in their effort to 're-capture' their youth, or to stay young. From the clothes they wear to Botox, our culture is obsessed with staying young. It feels like that obsession has also given us to feel entitled, indulged, and whiny. If the pandemic has taught us anything, I hope it's that the neglect of our elders is our current greatest shame, and that a return to thoughtful, respectful discussion (not to mention decency) in our public discourse, would be welcome. 

Meaning, Banality and the nature of Faith

There was a time when I was attracted to religious practice. I engaged quite vigorously with my religious tradition for a period of almost two decades. I attended synagogue weekly, learned the prayers, honoured the Sabbath in my household, and followed the holidays. I found the structure and regularity comforting. Ultimately, however, since it was the utility of living a religious life that attracted me in the first place to it, once that utility lost its value, so did my desire to practice. The structured and circumscribed aspects began feeling restrictive, a negative instead of a positive. The one thing I did not possess, after all those years of practice, and could never acquire, was faith. 

Throughout my 'religious stage' the nature of faith eluded me, and I often wondered why. Is faith something you can acquire, or is it something ingrained, genetic, inherited. In other words, was faith something you possessed or was it something that possessed you? 

In my experience it appeared to be the latter, and faith never possessed me. I determined, after years of trying, that faith was not something you can simply decide to have, or choose to have, because it's not rational. When it is developed in a person it is more like a talent than a skill. It can be cultivated, enhanced, or nourished in you, or conversely, it could be starved, but it cannot be acquired if you lack it. You can discover that you have it, maybe it was there all along and you were not aware. But you can also discover that you don't, and not for lack of trying. You can't convince yourself of something that's untrue, at least that was my case. 

People of faith are sometimes loving, hopeful, joyous and open minded. People of faith are also sometimes hateful, close minded and suspicious. Some are generous and some are cruel. This leads me to conclude that faith plays no part in whether a person acts one way or another. However, I think one thing is undeniable: People of faith are fortunate indeed. Because to believe in God, the Creator, the Almighty, is to believe that life is inherently imbued with divine purpose and meaning. 

Without faith, without the sense and conviction that life is imbued with Divine merit, the question of life's meaning becomes a strictly personal one. There is no necessary overarching, inherent, guiding principle to guide one toward an inevitable answer. The meaning is whatever we say it is, whatever we decide it is. In essence, the meaning of life becomes as idiosyncratic and banal as we are. The answer to a question that is no more meaningful than what am I going to have for dinner tonight, or what clothes am I going to where today. It also means that when things happen in life, usually bad things, there was no 'reason' for it. Bad things just happen, planes fall out of the sky killing hundreds of innocent passengers, children get cancer, people are victimized because they were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, good people suffer and bad people prosper, life is haphazard and uncertain, and to say, as in the biblical story of Job, that this is somehow part of the Creator's plan, strikes me as illustrative of a cruel, masochistic deity and not a loving, caring one.

What we do know is that life is comprised of moments; moments of love and hatred, of order and confusion, of joy and misery, of comfort and suffering, of justice and injustice. Putting aside the question of greater significance, and acknowledging that we are all more or less in the same boat, with impulses that are selfish and generous, loving and hating, the banality of life should lead one to conclude that they ought to strive toward adding to the love, joy, order, comfort and justice, and minimizing the hatred, misery, suffering and injustice, for themselves and for others, in whatever way they can.