The Good Ear

You cry while laughing much?  I don't, but I am, even as I type.  My cold has driven me to bed, and keeps me here, but Felix is sitting outside my bedroom door, singing to himself, loudly.  Every time I get ready to yell at him I start laughing, and crying.  And if I shout with laughter in my voice he hears only the merriment and takes it as encouragement; in trying to turn him off I've so far only succeeded in ratcheting up the volume.  No nap for me.

OK, I've finally managed to call him into the room, and by pretending to be angry and threatening not to give him any more snacks today, I've silenced him...temporarily.  Sounds cruel, I'm sure, stomping on my boy's creative instincts so.  Unless you're a parent, in which case I'm sure you understand completely.

This inclination to sing is a mixed blessing.  I have a good ear, Talia too, and Felix, it seems, has inherited these abilities.  He loves to sing, does it all the time, usually in tune, and often with lyrics of his own devising.  How amusing!  How creative!  Ultimately, how annoying!

How much of this am I supposed to put up with?  How much of it can I stand?  I don't know if I'm peculiarly prone to getting bits of music trapped in my head, but for sure it's a vulnerability of mine, and a devastating one.  The wrong sample can easily ruin a day, driving me to distraction or worse, and apt not to poison just one but to pop up again every few days for a week or two before finally disappearing...until the next time.

I am used to Felix infecting our household with the disease of the week, acquired in the pathogenic scrum that is a gregarious child's milieu.  He picks up as well a large variety of memes, some--superheroes, "Star War"--more commercial than--chasing people with sticks--others, at school and on the playground.  And then there are the songs.  We have been careful to steer him towards Elizabeth Mitchell and away from Rafi, that is to say to expose him to the less virulent of the childrens' corpus.  Our defense, I realize, is incomplete, as he bursts into a rousing round of "Bob the Builder, can we do it? YES WE CAN!"  Where did you learn that?  I DON'T KNOW!

Now he is being totally quiet, and that is the worst sound of all.

Find Yourself

"California," exhorts the California Travel & Tourism Commission, "Find Yourself Here."  Certainly I have been trying, and some of that finding, or looking at any rate, has been, well, very Californian.  Most especially this:  I meditate.  As with all self-help regimes and most people, I don't do it as often as I would like, nor as regularly, but I have certainly never done it before and now, I think I can honestly report, I do.  By great good fortune a near--close by, close to our hearts--friend of ours is an adept in these matters and was thinking of organizing a weekly "sit" even before I mentioned the matter to him.  The result is that I and a small handful of co-seekers get together each Wednesday for an hours' talk and half an hour or so of sitting with our eyes closed.

I'm not sure how to describe it less literally. I have no expectations, no demands, and no justification.  I just sit, pretty much every Wednesday, and I try to sit for a bit every other day, too (it is there, despite sitting, that I typically fall down).  I have abandoned any expectation that in sitting I would find myself in a state of non-thought, but tend instead to abstract myself somewhat from the thoughts that do arise.  This allows me, to the limited extent I am able, to view the flow of my thoughts, most often turbulent, sometimes reasonably measured, variable in any case.

And what does this view afford?  Certainly no great insights, no especial wisdom, and yet I do feel I profit from it.  Boredom, my great bugbear in life, has for some months been banished by the ever-present possibility (or perhaps threat is the correct term?) of my entering a meditative state.  I ask myself more frequently, if not frequently enough, why I am allowing myself to run away with a particular thought or feeling (typically my other great bugbear, annoyance).  And, with enough concentration, and more and more often, I am able to disassociate myself from my physical sensations just enough to lose a clear sense of my own physical dimensions, which is to say that sometimes, while meditating, my head, starting with my teeth and spreading outwards from there, starts to feel really, really big.  It's neat.

Felix has my number.  He asked Talia the other evening where I was.  Upon hearing I was at my meditation class he said "Oh, that's where dada sits and waits for something to happen."  Still waiting, boy, still waiting.

(For Felix's own meditation practice see this link.)

Schjeldahl and my Andy

I have few heroes aside from Abraham Lincoln. One of those, as you may know, is Andy Warhol. Another is Peter Schjeldahl, among other things the art critic for the New Yorker and, above all, a truly superior writer. I was very pleased, therefore, to see Mr. Schjeldahl write the following about Mr. Warhol:

Series like “Shadows” (enigmatic images from an illegible photo), “Oxidation Paintings” (Apollonian beauty achieved with piss on copper emulsion), “Camouflage” pictures (marvels of color), dashing collaborations with Jean-Michel Basquiat, and sombre self-portraits stand up to the strongest art made by anyone else, anywhere, at the time. See it. Admit it.

I do, I do, and that joyfully!

It had never occurred to me to check out what Schjeldahl (hey, can I call you Peter? No? Oh.) had to say about Warhol, but inspired by this clip I searched the New Yorker archive. In it I found another article, from 2002, this about a Warhol show at the Tate which I myself saw.  (Since I have no idea what Schjeldahl looks like, it is possible that he and I were in the same room at the same time and in subsequent versions of this story I plan to state this as flat fact.) His comments on Warhol therein prove to me that our thinking is in close accord ("Like the Beatles—his nearest equivalent in another field—Warhol invested vernacular idioms with a timeless eloquence." Yes!). But then he says this:

The show ends with striking installations of his later works—vast camouflage patterns, monumental Rorschach blots, gloomy "Shadows," sparkling with diamond dust, rusty spatters of urine on copper emulsion, and silk screens of da Vinci's "Last Supper," as well as zesty collaborations with Jean-Michel Basquiat. But these pieces strike me more as ingenious ideas for painting than as satisfying works of art. They feel phoned in.

Uh, wait a minute, these are the same late works you praise so highly eight years later! Ah well, "a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds" they say (attributed to Emerson here and there):  I love you still, Peter.

We have a winner!

As the red text above suggests, my Photo ID project hasn't been attracting a great many entrants. In fact, until yesterday's mail, it hadn't attracted any. But now we have an entrant, and not just an entrant:  a family of four contributing no fewer than 6 ID photos, plus, yes plus, a fantastic blowup of the kids.  Likely you will recognize them (posted with permission):

FANTASTIC PHOTO. And the first ID photo that fell out, enlarged for your delectation below, is simply priceless, worth a hundred entries on its own.

What a dreamboat!  I hereby declare this project a success.  Now everyone else, please send me an ID photo anyway!

Words of Comfort

Pictured below, the perfect serving of frites. Look long and hard, friend, for you will not see its like again:  Holland-België is closing.

When I first started visiting Amsterdam back in the early '90s I was introduced to two people who would prove to be life-long friends, and to whom goes much of the credit (if that's the word) for bringing me to Amsterdam in the end.  Babette and Michiel were and are their names, and at that time they were a couple, which made it all the nicer.  It was they who first took me to Holland-België, a convenience store (as we would call such a thing in America) that served fresh fries, as do many such stores in the Netherlands.  Their lives, full of bikes and parties and fun of all kinds, seemed nothing short of miraculous to me, but most miraculous of all was that the finest fries I had ever eaten--then and now--were to be had at a little shop that was literally half-a-dozen doors down from Michiel's apartment.  Many years later I moved to Amsterdam, and for part of that time I actually lived in Michiel's apartment, along with Talia, and it was during this period that I took the photo above.  You will understand, therefore, that the passing of this institution marks for me the end of a phase of my life.  Marks it in a way that actually leaving Amsterdam did not, because though leaving I could always go back.  I will never be able to go back to Holland-België again.

My life is largely free of regret, but the main exceptions are these:  that I did not eat more of those fries while I had the chance, that I did not eat more Ben & Jerry's Chocolate Peanut Butter Cookie Dough ice cream while I had the chance, that I did not eat more Utz Kettle-Cooked Mesquite BBQ Potato Chips while I had the chance.  I ate a lot of all these things, but not enough, not enough.  Please, all of you, look around at the things you love to eat, and eat them now.

Have you ever noticed how words of comfort generally don't? I have, but you're welcome to try anyway.