A Key To A Good Relationship

Healing Hands: mine and Fox's.  My left hand was pressing the shutter release.

A Key To A Good Relationship

            My wife and I have been together for almost eleven years.  I can't imagine having anyone being as close to me as she is.  We are like two tuning forks, vibrating at the same frequency.  I know what she is feeling, when she is feeling it, and I always know that she understands me.  That's a gift, a god-send.

            Our lives are not easy.  We duel with illness, poverty and aging.  We're really struggling.  But being together in adversity makes that adversity more bearable; I know someone's got my back.

            We may be hanging on the very fringes of society.  We are daily bombarded with messages from this culture that tell us we're not valued as elders, we are dispensable and  no one cares about our health or our future.

            Yet we have a successful relationship.  How much is that worth?  Everyone knows that a great relationship is priceless.  The Fox and I have one, and I'll share a lesson that I've learned about maintaining such a gift.

            We never forget to be courteous to one another.  In large things and in small, we speak gently, say "thank you", "please", and offer words of praise.

            It would be so easy to take one another for granted.  It would be so easy to leave out the endearments and the expressions of gratitude.  But we're getting old.

We don't know how long we have on this earth.  So we'll continue to nurture one another with every passing day, gratefully.  

The Artistry Of The Cosmos

       
          This is an image of the famous Horsehead Nebula, which is part of the immense Orion nebular complex.  The Horsehead has been seen in thousands of photos all over the world and written about in every language.  Astrophotographer Robert Gendler posted this on his Facebook page today and it was so new and startling in its depth that I felt compelled to write something about how I feel about astronomy and about the Universe in general.
          Mr. Gendler is an amateur astronomer.  His images can be found here:http://www.robgendlerastropics.com.  He is one of the world's master astrophotographers.
          When I see something so beautiful I must ask myself the question: who made such a thing?
It is primarily hydrogen.  It assumes its shapes by way of the gravitational influence of nearby stars. The entire region is regarded as a "star nursery"; vast amounts of hydrogen are gradually being squeezed more and more tightly until the pressure of gravity ignites a fusion reaction.  This fusion reaction is the first cry of a new born star.  I've taken pictures of this region and I know that the Horsehead is but a tiny extrusion of an immense nebular region that takes in many light years of space and includes the mighty Orion Nebula, M42. It is virtually encircled by a torus of hydrogen cloud called Barnard's Loop.  There's so much hydrogen, so much star-formation going on here that if one "zooms back" to see the region as a whole, the Horsehead is nothing but a speck.
          I don't adhere to any formal religion.  I see a mighty Intelligence in the shapes, lights,
the sheer artistry of the cosmos.  I see staggering beauty and I worship the maker of that beauty.
I'm an artist and I also try in my humble way to make beauty.  That's the only way I can touch the hem of the majestic robe of the Creator Of The Universe.  Thank you Mr. Gendler for your great work.  Thank you, Mighty Intelligence, for allowing us to see these things.

NGC 5189 by  Robert Gendler

Veep: A View Of Honesty In TV Dialogue

            We watched four episodes of VEEP.  We laughed, we were entertained, but we didn't finish the disc and we sent back both discs, Numbers one and two of Season One.

            Something about the series struck me as futile.  I will give ANY series a reasonable shot.  It's hard to produce quality work in this medium and the work is arduous.  I've seen pilot episodes that seemed like crap but the episodes got better as the series progressed.  The writers got their stride, the actors inhabited their characters and that ineffable magic of FILM started to work. 

            VEEP has talented people.  Julia Louis-Dreyfus has the authority to make a credible Vice President and she uses her patented body language to great comic effect.

            Still, there's something missing from VEEP.  It has no core.  I didn't see any change in the characters.  Four episodes is enough to reveal whether or not a series has a dramatic structure, whether or not the characters are going somewhere.  They might be going to Hell but still, at least they're in movement, they're changing.  Veep lacked this sense of dynamism.  The characters kept repeating the  sharp, witty and very nasty banter ad infinitum.  They kept trying to climb over one another's social and professional errors to enhance their own careers.  So what?  Isn't that what everyone does?  Not necessarily, but this kind of one-upsmanship has become a staple of television comedy.  TV and movie characters now speak, and act, as if their internal censors have been turned off.  I first noticed this tendency on SCRUBS, and it was brilliant.  There was something shocking about the way Doctor Perry Cox spoke to his interns.  He spoke the absolute, devastating truth, nothing was watered down.  Sometimes it was inappropriate.  Dr. Cox couldn't care less.  He abandoned the idea of "appropriate" because it was useless.  He played a teacher/physician and if he couldn't resort to blistering character assassination, one of his students may fail to learn a life-saving lesson.  On SCRUBS the characters routinely spoke dialogue that cut through the usual pleasantries of social life.  It was seldom less than hilarious.  From Dr. Kelso's blithely honest selfishness to The Janitor's pointless malice, the characters on that groundbreaking series ripped away the masks that people use in polite society. This mask has a name in psychological parlance.  It's called The Persona.

            As I watched the characters in Veep attempt to mine these same veins of ruthless truth-telling, I felt as though this indicated a complete paradigm shift.

            The Persona is disappearing  in television and film.  Characters actually say what they think and feel.  This may enhance a sense of authenticity but it also points to a vanishing civility.  People are becoming more rude, and not just in TV and film.  They may be more real, but they are also less concerned about one another and more concerned with themselves.  Honesty is a good thing but there's an evil side to such candor.  It has become a license to hurt.

            SCRUBS had heart.  It had a moral premise. Dr. Cox's ferocity was offset by his vulnerability.  We knew that people weren't as cruel as they seemed to be.  They were just tired of the same old shit.  The producers of that innovative series made comedy gold out of the idea that characters could say the craziest things, especially when they were true.

            I abandoned VEEP because I didn't feel that same sense of compassion. There was no moral thrust to the stories.  VEEP seemed to be amoral, and that was ultimately boring.

            As comedy, VEEP can't touch SCRUBS, and as political drama it doesn't even kiss the hem of WEST WING'S robe.  I give it two muskrats for the inventiveness of the dialogue and the sadly funny viciousness of its put-downs. 

            

Getting Out Of Bed: The Most Dangerous Part Of The Day

            In 2005 my wife and I moved out of an absurdly expensive cabin in the woods and bought a 38 foot motor coach.  We had decided to make a major change of lifestyle.  It was an audacious and risky move, loaded with potential pitfalls.  But it worked.  We got out of our "stick house" and moved into a slightly cramped but homey RV. 

            Our original plan included travel.  We crossed the country once, and went on assorted adventures, but the price of gasoline kept rising and our incomes kept falling.

            The RV became a home in a campground where the rent is cheap and all the normal conveniences of civilization are available.  Internet: check.  TV: check. Phone, water, power, sewage: check check check check.

            We love our 38 foot motor coach and we live amicably with two dogs and three cats, surrounded in a campground by a motley bunch of people from all walks of life.

            Our flat screen TV is in the bedroom.  There are cabinets and drawers, windows and fans.  The arrangement of space and the existence of five animal friends imposes one giant fact of life upon us: the only way on or off our bed is from the bottom.  Crawl in, crawl out, head first or butt first or any way you can.  It's a form of gymnastics.  Adding to the complexity of getting in and out of bed is the fact that there are two sets of doggie steps at the bottom of the bed.  Our actual exit/entrance is about two feet of space between these steps.  What's the story? you may ask.  The answer is twofold.  One, our bed sits higher than the normal bed because that's how RV beds are designed.  They are set on a swinging slab of plywood that can be opened to reveal a large storage space. 

            Our cats could get up and down without a problem, but when our teeny miniature poodles arrived we found ourselves being constantly disturbed by whines and whimpers.  I want down.  I want up.  I want down.  I want up.

            We ordered this cool set of pet steps: a five step staircase that fit perfectly into our domain.  Gabriel, the smaller dog, loves them.  Bear, the bigger dog (Gabriel's dad) is terrified by the steps and no amount of cajoling or training will get him to use them. Being the utter saps that we are, we left Bear's stool in place at the right end of the bed, put Gabe's steps on the left and there you have it!  No whines or whimpers.  Gabe up, Gabe down, Bear up, Bear down, end of story.  Each of our poodles is about the size of a shoebox.  They're half the size of our smallest cat.  They like sleeping and lazing underneath blankets or within piles of pillows.  There is a rigorous discipline involved in the act of moving to and from the bed.  We must ALWAYS know the location of the animals.  It has become second nature to make a mental map of the bed before moving in any direction. We feel our way, hands, eyes, entire bodies recording the positions of our loved creatures.  And it's been good; no one's been hurt.  Perhaps, even, the exercise and stretching keeps us loose and more fit than might otherwise be the case.  There are times when I find myself in familiar yoga poses, contorted but otherwise successfully moving to my destination.

            Getting out of bed is a job.  Getting out of bed is a job that has to be done cheerfully in spite of wake-up wrath, grogginess, the pukes, piddles or poops.

            I might interject here that my spouse and I live this way with very little inhibition.  We show tender compassion toward one another's aging bodies.  Life is inherently humiliating as it is; we are careful to grant ourselves some dignity as a couple.

            So...if I say that we have a rare intimacy, I believe it's true. There isn't any choice.  An RV is an environment that is not conducive to privacy. 

            Getting in and out of bed is a procedure that induces uncommon positions and viewpoints.

            It is time now for me to give you another piece of information about myself:

I tend to fall asleep in unusual positions and at unusual times.

            Talk about full moons!  At this point, if you are a bit prudish or tightly wrapped about certain normal anatomical realities, I suggest you stop reading and find an issue of Vanity Fair or O(prah).

            The Fox and I are in our sixties.  I'm not sure how this happened.  The God Of Hippie Fantasies promised that we would never get older than thirty five.  Anything after that was like one of those thirteenth century maps of the world.  HERE LIVE DRAGONS, says the map and that's how we felt.  Old age didn't exist.  It would never exist. 

            We weren't going to be sixty or sixty five.  Hell no!  Something would intervene to ensure our youthfulness.  We would discover that the juice of wild onions mixed with the nectar of rare orchids would halt the aging process.  Or something like that.  Getting old just wasn't real.  It would never happen.

            Before we met, The Fox and I lived wild and crazy lives.  We were in dangerous places, courting viruses or murder and dismemberment, to say nothing of derangement of the senses, intellect and terminal brain damage.

            Somehow we ducked under those scythes.  We survived, and the onion juice/rare orchid miracle didn't happen.  What is it that people say?  That today's sixty is yesterday's fifty?  What bullshit.  Today's sixty is more like seventy.  Baby boomers have lived risky lives, imbibed quantities of exotic stuff, participated in the great Poisoned Democracy, watched fifty billion bullets and ten billion bombs explode all over the world, fled from toxic clouds and radioactive dust storms.  We've lived in apocalyptic terrifying times!  It's stressful!  It beats down those lovely anti-oxidants that we're supposed to cultivate.  

            What the hell do we do now?  Am I going to have to be seventy?  Just wake up one day, bam!  I'm seventy? No!  Nuh-uh.  Fuck this.

            Time moves awfully fast.  Time is sneakier than a weasel stalking a raven's egg.

            I can fall asleep with a book in my hand and a mouth full of raisins.  I can look perfectly awake but I am sound asleep.  I can raise myself up on my left elbow to look out the window and fall asleep, halfway between up and down.  I can, so I am told, walk to the fridge, make myself a waffle, then walk away and get back into bed.  Eyes open but sound asleep.

            The Fox and I have had a rough year.  I lost a job I'd had for nearly thirty years.  I had worked as manager of a large commercial property.  Great job.  Name my hours.  No supervision.  Decent pay. Then the property owner died suddenly.  One day last year I got a letter giving me thirty days' notice.

            It's been that kind of year.  The Fox suffers from auto-immune diseases. 

I have the feet of a hundred year old longshoreman. I don't walk, I hobble.

When an opportunity comes along that gives us a good belly laugh, we cherish the moment like precious treasure.

            Last week I woke up to take my two o'clock pee.  I'm lucky I only pee twice a night.  My prostate must be the size of a football.  What is a prostate, anyway?  It seems to be a gender-specific time bomb buried just behind men's nuts.  Thanks, god.  Thanks for the prostate.  Great invention.

            Anyway, as I was sitting there taking my usual ten minutes to pee, The Fox woke up and slithered from bed.  It was time for her two-fifteen pee and she stood before me in the dark, waiting patiently.

            "You know what you did last night?" she asked, unexpectedly.  We don't talk much in the middle of the night.  We mumble and stumble, grunt and nod until our missions are accomplished.

            I didn't say anything.  She was going to tell me.

            "You got to your knees, turned around and started getting out of bed, head first.  Like you did just now.  Except that as your head reached the bottom of the bed,  your elbows folded, you laid your head in your hands and you fell back to sleep."

            I already had the picture.  I am a big hairy Jewish man.  As I crawled forward, dodging three cats and two dogs, I ran out of steam and fell asleep with my ass in The Fox's face. 

            I started laughing.  It was late and our neighbors are pretty close so my laugh was a high pitched "heee heeee" but it was still satisfying.

            "Your snore was so rhythmic" Fox continued.  "The night lights gave me a complete view of  your full moon and I thought maybe I could play bongos on your butt, maybe they would be tuned to nice pitches, maybe a minor third between them so it would sound like 'Sing Sing Sing'.  But I didn't want to wake you."

            I was tweeting like a canary I was laughing so hard and trying not to roar as I might in broad daylight.

    

     

   "I thought you'd wake up eventually and finish your chore.  As long as you didn't fart or something, what harm could  your ass do to me?  I was willing to take my chances.  You were so deeply asleep; and of course I think you're cute from any angle, so I figured 'what's the harm?'.

            We were both giggling like children.  Oh my god!  You just had to be there.

            I did of course wake up after about five minutes and complete my forward facing slink off the bed, snaking my way down with the help of the doggie steps, none the wiser regarding the comic episode I had gifted to my spouse until she told me this story the following night.

            Have I embarrassed anyone by telling this tale?  I couldn't care less.  We have been betrayed by the God Of Hippie Fantasies.  There is no magic wild onion/orchid juice to reverse our neuropathies, our arthritis, our pops and twinges, our encroaching deafnesss, blindness and dithering mental acuity.  I hereby decree that growing old is an activity of heroes, that it takes major guts to manage the passages that lead us to the Great Light that waits beyond death.

            And if there is no Great Light?  Then we will turn back to behold our brief and insignificant life experiences and know that this WAS the Great Light, one that we weren't able to recognize until after we had lived it.

            

I Surrender! A Capitulation To The Internet

I Surrender

            I surrender.  I raise my hands, throw down my weapons and kneel before the Internet.  I am now its prisoner, I am now its slave.  I let my attention wander, and before it returned (it was a ten second daydream), the Net had morphed into a new paradigm, had spawned a thousand new concepts.  In order to be computer literate, I must understand and master each of these thousand new concepts.  I give up.  I don’t have the time.  I don’t have the speed.

            Around the time Twitter arrived, my grip began to slip. 

            Twitter:  what the fuck is this?  Oh, I get it.  A giant global billboard.  Every person living must now BE a brand, and Twitter is the brand name town crier. Twitter itself generates a thousand spin-offs, becomes an industry.

            “I’m selling new software called Twitterbee to get you thousands of followers on Twitter!  Be in everyone’s face, all the time! Twitterbee.  Subscriptions begin at $4.50 a month.”

            Facebook.  I’m really lost with Facebook.  The word “friend” meant something in the past, it was a powerful concept.  It, the word “friend”, has become utterly devalued.  A friend is now someone who has permission to get in your face who has given you permission to get in his or her face.  What can we do with all these friends?

            It’s obvious!  Sell our Brand!

            Let me see, just what is my Brand?  What am I selling?  I’m an artist, a photographer, musician and writer.  That’s what I sell.  What do I call myself?

I know!  I’ll call myself AARTT!

I sell entertainment with a sideline in Insight.  It isn’t AARTT if it doesn’t have insight.  You’ll learn stuff when you consume my work.

            Among the things you will learn are the following:

How to tolerate yourself.  You are convinced that your flaws are so grotesque that no one will ever love you and you want to puke every time you look in the mirror.

            I can show you how to tolerate yourself.  I can teach you how to look in the mirror and say “hi there” and move on.  You just aren’t important enough to make yourself puke. Also, you're not alone.  Everyone feels this way at some point in a life.

            I can show you how to believe in God without being a fool.  Now that is hella useful.  Everyone needs to believe in something but that need is either repressed by your own subculture or it’s converted into a simpering set of clichés that are not worthy of you. 

            I can make you laugh.  Really, give me a few minutes, I’m just warming up.  Look at yourself!  Look at all the drama you’ve created.  How can you take yourself seriously?  Stop trying. What a Schlemiel, what a Megilla!
            This is my super-secret mantra and tantric yoga procedure for curing negative thinking.  Step one,
take your left hand and put it to your forehead with the palm facing outward.   Tilt your head slightly to the
left.  Make it look dramatic.  Now, in your most self-pitying voice, cry out, "Oy Veyzmir!  Oy Veyzmir!"
(For the goyim:  It's simple.  Oy vay z'meer).  The cry must begin on a mid-tone note and rise half
an octave higher with a strong accent on the final syllable. You MUST repeat this procedure at least eight times, closing your eyes  half way and letting your body droop.  Don't worry about getting the notes right, so long as you sound sufficiently self-pitying. If you fail to reach eight repetitions I am not responsible for potent side effects such as warts and a pungent odor of gefilte fish rising from your body.

            So come on, folks, step right up, buy some AARTT.  Oops, I have to get on Twitter, Facebook, Crazenook, Struttmutt, Hurdlelnurdle, Flank, Bubgut and all those other internet gizmos to sell my Brand.  And I’ve surrendered.  I surrendered in the first sentence.

            I think I’m fucked but I’ll figure out something. A podcast, a webinar...something.

Sit-Coms, Ray Romano and MEN OF A CERTAIN AGE

Ray Romano and MEN OF A CERTAIN AGE

           

            Sometime during the era of Norman Lear's dominance over the television sit-com landscape there arose a formula for writing scripts that haunts us still.  I call it the "three lines to insult to laugh track" gambit.  It's simple.  Character A enters the scene through what appears to be the kitchen or back door.  She asks a question of character B, who is eating a bowl of cereal.  Character B guiltily evades the answer to the question.  Character C throws an insult about Character B to Character A.  The insult is a clever quip exploiting Character B's weight or habits of personal hygiene.  The audience chuckles (or canned laughter of the proper intensity is supplied.)  Another character enters from the living room and asks the same question, i.e. "Who drank all the milk?"  Character A responds with a variation of the same insult, but it's a little stronger.  Audience laughs again, a little more fulsomely.

            Line one is the exposition, it moves the story line along.  Line two reveals the learned helplessness of a character.  Line three insults that character.  Then there's a laugh and the dialogue returns to another insult, another laugh before the cycle returns to the expository dialogue that moves the story another inch further along.

            All the laughs are from the insults or the escalation of the insults.  These imply long audience familiarity with the characters; the audience participates in the humor of the insults because they are, in a sense, members of the family, entitled to

exchange barbs with the characters.

            Shows such as I LOVE LUCY were constructed differently.  They were real Situation Comedies, i.e. Lucy would get herself into a comic situation.  The humor was provided mostly by lies that Lucy told to Ricky.  The lies were made necessary due to some transgression Lucy had committed against one of Ricky's personal rules. Each lie led to further complications as Lucy tried to protect herself from Ricky's notorious Latin temper.  The lies would lead to crazier and crazier situations until Lucy's fib was unmasked.  Yes, she broke Ricky's favorite bongo drum, yes she defied his order not to audition for the part in a TV commercial.  Somehow Ricky's temper never explodes.  The audience knows that Ricky loves Lucy and that he would never harm or abuse her.  Ricky's most fearsome outburst is "Lucy, you got some 'splainin' to do." He's merely playing the part of the fiery Cuban, in a time when Cubans were still hot-blooded band leaders.  Lucy has never been in any real danger. The threat of danger, and Lucy's fibs and their escalating complications to avoid this imagined danger are the meat of the show's humor.  The situation is comic, as is Lucy's physical humor when she inexorably loses control of the Situation.

            I may find I Love Lucy dated and no longer very funny, but I see a moral and imaginative collapse in the quality of the formulaic nit-coms we see today.  Insult comedy is a venerable stream in the great delta of comedic history.  Co-opting insult humor as the driving engine in the bottomless plethora of mediocre sitcoms only serves to allow laziness to rule the writer's room. 

            Producers and writers seem to have learned nothing from the formula-busting brilliance of Seinfeld.  True, since Seinfeld's long run on the air there is room for wackier premises and looser story structures, but these too have played into the propensity for lazy writing.  It's been an awfully long time since anything as good as Seinfeld has appeared.

            Ray Romano has never been on my psychic radar.  I didn't watch his sitcom. 

I don't watch many sitcoms for the reasons outlined above.  But Romano surprised me with his beautifully calibrated drama series "MEN OF A CERTAIN AGE".

            The series revolves around three middle-aged men.  They are old buddies from high school and they meet at a restaurant several days a week to eat breakfast and hash out their personal problems.  Scott Bakula plays out-of-work actor Terry Eliot.  His boyish charm still works on the ladies but it's proving to be an unreliable backstop for whatever pitches the future may throw at him.  At fifty, his face is falling and his prospects have dried up.  When he's offered the role in an  updated commercial that was once his greatest hit, he cringes with embarrassment.  Instead he takes a job with the second old friend of the trio, Own Thoreau, played by the redoubtable Andre Braugher.

            Owen is the son and heir to Big Daddy Owen Thoreau, the towering figure in one of Los Angeles' venerable auto dealerships.  Owen Junior still calls his father "daddy" and is struggling to overcome the iron-clad dominance of his monolithic father.  "Daddy" is ready to retire and hand the business over to his son.  But he makes it clear that he has no confidence in young Owen.  He feels that his son doesn't have the drive and charisma to sustain a competitive business.  Owen Senior's pompous contempt for his son, his constant undermining of younger Owen's efforts makes him the perfect bully and the ideal target for an audience's wrathful involvement.  He is what every good drama needs: a villain.

            Romano plays Joe Tranelli, owner of a store specializing in party supplies.  He's a compulsive gambler, recently divorced and trying with all his heart to connect with his adolescent children.

            These three very different characters share breakfasts, jogs in the hills above L.A. and as much intimacy as any American male can achieve.

            Using these simple ingredients, Romano has produced an absorbing drama that is utterly lacking in strain, self consciousness and over acting.  The obstacles and tensions each character endures are convincing yet played with a precision that draws no attention to itself. 

            This may not be a series that will attract a younger audience looking for a high level of stimulation.  I may not have been drawn to EVERYBODY LOVES RAYMOND but in the future I will be watching any project with Ray Romano's name attached to it.  He's demonstrated a quiet mastery of television drama. 

            The series went two seasons.  That was all it needed to achieve its goals.  A third season would have gone against the grain and defiled its own modest yet profound ambitions.
          MEN OF  A CERTAIN AGE has no laugh tracks, no set-ups to predictable put-downs, no generic sitcom kitchen-with-living-room set.  It has, instead, several great characters, three of whom are honestly struggling with the onset of male middle age and its challenge.  The series ended with satisfying resolutions without ever seeming pat or forced.  The struggles of life would continue but these three men could rely on one another's support.    I can't think of a greater gift  that can bestowed out of friendship.  Support equates to a guarantee that in times of trouble your friends have "got your back."
          

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