Oppenheim Arts & Letters

Language Play - Nuts, Bolts, and Moves

"No serious researcher denies that Muhammad came to a milieu that was highly influenced by Judeo-Christian ideas. Indeed, the Qur'an presupposes familiarity with Judeo-Christian ideas to the extent that it often does not give the full version of a narrative; there is no need to identify what is supposed to be common knowledge.[3] A typical example is in the verse that was only partially cited by Muslims commenting on news programs in the wake of the 9-11 terror attacks: "Whoever has killed a single human without just cause, it is as if he has killed the entire humankind."[4] In fact, the full verse is: "And for this reason, we ordained for the children of Israel that whoever has killed a single human without just cause, it is as if he has killed the entire humankind." Significantly, the complete verse refers to a divine edict not found in the Torah, but rather in the Mishnah, part of the Jewish oral tradition.[5]"

Mohammad, Khaleel.  "Assessing English Language Translations of the Qur'an."  Middle East Quarterly, Spring 2005, pp. 58-71: http://www.meforum.org/717/assessing-english-translations-of-the-quran

How do they exhort witnesses testifying in capital cases? They brought them in and admonished them: Perhaps you will speak from supposition, and from hearsay, evidence from the mouth of a witness, or "We heard it from the mouth of a trustworthy person"; or, perhaps you do not know that afterwards we will test you by inquiry and examination. Know that capital cases are not as monetary suits: monetary suits - a person may give his property and effect atonement; capital cases - his blood and the blood of his offspring depend on him until the end of the world, for we find concerning Cain who killed his brother, it is written, "the bloods of your brother cry" (Genesis 4:10); it does not say, "your brother's blood" but "bloods" - his blood and the blood of his offspring. Another interpretation of "brother's bloods" - his blood was dashed on the trees and on the stones. Therefore man was created singly, to teach you that whoever destroys a single soul of Israel, Scripture accounts it as if he had destroyed a full world; and whoever saves one soul of Israel, Scripture accounts it as if he had saved a full world. And for the sake of peace among men, that one should not say to his fellow, "My father is greater than yours;" and that heretics should not say, "There are many powers in Heaven." Again, to declare the greatness of the Holy One, blessed be He, for man stamps out many coins with one die, and they are all alike, but the King, the King of kings, the Holy One, blessed be He, stamped each man with the seal of Adam, and not one of them is like his fellow.  Therefore each and every one is obliged to say, "For my sake the world was created." And lest you say, "What do we need with this trouble?" Has it not already been said, "He being a witness, whether he has seen or known, if he does not utter it..." (Leviticus 5:1). And should you say, "What need is there for us to be responsible for the blood of this one?" Surely it is said, "And when the wicked perish, there is joy" (Proverbs 11:10).
[Moreshet translation]

Mishnah, 4:5 -- http://www.on1foot.org/text/mishna-sanhedrin-45

Elaine: What else did you tell [reaches over to slap Jerry] him. [does it

again] The two of you must have had *quite* a little chat!

Jerry: Oh, it wasn't like that! I didn't even mention you. You know, we

were in the garage. You know how garages are. They're conducive to sex

talk. It's a high-testosterone area.

Elaine: Because of all the pistons and the lube jobs?

Jerry: Well, I'm going down to that garage and telling him to stop doing it.

Elaine: Well, wait---wait a second.

Jerry: What?

Elaine: Isn't that a little...rash?

Jerry: No! He stole my move!

Elaine: Yeah, but...*I* like the move.

Jerry: Yeah, but it's like another comedian stealing my material.

Elaine: Well, he doesn't even do it exactly the same. He--he--he uses a

pinch at the end instead of the *swirl*!

Jerry: Oh, yeah. The pinch. *I've* done the pinch. That's not new.

Seinfeld episode: "The Fusille Jerry."  6:19, April 7, 1995: http://www.seinfeldscripts.com/TheFusilliJerry.htm

The bold-italics in the second passage are mine.

The unsung borrowing between writers -- or comedians and garage mechanics -- bothers me not in the least: creatives are a cross-pollinating breed and need not put the kibosh on one another for stealing a few lines of useful material -- or instruction -- now and then.

A couple of things about the literary relationship between Judaism's oral traditions as passed along in the Mishnah and Muhammad's fine choice of passage do bother me:

1. I didn't know the referenced and scholarly factoid setting this post in motion, and should I now apply myself solely to growing from such a curious speck of knowledge my own well architected crystal, what I may put together would not amount to much more than a few grains of wet sand.  Such arcane knowledge not only tells its small stories, it recalls also the oceans of time in which such language play may have represented  both a divinely indulged passtime--English has its own extensive library of fables, saws, and tropes, and I'm sure other languages do as well--as well as a technology inspiring competition for the claim of ownership and mastery.

2. Shall one count on one hand or two the number of lay Netizens likely to take inspiration from such notice?  I can count four at the moment, including at least one implied reader.  This becomes a political question where the all-together-now zeitgeist of the age could do with some large observation of the inspired nature of history-changing creative writing and ecclesiastical expression but is not likely to embrace the same en masse: between golf, NASCAR, football, and the universe of online chit-chat, few know time today as it may once have been experienced by most.

Every Sabbath, I shut down the computer as part of the pact, effectively retreating into Judaism's island in time. 

I should wonder at the effect of not reconnecting on Sunday, Monday, or Tuesday.

What if?

Modernity needs its scholars, and its scholars need monk's time, unbothered, unfettered, continuous, open.

Each may have in discovery and reflection as great a journey today as any three thousand or more years ago.

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Photo-Based Illustration from Communicating Arts

One of my goals has been to upgrade my Adobe Design Suite skills from Photoshop to Illustrator to InDesign to Dreamweaver, and thereby produce new custom or hands-on capability for print and web publications art, design, and layout--I've had the copywriting part pegged for some time.

Design, illustration, layout, and photography software draw both on practical, technical vocabulary development as well as intuition.  While anyone, essentially, may do something with many parts of the Adobe suites, there seems to me, as in music, a difference between topping out with three chords for playing guitar and pushing on to ascend to more capable Segovian heights.

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My First Logo

Client: Communicating Arts.

I've been doing several things related to my core capabilities in editorial and photography services, among them the acquisition of Adobe's Design Suite Premium and the list illustration and print publication (e.g., InDesign) software.  The same, of course, helps me do more for Communicating Arts but brought up to pitch, the same becomes a part of the firm's client services menu.

Every other mother's son enrolls these days in a computer graphics course, and for sure a young mind with a powerful computer loaded up with the Adobe Suite and plug-ins may produce some formidible graphic art, but mid-50's and creatively independent may serve as well.  Awareness, education, and the experience of many things, including the development of other arts count in listening to clients for story and formulating appropriate communicating strategies for it.

For the above, I balanced the "C" o the "A", which is appropriate as art supports communicating, but I would have liked to have done more or developed more options.  Nonetheless, day by day, a little each session, I will expand my technical "vocabulary" and grow technique in Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, and InDesign.

The above started with an Aleph and how to size, rotate, level, position, and color it.

Then I graduated to two letters.

To see it in its place: http://www.communicating-arts.com.

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Facing Facebook: Thoughts on the Global Thought Box

It's just a little past 5 a.m. here, and I am full up already with "computer stuff"--every minute of the day, whether it involves a few seconds of data entry or hours of effort in online communities or networks, has been swallowed up by the environment ported through the global computing network.  It's a great world, I grant you, but it sucks energy from the making of things other than the making of more common media.
 
In addition to the time suck, I'm finding Facebook the boundary buster of all time. 

If one invites one brother or cousin or nephew, one must invite all brothers, cousins, and nephews too to avoid slighting any.

Well just welcome to my life guys, and feel free to come in, rummage around, meet the ex-girlfriend, her fiance, the gal pal, the kids next door when I was twelve years old (we're all bald now, paunchy, and sporting beards or sports cars), and a few nice people from my online adventures.

In the Facebook venue particularly, "A" and "B" post regularly on my "wall" . . .  she's made him president of her old business platform, and I'm sure I'll either see him (them) crash and burn or succeed while I crash and burn (or succeed).

Must we no longer, by social fiat, suffer alone (as we might wish) or relish our triumphs in selfish but private glee?  And where is the past located but in the "people we used to know"?  What are people I used to know (from high school) doing posting their trivia (and getting in some advertising) on my Facebook page?
 
I've quit Facebook once; I'm tempted to do it again--and I could well add to negative magnetic cyberspace LinkedIn and Plaxo for good measure.
 
I want doors I can open and close.
 
I want No. 1 friend followed by a few only minimally less significant others, and I want those attached to an enjoyable circle of which I'm a part.
 
And everyone else--with the exception of the one or two acquaintances that might do me some good--can go to hell. [1]

I may be that bad.

I'm certainly angry, and in its own magical and restful way, the Sabbath helps underscore what has gone wrong, for on the Sabbath . . . I do not compute.

I don't watch television either.

Instead, I read and rest and keep quiet from dawn to dusk. 

It could be said of that experience that it is truly heaven sent.

Sunday: add back music and photography, perhaps some time in the park taking in fresh air, but leave the computer and the Internet alone.

Monday: game over for another five days.  In alphabetical order, here's the lineup, just add ".com" to any:

Allvoices: democratic do-it-yourself (DIY) syndication portal: I'm recently active with it and have posted two photographs on its servers. 

Facebook: this site needs to be called In-Your-Facebook for all the boundary-busting posting it has invited. 

I'm still new to the "portal", but it's got drama plenty: in Facebook's not-my-space-alone kind of space, I'm friends with the ex-girlfriend and her fiance (and I do like them), and she/they and my old "gal pal" (insensible heartache, that one) with myself as a vector are now witness to one another's lives.  The dislocated, possibly relocated fiance of the ex-, a former Fox news guy, has picked up with her old business and its contacts while the gal pal has posted pictures of the new townhome into which she's moving--and that townhome is located in the immediate vicinity.

Watch for Facebook: The Movie or television comedy.

From Seinfeld's comedy, George's panicked complaint applies: "This is not good. World's are colliding! George is getting upset!" [3]

Jim is not getting upset, but Jim may leave Facebook, again.

It looks like I'm not the only one to note this predicament (and here is the benefit side of the Internet):

It’s natural for us to have such partitions.  Our identities are different when we are dealing with our parents, our close friends, our colleagues, our students.  It’s natural and there’s nothing wrong with it.  We need to be able to tell fart jokes to your old high school buddy one moment, be silly with our children the next, then act professional at a meeting with senior management.

This is precisely the protocol that Facebook violates, by having all “friends” be on the same plane, be they friends, parents, work colleagues or nieces. [2]

Then there's this from "Marcellus" at the Seinfeld bulletin-board type blog:

 the worlds colliding theory is quite simple, many people live they're lives in a similar way:
you have your "independant self" (the guy that tells nasty jokes, swears, hangs with the fellas, and is an all around cool guy)

and then you have "relashionship self" (the guy that does nice things for his lady, leaes the seat down, cooks sometimes. still a cool guy, but a little adjusted) [4]

For decades, I've had only to deal with three world's colliding, that of my inner Musician Guy, Writer Guy, and, the hobbyist between the two, Photographer Guy.  They've had a great time wrestling for prominance, and I threw a wrench at them twice: around age 40, I adopted Dancer Guy (AKA Cantina Guy), and then in my earlier 50's, the ex-girlfriend practically fashioned out of loopy and unworked clay a new man: Almost Family Guy.

What happens next?

International Peace and Collaborative Development Network: this Georgetown University-based networking community popped up on my radar in relation to hanging out online in the model-photographer culture of modelmayhem.com (just call me "commart", my standard web handle) and within that site moving from the photography forum to, what else, OA&L fans, "Soapbox"!

This blog, which started out most naively with a look over the English-language news published in Somalia, and the Mayhem had a major hook-up in my head: op-ed heaven for the posterbating posterati, is what it was.

I informed MM's Soapbox; it informed me (tipped me to stories too).

What a time we had, but, you know, such cerebral relationships may, can, and do grow old, and I wanted to up my game and draw closer to the professional international opininng and research community.

At the Georgetown University-based peace and development network, I've become co-administrator of the Israel-Palestine Peace Group.

Now that's game!

Possibly, however, I've already jawed it to death.

Oslo's dead; Oppenheim lives on--and he's gone in for excursions to Kenya and Cameroon.

LinkedIn, Plaxo, and Xing (oh my!): Everybody's connecting with one another, but what they're doing next I haven't a clue. 

The latest for me among the virtual coat-and-tie set has been "Xing", and with it I haven't posted a profile worthy of a glance.  I'm feeling all linked out--and I'm practically linkless by latterday linking-up metrics.

In such spaces, I feel I'm present but absent (I do check on a couple of contacts at LinkedIn, but for me, at least, ain't nothin' happenin' there.  Exception: from time to time, someone throws out a bit of bait, and my firm, Communicating Arts gets its little engine revving (for a couple of hours, maybe a day).

Modelmayhem: The "Mayhem" is an Internet success story.  Prior to its launch, I had been talky on a related site, models.com for a while, and there an Internet acquaintance and friend accepted an invitation to moderate at Mayhem invited me to sign up.  So done and about 8,000 posts later, I can say I've had a truly great conversation with a broad swath of the American and Canadian political communities plus quite a few folks elsewhere on the Big Blue Marble.

Massify: The pickup place for this one: Zoetrope, which I will get to in a moment.  An intrepid and seriously artistically professional (thank God) personality reviewed, sigh, a recent flower shot by moi, and I traced backed (Googled) his name into the online gallery and film communities, and so discovered this young gem of an above- and below-the-line talent network.

I wish I had a few scripts laying around for it.

The best I could do this week was put up a few photographs.

www.massify.com/profiles/jamesoppenheim

Zoetrope: Francis Ford Coppola has billed this child of his child's, Sofia's, (or perhaps it is just his) the "Virtual Film Studio". 

Having grown plain impatient with other writers--hell on earth is reading bad scripts and short stories (all the way through) and feeling bound by various invisible personal and social demons to respond thoughtfully to them--I planted myself in the Photo Wing, where I have over the years produced more than 1,000 reviews with comparatively high recipient-responding scores.  That's a mean feat.  Someone, for being dogged about it, will catch up with the number of reviews submitted, but it's going to be awfully hard getting that number plus the quality score as high together.

At Zoetrope, I've made or left my mark.

I'm still there, virtually, too, and trying to stimulate community discussion (okay: I'm trolling, I admit it). 

In that venue, focused and highly motivated people move forward into realspace amateur and professional lives, as I have, to more or less success; others fiddle for years; and there's a contingent, I feel, of retired whose works or style have frozen in keeping with the essentials of their characters and habits over a lifetime.  Some are very good; some are not: whether or not, they're out of project orientation and working their inventory, which is inevitable with age, or enjoying travel.

Realspace.Hagerstown.apartment.library.study

The library, the accumulation of an "English major's" lifetime plus inherited stock plus new arrivals from Amazon now tops 2,000 volumes, a few of them collectibles, many of them first editions picked up in thrift stores (that's how booksellers make money), and more and more of them arriving at $25 a pop, which is some pasta, but it gives me leave to say that I'm behind on at least $100 worth of reading.

Down the hall: an acoustic guitar and music stand (plus capo, picks, and tuner)--I have always played music like a demon and sung like an angel . . . and have always been invited back to places I have played, many of such for money.

It's shameful sitting here at this computer while that capability dies.

I play old repertoire a few times a day and may get in a solid hour once or twice a week, but that's just simmering an old dish.

Of course, careers in showbiz, especially the music biz, have their trials, and many of them deeply personal, and time may change their character--I'm barely doing jumping jacks these days, much less "Jumpin' Jack Flash."  Still, whatever's left, it's waiting down the hall, and, from there, somewhere out in the community--not here in this magnetic post-modern all-in-the-head environment.

Creative writing?  Photography?  New Stuff of Any Sort?

To communicate really well, and make of this my wisdom for the day, one must stop communicating continuously worldwide about everything all at once.

I'm taking a breather, the longer, the better.

Reference

1. Oppenheim, James S.  Correspondence, revised.  October 15, 2009.

2. Haine, Philip.  "Worlds collide on Facebook."  Steal This Idea, January 29, 2009: http://stealthisidea.com/articles/worlds-collide-on-facebook/

3. Mandel, David.  "The Pool Guy."  Seinfeld, 7:8, November 16, 1995: http://www.seinfeldscripts.com/ThePoolGuy.html

4. Marcellus.  Posting under "Worlds Collide Theory."  Seinfeld Blog, October 18, 2005: http://www.stanthecaddy.com/worlds-collide-theory-theory-that-discuss.html

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They Exist - I Exist

"Lost Line" (070221-a-027)

Whatever I may do with Photoshop (CS4), the basis starts with time in an environment discovering, exploring, or experimenting with subject.  Whether rendered "straight" (with fidelity to The Real) or played with as graphic art and illustration, the process--my process--necessarily starts away from the computer.

In the beginning, I had already a few "arts and letters" habits--I was the kid with his nose in a book and a pretty good feel for the piano--when my oldest brother put a Minolta SRT 100 in my hands.  It was a tool I could use--and thought I would use--outside of the house, whatever other constraints there might be.  The years have proven ironic by locating a great part of the effort in photography at the computer--once again, indoors, in a room, separated from earth, air, wind, and much in the way of both fire and rain.

Even alone, it seems one has to fight to go out!

The print, the tangible one, now seems the end of a long process, part of it embedded with the life, for all who look at photographs know well where the photographers stood, part of it born with accumulated ideas about visual art and the part of one's self that extracts from reality certain scenes at certain moments.

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Momma Done Take My Kodachrome Away

Kodachrome 64: wasn't it beautiful?

I'm printing the above shot today, which represents a great run and, I think, a great tragedy out of photography's Film Era.

Invented by two musicians, Leopold Godowski and Leopold Mannes, the material had been in continuous manufacture by Kodak from 1935 to the summer of 2009 (June 22).  My introduction to it was, in fact, my introduction to photography:Vu-Master stereoscopes of the Grand Canyon.  I have them still today, and they are as breathtaking as they were when I was still in my Dr. Denton's.

The backlit slide may offer a tiny bit more detail in the darks than the scan, but even in digital translation what a lovely rich surface was Kodachrome 64.

Kansas-based Dwayne's Photo, the exclusive U.S. processor of the film has offered to continue processing Kodachrome to December 2010, so the two unexposed rolls at hand here should be fine: but what to shoot?

I am due for a long walk in the countryside.

Reference

Dwayne's Photo: http://www.dwaynesphoto.com/

Wikipedia

"Kodachrome": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodachrome

"Leopold Godowski, Jr.": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopold_Godowsky,_Jr.

"Leopold Mannes": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopold_Mannes

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Foretelling the End of Slavery

Americans have an old saying, long attributed to film mogul Sam Goldwynn: "Don't worry about the War.  It's all over but the shooting."

I've heard it noted or suggested that the outcome of America's Civil War, or as southerners continue to call it, "The War Between the States", was determined on September 17, 1862 fairly much on the landscape pictured above.

General Robert E. Lee's army had crossed the Potomac River into Maryland at Sharpsburg, extended itself across South Mountain, in whose shadow I live, and east to Frederick for provisioning and recruits.  The provisioning turned out a matter of cash trade; the recruiting, although not entirely a flop--the skirmishing on the 17th may have been set off by a Baltimore unit aligned with the south--had not gone so well.  The civilian Yankee reception turned out chilly.

Lee's assembly on the east side of South Mountain had dropped a copy of the battle plans for Sharpsburg, and these picked up by the Army of the Potomac would seem to have helped its general, George B. McClellan, rise to the occasion, something he had been unable to bring himself and his units to do while bivouaced for months in Virginia's tidewater region.

There are many descriptions of the battle online, but all agree on the facts met at the end of the day: 23,000 casualties, a field truce for a sober evening spent cleaning up some and even conversing between opposed officers, and a morning that saw Lee's thoroughly whipped army left to retreat across the Potomac to fight another day.

That other day took place in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania over the summer of the following year from July 1 to 3, and it proved so disastrous in the end that Lee himself apologized personally to those beaten and retreating from the pivotal battle of Little Round Top.  His vanity and ego had far exceded his good sense, and he had knowingly sent his men--his General Pickett's men--up a hill against a better positioned and quite "canny" force--short on ammunition, a fair portion of Union soldiers had lain hidden and held their fire until last moments, which they then followed with ferocious hand-to-hand combat.

Foretold by the dismal day at Antietam and confirmed at Gettysburg, the real and truest end of the Battle of Gettysburg took place at the first reenactment of "Pickett's Charge", Lee's disastrous decision, in 1913:

Back in 1913, just fifty years after the momentous Battle of Gettysburg, 50,000 Confederate and Union veterans returned to camp together on the fields where they had once been locked in mortal combat. The highlight, however, was a reenactment of the infamous Pickett’s Charge, in which more than 3,000 men died in a matter of minutes. But this time, instead of meeting one another with bayonets and artillery fire, the old men threw down their weapons and embraced one another. . . . .

Source: http://blogcritics.org/culture/article/q-whats-so-heartwarming-about-the/

The documentary by Ken Burns, The Civil War, contains black and white photographs or footage of that moment.

There are few uncontested assertions in the 20/20 hindsight that follows in the wake of wars as they become historical artifact for scholars, but of this be certain: Antietam stands signal as a beginning of the end of the southern plantation-based and slaveholding artistocracy that stood with its money behind the shield of "Stats Rats".

States Rights.

A latterday General Grant reminded me that seccession meant assuming ownership of the national funds forwarded for the Louisiana Purchase, essentially an act of theft from even the then loosely related "American People."

I go out to Antietam now, as do many locals, for recreation.  Bikers, hikers, joggers, birdwatchers, and, of course, photographers and others use the park as an outdoor recreation resource, but I believe most remain aware and sensitive to its dead and to its larger meaning in the American psyche and to its message to the world. 

At Antietam, "Out of Many, One" (E Pluribus Unum) and " . . . that all men are created equal" found the seeds for their implementation and their reality.

The warriors, south and north, who had never seen this thing called "a country" had traveled from every corner of it for the one day of battle.

Their children today costume up, study the maps, the journals and come out annually to do it all over again.

I'm sure a park ranger had (or has by now) removed the flags put there by a visitor from (or friend of) the historic "69th Irish Brigade" shortly after my visit--that above is a detail from their monument at Antietam. Here is a related contemporary video from the same.

Source: YouTube poster "IrishJoe3". "Civil War Reenacting With the 69th Irish Brigade." Posted July 13, 2008: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-JcCm2T1ZE

Look carefully, and you may see a multicultural Irish Brigade.

Out of Many, One.

This next photograph is mine, an interpretation of "Bloody Lane", an eroded and sunken farm road from which Confederate soldiers stood off the Union army until a position looking down the lane was obtained and the men firing from the ditch "infilladed".  The monument in the middle ground is that of the 132 Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry.

 

Reference

"Bloody Lane": http://www.88ny.net/Antietam_Bloody_Lane.htm

Wikipedia

"Battle of Antietam": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Antietam

"Battle of Gettysburg": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Gettysburg

"Little Round Top": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Little_Round_Top

"Pickett's Charge": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pickett's_Charge

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Change of Seasons

Artist-intellectual . . . writer, musician, photographer . . . whatever the aspirations, much energy this year has been siphoned to this blog, related online political chit-chat (e.g., the "Israel-Palestine Peace Group", where I am currently co-administrator), and frank re-entry into Jewish life and engagement with holiday and ritual observance.

That guy above, a keystone, one I think intended for the Lyric Opera House in Baltimore and purchased at a Washington Ethical Society communal yard sale for $4, if that.  It has had a devilish life of its own on the balcony and as an object of photography around here. This year, taking advantage of a cup hollowed into his top deck, I planted ivy for a toupee.

The garden has another stone face, a "Ra" come out of the deep wells of the pagan mind.

I acknowledge neither sculpted pieces as gods but both as signal to an interior arrangements in the universal psychology.

Jewish life, pretty much tuned to the northern hemisphere, makes the season of death one of birth and renewal instead. By this day--Yom Kippur has passed--we have let go of some not-so-good things and, one hopes, have embraced other and better things.

Having spent a great deal of time indoors this past year as well as time around the "Islamic Small Wars" and associated conflict talk, I thought it might be time to spend more time away from the computer, balcony, library, and media center--which define my space--and get in a little more of nature and the landscape.

Stealing away may not be as easy as it looks.

Take a healthy curiosity, much imagination, and a good heart and give all the Internet plus time for reading and viewing films (and a little time too for music), and there's not much time left for touring, but for health, this one must go out.

The reward for going out?

Returning.

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Fall Reading from Spring and Summer 2009

Societies that know not the art of reading are doomed.

Nothing contains and transfers culture in its totality quite like a language and its literature.

Unfortunately, so I have reason, Internet time and read-a-book time are not compatible.

The system on which you're reading this moves at light speed.  It produces a constant present of continues subhistorical event although so many events may seem historical the day they make the news, which is the day they have their greatest effect on perception.  Orwell's observation comes to mind: "Oceania was at war with Eurasia; therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia."  Often enough, the news that most sticks in our craw turns out that which we have least patience for investigating: quick, on to the next news item!

Books, on the other had, draw from the dark and deep wells of time, and each contains a part of the universe of its author's mind, itself a reflection of thousands of facets of social reality and, time and again, a conduit as well of nature and the divine.

My list here is a grab bag.

No one has paid me to lock on a certain beam and read through its cyberspace and realspace bookshelves, and yet there themes evident.  For example, having been for decades the most assimilated of Jews, this past year brought me to confront what that means in both a personal and communal sense.  In that I inherited the small library kept by my parents, it took just two steps from my bed to reach for Sholom Aleichem's collection of short stories, The Old Country.  Here is a spoiler of an excerpt, but on as cogent to contemporary politics as may be:

"The next examination," wrote Benjamin in his last letter, "is my Day of Judgment, because if I get less than a ninety-four I shall not be able to get in, and if I can't get in now I shall have to stay over another year.  And who knows that will happen next year?  Maybe next it will be even worse.  What will I do then?  What will happen to me?  Why did I ever have to work so hard, wear myself out like this?  Study so hard, starve day after day, freeze in unheated rooms and spend so many sleepless nights?  I am not the only one to ask these questions.  There are many others like me--Jewish boys--who stayed over from last year and can't get in because their average is not quite high enough.  I don't know what I shall do . . ."

Yisroel the shammes went around in a daze.  He could not understand why Benjamin's letters suddenly should have become so melancholy.  He asked Yarachmiel-Moishe to write to Benjamin and ask him what he meant by "average" and "ninety-four."  In short, he asked Benjamin to write and explain everything, and not to worry, but rely on the Eternal One who could do everything.  And the main thing still was the he should remember he was a Jew, and if the Lord willed, all would be well . . ."

My mother, Molly, arrived at Ellis Island from Poland when she was four years old.  While I was growing up, she taught Yiddish at the Chaim Weizmann School--otherwise a K-12 elementary schools, in Silver Spring, Maryland on Sundays, and I would play the piano for her music classes as well as an annual show.  As a child, one thinks nothing of such an excursion--and Fiddler on the Roof, but of course that's just part of the routine for the People of Many Books as well as the makers of much fine and lively art.

In adulthood, however, and late for me, one may see it: the necessity of leaving Germany and Poland--and for others Russia and Ethiopia and other less welcoming quarters across the skin of the earth--and coming to American to be both one's self as a Jew as well as a person that is "just like everyone else."

With the Middle East continuously in the news, anti-Semitism rampant across the Internet, and conversion movements chipping away at the goodness and normality of just 15 million people, spending a little time with Sholom Aleichem and the characters of the shtettle seemed this winter most appropriate for me.  Now here it is summer, and may you too have long days, especially if you have been remiss and the Jews are your own, for perhaps dwelling briefly in that old country's zeitgeist.

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Aleichem, Sholom.  The Old Country: Collected Stories of Sholom Aleichem.  New York: Crown Publishers, Inc., 1946.

Jewish life post-Holocaust has changed although cause would seem muddied by the horrific depopulation of European and Russian Jewry through mass murder and persecution.  Reading Sholom Aleichem frames not the essential Jewish life, I think, certainly not the life of ancient Judea, but the part defined by aggregaton, anti-Semitism, uncertain status and persecution, and, in too many places too often, unpredictable violence.

If I have decoded AISH's calls for reversion and redemption about right, one might succeed too well at being "just like everyone else."  The Old Country: Collected Stories of Sholom Aleichem and its companion Tevye's Daughters provide for memory and spirit many reminders about being different, not quite like everyone else, not better--oh goodness no--but refracted and resolved through the quintessentials of the Jewish experience.

Gould, Terry.  Murder Without Borders: Dying for the Story in the World's Most Dangerous Places.  Random House Canada, 2009.

"Guillermo Bravo was killed by people who saw they were at risk of losing the goose who laid the golden egg," she said.  "And when I was 'goose' and 'golden egg,' a lot of people in Huila know which goose and which egg." (p. 53).

Every gangster--and all of similar ilk--has a reputation to uphold, and every reporter worth some salt will cover the bombings and the murders.  How deep and how far they may go into the works--personalities, fronts, payoffs, bribes, etc.--has some to do with the demands of conscience, idealism, and love: if there's a practical lesson in Terry Gould's illuminating journey into the lives of whacked journalists, it may be that those who dare to jam up their subject's businesses catch a little extra scrutiny for it.  I'll list the names of writers covered in Murder Without Borders but would note far more interesting the nouns surrounding their deaths:

• Guillermo Bravo Vega, Columbia
• Marlene Garcia-Esperat, Philippines
• Manik Chandra Saha, Bangladesh
• Anna Politskovskaya, Russia
• Valery Ivanov and Alexei Sidorov, Russia
• Khalid W. Hassan, Iraq

Again, those are the names of the journalists.

Caught in the edges of their research nets: presidents (guess which ones and buy the book to see if you were right), wealthy businessmen well known to their communities.  Throughout, Terry Gould claims to have looked for the "what ticks" in the journalist who kept themselves in harm's way, but for those for whom breathing and reporting continue to twine, each chapter as well provides a guide back into the coverage that got a colleague killed.

Any volunteers for biography as a diving (in) platform?

For each of the journalists mentioned, Gould has exhumed the unique "culture of impunity" supporting the murder of journalists.  Here, taken practically at random, is a sample of how the book works:

"In Khulna Division, most of the rice stored in the Mongla godowns was in the hands of three oligarchic Muslim families--Khulna's first modern godfathers.  During the 1950s and 1960s the families had derived their power from collaboration with the Jamaat-e-Islami party that backed the Pakistani regime and had switched sides only when it became apparant that India would enter the War of Liberation on the side of a free Bangladesh.  In the two years after liberation, the families had actually expanded their power, paying off corrupt officials in the struggling new regime of Sheikh Mujib.  The head of one family had taken charge of Khulna's chamber of commerce as well as of the families' underworld operations in Mongla.  He then took full advantage of Khulna's starving citizens by demanding property mortgages as collateral for food.

"To the twenty-year-old Saha, the injustice was so overwhelming that he began to question whether the best way to serve his country was as a scientist . . . ." (p. 123)

Gould's stories, sifting over the lives of dead "journos", probe into the state level countenance and structure of murders carried out to protect the corrupt.  For bloggers and journalists drawing their quills from out of the wells of conflict and criminality--and don't those two go hand-in-hand these days?--they're instructional.

McInerney, Jay.  How It Ended.  New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009.

Back in my teen days, one writerly friend said to me, "In the old tragedies, everyone died.  In the modern ones, everyone has to go on living with the awful thing that has happened."  Place this volume of McInerney short stories in the thoroughly modern category.  Guided by a most practiced hand and told straight, they well illustrate the principle noted--and there's not a clunker in the bunch

Morris, Benny.  1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War.  New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008.

One of Israel's "New Historians", Benny Morris has taken punches from the pundits from Israel's right and left, so one may have confidence that the material exhumed and its presentation answer to no other than Benny Morris and the Almighty.

This is actually a thing dear to me among artists and intellectuals: freedom from other human beings and fidelity only to conscience and to God.  Western academic and institutional life have made such a possibility for quite a few, and here and there, individual affluence too may help bolster this pure modality for the mind and spirit.

While turning over the good, bad, and ugly, Morris, however, notes a paucity of data made available by Arab states: we may not have the whole of their stories, yet, but by gosh the Morris telling keeps the birthing of Israel under a highly resolved microscope.

Naipaul, V. S.  Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey.  New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1981; First Vintage Books Edition, 1982.

Not pretty, this travelogue, but compelling.  Among complaints in the air about militant Islam is the notion that the answer to every problem within Islam is more . . . Islam--more religiosity, more direct reflexive adherence to the instruction manual and its adjuncts.  For everyone.  Everywhere.  Naipaul attacks this from another direction, and that is observation of the vagueness with which other paths--development, contemporary education, planning--may be addressed by Islam's most zealous proponents in Iran, Pakistan, Maylasia, and Indonesia. 

Ondaatje, Michael.  Anil's Ghost.  New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000.

The evil inherent in conflict produces mystery, starting with the appearance of murder that may not look at first glance like murder.  Although the heat of conventional war has dissipated in Sri Lanka's victory over the Tamil, secrets and shadows remain stained on the landscape.  Michael Ondaatje's book works from the earlier phase of the war and with tie-ins to forensic pathology and archeology, dips into the wells of mysteries within mysteries.  Disappearances, murders, veiled threats, and the suddenly altered realities and political landscapes cast by low-intensity conflict make their appearance in this most atmospheric and engaging work.

Potok, Chaim.  My Name is Asher Lev.  New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972. 

I think this one has aged and come from a time more innocent about art and its gifted and rebellious souls.  Unique for presenting an Hassidic art business story as well as a story about cultural cross-fertilization and reformulation, I felt it read much like a son-to-mother family drama about privacy, boundaries, and betrayal.

In today anything and everything goes art and entertainment cultures, the notion of painting a Jewish crucifixion using one's own momma, hidden by interpretation but there in spirit, may as well flit right over to the painted Jewish Madonna known as "Madonna", leaving Chaim Potok's book somewhat adolescent and sweet.

We've become accustomed to far more shocking statements.

Funny thing though: I like it that the book is here, a contribution to a growing Jewish bookshelf, and may some day serve a guest for reading on a wintry day as its depictions of mood and weather as an adversary remain memorable.

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Photography - Printing - "White Spring"

As this blog may suggest, I've been busy with it and all that informs it, which includes each week much in the way of books, films, and web sites: all fuel for that fire in the belly of the artist.  However, I've been making progress in photography too with behind-the-scenes systems upgrades and fair maintenance.

While I remain available for portraiture, weddings, and journalism, I'm turning attention back to the personally crafted fine art print: work on the above on white film substrates and other surfaces will start quite soon.  My printer capability is to 13x19 inches using HP's archival Vivera inks.

I don't know what the print runs will be, but I'm inclined not to produce in runs of, say, 50 but rather between several to a dozen (cataloged and numbered and signed on the back or front as my taste dictates) of what most appeals to me and should to collectors as well.

To contact me for services, inventory, or showing: jso@communicating-arts.com.

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