Throwing in the Towel

I'm throwing in the towel. Literally. I've had enough. In fact, last night my son and I threw in the towels and took baskets of wet laundry to a Norwalk laundromat to dry the clothes. After over 3 years of steady service for the two apartments in my building (me and the downstairs neighbors), the LG dryer is giving up the ghost. For weeks the dry function has performed worse and worse. I tinkered with the settings to try the manual setting and that worked for a while, but no longer.

I remember how we managed wet laundry growing up in Texas 50 years ago -- a clothesline and clothes pins! The heat and dry air did just fine. But in Connecticut, that approach doesn't work so well, especially without a backyard with plenty of sunshine access.

In a fit of creative, multi-track problem solving, my son and I went to the laundromat. To our pleasure 32 minutes of drying in two machines (a quarter for eight minutes) did the trick. I had forgot the simple pleasure of fresh, dry laundry. At the same time, I called a well-regarded local repair service to pay a house call and try to find the problem—most likely a faulty sensor. The LG spins fine, it just doesn't generate heat. If it can be fixed, great, if not, then it's back to the laundromat we go.

I'd like a simple clothesline, but that'll have to wait for global warming to accelerate.

Mom, the War Years

In going through old family photos recently, I found a a profile about my late mother that looks like it appeared in the late 1940s in the McAllen Monitor or Mission Times, both papers in far South Texas, where my mother grew up. Here's this look at the family history:

She Talks Army, Navy Lingo

Shirley Lissner admits she isn't bi-lingual. But she can converse in the languages of two services—the Army and Navy.

For Shirley, now with the Mission Citrus Growers Union, is a veteran of both branches—an experience few men and far fewer women can lay claim to.

Firs she joined the WAACS. After that service was incorporated into the Regular Army, she resigned, then enlisted in the Navy's WAVES a year later.

Shirley, a native of San Antonio, came here with her family in 1926. Previously they'd lived in Gonzales, "but I still can't speak Spanish," she complained.

Joining the WAACS, says Shirley, seemed an interesting thing to do back in 1942, so she signed up and was sent to Nacogdoches, Texas, for basic training.

"Later, at Camp Polk, La., I got mixed up with a company going overseas," Shirley laughed, "and when I found out where we were going I got out in a hurry. You had a choice then."

The Brooklyn Port of Embarkation was Shirley's next base. She worked there as a cryptographer operating, encoding and decoding messages.

"Forget everything you know; they told me when I left there," Shirley commented. "I can't tell you much about my work because I did just that—forgot it."

Eight months after arriving in Brooklyn, or in 1943, the WACS went into the Regular Army, so Shirley left them. "I'd been through the first sergeants school at Des Moines but they discharged me as a Pfc anyway," quipped Shirley.

During the next year Shirley worked at Moore Field as a teletype operator. Then—"it was the uniform, I guess," Shirley said -- she enlisted in the WAVES in October, 1944.

Now quite experienced in communications, she was assigned to the Navy's communications office in Washington, D.C.

"Our office was down the hall from the then Secretary of the Navy, [James] Forrestal," Shirley remembered. "I was there six months before I started saluting him; I didn't know who he was."

Discharged in March, 1946, Shirley fared better in rank with her second service, having been made a T 3/C."And I liked navy blue better than O.D., too," she commented.

Shirley worked in San Antonio a year before returning here, where she's a secretary with the Mission Citrus Growers Union.

She isn't entertaining any ideas just now about any more enlistments. But . . . if another war comes . .  there's always the Air Force, Shirley's thoughts might be as she speculatively scans the sky!

This Is Not a Picture of Jesus. It May Not Even Be a Picture.

ACLU and the Freedom From Religion Foundation are all aflutter about an alleged painting of Jesus hanging in Jackson Middle School in Ohio. The painting was donated by students and has been quietly corrupting secular values since 1947, according to this story.

The constitutional arguments and response from the Liberty Institute, defending the school district, are predictable. What would not be predictable would be my suggestion for a response from the school district.

The argument would be: This is not a picture of Jesus. It is a picture of President Obama. After all, Obama's a calm, forward-looking, confidence-inspiring person who inspires messianic hopes among some acolytes, such as Newsweek and Foreign Policy.  Or it could be a picture of Jesús, a hardworking undocumented proletarian, struggling to survive in the fascist hellhole that is Amerikkka. It could be a chair. This could be a painting of ANYTHING. That's the beauty of post-modernist theory.

The argument would be based on the firm, tested concepts of post-modernist literary theory. Essentially, art of any kind is simply a starting "text" that the subjective individual interprets according to his own frameworks as colored by race, gender, economic inequality or assorted victimological modalities. Objectivity does not exist -- it's a myth of western rational imperialist hegemonistic oppression. But don't take my word for it! This explains the issue nicely, and here's a key excerpt:

Postmodernism takes the relativistic position that there is no absolute truth or objective reality, that what we experience as reality is a social construct (solely constructed by individual human minds), that it consists only of our interpretations of what the world means to us individually, and that individual responses to a given cultural product comprise the whole reality of that product.

Since individual responses tend to differ from one another and change over time, postmodernist thought is skeptical of explanations that claim to be valid for all human groups, cultures, or times. Instead, it encourages the exploration and comparison of individuals' subjective responses to a given poem, painting, or other cultural product. It examines the role that language, power, and motivation play in the formation of ideas and beliefs.

This sets up a clear defense for the school, if it wants to take a bracingly non-traditional approach and set aside generations of assumed meaning for the painting. Simply argue this is not actually a picture of Jesus, but a text/representation open to multiple, conflicting meanings based on the frames employed by the subjective viewer. Surely the ACLU and Freed From Religion Foundation understand the critical role of free enquiry and the value of post-modernism.

Getting Quoted by Match.com

One of the fun aspects of publishing the book has been leveraging it into some press exposure, either through radio interviews or contributions to articles. Here's an article, "Stop Dating the Wrong Person," that quoted me, part of a longer comment. The author did a good job pulling the substance out of what I told her without including some of the more gruesome details of my adventures dating women that were attractive but just not good matches for me. Well, this is for the Match.com magazine, so talking about matches makes sense.

Here's the relevant part:

How to break the habit: Resist the urge to “fix” another person

Having an “ah-ha” moment of clarity can strike at any time, but you can speed up the process by acknowledging your issue and taking steps to change things going forward. “I often went 
for needy, sexy women who were struggling with emotional, family or financial issues, and then I’d set
 myself up as a kind of ‘white knight’ who could ‘solve’ all their problems,” says author Van Wallach. “The relationship would revolve around the
woman’s issues… rather than an equal partnership.” After dating a woman with massive, relationship-dominating issues (including an ailing parent and job difficulties), Wallach finally decided that enough was enough. He’s now in a more balanced relationship that’s been going strong for almost five years.

Django at 40 is a Lonely Hunter

Think about these for movie concepts: introduce an energetic, driven black man to a white man from another culture who literally speaks another language. That's one idea from Django Unchained from Quentin Tarantino.

Then take this idea: a budding teenage girl struggles to navigate adolescence, family conflict and economic troubles in a depressed era. That's one idea from This is 40 from Judd Apatow.

Now, what if you smashed the two ideas together in one epic book that became a movie -- with an amazing performance by an actor who, 45 years later, could win an Oscar nomination for his brilliant work in Argo?

The book and movie in question is The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, published in 1940 when author Carson McCullers was only 23 years old. It tells the story deaf-mute John Singer and his impact on people in a Southern mill town in the late 1930s. One of them is a black doctor, Dr. Benedict Copeland, who must deal with the impact of segregation and racial oppression. The book completely sweeps up the layers of cultures and social ferment of its time and greatly impressed me through its artistry and McCullers' vision. It's one book I'd nominate for the mythical Great American Novel.

In the Django comparison, Singer would be Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz), the dentist-bounty hunter who frees and befriends Django (Jamie Foxx). Singer speaks in sign language and gestures; Schultz speaks German and English. Django's opposite would be Dr. Copeland, who stayed with his own values in the book and movie. Suspicious of Singer at first, the men form a friendship.

Released in 1968, the movie version of Lonely Hunter had a stellar cast. Canadian actor Percy Rodriguez played Dr. Copeland with stubbornness and compassion. Alan Arkin, who in his mid-30s, played Singer and was nominated for an Oscar for Best Actor in a role where he did not speak a single word, yet delivered a deeply empathetic and varied performance. He didn't win the Oscar, but he won for Best Supporting Actor for 2005's Little Miss Sunshine. Now, four decades later, he has his fourth Oscar nomination for his turn as film mogul Lester Siegel in Argo.

Not to stretch the analogy too far, Lonely Hunter explored territory later picked up in Django, of men working together in a relentlessly hostile society.

This is 40 connects to the family and economic issues of Lonely Hunter. Teen Mick Kelly was played by Sondra Locke, who won a Best Supporting Actress nomination. She deals with a bitter mother and a disabled father, plus bratty younger brothers. She dreams of better things -- culture, romance -- but financial struggles drive her in another direction. The book is much grimmer than the movie, as I recall, on Mick's prospects. Her opposite number in This is 40 would be Sadie, the 13-year-old daughter of the main characters, played by Maude Apatow.

Granted, the pampered life of Los Angeles is a long way from Georgia in the 1930s (1960s in the movie) but the dynamics of family discord and adolescent anger are similar. While the outside packaging changes, the present of life remains about the same from generation to generation. We're all lonely hunters.

My Life as a Watch Man

Photos of me from 30 years ago show a young man dressed about as I am now — blue jeans, button-down cotton shirt with the sleeves rolled up. The glasses changed from the aviator style to something more classical (less 1980s, that is) and I augmented the thinning hair with beards and goatees until I finally settled on my current look a decade ago. So while I've never been a fashionista,  a close observer would notice some attention to detail, within the rigid limits of straight male style.

Here's an example.

Coming home on the train yesterday, I noticed a man with a tie that caught my attention. Its swirls and blue-green tones looked exactly like something I would ear. He had a grizzled look, prep-school baseball cap turned backwards, probably a coach or aging jock, approximately my age. We stood by the door, both leaving at the same station. I decided to break through the thick silence among suburban male commuters and remarked, "I really like that tie," I told him, as a third man, whom I recognized from the regular slog to New York, looked on.

"Yeah, it's a Jerry Garcia tie," he said.

That explained the magnetic attraction — I have two Jerry Garcia ties, beloved gifts from my marriage, and they are essential to my personal style on those rare occasions when I wear a tie to the office.

"I've got two of them myself," I said. "I love the design." After at least 15 years of steady use, they still look great.

The man standing with us chimed in with a comment about the Grateful Dead. Suddenly, we three strangers had a bond to tie us together. The first man, Grizzled Jock, had met Garcia several times while a college student.

"He keeps making money even after he died," he mused.

The doors opened and we went our separate ways. The talk inspired a New Year's resolution — wear more ties. I have a lifetime collection, enough to keep me in fashion in the most formal of work environments. My closet includes two orange-and-black ties, purchased at the Princeton University Store, required wear for any alumni events I attend (as well as the occasional corporate event at the Harvard Club in New York). I've got plenty of plain blue, yellow and pink shirts perfectly ready to be worn with my black and dark-blue khakis and brightened with ties from J. Garcia and other purveyors of men's style, often with an Art Deco motif.

Besides ties, the urge for ornamentation exists primarily on my right wrist. I've always enjoyed watches. As a teen I gravitated to the trendiest 70s look with leather bands sporting multiple buckles. When I graduated from college, my father gave me an inscribed TAG Heuer watch with both digital and analog displays. It constantly broke down and multiple repairs couldn't keep it running. I soldiered along with forgettable watches until I experienced a time-keeping epiphany at a flea market on New York's Upper West Side in the late 1980s. A watch dealer displayed an incredible Art Deco watch with a rectangular face and a sleek gold-toned band. I had to have it and I bought it immediately. For decades it was THE classiest watch I had, the perfect detail for swanky nights on the town and serious job interviews. This was nicknamed the Deco watch.

My stable of watches grew over the years. Each purchase remains a sharply etched memory. As a student of Russian history, I jumped at the opportunity to buy Russian watches newly available in the West after Mikhail Gorbachev became the last General Secretary of the USSR. in September 1989, while on my honeymoon in Italy, I bought a Raketa watch with an intriguing design; it included an adjustable monthly calendar, beginning in 1981 and concluding in the inconceivably distant year of 1999. Its blue face and cyrillic lettering gave it an exotic air. This is the Honeymoon watch.

In the 1990s, I inherited a Greenwood watch — thick square crystal, chunky metal-link band, from my friend Rena Frank,. whom I had known since 1980 through Project Dorot, which connects the Jewish elderly with visiting volunteers. Before she died in 1994, Rena, a Berlin native who escaped to London in 1938 and then on to New York in 1952, gave me the watch, which belonged to her brother. The watch had deep meaning as it came from this treasured friendship, and its connection to a vanished European world.  I call it the Rena watch.

Over a decade later, at a display stand at the long-vanished International Pavilion at the corner of 42nd Street and 5th Avenue, I celebrated the start of a new job by buying two more Russian watches. One had a dark-green face and the name "Kommandirsky," in script cyrillic letters. The other, truly awesome, piece was the Poljot brand (Russian for "Flight") watch. This had stopwatch functions and remains the thickest watch I'd ever seen, so massive and unyielding I nicknamed it the Soviet Bloc watch.

For years, these watches satisfied my fashion needs. They ranged from the understated and elegant Gruen and Greenwood to the show-stopping novelty of the three Russian watches. They became the signature of my personal style, to the extent a man can break out of the the dictates of officewear. I'm content to follow the khaki and button-down look. Indeed, I joke that I could pull clothes out of my closet blindfolded and they would inevitably go together. And if I happened to pull down a plain blue shirt, then any tie would also look good.

Around the World with Bob Marley

The past two days I had the pleasure of watching Marley, a 2 ½ hour documentary about Bob Marley. I was familiar with his music and influence, and his lamentable death at the age of 36 from melanoma. But I didn’t know the total history and this documentary covers everything so well and so thoroughly that I will listen to Marley’s music and look for his worldwide influence afresh now.

Marley brims with concert and interview footage of the man, interviews with his children, wives/lovers and band members, and even Jamaican political leader Edward Seaga. This article is an exhaustive look at the movie’s content. What did I learn? Well, everything:

• His father, Norval Sinclair Marley, was white and born in Jamaica in 1885. Norval’s mother, Ellen Broomfield, was Syrian Jewish. Norval served in World War I and was not a factor in Marley’s life, although the Marley’s family businesses appear in a key scene in the documentary.
• Marley lived in Wilmington, Delaware, where his mother had immigrated, and he worked on a Chrysler assembly line.
• Marley’s shows primarily attracted white audiences in the U.S. One music promoter wanted him to be the opening act for the Commodores as the only way to draw a crowd.
• Marley was an intense performer and never phoned in a gig, based on the footage. He was always on, always giving it his all.
• Despite an estate valued at $30 million, Marley refused to write a will, owing to his Rastafarian beliefs. The movie lightly touches, in a humorous way, on Marley's lack of estate planning. In reality, families members have been waging bitter court fights over trademarks and business rights for the past 30 years, a tragic aftermath that would make a fascinating documentary on its own, the temporal flip side of love and peace.

Marley came close to being assassinated in 1976 during political turmoil in Jamaica. He was scheduled to play at the Smile Jamaica concert, and, despite some wounds, he did indeed play. The film captures all the electricity and emotion of the concert. I was particularly struck by Marley bringing on stage the two main political rivals in the country, Michael Manley and Edward Seaga, and he embraced both of them in a plea for unity and reconciliation. The moment showed Marley as a man who truly put his philosophy ahead of politics.

The scene made me think – could there be a U.S. performer or personality with the vision, message and respect who could make that kind of gesture? Who could bring political rivals together for a heart-felt moment? Bruce Springsteen comes to mind as a possibility. Oprah Winfrey? Both seem too politically obvious and not likely to embrace somebody they see as afflicted with GOP cooties. After much thinking, the one performer I can see uniting different schools of thought would be the Man in Black, Johnny Cash. His was a hard-bitten, compassionate message from a man who had seen the dark sides of life. He could appeal to anybody. But, unfortunately, he’s dead. Merle Haggard's got the world view and he's still alive, but I can't see him with national appeal. B.B. King? An icon of the blues, world respected, but not exactly a philosopher king.

The film included a striking bonus feature about the impact of Marley’s music worldwide. It’s one thing to say the music still lives, but it’s quite another to concretely show people using the music as the basis of social and political action. That’s what Marley does, brilliantly. Segments from Jamaica, Brazil, Japan, Tibet, India, Kenya and, most tellingly, Tunisia at the start of the Arab Spring, show the power of Marley to get people moving. The range of social situations is amazing, from the violence and poverty of Brazil to the sterile, uneasy prosperity of Japan. In the Tunisia segment, protesters daub song titles on walls and demand their civil rights and free speech with the colors of Jamaica prominent in demonstrations.

What prophet could ask for more?

Giants in Their Days, and Ours

A few weeks ago, I learned of the passing of James Miller of Mission, Texas, the father of my best friend growing up and an anchor of Mission’s civic life since the early 1950s. He was 93 years old.

This news came the day after I finished reading the book Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption by Laura Hillenbrand, about the extraordinary life of Louis Zamperini, an Olympic runner who survived a Pacific Ocean plane crash and horrific treatment by the Japanese as a prisoner of war, and then a post-war descent into alcoholism. He not only survived but underwent a moral regeneration and continues to enjoy life daily – to keep up with him, just visit his website.

The book and the passing will forever link James Miller and Louis Zamperini in my mind. They grew up in the 1920s and 30s, served their nation ably, took what life dished out and bounced back up. I know other men like them, in their late 80s and early 90s now, who returned from the Pacific and Europe to build families and businesses, contribute to their communities, enjoy their grandchildren and appreciate every day of life.

They’re modest about what they do. One man I know, Eric Leiseroff, had the last bar mitzvah in Dresden, Germany in 1938, just before Kristalnacht. He and his mother left Germany on what might have been the last train out to Portugal in mid-June 1941, arriving in New York after the Germans invaded the USSR. Three years later, Leiseroff returned to Germany in the US Army, where his native German speaking skills made him a valuable intelligence GI. After V-E Day, he joined a team hunting down and interrogating members of the SS. After declining an offer to remain in Germany under cover as a spy, he returned to the US, found a job as a paper salesman that he held for 57 years and married. He and his wife just celebrated their 62nd anniversary.

“I had a boring life,” he says. And yet for members of my generation, an incredible one.

I last saw Mr. Miller and his wife Mrs. Miller (Esther by first name, but they were ALWAYS Mr. and Mrs. Miller to me) when I returned to Mission for my 35^th high school reunion on June 2011. A trip to the Millers’ home always highlighted my journey to the past. I usually took a spin through Mr. Miller’s office, where pride of place went to a portrait of him as a Coast Guard officer in World War II. We’d drink tea, nibble on cookies, catch up on the news of the sprawling Miller family, of five children and enough grandchildren and great-grandchildren to populate a small village. My adventures in the Northeast always interested and amused the Millers. During one visit, I said, “I hope you don’t mind that I put a ‘Hillary for President 2008’ bumper sticker on your car,” I joked, and they responded with mock indignation. We’d take photos, say good-bye and I’d leave, always admiring the Texas sunlight filtering through the sturdy mesquite trees in the front yard.

For all their modesty, these are tough old guys, survivors of times and challenges I can barely imagine. No human should endure what Louis Zamperini did, years of abuse followed by years of self-destruction with liquor. How he survived and how he ultimately—and abruptly—conquered his demons was so mesmerizing that Unbroken renewed my often-flagging faith in the power of reading books. The older I get, the more I skate through books, struggling to emotionally connect with either novels or non-fiction. Especially in novels, I often can barely care about the characters. The characters don’t matter, the books’ style and trendiness count for more than coherence or basic readability (perhaps I should take more care in my reading selections). But Hillenbrand writes with total clarity. Every sentence makes sense; every sentence relentlessly propels the story ahead with Dickensian cliffhangers that dared me to not immediately read the next chapter.

Now I’ll try to put the reading lessons to work on a real writing project. I’m signed up November’s National Novel Writing Month event. I’m already way behind – easy rationalizations include weather, no power, other work commitments, need some more excuses? – but I’ve got ideas in my head and I just need to push them through my fingers. If Laura Hillenbrand, who suffers from a severe case of chronic fatigue syndrome, can writer an incredible book about Louis Zamperini, who beat everything that King Neptune and the Japanese Empire could throw at him and keeps chugging along in his mid-90s, then I can surely rouse myself to pound out some pages. These old guys knew how to keep going, maybe I can draw some inspiration from their examples.

A Launch Party for "Narco Estado"

Tuen Voeten goes where angels fear to tred. Few willingly plunge into African war zones or the Mexican drug chaos except souls equipped with a camera and very steady nerves. Voeten, a Dutch photojournalist, follows the action and returns with portfolios that give witness to the terror and humanity found far from his European home.

I met Voeten at a launch event for his latest book, Narco Estado, held at Ye Olde Carlton Arms Hotel in New York. Published by Lannoo Publishers in Belgium, the book contains Voeten’s photos taken during 2009-2011, when drug killings rocketed in Ciudad Juarez, the site of many of the photos, along with the cities of Culiacan and Monterrey. I read daily about the situation in Mexico at Borderland Beat and Frontera List (where I learned of the launch event), and Voeten gives visual shape to the horrific stories. Bodies lie sprawled in cars, on streets, in fields, in buildings, neighbors silently watch the police on the scene, a man with a vision cares for the insane in a desert compound, prostitutes wait for customers on dark and empty streets. With a journalist’s care for documentation, Voeten provides details on the time, location and context of each photo. His website describes the book this way:

From 2009 till 2011, Voeten focused on the drug related violence that is destabilizing Mexico. He visited the epicenter of the violence, Ciudad Juarez, as well as other hot spots such as Culiacan and Michoacan. With introductory essays by El Paso based anthropologist Howard Campbell as well as Culiacan based writer Javier Valdez Cardenas, this hard hitting photobook tries to explains why the drug violence in Mexico can no longer be ignored as a fringe criminal problem, since it is eroding the very fundaments of our human civilization.

Narco Estado is the latest result of a career spent on the edges of civilization. Other projects include. What’s next, I asked him? For now, he’s finishing up his dissertation on Mexican drug violence at a university in Belgium.

The location for the launch party also added to the atmosphere. Over the decades I’ve visited many New York hotels, from the massive Marriott Marquis and Waldorf=Astoria to smaller, sleeker hotels like the W. But I’ve never set foot in a raffish place like the Carlton Arms. Indeed, I never knew it existed until I attended the Voeten event.

Located at non-trendy 160 E. 25^th Street, the Carlton is easy to miss from street level; you ring an bell and ascend a flight of stairs to reach it. And then  . . . the place feels like the setting for a Graham Greene novel, or a throwback to New York in the 1930s. Art decorates the lobby and rooms, overstuffed chairs encourage lounging, the rumpled and effective staff completes the atmosphere. The place has art openings and other events and I’ll definitely keep my eyes open for whatever comes up next. It felt like my kind of place in the city of polished megaliths, the scampering marsupial among the mastodons of lodging.

Ritual and Violation Through the Ages

Here's something new at Times of Israel, touching on issues of ritual and Jewish practice covered in the book. It starts,

The new 9-ll attack in Libya and its aftermath sickened me with images of the death of Ambassador Christopher Stevens and reports of the violation of his body, dragged through the streets of Benghazi. Seeing the bloody handprints of Americans on a pillar reminded me of the photo from the 2000 lynching of two IDF reservists in Ramallah, as Aziz Salha waved his blood-drenched hands in triumph after the killings, which also involved the reservists’s bodies being dragged through the streets. 

Separated by almost 12 years but united by the barbarism of the perpetrators, these two acts coincide with thoughts I’ve had lately on death, the rituals of mourning and the deep anguish caused when those rituals are violated. 

With Yom Kippur passed, with its reflections on life and death, I’m struggling to find a narrative thread connecting horrific media images. They contrast violently with my traditional sense of treating the dead.