This Friday, the 24th of Kislev and the eve of Ḥanuka, is Heine’s Hebrew birthday. He was born December 13th, 1797.

I first encountered Heine, in Amos Elon’s survey of German Jewry, The Pity of It All: A Portrait of the German-Jewish Epoch 1743-1933. Here’s why I love him so much. Besides his sharp wit and poetry, Heine railed against patriotic chauvinism. In 1817 at the age of 20 he witnessed the Hep! Hep! riots and a mass burning of “subversive” books  accompanied by speeches against Jews, foreigners, “and cosmopolitans, et al.” Three years later, he penned the following prescient line in his verse tragedy, “Almansor,”:

Dort, wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen.
[Where they burn books, they will ultimately also burn people.]

Heine had keen, almost prophetic insight. Elon writes that he “voiced the first, most acute prophecies about German nationalism and militarism.” Heine is famous for having predicted the dangers of Prussian nationalism manifest in a unified Germany. Living as a fugitive expatriat in France in 1834, “he saw the demons lurking under the surface of German life and warned the French:”

Watch out! I mean well with you and therefore I tell you the bitter truth. You have more to fear from a liberated Germany than from the entire Holy Alliance along with all Croats and Cossacks.

A drama will be enacted in Germany compared to which the French Revolution will seem like a harmless idyll. Christianity restrained the martial ardor of the Germans for a time but it did not destroy it; once the restraining talisman is shattered, savagery will rise again, . . . the mad fury of the berserk, of which Nordic poets sing and speak. . . . The old stony gods will rise from the rubble and rub the thousand-year-old dust from their eyes. Thor with the giant hammer will come forth and smash the gothic domes.

The German thunder. . . rolls slowly at first but it will come. And when you hear it roar, as it has never roared before in the history of the world know that the German thunder has reached it’s target.

(H. Heine. “Zur Geschichte von Religion und Philosphie im Deutschland,” Sämtliche Schriften, vol. 3, p.505.)

His  attitude towards Judaism was highly influenced by the difficulty he and other assimilated intellectual German Jews felt in the face of state oppression. But these sentiments were tempered when he experienced Polish Jewry during a trip in 1821, writing:

Despite the barbaric-looking fur cap on his head and the even more barbaric ideas within, I hold the Polish Jew in much higher regard than many a German Jew with a Bolivar hat on top of his head and Jean Paul inside it. In stark isolation, the character of the Polish Jew has evolved into an integral whole; by breathing the air of tolerance this character has acquired the stamp of freedom. . . . As for me, I prefer the Polish Jew, with his grimy fur, his flea-bitten beard, his odor of garlic, and his wheeling and dealing to many others in all their savings-bond splendor.

(Heine. Sämtliche Schriften, vol. 2, p.69.)

This description mixes criticism with a liberal romantic pride in ethnic Judaism born outside the constraints and pressures of the assimilationist Germany he was familiar with. In contrast, his attitude towards Reform Judaism reflects deep misgivings. Elon notes that Heine was “dubious about fashionable modifications like German [Jewish] prayer books and organ music. They were merely imitative of Christianity and offered only a “new stage set and decor.” The new rabbis (Heine called them souffleurs–prompters) wore a Protestant parson’s ‘white band’ in their collars. Reform Judaism was like mock turtle soup, he thought, ‘turtle soup without the turtle.’ Heine was an early precursor of the legendary Spanish anarchist who asked a Protestant missionary, ‘How can I believe in your religion when I don’t even believe in mine, which is the only true one?’” Like many Jews in his circle he submitted to a Baptism that held meaning only in the burden of shame and bitterness he would carry the remainder of his life. Professional life in Germany was entirely closed off to Jews unless they submitted to a Baptism. Regardless, his tragic humiliation has haunted his name ever since.

Fleeing Germany for freedom in France, Heine was quickly attracted to the early socialism espoused by Henri de Saint-Simon, a practical philosophy that espoused a mix of free love, pantheism, technocracy, and meritocracy — in short, liberal ideals anathema to more conservative and traditional sentiments. Meanwhile, he continued to write romantic poetry that drew its imagery from the well of both German and Jewish mythology.

Undeniably, I feel a kinship here. I am one dreaming being even when the catalog of prideful identities bifurcates and fragments my imagination in so many useless ways. I am navigating my religious, ethnic, and national identity when ethnic patriotism and religious demands make claims on the integrity and authenticity of my being Jewish, and often enough seem to distract from more universal truths.

The pity of it all is that the fathomless tragedy of the Holocaust was not only the mass slaughter of our families and the dissolution of our being. It is also in how Germany butchered and mutilated itself, for we were once Germans even if they refused to accept this, and how much the poorer they are for it. Romantics like Heine pined for acceptance as Jewish Germans, a desire absolutely justified by his ancestors cultural identity rooted in the more than 1500 year long residence amidst the misty woods and vales of Ashkenaz. Ethnic narratives profoundly shaped by Zionist self-reliance and a complete rejection of Germany following the Holocaust, conspire as well to obscure the profoundly deep connections Ashkenaz Jewry had in those lands, cities, and shtetls stolen from our grandparents and great-grandparents. Their presence as neighbors was organically entangled in their culture, but they pretended it wasn’t so, and what a bloody mess they left behind when they ripped us out from inside them.

This coming Sunday 2-5pm, December 13th, I’ll be at the Lorelei Fountain in the Bronx reading Heine’s poem Die Lorelei, drinking a toast in his honor, and lighting the third light of Ḥanuka. Anyone who cares to is welcome to join me.

Portrait of Heine by Gottlieb Gassen, 1828

Die Lorelei

by Heinrich Heine

Wonka’s oblique answer references the first stanza of a poem by Arthur O’Shaughnessy, the “Ode” featured in his collection of poems from 1874, Music and Moonlight. I didn’t understand Wonka’s response to Veruca Salt until I read the entire poem. The meaning provided me a key to understanding the story, who the mysterious character Wonka represents, what his motivations are in finding a child to give his factory to, and what Charlie Bucket really means for him. Read the poem below, and I think you might understand too.

ODE.

WE are the music makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea-breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams;–
World-losers and world-forsakers,
On whom the pale moon gleams:
Yet we are the movers and shakers
Of the world for ever, it seems.

With wonderful deathless ditties
We build up the world’s great cities,
And out of a fabulous story
We fashion an empire’s glory:
One man with a dream, at pleasure,
Shall go forth and conquer a crown;
And three with a new song’s measure
Can trample a kingdom down.

We, in the ages lying
In the buried past of the earth,
Built Nineveh with our sighing,
And Babel itself in our mirth;
And o’erthrew them with prophesying
To the old of the new world’s worth;
For each age is a dream that is dying,
Or one that is coming to birth.

A breath of our inspiration
Is the life of each generation;
A wondrous thing of our dreaming
Unearthly, impossible seeming–
The soldier, the king, and the peasant
Are working together in one,
Till our dream shall become their present,
And their work in the world be done.

They had no vision amazing
Of the goodly house they are raising;
They had no divine foreshowing
Of the land to which they are going:
But on one man’s soul it hath broken,
A light that doth not depart;
And his look, or a word he hath spoken,
Wrought flame in another man’s heart.

And therefore to-day is thrilling
With a past day’s late fulfilling;
And the multitudes are enlisted
In the faith that their fathers resisted,
And, scorning the dream of to-morrow,
Are bringing to pass, as they may,
In the world, for its joy or its sorrow,
The dream that was scorned yesterday.

But we, with our dreaming and singing,
Ceaseless and sorrowless we !
The glory about us clinging
Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing:
O men! it must ever be
That we dwell, in our dreaming and singing,
A little apart from ye.

For we are afar with the dawning
And the suns that are not yet high,
And out of the infinite morning
Intrepid you hear us cry–
How, spite of your human scorning,
Once more God’s future draws nigh,
And already goes forth the warning
That ye of the past must die.

Great hail! we cry to the comers
From the dazzling unknown shore;
Bring us hither your sun and your summers,
And renew our world as of yore;
You shall teach us your song’s new numbers,
And things that we dreamed not before:
Yea, in spite of a dreamer who slumbers,
And a singer who sings no more.

The premise of Roald Dahl’s novel, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964) asks: what would an industrial factory engaged in mass production look like if it was built by a fantasist, dreamer, and romantic in a world dominated by pragmatists, realists, and materialists. In this lonely island, Wonka wonders who will inherit his life’s work and hopes that in the next generation of children there might still be romantics. His sampling of youth via the lottery tickets provides a referendum on Charlie’s generation. The selected tourists to Wonka’s candyland are a fools gallery of technocrats, capitalists, hedonists… and opportunists. The latter is what Wonka makes of Charlie Bucket.

Poverty does not make Charlie a finer candidate than any of the others or even more sympathetic to Wonka. But the moral challenge that Charlie meets in the face of his family’s dire poverty does affect Wonka. For Charlie to give back the stolen everlasting gobstopper means returning to Wonka’s competitor Oscar Slugworth empty handed and to his family with only tales of Oompa-Loompas. Wonka is so resigned to the absence of new romantics in the world that he is willing to give up everything to Slugworth by letting Charlie walk out with the gobstopper. By returning the gobstopper Wonka is enlightened to Charlie’s enduring romantic virtue. Charlie’s elevation of an abstract moral good over an immediate material good justifies his embrace of the young lad as the rightful recipient of his vast empire of imagination.

If these insights were intriguing, note that they don’t apply to either Roald Dahl’s book Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964) nor the screenplay he wrote for the film. Rather, credit is due to David Seltzer, an uncredited Jewish screenwriter who wrote at least 30% of the final script. Seltzer was responsible for all of Wonka’s literary references throughout the film including Wonka’s quotation from O’Shaughnessy’s “Ode” and his quote of Portia from Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice at the end of the film, “So shines a good deed in a naughty world.” ( Seltzer later directed another film representing the tribulations of an alienated romantic youth, Lucas (1986).)

Dahl, furious with the casting of Gene Wilder over Spike Milligan and Seltzer’s focus on Wonka rather than Charlie Bucket, later forbid a film adaptation of his Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator (1972). Focus on Dahl’s anti-Semitism often focuses on his 1983 outburst: “There’s a trait in the Jewish character that does provoke animosity … I mean there is always a reason why anti-anything crops up anywhere; even a stinker like Hitler didn’t just pick on them for no reason.” It’s intriguing to speculate that a decade earlier Dahl’s animus might have been expressed in his frustration with Gene Wilder and David Seltzer’s reinvention of Wonka, the romantic industrialist, as a Magical Jew.

Behold, my Omphalos as digested arithmetically (with some aesthetic treatments) by Jonathan Feinberg’s text cloud application over at wordle.net. Makes for a rather elegant visual poem, no? The wordle engine accepts site URLs, RSS feeds, or giant gobs of text. The latter is what I fed it after copying the source of my ATOM feed and removing all the links, html, and other xml cruft using NoteTab. Hat tip to Jamais Cascio over at Open the Future for sharing the coolness.

The application provides some control over the appearance of the cloud. You can configure how many words appear (I chose 200). There are also settings for the orientation of the words (vertical/horizontal), palette, and font choice.

Some comments. It doesn’t appear as if the wordle engine is context sensitive to words that appear in close proximity to each other; place names like Bond Hill and Baton Rouge are thus not recognized as such. It would also be nice if common words such as “like” and “also” could be filtered out or relegated to the background as glue for more significant nouns like “heierophant” and “cosmogonic”.

Still, looking into the world cloud as a mirror of my writing over the last three years or so is interesting. All those music related terms are surely the result of importing all the posts I made over at mog.com in 2006 and 2007. Should I be as surprised as I am that this blog is so “Jewish”? Probably not.

Joe Lamantia has written more about text clouds here. (A tag cloud with all the tags and catgories of articles posted at the Omphalos appears on the right sidebar.)

Upon moving to Philadelphia in 2007 I bought a copy of Commercial Entertainment Product at the Digital Underground, a music store at 5th and South where I was making friends with local scenesters, and it was there that I probably learned the following year of the Spooky tour with EBN coming to the TLA. I had a mixed experience at the show. I think I got there late but was quickly impressed by EBN’s visuals. They had set up a double screen with a mirror image of the left on the right side, so there was some very cool if simple effects of action in the videos blending towards the center of the two screens. The visuals they provided for Spooky’s set were again very aggressive and I thought kind of childishly masculine, with lots of quick cut edits of men in race cars, spies, guns, and things getting blown up. EBN had made their name for videos that parodied the manipulation and dissemination of propaganda for the first Gulf War through mainstream media. For example, in their video “Syncopated Ordinance Demonstration #1″ (see below) they contrast the war footage of tanks getting bombed, with GI Joe’s cartoon battles, and scantily clad women shooting uzis in gun manufacturer advertisements, and so present the different ways violence on TV is presented in one single grotesque.

EBN’s viduals for dj Spooky’s sets were much more superficial. Without depth, EBN’s art was merely being used to complement the aggressive and masculine tone of Spooky’s presentation of illbient in relation to hip hop.

But I wasn’t dissapointed during EBN’s solo set. I saw videos that were works of art in and of themselves, and not being used to complement some other message. One of them featured a manipulation of Frank Sinatra from a short TV clip that would phase in and out of itself in audio and video. Seeing it made the entire evening worthwhile. Following the show, I searched in vain for anyone who had recorded the show. I wrote to dj Spooky asking for more information. I asked friends who new folks that regularly bootlegged shows at the TLA. Nada. And to make matters worse, I soon learned that EBN disbanded.

Fast forward to 2006. EBN videos were all over the place on youtube, and I did some exploring and found that the EBN project has been revived somewhat. All the members had gone onto other things, mostly in media production work, and EBN frontman Joshua L. Pearson had become a family man. But he had also created an official web page for EBN and posted a few videos, mostly quicktime files from Commercial Entertainment Product, for download. I still couldn’t find the Sinatra video but I was excited that it probably wasn’t lost. Hopefully it would be posted on youtube or somewhere else. At the time, looking for it would have to wait since I was terribly busy in Louisiana doing urban planning following the hurricanes of 2005. I would follow up on this later.

And so when I had some spare time earlier this year I sent out emails to all the EBN project members on whether the group had any plans to make an official release of the old videos on DVD. Greg Deocampo (currently of Mediatronica) was the only one who responded, but wow, what a response. He pointed me to his pesonal project Eclectic Method (EMN) and his portfolio of EMN videos. On a separate page of the EMN project, Greg had all the videos that had been made for the CD album Telecommunication Breakdown in 1995 but hadn’t been released due to there not being enough space on the CD for all those videos. (Only “Electronic Behavior Control System,” “3:7:8,” and “Homicidal Schizophrenic (A Lad Insane)” were released on the data side of the CD.) Mediatronica was also hosting a mirror of the videos on their video distribution site televis.es. Among the flash videos was a copy of the Sinatra video entitled “Frank”; I was overjoyed! (See “Frank” below.) A great interview of Deocampo is available in the episode archive of the public radio program, Some Assembly Required.

Having become a collector of EBN videos, I was dismayed to find that quite a few were no longer accessible on youtube or anywhere else. For years, a site called GNN (Guerilla News Network) had hosted a series of seven EBN videos it called “The Lost Tapes.” A few had surfaced on youtube, and one or two on file sharing networks, but the others had since 2004 when GNN stopped hosting them, become truly lost. Another video, “Banjo Lesson,” was made inaccessible when a youtube user named Nomeus had his account suspended. And so last week, I went looking for Nomeus, and finally caught up with him on his urban exploration site flurbex.com. I’ve since been able to get copies of all the missing files and repost them on youtube. Here’s “Banjo Lesson”:

I’ve reposted Lavie’s poem below.

“Jeer at them” with apologies to William Blake

And did the Rebbe’s feet in recent time
Walk upon Iowa’s fields of green?
And were the illegal Mexicanos
On Iowa’s pleasant pastures screened?

And did the ICE helicoptors
Hover over our well-paid shills?
And was Crown Heights builded here
Among these dark Satanic mills?

Bring me my public relations flack!
Bring me my homeless men of Texas!
Bring me my army of wetbacks!
Lie to my critics that afflict us!

I will not cease from PR fights,
I will stick it to the goyishe “Man”
Till we have built Crown Heights
In Iowa’s green and pleasant land.

Adapted from “And did those feet in ancient time” by William Blake from the preface to his epic poem, Milton: a Poem. In 1916, C. Hubert H. Parry composed music for the poem to be sung as a hymn called “Jerusalem” (thus Lavie’s “Jeer at them”). Wikipedia notes,

The term “dark Satanic mills”, which entered the English language from this poem, most often is interpreted as referring to the early industrial revolution and its destruction of nature.^[1] This view has been linked to the fate of the Albion Flour Mills, which was the first major factory in London, built in 1769 by Matthew Boulton and James Watt. It was powered by Watt’s steam engines, and produced 6,000 bushels of flour a week. The factory could have driven independent traditional millers out of business, but it was destroyed, perhaps deliberately, by fire in 1791. London’s independent millers celebrated with placards reading, “Success to the mills of ALBION but no Albion Mills.” ^[2] Opponents referred to the factory as satanic, and accused its owners of adulterating flour and using cheap imports at the expense of British producers. An illustration of the fire published at the time shows a devil squatting on the building.^[3] The mills were a short distance from Blake’s home.

The Romantic movement which Blake helped invoke began in response to the dehumanization of industrialization, environmental devastation wrought by the intense exploitation of nature, and the loss of culture resulting from the alienation of artisans and craftsmen in the production of goods. The purpose of industrialization is to use efficiencies to lower costs, but often enough, industrialized mass production simply shifts costs away from the consumer and industry and onto the workers and the environment. Resources, both natural and human, are ruthlessly exploited resulting in environmental and social ills that ultimately cost more money to rectify than that incurred in the expense of a more humanely produced consumer good.

Lavie focuses on the exploitation of “illegal workers” and “wetbacks” (terms I’d never use) to describe just one corruption within the Rubashkin enterprise. Rubashkin’s business ultimately aims to satisfy Jewish Americans insatiable and unhealthy appetite for (kosher) meat through the mechanism of industrialized mass production. The exploitation of undocumented workers is one method of lowering the costs to the consumer. Unfortunately, lowering costs doesn’t come without a price — the true costs of environmental and social ills caused by pollution and labor abuse are simply passed onto the health and welfare of society and the environment we depend on.

With all the attention on Rubashkin’s disgusting labor practices, it’s also time to remind folks how Rubashkin has regularly sought to lower standards whether it be in food safety, worker safety, humane treatment of animals, and the pollution of the environment.

Might the Rubashkin travesty revive the nascent Jewish movement that aims to place renewed emphasis on Jewish and humane values in the Kosher Food Industry? You can do your part by supporting hekhsher tzedek.

A turntable spins ye-ye
A darkness sleeps in fits
A cat speaks in Mandarin
and the walls, last forever

A man is hidden under the boards
While the window glares on its curtains
All lines cast suspicions
on the vagueries of nature’s curve

Brightly bit, sound asleep
exposed in so many tears
and projected through with
the light of shining wit
a drama in black and white
and a tragedy in color

The turntable spins ye-ye
the dance party is over
and the cat licks its chops
in the house that emma built

in a sub-basement that the house built
in a different plane, on a scale removed
the memories of the house dream an emma
cast in infrared and animated with love
a panoply of spirits shimmering and laughing
cooking and breathing and weaving a guitar out of old chord

kittens act out Siysphus with a ball of twine
on a mountain of folded laundry
the bicycle room looks upon the garden
and echoes with the ring of rusty belling
a friend is dozed upon the chaise casting spells
of resurrection…

awaken dear emma, awaken
life under rebar and concrete oppression
erodes all homes with moisture and oxygen
the house becomes the garden, the window the way through
the emma the notion, and the idea a means to
awake dear emma, awake
and live in musical tires, with spyrographs drunk in honey
and fungus budding through floorboards, over sweet oceans
in time with all awakening

the house becomes the emma
a smile simply drawn
in parametric models
grown from new math
all the lawns have been banished
and the asphalt all ground up
what becomes is Now is emergent
this house that emma built
a lattice of dreams in habit

One created a kingdom of earth and became suffused with it.
One created a kingdom of one and hid himself in it.
One created a kingdom of love and filled it with two and a challenge to entice them.
One created a kingdom without number and became lost in it.
One created a hole and pondered in it.
One created a throne and a castle but rarely dwelled there.
One created a kingdom of mystery of awe and of wonder, and an ocean of tears all about it.
One created a kingdom of sorrow and filled it with souls of all manner of complexion and humour.

Between the kingdoms, there were seven paths.

One path led around a hill, and its passage could not be described.
One path was covered with water.
One path was hidden under earth and mountain.
One path was painted with letters, sygils, and symbols, mostly forgotten.
One path was so broad it was easily mistaken.
One path was too narrow, and surrounded by demons.
One path led back on itself when walked on facing forward

——-

with apologies to Tolkien, a riff on his “Verse on the Rings of Power”, this was inspired by some thoughts after reading Raphael Patai’s The Hebrew Goddess on the trancendent and imminent aspects of divinity.

One year later and I’m still in Baton Rouge and working with my planning team, now an order of magnitude larger. Plans out the door include the City of Port Allen Annexation Plan and the Comprehensive Coastal Protection and Restoration Master Plan for Louisiana. To reprise, I came down here a year and a half ago at the blind invitation of URS Corporation who I soon learned upon arriving was needing planners, civil engineers, economic development specialists, and the like to fill Parish Recovery Teams in a FEMA division called ESF-14 Long Term Community Recovery. Most of those parish teams were disbanded at the end of April, our reports and projects destined to live on as part of the massive Louisiana Speaks initiative. Andres Duany, Peter Calthorpe, and John Fregonese were all part of this effort too, as was the Coastal Protection and Restoration Master Plan for Louisiana. What once seemed to me to be a disparate collection of independent planning efforts loosely guided along parallel planning paths, has now come together in a somewhat elegant convergence under the direction of important civic groups like the Center for Planning Excellence and the Baton Rouge Area Foundation. Situated as I’ve been in the corporate planning world consulting on various aspect of these massive plans — and now looking back — I’m relieved that there has been so much collaboration where there could have been more fiasco.

What else is new? Rabbi Geoffrey Dennis from Flower Mound, Texas, came last weekend to Baton Rouge and spoke at length introducing a number of now obscure aspects of Judaism (angelology, animism, fantastic/cosmic beings such as the leviathan, behemoth, and ziz, etc.). Right up my darkened alley, I found these talks enlightening and inspirational. Enlightening because I don’t get to hear other scholars talk about these things ever so it helped me make all sorts of connections that I hadn’t before. Inspirational sinceit once again made me dream all romantic like that I could be a rabbi someday too and help resurrect animism as part of a wider environmental worldview within Jewish practice. Who knows when I’ll get to that… but I’m looking.

Molly F. introduced me to a reading circle and we’ve since read Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle and Hemingway’s Movable Feast. Hemingway urges writers hovering above their blank pages to just “write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence you know.” A very cool person I met over Passover in Cincinnati urged me to do so, so I did. And this is what I wrote:

when i write i
dodge words, not knowing
whether i’m
channeling truth or
arranging pawns

when i speak i
walk over cliffs,
over water,
into fire, then
remember and wish
telepathy could permeate
all our hearts

when i act i can’t see
except through mirrors
representing the image of
the likeness of myself,
my eyes imagining
possessing the eyes of others

so i write without walking
and speak with my eyes closed
and act with my heart
prepared for battle

and when a miracle occurs
and i am blinded by truth
and my heart is pierced
and my tongue is splintered like babel,
i am suspended (between worlds)
and take solace in simple presence,
in silence, and in wonder…

but if I’ve learned anything these years:
miracles only blossom
from preparation
and preparation develops
from a choreography
where the dancers
are a multitude of desires
who in patient discipline,
with love and with
humble recognition
of the limits of language and symbol
discover and express the ubiquity of hidden things
pointing the way.

Each of us an intervention
of the Other
each of us a miracle
of presence defying
recognition, pointing the way
improvising without choreography
in fearless moments.

———-

Next we’ll be reading Young Werther by Goethe. I was hoping for Gogol’s Dead Souls but the reading is admittefly very lazy and likes short books!

I’ve been Netflixing more lately and I found a film that really surprised me. My queue is so long and I move through it so slowly so I am clueless where I got this recommendation from to see it. The film is My Son, The Fanatic and it offers a very nuanced vision of assimilation and the politics of ethnic and religious identity for Pakistani Muslims in England. Of course, the story will also resonate with anyone familiar with the embrace and dissonance of cultural influence, personal choices, conformity, and hypcorisy. I loved it.
Molly F. and I saw the entire Firefly series and Serenity. Now I know why so many people were in love with this. I join my voice with theirs in mourning the stupidity in cutting down this young series just as it was hitting its prime.

Speaking of good stories, I finally received my DVD of the complete Nowhere Man series. The dvd box surprised me with some trivia: the producers of this deeply wierd conspiracy serial, are the same producers of the very successful 24 series. 24 is a fun story but I’m a bit afraid that Cheney and his Bushies, look to the 24 scripts to nourish their own destructive agendas. The last pronoic story I’ve ever seen was the brilliant, They Might be Giants film from 1974. Julia S. saw tht with me and we both enjoyed it immensely.
Speaking of my friend Julia S., we took a trip to the Festival Internationale in Lafayette a few weeks ago. There I saw one of the best live shows in my life — that of a group from Guinea called Ba Cissoko. I pray someone recorded it and that I can hear it again since I missed the first 30 minutes. I made some 30 second recording with my cell phone I hope to have on youtube eventually.

14 kinds of people

1. those mistaken for bigfoot
2. those who are asleep
3. government workers
4. nameless ones
5. those who exist only in dreams
6. women with cats
7. seafaring ones
8. those who are crying that cannot be consoled
9. actors
10. dead ancestors
11. babies
12. others
13. cyborgs, or drivers of cars
14. those that are already driven to madness

Jennifer Wickboldt wrote the poem above, one of many available sprawled over old tripod user pages. Friday evening I had a long conversation with her. Later today she is being cremated. I can still see her sitting in my apartment, the apartment she used to live in before I came here to Baton Rouge. She was asking me about passover and mezuzahs. And she liked the band Red House Painters. She was very cute and had a boyfriend who loved her very much, many friends, and a dog named Latte. She was a magic person, so of course, she was constantly assaulted by demons who feast on vivacious creative people. Sunday morning they got their wish, convincing her to do herself in. She traded her future away for salvation from a troubled past. I am so sorry.

As my father says, tragedies like these remind us to hold each other tight and never take for granted the time we have with each other.