violence = other people

This just in from Slate: “The LAT notes that many are losing faith in the country's politicians who are seen as more concerned with their own power instead of working together to end the violence.”

I guess it took the seasoned journalists of the Los Angeles press corps to make that brilliant deduction. Hey, Marge, did ya hear the news? Them politicians are concerned about their own power. Now don’t that beat all.

The real surprise is that the esteemed members of the Fifth Estate were not talking about the dedicated members of Congress engaged in bipartisan efforts to 'support our troops', 'quell sectarian violence', 'regain control of ethnic enclaves', 'reinstate the rule of law', 'round up the terrorists', and any other euphemism for war you can think of.

No, this was about Kenya. When they kill people, it's violence and chaos. When we kill people, it's called restoring order.

A Peasant Feast

New York City in midwinter is a convergence of human and material riches, audacity, industry, intelligence, and imagination. We are all immigrants, and we all work for a living and care about the same things, so our many differences diminish the more we look each other in the eye and tell the truth.

The occasion of our visit was Alexandra's BFA thesis show, and she was kind enough to invite us. Gven and I were looking forward to it, to say the least, and it gave us the excuse we needed to break out of our midwestern rut, take off and visit Jessi on his own turf, see where he lives, where he works, what kind of folks he hangs with. Long story short, we liked what we saw, and it was a very, very good trip.

We went directly to Hotel 17, emerging from the Lincoln Tunnel onto 34th Street and across Manhattan to 2nd Avenue, then a few blocks south to 17th Street. Our room on the seventh floor had a nice view facing the street, half a block from Stuyvesant Square, a pretty little park facing the brown stone St. George's Episcopal Church and the red brick Friends Meetinghouse and Seminary, standing side-by-side next to a statue of Peter Stuyvesant and his wooden leg.

It was a short walk for Jessi to the hotel after work, giving us just enough time to shower and get dressed. The Tisch School of the Arts was another short walk down Broadway, and we took the elevator to the eighth floor, where it opened immediately to Alexandra's photos in the hallway with Alex and her family standing in front of them.

Introductions all around: her parents Rhonda and Dennis, her sister Caroline, her aunt and uncle Caroline and Gary, her other aunt and uncle Jean and John, their family friends the Tortorellos. We talked about our day; we looked at photographs up and down the hall; we talked about our kids, about photos, about finishing college, and how nice Alexandra looked dressed up; we talked about our various Ohio connections (such as Gary playing football on the 1968 national champion team, Go Bucks!), about the more shocking photos on the far end of the hall, and the fact that there was wine in a room down the hall.

When it was time to go, we all congregated on the sidewalk and began the trek a few blocks south to McDougall Street for dinner. Our entourage stretched out a block or more, with Dennis leading the way and several clusters of people walking along in the windy evening. Move over, Chicago, the Hawk is out tonight. Cafe Jacqueline was warm, charming, quiet, and our group sat at a long table that was conducive to conversation.

What can I say? Everything about it was delightful. Naturally there was lots of talk about food and cooking and what was on the menu. We ordered dinner, revealing our true characters to one another, and enjoyed a beautiful meal. A few moments stand out in particular: hearing about Caroline's experiences at Tufts and plans for her junior year in Rome; understanding how Alexandra's changing majors from photography to anthropology to linguistics and back to photo makes total sense as a liberal arts journey culminating in her show, entitled "Field Studies"; and Dennis's toast to his daughter's completion of four years of college and ten years of horses, so now he gets a well-deserved break.

After dinner we walked to their cars, and the family group headed home to Connecticut, while Jessi and Alexandra took Gven and me out for coffee and dessert at Veniero, a little cafe on 1st Avenue that has some special history for them. They took the subway back to Brooklyn, and we went back to our hotel to collapse happily and sleep.



We slept late on Friday and took a leisurely walk through the East Village en route to breakfast with Jessi and Alex. We stopped at a yarn shop, a bicycle shop, and a community garden. We had a great breakfast together at The Sidewalk on Avenue A, then walked with Alex to the station so she could take the train to Connecticut to spend the day with her family.

Jessi and Gven and I spent the rest the afternoon at the Metropolitan Museum, just wandering, looking, absorbing. I was most taken by a couple of small pieces by Paul Klee and Max Ernst, and Magritte always turns my head around. It was a little exhausting, so we went for a cup of tea and a bagel, restored ourselves, and headed for Free Friday at the Museum of Modern Art in midtown.



Different crowd with different energy, totally different architecture, not as overwhelming as the vast embarrassment of riches that is the Met, the MoMA was very busy yet user-friendly. An Alexander Calder mobile kind of hypnotized me with its qigong quality, and I looked at Warhol's huge Mao for a long time. There is also an amazing shark in formaldehyde called "The Physical Impossibility of the Mind Conceiving Death" or something like that.

We were so ready for dinner, and Jessi led us to Veselka, a Ukrainian restaurant on 2nd Avenue that was so right. We ordered pierogis and Lvivski beer, relaxed into that little bit of Eastern Europe, imagining we were in Kiev, and in a way we were.

Energized but winding down, we took the subway to Brooklyn to see Jessi's house, The Fort, in Crown Heights, where one housemate after another assured us that "It's always this clean." I'm sure it is. By this time, Gven and I were two tired but street savvy city dwellers, so we took the subway back to Manhattan and our hotel to once again collapse happily and sleep.

We were going to try out a different, tiny breakfast place, which incidentally has the best borsht in the universe, but it was a busy Saturday morning and we ended up back at the Sidewalk for another excellent breakfast. On the way, we explored some more. I looked and looked for Parker Posey walking down St. Mark's Place and other cool streets in the East Village, but surprisingly we didn't bump into her. By the time we sprang Gven's car from the garage and headed back through the Lincoln Tunnel to New Jersey and home, it had been an exciting 48 hours in the city for two midwesterners.

We had a fabulous visit, thank you. I can't call it "A Moveable Feast," as Hemingway described Paris in the 1920s, because, let's face it, you can't live well on a shoestring, getting by in an unheated flat by wearing a sweatshirt as an undershirt, but it is clearly some kind of feast, by golly, and it was a special treat to have Jessi and his sweetheart Alex introduce us to their world.

Enpiar on football

Now I know.

All I had to do was listen to Enpiar* on my way to work in the morning, and now it's all clear. It took John "like Howard Cosell but oh-so-humble" Feinstein to clarify the mysteries of the NFL playoffs for me. In a mere five minutes or so, I found out that:

1. Brett Favre did not, in fact, play for Vince Lombardi in the 1960s. That was Bartt Starve. Or Borat Stavre. Or Barack Ofarva. Or some other guy from Down South.

2. Since the Giants won and the Colts lost, Eli Manning is better than his big brother and will soon have all of Payton's endorsement deals.

3. Tom Brady is the best quarterback in the history of football.

As if we needed further proof that anyone can say anything on the public airwaves.

*For those of you who are not bilingual, enpiar is the verb meaning "to pontificate in a pseudointellectual, high-minded manner, as in the following conjugations: Yo enpio (I know it all), Ustud enpia (You tell me all about it), Tu enpias (You explain it for us), Ellos enpian (They tell you how it is), Nosotros enpiamos (We know more than they do).

caucus schmaucus

Oh my! Aren't the ladies and gentlemen of the Fourth Estate all in a dither about the results in Iowa. They are beside themselves with the historic implications, the groundbreaking this, and the breathtaking that. Clearly it is good for the news business to have something to write about.

They are making dire warnings that the Clinton campaign is in trouble, that Edwards might as well pack it in, that Giuliani is as good as dead, and that Romney is out of it. These serious journalists are just about peeing in their pants with the excitement.

Excuse me, but one win by a Bible Belt fundamentalist in a state full of Bible Belt fundamentalists does not a nomination make, so hold on right there before anointing Huckleberry Hound the new savior.

I admit that it's newsworthy, historic even, for Obama to win, even though it's the state next door, and in the heartland his youth plays better than That Woman and That Southern guy.

And so it's on to "Live Free or Die" New Hampshire. Again the headlines blare the shock, the surprise, the remarkable comeback of one thought dead. Give me a break. These people are apoplectic about a 3 percent difference in a state with as many voters as Steubenville. I think I'm reading today's reaction by reporters to yesterday's reaction by reporters to what someone said on TV the day before in response to a statement last week by an unnamed source. Classic pseudo-events, per Daniel Boorstin's critique of manufactured 'history' as a dressed-up form of public relations.

Since we seem to live in an era of media saturation, those journalistic guardians of democracy will continue to wag the dog while the rest of us consumers of random information listen with rapt attention. The electoral process will devolve into the soap opera of whether the sagacious old soldier McCain, doing his best Ronald Reagan routine, can sustain good Nielsen ratings for another ten months; whether That Woman can fend off her shadow-selves, the weak weeping wench and the cold calculating Cruella deVille, and sing the finale "Don't Cry for me, Argentina" with words changed to "I listened to you, and in the process I found my own voice."

This really big shew is on the road again, next stop Michigan, where a slightly different song and dance will try to win the hearts (forget the minds) of audiences in the slumping rustbelt. Will George Romney's square-jawed boy come through in car country? Will Obama make up that "shocking" three-point difference? Is this just another ploy to divert our attention from the war that has killed 16 Americans in the last 10 days? What do the polls say?

basketball jones

File under 'Poor Me'.

This lament relates to a recent report to a circle of men on the subject of addiction, habits, and conditioning. I talked about some of the unintended consequences of becoming addicted to t'ai chi. In short, I'm so hooked after 30 years that I don't function very well if I miss a day or two of practice.

Truth be told, I'm just high-maintenance, as those who know me best will confirm. It has taken me many years of study, meditation, and practice practice practice to fine-tune my particular wants and needs, and I'm not about to let all that work go to waste. All those classes, all those books read, papers written, seminars and workshops and retreats shouldn't go down the drain. By now, I have a pretty good idea of what works for me, and if I get around to doing it all, I invariably feel good.

The downside is what happens when I miss a few workouts. I'm a train wreck.

I think it was late November when I neglected some key elements of my regular practice. Stayed inside, read a lot, brought work home, didn't work out much, and promptly became a habitat for a colony of viruses, sniffled for two weeks, and got over it.

Now it's other complaints. For a while I was hanging from my knees on a trapeze, but that put a strain on already weakened ligaments, so I stopped. Then I was hanging upside-down while gripping with my hands, and I started getting a sharp pain in the wrist, so I stopped. Now that I'm off the trapeze altogether, my back isn't getting that nice long, gravity-reversing stretch.

Like I said, poor me. If it ain't one thing it's another. Life's a bitch.

Next came the hip thing. Somewhere between the sacrum and the right thigh, a muscle (the piriformis?) has been pulled beyond its capacity by something I was doing - or not doing - so now it reacts to anything I do - or don't do. Bending forward, bending backward, sitting, standing, lying down, getting up, flexion, extension, sleeping, waking, ouch.

And another thing: why is everything falling apart on the right side, while my left side seems just fine? Something Jungian, no doubt, something dark and shadowy. My animus disintegrates while my anima integrates. The warrior archetype is injured in a battle with the editor archetype.

Or it might have something to do with the post-holiday letdown, when the anticipation and stress, the changes in schedule and diet, the increase in fat, sugar, and alcohol find the vulnerable body parts and do some damage. Mea culpa.

Even with unreasonably warm weather, I'm getting an early attack of cabin-fever, unable to go outside and play like I did the other three seasons of the year. To make it worse, I don't have a home court anymore, and I simply feel the need to shoot hoops.

If you spent half of your first 18 years in the driveway with a ball, you know that shooting hoops cures many ills. It not only gives the legs something to do after sitting in an expensive ergonomically designed chair all day, but it gives the hands a tactile sensation like no other.

Throwing and catching and dribbling are akin to drumming on an animal-skin drumhead, the percussive beat of the bouncing ball off the hardwood, the backboard, the rim. I haven't had those sensations lately, and I miss it. Not to mention the muscle memory of shooting a jumpshot that uncoils from the feet through the legs and torso, ending with the crest of that vertical wave releasing a spinning spheroid arcing up and through the net. Swish. The inner crowd goes wild.

But what I really need is a workout, something to make the heart and lungs pump more oxygen to more places, organs pushing other organs to push back, recover, and push again a little more. My knees will adapt and not snap sideways. My hips will limber up and not seize up. My wrist will regain its range after a hundred rusty attempts to lay the ball up in a fluid motion. My shoulders will get over the initial shock of repeated reaching, and my spirit will soar.

Say Cheese!

Say limburger, port salut, brie, cream cheese, cheddar. Say gouda. Have a cracker.

Say rum and orange juice, rum and tonic, cabernet sauvignon, pale ale, black and tan. Say cosmo.

Say lutefisk, smoked salmon, pickled herring in sour cream sauce. How about a piece of lefse with that, eh?

Say mashed potatoes, peas, and lots of melted butter. Say roasted chicken, cranberries, baked sweet potatoes, carrots, parsnips, and shallots. Say lamb with eggplant and rice. Say sea bass with asparagus.

Say pumpkin pie, apple pie, and pumpkin pie again!

Say coffee, English black tea, Sleepytime.

Take a nap, take a walk, take a picture already.

Okay, the holidays are over. It was great; now get back to work. Shovel the sidewalk. Have some rice and beans.

cut & dried

Not to sound alarmist, but we're on the brink of a serious firewood shortage. Let's not mince words; this is an impending crisis. I saw it looming months ago, when the remnants of last year's wood sat in an otherwise empty shed next to a pile of unsplit logs from a neighbor's newly cut tree.

I spent some quality time with my splitting maul over the holiday, and now those logs are split and stacked artfully in rows measuring about 6'x6'x6' - about a cord and a half - too little too late. The Golly household used up the last of the cured wood on January 31. It just worked out that way, it wasn't planned.

So now we either burn uncured wood (not desireable) or don't have a fire (unacceptable). You know it needs time before it's really ready to burn, hence my concern. Of course we could use the new wood scrupulously, take only the smallest sticks, load the stove loosely to give them plenty of air, use more kindling, and try to finesse it. Do I sound skeptical? I am.

The cold, hard fact is that green wood doesn't want to burn. The tree might be dead, technically, dismembered and put rudely into storage to have its molecules recycled by other carbon-based life-forms (homo sapiens sapiens Golly), but it hasn't gone through the complete death process, passed through all the bardos, and released its arboreal soul into the universe. Some things can't be rushed.

It's a quandary. Gven even dared to bring up the possibility of - excuse the expression - buying firewood. No way. I've seen a couple of possible sources while driving around the streets of Methodistville, but no approved access is forthcoming yet. Like subprime borrowers letting their mortgage payments balloon, I waited too long before refinancing the woodpile, and now it's my karma.