I Really Should Know Better

I was born into a family so very affected by xenophobia. So too, the families of the kids i grew up around and with. The Melbourne Jewish Community, as it stands today, is the product of a genesis founded by an influx of immigrant individuals and families who fled the midsts, remains or precursors to religious persecution across Europe. They arrived on the shores of Australia's great Southern city and went about their rebirth as survivors. They recovered, rebuilt, grew, multiplied and re-established themselves in another place and time.


Jews carry stories with them like Americans carry Patriotism, Catholics carry Repression and The Irish carry Alcoholism. Whether its fantastical legends that border on the absurd, to side-splitting humorous retellings of a mundane every-day occurrence,  to more somber cautionary tales, stories are the key to the fabric of the very culture that unites Jews into a common and shared expression of existence. It's a stereotype, but as George Clooney's character in Up in the Air says, "I stereotype - it's quicker.".

Chapter from Don't Wanna Go Home

Performance Art.


When someone throws out that term, they are are speaking of the toil and expression of Rock Stars, Broadways Dancers and aging Stuntmen. Of Actors, Stand-Up comics, Trapeze Artists and Lion Tamers. Perhaps you may be a little bit more pretentious than your neighbor and you term 'Performance Art' as differing from the more mainstream 'Performing Arts'. You would then only use the 'Performance' term to refer those (supposedly) avante-garde and (supposedly) intellectual 'happenings', that range from public poetry readings and naked gardening, to Street-Theater and suspending one's self in a clear perspex box for a week. Even the fool standing right now at the entrance to Covent Garden Market, painted entirely in grey and frozen in a pose whilst he waits for someone to throw a Pound at him so he can reward them with the amazingly complex and brilliantly challenging action of moving an arm or some such shit, is a Performance Artist.

Faith No More or Bob Dylan?

'Wonder Boys' was released in 2000 and is a film based on the novel by Michael Chabon. I've never read the book. In fact, I've never read any of his work, though lately quite a few folk have recommended The Yiddish Policeman's Union to me, so perhaps soon enough I will take up the weight of direction and read the man's work. I’ve never seen the film either. Well, that’s not true. I have seen virtually every scene and heard nearly every line of dialogue. To be entirely accurate, what I should have said was that I’ve never seen the film in it's entirety IN ONE SITTING. Over the past decade, I reckon it's at least a dozen times that I have turned on a TV and landed somewhere along the 111 minutes that the film runs for.

I am Spartacus Happy Pants

There is this photographer I know. He lives in LA now, somewhere downtown I believe. I first met him on The West Coast, but it was back in NYC that I got to know him better. He is one of those people who projects that very specific So-Cal, laid-back, beachy and breezy charm. It emits from his eyes, his sandy facial hair and the way his accent drawls and draws out the end of his paragraphs. He has compiled photo essays of war-addled Afghanistan, has been embedded with some sort of African Charity Soccer Team, held house parties way up in The Beverly Hills and signs off his letters with "Send my regards to The Queen". One of the things I like most about him is how his experience in and of the past so clearly dictates, informs and composes the character he is now in the present. He is only who he is and is that person to everyone. He is truthful in the image he projects. I don't know many people about whom I can say that.

Premeditation just results in too many parentheses....( )

I've written this posting several times. Not completely, but I’ve drafted the introduction, imagined a middle and constructed an ending. Whether in my mind or with pencil on my Europa Major Pad or even on my BlackBerry, whilst fighting against the predictive inaneness of (the so called)Sure-Type, I’ve put sentences together. I've tested the waters with discussions about some of it's key points and I’ve impassioned it's arguments. It's become so much more involved and weightier than the actual worth of a couple paragraphs which, at best, would be read by only three people(That excludes my Mum. Never count your Mum as a fan, viewer or follower - that's just cheating.). So much so, that the other night, somewhat drunk, I over ambitiously referred to it as 'an article'.

I've seen you before.

Have you ever run away?


Inadequately packed a swag, stumbled across the threshold, shouted a triumph over your shoulder, pinned your ears back and just ran. Eyes open, but rage or fear or love or desperation blinding any registered sight. You may have been pre-adolescent or post-university or in the twighlight of a cancer grip. Maybe it was after the third child was born, or just before the wife came back from the nail salon. Perhaps you were right, perhaps you should have stayed to fight your corner, perhaps it would have gotten better. Perhaps destiny chose your need to escape or maybe a deficiency in your character informed your selection. You may have left a note, your may have tried your hardest to close the French-Doors without emitting a sound or maybe you violently smashed that vase his mum gave to him on your way out, using the explosion of Mexican Glass to serve as the exclamation point to finish your rant.

Head/Skin

Skin. Head.


Head and Skin.


Two different words with two very distinctly different meanings.


"I've got you, under my skin" sings Frank Sinatra or Louis Prima (depending which version you prefer of the Cole Porter song - at the moment i'm more so into the Louis Prima and Keely Smith one)


"Man, that girl really got into my head." announces to me my friend from The South.


Skin and Head.


They can't both be talking about the same feeling, for Head and Skin are so very different.

Hey, Mr - ! You watching?

When i was younger, my back hurt less, i was quicker to anger, i couldn't carry a tune and i could bowl a wrongun, flipper and top-spinner to compliment my stock leg-spinning ball. i also never wrote the word 'God'. i'd instead write 'G-d'. This was due to a belief ingrained in me by parents and teachers, that somehow writing God/G-d's name in it's complete form would somehow incur his wrath. This is a strictly Jewish belief, because i am yet to encounter it elsewhere.


Anyways, time passed, i ate pork for the first time, turned the on TV on Shabbat and decided not to be frugal with my money at all and visit doctors less. i turned my back on the life offered and conceived for me. But supplanting a hyphen for the letter 'o' was a habit that took longer to shake. For years, i'd avoid writing the word altogether because i was both embarrassed to go the hyphen and held uncomfortable by the thought of not. Even today, as i construct this little post, i'm avoiding the word.

New Town

What have they done to the old home place, why did they tear it down?

And why did I leave the plough in the field and look for a job in the town

J.D. Crowe, 'Old Home Place'

My mate the Canadian placed her in the 'girl next door' genre. I suppose he was referring to how she drew attention in response to an easy warmth she projected rather than an eye catching strikingness. True. The thing that caught my imagination was the wake of a just passed knowing grin, that told me of an analytical wit at work. This is how i chose to see her anyways. It could have just been an uneasy smile. The sort one displays when slightly uncomfortable and nervous. But as de rigour, I ran with the more romantically appealing snap judgement.

There were a couple of hindrances to my confirming or otherwise of my first impression.  The Canadian and I were in the middle of our own activity and conversation, whilst she dined on an early dinner with her two companions - one male and one female. It was hard to tell if any of them were in a commited agreement to any or each of the others.

Value

On the world financial market, the US Dollar is the barometer for ascribing value. It's the constant against which one can define the value of the gold, coal or Yen you have stashed under the bed. The exchange rate of USD to GBP dictated the amount of Pounds the aggressively eager, Pakistani man pushed under the thin slit in the thick perspex window at the Bureaux de Change, just outside of Leicester Square. This was an ever so simple transaction to understand. I expected how much i was to receive due to the rate displayed on the A-Frame board out on the sidewalk and i surmised the numerical total by reading the numbers printed large on the banknotes. What is a little harder to understand is what is the actual 'real' value of 1 Pound. What it actually gets you on the High Streets and how much is needed to maintain the lifestyle i've come to enjoy and expect.

Got A Cough

Once again, i've taken a slight extended break from posting. There's the practical hurdle of being free of direct computer access, but this would be only a cheap excuse. No, there's a contributing-factor that is playing a far more dominant part in the explanation of my absence from this page. I'm flat. It's not writers-bloc, i have a multitude of subject matters to cover, songs to quote, grumpiness to expel and witticisms aplenty to sprinkle around. It's a general malaise that has descended upon me. Not just me, but, seemingly, most of the city around me.

House Hunting

I had an hour spare between the apartment hunting appointments this week and found myself outside the very impressive Brooklyn Museum on Eastern Parkway. A massive stone and concrete, turn-of-the-20th-Century affair, it's a hulking edifice complete with the almost ubiquitous Museum Roman Columns. But you'd probably miss them at first glance, for they've dressed the entire entrance side of the building with a bizarre 3 storey high, glass and steel 'bib', that serves as a reception area. It looks completely out of place and entirely like the 100-year-later-afterthought that, in reality, it actually was/is.

Vice

'You keep me searching for a heart of gold and I'm getting old'

Neil Young, 'Heart of Gold'

I have a question i sometimes ask upon meeting new people that intrigue me. I firstly define the word 'vice' to mean 'a particular thing that you enjoy. Something you derive a heightened sense of pleasure from, yet at the same time, it can and does also have a somewhat detrimental effect of you - whether that be health, wealth, emotional state, lifestyle or other'. Then, i ask:

"What's your vice?"

Pornographic Zoetrope

'My life has been full of terrible misfortunes - most of which never happened.'

Michel de Montaigne

 
I was thinking of all the women I've seen naked in my life. Not those on a page or a screen, but rather those i'd seen up close (up close and very personal). I wasn't thinking about them in a manner akin to gazing into a pornographic zoetrope in my mind, but rather of the actual people themselves. To be even more specific, I was thinking of how many might now regret revealing themselves to me in such a manner. Not because of anything I may have done at the actual moment of the clothing hitting the floor, but due to something that may or may not have happened further on down the track to make them feel not so fondly of/towards me.

What's in a Neighborhood

The party is over. My free-rent lifestyle is about to be curbed. Up until now, i have been crashing in the spare bedroom at my sister and her husband's apartment in Brooklyn. Whereas the neighborhood itself has been sparsely providing and entertaining (unless you're into the whole Kosher/oily food/girls in wigs thing), it has provided a perfectly stable and efficient jumping off point for my time in The City. But now this experience must come to an end. The reasons are many, but suffice to say- even if you do find the proverbially impossible 'free lunch', at some point, Lunchtime will end.