Why Should This Night Be Any Different.....?

 

That’s the Fifth Question, my childhood amendment to the long-held set of four that centerpieced the obligatory family Seder each year.

I really thought it made a perfectly shaped addendum to that philosophical battery of inquiries regarding something quite so universal, religious and whole. Certainly as an adult, given the structure of family traditions as we civilized dwellers have come to adopt them, I think an inclusion would be one whose time is well overdue.

But to whom do you lobby for something like that…? And if the answer is the tribunals of the Synagogue, then you might as well forget it.  Those people have much larger and more significant things to contend with, like rates of annual membership and how to advance them. That, they can come to work each day and deal with;  Life, they can’t.

This is why, at age seven, I knew that the only pragmatic approach was to very candidly adopt my own amendment, and keep it quiet.  No one I knew would care to hear it, and it made more sense than anything I knew back then.  It was also my very first teaching in one of the most profound religious and philosophical structures I’d ever encounter in my lifetime: Truth is not a matter of articulation.  In fact, it’s very much the opposite.

To be even more concise, when applicable, it’s a form of outright denial. And that act of denial serves more to placate and protect the innocent and the powerless than to liberate them.  Even inside their own minds, over the span of a lifetime.  And it’s this blessed, uncommon gift of awareness, endowed upon me in early childhood, for which I can thank my greatest and most effective teacher:  My mother. Tonight, we’d all be treated to one of the greatest ecumenical lessons a religious gathering could offer.  She’d be drunk off her ass.

If there’s a shred of well-cultivated hostility there, so be it.  It’s in check, it’s not harming anyone, and it’s absolutely healthy and cathartic. I don’t think the Almighty Himself would hesitate to concur on something quite so academic.  It’s us disciples that can’t come to terms with things.  Like alcoholic family members.

For those unschooled in these things, let’s set the stage.  For one, you don’t need a holiday to be piss-drunk in front of your whole family.  Any gathering occasion, secular or otherwise will suffice.  In our case, it was kind of inevitable.  When my mom became a single divorcee with a stork surprise in the late 60s, her surrounding family, terse as diplomatic relations may have been, put their principal differences aside and embraced their Jewish family values, carved in the stone of their Depression-Era, War-Era upbringings, to put the blessed new child first and effectively ignore both any intimidations or evident, uncomfortable realities, like for example, “what the hell does this train wreck think she’s gonna do, single, drunk and with a child…..and who’s she gonna prevail upon if she doesn’t marry her ass off to some accountant from Syosset once and for all…??”

That’s how the shaken mama cat ended up with her brand new kitten, leaving her Brooklyn flat behind, and moving into her angry older brother’s cottage in Bayside upon his mandate. Not of course in any articulation of the above.  Rather, it costs a fortune to raise a kid, and why not do it in the house where the two adult kids were finally out of, and be in the care of his wife, who he never was able to relate to and was scared to death of living in the house alone with.  And it gave the house a few more years of property value, with an older playmate for grandchildren that would be rolling off the assembly line soon enough.

The single kid sister in her late thirties with the new kid was not some dangerous fuckup, to be clear.  She worked plenty, in more than one administrative office function in her time, when her literary aspirations weren’t dogging her.  She did not drive or own a vehicle. And in traditional functional alcoholic fashion, she was extremely cautious regarding her controlled choice of just when and around whom she’d get fucked up for the evening.  Animals are brilliant creatures.  Ever been to the Museum of Natural History..?

Most importantly, she’d never, in any drunken state, allow her child into harm’s way.  Allowing herself into the custody of her brother’s protective home environment was part of that instinct.  She’d have plenty of room within to swill around in her substance, anyway.  It was a very conducive environment. All you had to do was look the other way and say nothing about it.

Only one thing can make such an environment quite so difficult for a child, and that’s the conducive, polar-opposite environment that mostly holds forth on any other regularly scheduled night, when everyone’s well-behaved, in their right mind for the most part, dry and sober. Sometimes reserved and depressed, but other times full of words and laughter. There were very many excellent times in this author’s kittenhood, even if this kitten got dunked by the tail many times…

That’s the Twilight Zone this toddler grew up in, when on any unannounced occasion, the brilliant and vivacious woman who decorated the cast headed by the lower-key, middle-aged, 1950s suburbia-alumni husband and wife, would arrive home from work smelling like a brewery, ranting passionately, incomprehensively, emotionally, angrily, and collapsing all over the house.  And the outspoken King and Queen of the court would remain bizarrely silent and unresponsive. In some state of panic, this four, five, six, or seven-year old couldn’t get a response out of them.  Next day, all was quiet on the Western Front. Until the next time.  There was usually a good one-month grace period, before she’d show up at home in that condition again.

If that wasn’t soon enough, sometimes she’d spend the night with friends in the next borough, like her still-beloved ex, and the friends they still knew from eras past.  She’d be on the phone with my patient aunt that evening, asking to talk with me, and my aunt would put her reluctant boy on the phone.  I’d have to sit through some drunken Judy Garland monologue.  The best part was knowing I’d be off the phone in about sixty seconds.

But not on Seder night.  That was a live in-concert show.

My aunt and uncle were the convention center for the family Seder.  The young, affluent son and daughter, their spouses and respective litters, my common playmates would all make their way in.  Under lesser circumstances, I looked forward to these summits.  Even if I could only really take their company in shorter form, an evening all together, with all the grownups offered the best set-up. My younger cousin and I could lumber off with our make-believe theatrics, the bedrooms our exploration caves, grownups laughing and serving out front, and by night, the place is empty and I’m in my bedroom with my stereo and Bob Dylan 8-track tapes.

On nights such as this, there’d be none of that. I’d be shuttled home from school by my uncommonly quiet aunt, a normally outward spirit.  We’d roll into the place scored not by the usual Zenith full of General Hospital, but rather the serenade of my bedroom stereo, a Vivaldi Symphony purring out of the 8-track player.  I knew trouble when I heard it.  My mother would be swilling about the house, as detainable as ever, a structure about to fall any moment, while my aunt dashed off into the kitchen to whip up her classic cinnamon Bundt cake for the evening’s proceedings.  As the drunk stumbled about, hurling insults at her brother, he’d scream her down while he set things up in the dining room for the annual commemoration of Elijah’s Arrival.  I’d try and find a good, safe corner to hide out and beat this whole scene.

You won’t get anything too deliciously sensational or scandalous from this story, I’m afraid.  Even on the non-secular occasions did anyone use weapons beyond their raised voices, or even threaten to.  Ours was an intellectual household.  The outright denial spoke to that.  It was mostly a non-violent scene.

There were a few spectacle occasions, to be sure.  One of them went down in a hallway bedroom, with an entire family of child cousins in tow outside the door, when the drunk raged against my aunt, and dived under the bed for her bottle of J&B,  My outraged aunt lost her cool and blocked her, leading to the kind of staged altercation seen only in preview clips that opened things like The Streets Of San Francisco. Two ordinarily civilized older women suddenly in fisticuffs, one sending the other slamming backward to the floor.  I wasn’t shocked, and I don’t think any of the spectators were either.  If anything, I despaired over the certification of my life as a cliché, a carbon copy of those archaic, antiseptic little Centers for Disease Control public-service announcements for family alcoholism I’d see on Sunday mornings before 8AM, in that local-TV public-affairs desert, before anyone else was awake, and before Wonderama came on. 

Those enlightening, disgusting little filmed messages also set me straight on just what my family situation was.  I don’t know why people were so down on television as some poison in a kid’s life. If it wasn’t for those educational little ads, I’d have really been convinced I was out of my mind, and likely in therapy or on drugs for the rest of my life.  Here was TV reminding me that I really was normal, and the house was crazy.  In too many ways, I owe my life’s salvation to the FCC.

I’m not sure just where things went play-by-play-wise on that Seder evening fifty years ago, after the hallway bedroom fight scene, but it wasn’t anything beyond tears drying and everyone back in the dining room for cake, coffee and Louis Sherry ice cream afterward, my mother unconscious in her small bed chamber.  It was on that evening that I’d make my premiere as the presenter of the “Fair Koshes” or Four Questions of the Passover Seder, the old “Why is This Night Different Than…” line of inquiry.  I’d been put to some ineffective Hebrew School lessons, and had just managed to master the execution of the sung Four.  There was still a great deal I did not understand at age seven.  I didn’t realize that when my inebriate mother howled at the table about her child’s impending recital of the “Fair Koshes”, that the term was actually a Hebrew reference, and not some drunken incoherence.  I also didn’t understand why no one in a room of twelve or more adults didn’t open their mouth and say, “She’s Drunk”, nor did I understand why no one had the where-with-all to try and politely usher the creature out of there, in the effort to maintain a unified dignity.  But the absence of any of that kind of effort or the capacity for it educated me more than enough.  The sanctity of the Seder was a mere backdrop, some Beckett-like pre-text in some experimental theater production, that transcends the words and scenery to present an experience much more lasting and unforgettable.

Dyaneu.

-Noah F.

 

Slave Patrons

Between my wife and I, at least one of us is thankfully in tune with the contemporary TV entertainment landscape of today. My wife might join me for an indulging leap into some great old full-length, obscure prime-time presentation of the late 1970’s on YouTube now and then, but she’s the one to refer to about what’s just hit the platforms in the last few.  And, like any TV consumer, she has her favorites. At the top of the A list, which means Now Playing on the i-pad in our living room or kitchen for continuous showings, is one or more incarnations of the Chef Competition shows branded and made famous by Chef Gordon Ramsay. Among them are Master Chef, Top Chef, and Hell’s Kitchen.

These shows don’t need my endorsement. Folks who for some reason never liked The Beatles are inclined to keep their lack of enthusiasm to themselves, lest they be uncontrollably excoriated by the nearest human. I’ve always had a respectful appreciation for the art of cooking, and those who master it, even if I’m not riveted to recipes, visual demonstrations, or motivated personally by the challenge of kitchen range efforts.

The odd thing is, the tone and directive of these smash-hit Ramsay shows don’t seem to have any of that base respect. To spend some screen time with any of them, it’s evident that the food, the creations and their ingredients are little more than the equivalent of props in some Animal House cafeteria scene.

If you’re not familiar with these shows, some clarification would help: they aren’t traditional cooking shows. Graham Kerr in the late 1960’s would spend twenty-five minutes in a glamorous designer kitchen setting, focusing hard on completing one course or dinner. He may have been the eye candy, but the star was the entrée. Julia Child on PBS was strictly business. She shared the gears on how to make that gourmet dish actually happen in your kitchen.

The Ramsay gallery is a reality-show format, using a very hyper jump-cutting documentary approach to capture the heightened drama and impulsive energy behind the competition amongst pedestrian kitcheners chasing their wild dream to become America’s Next Top Chef.

It’s essentially designed as a voyeuristic approach to what goes on in the challenge to become what Ramsay and his fellow judges are, professionally. Unlike the panel however, the contestants haven’t necessarily spent a decade or more studying with the Great Chefs of Europe on a pile of scholarships. Take a bunch of U.S. civilians with lots of kitchen experience and a love for food, pit them against a tribunal of dour elitists as well as each other, and voila..! The world’s first Culinary Gong Show..!

In a world of fear, with broadcast presenters petrified over any misapprehensions or behaviors their presentations might provoke, you’ll be sure to see redundant and sometimes almost unnecessary disclaimers flagging these reality shows at all times. But these smug “Chef” competition shows bear none of those. They wouldn’t dare. It’s tacitly understood as to what the purpose of the show really is, and what it really isn’t: The star of the show is the outwardly toxic behavior. The food is a mere prop.

But as a prop, it’s skillfully used, in conjunction with the directing, editing, lighting, and every other artistic element so exquisitely combined to bring home this symphony on your device.

The template for the show is the crafted design of It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad World. The indoor version. No car chases or biplanes. No basement explosions. When they do the movie, that might get added. But if they did this show in 1963, Ethel Merman and Dick Shawn would have been perfect casting.

They of course were actors, and these Chef shows are populated only with non-screen civilians, of a more local fame in their own right, perhaps. But for a bunch of civilians who have never acted, boy can they erupt on camera..!

The directorial style, again, is not in any way linear. A passionate, involved, on-site showdown to create a masterpiece can only be effectively depicted within a forty-minute format in bite form, something akin to those little teasers we used to see in the cold openings of Mannix, Cannon and The Love Boat. The only linear process elapsed in the presentation is the competition itself, and the behaviors and anger of these determined grillers. Food flies off chopping tables, tools and containers get dropped or broken, people fight and sulk, and it’s really good diet management TV. For a food show, you don’t really ever get hungry watching this.

But food is legitimately part of the plot, so at some point, it’s spatulas down, and time for judgement. And herein lies the predominantly antisocial component of these ultra-chef competition showdowns.

As each contestant’s finely crafted dish meets the tribunal, it faces a brutal scrutiny, based primarily on visual appearance. If it doesn’t look as artificial and spray-painted as an entrée in Gourmet magazine, it’s put to the slaughter, on national television, direct and in color, for all eyes adult and youth to bear witness. A public execution.

King Ramsay himself will angrily disparage the plate and smugly cite the particulars of its perceived grotesqueness, voiced over an extreme closeup of the culinary submission, shot under some clinically intense lighting, something akin to a forensics lab training video, rendering any possible subject immediately toxic. Under that lighting, an Entenmann’s Devil’s Food Crumb donut could pass for debris from Three Mile Island. Music swells, then falls to a deep, orchestral diminuendo, bass strings at a low moan, as the sheepish judges under the King’s domain quietly and submissively concur on the outrageously obvious unacceptability of the ugly trash before them. Upon the sacred tasting by each, the heightened response speaks to the visceral olfactory experience mitigated by the moistness of the crust or lack thereof, the offset of the parsley sprig deemed congruent or not, and whether or not the perfectly layered cheese melt envelopes each bite of the crepe in the perfect oral sensation.

I’m not about to get into or tamper with the great Ancient Roman Spectacle of gourmet chef competition scrutiny. Like a piano competition at Julliard, it’s rightly based upon a set of criteria unattainable, an approval achieved only when the submission is known to provoke a profound wonder across the panel, unanimously. That’s the kind of on-screen subtitle disclaimer those judging scenes could use. Because as industrially attuned as that level of scrutiny might be, in the decisive kitchens of Italy or France, when elite competitions behind closed doors are electing the artists that will feed a population of elitist bistro patrons, also very much behind closed doors, in a world functionally detached, galaxies away from the people waiting ninety minutes on a register line with their three children at Target on a Tuesday night, hoping they can get to Family Dollar on the way home before they close, a very dysfunctional message is being teleconveyed.

The thrilling object of the game show known as Master Chef and its counterparts is in that inarticulate catharsis, the inner vulnerability exposed, of seeing these heart-set goal strivers have their dreams shot down with one single bullet by the Arbitor of Great Taste. There’s something quite gothic about it. If an illustrated version hasn’t yet been unveiled at Comic Con, it will be, before long. All the elements are there: Evil Lord, disciples, supplicants, scenic locales, the works..

The TV programming makers of today clearly are not in the broadcast game anymore. As the late, great sage Fred Silverman once presaged over fifty years ago, it’s now an industry mostly of “narrowcasting”, a telescoped effort to create a mix that will reach a particular and presumably large audience in the most immediate and visceral way possible. A can’t-miss recipe that makes no apologies for itself. It’s the Diana Christensen formula from Chayefsky’s Network, so long ago.

It's long known that food, and the most succulently presented, elite-gourmet-prepared, bears to a mass population, one so removed from the balconies of privilege, an impulsive and almost sexual power, one that ignites the most Freudian imbalance in the cortex. One hundred years of advertising research has established this scientific fact. Master Chef and it’s counterparts are a one-hour story of romance, hope, vulnerability, betrayal, and the intense eroticism of naked rejection in the bedroom with all the lights on. An edible Harlequin series.

That’s what gets the eyes riveted and the Arbitron meters tabulated. But this show does not play strictly to adults on the Playboy Channel. It’s a Gong Show no less ubiquitous at dinner tables nationwide as was Chuck Barris’ original The Gong Show, forty-five years ago. That formula hasn’t changed either.

So with families, grownups and children alike, all gazing at this handsome, immaculate presentation together each night, believing it in many ways to be educational, sophisticated, and perhaps a voyeuristic journey into the world of food-making competition, what is the take-away doctrine..?

Basically, the gift-wrapped message is that food any less than visually and tasteably exquisite on the very first bite, in the eyes and mouths of professed experts, is worthless, and fit for nothing but the trash. Propagated is the dictate that if it’s not sexy enough on visual sight and oral contact, it’s unworthy of anyone.

Again, the scrutiny within the gourmet competition game is an elite puzzle. If that twenty-four-year-old who just blew me away with that Mozart sonata at the Steinway told me he’d lost the Juilliard competition by four notes, I’d never have known, and still wouldn’t care. The kid’s a knockout. And his performance was stunning.

Our nation is fed primarily by the services that provide the courses and treats we thrive on, good or bad, predominantly healthy or not, every single day. It’s a nation of short-order cooks, wrap-rollers, deep-fry shufflers, pizza tossers and couriers, Chinese take-out kitchen boilers, cold-cutters, sandwich-makers, hash-slingers and egg-scramblers. Those people are the daily providers of breakfast, lunch, dinner, to a ravenous and satisfied America. A trucker at road-stop diner will likely not take exception to the fact that the edges of the scrambled egg were almost unnoticeably charred, or that the hash browns touched the edges of the bacon strips on the plate. He won’t likely be inclined to question or analyze how well the ratio of cheese-to-egg in the omelet is balanced by that slurp of coffee in his mouth. On the whole, that trucker, student, mom, commuter-in-transit will be fitfully nourished and placated by their offering, and they’ll know it’s value in their daily lives. These are the Slave Patrons of America who can only find excitement, and in some ways a relatable vindication in the spectacle of the Master Chef competitors vying for the palettes of the One Per-Cent.

And these are often the same gratuitous souls who will find themselves keeping rapt score while watching this yummy gong show, concurring with the conviction of that smarmy head chef from that Chicago restaurant about how the layout of the cheese over that crepe is something no one in their right mind would do anything with but fling in the trash.

But in the concern that lest our patrons lose their perspective in the process, on the intrinsic and critical value of food in our lives, one and all, all these chef competition shows will usually include some public-service message for those food-for-the-hungry organizations, or maybe a full episode that presents the cooking challenge in conjunction one week with one of those soup kitchens across this great heartland of ours. Then, once penance has been done, back to our elitist comfort zones, eating and disrespecting.

A friend of mine told me of how he presented a sandwich he’d wrapped for himself to a begging vagrant on the train one day. He graciously handed it over and said as a rejoinder, “Well, I don’t think Gordon Ramsay would give it five stars, but, y’know it might be pretty good..” The humble vagrant thankfully accepted and said….”Oh yea, y’know I’ve seen him….that guy’s totally a food genius..!!

Noah F.

Why Am I Getting All These Retirement Articles and Medical Ads..? I’m Too Young For This..!

I don’t doubt it for one moment.  Numbers are numbers.  But even the value of currency changes vastly over time, as does the significance of the numeral on that U.S. legal tender.

I’m fifty-six. I’ve never been that before, and my life’s experience, oddly, never endowed me with a thorough understanding on just how to be fifty-six.

In today’s anti-ageism world, gratefully, we generally all don’t judge or discriminate by age the way we once did. Professionally as well as socially. It undoubtedly has to do with the result of the vast population growth of the last fifty years, coupled with the existing population of so many of the grownups preceding that explosion. Unless the legislation of a “Logan’s Run” Bill were to be passed, the answer is, we all just have to learn to live with one-another. Peacefully.

Unfortunately, one unconditional side effect my age has provoked is this inexplicable comfort I experience when I’m presented in any situation with someone within or beyond my years.  I’m always grateful for the company I keep and those who nourish me. Those younger “old soul” people also know my algorithm, and there are blessedly plenty of those.  But somehow, advancing toward Senior Cat in a world dominated by more and more chronological kittens is something to be reckoned with.

The irony that characterizes my life is, I never could really be a kid.

From the time I began grammar school, Grade K, I was more in tune with adult company.  I was raised in a home of three middle-aged grownups.  My aunt and uncle were the fifties family in the 1970s. Empty nest, with constant grandkid visits. They were my cast playmates. To offset all that silly kid stuff, thankfully there was my mom.  Sometimes, when things got too raucous with the little ones, she’d snatch me aside and whisper, “hey, wanna go to the movies…?” She was just as bored as I was..! We’d get a ride over to the UA Quartet or Glen Oaks, and regardless of what the chosen feature promised, it was a respite.  And she took us to some great ones, like Day Of The Dolphin, Funny Lady, or the uproarious re-release of Take The Money And Run. But what made those afternoons important were the discussions.  Lectures, actually.  My mom was known to venture on in table talk about English literature, Socrates, Aristotle, the Mortimer Adler or Leonard Bernstein interview she watched on Channel 13 last week, and all things academic.  None of them college-learned.

She never attended college. I was raised by a single woman in her mid-forties who lived on administrative office jobs and a lifetime of reading everything in any college bookshop.  She would come to insist in years to come that nothing I was being taught in my Core Curriculum of History or Arts was being related nearly as comprehensively as her efforts would offer.  I had enough exposure to her home-schooling to second that, actually.

Despite some of the numerous setbacks of being raised, ultimately one-on-one at age nine, by a codependent elitist intellectual, one of the top benefits, I never doubted, was some very good company.

Being with my mom and her closest companions at the time, her older ex-husband and friends, in their trendy Village settings in the late 1970s was kind of like hanging out on the set of Open Mind or The Stanley Siegel Show.  Their sociocultural references were ones I’d research and learn all about if I didn’t get them already.  I became absorbed in knowing what all those Bogie and Bacall cracks meant, if I didn’t already figure it out from all those 1940s Warner Bugs Bunny features I’d wake up with on Channel 5 each morning.  When kids my age were wrapped up in Star Wars and Saturday Night Fever, I was fixated on the Museum of Broadcasting, and those precious mid-century kinescope films of The Dinah Shore Chevy Show, Texaco Star Theater, The Ed Sullivan Show, and that Lincoln Diamant collection of TVs earliest acclaimed commercials. When I was approached by one of those high-rise living room talkers wanting to hear what this little kid had to say, this ten-year old was never spoken down to. I could rap about the history of TV comedy for an hour. With Norman Lear.  We would have dug one another when I was ten.

I studied the men’s styles, their wardrobe, these men in their greater fifties.  Mom’s silver haired ex- was a dapper Manhattan schoolteacher, and almost never showed up in anything less than a nifty tweed jacket and knit tie. His notorious Costanza-like twin brother was also a snazzy clothes horse.  I didn’t wear such fashions.  A ten-year old doesn’t stroll into the schoolyard wearing a jacket and tie. But I sure could dream.

My daydreams consisted of the tall, slender grownup me, decked out in the sport jacket, the print tie, and that girl in the fifth grade I secretly crushed on, arm in arm on our way out of the Metropolitan Museum.  Every ten-year old has his dream.

I’d grow up, and keep all that frame of reference I’d cultivated within me. The eighties didn’t really impress me when I lived in them. I held my high school teachers with great respect, perhaps the kind not all my classmates maintained.  Our Assistant Principal was a finely composed man, impeccably dressed each day, with a voice and delivery like a commanding TV news anchor, a veritable Milton Lewis or Roger Grimsby.  My English Honors-Program Lit teacher was lost on his entire class, in their eyes an unmistakable Saturday Night Live sketch.  But to me, this silver-maned semi-Anglican in tailored formals was the real stuff. 

Even if I did hang with a bunch of high-school co-seniors who prided themselves on some kind of worldly sophistication because they watched Masterpiece Theater Sunday night as part of their Honor Society project, but were more focused on the latest Wham video on MTV, I still saw myself not quite so applicable. Ultimately, I’d figure out how to recognize my own individuality, and appreciate it. 

Part of it always meant tossing out references of a world of the past.  Why was a kid of seventeen in the eighties comparing a TV sketch to Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca.? The one response I’d never stop hearing from elders around me was “You’re too young to know about that..!!” How rude.

I never knew why that was an offense.  I still don’t.  If someone today introduced me to their sixteen-year-old and the kid began discussing the early days of Studio One and Playhouse 90, we’d have one fine conversation..!

And amidst a majority of my life spent in the wings of the radio business, where it’s all about the thrill of just “getting the show on the stage”, a constant, collective Olympic effort, surrounded by like souls just as dedicated and clever, there’s been little call for academic conversation or formal attire on any regularized basis.  Just absorption in and gratitude for one’s occupation, while ignoring the changing cultures, if one so choosed.  That’s how I woke up one day in 2005 with no computer or cell phone.

I would learn soon that my elitist disdain would need to change, along with my other virtues.  And in this odyssey I would come to discover not a generation gap, but an existence on a planet in a generation galaxy.

Those grownups, the stencil by whom I designed my self of today, were my age back then.  They were much less healthy by comparison, they had accrued more experience and establishment professionally and financially than I’ve yet to conquer. And to this day, I continue to admire the long lost presence of those vintage towers, indulging when I can at last in some of the era literature and available media on which they once dined. I can actually, virtually pretend I’m them back then..

And suddenly, I’m me now.

Last time I looked in the mirror I was twenty-four years old dreaming of the respect I’d receive as a shirt-and-tie, cardigan-clad grownup. Respect of course, begins inside the self.  I can’t honestly say I’m frightened or dismayed by the sight of a full beard of gray fur.  Trouble is, I’m not so at home with being surrounded by what the AI-driven society believes is my proper wheelhouse.

It’s understood that soon I’ll be a member of that distinguished senior cult. And with that comes the necessary debriefing and indoctrination, on Medicare, health care supplementation, benefit capabilities, matters of “retirement” such as that might be. It’s been commonly believed that the challenges for a man in retirement consist of dealing with the nature of the relationship with his wife after forty years, while sanding the wooden patio deck of his American Gothic backyard, of his palatial two- story pre-century house of six bedrooms, as seen on those financial ads during NFL Sunday. Perhaps the dreaded word of retirement brings to some of us the dreaded fear of just how we expect to exist in some livable way without our codependent source of income or professional identity.  If the holographic Doctor on Star Trek Voyager lost his license, which I think may have happened on one episode, he’d be a mess..!

Most in today’s world, those reaching in age but still vital to our professional teams, are not necessarily ready, or are they persuaded, to step down.  Some, like home-bound pets gazing out windows longingly, cannot.  And therein lies the new dichotomy of the American culture, dividing rich from poor.  The ballad of the Boomers is only the beginning.  Soon we’ll have something called the Split of the “X”.  And it won’t be a kind one.

With life costs and health care costs going nowhere but up, the Medical Industrial Complex surging prices inhumanely, it returns to what some mad, raging House Speaker once yelled in a session years ago, citing the message of the modern health care system: “Get rich or die quickly”.

Taking proactive care of ourselves begins of course with apples per day and less doctor appointments.  But even Jack LaLanne saw his physician.  And for those of us blessedly long un-beset by such immediate need for so long, certain birthdays mean finally dealing directly with that annoying thing you just lived with forever and didn’t think about. Usually because it won’t go away and you don’t know what it’s gonna turn into. It also means looking at how you’re gonna afford to live, maybe where you might be forced to leave and migrate to.  That’s if nothing else changes the plot.

The fifty-sixers I once knew likely did not have to contend with these kinds of untold dreads. They had pensions, safe long-term investments, and policies.  And yet, this looming tidal wave ahead on the radar, I do not perceive myself in any way as “grown up” as those sometimes ailing, ached-and-pained elder statespeople.  I’m blessed, after odysseys of my own to be mostly fitness-minded and dodging the pack in the men’s locker room at the gym, the thirtysomething Schwarzeneggers, talking sympathetically of all the moves they can’t do anymore because of what the prescription meds and steroids did to them. It’s kind of like winning a game of checkers on the Titanic.

But I’m reminded that on this Titanic I’m just a passenger. Age or not.  And if I care to pretend I’m on the Preferred Deck while confined to the rafters, I just might do that. Ultimately, we’re all going to the same place.

Noah F.

 

 

 

 

Even Aeschylus Got Started at Hallmark Once....

 

One day, the cultural boundaries of social media will no doubt predictably expand to allow us, one and all, to meet the communal expectation of sharing in real time-live action video what were at one time in our anthropology human life’s most intimate routines.  Like consuming our food over the sink or at the kitchen counter, or perhaps our time in the rest room. While limited, obviously and agreeably to head shots, depicting nothing too visibly obscene or graphic, much as some modern prophets once presaged, for those inclined, our most intimate lives are going to become some kind of inside-out Maysles Brothers-Fredrick Wiseman-reminiscent documentary, composed of some lesser-cultivated mounds of self-cinematographuzed surveillance footage. The more pretentious among us will opt for black-&-white.

Like any cultural norm on the horizon, its advent exists in pronounced traces. The earliest trace will be inarguably defined in social media’s initial effects upon the communal celebration of birthdays in the common Judeo-Christian culture.

To the day this passage was written, social media has, amidst the scorn and reprimand, been lauded as the extended family conduit, allowing the detached and lonely among us to more easily share and cultivate couches of friends and loved ones, with whom we can express our most immediate thoughts and feelings, and hence never be alone.

Intimate relationships of any sort work both ways. Those whose lives rebuild upon the welcome change of such constant personal connection are forced to become re-socialized to accept the responsibility of both acknowledging and receiving perfunctory greetings upon one’s most ambivalently held personal dates. The most common of these would be birthdays.

What makes the treatment of birthdays on social media such a precarious matter is that while on-line virtual communication is so rife with capability for video linking, picture-sharing, creative graphics and the like, there exists among our electronically cyber-social population, a vast amount of gregarious Facebook participants over the age of twenty, who hold their birthdays, for better or worse, as a mostly non-celebratory event. In kind, to those adults they know and hold dear, they may see fit also not to openly laud any grand well-wishes, but rather keep their knowledge of their friends’ awareness of their acknowledgment silently tacit, and greatly respected.

To many, it isn’t really about an abject “fear” of aging, or even some excruciating discomfort.  But maturity installs certain mental structures within the level-headed citizen.  As a boy of fourteen, I thought nothing was more outrageously hilarious than the shock humor of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, and their jokes and bits referencing death, gags that played on their old BBC programme to howling studio audiences.  Many of the humor-loving grownups around me at the time though, people generally of my current age, didn’t find those death gags so funny. As a kid interested in humor-writing, I couldn’t really understand why, though I knew there had to be a reason. One time, with my most liberally-outspoken middle-aged aunt, one who really did appreciate the bluer side of that Brit TV humor, I shared a common Python death-joke reference, to which she sourly growled…..”Not funny….”

It would take me that golf-swing distance from that moment in my teen life until now to understand why it wasn’t.  It was essentially for the same reason that obligatory birthday greetings for too many are not necessarily something arbitrarily celebratory.

Okay, why..?! What’s with us Debbie-Downer-buzz killers…?? Why can’t we just be happy in the face of the uproarious Facebook birthday greeting avalanche and just dive in like a kid into a pile of shoveled fall leaves, instead of moping around like a confused and alienated Dustin Hoffman during his celebration party in The Graduate…?

My aunt didn’t like to think or even joke lightly about death. Elders of mine who cut their comedy-loving teeth on the likes of Sid Caeser, Carl Reiner, Mel Brooks and Woody Allen, were the same ultra-Jewish God fearers that knew the gothic and very direct dangers of that thing dating all the way back to the ancient Greek societies: Hubris.  I learned it to be that forbidden closet of celebration and irreverence that directly provokes personal tragedy. For one thing, you couldn’t write a play or a TV show without it. 

Birthdays of course are not meant, in our culture, to be directly associated with one’s passing.  But as one veers through different time zones in the human life personally for the first time, despite the blessed presence of kindred souls, the internal response will always be one to negotiate.  No time spent with any therapist, psychiatrist or social counselor in some attempt at articulation may resolve it either.  And it just might not be thoroughly conducive to a barrage of the most well-meant Facebook greetings, memes, foolish aging jokes, cake illustrations, and what seem on many levels like some obligatory ritual by every distant one of your mostly invisible 697 Facebook “friends” to post a “Happy Birthday”.  Birthday night means a lot of acknowledging “like” clicking before bedtime.

A friend of mine, a fellow I precede by a decade or more, thanked his friends for all the social media greetings on his birthday, which he cites as getting less celebratory as years move forward.  He’s a pretty upbeat and successful guy to begin with, and my inner response to his comment was, “Y’know, a birthday isn’t supposed to provoke a scratch-off winning ticket response. !”  To yours truly, a birthday, for this grownup anyway, is to be a day of utter and solemn joy.  No, it’s not a nine-year old’s anticipation of a Lego set, a new Bob Dylan 8-track tape, and presents at a party later…It’s not some twenty-year old’s keg party.  For a mature grownup it’s a precious, inarticulate day of appreciation and thanks for the care and safety God has shown you, through the presence of others. It’s an annual time out for some quiet self-observation, to get real about what you’re really letting yourself get upset about unnecessarily, for some self-inflictive and pointless reason, and appreciation of how much you’ve successfully overcome, a decorated veteran of this thing called Life.  Yours need not be the book you will author, or the blog you’ll create, or story you’ll cathartically share with others.  But it’s your honored badge nonetheless, to wear with pride.

It's a little hard sometimes to try and maintain that austerity when you’re the birthday-greeting-recipient act on this Facebook Gong Show.  But that’s when you realize. Off stage, when the set is shut down and the cheering studio audience gone, you really are the recipient of that respect, the respect the virtual on-stage celebrity panelists and their wild barbs know you share with them.  They’ll know it even when the internet is down worldwide, indefinitely.  In the interest of hubris, let’s not even discuss it any further.

 Noah F.

Let’s Not Exactly, But Establish Something Equivalent To Say We Did...

 

I recently had the thrill of an epiphany marking the circle of history, a moment in media time that might have only best been appreciated by the likes of Marshall McLuhan or maybe Andy Warhol over sixty years ago.  It was in real time, and it really happened. The atmosphere around me almost turned sixteen-millimeter black-and-white.

Hearing some predictable little bullet interview with some self-proclaimed startup-business sage, amongst his top recommended ingredients necessary for the successful startup, he cited in passing the importance of having a published book. When the interviewer began asking about the type and nature of the book, and how thorough its content need be, the subject flatly denounced its significance.  His response was that the book’s existence, it’s handsome jacket and its retail existence on Amazon was all that was relevant on the startup interview frontier. The man’s own alleged multi-million-dollar success was nothing to sneeze at.  Although I’ve not acquired and read it, his own book must be one hell of a read.

With no disrespect to the business sage-author in that teensy little interview maybe no one heard but me in that avant-garde fly-on-the-wall moment, that glistening molecule of the irony of our society commenting on itself, the fellow interviewed was no less than the oracle at Delphi, the Greek chorus, stating very much simply what is our accepted media culture. It was the un-fakest news I’d heard in a very long time.

Watchdogs are pronouncedly all over the place. While we need them now more than ever with regard to personal products, environmental, food, medicine and the like, there really isn’t too much time and attention available to police, apprehend or shut down the theoretic or occupational liars that build their so-called credibility on those light, pliable, good looking blocks of painted styrofoam.  Though our culture is way more litigious now in a world of precarious credibility, buyers are expected to be even more wary and won’t get too much legal sympathy for their romantic inclinations of belief.

The bottom line is, if it looks good, do it.  Fewer and fewer today will bear even the intent to question one’s props.  We are existing in a world predicated more and more by the minute on presentation.  If the success of a blind date rests on how you look when you show up at first sighting in that restaurant lobby, multiply that exponentially with regard to an investor meeting or even a corporate interview, and you know what’s what.

Naturally, you won’t get that far or any further if you don’t know the respective “ropes”. But you’re meeting with people grading you not on what got you to the meeting, but on what you can impress them, and potentially others with, at face value.  A fake book is obviously a great start.

How did our culture arrive at one, business and otherwise, where “fake” is in too many ways tacitly acceptable..?  It seemed over one hundred years ago that no one took that irreverent, underground business known as the “moving pictures” to task for its handsome but fictional representation of wars or train robberies. Sixty or seventy years hence, when local and even network TV news divisions fell under fire for their “live-on-the-scene” captures that sometimes were not all they purported to be, the upheaval remained mostly within industry confines, viewers on the whole remaining untraumatized, and generally numb to a relatively accepted finite level of credibility within the media circus.

I won’t soon forget the week that something revolutionary called the Cable News Network, a creation of that Atlanta TV mogul Ted Turner got unveiled.  My mom and I were not rich enough to afford cable TV in 1980, but we did acquire the TV Guide with the gatefold listings for Premiere Week.  All of twelve, and already a heritage TV viewer, I was fascinated.  How much newscasting can they really churn out for twenty-four hours…..constantly..??  My mom offered that maybe they’ll have to start inventing news.  A prophet, she was.

It's not so much about “all the news that’s fit to print”, or abundance with the lack thereof anymore.  Maybe it used to be.  In times since that handsome reprimand, we’ve shifted focus to another criteria.

There may be less human operation in media now, and more “AI”, to any extent. But the audiences reached by these processed foods are in fact real humans, and make no mistake about it, audiences catch on.  If the object of the ball game drifts from accuracy and credibility to entertainment value, they will quickly understand, and grade accordingly. 

And entertainment value, as News Patriarchs of Milleniums Past once in their decline feared, and demonic creatures like Network’s Diana Christensen implored, is now, in a world drowning in available media, the only pliable and measurable value to anything.  Even information.  Even the relevant kind.

It’s the relevant part that actually for the first time ever begins to cause a problem. It reached some affecting levels when the whole COVID thing happened.  Naturally, there are many who question what a lack of spread in the existing media would have done to temper what became a psychotic scare.  Unfortunately, that one’s too big to untangle.  But it does question the fearful corporate-government manipulation of the media we see and hear.  All of it.

That whole odyssey has only served to further our more intelligent awareness of the eroding accountability of the available media.  There’s exponentially more of it now.  And inversely less of it on the whole can be taken seriously.

So who’s to blame for this..?  Corporate interests..? Government..? The late, great Ted Turner…? William Randolph Hearst..?  Rupert Murdoch..?

Maybe we need to harken back to that profound truth once quoted by the late, great Edward R. Murrow during that crisis known as the McCarthy Era.

In unveiling the veneer of the Senator, Murrow stated that maybe the greatest wound inflicted upon us Americans is the ones we inflicted upon ourselves, our false beliefs and fears, ones we submitted to in our embrace of cathartic ignorance.

Could today’s angered cry of “fake news” be the pain of a self-inflicted wound..?

Every day, a new website is built.  A new domain is approved and bought.  A new “news feed”, a new podcast.  A new book comes out, on line or on kindle. 

Some of these are actually at some point read or listened to by someone.  Some, like this little piece on this little blog, will be posted by the writer and read by no one.  But it sure does look handsome.

We don’t open newspapers anymore, we log on and scroll.  And those scrolls are no longer the elite product of hired writers, columnists and trusted scribes.  Podcasts, those available presentations that are reviving the medium our great grandparents knew as ”radio”, are now this very commonly approachable venue that does not require employment by a news or program director.  One need not meet with the likes of Frank Stanton or Ed Murrow to become one’s own Elmer Davis.  Just buy your equipment, voice your tirade, and upload..!  And now we can share and share alike.  We may have grown up in a world where our elders would growl at that idiot, Howard K Smith at the end of his ABC News editorial each night.  But in the adage of “if you think you can do better…”, the complaining ends and the doing begins..! Isn’t this what America is really all about..?!?

In some ways, perhaps it is. And too many of us are having a good time cooking and serving to even worry about who’s sampling our offerings in what is an overcooked buffet table at the most gluttenous event ever. We are obese with publicly presented matter in an egocentric world of people too entertained by the sound of their own voices and sight of their own words to even effectively share in one another’s company in one’s very own, exclusive sandbox.  I don’t really know too many people who read too many blogs or actually listen to too many podcasts. Most people are now too busy presenting their own.  And as far as successive accomplishments, if you can have the platform, do you really need the credibility…?

Less than fifty years ago saw the harvests of talk-show satire on TV. Programs like TVTV and Fernwood 2-Night consisted wholly of the pretend wallpaper predicated on the jokefulness of how easily credible any of that guff could sound. Today, that very guff is the real thing.  Not only do we know it  We’re buying it.  Guff is great, and you’ve got to admire the presentation..! Heck, I know the guy who did that podcast..!  No more six degrees of separation.  We all know these people.  What more credibility do you need..??

A musician I knew years ago once talked of the night he played with his twelve-piece band in a club one night where “there were more people on stage than in the audience”. And in his opinion, they gave the show of a lifetime.  On the once-presaged information superhighway now, there are many such presentations.  The real gift of it all is being the lucky patron in that club, that intelligent, alert, appreciative audience of one, who doesn’t really care how real it is, how credible it is, or even how long or short it is.  That one patron just wants a damn good show.  I hope one day, one quiet night, I’ll get to be that very patron.  In a world so full of it, it’s the best one can wish for.

 

-Noah F.

 

 

 

"I Can Be Impervious To It Now...."

Is the modern social demon known as The Internet capable of vindicating that overcriticized demon of our past..?

“You can’t go home again…” was the phrase credited to the late, great author Thomas Wolfe, citing an all-too admissible condition: No geographic pilgrimage, no imposed socialization, not even in many cases a reunion with a set of particular artifacts, nor a fondly enjoyed food or treat of our youth or a prior time, will conjure the instant immersion in that Walden Pond of the immensely craved nostalgic experience, that mad dash to our teen-hood, childhood, or pre-adolescence. Hearing an old record for the first time in decades might do it for a nanosecond, when that arrangement hits our ears. A stroll past a childhood corner still remaining amidst unidentifiably changed stores and homes might drudge up that Hal Holbrook Our Town moment for a second or two. But all too conscious of our current surroundings, the emotionally displaced grownups among us are, let’s face it, prisoners of the modern world.

We can’t start blaming the world for that. Would we have taken the atmosphere around us for granted as such when we were kids if we knew it would come to this..? I don’t see why not. Back then, it was the only world we knew, much like the one we take for granted today. Living in it means you may not be able to treasure it the way you will forty or more years later. That’s just plain science.

The fact is though, there is a very nostalgic component, ripe for the capture, that can in fact provide that missing puzzle piece that will for many of us fulfill the only organ within us that can generate an empowering, nourishing and comprehensively emotional journey home. That organ is the soul.

If you’re curious, look it up, but enough has been written about the nature of the soul as the human compass, short of reviewing it all here. From Thomas Moore to the late, great Father Paul Keenan, and many other prolific scribes in-between, the concurrent dictate is that the soul is the “G.P.S.” of the mind and body.

How do we reach the soul..? It’s a case-by-case thing. No two humans are quite alike. If none of those trappings listed above will do it for you, maybe it’s one of the key domestic ingredients you haven’t yet added. And only now is that key ingredient starting to become available.

What would it take to develop a “time machine” ? I was maybe about twenty-one when a same-aged close friend of mine and I waxed nostalgic for a good long time one late night in 1989, lamenting as we were on the horizon of the Generation X “Grunge Era”, about how we’ll never be able in this desolate world to return to those days and nights with the collective and profoundly memorable television backdrop that scored our earlier lives. An excavated stack of genuine period issues of TV Guide was admittedly as close as we knew we’d ever come to the surrounding cathode-ray sights and sounds of our harmless, innocent youth. We verbally, vividly and cathartically recalled in some unified thrill the phrases, jingles and announcer mantras of the local television continuity that were the defining décor of our most impressionable era. How many times did we used to hear that same announcer in 1979 say “Tomorrow on the 4:30 Movie..!!”, or that one nameless, distinct voice on Channel 11 say, “Available at Bradlee’s”, right at the end of that product jingle..? Those very ubiquitous knick-knacks were the most recognizable icons of our predominantly fond childhoods, and our night concluded with the gratitude of remembering it, for we’d never see or hear them again.

The evening’s talk raised the fantasy thought of how great it would be, in that pre-internet, VCR age, if some enterpriser would see fit to restore and combine some of the more obscure full-length TV shows of the 1970s with their original commercial breaks fully preserved as well. The going consensus was that almost nowhere would anyone with a high-priced VCR in the last ten years have recorded or preserved anything that included those dreaded commercials and station break scraps. If one made such an investment in a home unit and those pricey cartridges, they were cautious enough to tape only the viewable portions, and leave the crusts behind. Years later of course, here’s these two nostalgic boys realizing that the crusts are in fact the most defining portion of the sandwich.

The crusts, in all their refined splendor, are over thirty years later seeing restoration, and feeding a home-starved population.

The household staple of the last fifteen years, YouTube, has provided a precious and publicly accessible display case for the treasures being unearthed in recent years, by tape-rolling civilians of long ago, and industrial-tape archivists alike. Despite any lofty ideals held in the 1970s and 80s, plenty of VCR owners were just too overwhelmed with the potential task of trying to avoid the appearance of commercial breaks on that NBC Monday Night At The Movies they taped in 1976. So on the cassette they stayed eternally. Until the tapers or someone close to them saw fit to take that dusty relic off the shelf and carefully dub the full two-plus-hours of content onto a YouTube file for all to enjoy, the way the owner and many viewers did on their TV sets that very night in history, prime-time promos, Tomorrow show teases and all. Is there any allure in such pedestrian viewing..?

If you have the desire to literally return for a couple of uninterrupted hours to an evening in your younger or childhood past, it’s precisely that kind of restored matter that may take you there the way nothing else can, certainly if you’re of the “TV Generation”.

Being of the “TV Generation” is by no means a current-day classification. Anthropologically, the “TV Generation” cites a specific, twentieth century population of children who in many cases and in many homes maintained the presence of the TV signal as literally their interior décor, the sort that the late Professor Marshall McLuhan would certify as such. As significant as the avant-garde, tart-colored wallpaper and the shag carpet rendering the living room a veritable cornfield, that wood-grain foundation with it’s rainbow-hued glow defining the room was the main ingredient, completing the ensemble at usually any and every moment.

There’s no established corporate agenda or manufacturing dictate or missive behind the benevolent efforts of the folks excavating and uploading, and probably no forseeable profit motive. What there is however, is the labor of love in the restoration of these lengthy video treasures. Sadly, in what is yet an un-zoned online world, there are some watchdog figures who need to maintain the unfriendly task of obliterating those video scraps or portions thereof whose inclusion violates commercial rights of any sort. No doubt about it, the corporation will always padlock the playground. Often though, in an internet video-scape mostly ungoverned, the intent uploaders will find way before long to re-emerge their treasures. While probably no one’s interested in violating any rights in the process, the reason for the constant renegade efforts and the popularity of these fully restored broadcast files is clear. For an undeniable many of us, these uploads are at last our precious journey home.

A three-hour continuous broadcast file of CBS News coverage on Election Night 1976…..NBC World Series coverage, 1975, Game Three, commercials and all…..The ABC Friday Night Movie with Jaclyn Smith from November 1979, complete with Clairol ads, News-at-11 teases and the rest.....it’s that fourth wall that once defined our earthly existence……damn those sociologists of the 1970s and their crusade against television...!

The irony of course, about that era’s outspoken authors, Jerry Mander, Marie Winn, and Frank Mankiewicz among others, is that these renown television hate-baiters had yet to see or even conceive of this thing called The Internet, the advent of social media platforms, and the neurological decay and psychological harm their innocent technological capabilities would ultimately render. In contrast to a time when adults of mature age could be relied upon to always correct the young in matters of judgement and behavior, we are in an electronic-driven culture that has for many compromised proper mind. It has in many cases farmed into a brand new substance and addiction syndrome, mitigated by abstinence and twelve-step therapy for some who’ve never imbibed as much as an ounce of wine in their lives. For a good many, the internet is not a friendly appliance. When used incorrectly or irresponsibly, like any valuable household power tool, the results can in fact be life-damaging.

And it’s this noted deadly and inescapable force, the source of artificial intelligence, predatory activity, random thievery, deceit and disparagement, that from within also comes the precious connection that restores the souls of so many, providing no less than a healing solace in a cathartic and necessary visit to a place we can no longer go, but to one we can very gratefully for just a few quiet hours return, commercials, annoying little promos, announcements and all. Who cares what’s on..?

Noah F.