Category Archives: Culture

BEAUTIFUL DAYS IN MY NEIGHBORHOOD

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Throughout the past few years many aspects of Boston have been depicted in books (George V. Higgins, Dennis Lehane, Robert Parker novels and more) as well as in the cinema.  Most recently, Mystic River, Gone Baby Gone, The Departed to name only a few.  Not surprisingly the reader or viewer is mostly treated to the underbelly of the underworld–though there have been some exceptions—Good Will Hunting, for example.

As a detective fiction writer, I too use Boston as a background for my mysteries.  But the alpha and omega of my town is neither the crime world or its historical significance and the preservation of that history.

Boston’s real backbone is its neighborhoods—each with their own name and often cultural differences.  The North End, seat of our Italian population, South Boston (about which much has been written and filmed), and many others like the South End, Roxbury, and Dorchester.

I live in Jamaica Plain (JP), one of Boston’s most diverse neighborhood with a mix of Irish, Hispanic, gentrified Whites, African Americans, gay men and lesbians, and Asians.  During my thirty years of living here, I’ve watched the housing market undercut a swatch of that diversification with house and rental prices.  Still, there’s a reasonably decent mix of community people, which, in a provincial city, is pretty difficult to find.

Over the course of a year there are Dominican and, Puerto Rican festivals, Little League, Wake Up The Earth parades and celebrations.  There are farmer’s markets, night time lantern walks around Jamaica Pond (about a mile and a half in circumference), and in the deep of winter, public Caribbean parties.

But my favorite community weekend is Jamaica Plain Open Studios (JPOS) when local artists and crafts people line the streets, open their houses and apartments, use public spaces and local businesses to exhibit their work.  Begun around 1993 after the JP Multicultural Arts Center was forced to close for economic reasons, the yearly September event draws people from the entire city.  In fact, other Boston neighborhoods (Roslindale, South Boston, etc) have followed suit with their own Open Studio days.

I’m sure Boston isn’t the only city that showcases its local artists, nor the only one with open studio weekends–whatever they’re called.  But JPOS is mine and I want to present some sights from this past weekend.

This watercolor above by Peter Bass is of JP Center, the heart of the neighborhood and one of the major locations of JPOS.  Churches, theaters and  public buildings present groups of artists’ work; individual artists open their homes.

      

Here are some examples of what we saw in the Center.  The first artist below turned out to be an old book rep friend of mine who has become a landscape designer and jewelry maker, Barbara Trainer and second two below are the work of Anna Koon.

                              

 

 

 

 

 

 

The other end of JP was home to factories and their workers’ housing.  Another center for artists is a restored brewery, now home to an annex of Sam Adams, and other factories that have been converted to artist spaces.

More jewelry, more crafts, more art.  We spent an extra long time in the studio of Maggie Carberry, whose work hangs in our kitchen and in the dining room of my in-laws.

Lest you think this show is just for adults, let me add one last picture:

I would love people to put their own community pictures on my author page on Facebook.  And if you feel like it, it would be great if you “liked” the page.

 

ART, MEDIA & MAKE BELIEVE

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When reviewing last week’s post, I noticed part of a sentence that read “the dystopian violence depicted in movies and television, either a reflection of what is or a harbinger of what’s to come” and began to think about art and the media.  It also made me think about the large number of people I know who believe that violence in movies, television, and video games (they rarely talk about it in regard to books or plays, which I find curious) reflects and adds to the violence in our country.

Yet according to the New York Times, it turns out that the number of violent crimes in the United States dropped significantly last year to what appears to be the lowest rate in nearly 40 years.  (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/24/us/24crime.html?_r=1).

And Time Magazine reports that,from 1993 to 2010, the violent crime victimization rate decreased 70 percent. “This means the human dimension of this turnaround is extraordinary: had the rate remained unchanged, an additional 170,000 Americans would have been murdered in the years since 1992. That’s more U.S. lives than were lost in combat in World War I, Korea, Vietnam and Iraq—combined. In a single year, 2008, lower crime rates meant 40,000 fewer rapes, 380,000 fewer robberies, half a million fewer aggravated assaults and 1.6 million fewer burglaries than we would have seen if rates had remained at peak levels.” (http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1963761,00.html).

Both articles say that the reasons for this plunge are unclear and suggest a number of possible explanations.  But bottom line is bottom line.  Violent crime is down not up during a period of time when the reverse should be true according to those who believe current movies, TV, and video games lead to more a more violent culture.  It just ain’t so.

I grew up with cartoons that were not at all shy about violence.  Tom and Jerry, The Roadrunner, Mighty Mouse and all those episodes where Porky Pig tried to blow away the wabbit.  Grew up with comic books that had no qualms about blood and gore either–Superman, Batman and a whole lot more.  Try Zap Comics on for size.

Our culture has never been lacking in the media’s artistic expression of violence.  Dime store pulp books with hacked female bodies, True Crime magazines with bloody, bodacious blondes on the cover, black and white movies that stirred the same emotional fear and repulsion as do today’s “slice and dice” like Psycho, 13 Women (1932), and Peeping Tom (1960). Some of those “classics” were even able to engender some serious ugly without spilling a drop of blood. Think Cagney mashing a grapefruit into Mae Clark’s face in The Public Enemy.  Different presentations than today’s cinema, but the same feelings provoked in those who watched them.

Or consider detective fiction, a wonderfully American genre of writing. (I’m biased. Duh.)  Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett is regarded as one of best.  That book leaves dead bodies all over the place.

Or think literary fiction.  Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy.  Not for those with gentle stomachs.

Violence is everywhere we look. Genre fiction, literary fiction, science fiction, graphic novels, and, of course, movies.

I’m not a horror movie fan.  Never saw any of the Texas Chainsaw Massacres and never will.  But Raging Bull is often listed in “best of the generation” lists.  As are a couple of The Godfathers, Taxi Driver, Casino, and, of course, Pulp Fiction.  Certainly the spaghetti westerns and all the great westerns were locked and loaded.  And while it’s true that there’s a distinction between a single shot to the heart rather than a spray from an automatic rifle, I’m not sure I could pick the more chilling.  Or the more “realistic.”

The list of great books and great movies is filled with those that contain bone-chilling violence. And while I can’t say much about video games because I don’t know anything about them, the inescapable fact is that we are living in a country with the lowest violent crime rate in the past forty years.  Not exactly a ringing condemnation of those who do play them—at least as far as violence is concerned.

So I’ll say it again: I don’t believe that today’s media and art forms generate more violence within our population despite its increasingly graphic detail.

In fact, it’s my speculation that violence exhibited in all our different media probably helps reduce it in the “real world.”  We live in a nation born of violence, a nation whose history has spilled blood by the barrelful.  Against Native Americans, Blacks, Irish, Italians (who suffered biggest mass lynching in U.S. history) and I’m just skimming the surface of domestic.  We go international and it’s off the charts.

Violence is simply sewn into the fabric and nature of our culture.  I wish it weren’t so, but we are who we are.  The only question is how and where that violence manifests itself.  And if it can live within us without our acting it out.  This, I think, is the way that violence in media and art ameliorates rather than promulgates.  It is, and has always been, a way for that part of our cultural identity to express itself without inflicting any actual harm.  Violence in the media and in art is the pressure cooker’s release valve.

I’m not denigrating those who recoil at what they might read or see, or make decisions about where to draw their personal lines.  Those individual decisions are healthy.  Hell, I spend a fair amount of time in the movie theater covering my own eyes.  But they are individual decisions, and to argue that we are a more violent society because of our books, movies, games, and art is flat out wrong.

 

Miscellanea

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If I had imagined that “A Tough Write,” the last four posts chronicling my relationship with my dad, was going to be cathartic, I was wrong.  I do feel good about my honesty and my ability to get it down on ‘paper’, but I don’t feel much different than I did before I wrote the series.  Presumably I’m learning a lesson that many people already know—time helps more than venting, however well written and honest that venting is.

Maybe it’s that I don’t feel as “light and airy” as I had hoped.  Maybe it’s that I feel drained.  Maybe it’s the countdown to Jewish Christmas (Chinese and a movie).  But it’s one of those weeks where, as my friend Bruce Turkel put it, “I got nothin’.” (see: http://turkeltalks.com/index.php/2011/10/16/i-got-nothin/)

Rather than make something out of that nothin’, which Bruce already did so well, I’ve decided to let the week’s thoughts, ideas, insights, lack of insights, wishes, and experiences lope onto the page.  Or at least some of them.  I may be honest, but I do have some limits. (Where are they?  Where are they?)

In no particular order:

Television

NCIS, which has one of the highest television viewerships is my “comfort food.”  And like mac and cheese or take-out pizza, familiarity is probably more important than quality, especially when you’ve had a bad day. Nothing on NCIS makes you jump out of your skin and the relationships between the characters never surprise—that’s sort of the point.  Despite the above, Mark Harmon, in his role as Gibbs, has serious ‘duende.` ((P)RAISING THE DEAD): http://www.zacharykleinonline.com/1/archives/07-2011/1.html).

If you do want to jump out of your skin, Homeland, Showtimes’ series based on Gideon Raff’s Israeli Hatufim or Prisoners of War, makes that happen.  Claire Danes, as Carrie Mathison, is terrific as a manic on a mission to prevent a major terrorist attack.  Her intense mishagas is wonderfully offset by Saul Berenson (Mandy Patinkin), Carrie’s calm, soulful, mentor who mostly believes her hunches, but spends as much time trying to keep Carrie’s head together as hunting down any potential attack.  Damian Lewis as Nicholas Brody (whose acting is also marvelous) is an American Marine held captive by Al-Qaeda for eight years, originally the object of Carrie’s suspicion but becomes…well, I’ll let you discover what happens.

If you have Showtime and On Demand, I suggest you start from the beginning.  The show is that good.

Another pleasure on the television front is Starz’s Boss, which chronicles Mayor Tom Kane of Chicago (Kelsey Grammer, cast against the grain).  Although the series takes place in the present, it’s really about how the first Mayor Daley ran his town.  I think the series is worth watching, but I’m biased since I Iived in Chicago during three or four years of Daley’s term.  Again, if you do have On Demand and Starz, I’d suggest watching the show from the beginning.

(If folk have different recommendations, please let me know in the ‘comment’ section.  I’m always ready to hear about something decent on the tube.  Grateful too.)

Books I’d like to read:

Coming through Slaughter by Michael Ondaatje

House of War by James Carroll

Time Bites by Doris Lessing

The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach

On the recommendation front:  But Beautiful (A Book About Jazz) by Geoff Dyer.  Truly fabulous as he riffs about jazz greats, writing those riffs in the style of each particular musician he profiles.  A stunning book for anyone who loves jazz.

Movies I want to see:

Sherlock Holmes: A Game Of Shadows.

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.

Mission Impossible-Ghost Protocal.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.  (LeCarre’s second best book next to The Spy Who Came In From The Cold.)

Dangerous Method (Viggo as Freud?  He’s been great as everyone else).

My Week with Marilyn.

Documentaries I want to see:

Page One: Inside The New York Times.

Urbanized.

Eames: The Architect & The Painter.

The Black Power Mix Tape 1967-1975.

 Art I want to see:

Degas Nudes at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts.

Play I’d like to see:

THE FRIENDS OF EDDIE COYLE at Club Oberon.

But mostly I want to finish the work of getting my Matt Jacob Mystery Series prepared for download.  It’s been a hell of a lot more effort than I imagined and I’ve yet to even figure out how to cut through the noise of the Internet where the books will live.  How to get the Matt Jacob series a following despite the overwhelming infoload of virtual reality? Of course, if anyone not on my mailing list wants to be, please let me know at zacharykleinonline@gmail.com.

I want finish because I’m chomping at the bit to write new ones.

So I plan to take the next two weeks off of my Monday posts.  I won’t finish my project, but it will give me an opportunity to do some catching up.  It will also allow me to recharge my Monday post batteries.  A Tough Write was tougher than I realized

I hope you all will return when I do.  Have a great, safe holiday; then let’s meet up again online Monday, January 9, 2012.

Feliz Navidad

Whoever undertakes to set himself up as judge in the field of truth and knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the Gods. – Einstein

Give Me A Goy Or Get Me A Gun

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(An Early Bird dinner in Florida)

It started when Barry, the 60-year old waiter, screeched to a stop at our table. “Your table is number twenty-nine, remember that. I stink at this job, so when I screw up you can just shout ‘table 29.’”  His Groucho was so good I wanted to jump up and stick out my knee to shake his hand.  Turns out he was funny—and, unfortunately, honest.

Things moved along, the occasional call across the room for “butter, not margarine” and “Can we get our coffee now?”  No problem, Groucho did his best.  But my Jewish self-loathing, usually reserved for the Israeli genocide of Palestinians, began to rear its head as the table next to us filled up with a nine person circus.

The women.  Ahh, the women.  Blonde hair, black hair, another, the hue of Rita Hayworth in Gilda—at least that reddish hue you’d imagine it would be if the movie were in color. If I had a dime for every nip and a dollar for every tuck, I’d buy the world a Coke.  We’re talking 80 plus without a single wrinkle or wattle.  Blonde hair, black hair, silver hair.  You gotta hope they shaved their legs.

And the men.  I couldn’t quite count the dentures and none popped out—at least that I could see from my seat.

“The game last night, my god, what a way to lose,” said the man, who became The Maven. (He who knows it all).

“I watched it but don’t remember the end,” said the guy who turned out to be The Forgetter.

“How can you not remember the end?  It was the best part.  Everything happened.  Did you fall asleep?  Mother, do you know what you want to eat?”

“What?  I can’t hear you!” Blonde Mama yelled from the other end of the table.

“Are you wearing your hearing aid?”

“What are you saying?” she shouted.

“He’s asking if you know what you want to eat,” Silver Hair explained, talking into her ear.  “Why aren’t you wearing your hearing aid?  You spent a fortune for it.”

“They make my ears look too big for my head. And I don’t know why he keeps asking the same damn thing.  I always get the veal.”

Which veal?” Silver Hair tries to shorten the inevitable process with a preempt.

“The Italian one. I just don’t know what’s the matter with that kid.  He must have a gene missing!”

The Blonde Mama had a problem hearing, but when the waiter finally came, her memory was razor sharp.  She ordered with machine gun precision: matzo ball soup, salad, blue cheese dressing, veal (Parmesan, it turned out), ziti on a side plate, vegetables, iced tea with two lemons, “make sure it’s two lemons.”  I idly wondered if she was going to take one of the slices home.  When she asked for a Styrofoam cup and top in advance for half her matzo ball, I was sure of it.

Meanwhile the table had moved on to politics.

“Obama, what’s to know?”

“Plenty, just listen to Colbert,” The Maven was saying to anyone who might be listening (loud enough that “anyone” could include the entire restaurant). “I’m telling you, he’s a genius!  Him and that other guy.  Pure genius!”

“Comedians can’t be geniuses,” the Forgetter responds, “anyway, both of them are slanted. And they don’t admit it.”

The Forgetter, who had forgotten that the waiter had taken all the orders added, “The waiter won’t know what veal dish you want.”

“Ahh, another country heard from,” said his wife.  “He just took all the orders,” shaking her head.

I’d fallen into one of the Seinfeld Florida episodes.  I also realized that Jerry might be a comic genius too, but in those cases, he just sat down with a pen and paper taking notes at the early bird.  It wasn’t parody or satire.  Just what it was.

At this point Groucho brought our $9.99s.  I thought about doing the hora around their table with a pork chop in each hand, shouting that I’d spent 12 years in a yeshiva.  Restrained by Sue, I quietly dug into my chops and continued to listen.

Their main courses began to arrive.  Act Three.

Barry began selectively scattering little side bowls of broccoli around the table.

“Where’s mine?” asked Blonde Mama.

“You ordered the vegetables,” said her neighbor.

“Broccoli is a vegetable,” Blondie replied and grabbed the dish.

“You got to take this plate back,” The Maven said angrily to the waiter.  “I must have said ‘well done’ four times and look at this!  Everything is bright red!”

The waiter, looking suicidal, to his credit, calmly picks up the dish and apologizes.  “I’ll take it to the kitchen,” he says, barely getting the words out in a strangled tone.

That Blonde Mama heard.  “Just eat what’s in front of you!” she bellowed to The Maven.

“Okay, okay,” The Maven replies. “Just give me the plate. It’s fine!”  And grabbed it from the waiter who looked like he wanted to jump through the window.

At this point I needed a Gentile. I needed someone who will think an underdone steak is a penance to bear.  Or, when he realized he had ordered mixed vegetables instead of broccoli, he’d eat that succotash in silence or just quietly leave it there until it was cleared away.

I really, really needed a Gentile.  Even one just to look at.  Hell I’da admired his plaid pants and golf club.  I needed a goy or I needed a gun.

Sue saw the look on my face. “Just be patient.  There’s vodka in the freezer at your dad’s.”

Silence descended at the group’s table as everyone decided to eat.  Didn’t last too long. Someone said, “They give you your money’s worth here, anyway.”  Which began an argument about where you could eat the most for the least until their food was gone.

“Gone” really isn’t the correct word.  Half gone, quarter gone might be closer to the truth.  But the eating had stopped with an air of satisfaction surrounding the table.

Barry came back.  He knew the drill.  “How many boxes?”

“Seven big ones,” The Maven demanded, still angry about his red meat.

I remembered a friend telling me about the ultra fancy Jewish country club a few towns over.  Although the place was filled with Caddies, Mercedes, Lexis’s, and Jags, no one was allowed to bring pocketbooks or bags into the restaurant for the fancy buffet.

Not so in the Grand.  Hell, they supplied the carry-out tools.

Again the table lapsed into silence as people shoveled their food into the Styrofoam until Blonde Mama forked the unfinished matzo ball, shook it into the cup, then tilted her bowl to make sure every drop of cold liquid made it into there too.  Practice makes perfect.  Somehow I believed she could have done it in her sleep.

And then they were gone.

My nerve endings still firing, we called for our boxes, filled them up, paid the check, got in the car and headed home.  No goys, no guns, but we made it back alive.

Failing Yoga

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According to every yoga teacher I’ve ever had, failure and yoga have nothing to do with each other.  Listen to your body, let it guide you on your own individual path.  Well, If, I listened to my body, it would be lying down.  On the couch, not on a mat.

Failure not an option?  Yeah, sure.  Have you ever seen a yoga teacher who wasn’t lanky and fit?  I’m here to tell you that if you’re old, overweight, and out of shape–failure is not only an option but a damn near certainty.

Yoga first caught my attention when I read that Robert Parish, the center of the Celtics great 1980s basketball dynasty, and a person who most definitely has duende, mentioned it as his way to stay limber.  In fact, he said it was also allowing him to extend his career.  Interesting, but I’m way too short to dunk.

Then my partner, Susan, began going to a class on in the mid 90s.  Ten years of cajoling later, I was convinced to join her and a couple of our friends.  So for about five years now, I’ve been trying to twist my body into extremely weird positions.

Yes, I can bend over and touch the floor.  I can inhale and exhale using my abdomen with the best of ’em.  I can get into Warrior and Goddess and even lie on my back and twist my body one way while my knees go another without pain.

And that’s when success comes to a screeching halt.  The rest seems like torture–of one kind or another.  Every time I’m told to move into Plank Pose, I do it.  But the first thought that jumps to mind is “drop down and give me twenty.”  And I was never in the army. Hell, I couldn’t do more than three pushups at any point in my life.

Then plank morphs into Downward Dog.

Twenty might have been better.  At first, “assuming the position” with my butt stuck up in the air made me think of bending over for soap in jail.  It took about a month, but eventually the image disappeared and was replaced by pain in my shoulders.   My instructor tried to be helpful: Rotate the inside of your elbows forward to lessen the shoulder strain.  It did, which allowed me two or three sun salutations (extra dogs) before the pain again kicked in.

Then there’s the balance issue.  Actually it’s a nonissue; I have none.  First, I can never find a spot to stare at without seeing someone else moving since I insist on being in the back row.  I prefer making an ass out of myself without other people watching.  In theory, anyway.  I never get away scot-free–a good part of the hour, the people in front of me are bent over with their head between their legs looking at my feeble attempt to stick my own head under my crotch.

But back to balance.  We start slow by placing one foot on a yoga block and simply swinging the other leg back and forth to loosen the hip.  I’m fine for two swings, three on a good day.  Then it’s off the block and onto one leg with the other placed on the inside of the planted thigh.  I have a few problems with this.  I have a bum knee, which makes standing on that leg and lifting the other impossible.  And when we switch to the leg without my bum knee it ain’t any better.  Like I said, no balance.  At this point in the hour I start to wonder what the fuck I’m doing there, but I force myself to focus on breathing since that I’m able to do.

Only my doubts come screaming back when we’re told to turn our feet outward with our heels touching and slowly lower ourselves (spine straight!) into a squat.  Which I can also do (I often play catcher on my softball team) but I know what’s coming next.

The fucking Crow–a crouched pose where you’re supposed to flatten your hands on the floor, bend your elbows, and lift your knees onto them.  The first time I tried, my body simply refused to move out of the crouch. My teacher noticed my look of dire immobilization, came over, and lifted me up from the rear.  At that moment I understood the freeze.  My nose was inches away from the hardwood floor that was just waiting for a splattering face plant.  I’ve already broken my nose three times; I ain’t gonna do it again.  I guess Geraldo felt my entire body begin to tremble and he gently brought me back down.  Sweet of him and even sweeter is his willingness to let me roll into relaxation mode when the Crow is coming.

Especially since it’s sorta fun to lie in my back and watch some other people glide smoothly from the Crow to a headstand.  Pretty amazing sight.  Which is all it will ever be.

So, in all honesty, I am a yoga failure.  Nevertheless, I’ll keep going each Monday with the forlorn hope that, someday, I’ll be able to stand on one leg longer than 5 seconds.  And with the anticipation of our every Monday night after-yoga do.  Eating a hot (not down) dog and drinking a couple of beers.

Toxins out, Toxins in.  My yogic symmetry.

“We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.” – Anais Nin