Arnica Anicca

Today’s Enneathought for my personality type: my passion is lust, an addiction to intensity. It's interesting how often that's seen as aggressive (as in how I eat melon) or worse, anger.

A friend asked me "is there a Jewish guy" in the poorly photoshopped web photo above for a CBC comedy program. I tried to listen to the guy on the right but kept getting the uncanny blowhard on the left. I finally found the right shtick, and whoa, what a throwback mix of Borscht Belt humor with a bit of curry. Yes, I was annoyed at the question. People still believe they can spot a Jew by some set of stereotypical looks, despite the offensive (to say the least) history of that notion. Who would have figured Superman to be a Jew by looking at his face? The model was an accountant named Stanley Weiss, according to an article in today’s New York Times. It’s no accident that Superman arrived in a rocket ship like baby Moses in a papyrus basket.

BTW: Perlmutar lost me at his very first joke about Halifax. Only a Canadian would laugh at that! Googling to catch the geographical confusion didn’t do it for me either. But, yes, he is a funny guy, and I’m proud he’s a member of the tribe.

More about annoyance...

The same person asked if I’ll talk at 10pm, even though, I'm usually asleep by then, maybe as a way of challenging my boundaries? At Outward Bound, one of the comments that shook me in the “Give and Take” exercise was a young person saying she wished I would be more flexible. Inflexibility, I’m afraid, seems to be an inevitable aspect of aging. Certain comforting things take on a habitual rhythm; other things, that may be vaguely uncomfortable, become downright intolerable. But maybe “growth” is all about staring down the latter, learning about both the causes of discomfort and how to apply anicca (my favorite word of 2012) when it arises.

BTW: I started 2013 with a pulled back muscle from skiing, and just as quickly as the pain hit me, after 5 days of immobility, it seems to have miraculously disappeared. I think the valium did the trick, but maybe it was the homeopathic arnica pills my wife brought me (my brother suggested arnica gel, but I guess, like so many other things, I didn’t communicate that to her properly). Arnica is from the Greek “arna”, meaning lamb, like Jesus, but for its soft hairy leaves. Anicca is from Pali, the opposite of “nicca”, meaning continuity. Whoa, what strange semiotic harmony… healing is soft impermanence, just like—you know it—breathing!

Or maybe my friend asked if I would talk at 10, fearful of an angry response to a disappointing change of plans? Or it’s just a sign of too little time for the call, just poor planning. I married a (then future) planner, and take great pride in my own planning abilities. But I'm a bit of a Jekyll and Hyde about it: relying as much if not more on gut spontaneity, loving to figure out detailed itineraries while hating to be told what to do or following them strictly, and getting "stuck" in extended periods such as this where I seem unable to plan anything at all beyond the present. (I was so immobilized by pain yesterday that I missed an Icarus Session with Seth Godin yesterday.)

When I’m busy healing, I think, I need to turn off my planning faculties entirely to create space for unplanned opportunities and to shake myself out of habitual patterns. Or is it actually just an isolationist habit. For my Type 8, the Enneagram folks call it disintegrating to Type 5. In Getting the Love you Want, Harville Hendrix says that in every relationship, one person is a fuser, the other an isolationist. I wonder whether both partners can sometimes have both instincts. That it’s more a matter of trying to create a balanced rhythm of push and pulls, experiencing the full spectrum of fusion and separation, and appreciating all of their attendant joys and sorrows.

Or, especially for types like me, learning how to appreciate the lack of intensity in between, that is, the mere push and pull of breathing.

Grow up

I've started reading an amazing book: Getting the Love You Want. I’m up to chapter 5. It's all about how early childhood experiences, especially with your caregivers, influence your choice of mates later in life, and, more profoundly, why and how you experience love.

I hate ebooks! Every time I use them, I have to relearn how to navigate. But there's no going back, I can't keep accumulating physical books, and have no time left to wait for their delivery. Libraries and book stores... what the heck are those?!

Learning and relearning: how to love, earn a living, survive, enjoy such a rapidly changing world.

Today’s assignment is to write the limo scene without dialog.

I asked my LA advisor why he liked my bike race scene so much better than everything else I showed him to date. He said, now that I know you can write, I can tell you what I really thought about the dialog you sent earlier: rank amateur wretched puke!

Someone else I sent it too basically said the same thing: “The dialogue sounds too stiff and contrived. It doesn't sound like a conversation.”  She apologized afterwards when I said ouch!

I think (I hope) she was the only other person I sent it to. I was SO EXCITED when I wrote that dialog that my instinct was probably to send it to everyone I know! It was the first dialog I wrote after structuring and restructuring the script for six months or so in response to contradictory feedback from three opposing camps (positive, negative, and silent).

No matter how bad it was, what I needed more than anything at that moment was encouragement! And despite all evidence to the contrary, I still somehow felt like a natural-born screenwriter! What the…?

I now appreciate even more deeply how good a teacher is my LA advisor. After my first dialog submission, he bit his tongue and wrote back “hey Ben, I think it's a great start,” and sent a bunch of suggestions about movies I should watch and things I should do differently.

I was chomping at the bit to do more, but he delayed responding, sometimes for weeks. He even asked me for advice about a project he was developing. I was so thrilled and flattered to oblige, no matter how great or little use any of my suggestions actually were to him.

I am learning an entirely new craft, and am repeatedly shocked at how tone-deaf I am regarding my mistakes. It seems so unusual to return to a beginner’s stage at my age. I’ve even been called adolescent for doing so.

What is it about achieving expertise that repulses me so much? I love the respect it brings, but loathe the predictability of knowing the answers. I really hate know-it-all close-mindedness, which is so hard to avoid with expertise.

Virgin territory is my sandbox; vocational risk, my drug of choice.

I guess what I really want is to play again. I can’t wait to keep writing my screenplay!



The Uncanny Valley

The problem with stereotypes is the uncanny valley. Being almost-human isn’t just creepy, it robs people of their humanity in the profoundest way, far more than a caricature that doesn’t pretend.

The phrase was coined by a robotics professor and is most commonly used in the context of CGI (computer-generated imagery) and its eerie similarity to the mediation of real actors. I wonder if moving images felt the same way when they were invented. Maybe not, since the public gravitated toward the new industry rather than recoiling from it.

Any representation, in fiction, nonfiction, visual art, even music, that feels close-but-no-cigar fake yields the same repulsion. It's worse than something that's far off. Way wrong can be funny, but slightly wrong—especially if trying to be right—is just yuk.

Sunday night at a fundraiser, I heard a fellow named Bernie Glassman, who cofounded zenpeacemakers.com and coauthored the soon-to-come The Dude and the Zen Master with Jeff Bridges, say “wars aren’t fought over opinions, only over what’s right and wrong.”

I’ve learned this past year that Buddhism was popularized in America largely by Jews, mostly since the 60s, but also in the 19th Century. They call them “JuBus”! Zen Master Bernie said he’d read my screenplay when it's ready for feedback. I love his “mantra”: “just my opinion, man!”

The near-miss is unnerving, the what-if so troubling. But wars are fought over entrenched polarities, when opinions become opposites in a world of disturbing nuance. The miracle of meditation, if enlightenment is possible, is promising to teach peace in the uncanny valley, equanimity in the face of stereotypes.

Vive la Différance

“Show me a young Conservative and I'll show you someone with no heart. Show me an old Liberal and I'll show you someone with no brains.” ― Winston Churchill

“The axis today is not liberal and conservative, the axis is constructive-destructive.” ― Steve Jobs

“If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution.” ― Emma Goldman

“Categorization is rudimentary theory.” ― Wassily Leontief

I grew up with ideology. So did the world at that time. You were right or left, or, if American, in the self-described middle. My mother called me a “Brooks-Brothers Marxist,” because of my young penchants for suits and leftist world views.

My political education took place in London before the fall of the Berlin Wall, and as a result, America seemed like a foreign place, its bland, muddy middle of isms: liberal, conservative, individual, and exceptional. Historical materialism, in contrast, unlocked the secret workings of human society for me, though its very language was taboo outside of academia and in many places inside too. I’ll never forget my conversation (too polite a term) with a Polish woman in a pub about how the communist societies of Eastern Europe did not represent the kind of social systems for which Marx advocated. She would hear none of it, nor would most of the Western world. Mostly what’s left, it seems, is my handedness, one strange expression of which, I just noticed, is a drawer full of left-hand gloves, their partners lost to the daily toll of biological bias.

It all seems like such ancient history. Left doesn’t even warrant its own color any more. A mere news commentator could redefine red as a Republican State at the dawn of the 21st Century. The hierarchy used to be so clear: one’s relationship to the means of production was the primary determinant of human welfare: suffering, happiness, opportunity, freedom. The multitude of cultural, demographic, and even environmental concerns are just superficial manifestations of the fundamental material relationships between us. Marx called them “superstructures”. Take race, class, and gender: your class, no doubt, has greater impact on your life experience than race or gender according to the Left. Women and people of color are generally more oppressed, because they have historically weaker positions relative to the means of production; a wealthy Black woman, for example, would generally have a better life than a poor white working man. OMG, did those arguments seem so insightful back in the day, and now so radically simplistic. Just ask Oprah!

Generalizations and stereotypes are dangerous, but we need them to make sense of the world, or at least we think we do. Without prejudice, or categorical thinking, we would be overwhelmed by difference: lost within infinite diversity. Discrimination, like discernment, can be a value-neutral, even elegant, affair; its judgmental—even hateful—attire is worn when our most craven defensive instincts attempt to bar unlike guests. Even life and death, the ultimate bifurcation, would become just a spectrum of possibilities without our abilities to discriminate. As with variations in aversion to risk, each of us has a uniquely personal relationship to typological rigidity, what kinds and how much we need to navigate comfortably through the day. As days pass, this relationship often changes. My need for ideological distinctions has dissipated over time, but I am well aware that a common definition of aging is the opposite tendency. Old dogs are blindest to their own attitudinal biases. The theories of one generation can make perfect sense to its members, but not jive at all with the experience of the next. And so it went: identity flipped the hierarchy, just as Marx “stood Hegel on his head” (which may be as famous a Leftist misquote as Emma Goldman’s dancing revolution).

Mine seems motley. Maybe that’s because in all apparent respects, I am a member of the most privileged one—hello, well-heeled white American men! Identity politics were created for my opposites, who demanded their just deserts. But I’m also a Jew, and hence not white at all (which would take another essay entirely to explain the antebellum origins of this now-ubiquitous racial category), and one raised by a family dominated by strong, independent Southern women in a largely African-American Northeastern city. At one time, a Black Baptist judge married a Hindu man to a Muslim woman in our Jewish home bustling with a Christmas tree and three kids attending Quaker school. Assimilation was the mantra of my upbringing. We tried to fit in and succeed to the best of our abilities; identity was a private matter: straight, gay, or goy. Much of my subsequent professional life focused on downtrodden populations, because I identified with their struggles, not their identity. I did my mother’s bidding as much as my father’s, still searching for my own. Motley is confusing, because the borders are indiscriminate, yet as a Jew, I am not motley at all, defined by a pure-blooded matriarchal lineage going back to BC.

I once went to a feminist organizing meeting in the 1970s and was asked ultimately to leave, because the women at that time, more than anything, needed a time and place to define their own agenda, a room of their own. I believe in equal rights, but I don’t believe men and women are equal at all. On the contrary, they are quite different, and unlike race, in ways that are as profoundly biological as sociological. Would the world be a better place if women were historically the dominant gender in terms of money and power? Maybe not, but it would definitely be different. We may well be moving in that general direction with women becoming more educated than men, more health conscious, and, I suspect, often more naturally endowed with emotional intelligence, the key power trait in an ever-more service-oriented economy. Do I think a gas-station calendar of pin-up models inevitably demeans young women or deleteriously shapes their self-image? I doubt it. My girls already know they can lead the boys by more than their gazes, though by their gazes too.

What the world needs now is a men’s movement that teaches emotional maturity to the hordes of stunted adult males hell-bent on war and terror and domination and greed whenever they’re given a room of their own. It probably won’t be women who teach them, even if they are in charge, and already among the world’s greatest leaders, artists and thinkers. When a man’s instinct is to let the baby cry herself to sleep, a woman may think that cruel, but the exhausted mother can’t otherwise go on, and the baby can’t otherwise separate “I” from “Thou”. What a foolish stereotype, you say?! Many other stories are just as true. Age has taught me to be slow to judge. I don’t have all the answers, but nor do the isms. Jacques Derrida once mesmerized me at the New School, but I can only vaguely remember his labyrinthine riffs on discrimination and difference. I learn today that he coined the word differance, a French play on differ and defer, and their fundamental roles in language and thought.

The baby waits, the mother cries, the man tries to discern, the world keeps changing as red becomes blue. We reach across a divide. Some notes fall flat, others sound new, maybe echo too. This is about me and you.

Flying with Sandy

With the day-after gusts and drizzle, no power for TV, and an Executive Order outlawing Halloween for New Jersey kids in the wake of the “Frankenstorm”, I was able to convince my younger daughter to take a walk with Duke (the dog) and me to see if the playground had reopened.

It hadn’t, but a bunch of kids were on the corner, and Breena asked please, please, please can she hang out with them. I said yes, as long as she didn’t leave the corner for any reason other than to walk home.

This is a story about time, which, it seems, is what my blog is about. More specifically, it’s about time interrupted: its tricks and treats. Disaster, like a sabbatical on steroids, refocuses our relationship with time by disturbing the normal course of events. Things like elementary schools and lights stop all together, others like buying gas or getting to work take forever, and the priorities of our days are reshuffled like a deck or toppled like a house of cards.

The screenplay I’ve been trying to write for the past six months is about a disaster involving the national power grid, but one caused by a terrorist cyber worm rather than natural causes like winds and floods. I haven’t gotten past the outline stage, because my readers keep getting confused by the 40-year time sequence. I finally got it right, I think, after following the advice of my screenwriting buddy in LA, by creating a temporal “anchor” in the year 2037. That's when there is an assassination attempt on the life of U.S. President Jason Martinez. I emailed my rewrite a month after his comments, which was Monday morning, the day Sandy came to town.

The next day, I drove around looking unsuccessfully for gas—actually, really just so Emma could charge her iPhone—and returned to find the kids from the corner in my driveway without Breena. They said she had gone to another kid’s house, in direct violation of my only rule. Then, like water finally breaching the sandbags, they really spilled the beans: Breena had been stealing my money to buy weed at the playground, as well as pizza and other stuff, most of which she gave away to her new-found friends.

Dr. Russell Barkley, one of the world’s leading experts on ADHD, says the disorder is not so much about inattentiveness, but rather a kind of “time blindness” or “nearsighted[ness] when it comes to time.” People with ADHD don’t have a normal “sense of self across time.” Maybe you could say the same things about all teenagers, but as a parent of a kid with ADHD, it’s clearly different, though also not clear at all what it is or what to do about it.

There are only three parts to time: past, present, and future. All the spiritual stuff I’ve been exposed to on my sabbatical tells me to reorient my attention to the present. Just breathe. Almost like intentional ADHD. Oblivious to consequences, Breena lives in the present, like a bird with eyes darting from one worm to the next. When Emma gets caught, she will deny her involvement for days; Breena, in contrast, fesses up immediately. She even feels sorry, but cannot articulate why. So there is little need for denial.

During this Presidential campaign, there has been no mention so far of climate change, even though the predictions of increasing frequency of extreme weather events have already painfully come true. Would greater political “presence” mean less denial or more inattentiveness to consequence?

I think I am now going to bicycle to Hoboken to volunteer my time. Unless I get distracted with some other flight of fancy.

The Rut is a Path

“If you can't fly then run, if you can't run then walk, if you can't walk then crawl, but whatever you do, you have to keep moving forward.”

― Martin Luther King, Jr.

It took a week to get the thethreesss urls (.com and .org) to point here. Technology is amazing, but what a time suck. I live to be in flow, but one thing I've learned on sabbatical is that we can learn as much if not more from being stuck, what George Leonard in Mastery calls "loving the plateau."

One of the great ideas I've had on sabbatical is called "The Visible Universe Project." It's kind of a Google Maps for time. I pitched the idea to a Google manager, who said he liked it and suggested that I develop it with a bunch of grad students, prove it has traction, and come back to him. That not what I wanted to hear. After putting everything I had into launching United Visual Arts, raising start-up capital while simultaneously quadrupling the revenue of the nonprofit I was also running (City Without Walls), and proving the concept behind my patent-pending defEYE® frame, including validation by the Museum of Modern Art no less, I felt like I already had way too much skin in the game. One of the many aspects of my stuckiness is needing to close UVA by year's end, despite having created something beautiful that has yet to see its day in the sun—other than a brief stint in MoMA's holiday catalog featuring a Marilyn by Warhol.

If you look closely at the image of the "Visible Universe" above, there's a pink curve that shoots off the top of the page in the center in a way that's different from all of the other data structures I plotted since the beginning of time. This is Moore's Law, or what Ray Kurzweil calls "the law of accelerating returns," predicting a singularity like the Big Bang that started it all billions of years ago or the Big Freeze that may end it billions of years hence (all also visible above). But this technological singularity could happen within a mere generation: a single, affordable, handheld device with computational powers many times greater than all the human brainpower on earth. This has been called a kind of "event horizon," beyond which predictions are impossible. Now THAT is a deep rut!

A friend of mine asked me to review chapters of a book he's writing about fundraising. From my years in the non-profit world, nothing seems more deadly than the work of development staff; they feel all the pressure and none of the rewards. My friend and his book, however, have allowed me to see otherwise: effective fundraising is the secret sauce behind all great social enterprise. With enough cash, you can accomplish almost anything; without it, mostly wishful thinking. One of his insights is that effective fundraising depends first and foremost on effective leadership. Now THAT helps me see beyond the rut.

My main feedback is that he needs to transform himself from a social-media curmudgeon into an apostle. Whatever the limitations of using these new media for fundraising today, it's all about relationships, and no matter how small or significant, every relationship in the future will be so mediated. As Netscape CEO Jim Barksdale (via Web 2.0 herald Tim O'Reilly) says, you've got to get in front of that parade. The most important "ask" in today's rapidly changing marketplace, as I learned today from Michael Schrage, is "who do you want your customers to become?" These changes will arise through storytelling, about which, even McKinsey & Co. recognizes, nonprofits (and screenwriters) can teach us a thing or two, and social media will be the primary vehicle for their transmission throughout society.

Hmmm. So let's put this all together: leadership, fundraising, and social media, with storytelling as the glue. A path appears from being present in the rut.

Columbus Day

An old friend who is a professor of political science read my last post and asked, why "no women" among the famous people I mentioned? He reminded me that in addition to Barry Commoner's death at 95, the great historian Eric Hobsbawm also died at 95 last week, though reported on page B19 instead of A1 of the same issue of the New York Times.

The two greatest lessons of history are "to the victor belong the spoils," and anicca, the Sanskrit word for "impermanence". How appropriate that the former was first uttered by a Nineteenth Century American in the early days of this country's long march to becoming the unrivaled superpower that it is today (New York Senator William Learned Marcy in 1832). The latter is one of the three marks of existence according to Buddhism, among the world's oldest teachings for how to overcome suffering; every victor is inevitably vanquished, though it can take years, generations or even millenia.

A friend sent me a press release last week, announcing his efforts to promote Italian-American culture. I was introduced to him by another friend who promotes Italian culture for a living—and with a much thicker Italian accent. She also introduced me to my first billionaire (yet another Italian American, but that's another story), and asked me once why I was surrounded by so many Italians rather than Jews like myself. Click on the map to my left to see the answer in terms of sheer statistical probability: Italians are the largest population by ancestry in the entire New York metro area.

In an article for London Review of Books on the 500th anniversary of Columbus's "discovery", Hobsbawm argues 1492 marked the first time in a thousand years that Europeans were engaged in conquering other lands rather than being conquered by Asians and Africans, a reversal that also included the expulsion from Spain of Jews and Muslim rulers. The Europeans expected to reshape the New World in their image, not the other way around. But the creative destruction that has transpired since then has been America's quintissential and hegemonic impact on the world.

Native populations have been vanquished throughout most of the Americas, now comprising less than 1% of the population in the U.S. and much of South America, but the map to the left shows they also still comprise major proportions of the population in some countries, as well as majorities in many subregions such as northern Canada. Click on the map below to see how despite this mass extermination over centuries, the echoes of these First Nations continue to reverberate in almost every American neighborhood today.

I am an assimilated American Jew, for example, living in a place called Weehawken, a word evolved from Lenape, meaning "rocks that look like trees" or maybe "at the end" (both probably refering to the mighty Palisades), having grown up celebrating Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Passover, and surrounded by a motley intergenerational mix of immigrants from Italy, Ireland, Cuba, Columbia, Dominican Republic, etc. The local, one-party (so-called "nonpartisan") spoils system is so complete and corrupt here that even the many local escapees from Communist states don't notice. Our political bosses are such masters of patronage that despite the occasional jail term, they would make "I seen my opportunities and I took 'em" Plunkitt of Tammany Hall proud, a direct lineage not only of 1492 but of the entire evolution of our species—one of the single greatest insights of a European in the New World.

My political science friend, who knew Hobsbawm personally, says he "despised the notion of identity in all its guises and took a lot of abuse and was marginalized in public discourse, mainly due to the liberal intellectuals who run the show in academia." It may seem anachronistic not to have named a famous woman (or, he might have added, person of color) in my last post. Feminists launched identity politics in its now multiple forms so many years ago, but it is easy to forget that it is all so recent in the grand scheme of things. With the same kind of statistical probability of my being surrounded by Italians, I could not possibly remember seeing a famous woman on a plane or person of color on the Upper East Side with the same ease that I can recall sitting across from Spalding Gray while we sipped hot chocolate on the top of a ski slope, because the forces of history had simply not allowed enough of them to reach such fame or fortune until just about now.

I could write ten more posts on the subject of identity politics in American history, and maybe I will. I think one I will call "Octoroon."