Cars with Yakima cases

   It was summer here in San Francisco, California, when I originally wrote the draft to this blog entry. It feels like that time of year here now, in late February, as it's about sixty five degrees. During the summer here children are on school break, adults are often taking time off from work, and many people are making sure their Yakima cases are securely fastened on top of their cars before heading out for that drive to go biking, hiking or camping. When I spot one of these space-age things on a roof, it's usually on an SUV or, often, a Subaru Outback. These cars have appear to have a lot of storage room inside, so the question often occurs to me; what exactly is hidden on those roofs?

A Yakima attachment awaits its case

Stop acting like a human being!

   Although I often judge people that have pets, especially dogs, in a negative way when they are in public, I do tend to think of animal behavior as being more 'natural' than human-animal behavior; it's really just their association with human beings that disturbs me. I see these pets as enslaved by human beings, who fulfill their basic food and shelter needs, and who, in my reading of them, rob them of their nature, of their animality.

   When I am taking my regular walk in the early morning hours around Stow Lake in Golden Gate Park, I often see ducks and geese engaged in what I assume to be territorial battles, chasing and nipping at one another, and it all seems very natural and appropriate. In fact, it bothers me when people try to intervene in these scuffles; I resent them trying to impose their humanity on their behavior. To me, when animals appear mean to their fellows, they are really engaged in something very organic and appropriate, but people are trying to impose their own sense of normalcy to their behavior. 

   When it comes to human interaction though, I become very suspect, and words like 'motive' and 'judgment' enter my mind. I suddenly wish people would act more 'human'.

   

Home and loss

   Every morning before work, I take a long walk around Stow Lake in Golden Gate Park. It helps me to relax before I'm inundated with the stresses at my job, and at certain points during the walk, I actually feel like I'm just existing, rather than thinking about my place in the world, and all of the thoughts and feelings that entails.
   There are places at Stow Lake which have incredible sounds (birds calling, water droplets falling), amazing smells (Eucalyptus trees, flowering plants), and great things to look at as well. One of those things was this honeycomb (pictured below on the left), which I noticed about two months ago. When I first saw it, there was a small amount of bee activity around it, but not enough that it seemed to be so active a hive anymore, just a few bees buzzing around the lower portion of it. I wondered what had happened that it seemed to be nearly abandoned, with only a few, apparently confused individuals seeming to be find this beautiful object useful anymore. For the next few days, I thought about what may have caused the demise of this object, and noticed that as the days passed, so did the activity around it. I thought about taking it home, to have as my own, to rally around it like I was a bee, to preserve the memory and feelings that I had felt as I passed it. I thought about removing it, but concerned about the possibility of angry bees still lurking nearby, and feeling that perhaps its' place was there in that tree crevice, I decided not to touch it.
  The next time I passed it, it was gone.Two days after that, while walking near it, I spotted a young, evidently homeless man sleeping on a bench near the tree that formerly held the honeycomb. I have never seen a homeless person sleeping on a bench anywhere around that lake for the eighteen months or so that I have been walking there daily, and it seemed like that person's temporary home for that night had somehow referenced those bees' missing home. It made me sad that the sleeping person was so young to be homeless, but as I passed him walking the next time around on the path he appeared rather healthy, and I wondered if his choice of that particular bench had somehow rejuvenated him, as that honeycomb had rejuvenated me so many times previously.

 

Stage left, stage right

   A few weeks ago my wife and I went to see a production of  Opera Parallèle, a theater group here in San Francisco. When we first arrived at the theater, I thought that it could be fun, a sort of date night out for us downtown, where we rarely are together. As the play started, and the music began, I was optimistic; I like Kurt Weill / Bertolt Brecht collaborations, and I thought I might actually enjoy what we would be seeing. I should add here that I'm not a big fan of live theater. Actually, I mostly don't like it.
   As the play continued, I began to grow bored and a little annoyed at the action in front of me, and I thought a bit about what it was that bothered me. I quickly realized that my annoyance was focused on the players appearing to watch the main performers from stage left and right, there allegedly as both part of the action and as observers to the action as well. It seemed somehow absurd to me that they should be both onstage, being watched by myself and others in the audience, as well as acting like they were also watching the main performers at center stage, who were alternately talking and singing. Did they think that us in the audience would sit comfortably with this role that they were taking, as both performers and audience?
   I am well aware that all art is full of these type of constructs, whether it is the canvas or photograph on the wall, or the film which frames the viewer's eye, excluding them from seeing an 'outside' of the picture, yet in the case of live theater, I find this framing uncomfortable, and I think that it is because the device is not false enough, that it sits too precariously on the line between portraying a kind of reality, while also highlighting the obvious artificiality of the reality it seeks to show.
   Perhaps it is this 'in-betweeness' that bothers me most, that the right and left sides of the stage are too blurred, and that this blurring of lines makes me dizzy and threatens to swallow me in its' abyss.

 

                            Snagglepuss ready to definitively exit stage left

Cortita

   During my regular morning walks in Golden Gate Park I see a variety of animals; ducks, birds, sometimes raccoons and skunks, and of course, squirrels. To one other, squirrels must be easily recognizable, but to me, it is hard to differentiate between them. There are a few that I seem to recognize because of some feature (I give them silly names like "Gordo", "Tiny" and "Flaco"), but only one that I really can be sure that when I see it on different days, that it's the same squirrel. I call her (I'll get more into the gender in a moment) "Cortita", which is a reference to her being "short" of tail (It's really just a stub). I can be relatively sure that it's the same squirrel that I see, because in addition to it lacking a long, fluffy tail, I also see this squirrel in the same general area every time, this over a period of about a year and a half.

   Regarding gender, I had assumed that this particular animal was in fact "Cortito", that is, a male, because it is rather large, but recently realized that it is in fact female, because I saw it one day with what looked to be bedding in it's mouth, and after a little research learned that only the female of the species raise their young (the males are basically "wham, bam, thank you ma'am"when it comes to mating and child rearing). I guess that I am also a sexist when it comes to female squirrels.

   The reason that I was moved to write here about this one particular squirrel is that she has become something important to me, a kind of friend that I see regularly during a time of tranquility in my day, myself being a person who at times feels a little different and a bit defective when it comes to my place in the world. I don't know why she has only a stub instead of a tail (a birth defect, a fight perhaps), but I see Cortita as a very capable being that is able to make her own way in life, and besides feeling like I actually care for her, she is an inspiration too.

                                                  Cortita's unique side

Ethnic music for an ethnic Yankee

   The feeling of being a part of something bigger than me (such as a small group of people, or society as a whole) is often followed, or preceded, by feeling apart, as these feelings of acceptance are usually tenuous and fragile. I feel like I want to belong, but inside there seems like a sizable chunk of me that regards belonging as frightening and despicable, and that side is always ready to assert itself in most any situation. This is often apparent to me in my tastes in the arts, and in music in particular.
   Much of what I like in music is from other countries than my own, usually in languages I am unfamiliar with, and from cultures that are foreign to me. This music is generally called 'world' music these days, but for me that term implies an inclusive world, and the world which I live in often does not feel that way. I prefer to think of this music as 'ethnic', because I relate to that term; while I was born in the United States as a white male, I was also born Jewish, and although I am not religious, I do feel 'ethnic' in relation to other white people. Growing up in New York City (an area with the largest Jewish population in the world outside of Israel), I still felt a sense of being different, and was at times at times referred to by my friends, albeit jokingly, as "Jewboy". My Jewish friends and I would often refer to each other in a similarly derogatory way, owning that sense of ethnicity much in the same way that it seems to me that some African American people do by using the 'N' word.  In fact, I could just as easily say that I feel 'ethnic' in the world in general, in that I often feel that sense of specificity that seems to be implied in the word 'ethnicity'.
   I assume then that my love of Rebetiko music from Greece, my enjoyment of the Romanian singer Maria Tanase, and much of the music from such African countries as Madagascar, Mali and Zimbabwe plugs into my sense of 'otherness', yet also in some way feels familiar to me. It's as if I share the culture behind these musical forms. By being both a 'Yankee' and a foreigner within my own country and myself I can become most comfortable.

Jewish Yankee Ron Bloomberg

                                                 

Updating my present

   I don't have a lot of specific memories of my childhood, just bits and pieces that I try to put together to help me understand how I came to be the ways I am today, and perhaps what I might wish to be more like in the future. I try to jog more memories and feelings loose in multiple ways, including through psychoanalysis, making art, taking walks in nature, and writing on this blog. All are ways that I try to better see what I have experienced, whether I am conscious of those experiences or not. I find that as I am able to recall more things, no matter how minute, the more a sort of story line starts to form, and my past begins to appear more sequential.
   I have found that expoloring the different kinds of music, clothing and design styles from my childhood and early teenage years helps me to remember things I have long suppressed or forgotten, and often lead me recall other images, thoughts and feelings from my past.
   Some of the things I am currently exploring are wacky packages, slow soul music from the 1970s, and earth-toned colors.

That's me in the lower left corner with my sister and some cousins. I must be 

around eight or nine years old here, which would make this around 1972.