Family Friendly Concert in Campbell

It was so nice to see everyone gathered in Campbell for some good food, toe-tapping music, and wonderful company. I hope we can gather again soon.

Posted via email from Aviv's posterous

The Future of YouTube

I remember the first time I heard YouTube touted and vividly recall my initial reaction: "This is a venture sure to disappear within two months. Who wants to watch poorly filmed videos of strangers when you can barely stand to sit through your own family's recorded antics?!"

As is ever the case, you can bet to win based on my predictions. Should I claim aloud an internet idea is ridiculous and useless, you can bet it will be a viral success. My vision, it appears, is far too limited to see the real use of virtual tools.

Now, thanks to a BRILLIANT Israeli artist who goes by Kutiman, I understand the use of millions of low-budget (or should I say no-budget) "look at what I can do" videos waiting to be mined on YouTube. We must all now go to gather, cut, paste, cut, paste, cut, and paste until melodious music is made from disparate pieces waiting to find communal partners.

You simply MUST see and hear all of Kutiman's work. Do not wait to "pass / go"; rush to his website (http://thru-you.com), sit back, turn your speakers up to "11", and get ready to stare in awe at the skill and wonder of an artist who magically transforms dregs to wine.

All hail the new Messiah of Mashup Music!

Guest Blogger Alan Abel on S.I.N.A.

The Society for Indecency to Naked Animals (S.I.N.A.)
By Alan Abel

Last week in St. Louis I met G. Clifford Prout Jr., leader of an unusual organization called the Society for Indecency to Naked Animals, or S.I.N.A. for short. It is Mr. Prout's belief that all domestic animals should wear clothing for the sake of decency. He points out that we human beings, who are biologically animals, share our food, our love and our homes with our pets. Then we should also share our decency with them.

The S.I.N.A. philosophy for clothing all animals was initially prescribed by Mr. Prout Sr., who passed away last year leaving a will estimated at $400,000 to his son. There was a provision in that will that the inheritance was to be spent solely for promoting decency and morality through S.I.N.A. Since his father's passing, Cilfford Jr. has been diligently spending vast sums of this money for his dedicated cause, traveling all over the world, lecturing, and forming new S.I.N.A. chapters.

According to Prout, children habitually dress their dogs and cats because of a socially learned stimulus to look decent. Little Johnny sees his parents clothed. He looks at himself and he is clothed, but Rover the dog is stark naked! Unable to ignore the sight of Rover's immodesty, the child puts doll clothes on him. But how do his parents react? They rip off the clothes, calling Johnny a baby. He cries and trouble begins as a double standard is permanently fixed in his young but impressionable mind.

Mr. Prout added that when children are denied the healthy habit of dressing their pets, they rebel against their parents, school and community, in that order.

"Try and explain to a three-year-old girl why her cat must remain in the nude," he said. "You can't. She becomes frustrated over the prevailing hypocrisy and joins a gang engaged in street fighting, muggings and robberies. School dropout, unwed mothers and other forms of antisocial behavior called juvenile delinquency are these youngsters' expressions of their contempt for the adult world they will inherit. So, the sooner we clothe these naked animals the better our chances are that we'll bring up young people to become decent citizens.

There are now over 25,000 honorary members of S.I.N.A. who have taken the pledge to clothe all animals, including those of neighbors and any strays prowling backyards. These determined moralists carry emergency animal clothing in their cars, can spot a naked animal at fifty feet, and then clothe him in twelve seconds flat! (Mr. Prout himself holds the present world record for catching and dressing a dog in nine and-a-half seconds).

"Decency Today Means Morality Tomorrow" is the motto composed by Mr. Prout that is prominently displayed in every member's home, framed on walls, carved above fireplaces, embroidered on pillow cases, or chiseled into front sidewalks.

"Naked animals are everywhere and must be clothed to protect our children from the sight of indecent nudity," explained Mr. Prout as we parted. "You tell a clothed dog to get off the couch and he will. Naked cows grazing are actually hanging their heads in shame because they are forced to be nudists in a clothed society. How can you deny that? Remember, decency today means morality tomorrow! Don't ever forget; a nude horse is a rude horse."

For more information, place the movie Abel Raises Cain on your Netflix list and while you wait for it to arrive in your mailbox, listen to this:

California Academy of Sciences

With great promise comes great expectations. As the country’s only combined aquarium, planetarium, natural history museum, and research institution, the new California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco is uniquely positioned to highlight the interconnectedness of the living world and the multidisciplinary nature of modern science. How dismaying, then, to find during my recent trip to the Academy that the opportunity to tell a rich story of connection and responsibility is squandered.

If, as their literature states, the Academy was designed to investigate two basic questions: "How did life evolve?" and "How will it survive?" I must admit neither were posed to me in a compelling manner during my wanderings through their exhibits.

There is much to be impressed with: the planetarium is dizzyingly delightful; the living roof top -- 197,000 square feet of local plant life -- is a marvel to witness; Italian architect Renzo Piano's architectural design is a breath of fresh air -- from the outside the structure's elegant bulbous profile blends in with the city's rounded green hilltops and Golden Gate Park's expansive lawns, and from the inside one is consistently startled by a sense of transparency and connectedness between the building and the park through both a careful selection of materials and a thoughtful arrangement of space.

There is much to question: What is the point of maintaining the African Hall taxidermy dioramas? (Nostalgia is no excuse for wasting valuable real estate on stuffed animals placed on sand scattered before poorly painted savanna backdrops.) Was the Disneyesque faux "marsh" designed merely to provide a home for the famed lethargic albino alligator? (What really is to be learned by staring at an immobile white gator parked on a heated rock amidst computer controlled piped-in mist?) With 38,000 live animals and over 20 million research specimens in their vaults (hidden far away from visitors' eyes behind locked doors) is there ANY excuse for an entire section of the museum devoted to colorful information boards crammed with glossy photos, large font text, and the occasional television screen replaying National Geographic segments better suited to home viewing?! (Bring out the specimens for God's sake -- creationist pun intended -- and pique our curiosity through eyes-on interaction with authentic anthropology, ichthyology, ornithology, and herpetology.)

In Yiddish we say, "A shande!" -- a downright shame that from a museum dedicated to questions of life I came away with a profound appreciation of inanimate structure. Architect Renzo Piano is to be lauded for designing a building that is not only stunningly inspiring and visually enticing, but LEED certified (in plain English, it lovingly caresses the environment while withholding its baggage). How long will it take for the "living" exhibits inside to match the majesty of their home? That is the question I pose to the curators and the question they should force upon me as I exit their space and consider my footprint upon this planet.

The Gift of Giving

They call Ethan Bortnick a child prodigy, but the appellation, I fear, misdirects our attention from his true gift. He has, without a doubt, a jaw dropping facility on the keys and a natural ear for musical composition that is simply incomprehensible in a 6 year old. (Just take a listen below:)

His inexplicable talent is not, however, the gift he gives to us as his tiny fingers dance across the ivory and ebony. (Such young talent often infects us with sentiments of jealousy and silent self-loathing, along with hints of venal accusations against parents who push their young children too far too fast.) No, Ethan's true gift to us is his innocent and infectious joie de vivre. Just study the way this youngster revels in sharing his passion and craft.

It is what I admire most in my youngest students -- the sheer joy in which they discover and share, the unencumbered manner in which they experiment and produce, free from the fetters of self-conscious guard or the ever vigilant eye on external criticism.

Media run to ask us what we plan to give during this season of gifts, during this season of economic uncertainty. May I suggest whatever you give you do so with the smile and laughter modeled by Ethan, with the pure exuberance of his play and the virtuous zeal of his music.

Take a Second Look

He's 31, Yale educated, and one of the hottest portrait painters in town. But you've never heard of Kehinde Wiley? She's 41, Canadian raised, and one of the most controversial portrait photographers in town. But you've never heard of Jill Greenberg?


I am mesmerized by many of Wiley's pieces. While the portrait portion of his work is hyper-realistic, the settings offer a pastiche (or palimpsest) of styles -- scratch off the surface paint and you're sure to find sketches of Islamic architecture or West African textile designs or European haute-couture wall paper. And the manner in which he sets his subjects up for portraits -- placing before them the option of choosing a classic pose -- rests in stark opposition to the methods of Greenberg. Take her collection called "End Times" (originally entitled "Another Four Years" following W.'s re-election in 2004):
"How did she get these kids to cry?" you may ask. She asked parents to give their unsuspecting kinderlings a lollipop and, when the candy was firmly in mouth, instructed the compliant guardians to rip to sweet sucker from their trembling lips. Then she shot away as tears streamed down and sobs rang out. "Despicable," you think to yourself? Oh, but witness the sheer beauty of the grief she captures:

I yearn to express the anachronistic pride and self-assured confidence of a Wiley subject, but find myself ineluctably returning to the tear-strewn wide-eyed terror of a Greenberg subject. How can it be otherwise in December 2008, when our esteemed newspapers tout, above the fold, Obama's new star-studded economic team and bemoan, below the fold, the need for yet another industry bail-out.

Double Entendre

I've often flirted with the idea of writing a poem on the Target department store logo. It is simply too rich a target to pass up, a heavy possum rummaging through your garbage in the early evening, waiting for the stifling spray of buckshot to take it down. Yet I have no talent for the lyrical phrase nor for the cleverly distorted image. Thankfully there are skilled writers out there tackling the important subjects of the day, making sweet use of their finely tuned talents, directing their witty sights on low hanging fruit and cooking up confections too rich to pass on. Take, for example, this lovely piece of poetry by Robert Fanning:



The lines just drip with double entendres: "shot," "target," "crosshairs," "death," "rack," "hunters," "forest." There is the wondrous symmetry of the animal's "rack clearing" clothes from a "clearance rack" and the brilliant imagery of shoppers ducking for cover when it is the "deer in the target" crosshairs. And the final line, sweetest of all, causing me to laugh (some claim guffaw!) out loud as I hear it for the first time while riding in a packed rush-hour rapid transit train: "All of them, in Target, chasing the almighty buck!" Makes ya want to go out and purchase every book of poetry Fanning has produced. But we're too careful guarding our almighty bucks these days and a trip to the library may, instead, be in store.

(The reader of these lovely lines is master story-teller Garrison Keillor of Lake Woebegone and A Prairie Home Companion fame. The audio is taken from his daily installment of "A Writer's Almanac," a podcast worth adding to your list of listening pleasures, in case you miss the broadcast on your local public radio station.)

Old Alliances Anew

In the early 1960's, Lena Horne, singer of famed sultry voice, put out word that she was interested in singing an original civil rights protest song and entries from composers far and wide came pouring in. That she chose a piece written by the eminent Jewish Broadway duo of Comden and Green (that's Betty Comden, nee Basya Cohen, and Adolph Green of "Singin' in the Rain" fame), is no surprise. African American writers sharing material with Jewish performers, Jewish writers passing shtick onto African American performers, a long history of such collaboration exists in the rich annals of our libraries. What really piques the cultural imagination is the music composed for the song (entitled "Now!") Lena chose. Take a listen (below) and see if you can identify the signature melody as the refrain kicks in:

If you recognized "Hava Nagila" I can only hope the cognitive dissonance you experienced registered as high on the Richter Scale as mine. Only in the 1960's could a joyful Jewish tune set to the Hebrew words "Let's celebrate and be happy" be imperceptibly transformed into a song, somber yet triumphant, demanding equal rights for black America "Now!".

But, then again, here we are in nascent Obama 2008 looking forward to an historic first "black" president whose first public appointment, chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, is a modern Orthodox Jew revving up to put the motto "Yes We Can" into action "Now!"

Here's to the hope they can make some beautiful music together. Though they'll need all the fortune they can collectively muster, we can rest assured they've been named presciently for their future mission: one with the first name "blessed" in Swahili-Arabic and the other with a last name "god is with us" in Hebrew.

More Words with Pictures

Careful What You Worship For

Words of wisdom from beyond the grave for a post election, mid-recession country; sections of David Foster Wallace's commencement address at Kenyon College in 2005:

In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshiping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship -- be it JC or Allah, bet it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles -- is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.

Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful, it's that they're unconscious. They are default settings.

They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing.

And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about in the great outside world of wanting and achieving. The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.

That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.

Click here for the full text of the speech.

Click here for video of a reading the author gave in San Diego.

Are We There Yet?

In 1654 two brilliant mathematicians, Blaise Pascal and Pierre de Fermat, conducted a correspondence in which a variety of seemingly intractable puzzles were presented and solutions proposed. Some of the problems posed in their letters (Fermat's last theorem among them) were only recently solved, after hundreds of years and thousands of subtle solutions worked over by the best and brightest. Some of the problems posed (like "the unfinished game") appeared recalcitrant at the time but can now be solved in minutes by my fourth graders after a two week unit on probability. This leads one to wonder how two puzzles which today seem diametrically opposed in difficulty (one can be solved by only a handful of people in the world and the other can be solved by more than a handful of my students in a simple elementary school) appeared equally mystifying then.

"The Unfinished Game" puzzle can be summarized thusly: Suppose two gamblers decided to wager some money on a dice game. Each put into the pot $50 and decided the game would consist of five rounds in which each player would roll one die. The player with the higher roll would win each round and the player with the most wins out of the five rounds would take the pot of $100. Now suppose, due to some emergency, the game was forced to come to halt after player A had won 2 rounds, and player B had won 1 round. The question Pascal posed to Fermat was: How should the pot be divvied up at this point in the unfinished game?

Here's how Keith Devlin, author of the highly recommended book pictured above, explains the dilemma: "If the game were tied, there wouldn't be a problem. They could simply split the pot in half. But in the case being examined, the game is not tied. To be fair, they need to divide the pot to reflect the two-to-one advantage that one player has over the other. They somehow have to figure out what would most likely have happened had the game been allowed to continue. In other words, they have to be able to look into the future -- or in this case, a hypothetical future that never came to pass."

Considering that before the mid-seventeenth century scholars generally agreed that it was impossible to predict something by calculating mathematical outcomes, it appeared finding a solution based on "hypothetical future" outcomes was impossible. Fermat thought this puzzle was easily solved: in the case of the best-of-five dice game that is stopped after the third round with one player in the lead by two to one, there are four possible ways the game can be completed (B wins round 4 and A wins round 5, or A wins round 4 and B wins round 5, or A wins rounds 4 and 5, or B wins rounds 4 and 5). Of those four, three are won by player A after the third round. So the two players should split the pot with 3/4 ($75) going to the player A and 1/4 ($25) going to player B. Simple, yes? Well Pascal (that is Pascal of the brilliant Pascal's Triangle) couldn't understand this solution. He proposed a much more detailed analysis (pages long and still inconclusive) and then asked Fermat to explain his solution again (and again) and still didn't comprehend it. How is it that this certified genius couldn't understand such a simple and elegant solution?

Pascal's incomprehension appears to hinge on the wide spread belief (of his contemporaries) that humans could simply not speculate on the future. The future, along with any predictions, belonged in God's realm and no amount of human ingenuity could scale to the heights of such wisdom. But here we live in a time when speculation on the future, based on mathematical models, is seminal to a functioning democracy and economy: insurance tables, weather forecasting, election polling, software design, drug design and testing.

It is ludicrous today to contend that the future cannot be predicted, that probability and statistical analysis are insufficient to build models of future event outcomes. Or should I say it "was" ludicrous to argue against probability, for look at our economy now limping sickly between bouts of influenza and rickets. How best to split the pot of an unfinished game was solved over one hundred years ago, so why are we still muddling our way through a bailout package the sharpest minds of our time have yet to predict the likely success of?

Yma Sumac is Dead

Yma Sumac, the Peruvian songbird, is dead. Long live Amy Camus, Nightingale of the Andes.

Her life was a testament to the power of American re-creation. Her death is a reminder of the dominion of acoustic acrobatics.

Personal biography: Born Zoila Augusta Emperatriz Chavarri del Castillo in 1922 in Peru, she arrived in the States with the exotic moniker Yma Sumac and an astounding vocal range (from low baritone to high soprano) richly sought by Hollywood and Broadway. As Wikipedia so subtly presents it, "The combination of her extraordinary voice, exotic looks, and stage personality made her a hit with American audiences."

Public hagiography: A Jewish girl from Brooklyn who changed her birth date, wrote her name backwards, and claimed regal Incan ancestry, exploded on the 1950's American music scene with Mambo styled South American folk songs orchestrated by the eminent Les Baxter. As Wikipedia so subtly presents it, "The combination of her extraordinary voice, exotic looks, and stage personality made her a hit with American audiences."Both histories were, at one time and another, publicly approved by the indefatigable chanteuse, but only one (or neither) of the tales is true. Before you conduct your digital research, share with us which of the two you would ascribe to, upon which of the two you would wager the family home's mortgage.

And we wonder why a voter or two (or hundred thousand) doubted the true biography of (Barry) Barack Obama. How many of us tell consistent, coherent tales of our journeys with each passing year? How many of us stretch our stories to reach the shrill heights of the voice of Yma/Amy?

Long live the hope of renewal!

Words with Pictures. Words with Pictures.

You Told the Truuuuth!

I grew up on a relatively unhealthy afternoon post-school diet of bowls of Fruity Pebbles consumed while studying televised Scooby-Doo cartoons interrupted regularly by saccharine, moralistic commercials like the one above. For those of you who know all too intimately of my ongoing fascination with the Mormon faith, it will come as no surprise that the song and message of this advertisement have stuck with me lo these many years.

Watching again (and again) this young boy confess to the accidental breaking of a neighbor's window, I was sent immediately to a foggy day in Daly City, one of our many visits to cousins Israel and Lila, when an errant red rubber ball I had rocketed high above the sloping street during a heated game of kickball veered ominously toward the bay window of a lime green house and, with a shattering pitch I hear even now, smashed an enormous pane to smithereens. I recall our group instantly bolted to Aunty Estie's house (no one needed to yell, "Run!"), raced through the door past a warm gathering of parents in the living room, landed in Israel's room in a pile and proceeded to pretend that nothing out of the ordinary had transpired, acting as nonchalantly as a guilty group of non-plused adolescents could muster.

I must admit I continue to shrink from taking responsibility for many of my major misdeeds, a fear I find both enervating and atavistic. While I pour implausible excuse upon improbable subterfuge I can't help but wonder why I expend such copious amounts of psychic energy to cover, when simple transparency and penitence would do the trick in moments.

And now I turn my gaze to the state of our union as the election quickly approaches and note with dour concern that broken windows abound -- splintered economy balancing on valueless Credit Default Swaps, shattered health-care system held together with threadbare band-aids, battered Afghanistan looming as our next military investment, unsustainable deficits that force our state to steal from city coffers.

Who among those responsible for this mess is strong enough to step forward and sing, "I broke your window with my ball, and I've come to confess"? And when the penitent uncover their guilt will we greet them as heroes ("for you have displayed honor") or shackle them in manacles on the town square for all to stare upon and spit? And when the unpenitent are finally brought to justice claiming, "I would have gotten away with it had it not been for those pesky kids" will we simply laugh and turn the channel or chuckle and wait for the coming episode to unfold its formulaic plot before our sugar-satiated bellies?

Waazzuuup 2008

Some tropes resonate beyond their date of expiration.