Budapest, December 7, 2OO6
Let's remember Pearls Harbor as we did the Slamomo -and Viva Zapata the Shoe merchant, who said (at least, in the pic, Brando said): "My people need tortillas --not promises!"
Just came from seeing the latest Woody Allen-Scarlett Jo collaboration, "SCOOP". Well, he musta scooped this one up from the bottom of the barrel. Light fare, to say the least --lighter than air on a Sunday afternoon in the Arizona ...
Scarlet --well, yeah --she's easy to look at, but she better look beyond Allen if she wants to get serious about her career. Jack Hughsome --or wuzzit Hugh Jackoff -- Good looking Aussie chap, but little or no screen charisma -- Woody obviously threw this plot together just so he could spend more time following Johansson's lovely little ass around the set for a few weeks. Didn't find it very funny, and, except for the one scene with Scarlett in skin-tight one-piece bathing suit -- pretty boring -- but, okay -- she's easy on the eyes. The flim was so flimsy it was like Chinese takeout in the Jewish neighborhood -- fills you up for five minutes, then you're hungry again -- I actually felt so unsatisfied that I wanted to see a real movie right afterward, but it was too late --as the Pushkin Theater let out for the night.
But there were some good trailers: Next film I def wanna see is Andy Garcia's "Lost City" about Castro's rise to power in the fifties -- with, among others --Dustin Hoffman and Broken-Flowers Bill Murray --that one's got to be interesting -- Also Altman's swansong, the one about the radio guy in Minnesota --with Streep singing -- belting out songs (sic) -- looks interesting --and of course, I haven't yet seen BORAT --Have you ?
And that's it for Pearl Harbor Day in Budapest, 2ÖÖ6
Thursday, December 7, 2006
Monday, December 4, 2006
ALIAS ALEXANDR FORD or, “The Life and Times of Moishe Lipshutz”
PROPOSAL for a possible screenplay on the life, career and death of the famous Jewish-
Polish film director ALEXANDR FORD.
WORKING TITLE:
ALIAS ALEXANDR FORD
or, “The Life and Times of Moishe Lipshutz”
The salient facts of Ford’s life are here presented in roughly chronological order.
1. Ford born, 1908 in Lodz. Little is known of his youth in the Lodz Jewish community and needs to be researched. Of prime importance in the screenplay would be what was his motivation for changing his name from “Moishe Lipshutz” to "FORD" and precisely when and how this occurred. One can envision a young man very much wanting to Dis-identify with the Jewish community – Yet strongly enough tied to it so that he made at least TWO films of directly Jewish content.
“SABRA”, 1931, deals with new Jewish immigrants to what was then “Palestine” and their conflict with Arab neighbors – therefore, very relevant to the present – bardzo aktualny! – It was shot in Palestine… His second Jewish film in the mid thirties was about the Medem Institute for tubercular Jewish children – and was made IN YIDDISH! – Prints of both of these films exist and are easily available.
2. His activities as co-founder, at age 28 of the START FILM COMMUNE and relation to other members such as Director, Wanda Jakubowska. Then comes the war.
3. THE WAR YEARS. Making documentary films for the military film team in Russia. Ford becomes a Communist.
4. The immediate post war. The making of “ULICA GRANICZNA” – ("Border Street", the first film about the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising) -- , a gigantic hhit at the time. One member of the cast, Maria Broniewska, who played the young Jadwiga (Jadza) in the film is still alive and available for consultation. I have met her and spoken with her about her personal relationship with Ford, which was very negative. He kept her from getting further jobs.
5. The peak years – Piatka z ulica Barskiej, Mlody Chopin, (YOUNG CHOPIN), and finally the giant hit film, KRZYZACY –(THE CRUSADERS) --Ford is now the “Czar” of Polish film ….
IT SHOULD BE NOTED THAT Ford was a man of small stature with a small moustache. Like many little men he had a gigantic ego and a kind of Napoleon complex, when he was at the top of the heap as the "czar" of the Polish film world in the sixties until the wave of Anti-Semitism which struck in 1968..
6. OSMY DZIEN TYGODNIU (The Eighth Day of the week) and the fall from grace with the Communist establishment -– relations with Comtroversial writer Hlasko, the legendary actor Zbigniew Cybulski and Jewish-Polish producer Arthur Brauner – (the latter, still alive and active in Berlin) --
7. I968 – THE EXILE – first to Copenhagen – there is still a Polish Jewish community in Copenhagen, some of whom will surely remember Ford in Copenhagen, as will the people who worked with him at NORDIC FILM.
8. THE CONFLICT with influential Polityka film critic Kaluzynski, and his rivalry with him over the affections of the Jewish American beauty queen whom Ford finally married. A son from this marriage (unfortunately, alcoholic) still lives in Lodz.
9. Ford goes to Israel to make a KORCZAK film which is not successful.
"Jestesz wolny, Dr. Korczak") –
10. In 1980 Ford, at the end of his rope, travels to Miami, there hoping to effect a reconciliatuion with his American wife who divorced him -- (when? – need to research the details of the marriage – surely much was written about this couple at the time in the Polish ‘Boulevard Press’ ) -- The ex-wife refuses to see him and he commits suicide – a forgotten man – however – Somewhere in Florida a police record of this death must exist and it may have been reported in some local paper as a "fait divers".
Among people still alive who would have very clear memories of Ford would be, inter alia – Jerzy Kawalerowicz, and a number of other people who may have worked with him. Also, there must be people on the wife’s side – or perhaps SHE HERSELF – still alive in the States and available for consultation.
In any case, this would make a remarkable film which could easily be of interest to the non-Polish world for the Jewish and Political overtones -- as well as – oczewiscie – for the Polish audience.
What needs to be emphasized in the film is:
The early Jewish years in the thirties – The making of the Jewish films – The making of "Ulica Graniczny" ('Border Street', the very first film about the Warsaw Ghetto, made almost immediately after the war, and for many years the Polish box-office record holder) -- and the Cannes film festival where it won a director’s prize –
The Fall From Grace with the Communist establishment connected with “Osmy Dzien Tygodnia” – ("Eghth day of the week" and everything concerning the relationship with the American Jewess from New York, who, apparently, caused quite a stir when she arrived in Warsaw – as a model or something like that – (this needs to be researched) –
Finally, The Events Of 1968 – the official persecution of Jews (which caused almost all of the remaining Jews to flee Poland for good), and the conditions under which Ford is forced to resign as head of Film Polski – his exile in Copenhagen, then in Israel – his final demise in Miami, Florida – April 4, 1980.
ALEX DELEON-PEWNY
Warszawa, 7 Listopada, 2002
YIDDISH, A DYING LANGUAGE
YIDDISH, A DYING LANGUAGE
by Chaim Pevner
Speaking as a native speaker of Yiddish, one who grew up in a community
where everybody spoke Yiddish, where all business and all everyday
activities were conducted in Yiddish, where the people around me lived their
entire life in Yiddish, twenty four hours a day, awake and asleep, in health
and in sickness, in hope and despair -- there is now absolutely no doubt
left in my mind that I am one of the last thoroughly fluent carriers of a
dying language.
The reason that this is true is quite simple -- the Yiddish speaking
community no longer exists. Because of the social nature of language, once
the community is dead the language is essentially dead. True, there are
still hundreds -- perhaps a few thousand fully fluent speakers of Yiddish
scattered about the world -- and there are perhaps a few households here and
there -- in Israel -- New York --a very few here and there -- where Yiddish
is still the dominant language of the home -- but very few. And there is no
outside community of Yiddish speakers on the street to backup this home use
of Yiddish. In the next generation Yiddish will be effaced. One sign that
the language is just about dead is that there are quite probably NO
monolingual speakers of Yiddish left -- in fact very few even whose dominant
language is Yiddish. I actually know several but, they are all very
advanced in years. Once they are gone it's all over -- a matter of ten,
possibly fifteen years.
Of course there will be a fairly large number of Hassidim who will continue
to use Yiddish as a religious language. It is the current practice still,
in many yeshivas to explain and discuss the mishnaic Torah commentaries in
Yiddish. Therefore, there are still young boys and teenagers who continue
to maintain a certain competence in Yiddish. However ;(1) this is a very
special, limited kind of religious Yiddish, which bears little resemblance
to the full secular language, and (2) Yiddish is unquestionably the Second
Language of these children. If the Yeshiva is in London OR New York, their
dominant language -- the one they actually use to talk to each other on all
subjects other than religion -- is English. If in Israel, the dominant
language will tend to be Hebrew or English. Elsewhere, whatever the
reigning local language is -- French, Spanish, Danish, whatever.
There is also a small community of academic scholars -- young and middle
aged teachers of Yiddish in Universities -- some of them not even Jewish.
In every case they speak a stilted, highly unnatural form of "textbook
Yiddish" of a kind which it is painful for a native speaker of Yiddish like
myself to listen to. I recently met one such scholar in Oxford who has a
PhD in Yiddish studies and is a teacher of Yiddish. His Yiddish was
reasonably fluent, but highly influenced by German which he had studied
before Yiddish -- and totally UNNATURAL. The question was not that he
speaks Yiddish with a slightly odd non-native accent, rhythm and intonation
-- in fact his Yiddish is quite clear and except for an occasional lapse in
syntax or morphology is basically correct and essentially complete. The
problem is that it is fatally obvious that he acquired his Yiddish without
benefit of exposure to a cohesive Yiddish speech community. It therefore
lacks the most important qualities that make the language a living organism
--- spontaneity and natural flow -- and the mindset internal to the speech
community where it was used -- a quality of language which manifests itself
not only in the words and phrases chosen by the speaker to convey a
particular thought -- but moreover -- the way the words sound -- the music
of the language.
Listening to one of these academic speakers of Yiddish speak is like
listening to somebody singing An Entire Opera Off Key -- It soon becomes
tiring, even annoying to the ears of the true native speaker. The words are
more or less right, but The Flow Of The Words is wrong, the music is wrong
-- or totally lacking -- Therefore, the overall impression is disconcerting
linguistically, and emotionally alienating.
I recently found myself involved in an extended conversation with another
enthusiastic and very capable speaker of academic Yiddish -- and although I
myself was literally hungry to have someone to exchange ideas with in
Yiddish --- at some point I realized that I was NOT ENJOYING the experience
-- that the linguistic (on an emotional level, for language is by definition
emotional) feedback I was getting was less than satisfying -- that it was in
fact disturbing and affecting my own Yiddish negatively in a kind of
subconscious application of Gresham's law to the linguistic domain -- bad
money tends to drive the good money out -- unnatural Yiddish tends to derail
the mindset of the speaker of natural Yiddish. At some point I simply
bailed out and switched to English, because it was just too tiring -- too
much of a strain, and too alienating -- to continue the conversation in
Yiddish.
This, may it be noted, is in stark contrast to a conversation of any
length, and of whatever banality -- with a true native speaker of Yiddish
-- which in my case these days invariably occurs only with somebody older
than myself. When speaking with a true native speaker of the language there
is an immediate sense of relaxation -- a sense that you are going to have a
good time just slinging the words around -- no matter what the topic of
conversation. It is always refreshing for me to talk Yiddish with real
native speakers -- it's like returning to childhood and playing --
Vocalizing for the sheer joy of vocalising -- the way birds chirp together
or crickets crick. Something very, very primitive.
(I do not, incidentally, ever get the same charge out of using English --
which indicates to me that English is emotionally secondary to Yiddish, in
my deep psycho-linguistic structure)
The fact that the next generation of potential Yiddish speakers are being
taught the language by teachers who themselves speak it in a way that is
OUT-OF-TUNE means that even the few students who manage to attain some
competence, will, nevertheless, never attain natural sounding Yiddish,
because they have no natural speech community against which to bring their
own Yiddish into tune. One can therefore discount the effect of University
Yiddish as a force for "bringing the language back to life" -- (except in the
form of an artificial monstrosity) --
I have visited such university classes. What they are producing is a few
people who can grope their way through some of the Yiddish classics with
about the same appreciation of the underlying culture as students who today
study Latin have of the culture of ancient Rome. The majority of these
students will never learn Yiddish -- they will merely learn to flail abut in
Yiddish.
The "fluent" Yiddish of today's yeshiva bukhirim is a special case. The
form of Yiddish that is being preserved in these religious institutions is
indeed a "form of Yiddish" -- but what form? -- and to what extent can this be
called a whole language if a whole language, such as English, Japanese or
Eskimo, is the expression of a whole culture. In fact, Yeshiva Yiddish is
not the expression of a whole culture -- it is the expression of a very
limited, totally religion oriented, Fundamentalist SUB-culture within Jewish
culture, which does not come anywhere near expressing the whole of Jewish
culture. To do so it would have to be able to discuss, e.g., non religious
works by secular Jewish writers like Barshevis Singer, Sholem Asch and
Philip Roth, among others. But such works are taboo among the religious.
As are things like films, TV and most other secular activities and sources
of general information.
The only parallel to Yeshiva Yiddish I can imagine is of necessity
hypothetical. Imagine that the English language here has been completely
replaced by Japanese -- (and has long since died out everywhere else where
it has been systematically replaced by Chinese) in all walks of life -- for
two generations. There are only a small number of aged people left who
still remember English from their childhood years. However, there is one
place where English is still used regularly -- and this is the only domain
of the society in which it is still used -- the born-again, fundamentalist
Christian church. Moreover, the only subject that the disciples of Christ
ever use English for is to preach about the New Testament. This and this
alone. All their other affairs are conducted in Japanese. Could this
special, religiously focused subset of English be said to represent the
whole English language, when Shakespeare, baseball, cricket, TV, movies, the
news of the world, every other domain of life is never referred to except in
Japanese? -- I think not. At that point I would be tempted to regard English
as a dead language and the "Christianese" variant of it as a extremely
limited liturgical descendant -- something like Coptic in Egypt. Even
now, the Yiddish used in the Yeshiva is a rather distant relative of my own
ordinary, secular Yiddish, and I can barely follow a yeshiva discussion in
Yiddish.
Since almost all of the hopes for the survival of Yiddish are now pinned on
the extremely religious orthodox community with their yeshiva system of
education, and since it is highly unlikely that there will ever be any
resurrection of the general secular Yiddish speech community outside of this
most narrow religious sector -- I see no realistic hope for the survival of
Yiddish as a full language in the sense elucidated above. Though it may
persist in a highly specific variant offshoot form, that form will
eventually have about as much in common with the universal Yiddish of, let
us say, the Yiddish newspapers of 1939 as new Testament Greek has with
modern Greek or Cicero's Latin with modern Italian.
London, 30 September, 1997
by Chaim Pevner
Speaking as a native speaker of Yiddish, one who grew up in a community
where everybody spoke Yiddish, where all business and all everyday
activities were conducted in Yiddish, where the people around me lived their
entire life in Yiddish, twenty four hours a day, awake and asleep, in health
and in sickness, in hope and despair -- there is now absolutely no doubt
left in my mind that I am one of the last thoroughly fluent carriers of a
dying language.
The reason that this is true is quite simple -- the Yiddish speaking
community no longer exists. Because of the social nature of language, once
the community is dead the language is essentially dead. True, there are
still hundreds -- perhaps a few thousand fully fluent speakers of Yiddish
scattered about the world -- and there are perhaps a few households here and
there -- in Israel -- New York --a very few here and there -- where Yiddish
is still the dominant language of the home -- but very few. And there is no
outside community of Yiddish speakers on the street to backup this home use
of Yiddish. In the next generation Yiddish will be effaced. One sign that
the language is just about dead is that there are quite probably NO
monolingual speakers of Yiddish left -- in fact very few even whose dominant
language is Yiddish. I actually know several but, they are all very
advanced in years. Once they are gone it's all over -- a matter of ten,
possibly fifteen years.
Of course there will be a fairly large number of Hassidim who will continue
to use Yiddish as a religious language. It is the current practice still,
in many yeshivas to explain and discuss the mishnaic Torah commentaries in
Yiddish. Therefore, there are still young boys and teenagers who continue
to maintain a certain competence in Yiddish. However ;(1) this is a very
special, limited kind of religious Yiddish, which bears little resemblance
to the full secular language, and (2) Yiddish is unquestionably the Second
Language of these children. If the Yeshiva is in London OR New York, their
dominant language -- the one they actually use to talk to each other on all
subjects other than religion -- is English. If in Israel, the dominant
language will tend to be Hebrew or English. Elsewhere, whatever the
reigning local language is -- French, Spanish, Danish, whatever.
There is also a small community of academic scholars -- young and middle
aged teachers of Yiddish in Universities -- some of them not even Jewish.
In every case they speak a stilted, highly unnatural form of "textbook
Yiddish" of a kind which it is painful for a native speaker of Yiddish like
myself to listen to. I recently met one such scholar in Oxford who has a
PhD in Yiddish studies and is a teacher of Yiddish. His Yiddish was
reasonably fluent, but highly influenced by German which he had studied
before Yiddish -- and totally UNNATURAL. The question was not that he
speaks Yiddish with a slightly odd non-native accent, rhythm and intonation
-- in fact his Yiddish is quite clear and except for an occasional lapse in
syntax or morphology is basically correct and essentially complete. The
problem is that it is fatally obvious that he acquired his Yiddish without
benefit of exposure to a cohesive Yiddish speech community. It therefore
lacks the most important qualities that make the language a living organism
--- spontaneity and natural flow -- and the mindset internal to the speech
community where it was used -- a quality of language which manifests itself
not only in the words and phrases chosen by the speaker to convey a
particular thought -- but moreover -- the way the words sound -- the music
of the language.
Listening to one of these academic speakers of Yiddish speak is like
listening to somebody singing An Entire Opera Off Key -- It soon becomes
tiring, even annoying to the ears of the true native speaker. The words are
more or less right, but The Flow Of The Words is wrong, the music is wrong
-- or totally lacking -- Therefore, the overall impression is disconcerting
linguistically, and emotionally alienating.
I recently found myself involved in an extended conversation with another
enthusiastic and very capable speaker of academic Yiddish -- and although I
myself was literally hungry to have someone to exchange ideas with in
Yiddish --- at some point I realized that I was NOT ENJOYING the experience
-- that the linguistic (on an emotional level, for language is by definition
emotional) feedback I was getting was less than satisfying -- that it was in
fact disturbing and affecting my own Yiddish negatively in a kind of
subconscious application of Gresham's law to the linguistic domain -- bad
money tends to drive the good money out -- unnatural Yiddish tends to derail
the mindset of the speaker of natural Yiddish. At some point I simply
bailed out and switched to English, because it was just too tiring -- too
much of a strain, and too alienating -- to continue the conversation in
Yiddish.
This, may it be noted, is in stark contrast to a conversation of any
length, and of whatever banality -- with a true native speaker of Yiddish
-- which in my case these days invariably occurs only with somebody older
than myself. When speaking with a true native speaker of the language there
is an immediate sense of relaxation -- a sense that you are going to have a
good time just slinging the words around -- no matter what the topic of
conversation. It is always refreshing for me to talk Yiddish with real
native speakers -- it's like returning to childhood and playing --
Vocalizing for the sheer joy of vocalising -- the way birds chirp together
or crickets crick. Something very, very primitive.
(I do not, incidentally, ever get the same charge out of using English --
which indicates to me that English is emotionally secondary to Yiddish, in
my deep psycho-linguistic structure)
The fact that the next generation of potential Yiddish speakers are being
taught the language by teachers who themselves speak it in a way that is
OUT-OF-TUNE means that even the few students who manage to attain some
competence, will, nevertheless, never attain natural sounding Yiddish,
because they have no natural speech community against which to bring their
own Yiddish into tune. One can therefore discount the effect of University
Yiddish as a force for "bringing the language back to life" -- (except in the
form of an artificial monstrosity) --
I have visited such university classes. What they are producing is a few
people who can grope their way through some of the Yiddish classics with
about the same appreciation of the underlying culture as students who today
study Latin have of the culture of ancient Rome. The majority of these
students will never learn Yiddish -- they will merely learn to flail abut in
Yiddish.
The "fluent" Yiddish of today's yeshiva bukhirim is a special case. The
form of Yiddish that is being preserved in these religious institutions is
indeed a "form of Yiddish" -- but what form? -- and to what extent can this be
called a whole language if a whole language, such as English, Japanese or
Eskimo, is the expression of a whole culture. In fact, Yeshiva Yiddish is
not the expression of a whole culture -- it is the expression of a very
limited, totally religion oriented, Fundamentalist SUB-culture within Jewish
culture, which does not come anywhere near expressing the whole of Jewish
culture. To do so it would have to be able to discuss, e.g., non religious
works by secular Jewish writers like Barshevis Singer, Sholem Asch and
Philip Roth, among others. But such works are taboo among the religious.
As are things like films, TV and most other secular activities and sources
of general information.
The only parallel to Yeshiva Yiddish I can imagine is of necessity
hypothetical. Imagine that the English language here has been completely
replaced by Japanese -- (and has long since died out everywhere else where
it has been systematically replaced by Chinese) in all walks of life -- for
two generations. There are only a small number of aged people left who
still remember English from their childhood years. However, there is one
place where English is still used regularly -- and this is the only domain
of the society in which it is still used -- the born-again, fundamentalist
Christian church. Moreover, the only subject that the disciples of Christ
ever use English for is to preach about the New Testament. This and this
alone. All their other affairs are conducted in Japanese. Could this
special, religiously focused subset of English be said to represent the
whole English language, when Shakespeare, baseball, cricket, TV, movies, the
news of the world, every other domain of life is never referred to except in
Japanese? -- I think not. At that point I would be tempted to regard English
as a dead language and the "Christianese" variant of it as a extremely
limited liturgical descendant -- something like Coptic in Egypt. Even
now, the Yiddish used in the Yeshiva is a rather distant relative of my own
ordinary, secular Yiddish, and I can barely follow a yeshiva discussion in
Yiddish.
Since almost all of the hopes for the survival of Yiddish are now pinned on
the extremely religious orthodox community with their yeshiva system of
education, and since it is highly unlikely that there will ever be any
resurrection of the general secular Yiddish speech community outside of this
most narrow religious sector -- I see no realistic hope for the survival of
Yiddish as a full language in the sense elucidated above. Though it may
persist in a highly specific variant offshoot form, that form will
eventually have about as much in common with the universal Yiddish of, let
us say, the Yiddish newspapers of 1939 as new Testament Greek has with
modern Greek or Cicero's Latin with modern Italian.
London, 30 September, 1997
GAS CHAMBER ZOMBIES
A Film Idea
by Chaim Pevner
>>
(or, "Deck the Halls with Boughs of Germans")
Gerhardt Schroeter is a young middle class German living in Oberursel, an upscale suburb on the outskirts of Frankfurt. He works in a bank and is in every way a German Clark Kent -- a model, upstanding citizen, hard-working, church-going, idealistic nice guy, who is well liked by everyone.
However, he is troubled by recurrent nightmares in which he sees himself every night on top of an Ausschwitz Gas Chamber injecting Zyklon-B pellets into the chamber below. He doesn't really want to do this -- in fact he is horrified by the death agonies of the Jews in the chamber below, but he has no choice -- and he always wakes up in a cold sweat murmuring -- "I was just following orders" --
Eventually he finds out that his nice German father, a war veteran with an artificial nose and ear and other scars, was actually a gas chamber operator during the war, and -- when the father, who insists that what he did was right -- and starts lecturing Gerhardt on the correctness and necessity of the Final Solution -- Gerhardt becomes obsessed with guilt and now has dreams in which he sees himself as Jesus nailed to the cross -- actually, a large grenn "hooked cross", a Giant Nazi Swastika.
In his next dream he is given a can of special pellets to throw into the gas chamber.
As the camera zooms in to an overturned Zyklon-gas cannister on top of the death chamber
we note that the can is marked in small letters following the big capital letter "Z" -- with the barely legible words "zombie gas" in small lettering.
Cut to the interior of the gas chamber where the Jews inside are turning into zombies.
When the gas chamber doors are opened to recover the dead bodies the Jewish zombies
come marching out and mechanically attack the German guards and the Kapos -- start to strangle them and eat them alive as they rip their flesh off and chomp on jugular veins. The desperate
bloody, half eaten guards shoot at the zombies but it's no use -- the zombies are Living Dead -- impervious to the bullets. Gory scenes ensue of the zombies eating all the Germans in the camp and
literally ripping them to pieces, smashing their heads against iron posts, gouging their eyeballs out and chewing them up, biting through skulls and slurping up the hot brains, biting off ears and
noses, ripping tongues out and eating them raw, wiping their bloody mouths with pieces of Nazi uniforms, trampling Nazi medals underfoot as they go ... Only his father manages to escape,
badly chewed up but alive.
When Gerhardt wakes up from this one he realizes that he must do something to atone for the immeasurable collective German guilt. On Christmas Eve he locks his whole family in the cellar of the house, his wife, their two lovely Aryan children, and his unrepentant Nazi father and mother. He has prepared special music -- the classic music played in the death camps, as a death camp documentary film is projected onto the wall, and then, he starts injecting Zyklon pellets through an opening he has specially prepared under the living room rug above -- (in fact, this is the Christmas season and the secret opening in the floor is concealed just under the X-mas tree in the living room) -- he then runs down into the cellar to join his family in death. The camera zooms in to a closeup of an overturned gas canister -- in small letters we can discern the words "zombie gas" ...
As the music wells up the cellar door opens and the red-eyed children emerge first, followed by the adults -- they have all become ghastly Gas Chamber zombies ...... and clunk there way out of the house and down the street into suburban Frankfurt where they will procered to devour anyone and everyone they can find out on the streets on Christmas night ...
Written: Riga, Latvia-- September 11, 1999
{Rosh hashana, 5760}
by Chaim Pevner
>>
or "Revenge of the Gas Chamber Zombies"?GAS CHAMBER ZOMBIES
(or, "Deck the Halls with Boughs of Germans")
Gerhardt Schroeter is a young middle class German living in Oberursel, an upscale suburb on the outskirts of Frankfurt. He works in a bank and is in every way a German Clark Kent -- a model, upstanding citizen, hard-working, church-going, idealistic nice guy, who is well liked by everyone.
However, he is troubled by recurrent nightmares in which he sees himself every night on top of an Ausschwitz Gas Chamber injecting Zyklon-B pellets into the chamber below. He doesn't really want to do this -- in fact he is horrified by the death agonies of the Jews in the chamber below, but he has no choice -- and he always wakes up in a cold sweat murmuring -- "I was just following orders" --
Eventually he finds out that his nice German father, a war veteran with an artificial nose and ear and other scars, was actually a gas chamber operator during the war, and -- when the father, who insists that what he did was right -- and starts lecturing Gerhardt on the correctness and necessity of the Final Solution -- Gerhardt becomes obsessed with guilt and now has dreams in which he sees himself as Jesus nailed to the cross -- actually, a large grenn "hooked cross", a Giant Nazi Swastika.
In his next dream he is given a can of special pellets to throw into the gas chamber.
As the camera zooms in to an overturned Zyklon-gas cannister on top of the death chamber
we note that the can is marked in small letters following the big capital letter "Z" -- with the barely legible words "zombie gas" in small lettering.
Cut to the interior of the gas chamber where the Jews inside are turning into zombies.
When the gas chamber doors are opened to recover the dead bodies the Jewish zombies
come marching out and mechanically attack the German guards and the Kapos -- start to strangle them and eat them alive as they rip their flesh off and chomp on jugular veins. The desperate
bloody, half eaten guards shoot at the zombies but it's no use -- the zombies are Living Dead -- impervious to the bullets. Gory scenes ensue of the zombies eating all the Germans in the camp and
literally ripping them to pieces, smashing their heads against iron posts, gouging their eyeballs out and chewing them up, biting through skulls and slurping up the hot brains, biting off ears and
noses, ripping tongues out and eating them raw, wiping their bloody mouths with pieces of Nazi uniforms, trampling Nazi medals underfoot as they go ... Only his father manages to escape,
badly chewed up but alive.
When Gerhardt wakes up from this one he realizes that he must do something to atone for the immeasurable collective German guilt. On Christmas Eve he locks his whole family in the cellar of the house, his wife, their two lovely Aryan children, and his unrepentant Nazi father and mother. He has prepared special music -- the classic music played in the death camps, as a death camp documentary film is projected onto the wall, and then, he starts injecting Zyklon pellets through an opening he has specially prepared under the living room rug above -- (in fact, this is the Christmas season and the secret opening in the floor is concealed just under the X-mas tree in the living room) -- he then runs down into the cellar to join his family in death. The camera zooms in to a closeup of an overturned gas canister -- in small letters we can discern the words "zombie gas" ...
As the music wells up the cellar door opens and the red-eyed children emerge first, followed by the adults -- they have all become ghastly Gas Chamber zombies ...... and clunk there way out of the house and down the street into suburban Frankfurt where they will procered to devour anyone and everyone they can find out on the streets on Christmas night ...
Written: Riga, Latvia-- September 11, 1999
{Rosh hashana, 5760}
Budapest to Seattle
Budapest,
Lunes 4 de Diciembre, 2OO6
Dear Bana --
No es tanta cosa de emergencia -- it's more of a chronic condition, but a very uncomfortable one -- even now, as I am writing this, my left hand which I don't use to write -- feels as if there is a small load of liquid metal inside, and my left little finger feels like it is always wearing the Ring of the Nibelungen --altho there is nothing there, obviously. At this point all I would like you to do is just check out in what part of the medical center such "palsied" or "trapped nerve" conditions are likely to be treated -- Probably, the neurology dept. Once you find that out I'm on the way. The only thing is that, since this is the Holiday season, some doctors may be away or whatever.
So, if you could just call the neurology dept. (shouldn't be hard to find since you're already at the U. on your job) -- and then ask to speak with some doctor there, tell him you have a friend coming in from Budapest, and could he set up an appointment for sometime around, say December 15 --2Oth ... If you find the exact doctor who handles such cases --(palsied ULNAR nerve in the leftarm, between elbow and little finger of left hand -- causing partially disabled and weakened left hand -- apparently caused by calcium deposits up around the neck) --
That's the official diagnosis so far, without having taken any x-rays or electromyograph -- just talking to a couple of Hungarian doctors.
If you do locate the right doctor, maybe I could email him for further discussion of the case and to set up an appointment.
In any case, I have been walking around with this messy condition since July! -- more than four months and it has been making my life miserable -- --i MUST REALLY BE STUPID!
It may take some kind of extended physiotherapy, so I want to get started as soon as possible. I would also like to get rid of this and return to normal health ASAP ...
So that's the story for now.
I have decided to cancel all other activities, such as film festivals and fatiguing travel until this is taken care of. I am already giving up an invitation to Florence, Italy -- next week -- with a FOUR STAR hotel stay thrown in -- because I am just too tired and fucked up to enjoy another trip like that until this goddamn arm is taken care of --no matter how many film festivals I have to miss in January, or until this is fixed.
So, lemme know if you have any success at the Med Center --and I hope to see you during the Holidays. Maybe we'll take in the "NUTCRACKER" at the Opera house --That was fun last time.
So, how is Jean-Marc getting along these days?
Hasta la proxima,
Alex
BANADEVI, GODDESS OF REGGAE, ROTE FROM SEATTLE:
Hi. Just let me know when you're arriving . . . Maybe then I can get started on setting an appointment with the doctor. If you are in immediate need, when you arrive I can go with you to emergent care unit at the hospital.
I went to dinner yesterday with Jean Marc. Nothing fancy, just Ivars by Lake Union.
Lunes 4 de Diciembre, 2OO6
Dear Bana --
No es tanta cosa de emergencia -- it's more of a chronic condition, but a very uncomfortable one -- even now, as I am writing this, my left hand which I don't use to write -- feels as if there is a small load of liquid metal inside, and my left little finger feels like it is always wearing the Ring of the Nibelungen --altho there is nothing there, obviously. At this point all I would like you to do is just check out in what part of the medical center such "palsied" or "trapped nerve" conditions are likely to be treated -- Probably, the neurology dept. Once you find that out I'm on the way. The only thing is that, since this is the Holiday season, some doctors may be away or whatever.
So, if you could just call the neurology dept. (shouldn't be hard to find since you're already at the U. on your job) -- and then ask to speak with some doctor there, tell him you have a friend coming in from Budapest, and could he set up an appointment for sometime around, say December 15 --2Oth ... If you find the exact doctor who handles such cases --(palsied ULNAR nerve in the leftarm, between elbow and little finger of left hand -- causing partially disabled and weakened left hand -- apparently caused by calcium deposits up around the neck) --
That's the official diagnosis so far, without having taken any x-rays or electromyograph -- just talking to a couple of Hungarian doctors.
If you do locate the right doctor, maybe I could email him for further discussion of the case and to set up an appointment.
In any case, I have been walking around with this messy condition since July! -- more than four months and it has been making my life miserable -- --i MUST REALLY BE STUPID!
It may take some kind of extended physiotherapy, so I want to get started as soon as possible. I would also like to get rid of this and return to normal health ASAP ...
So that's the story for now.
I have decided to cancel all other activities, such as film festivals and fatiguing travel until this is taken care of. I am already giving up an invitation to Florence, Italy -- next week -- with a FOUR STAR hotel stay thrown in -- because I am just too tired and fucked up to enjoy another trip like that until this goddamn arm is taken care of --no matter how many film festivals I have to miss in January, or until this is fixed.
So, lemme know if you have any success at the Med Center --and I hope to see you during the Holidays. Maybe we'll take in the "NUTCRACKER" at the Opera house --That was fun last time.
So, how is Jean-Marc getting along these days?
Hasta la proxima,
Alex
BANADEVI, GODDESS OF REGGAE, ROTE FROM SEATTLE:
Hi. Just let me know when you're arriving . . . Maybe then I can get started on setting an appointment with the doctor. If you are in immediate need, when you arrive I can go with you to emergent care unit at the hospital.
I went to dinner yesterday with Jean Marc. Nothing fancy, just Ivars by Lake Union.
"Alley Ock-barr! --- (The True Story behind the pilot training for 9/11)
A full length cartoon done in claassic Porky Pig Style, entitled "Alley Ock-barr! --- (The True Story behind the pilot training for 9/11) --SEE sincere Arab martyrs cut the throats of comely Infidel Stewardesses -- SEE Arab martysr lap the blood up from the floor of the plane -- SEE the Martyrs Souls ascend up to Islam Hevvin as the planes hit the Towers and go up and down in Flames --
SEE ARAB PARADISE, filled with young Arab virgins in see-through full-length BURKAS --giving the Martyrs arriving into Mohammed's Paradise welcoming Blow Jobs at the Pearly Islamic Gates -- SEE the expressions of full Islamic ecstasy on the faces of the frazzzled Arab Martyrs --(some of them got a little new Hardcore Pornograph edition of the Holy KURAN will be distributed at the door --
The signoff at the end of the film will be PORKY saying --th-th-th-th-THAT's all folks --IN ARABIC! --
And a mullah in full beard will then come on to assure the faithful audience that this pig is kosher and has been declared HALAL meat for Döner Kebab use by both Jews and Arabs.
I got a couple others, but this is the one that came to me tonite while walking up here to the late-night Internet I use which has a Kurdish attendant who believes the Massacre of the Armenian in Turkey in 1915 was actually a Massacre of the Turks by the Armenians --Well, different massacres for diffrent folks...
SEE ARAB PARADISE, filled with young Arab virgins in see-through full-length BURKAS --giving the Martyrs arriving into Mohammed's Paradise welcoming Blow Jobs at the Pearly Islamic Gates -- SEE the expressions of full Islamic ecstasy on the faces of the frazzzled Arab Martyrs --(some of them got a little new Hardcore Pornograph edition of the Holy KURAN will be distributed at the door --
The signoff at the end of the film will be PORKY saying --th-th-th-th-THAT's all folks --IN ARABIC! --
And a mullah in full beard will then come on to assure the faithful audience that this pig is kosher and has been declared HALAL meat for Döner Kebab use by both Jews and Arabs.
I got a couple others, but this is the one that came to me tonite while walking up here to the late-night Internet I use which has a Kurdish attendant who believes the Massacre of the Armenian in Turkey in 1915 was actually a Massacre of the Turks by the Armenians --Well, different massacres for diffrent folks...
Sunday, December 3, 2006
SPEAKING OF FEMMES FATALES
SPEAKING OF FEMMES FATALES ...
Louise Lorringer was most definitely a Femme Fatale. You wouldn't guess it to look at her -- she seemed so clean-scrubbed and rosy Mid-West -- a 22 year old UCLA co-ed--- a blushing all-American Rose from Wilmette, Illinois... but when you got done getting wrung through the meat-grinder of her affections you didn't have to go see any films-noir -- You were living in one!
Louise was undoubtedly the great love of my life -- (from September 1966 to March 1968 -- a total of some eighteen months all told) -- but there's no telling how many other young lives she was also the great love of ... and the one that put her out of her misery -- and mine as well -- for good --was José Gonzalez, the handsome film student from Argentina and East L. A. -- who cut her life short at the age of 24 with many plunges of a kitchen knife -- "I would never have killed her if she would of let me fuck her that day --José told me years later -- "but she didn't, and then she fought like a tiger for her life" ... Those were José's exact words when I met him seven years later after they let him out of the nut-house in Atascadero -- and we became friends again, sort of ... in L. A. in 1975 ...
So, how do you tell a femme-fatale? -- from, say, your ordinary run-of-the-mill attractive female who is not necessarily hell-bent compelled to destroy every male she comes in contact with, and just wants to get married or nicely fucked... Well, there are various hallmarks and danger signals. For one thing, they like to introduce one boyfriend (or lover) to another, just to see if they will clash and try to kill each other over her. Like, take Ronnie – the sandy-haired little fag from the Russian department at UCLA – the day that she and I were still going strong at RAND, and I made a date to meet her after work at Olivia’s Soul Food Kitchen over on Ocean avenue (the one the Doors did a song about) – and with no previous warning she shows up with this harmless looking little wimp in tow -- (it turned out later that he was gay but I didn’t know that then, and later she actually moved in with him!) – Ronnie –and, of course, I should have said right then and there, „Hey – I thought this was supposed to be a dinner for two – and I really don’t give a shit about meeting a new boyfriend of yours from school” – at which point I should have split and left them both there with dropping jaws ... But, no – I was already far deeper into Louises’s fatal clutches than I realized – So, I just sat it out – squirming internally throughout the entire dinner – trying to act cool, as if I didn’t mind that she’d brought a friend along – She wanted him to meet me, she said, because I was a hot-shot Russian linguist at RAND and Ronnie was such an enthiastic student of Russian at UCLA – Yeh, sure, just what I need – to meet every new student of Russian at UCLA who is seriously interested in the Instrumental Case ...and in Louise! – How the fuck did I ever let myself be taken on that trip! – but I wanted to be perceived by her as „cool” and able to rise above bullshit situations such as this – however, the web of femme-fatality bears bitter fruit as we shall see.
I don’t think it was too long after this that she picked up with my best friend of the time –José Gonzalez – needless to say, I was the one who introduced them... Oh yeah – That’s another trait of the femme fatale –They start fucking your best friend right under your nose, and act like it’s just a friendly handshake –and she’ll get back to you as soon as she’s had enough of him. And then she moves in with him – to a cheap apartment on lower La Cienaga –and let’s YOU fuck her in THEIR apartment – with a little help from some LSD – the little white pills then known as „pure Ousley”.
But I’ve already gotten way ahead of my story -- the story of Me and Louise and José and the psychedelic sixties. The whole thing actually started on a beautiful day at the end of the summer of 1966 – September the First, to be exact – the day I started my new job at the RAND Corporation on the bluff in Santa Monica overlooking fabled „Muscle Beach” – the job of my dreams – and thought I had it made for the duration. I was hired on at RAND by David Hayes, a somewhat maverick, droopy-eyed linguist from Tennessee who had his own private linguistic theory which he called „Dependency Grammar”, as a creative thinker on the RAND Russian Language Project.of which he was the guiding light. I had just spent a couple of years at UCLA as a graduate student of Chomskian linguistics – the school of linguistics which was then all the rage – but I hated the dry, bloodless, formalistic, tree-structure Chomskian approach to the study of language, and was on the verge of dropping out of the masters degree program when suddenly this job – a high-powered job in linguistics, but not of the nauseating Chomskian kind – suddenly fell into my lap almost out of the blue. How this happened is a bit of a digression, but a necessary one in order to understand the background of everything that happened later.
In the summer of ’66 there was a kind of world series of linguistics held on the UCLA campus for some eight weeks during July and August. This was the annual Summer Institute of Linguistic, an academic event held at a different campus around the country every year and attended by students from all over the map. But 1966 was a very special year at UCLA because Noam Chomsky, the then undisputed superstar and king of linguistics – at the very peak of his academic fame and fortune – would not only be there in person, but would be giving two lectures every afternoon expounding his latest theories of „Transformational Generative Grammar” to a captive audience in the largest hall available – the audience composed mostly of graduate students in thrall before the new Guru of the discipline, but also by a large contingent of the most prominent linguistic specialists in the world – psycholinguists, neurolinguists, experimental phoneticians – you name it – as well as all the major theoreticians, some of whom had language theories somewhat divergent from those of Chomsky – but who were nevertheless keen on hearing the latest Chomskian formulations straight from the horse’s mouth. – the new Gospel according to Chomsky, direct from M.I.T.
The atmosphere in the spacious Psychology Building lecture hall every afternoon from four to six (with a coffee break in-between) was something like getting a double dose of the Sermon on the Mount – and you were even able to fire a few questions at the Messiah at the conclusion of each sermon. The proceedings were moderated by Dr.Robert Stockwell, a wiry bespectacled blond-haired intellectual Bible-Belt-nik from Oklahoma, who was acting head of the UCLA linguistics department, (official sponsor of the institute) and having discovered the real Messiah, did just about everything but bow down and lick Chomsky’s shoes on every possible occasion. He preached Chomskyism in the UCLA linguistics department and seemed to think he was Jjohn-the-Baptist during the lectures making sure that The Word was properly heard. Never mind that hardly anyone in the audience could actually figure out what Chomsky was actually saying. When the word is coming from above you pretend to understand and nod in agreement even if you don’t. There was one guy at the back of the hall – a traditional linguist from Michigan, who would get up and regularly point out apparent contradictions in Chomsky’s formulations – but he was regularly shouted down as if he were a heretic farting loudly in church. Those were heady afternoons – to witness two hours of amazing double-talk by one of the cleverest double-talkers of the century, Noam Chomsky -- being passed off and accepted by a highly sophisticated academic audience as the absolute Gospel Truth.
Since this was also the height of the Viet-Nam protest days, Chomsky would also make a couple of unscheduled and unpaid political speeches that summer at hastily organized campus Anti-War rallies known as „Teach-Ins” featuring such other luminaries as Prof. Herbert Marcuse, retired veterans of the war, former RAND researchers, etc., etc. (names to be filled in later). This man, Chomsky, while looking like a mild-mannered reporter for the Daily Planet, was so incredibly glib that – come to think of it – he could have taken a position in favor of the war -- and would have sounded every bit as convincing! Too bad somebody didn’t stage a debate at some point between Chomsky and Billy Graham – that would have been one for the books – two True Believers and genius bullshit-artists going at it head-to-head.
Budapest, August 12, 2OO6
To be continued ...
Louise Lorringer was most definitely a Femme Fatale. You wouldn't guess it to look at her -- she seemed so clean-scrubbed and rosy Mid-West -- a 22 year old UCLA co-ed--- a blushing all-American Rose from Wilmette, Illinois... but when you got done getting wrung through the meat-grinder of her affections you didn't have to go see any films-noir -- You were living in one!
Louise was undoubtedly the great love of my life -- (from September 1966 to March 1968 -- a total of some eighteen months all told) -- but there's no telling how many other young lives she was also the great love of ... and the one that put her out of her misery -- and mine as well -- for good --was José Gonzalez, the handsome film student from Argentina and East L. A. -- who cut her life short at the age of 24 with many plunges of a kitchen knife -- "I would never have killed her if she would of let me fuck her that day --José told me years later -- "but she didn't, and then she fought like a tiger for her life" ... Those were José's exact words when I met him seven years later after they let him out of the nut-house in Atascadero -- and we became friends again, sort of ... in L. A. in 1975 ...
So, how do you tell a femme-fatale? -- from, say, your ordinary run-of-the-mill attractive female who is not necessarily hell-bent compelled to destroy every male she comes in contact with, and just wants to get married or nicely fucked... Well, there are various hallmarks and danger signals. For one thing, they like to introduce one boyfriend (or lover) to another, just to see if they will clash and try to kill each other over her. Like, take Ronnie – the sandy-haired little fag from the Russian department at UCLA – the day that she and I were still going strong at RAND, and I made a date to meet her after work at Olivia’s Soul Food Kitchen over on Ocean avenue (the one the Doors did a song about) – and with no previous warning she shows up with this harmless looking little wimp in tow -- (it turned out later that he was gay but I didn’t know that then, and later she actually moved in with him!) – Ronnie –and, of course, I should have said right then and there, „Hey – I thought this was supposed to be a dinner for two – and I really don’t give a shit about meeting a new boyfriend of yours from school” – at which point I should have split and left them both there with dropping jaws ... But, no – I was already far deeper into Louises’s fatal clutches than I realized – So, I just sat it out – squirming internally throughout the entire dinner – trying to act cool, as if I didn’t mind that she’d brought a friend along – She wanted him to meet me, she said, because I was a hot-shot Russian linguist at RAND and Ronnie was such an enthiastic student of Russian at UCLA – Yeh, sure, just what I need – to meet every new student of Russian at UCLA who is seriously interested in the Instrumental Case ...and in Louise! – How the fuck did I ever let myself be taken on that trip! – but I wanted to be perceived by her as „cool” and able to rise above bullshit situations such as this – however, the web of femme-fatality bears bitter fruit as we shall see.
I don’t think it was too long after this that she picked up with my best friend of the time –José Gonzalez – needless to say, I was the one who introduced them... Oh yeah – That’s another trait of the femme fatale –They start fucking your best friend right under your nose, and act like it’s just a friendly handshake –and she’ll get back to you as soon as she’s had enough of him. And then she moves in with him – to a cheap apartment on lower La Cienaga –and let’s YOU fuck her in THEIR apartment – with a little help from some LSD – the little white pills then known as „pure Ousley”.
But I’ve already gotten way ahead of my story -- the story of Me and Louise and José and the psychedelic sixties. The whole thing actually started on a beautiful day at the end of the summer of 1966 – September the First, to be exact – the day I started my new job at the RAND Corporation on the bluff in Santa Monica overlooking fabled „Muscle Beach” – the job of my dreams – and thought I had it made for the duration. I was hired on at RAND by David Hayes, a somewhat maverick, droopy-eyed linguist from Tennessee who had his own private linguistic theory which he called „Dependency Grammar”, as a creative thinker on the RAND Russian Language Project.of which he was the guiding light. I had just spent a couple of years at UCLA as a graduate student of Chomskian linguistics – the school of linguistics which was then all the rage – but I hated the dry, bloodless, formalistic, tree-structure Chomskian approach to the study of language, and was on the verge of dropping out of the masters degree program when suddenly this job – a high-powered job in linguistics, but not of the nauseating Chomskian kind – suddenly fell into my lap almost out of the blue. How this happened is a bit of a digression, but a necessary one in order to understand the background of everything that happened later.
In the summer of ’66 there was a kind of world series of linguistics held on the UCLA campus for some eight weeks during July and August. This was the annual Summer Institute of Linguistic, an academic event held at a different campus around the country every year and attended by students from all over the map. But 1966 was a very special year at UCLA because Noam Chomsky, the then undisputed superstar and king of linguistics – at the very peak of his academic fame and fortune – would not only be there in person, but would be giving two lectures every afternoon expounding his latest theories of „Transformational Generative Grammar” to a captive audience in the largest hall available – the audience composed mostly of graduate students in thrall before the new Guru of the discipline, but also by a large contingent of the most prominent linguistic specialists in the world – psycholinguists, neurolinguists, experimental phoneticians – you name it – as well as all the major theoreticians, some of whom had language theories somewhat divergent from those of Chomsky – but who were nevertheless keen on hearing the latest Chomskian formulations straight from the horse’s mouth. – the new Gospel according to Chomsky, direct from M.I.T.
The atmosphere in the spacious Psychology Building lecture hall every afternoon from four to six (with a coffee break in-between) was something like getting a double dose of the Sermon on the Mount – and you were even able to fire a few questions at the Messiah at the conclusion of each sermon. The proceedings were moderated by Dr.Robert Stockwell, a wiry bespectacled blond-haired intellectual Bible-Belt-nik from Oklahoma, who was acting head of the UCLA linguistics department, (official sponsor of the institute) and having discovered the real Messiah, did just about everything but bow down and lick Chomsky’s shoes on every possible occasion. He preached Chomskyism in the UCLA linguistics department and seemed to think he was Jjohn-the-Baptist during the lectures making sure that The Word was properly heard. Never mind that hardly anyone in the audience could actually figure out what Chomsky was actually saying. When the word is coming from above you pretend to understand and nod in agreement even if you don’t. There was one guy at the back of the hall – a traditional linguist from Michigan, who would get up and regularly point out apparent contradictions in Chomsky’s formulations – but he was regularly shouted down as if he were a heretic farting loudly in church. Those were heady afternoons – to witness two hours of amazing double-talk by one of the cleverest double-talkers of the century, Noam Chomsky -- being passed off and accepted by a highly sophisticated academic audience as the absolute Gospel Truth.
Since this was also the height of the Viet-Nam protest days, Chomsky would also make a couple of unscheduled and unpaid political speeches that summer at hastily organized campus Anti-War rallies known as „Teach-Ins” featuring such other luminaries as Prof. Herbert Marcuse, retired veterans of the war, former RAND researchers, etc., etc. (names to be filled in later). This man, Chomsky, while looking like a mild-mannered reporter for the Daily Planet, was so incredibly glib that – come to think of it – he could have taken a position in favor of the war -- and would have sounded every bit as convincing! Too bad somebody didn’t stage a debate at some point between Chomsky and Billy Graham – that would have been one for the books – two True Believers and genius bullshit-artists going at it head-to-head.
Budapest, August 12, 2OO6
To be continued ...
CONFESSIONS OF AN OUTSIDER
CONFESSIONS OF AN OUTSIDER, OR HOW TO BE A FAILURE
IN LIFE WITHOUT REALLY TRYING
By Herman Pevner
There is an old proverb – or is it an ‘aphorism’ – anyway, one of those concise “wise sayings” that seem to embody an eternal truth about human nature – the one I’m thinking of, translated into street English, basically says: “Tell me who you hang out with and I’ll tell you who you are” -- which is a variation on the theme of “Birds of a feather” .... which sort of goes; “If you tell me what kinds of birds you flock around with – I’ll tell you what kind of bird YOU are” ---
Well, most of my life I have found myself hanging out with outsiders, losers and weirdos of one kind or another – so, I guess that makes me an outsider and/or a loser – of one kind or another ...or a weirdo!
Let me point out, however, before going any further, that the outsider never really wants to be an outsider – He would much prefer to be an INSIDER – a member of the “in-crowd”, if he had any say in the matter, but it is always conditions over which he (or she) has no control which force him to be an outsider – “laughing on the outside, crying on the inside”, as a very popular song used to put it way back when ... In any case, my own personal outsider-hood started before I was even born. My mother who was already an outsider, the ‘black sheep’ of the family so to speak – decided to have a child out of wedlock, and that was me. Not only was I born outside of wedlock, but my mother died in a mental hospital when I was merely fifteen months old, leaving me to her parents – who were Yiddish-speaking immigrants from Russia – to raise. Thus I grew up in a Yiddish-speaking environment, in an entire community of outsiders – who were so outside the American mainstream that they didn’t even understand the language of the country they were living in! – let alone the ideas and the mentality of the American world all around them.
When I started school at the age of six, although I had somehow managed to absorb English along with the Yiddish which had far and away dominated my linguistic environment up till then – I soon realized that all the other little kids in the first grade, coming from more assimilated English-speaking Jewish families – already knew all kinds of things about which I had not the slightest clue.
For instance, the “Mother goose” rhymes which all the other kids seemed to be familiar with, were totally strange to me. An old woman who lives in a shoe?? – What the hell are they talking about! The Elson Gray readers with the dark green covers and the funny pictures, which told stories about “Dick and Jane” and their dog “Spot” and had these ridiculous English sentences in them like: “This is a ball. See the ball, Spot? – Look and see! – Run, Spot, run!” -- -- seemed to me like stories from another planet. Yet, this is what we had to learn to read from, and, as far as I could see, all the other kids seemed to be quite familiar with the weird world of “Dick and Jane” -- whereas to me it was utterly strange – a little funny, like when the cat got all tangled up in the ball of wool – but basically, strange.
I knew lots of things about Ukrainian shtetl culture – “back in the Old Country” -- which was what my family talked about most of the time – and I knew what a “pogrom” was, but mainstream American culture was almost an entire blank to me. So, I just sat there at the back of the room, kept my mouth shut, and listened in awe – hoping that eventually I would “catch up” to the other kids. This feeling of not knowing what everybody else was taking for granted has been with me all of my life, and I have spent much of my life trying to “catch up” – with an entire culture that passed me by in my earliest formative years and all the other things I thought I absolutely needed to know if I was ever going to be accepted into the pack.
I tried so hard – studying by myself – everything I could lay my hands on; comic strips in the newspapers -- (Prince Valiant, Popeye, Nancy and Sluggo, Jiggs and Maggie, Mutt and Jeff) -- comic books – (especially The Flash, Captain Marvel, and the Human Torch ) – then there were the “ big-little” books, and newspapers, and my war picture cards (I would read the stories on the backs of them until I knew them by heart – especially the campaigns of the Spanish Civil War) – I even studied the Yellow Pages of the phone book and was fascinated by the cartoon images of “The Pep Boys”, Manny, Moe and Jack. Then, of course, there were the Baseball cards – featuring guys with “real” American names like “Arkie” Vaughan, “Pinky” Higgins, “Taft” Wright, “Dolph” Camilli, “Babe” Dahlgren, “Luke” Appling, “Soupy” Campbell, and the like --I memorized all their capsule biographies and statistics -- and then there were the Superman cards and Uncle Sams – -- depicting handsome young Americans in training for the war that was coming soon …
I also listened to “my stories” on the radio – religiously – every day between five and six – Little Orphan Annie, Jack Armstrong – the ALL American Boy! – Mandrake The Magician, and – best of all – Captain Midnight and the Secret Squadron – then I got interested – really interested, in science and languages – astronomy, chemistry, and all kinds of languages – and history and geography, and The War, and Aviation – all the WW II military aircraft – I knew everything about all of them – P-40s, Airacobras, Mustangs, Spitfires, Hurricanes, Grumman Avengers, Stukas, Gull-winged F-4Us, DeHavilland Mosquitoes, the Focke-Wulf 190, the Japanese Zero, the “Flying Fortress”, the heavy bombers -- the Avro Lancasters and Short Stirlings – with the 99 foot wing spans, because British hangars were exactly 100 feet wide -- the attack planes, B-25 and B-26 -- I followed the war and geo-politics avidly, and then I started taking all kinds of books out of the library and devouring them, quietly, on my own ... and then one day I turned around and realized that I knew about ten times as much about everything as most of the people around me – not only the kids but the adults as well ... But by then it was too late. The outsider mentality which was to hound my existence for the rest of my life, was fully formed and firmly established -- and nothing was ever going to change that!
I should add, however, that the various naive childhood media which I made use of in order to work my way out of the peculiar immigrant world of my family and their Yiddish-speaking sub-society – basically the Russian shtetl transplanted to the streets of Philadelphia -- out into the wider world of American culture -- my first contact with which had left me feeling totally lost and left out -- these media, the comic books, picture cards, radio programs, etc. – were in fact much more sophisticated than the Elson Grey type ecucational pablum and drivel that was being spoon-fed to us in elementary school.
The detailed explanations on the backs of the penny bubble-gum war cards made no concessions to “little kid English”. They were, in fact, capsule reports on the state of the wars then going on in Spain, China and Ethiopia – written for adult readers. It was here that I learned words like “bombardment”, “atrocities”, “besieged city”, “artillery”, “cavalry”, “aggression”, “barricades”, “defense, “loyalists” and “rebels” – in short, the entire vocabulary of adult newspapers – at the age of six and seven. The cards also made me familiar with important World figures such as Generalissimo (great word!) Franco and Chiang Kai-Shek. Moreover, through them I became thoroughly familiar with the geography and landmarks of Spain – the Alhambra in Toledo, the Alcazar in Seville, the University battle grounds in Madrid, the Ebro River, Barcelona, the cities of the north – Santander, Oviedo and San Sebastian – all scenes of military activity. From these war cards I learned that the main North-south railway in China passed through Hankow, a major junction city – and ogled images of street battles in Shanghai and Nanking. From these cards I actually had a fair idea of what The Bund in Shanghai looked like and understood the military strategy of the invading “Japs”.
I doubt that other kids studied the captions on the backs of the cards as carefully as I did – and I was certainly the only kid around who drew realistic war scenes with colored crayons, derived from the images on these cards. An odd footnote to all this: at the bottom of the back of every card – many of them bearing extremely gory images of torn bodies and blasted buildings –was the slogan; ‘TO KNOW THE HORRORS OF WAR IS TO WANT PEACE” – -- Hard to believe; ( The official title of the series -- in all 240 numbered cards which are today a rare and coveted collectors item, is; “Horrors of War Cards”) – because all these cards did for a little boy like me, besides teaching me a much higher level of English than I was learning in school – was make me think that war was simply glorious and colorful – the greatest thing around -- And the sooner it comes, the better!
As for the comic pages in the Sunday papers: The language spoken in “Prince Valiant – ( In the Days of King Arthur) ” -- my favorite comic strip of many – was a kind of exalted Arthurian English which was clearly aimed at adult readers, and was a subtle introduction to British literature and legend as well as an introduction to Art History, since the ‘sets and costumes’ were so carefully drawn in high realism, that one could admire a single panel for ten minutes at a time. The artist was a minor genius by the name of Hal Foster. And Mandrake The Magician who “gestured hypnotically” also spoke no-nonsense adult English. From Popeye one learned a hilarious variety of a kind of English one should NOT speak – "arf-arf -- blow me down!" -- and so on. In short, the comics were a far richer and more sophisticated introduction to the English language – and the many varieties of culture at large -- than anything served up at school!
There was an extremely boring hour once a week in school called “music appreciation” which put everybody to sleep, as the teacher struggled vainly to make us understand things like “ the structure” of Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony. The only thing good about it, I thought, was that he never finished it. (Today I think otherwise) – But my real introduction to classical music came from the stirring trumpet blasts of the William Tell Overture which introduced The Lone Ranger on the radio – or the background music of the Flash Gordon movie serial – which was Liszt’s “les Preludes” – I didn’t know this was "classical" music – I just liked it and learned it… Then, later on there was Sibelius’ “Valse Triste” on “I Love a Mystery” – spooky music, but the kind you couldn’t forget…
If the movies could make a nice Jewish guy like John Garfield, a criminal – (“They Made Me A Criminal”, 1939) – they made a shaggy Yiddish-speaking shtetl kid like myself, into an AMERICAN! – as I identified a mile-a-minute with Errol Flynn splitting the other guy’s bulls-eye arrow in two, in “Robin Hood”, or waiting for the Indians to charge in “They died With Their Boots On”, or James Cagney standing the cops off in Sing-Sing as the tear gas comes pumping in – or Ronald Reagan as “The Gipper’ in “Knute Rockne, All American” – or, discovering that “there is no such thing as a bad boy”, from Spencer Tracy in “Boy’s Town” or discovering the telephone itself with Don Ameche in “Alexander Graham Bell”, or standing off the Riff on the ramparts of the Foreign Legion fortress in Morocco with Gary Cooper in “BEAU GESTE” – or having madcap adventures with Cary Grant and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., in India in “Gunga Din”, and -- maybe most important of all – realizing that I could speak better English than Olympic hero Johnny Weismiller in my absolutely favorite movie series of all, “TARZAN’ – I especially got a big private kick out of the scene in “Tarzan’s New York Adventure” where Tarzan shows up in court in a baggy suit and the judge says to him, “Now, Mr. Tarzan -- Do you swear to tell the truth – the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?” – to which Tarzan replies with profound dignity, “TARZAN NOT LIE!” – here I felt a small surge of superiority as I privately corrected his English – You dope – you shoulda said; Tarzan DOES not lie! – you can’t win this case with shitty English like that …
In short, with the help of the comics in the Sunday papers, various kinds of picture cards, all kinds of comic books, kiddies radio programs, and the marvelous adventures up there on the silver screen – I gradually “caught up ” – and eventually surpassed the other kids, but I never got accepted into their clubs, because now I knew Too Much, which also made me different – and anyway, I was born to be an outsider.
Warsaw, Tuesday, June 08, 2004
To be continued – Next, my early playmates ... my imaginary friend “Frank” and how I became a loner at an early age ...
IN LIFE WITHOUT REALLY TRYING
By Herman Pevner
There is an old proverb – or is it an ‘aphorism’ – anyway, one of those concise “wise sayings” that seem to embody an eternal truth about human nature – the one I’m thinking of, translated into street English, basically says: “Tell me who you hang out with and I’ll tell you who you are” -- which is a variation on the theme of “Birds of a feather” .... which sort of goes; “If you tell me what kinds of birds you flock around with – I’ll tell you what kind of bird YOU are” ---
Well, most of my life I have found myself hanging out with outsiders, losers and weirdos of one kind or another – so, I guess that makes me an outsider and/or a loser – of one kind or another ...or a weirdo!
Let me point out, however, before going any further, that the outsider never really wants to be an outsider – He would much prefer to be an INSIDER – a member of the “in-crowd”, if he had any say in the matter, but it is always conditions over which he (or she) has no control which force him to be an outsider – “laughing on the outside, crying on the inside”, as a very popular song used to put it way back when ... In any case, my own personal outsider-hood started before I was even born. My mother who was already an outsider, the ‘black sheep’ of the family so to speak – decided to have a child out of wedlock, and that was me. Not only was I born outside of wedlock, but my mother died in a mental hospital when I was merely fifteen months old, leaving me to her parents – who were Yiddish-speaking immigrants from Russia – to raise. Thus I grew up in a Yiddish-speaking environment, in an entire community of outsiders – who were so outside the American mainstream that they didn’t even understand the language of the country they were living in! – let alone the ideas and the mentality of the American world all around them.
When I started school at the age of six, although I had somehow managed to absorb English along with the Yiddish which had far and away dominated my linguistic environment up till then – I soon realized that all the other little kids in the first grade, coming from more assimilated English-speaking Jewish families – already knew all kinds of things about which I had not the slightest clue.
For instance, the “Mother goose” rhymes which all the other kids seemed to be familiar with, were totally strange to me. An old woman who lives in a shoe?? – What the hell are they talking about! The Elson Gray readers with the dark green covers and the funny pictures, which told stories about “Dick and Jane” and their dog “Spot” and had these ridiculous English sentences in them like: “This is a ball. See the ball, Spot? – Look and see! – Run, Spot, run!” -- -- seemed to me like stories from another planet. Yet, this is what we had to learn to read from, and, as far as I could see, all the other kids seemed to be quite familiar with the weird world of “Dick and Jane” -- whereas to me it was utterly strange – a little funny, like when the cat got all tangled up in the ball of wool – but basically, strange.
I knew lots of things about Ukrainian shtetl culture – “back in the Old Country” -- which was what my family talked about most of the time – and I knew what a “pogrom” was, but mainstream American culture was almost an entire blank to me. So, I just sat there at the back of the room, kept my mouth shut, and listened in awe – hoping that eventually I would “catch up” to the other kids. This feeling of not knowing what everybody else was taking for granted has been with me all of my life, and I have spent much of my life trying to “catch up” – with an entire culture that passed me by in my earliest formative years and all the other things I thought I absolutely needed to know if I was ever going to be accepted into the pack.
I tried so hard – studying by myself – everything I could lay my hands on; comic strips in the newspapers -- (Prince Valiant, Popeye, Nancy and Sluggo, Jiggs and Maggie, Mutt and Jeff) -- comic books – (especially The Flash, Captain Marvel, and the Human Torch ) – then there were the “ big-little” books, and newspapers, and my war picture cards (I would read the stories on the backs of them until I knew them by heart – especially the campaigns of the Spanish Civil War) – I even studied the Yellow Pages of the phone book and was fascinated by the cartoon images of “The Pep Boys”, Manny, Moe and Jack. Then, of course, there were the Baseball cards – featuring guys with “real” American names like “Arkie” Vaughan, “Pinky” Higgins, “Taft” Wright, “Dolph” Camilli, “Babe” Dahlgren, “Luke” Appling, “Soupy” Campbell, and the like --I memorized all their capsule biographies and statistics -- and then there were the Superman cards and Uncle Sams – -- depicting handsome young Americans in training for the war that was coming soon …
I also listened to “my stories” on the radio – religiously – every day between five and six – Little Orphan Annie, Jack Armstrong – the ALL American Boy! – Mandrake The Magician, and – best of all – Captain Midnight and the Secret Squadron – then I got interested – really interested, in science and languages – astronomy, chemistry, and all kinds of languages – and history and geography, and The War, and Aviation – all the WW II military aircraft – I knew everything about all of them – P-40s, Airacobras, Mustangs, Spitfires, Hurricanes, Grumman Avengers, Stukas, Gull-winged F-4Us, DeHavilland Mosquitoes, the Focke-Wulf 190, the Japanese Zero, the “Flying Fortress”, the heavy bombers -- the Avro Lancasters and Short Stirlings – with the 99 foot wing spans, because British hangars were exactly 100 feet wide -- the attack planes, B-25 and B-26 -- I followed the war and geo-politics avidly, and then I started taking all kinds of books out of the library and devouring them, quietly, on my own ... and then one day I turned around and realized that I knew about ten times as much about everything as most of the people around me – not only the kids but the adults as well ... But by then it was too late. The outsider mentality which was to hound my existence for the rest of my life, was fully formed and firmly established -- and nothing was ever going to change that!
I should add, however, that the various naive childhood media which I made use of in order to work my way out of the peculiar immigrant world of my family and their Yiddish-speaking sub-society – basically the Russian shtetl transplanted to the streets of Philadelphia -- out into the wider world of American culture -- my first contact with which had left me feeling totally lost and left out -- these media, the comic books, picture cards, radio programs, etc. – were in fact much more sophisticated than the Elson Grey type ecucational pablum and drivel that was being spoon-fed to us in elementary school.
The detailed explanations on the backs of the penny bubble-gum war cards made no concessions to “little kid English”. They were, in fact, capsule reports on the state of the wars then going on in Spain, China and Ethiopia – written for adult readers. It was here that I learned words like “bombardment”, “atrocities”, “besieged city”, “artillery”, “cavalry”, “aggression”, “barricades”, “defense, “loyalists” and “rebels” – in short, the entire vocabulary of adult newspapers – at the age of six and seven. The cards also made me familiar with important World figures such as Generalissimo (great word!) Franco and Chiang Kai-Shek. Moreover, through them I became thoroughly familiar with the geography and landmarks of Spain – the Alhambra in Toledo, the Alcazar in Seville, the University battle grounds in Madrid, the Ebro River, Barcelona, the cities of the north – Santander, Oviedo and San Sebastian – all scenes of military activity. From these war cards I learned that the main North-south railway in China passed through Hankow, a major junction city – and ogled images of street battles in Shanghai and Nanking. From these cards I actually had a fair idea of what The Bund in Shanghai looked like and understood the military strategy of the invading “Japs”.
I doubt that other kids studied the captions on the backs of the cards as carefully as I did – and I was certainly the only kid around who drew realistic war scenes with colored crayons, derived from the images on these cards. An odd footnote to all this: at the bottom of the back of every card – many of them bearing extremely gory images of torn bodies and blasted buildings –was the slogan; ‘TO KNOW THE HORRORS OF WAR IS TO WANT PEACE” – -- Hard to believe; ( The official title of the series -- in all 240 numbered cards which are today a rare and coveted collectors item, is; “Horrors of War Cards”) – because all these cards did for a little boy like me, besides teaching me a much higher level of English than I was learning in school – was make me think that war was simply glorious and colorful – the greatest thing around -- And the sooner it comes, the better!
As for the comic pages in the Sunday papers: The language spoken in “Prince Valiant – ( In the Days of King Arthur) ” -- my favorite comic strip of many – was a kind of exalted Arthurian English which was clearly aimed at adult readers, and was a subtle introduction to British literature and legend as well as an introduction to Art History, since the ‘sets and costumes’ were so carefully drawn in high realism, that one could admire a single panel for ten minutes at a time. The artist was a minor genius by the name of Hal Foster. And Mandrake The Magician who “gestured hypnotically” also spoke no-nonsense adult English. From Popeye one learned a hilarious variety of a kind of English one should NOT speak – "arf-arf -- blow me down!" -- and so on. In short, the comics were a far richer and more sophisticated introduction to the English language – and the many varieties of culture at large -- than anything served up at school!
There was an extremely boring hour once a week in school called “music appreciation” which put everybody to sleep, as the teacher struggled vainly to make us understand things like “ the structure” of Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony. The only thing good about it, I thought, was that he never finished it. (Today I think otherwise) – But my real introduction to classical music came from the stirring trumpet blasts of the William Tell Overture which introduced The Lone Ranger on the radio – or the background music of the Flash Gordon movie serial – which was Liszt’s “les Preludes” – I didn’t know this was "classical" music – I just liked it and learned it… Then, later on there was Sibelius’ “Valse Triste” on “I Love a Mystery” – spooky music, but the kind you couldn’t forget…
From “Planet Comics” – a wondrous comic book that wasn’t around very long,because it couldn’t compete with the super-hero type editions flooding the market – I developed an early interest in Astronomy, which has never waned. Then, of course, there was the Saturday Matinee at the Movies – every Saturday, without fail -- another form of “alternate education” which enriched me in ways I didn’t even realize until years and years later.
If the movies could make a nice Jewish guy like John Garfield, a criminal – (“They Made Me A Criminal”, 1939) – they made a shaggy Yiddish-speaking shtetl kid like myself, into an AMERICAN! – as I identified a mile-a-minute with Errol Flynn splitting the other guy’s bulls-eye arrow in two, in “Robin Hood”, or waiting for the Indians to charge in “They died With Their Boots On”, or James Cagney standing the cops off in Sing-Sing as the tear gas comes pumping in – or Ronald Reagan as “The Gipper’ in “Knute Rockne, All American” – or, discovering that “there is no such thing as a bad boy”, from Spencer Tracy in “Boy’s Town” or discovering the telephone itself with Don Ameche in “Alexander Graham Bell”, or standing off the Riff on the ramparts of the Foreign Legion fortress in Morocco with Gary Cooper in “BEAU GESTE” – or having madcap adventures with Cary Grant and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., in India in “Gunga Din”, and -- maybe most important of all – realizing that I could speak better English than Olympic hero Johnny Weismiller in my absolutely favorite movie series of all, “TARZAN’ – I especially got a big private kick out of the scene in “Tarzan’s New York Adventure” where Tarzan shows up in court in a baggy suit and the judge says to him, “Now, Mr. Tarzan -- Do you swear to tell the truth – the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?” – to which Tarzan replies with profound dignity, “TARZAN NOT LIE!” – here I felt a small surge of superiority as I privately corrected his English – You dope – you shoulda said; Tarzan DOES not lie! – you can’t win this case with shitty English like that …
In short, with the help of the comics in the Sunday papers, various kinds of picture cards, all kinds of comic books, kiddies radio programs, and the marvelous adventures up there on the silver screen – I gradually “caught up ” – and eventually surpassed the other kids, but I never got accepted into their clubs, because now I knew Too Much, which also made me different – and anyway, I was born to be an outsider.
Warsaw, Tuesday, June 08, 2004
To be continued – Next, my early playmates ... my imaginary friend “Frank” and how I became a loner at an early age ...
TRAPPED NERVE IN WRIST
On Friday, December 1, 2006
NORMA WROTE FROM LONDON ( In Yiddish):
Mayn tyere Chaiml bin zsufriden tsu krigen dain breifele.
der doktor ot mir gegeben steroids far main trapped nerv.
Er hot mir gemacht a plastic frame to strap on at night to rest it.
Before injecting the steroids, which apparently had to be done vey carefully, or it could hve all gone wrong.
ich gleib az di doktorin in Seattle velen kenen dir helfen.
yoh, ich gleib az di kensr-=t zain 'lonely' siz shver nit tsu zain mit fraindt un mishpoche.
Ich duf gehn shlofen yets- ich vinch dir a gute nacht, main tairer.
dain cusine
Nachamala
--------------------------------------------------------
alex deleon
THAT SOUNDS LIKE EXACTLY -- PRÉCISEMENT- MA CHÈRE COUSINE NORMA ---
comme le probleme que J'ai, moi. Anyway, I have decided -- and received
approval from
See-Money Home Offoice -- to come back to Seattle, via Commercial air --(er vet, of
course, batzoln) -- to get my arm treated properly at the University of Wahington Med Center. That'll be a relief -- not to have to let some Hungarian vampire doctor cut into my arm with butcher knife -- But also because I have been rather depressed and Alienated lately -- because of lack of people I can relate to on an intimate-old-friends level -- and this hectic, but tiring
flurry of Film Festivals the last two months -- in Romantic-fantastic cities like Venice, San Sebastian, Barcelona, and Geneva -- but cities where I have no personal friends to commune with, and always bothered by this "trapped nerve" thing -- Curieux -- that actually does seem like the best description of the condition --"trapped nerve" -- thank you, Nekhume, for
giving me the right expression to put this fucking thing away -- and out of mind for a while. When I'm busy writing I stop thinking about the goddamn "trapped nerve" for a while, and then it doesn't bother me -- ober all the resta the time --oy vay -- af maine sonim ...(Only my enemies should havvit!)
Ikh zitz yetzt bay a computer in zeyer an alte hoyz in dem terkishn-kurdishn gebiet fin Berlin -- ikh hob gerekhrt a bissl gitn hash in a pfaife mi main nayim roosishn fraint, Arkady - un jetzt zonen ale di yunge lait avek in a pub ergetz, iz zitz ikh do einer alein un fiel mikh git tzu "redn" mit dir afn e-mail --ober redn mi e-mail iz gor nisht di zelbe zakh vi redn mit a mentshn punim in punim -- (Yeah, e-mail is better than nuthin, but it still ain't the same as talking "face-to-face" -- tete-à-tete, entre quattes-yeux---)
Ibermorgn, zintik, flig ikh avek tzurik in Budapest, un efsher a vokh shpeter, vel ikh avekfliegn kain Seattle -- I have a nice warm circle of friends there I've known for about 15 years, and in whose company i feel comfortable, and additionally feel that the people are a little concerned
about me -- a bissl azeyvi a kleine meshpokhe --
This is what's lacking in my otherwise generally interesting and exciting European life -- Intimate Personal relations! -- I meet many people all the time
and have extended relationships with some of them --but mostly on a film-professional, or otherwise impersonal level -- ifya see whadd i mean -- I interact with many many people -- intermittently -- here and there -- whether in Paris, Riga, Vienna, Rome, Budapest, Berlin, San Sebastian, Barcelona, or wherever -- just to practice the language at hand in the situation -- I have great language adventures wherever i go --of a very special kind that few (if any)
other people experience --For instance, In Barcelona I get lost in the crowd on the Ramblas and am soon interactig --living -- not only in Spanish, but in CATALAN as well --as I explore --so to speak --the tracks of Picasso and Dali -- to the cafè known as "ELS QUATRE GATS" -- The Four Cats --Los Cuatro Gatos --and talk to the waiters and people who have been there a long
time -- and so plunge into that movie -- in a bi -and tri-and-multi-lingual way with a
particular attachment to, and awareness of, the Art History AND the political history -- of The Franco era -- the battle of Teruel --the Brigades with Yiddish volunteers from Poland -- -- NOBODY I am sure "sees" and feels Spain and Barcelona from such a multi-faceted point of view --and the inolvement withal -- Becoming in a way part of that history -- But the last
time I was in Barcelona, it was was just two months ago, in late September --When I
went there on a bus from San Sebastia with Persian Film Critic and publisher Abbas Yari, after the San Sebastian 'Nazioareteko Zinemaldia' --Int'l Flim Festibule --me to get my passport extended at the US consulate there with 24 extra pages ... --Abbass to hang out and see the city before going back to Iran -- Funny Abbass -- who has been teaching me Farsi words all week at the hotel CODINA --and me teaching him how to say things like "Whatta pain in the ass" --and him cracking up at the vulgar American expressions I often use to season my monologue --
such a funny good natured guy, always smiling Abbas -- so we ride the bus down to Barcelona passing through the this crazy wild-West looking desert country of la provincia de Aragon on the way -- no wonder they shot Spaghetti Westerns here -- its nearly a completely interchangeable landscape with Arizona -- through Pamplona, where they run the bulls --one of Hemingway's reputed hangouts -- and the street signs are still in Basque, altho this far south few people still speak the Euskara -- Then Zaragoza -- --Caesar Augustus City in the Roman times --and then in Barcelona after, much against Abbas's better hotel judgement, we check into the Youth Hostel I know, right off the Ramblas -- around the corner from the Teatro Lirico famed Opera House -- and then I take him, to his amazement, to the PAKISTANI-ARAb Ghetto a couple of alleyways away -- and Abbas is delighted to feast on familiar middle-Eastern food after only Basque-Spanish goodies during the film festival in Donostia -- and we test our various languages on the waiter --who is some kind of Urdu-Punjabi Moslem -- a scene straight out of Daddy Warbucks in the Punjab -- and of course all these people in the ghetto are at various stages of trying to express themselves in broken Spanish -- (Shh --don't tell the waiter I've been teaching him Yiddish --he thinks it's Catalan!) --ANY WAAAAyyy --to make a lung story short -- makhn kertz a lainge geshikhte -- NOBODY experiences Europe in the multifaceted Linguistic-historical.art-aware- ical-Musical, filmical, back-streetical, and just plain plunge-in and livvit with the natives -Way that I DO. -- Nobody --Keinernisht ... ...
Every day is a marvelous series of rich unplanned adventures when I'm on the road in Europe and Turkey -- and yet ... nonostante -- when all is said and done -- At the end of the fukkin Day -- The Bottom Line Is -- that when I come "home" to my incredible pad in Budapest, Chaim is once again all alone -- isolated -- in my lone-wolf lair in a bleak shit-eating blue
collar-no-collar gypsistic neighborhood -- CSEPEL -- alone-again homesick blues ... in twenty-five languages -- and my wall to wall collages on all the walls -- my personal
Philadelphia Art Musem Abroad -- new film posters, new nudie photos, new Da-Da additions all the time, with Che Guevara peering out from toilet seet cover dans le Scheisserie --gabinetto --an ever-evolving exhibition and expression of my irrepressible imagistic imagination -- my personal Lascaux --
But still --immerhin -- alone-again, home-again, homeless-again, Budapest Blues -- Jaj Istenem (Rebeina-sheleilem!)-- as Bartok Radio brings you the latest report on the clogging of the Budapest streets by legions of new Maffia machines and the Gyurcsàny government retreats behind the stately Neogothic neo-lithic walls of the Parlament and the Tear Gas patrol is
called in to dispel the demonstrators out there on Kossuth Square demostrating for a bigger piece of the paprika pie for their hungry Hungarian dogs at the end of Leary leather leashes -- Vay -Iz -Meer! --Who-thefukk Needsit? --
So, I am looking forward to the temporary return to Seattle, to a place where, for a time, I will
have some people around I can actually relate to --and they to me -- I think -- -- But when I get there I'll probably find something else to complain about -- to kvetch and krertz about -- because It's my nature -- I'm a scorpion -- A Yiddish scorpion -- and I have a tendency to sting myself in the back with my own poison -- when not otherwise gainfully employed. (as a
scorpion).
Chaim-Scorpion, krertzing in Kreuzberg, Berlin
Dec. 1, 2006
NORMA WROTE FROM LONDON ( In Yiddish):
Mayn tyere Chaiml bin zsufriden tsu krigen dain breifele.
der doktor ot mir gegeben steroids far main trapped nerv.
Er hot mir gemacht a plastic frame to strap on at night to rest it.
Before injecting the steroids, which apparently had to be done vey carefully, or it could hve all gone wrong.
ich gleib az di doktorin in Seattle velen kenen dir helfen.
yoh, ich gleib az di kensr-=t zain 'lonely' siz shver nit tsu zain mit fraindt un mishpoche.
Ich duf gehn shlofen yets- ich vinch dir a gute nacht, main tairer.
dain cusine
Nachamala
--------------------------------------------------------
alex deleon
THAT SOUNDS LIKE EXACTLY -- PRÉCISEMENT- MA CHÈRE COUSINE NORMA ---
comme le probleme que J'ai, moi. Anyway, I have decided -- and received
approval from
See-Money Home Offoice -- to come back to Seattle, via Commercial air --(er vet, of
course, batzoln) -- to get my arm treated properly at the University of Wahington Med Center. That'll be a relief -- not to have to let some Hungarian vampire doctor cut into my arm with butcher knife -- But also because I have been rather depressed and Alienated lately -- because of lack of people I can relate to on an intimate-old-friends level -- and this hectic, but tiring
flurry of Film Festivals the last two months -- in Romantic-fantastic cities like Venice, San Sebastian, Barcelona, and Geneva -- but cities where I have no personal friends to commune with, and always bothered by this "trapped nerve" thing -- Curieux -- that actually does seem like the best description of the condition --"trapped nerve" -- thank you, Nekhume, for
giving me the right expression to put this fucking thing away -- and out of mind for a while. When I'm busy writing I stop thinking about the goddamn "trapped nerve" for a while, and then it doesn't bother me -- ober all the resta the time --oy vay -- af maine sonim ...(Only my enemies should havvit!)
Ikh zitz yetzt bay a computer in zeyer an alte hoyz in dem terkishn-kurdishn gebiet fin Berlin -- ikh hob gerekhrt a bissl gitn hash in a pfaife mi main nayim roosishn fraint, Arkady - un jetzt zonen ale di yunge lait avek in a pub ergetz, iz zitz ikh do einer alein un fiel mikh git tzu "redn" mit dir afn e-mail --ober redn mi e-mail iz gor nisht di zelbe zakh vi redn mit a mentshn punim in punim -- (Yeah, e-mail is better than nuthin, but it still ain't the same as talking "face-to-face" -- tete-à-tete, entre quattes-yeux---)
Ibermorgn, zintik, flig ikh avek tzurik in Budapest, un efsher a vokh shpeter, vel ikh avekfliegn kain Seattle -- I have a nice warm circle of friends there I've known for about 15 years, and in whose company i feel comfortable, and additionally feel that the people are a little concerned
about me -- a bissl azeyvi a kleine meshpokhe --
This is what's lacking in my otherwise generally interesting and exciting European life -- Intimate Personal relations! -- I meet many people all the time
and have extended relationships with some of them --but mostly on a film-professional, or otherwise impersonal level -- ifya see whadd i mean -- I interact with many many people -- intermittently -- here and there -- whether in Paris, Riga, Vienna, Rome, Budapest, Berlin, San Sebastian, Barcelona, or wherever -- just to practice the language at hand in the situation -- I have great language adventures wherever i go --of a very special kind that few (if any)
other people experience --For instance, In Barcelona I get lost in the crowd on the Ramblas and am soon interactig --living -- not only in Spanish, but in CATALAN as well --as I explore --so to speak --the tracks of Picasso and Dali -- to the cafè known as "ELS QUATRE GATS" -- The Four Cats --Los Cuatro Gatos --and talk to the waiters and people who have been there a long
time -- and so plunge into that movie -- in a bi -and tri-and-multi-lingual way with a
particular attachment to, and awareness of, the Art History AND the political history -- of The Franco era -- the battle of Teruel --the Brigades with Yiddish volunteers from Poland -- -- NOBODY I am sure "sees" and feels Spain and Barcelona from such a multi-faceted point of view --and the inolvement withal -- Becoming in a way part of that history -- But the last
time I was in Barcelona, it was was just two months ago, in late September --When I
went there on a bus from San Sebastia with Persian Film Critic and publisher Abbas Yari, after the San Sebastian 'Nazioareteko Zinemaldia' --Int'l Flim Festibule --me to get my passport extended at the US consulate there with 24 extra pages ... --Abbass to hang out and see the city before going back to Iran -- Funny Abbass -- who has been teaching me Farsi words all week at the hotel CODINA --and me teaching him how to say things like "Whatta pain in the ass" --and him cracking up at the vulgar American expressions I often use to season my monologue --
such a funny good natured guy, always smiling Abbas -- so we ride the bus down to Barcelona passing through the this crazy wild-West looking desert country of la provincia de Aragon on the way -- no wonder they shot Spaghetti Westerns here -- its nearly a completely interchangeable landscape with Arizona -- through Pamplona, where they run the bulls --one of Hemingway's reputed hangouts -- and the street signs are still in Basque, altho this far south few people still speak the Euskara -- Then Zaragoza -- --Caesar Augustus City in the Roman times --and then in Barcelona after, much against Abbas's better hotel judgement, we check into the Youth Hostel I know, right off the Ramblas -- around the corner from the Teatro Lirico famed Opera House -- and then I take him, to his amazement, to the PAKISTANI-ARAb Ghetto a couple of alleyways away -- and Abbas is delighted to feast on familiar middle-Eastern food after only Basque-Spanish goodies during the film festival in Donostia -- and we test our various languages on the waiter --who is some kind of Urdu-Punjabi Moslem -- a scene straight out of Daddy Warbucks in the Punjab -- and of course all these people in the ghetto are at various stages of trying to express themselves in broken Spanish -- (Shh --don't tell the waiter I've been teaching him Yiddish --he thinks it's Catalan!) --ANY WAAAAyyy --to make a lung story short -- makhn kertz a lainge geshikhte -- NOBODY experiences Europe in the multifaceted Linguistic-historical.art-aware- ical-Musical, filmical, back-streetical, and just plain plunge-in and livvit with the natives -Way that I DO. -- Nobody --Keinernisht ... ...
Every day is a marvelous series of rich unplanned adventures when I'm on the road in Europe and Turkey -- and yet ... nonostante -- when all is said and done -- At the end of the fukkin Day -- The Bottom Line Is -- that when I come "home" to my incredible pad in Budapest, Chaim is once again all alone -- isolated -- in my lone-wolf lair in a bleak shit-eating blue
collar-no-collar gypsistic neighborhood -- CSEPEL -- alone-again homesick blues ... in twenty-five languages -- and my wall to wall collages on all the walls -- my personal
Philadelphia Art Musem Abroad -- new film posters, new nudie photos, new Da-Da additions all the time, with Che Guevara peering out from toilet seet cover dans le Scheisserie --gabinetto --an ever-evolving exhibition and expression of my irrepressible imagistic imagination -- my personal Lascaux --
But still --immerhin -- alone-again, home-again, homeless-again, Budapest Blues -- Jaj Istenem (Rebeina-sheleilem!)-- as Bartok Radio brings you the latest report on the clogging of the Budapest streets by legions of new Maffia machines and the Gyurcsàny government retreats behind the stately Neogothic neo-lithic walls of the Parlament and the Tear Gas patrol is
called in to dispel the demonstrators out there on Kossuth Square demostrating for a bigger piece of the paprika pie for their hungry Hungarian dogs at the end of Leary leather leashes -- Vay -Iz -Meer! --Who-thefukk Needsit? --
So, I am looking forward to the temporary return to Seattle, to a place where, for a time, I will
have some people around I can actually relate to --and they to me -- I think -- -- But when I get there I'll probably find something else to complain about -- to kvetch and krertz about -- because It's my nature -- I'm a scorpion -- A Yiddish scorpion -- and I have a tendency to sting myself in the back with my own poison -- when not otherwise gainfully employed. (as a
scorpion).
Chaim-Scorpion, krertzing in Kreuzberg, Berlin
Dec. 1, 2006
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
