sooznham-fieldofvision

Besse Smith

2011-12-28T11:09:00.001-08:00

past two posts reside on www.jazzrman.blogspot.com

The latest is titled -- oh I've already done it -- Besse Smith

How it was

2011-10-14T01:57:00.000-07:00

Occupy Wall Street:

Afraid this morning that this whole, astonishing, peacable and peaceful act of social protest might come to a crashing end this morning. In a little more than an hour, Bloomberg's orders will be put into effect -- such stupid orders. Dragging out the hundreds, maybe thousands! of people doing nothing more than voicing a much needed message of conscience, awareness, dare I say it -- love.

Below some impressions of my first and I hope not my last visit to Zuccotti Park. It should have been posted a week ago, but my pics won't load for some reason. So, pictureless!

I went down to Liberty Park (amazingly, that really was its name) also known as Zuccotti Square this past Wednesday and wandered around just to take it all in. It was my first visit, and there was a lot to take in. Just a few impressions for now, with a few of my pics below. You can’t avoid the feeling of an open air encampment, mounds of sleeping bags, a huge blue tarp, sleeping heads poking out here and there. There’s a (large) library, a place you can get food. It’s a village. Artists, some with easels, some with black magic markers and pages of thick paper, scrawling on the pavement. I was handed a sign by James De laVega (I’ve learned later he’s a hipster muralist and street artist) The Game of Capitalism Breeds Dishonest Men it read. I joined in a march heading uptown, proudly holding up my message.

The folks who were running OWS are astonishingly polite. It – the good manners -- takes you aback. I’m of the generation that marched, shouting angrily, veins popping in the neck, fists raised. No veins could be seen anywhere. While I was snapping pictures I inadvertently strayed into a group of people who had started a slow, quiet group “walk” (I wouldn’t call it a march) around the park, chanting a slogan, calmly. I was standing like a boulder in a stream and I needed to be nudged aside. Someone told me, with a tinge of impatience “can you move please?” He then came back to me to explain why it was he had to ask me to do this. He actually did this. In the middle of a political demonstration.

This isn’t a minor characteristic. It’s telling of what this carefully crafted movement wants to convey. And they’re distinguishing themselves as decidedly mature, neat, and together.

The people’s mic – the mechanism and the messages. ‘Lovely’ Sounds dated, but something like that is the way you’ve got to describe it. The people’s mic is how they (whoever they are. A small group of Canadians I’ve heard started this and helped put in place the tone and method) have chosen to amplify the short speeches which are given on the Broadway (Eastern) edge of the park, where there’s a slightly lower amphitheater effect. At around 4:00, they called a halt to the bongo drumming and sporadic, undulating dancing of a few, and get us prepped for the expected arrival of the union faction. (Will it be a lasting, contributing faction? If so, I think OWS will definitely not be able to be ignored) Tens of thousands of union delegates from the SEIU, TWU, District 37, CUNY, NYU, The New School and others were massing from all parts of lower Manhattan and were expected to join together at this spot. We were getting our instructions. The way they told us about it, about how proper we needed to be, how we needed to make room, and move back, how we had to welcome them, etc. was all made clear in short succinct sentences that were repeated by concentric circles of us, participants, stretching all the way to the back to Trinity Place (the Western edge of the park). There was a church like, call and response feel to it, which turned into a concentric giggle when said organizer said – “Don’t fuck it up.” The group of people surrounding him repeated dutifully, ‘don’t fuck it up,” and the message travelled back. Then a young woman mounted something that enabled her to be taller than all of us, the huge orange arms of DeSuvero’s sculpture soaring above her head, and talked about how this was all in partnership with the Arab Spring. I thought at the moment -- what she’s saying, it isn’t a metaphor, it’s an answer, a huge people’s mic, stretching from Manhattan to Cairo, a rippled shout to those in Egypt wanting freedom, telling them, at that moment, that thousands of people across North America, wanting something as yet unnamed have linked arms with them. She said, ‘the people in Egypt. They have it much worse than we do. However bad it gets here, they have a very very difficult situation…” I had to head uptown to work, and I had to wrench myself away.

A new shoot, a new blog

2011-08-12T19:26:00.000-07:00

I just returned from New Orleans and St. Bernard, my first trip since last August. Almost a full year. And I haven't recovered. Yeah, there was the insufferable heat. ( I'll never forget what that felt like, heat index in the three digits, every day, the minute the sun the hoisted itself into the sky until well after nightfall) Mama Sue is not well at all, and what tore me up was that she seemed not to care. Sue, whose irreverent, Southern humor has warmed and astonished, shocked and delighted me for the past five years, is succumbing to something very dark, where conversing is beside the point. Where tending a garden is irrelevant.

Sue is a large part of my film, whose title, Mama Sue's Garden, alludes to her changing, fantasy garden. It was never all "real," but intermingled silk flowers, glass stems, cherubs and shards recovered from Katrina with palms and climbing vines. It was a curiosity shop-garden and a world.

I've long ago crossed the line that some friends say I should never have crossed. I've stepped from behind the camera to hold hands and join forces with the people I"ve been shooting. I"d love to start a conversation among other doc filmmakers about this. Are most documentarians full of " scruples" about this? Anyway, I'm all about blurred boundaries. I can hold a camera one minute and talk about revitalizing the soil with buckwheat and sunflowers (can you imagine that shot if that happens?!) the next. So I've crossed over into a garden rally-er. They've got the land. (For more details, scroll back through this blog) They've got a name -- Garden of H.O.P.E. Sue suggested the name, attached for a while to a scrappy group of volunteers, which she says stands for Helping Other People with Everything.

But this blog has become too -- um, all over the place. My few readers must be exhausted. St. Bernard, filmmaking, Mama Sue's Garden, Nicaragua, the flu, Prospect Park, Spanish lessons and Alan, my brother who has autism and some other disabilities. So I decided, why not make some partitions and start another blog, one devoted just to Alan, and his just started music sessions while this one will chronicle the progress towards completing a documentary where the end is really still an unknown.

Alan, who doesn't speak, who seems to inhabit another reality, has, at 60, started music *therapy.* I put it in asterisks, as I don't like the oxymoron-ish feel of that. How can music be anything BUT therapy? Alan drums like a jazzer, his music therapist said. What a wonderful thing to be -- a jazzer. Anyway, he does sound like a seasoned jazz drummer, taking the baton and crashing it down on the cymbal like an almost in-control madman. Does it four or five times and then stops, a wistful, far away look coming over him. So, the blog will be called Jazzrman.blogspot.com/

Where is the Family?

2011-04-09T18:56:00.000-07:00

In response to a harrowing article on the front page of the Sunday New York Times, about three weeks ago, I wrote the following op-ed to the Times. It wasn't printed, or you can be sure you all would have heard! Funny, though, I didn't notice any op-eds in reponse to this very disturbing article (Abuse and Impunity at New York Group Homes, March 13, 2011). And although it was described as the first in a multi-part series, no other articles on the subject have appeared. Somebody on the editorial staff it seems has been doing a lot of "killing" of reportage. I wonder why. Anyway, below, to the small audience of my blog, you'll find what I had written.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * my (unprinted) Op-Ed

When we would pull up to the grounds of Letchworth Village, one of the large state-run institutions for the developmentally disabled in NY State that in its heyday housed up to 5,000 developmentally disabled men, women boys and girls, we felt like guests at another planet. We were there to pick up my brother and take him out for a drive, but as we signed our names in a large black ledger, no one gave us more than a nod, and we weren’t allowed into the day room, from which the strangest howls and moans emanated, nor the back room where Alan, my brother, slept. Alan would be led by the hand out to the waiting room, usually fitted out in a natty checked suit. (I’ve learned since then those nice clothes were kept aside for visits. Inside the day room, Alan’s worn and generic clothing was frequently covered in feces). But, oddly, we were all dismayed when we learned that Letchworth Village was closing.

My brother, who is now 60, is what they then called profoundly retarded and autistic. He has never spoken a word. When he’s upset he’ll raise his arms and flap his hands wildly.

My parents knew about the abuses. Rivera’s reports on network TV in the early 70’s included Letchworth Village along with Willowbrook. But they, along with the vast majority of parents, objected strenuously to the institutions’ closing, in large part because they feared that there would be poor oversight out in the community.

We were far luckier than the consumers described in the Times article (Abuse and Impunity at New York Group Homes). Alan’s IRA is an airy, light filled home, with a highly competent staff. Alan resides for most of the evening in a large soft armchair, waiting for a hearty home cooked meal. He has learned to smile.

But one line in the piece stood ut for me. “In many cases, the developmentally disabled do not have families actively involved in their lives.”

There are complicated reasons for a parent or sibling to not visit their family member. But one of the less discussed realities is that there’s an uncomfortable relationship between the family member and the staff in these State run group homes. You do a sort of “dance,” as a fellow sibling described it. And this is actually a very large problem, affecting the welfare of our disabled family members.

The one thing that stayed the same was that we still tiptoed around the staff that cared for my brother. We gauged what they wanted from us was – nothing. We were not expected to intervene in any significant way with our family member’s care. My parents accepted this without question. It was only after my father died, and I became Alan’s Legal Guardian that I began to question the status quo.

The issue that ultimately forced me to upend my learned acquiescence felt like a holdover from the institution – namely the persistent use of psychotropic drugs. Without any evidence of a behavior problem, other than a loud vocal “tic,” or involuntary repetitive sound, Alan was on at least three of these, some of them so strong they’re used typically on people with schizophrenia. And, indeed, Alan’s diagnosis was rewritten to include mental illness, so that the drugs could be prescribed. I would sometimes show up to take Alan out for a drive and, indeed, found him excessively groggy.

I swiftly learned it was not easy to budge the meds. I spoke to everyone -- the team leader, the team psychologist, the head psychiatrist of the DDSO, and the director of the DDSO, only to have my request for a trial reduction flatly denied. The reason I was given was that Alan would become too loud. (When I wrote Albany, I was promised an investigation, but soon they stopped returning my calls.)

Finally, a no-nonsense administrator told me that, as Legal Guardian, I had the authority to refuse permission for these types of medications. In other words, I could terminate them just for the asking. Every last drug was eliminated over time, without any negative effect on Alan’s behavior. Even his team now agrees that Alan is a calmer and happier individual.

However, as I write this, I’m experiencing a bit of those old, inherited anxieties -- will speaking out incite staff members to “take it out” on Alan? I know better of course. I now have a reasonably good relationship with Alan’s team. They’ll read this and groan and then we’ll move on.

But for more than two years I stopped attending the yearly review meetings, and no one seemed concerned. I know now that the team should have been worried. Having a family member present at meetings and in their family member’s life is essential.

If people are now wondering what some of the answers are, I suggest that State IRAs actively encourage family members to engage in their child’s or sibling’s life. Family should be made to understand what’s at stake, and that, indeed, they have a precious responsibility. The laws which govern guardianship should be understood by everyone and spelled out clearly for staff and family alike. Perhaps, as they do in non-State run facilities, relatives of all the residents of a house can have the opportunity to meet one another. I think longingly of the private group homes that routinely facilitate family barbecues and parties. These aren’t feel good luxuries. These gatherings are essential to bringing into play the critical, and keenly observant eyes of a family member. Only when you have that kind of oversight, will abuses of all kinds end. Firing the largest abusers is only the beginning of the solution.

For more information on my brother, Alan, and his history, you can see some pictures and clips from the film, Without Apology, a documentary I made about him. www.withoutapology.com

missed appointment

2011-03-10T19:08:00.000-08:00

So now – after Donna played the recorder for my brother, and he clearly was delighted by it -- I can still see Alan swaying like a drunken sailor in this posh restaurant in downtown Nyack, where we went to celebrate his 60^th Bday -- I”m looking for a music therapist for him. I have no doubt that music therapy is what he must have. The first new thing I've learned about Alan, aside from his insane love of eating out, is that he loves music.

The compilation CD I had going in the car as we headed down to Nyack to meet up with a candidate for the music therapist job includes this very torchy song and -- great surprise to me – Alan grinned when this young singer from the bayous, Amanda Shaw, growled this come hither motif. Alan grinned. Was it possible that he caught the sexual innuendo of the music?. I should have pulled the car onto the shoulder. I don’t think I could have been more surprised than I was right at that moment, sitting next to my 60 year old brother, who's never spoken a word, and who seems supremely a-sexual.

Anyway, the other thing going on, while I was getting over the notion of Alan, my wild and wooly brother, having a universal response, was that I had “invited” my mother to this meeting with the music therapist, taking care to carefully go through the few items of hers that I’ve kept. And I had selected a shiny black bangle with a gold clasp. It’s understated and classy, and completely incompatible with the corduroy jeans and boots I was wearing. It would go more with a black cocktail dress. But I was, I realized, with a … jolt, dressing for my mother! She liked it when I dressed up (it’s not in my nature) and put on makeup. So there we were -- Alan next to me in the front seat, grooving to Amanda Shaw, and me, with a turtle neck that wasn’t stretched out, mascara, her dressy black bangle around my wrist.

And that makes me wonder – was I in some way doing this entire thing as much for my mother as for Alan? Was I trying to make it up to her somehow, help heal the wound that never would heal? And – also, endlessly endlessly, even after her death, working to find my way into her heart?

We stood for half an hour in a small off- the- street foyer that led into an apartment building, every so often, trolling the block looking for someone who looked as though he were looking for someone, and calling his number, to learn that he was nowhere. But I knew immediately that the music therapist had forgotten our appointment.

So Alan and I went and had pizza and then went to a café and shared a dessert. On a side street, I found a thrift shop, and while Alan sat in a wooden chair, far more patiently than Al, my husband, ever would have done, I browsed through a huge pile of stuff. (I would never even suggest to Al going into a thrift store after lunch.) But Alan, I’m pretty sure would have sat in that wooden chair for hours, gazing at the hundreds of cups and saucers and sweaters that surrounded him. Again, I had this sense of Alan as this mature person, and at that moment, a charming and endearing person as well.

lost in translation

2011-01-27T07:39:00.000-08:00

While studying Spanish at the Mariposa Spanish school I was a good student and I did in fact learn a little Spanish. I showed up with my notebook and pen every morning and dutifully copied down new vocabulary words and tense structures until I"d filled pages and at night before turning out my light I'd peer at the new words and examples and recite them in one quick attempt to commit them to memory.

But after I've long since forgotten how to conjugate irregular past tense verbs, I won't have forgotten (don't begin to name the tense that just flew by!) one of my conversation teachers, who -- like all my instructors there -- easily bridged the distance between us, getting down to real stuff pretty quickly and easily.

On day two, Raul, let's call him, asked what the last present that my husband gave me was. How that came up, dunno. I thought back. Was it my birthday present -- a top from my favorite catalog, presented in its original mail order wrapping? It was beautiful. Don't get me wrong! But I didn't mention the top for some reason, and said something about how travelling to Nicaragua was a joint present to one another. Raul smiled. And what about you I asked? "I give her grapes sometimes, or apples." I think I said "oh." And Raul looked a little embarrassed suddenly, saying "we don't have a lot of money." My "oh" wasn't, of course, about the modesty of his gift. I didn't know how to express how beautiful I thought a gift of grapes was. How sensual to buy a piece of fruit for your wife. How flattered she must have felt! But though we were both speaking English (this would have taxed the limits of my Spanish) I couldn't express it without then sounding like I was making a big deal out of it, which would make it seem like I didn't really mean it. So I said nothing. And that little missed bit of communication was probably the one regret I had during our trip.

apprender espanol

2011-01-11T11:14:00.000-08:00

I get a little distracted while I'm learning Spanish. Interesting things are happening all around us. As I mentioned in the last post, there's lots of animal life, and I can get lost watching a chicken settle into a small self-made trough in the dirt to lay an egg. There are also ducks waddling about, a half dozen dogs, white-faced monkeys, humming birds everywhere, large yellow birds high in the trees called Grees, squawking parrots and men working, doing stuff I can't quite identify. I'm like a six year old. What are they doing, Davixia? Que estan haciendo? (Yeah! Took me more than a year to be able to write that)

Under the thatched palapa roof that covers our small outdoor classroom, for five mornings this week, Davixia, my conversation instructor, and I go about discussing -- whatever. Like two friends, we have no structure to our conversation, although that is mostly my doing. I'm a recalcitrant student. I want to know about an odd, unrelated assortment of things. But one morning I agree to look at the book she's brought -- of old sepia photographs of Nicaragua ca. 1900. Men with puffed out chests, probably medals pinned to them, and large mustaches who I try to place. Only two possibilities I assume. With the Americanos, or fighting them. Nicaragua I believe, after skimming a few books on the subject, has fought against invading Americanos more than any other country in the world. (I ran this by Al, my resident historian (and husband). Nicaragua must have been invaded more than anywhere? He says 'no' Mexico takes the honor. I ask the table of lunch diners who've become my dear friends by now, and one of them counters, no not Nicaragua. Haiti takes the role of the most invaded-by-U.S. country. Someone else mutters -- Cuba)

I don't really care who the mustachioed man is. But drawing from late night reading -- Salman Rushdie's The Jaguar Smile (a fascinating, meandering writer's travelogue which I pulled off a shelf in the very well stocked library) I suddenly want to know about how land was reapportioned after the Sandinistas' victory (1979) I was in my 20's at that time, and remember how my hometown, Brooklyn, became a sister city to a small city in Nicaragua near the coast whose name I don't remember. We'd send stuff down (What on earth did we send? I think it was whatever we got the word was needed) via a member of our small group, who was perfectly bilingual, and very strong, as he needed to be for this mission of riding in trucks and unloading dozens of boxes, and who would describe his trip when he returned home. I remember him saying how beautiful Nicaragua is. I think, condescendingly I'm sure, that the younger people (kids in their 20s and 30s) staying here at La Mariposa Spanish School don't have a clue! We were campesinos! Revolutionarios! Rushdie writes about farmers who came down to offer help -- tractors, help repairing tractors, seeds, and not least, solidaridad. Nicaragua holds the romance of a country that stood up to the bully, magnificently, with guns, song, bravado, and as I learned through Rushdie, with reams of poetry. I may have known, but by now I've forgotten, that Ortega and half the founding council were poets.

I ask Davixia, who's not yet 20, about this history. What happened to the land, I want to know. On a trip up to Managua, we see people toiling in the fields. I hope that it's their land. I fear the worst, that they're tenant farmers and earn meager wages. Davixia tells me that some of the poor campesinos did receive land, which was taken from los ricos (the rich landowners). Rushdie says no. No land was seized. Land was abandoned, though, as the Contratistas fled the country for Miami. I ask my young teacher, who had signed on to teach me English, not history, I realized. I am being unfair. But I ask anyway, in broken Spanish -- Did they work the land collectively? Were there re-education campaigns? Was there an ideology? D seems unsure, and I sense underneath, a little uncomfortable.

Davixia is only 20 and she seems not only vague about her country's history, but far more interested in talking about things much more close at hand. And to her gratitude, I'm sure, we move on to another topic. She asks, will I continue to study Spanish when I'm home? I ask - What is she studying at la universidad (English) And I tell her about my neighbor -- who's from Puerto Rico - whose bright pink lipstick somehow distracts me from speaking Spanish to her in the hallways. Que colore? The same color as your bright pink shoes! Como tus zapatas! We both giggle helplessly.

So, it seems I'm by myself on the subject, but I want to know -- what has happened not only with land reform (the answer to my queries regarding collectives still are answered only partially.) but the whole Sandinista -- thing. I learn from an afternoon's lecture on Post-revolutionary Nica history that the first thing that the elected-with-CIA-assistance President Violette Chamorro did upon assuming office was pave some new roads and sell and rip up the railroad system, and, oh, buy up all the guns. Not a railroad car in the country now. I'm sure that any support for the small, stuggling but very idealistic communal farms up in the north was pretty well squelched by the Chamorro team.

photo (left): Paulette after a new delivery of laying hens.

The question that lingers after all these questions on this tragic past is - what kind of high school history instruction did Davixia receive? Is the Sandinista movement and its victory told? Do they still sing their songs? What about the role of Reagan and the illegal arms deals? (Let alone the drugs for cash deals.) Under another palapa roof, monkeys hopping around in the background, Paulette fills us in on these not quite forgotten transactions.

Equally importantly, how much of this history are the kids in the US in high school classes today being taught?

On our sightseeing trip to Managua, our guide, Berman (photo at right), also the Spanish instruction coordinator, a licensed veterinarian who can dance La Salsa like nobody's business, who'd fought with the Sandinistas, sticks a CD in the audio console of our camionette, and out pours an hour of vintage Sandinista revolutionary songs. Some of it sounds generic, but the a capella songs are heart stoppingly forceful and plaintive. (I found and bought the CDs in the Managua airport) Berman drives us past the modest street in downtown Managua where ( the re-elected) President Ortega lives, informing us, "he chooses not to live in the President's palace." Berman wears this proud, somewhat mischevious grin.

monkey feet

2011-01-09T09:41:00.000-08:00

Learning a language. Al and I have set off for Nicaragua for the second year running to attempt to improve our Spanish, and I confess, to get away from the New York winter. We're in the same place as last year -- La Mariposa Spanish school. Great place! Paulette Goudge conceived of it, and built the eco-compatible building and grounds. What I hadn't realized last year was that our shower water somehow finds its way into large cisterns in the lush grounds which in turn are are used to water the plants. She asks that we use environmentally friendly shampoo and soap. So we're nicely entwined w/ our plant friends. I pored over the label on my beloved hair conditioner. Paulette has rescued all of the animals that live here, including a large cage of white faced monkeys. (They were bound for the U.S. on some nefarious mission. They're not released into the wild for their own safety, not being native to this region.) As I was standing by them this morning, chatting with some other guests, one of them -- the monkeys that is -- put its foot in my cup of mint tea and then sucked it dry, looking avidly at what was left in my cup. Of course I obliged, and this wiley monkey managed to drink it down completely using a combination of hands, feet and tail. Proceeds from the school and inn go to support many worthy projects in the community, which is very very poor. Paulette informs us that some of our neighbors live on less than $2/ day.

I haven't gotten down to convey what it feels like to study Spanish here. I can't seem to do it, really talk about what it feels like in my case to learn Spanish, not till I describe the afternoon I spent last week at a local afterschool program. I'd collected toys, games and stuffed animals from friends and neighbors (who were incredibly generous. More teddy bears than I'd thought existed in Brooklyn) to bring down to the small school that serves toddlers in the a.m. and older kids in the afternoon.

We arrived at the afterschool program at around two. One of the interns, Allison, who had signed up to spend six months here, was my guide and companion. (Allison, reading, in photo)

It's completely voluntary. The kids come if and when they feel like it. The school is simple, white-washed with these amazing cartoon characters painted on the outside walls -- I snapped a picture of a fox who looks like he's about to sell you land in Florida as well a wolf perched on a roof top. The interior is strung with paper decorations, and all kinds of things. The place in its entirety looks as though it's ready for a party.

But no one was there. Then, as if a gang of children were staking us out, they suddenly appeared. From out of nowhere, our small room filled with about a dozen boys and girls -- from mabye 5 - 13. And they took these tiny brightly painted chairs and sat down and began to read, some on their own (the boys). Girls clustered around to hear Cenicienta. Not what I, the feminist from New York, thought I would have chosen. But for some reason I had chosen it. Perusing a shelf of Spanish language books in Barnes and Noble, I'd bought it because of its beautiful illustrations and also because it had an English translation at the bottom of each page. I should have realized that the young girls of the village of Santiago (not a paved road, not a car in sight. chickens and goats in the front yard) were intimate with the story. They nodded and smiled shyly as I began and went all the way to the Prince finding the girl who'd worn the 'cristal' slipper to the ball.

I've been informed that all State funding for Santiago's after-school program has dried up and since then, Paulette has directed some of the profits from La Mariposa Spanish School towards the one teacher's salary.

Luba

2010-12-15T04:38:00.000-08:00

It's been cold lately in Brooklyn. And in the 100 year old creaking apartment building I live in that's means the start up of a "difficult" steam heat system. Which means moments of sauna like blasts from the pipes, alternating with cool, and withholding radiators. All of us who live here are in a constant state of negotiations -- with these radiators, the windows, our fellow apartment dwellers, the super (poor Nick!) and building manager, who is always on vacation. And lately, I've added my medicine cabinet, in an attempt to quell all the cold symptoms I've developed.

The best advice I've received for this tiresome cold -- which everyone it seems has just come through or informs me that "yeah, it's going around" -- comes from Luba, a new friend, of sorts. I met Luba, while walking my dogs -- Violet and Princess Jo -- in Prospect Park the other day. I'm pretty sure that Luba comes from some part of the former Soviet Union because of the exercises she was performing when I saw her which reminded me of old films I"ve seen about Communist Youth Movement. (Luba could have been a child during the 50's) They're very energetic, what we used to call calisthenics and seem to require a lot of grunting, audible breathing, and occasionally spitting. Luba's style conflicted with my t'ai chi and on this first day we were together, sharing one of the park's rustic wooden platforms (which overlooks the most private, even exotic section of the 'lull water,' a stream engineered by the Olmstead crew a hundred fifty + years ago) I wasn't sure I ever wanted to be in the same vicinity as this heaving, stretching, bending woman again.

But on another day, a few weeks later, when approaching this same platform, there she was (I groaned to myself) doing toe touches -- 95 or so a minute -- and as I came near, she beamed. I coughed. My Russian friend frowned and without any of the social niceties of "hello" or anything, offered advice, and I have to confess, it was the most charming advice I've yet received for this problem. It involved mashing a large quantity of garlic. Her English is still a work in progress. I had to interpret. "You take the garlic and oil. Then you jump (mix?) with the oil. And then you compress, she said haltingly -- on your chest, and sleep. Sleep the whole night." Luba nodded. "You breathe it in (she demonstrated, sniffing deeply while grimacing and smiling simultaneously) and in the morning, you see, you feel great."

Luba also advises breathing in warm salt water through one nostril and expelling it through the other. "Start with water the same temperature as your body and then the next time, use cooler, room temperature."

I'm positive that both of these would keep me "innoculated" against these regular, dry heat colds. As soon as I get the courage to test them.

And then Luba returned to twisting from the waist, elbows held high, leaning over the railing occasionally to spit. I settled into my slow, far less strenuous I Chuan exercises. I think Luba inwardly was wondering why I bother.

And for all of this, I love Prospect Park, and can't see living anywhere that wouldn't let me get to it in less than a ten minute walk.

Alan's Birthday Party

2010-11-26T18:54:00.001-08:00

This past Sunday we celebrated Alan's birthday (as you may know if you read the post from the previous week) And an interesting time was had by all.

Just the facts ma'am. Al and I picked Alan up at his group home in Rockland County 11 ish Sunday morning. It had been a while, I'm chagrined to say, since I'd visited my brother, and a very long time since I"d come by on a Sunday morning. For whatever reason, I didn't recognize a single staff member. I was guessing turnover, though. Turnover is high at every level. I'm pretty sure that the hourly wage barely tops the minimum. The service-providing organizations have long lobbied the state for pay increases, and I've signed many a letter. Now that the State is cutting back ruthlessly on every front, there's no hope that working at a group home for the developmentally disabled will provide a living wage. Even Alan's service coordinator, who oversees more than 300 cases, works a second job. So, the folks on duty didn't know who I was, and opened the door a bit reluctantly.

This was going to be a short one and I'm off on a tirade about the pay scale for direct care staff. I will master the blogger's haiku one of these days. But not tonight...We asked that Alan be dressed for the cool weather we were about to take him out into. Another peeve. How they dress my brother. They dress him as though he were a child, or an invalid. On this point, I'm all in favor of treating him like the 60 year old man that he had just become! He knows how to put his arms in the coat sleeves, and if given instructions, can probably zip himself up. Never happens. They coddle him, bundling him into his winter jacket, taking one arm and inserting it into the sleeve, then the other, then zipping up the front, straightening the coat for five minutes, and finally pulling his wool cap over his ears. I can't bear it.

But I'm his sister, not his parent, and I reminded myself of that when I brought him to the car (not by the hand!) And once in, as promised, I got the CD player powered up. We had time only for Thelonoius, a beautiful old album that I've listened to, without complaint, on and off for months. No, for over a year now. I can't take it out of the player. Alan, who doesn't speak, or rather only speaks in his own private language of sounds, grunts, squeals, and occasionally alarming shouts and bellows grew silent. He frowned a bit, and sucked his cheeks in, as Sweet and Lovely gave way to Crepescule with Nellie. What was he concentrating on, I wondered and I think I began to frown a bit, wondering.

We reached our destination, The Hudson House, a wonderful eatery on Main Street in Nyack (Henry Hudson, no kidding, is the proprietor), and an extra two thumbs up because they didn't bat an eye at the awkward man whose head angles off in a direction opposite to his body and his feet at another angle still, pulling me into the dining room with a very firm grasp. They seated us at a corner table that was very nicely tucked away.

And then, Alan's noises grew in volume and increased in frequency and I thought sure that heads would start to turn. And it crossed my mind that we should eat and run, or maybe just run. But they didn't turn -- the heads. Alan's service coordinator was there, completely cool, and my cousin and his wife arrived and sat down and took stock each in their own way, but very quietly. Cousin Stanley I think was working to ignore the noisy man in our midst, chatting Al up about work. Donna, Stan's wife, smiled quietly and started to ask questions.

Donna, who has worked over the years with kids with all kinds of developmental and emotional problems was thinking that there had to be a solution. While I was getting myself into a bit of a dither, she was thinking hard. It seemed to all click for her when I mentioned what a nice drive we'd had coming over, listening to Monk on the CD player and how calm Alan seemed. She said, as though she'd had a week to think it over, that she would play the recorder for him. And she was apologetic about not having an alto recorder, but only a soprano, and before I could question her on any of it, she's pulls her coat on and is out the door. Five minutes later, D is sitting across the table, playing some delightful Renaissance melody (Donna is part of an amateur renaissance musical group)

Alan began to sway with a huge motion in time to this incredibly sweet music and most gratifyingly, his noises becamse single deep notes punctuating the concert, few and far between.

I realize that after writing last week about Wolfgang Fasser, this saintly music therapist in Italy, who was profiled lovingly in the film, In the Garden of Sounds, that life did imitate life. Donna had picked up the idea that music can reach and communicate with people who don't have speech, people like Alan. We had (by we, my family and even to some extent his current caregivers) written my brother off. 'You can't communicate with him' was and really still is the message. But D showed the same wisdom as Wolfgang Fasser. Donna was heroic at the Hudson House that Sunday morning, for which I feel so much ----- awe. And gratitude.

We all joked a bit. Was the dining room delighted with the concert? It was both old and very avant garde, I mused, not really caring too much what they thought, and watching as Alan, swaying, sounding off occasionally polished off a plate of chicken salad in record time, tossing a good portion down his shirt. And the Tellemann played on.

(tanleyS inormed me that one of the people dining that morning came over to our table to thank us for the music)

p.s. If you'd like to learn more about Alan's story, you can check out the website about the film I made about him, and us. www.withoutapology.com

Alan

2010-11-19T14:26:00.000-08:00

When my father was dying, and in a state of semi - cogency, that is to say, he spoke in surreal sentences that had very little sense of who he was in the here and now, but which had everything to do with the truth, said, when I asked about Alan, "Alan is everywhere."

If you'd known my father you'd have been amazed at that pronouncement. Throughout his life, he denied Alan's existence. He would be at an event, like an award ceremony, called the Alan Richard Hamovitch award ceremony, and wouldn't say that yes, he knew Alan. (!) I was at his side when this happened and was stunned by the silence on this very important person in his life.

Alan was his son -- and my only sibling. And Alan is what used to be called profoundly retarded. I'm honestly not sure what the PC expression for Alan's "problem" is. Intellectually challenged? A man with autism? A man with developmental disabilities (no, that's not used any more)

I don't mind if someone were to call him retarded. It really is a case of a rose smelling as sweet It don't matter. Alan's disabilities trump any concern of mine for what he's called. Alan is incapable of speaking, understanding anything abstract, holding a job, having a relationship, counting change....

Well, how do I know, if he doesn't speak? Truth is, I don't. I've been uneasy this past many years, wondering how much he might understand if someone were to talk with him, take him to places he loves, play him music that calms him down and makes a smile play on his face. Uneasy because he lives in a place that doesn't give him the things he loves to do. But then, I can't be too hard on them. I don't ask often enough, I don't think, 'what should I be doing this weekend?' I'm really ashamed to say that I don't visit him nearly enough.

So this Sunday, I'm going to treat him to everything I know that delights him, because it's his birthday. I've never celebrated his birthday with him. On Alan's 60th, I'm doing all of it. Inviting some cousins, his Service Coordinator, without whom I don't know what I'd do, Al, of course, and we're going out for brunch at a swanky restaurant in downtown Nyack. We're going to play Motown and the Beatles and Sam Cooke on our way over. (I know he's my brother when I notice him grow quiet and give these musicians his rapt attention.) And then we're going to pig out. Another way I know we're related? Alan loves to eat out. I mean, he gets so overjoyed, he will sometimes refuse to leave a place. Really! I once had to call for help. What's wrong, they said at his house. We're at an Indian restaurant, we're done eating, and he won't get up. It was like calling 911. We'll be right over, they said.

The noises Alan makes aren't those that you hear in an English sentence. They're made with different parts of the throat and mouth. And they're rich, they have timber. As well as clicks and smacks, and a fabulous range within a matter of a second. It can be startling if you're not expecting it, which is why we hardly ever -- no never -- took Alan out to eat when he was growing up. And I have to be honest, I'm a little uneasy. This is a really nice place. I don't think these glissandos of excitement will be ignored, which is what I want. The best place for ignoring Alan is Starbucks. I wanted to kiss the woman at the table next to ours when she sat down, drank her drink, and pulled out school work. You are amazing! I wanted to shout. I should be hardened, but I tense up, when people turn around in their chairs to look at us. I hate the feelings I assume they're experiencing -- like pity, or even support. Just. Don't. Look. (this is partly my problem. I know)

Saw a film at the Margaret Mead Film Festival last Sunday called "In the Garden of Sounds," about an artist, a sound artist, named Wolfgang Fasser, who devotes himself to people like my brother. Using instruments that he made or designed, as well as recorded forest sounds and bird calls, that he's gathered on his tromps into the countryside (he's completely blind, btw), he transforms the lives of these boys and girls -- none of whom, except one, has the ability to speak. These kids adore Wolfgang.

I think Alan would love Wolfgang too, who like Alan, is supremely gentle, and kind, and unlike almost anyone I know, is incredibly full of playfulness. He's devised a massage table of sorts, that's strung like a harp (underneath) and a wall of different sized cymbals. HIs art is play, his play is art. It's what we all aspire to, I suppose. Allen Ginsberg said, re making art, "why do it if it isn't fun?"

My one main sadness is that the people who work now with Alan don't look hard for what they could do to give Alan fun. They're earnest, they're competent, they take great care that he doesn't do anything that might endanger his safety -- and in my HO, they suffocate him. They -- his staff, his team -- look at me like I'm the Mad Woman from Brooklyn when I harp on this, the need for "fun" or something of interest to do, but I can't imagine anything more important.

So, for his birthday, I'm maybe going to have someone make a very long, one-stringed instrument, that will vibrate into a single deep rich basso profundo note. Or maybe a huge brass cymbal, that we'll hang on the rec room wall. (rec room used very loosely). Or a collection of CDs. Not sure yet.

Will try to have the presence of mind to record this birthday. But Alan may be singing, and I hope that I'll be laughing and I might forget.

For more images of Alan, you can visit the website devoted to the film I made about him, and us. www.withoutapology.com

an unusual birthday present

2010-11-03T04:47:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I think about giving an assignment to a roomful of compliant, eager and creative writing students. Funny thing is, I don't teach writing, and never did. And though I write, and am even dabbling in fiction now (for children -- and boy is that hard) I'm not a writer. But these thoughts of providing an assignment, and oh, 'you have two weeks in which to complete it' have been arising. Go figure.

This week's assignment? The best birthday present you ever received.

My birthday rolled around (fortunately) this past Thursday. I share a bday with Julia Roberts and the Statue of Liberty, and my cousin Eric, and I'm sure a few million other people.

This one, though, the thing I was delighted to receive was an unlimited supply of horse manure. Horse shit you ask? You wanted horse shit? Well, not specifically. Other things -- like a free day of plowing, or a perimeter fence for an acre -- would have been equally satisfying. I speak, as you may know, if you've read back a few posts, about the garden I'm assisting, or more accurately, fretting constantly about, down in St. Bernard Parish, Louisiana. Myself, along with three others, who are natives (I am not, which is a bit of a problem. I'm in in NYC, which is very far indeed from Southern Louisiana in more ways than one) started it, back now two years ago. Mr. Lynn Dean, a wealthy and very big-hearted man, leased us the land at no cost, for ten renewable years. August, our master gardener, called excitedly. The owner of a small group of race horses (race horses? In St. B? I've learned to love St. Bernard, but more for its generous, gregarious, gentle, well, not always gentle, people who are NOT the race-horse set, I assure you) wants to help the garden, and is willing to truck over as much manure as we need. His voice over the phone was urgent, excited, delighted. But the horse farm owner was a bit concerned about dropping off a truckload of manure right next to the Cornerstone Church, a former trade school in a tin shed, which sits on the corner of this acre. She wanted the Pastor's phone number so she could give him a heads up right before delivery.

I worry about the pastor, and the neighbors. Will they be as excited as August and me about this gift? Anyway, like Scarlet O'Hara, decided to worry about it later. I caught the fever. Horse manure! An unlimited supply. Free! It didn't come right on my birthday, but the conversation occurred a few days before and you know -- birthdays are really a cloud around the date. Al jokes plaintively that my birthdays go on for about a month, though this isn't so.

A load of horse manure is one of the things we need to get going on this little patch of green, what is destined to be an organic semi-urban farm down there, nestled between St. Bernard and Plaqueminnes Parish, just South of the Lower 9th and New Orleans. It's hard by the Mississippi, and when you look up -- I imagine this scene -- from weeding a patch of beans, you'll see the turrets of big cargo ships slowly gliding down or up river.

The skies down there are quite beautiful. So you'll also see the billowing clouds in a field of pale blue. Above the turrets. The earth is dark and dense (Mississippi mud pie wasn't named idly) and nutritionally very poor. So once we spread the manure, we need to plow it under and turn over the soil, and crumble it a little, integrating the fertilizer. August has told me all this. I confess, I am a farming neophyte. I've grown a patch of beans, cukes, tomatoes, like everyone else, but really in the most unprofessional way. I marvel at cumcumbers' agressiveness, how they leap their boundaires and march towards the carrots. But how to control bugs, thwart voles, irrigate in the dry dry months of this past summer -- I really don't know.

Back to St. Bernard. We received a gift of organic seeds from our friend, Lorna, who moved from Tennesse to help a variety of neighborhoods begin to farm, or garden, on top of straw bales. Post BP oil spill, post Katrina, she figured, people would be needing good cheap food. Anyway, they, the straw bales never arrived, as they were supposed to, from the Midwest. The promise of donated shipping never materialized. But Lorna left us dozens of packets of seeds. Everything we'll need for at least a year. I guess that's another wonderful present. Thanks, Lorna!

So, that's the assignment for this week. What has been your best BDay present?

p.s. My resolve to post here every week, with pictures, interesting musings, has been broken as you can see. I'm deep into editing Mama Sue's Garden and anyone who has edited anything will know that it doesn't leave much head space for much else. Kathryn and I are plowing ahead - pun unintended! - step by step through a recent moment in the history of three individuals, one of them August, and the others, Mama Sue and Lettie Lee. These two projects are intertwined though. I fervently hope that the film gets an audience. It has been at least three years of my life so far. But then, that its fortunes will fertilize the garden.

visiting Thich Nhat Hanh's Monastery

2010-10-17T18:15:00.000-07:00

I didn't mean to segue into a film review, after only a sentence about the Blue Cliff Monastery, so at a moment when I should be transcribing tapes for an editing session, I'm returning here, for a very brief second post.

A week ago, exactly, I went there -- out of need. I confess. NYC housing woes, which can be bitter, necessitated I find a place where I could be anonymous where the atmosphere would be right for getting out of my head.

So I fled to the Blue Cliff Monastery last Sunday, hoping that a roomful of shaved, cool heads, simply meditating, or simply being, or being simply, would help to calm my own overheated brain. They were there, as I'd imagind! Speaking in heavily accented English, this group of robed monastery leaders was calm, devoted, purposeful, un-neurotic, and seemingly un-troubled. There were young monks too, maybe 10 years old, but as seemingly calm as the rest.

I see that deep mauve I described whenever I think of them -- as all the monks were swathed in long layers of mauve. And as I'd hoped they would be, deep beneath the mauve robes and ritual, chimes and schedule, they were caring. The last came through the minute I walked into this very spacious empty hall. The first words I heard were from Thich N Hanh himself (on CD) In halting, accented phrases, that I at first had to strain to make out, they seemed to be mind reading. In other words, they hit their mark.

"If you're angry towards someone

[yes?! I'm listening]

that's not good for you! It's not good for them! It's not healthy! His voice was emphatic. Though I had just raced through the doors, a good half hour late, I was caught up in what he was saying, as though I'd run into an invisible net.

[So?]

You should start thinking about lighter, more joyful things.

[yeah?]

So I did try. I recall it was much easier said than done. But slowly, like lifting a very heavy box, I tried to shift, just a little, my thinking onto more 'joyful things.' I can't begin to remember what these thoughts were, or if I was even the tiniest bit successful.

We were given a snack after this lengthy talk, which I had begun to focus on almost exclusively having run out of the apartment at 7, with little to eat, and raced up the thruway, trying to access googlemap on my smart phone. I don't think snack thoughts counted as "happy thoughts" though. Then, the most charming part of the day -- our calm, organized caring leaders handed out little yellow song books and we stood in a circle in the crisp fall air and all sang. This is what we sang.

I like the flowers I love the daffodils I like the mountains I love the rolling hills I like the fireside When the lights are high  bom di ada, bom di ada, bom di ada, bom bom di ada, bom di ada, bom di ada, bom  I like the flowers I love the daffodils I like the mountains I love the rolling hills I like the fireside When the lights are low

Picture four or so demure and organized, super-competent Vietnamese monks -- along with us, a divers group of visitors -- getting into "bom diada, bom di ada, bom diada , bom...

I went to a monastery

2010-10-15T09:17:00.000-07:00

I went to Thich Nhat Hanh's monastery last weekend and was uplifted by the simplicity of the monks in their long mauve robes -- whoever picked the color of their robes is to be commended. But the spirit doesn't move me to comment on it all today. (Though simplicity and Being Here Now? Heartily recommend them.)

Don't want to write about this Monastery though becuz. The dreaded New Yorker's curse -- housing woes -- has befallen us, and until we see our way through it, I will be a curmudgeonly New Yorker -- grumpy, mindlessly eating, doing all the self-defeating things one does when the world isn't going the way you're sure it should. Can't say that mindlessly eating is all that bad, though....

But I can recommend a wonderful wonderful documentary, which is just making its way into the theaters nationwide (in the U.S), having finished its New York run, literally, last night. I suffered a parking ticket in order to get to the last screening of said run. The film is Budrus, about a non-violent protest by a Palestinian village (Budrus) against the punishing route of the dividing wall. (You know, the tall security wall Israel is constructing, which in many cases is encroaching on Palestinian farms? This process no matter how you look at it makes no sense. What purpose is there in cutting into land, appropriating it, when there's literally no reason to? No settlers were going to land there, no bases set up. It looked like nothing other than a land grab I'm afraid. And I'm not a flaming radical, just in favor of basic human rights. OK, here goes. I wasn't going to post at all today, and here I am discussing my views on the Middle East? Keeping a blog is a lot like life. Ya never know.

My idea of a protest for Middle East sanity is to set up a lemonade stand, raising quarters to send to Palestinians who aren't getting their day in court to secure a housing permit. I would like to see children raise money for their lawyers the same way they have been admirably raising money for the refugess of Darfur. Raising $100 in quarters and sending a check in an envelope to some reputable non-profit organization. This matter is a civil rights matter -- I mean, it's really very basic. Simply allowing someone to use their own land the way they choose. Talk about housing woes. I have no business comparing our situation with that of the palestinians, I know. Here I am with our mortgage paid on a leafy block of Brooklyn. But, that said. (Just kidding. I sound like a Daily Show skit) But why won't the friggin' co-op board grant us their approval!??? We're just like the Palestinians on the West Bank --

But the film. Back to the incredible film. Budrus was shot by multiple people -- anyone, actually who happened to be there as the bulldozers roared in and soldiers with guns appeared, and smoke grenades were flung about and a small agricultural village was gradually occupied, anyone who and had a camera, a cell phone, whatever and started recording the events that transpired, pitched in to tell the story that became this film. So, this included the residents of Budrus -- women too which when you see the film, you'll see why this was such a big deal. The women went out to face the Israeli soldiers FIRST, and that was very key. And it included a host of international supporters, and Israeli soldiers who shot video and turned it over to the filmmakers, and Israeli citizens sympathetic to the townspeople of Budrus, of course Palestinians, Hamas folk professing nonviolence and even :-) the film crew of Budrus

It's a Gandhian story of civil rights prevailing. It's lions lying down with lambs like you wouldn't believe. David vs. Goliath retold. It's a must see!

Notes from the Ground

2010-10-08T20:17:00.000-07:00

As promised, notes from a trip out to Patchogue on Saturday, organized by our local "chapter" of OFA, Organizing For America. If that sounds so unexciting, so "establishment" so - - and you're saying instead, what's next - - now that Obama's in, and by the way, not all that great. If you're thinking that, really, get over it. OFA, Obama's people, are doing god's work. If you were to ask me, what's the most important thing a citizen of the USA could be doing right now, at this very minute, I'd say ' canvassing for the progressive candidate in your vicinity.' I say this knowing full well what a pain it is doing this -- walking up to doors of strangers, wondering whether there'll be an old man in an undershirt, or a woman screaming, attempting to get a restraining order on her "old man," a police car idling at the curb. Or a German woman whose husband was a veteran.... (We came across all three) It's a little nerve wracking, I"ll be the first to admit it. I can't go up to someone I don't know at a party of a friend, so wandering around a neighborhood I've never been to, 50 miles from home, that predictably votes Republican, makes you swallow hard.

But it is what's necessary. Really really necessary if you want to keep the House and Senate in at least moderate hands. If you want to keep the incumbants in and give right wing opponents a real run for their money, so that they know who their constituents REALLY are.

So we disembarked at Patchogue, and were given our candidate's buttons and (literally) our marching orders. We split up, each small group of two or three to a volunteer local driver. Our driver had a talking GPS so we didn't get too lost, as we tooled through the suburban streets out to Mastic Beach, a neighborhood of mostly converted beach houses (we were a spit away from the ocean, but no, we couldn't go canvass there. Those homes were mostly second homes.)

So we were making our way confidently, more or less. Until we were let off, when I felt very "lost," looking up at the flag of the tea-party -- a large yellow banner with a 'Don't Tread on Me' inscription -- flying on a high pole below the colonial flag, i.e. thirteen stars in a circle. Oh boy. Where am I? The GPS lady didn't warn me about this. Our list skipped over this house, stopping at about every fifth house on Alder, and leading us, in a kind of scavenger hunt, to a series of small, and middle-sized homes -- some terribly derelict, overgrown yards and some clipped painted and polished. I wished that dogs could vote, because most of the time they were the only ones home.

Al is the shmoozer. We'd been told on our last canvassing trip -- which was for Obama in '08, down to Wilkes-Barre, Pa. -- that all those graphs and charts, statistics and prognoses you'd been dutifully studying? Throw them out. People vote on character, not programs. My guess is that if I looked inward, I'd find out that it was true of me too. I swooned for Obama after reading Dreams for My Father. If you remember, there was not a single word in there about his plans to give every American health care. But I tended to forget that fact and maybe out of nervousness would launch into a little spiel about the fact that Tim Bishop had voted for the Stimulus Bill (millions of jobs, well a couple hundred thousand? But whose fault was that?! Had Obama been given the money he actually wanted... At least I didn't say a word about any of this. Many people seemed to be completely befuddled. In this case it wasn't the economy stupid) I'd add brightly 'and Bishop voted for the Health Care Bill!' which most likely was shooting my candidate in the foot. Al knew not to go there. Forget about the Health Care Bill. When the elderly unshaved man in the undershirt opened the door to say he was watching The Public Enemy an old James Cagney movie, Al was in his element. Ten minutes later, the two of them were still talking like old geezers, now at a little table on the porch, while Mr. Undershirt was filling out his voter registration form. By the time he was done, he looked up and said, the health care thing. I don't understand why people are against it. (whew)

Al went beyond dedicated. While a woman in all stages of dishevelment was ranting to a police officer, she took a breath to inform us that she couldn't talk, she was trying to deal with a problem with her "old man." Can I leave some literature for you, Al said hopefully. She shot him a please-don't-hang-around-here-a-second-longer look. Al carefully folded the pages of the literature so they'd fit behind her screen door.

A young African American woman, trying desparately to keep her toddler from galloping down the middle of the street brightened visibly when we told her that Bishop voted for all of Obama's programs. Inbetween racing after Junior and admonishing her older child, who wasn't holding onto his young brother very tightly, she flashed a smile when she heard the date of the election. November 2nd? That's the day after my birthday!

Below you'll read the message that was in my 'mailbox' this morning, from Jeanne, our 'Organizing for America' organizer. We're going to take her up on her request for at least one more day of canvassing. We want to give our new ally a nice birthday present.

Dear Friends,
Thank you again for coming out on to canvass on Saturday. Together with our Long Island colleagues, we knocked on a total of 748 doors, talked to 208 voters, and found 110 who were positive about voting for Bishop. As we discussed on the train, the real issue in this race is going to be turnout. Bishop is looking good among registered voters, but his numbers are precarious when you look only at likely voters. The advantage of getting canvassers out every weekend is that we get people to feel personally engaged (and obligated -- statistically, people are more likely to turn out to vote if they've told another person they would).

So with that in mind, I hope you'll be able to come out again on one of the upcoming canvassing trips. We're trying to get as many people as possible canvassing this coming weekend, the 16th and 17th, because the LIRR is undergoing major construction on the weekend of the 23rd/24th, so we may not be able to get many people out that weekend. And of course, we'll be making a big push on the final four days, Oct. 30-Nov. 2.

Hope to see you again soon!

Turning

2010-10-01T12:07:00.000-07:00

. Someone once wrote that the way to make life more interesting is to "turn" from your routine as you went through your day. "Turn." Why that word I wonder? I don't know. But by 'turn,' he meant something as simple as taking a new route home from work or to and from the store or walking the dog. I thought, as I read this, 'this is the secret to life? ya gotta be kidding' But what he was getting at was that you'd see new things, you wouldn't be traveling on automatic pilot. And that this was important. Crazy thing is, he was right. Or at least it felt right last Friday. In the early evening, as I was lurching downtown on the 'F' train, I thought about calling Al (significant other) and asking if he'd like to see a movie that was playing uptown. Since you can't use your cell on the subway, I had to get out at the next stop to make a call the old fashioned way, and that stop happened to be Delancy Street, the heart of the Lower East Side, and the region of New York City that implies to anyone who's been to New York, and "turned" from the usual tourist sites, or read certain novels, the old, Turn -of -the -Twentieth Century, ethnic, Italian and Jewish (in particular) immigrant experience. I'm not sure why they picked Delancey to be decorated in original, and enormous mosaics, devoted to the sea no less, when so many of the other subway stops are grimy, even filthy, with loose or missing tiles, but somehow it happened. Ahh, I've done a little digging, literally as I was writing this. The entire collection -- on the downtown side -- is called "Shad Crossing" and it was completed by artist Ming Fay in 2004. And it's not an odd choice of theme after all. It does relate to the immigrant destination that this area used to be, as shad fish swim upstream in the spring, and so represent the tens of thousands of immigrants who travelled the ocean back 100 years or so, to make New York City their new home. I guess using a pay phone was another moment of "turning." As I dropped a quarter into the phone, I was already feeling as though I'd entered a time warp, I was already enjoying myself. And although Al had no interest in getting into the train and travelling a half hour to the theater, as soon as I hung up, I went up to the wave of tiny blues and aquas, grays, greens, whites you see here, and examined it for its minute, and incredible detail.

It was a good as a movie.

Lunch with Mary McHugh

2010-09-23T20:28:00.000-07:00

This week, it's Mary, my dear and truly wondrous friend, Mary. It's hard not to mention that she had her 80th birthday a couple of years ago. That's NOT what makes her wondrous. But maybe you can't escape that insignificant fact, in light of the fact that every week Mary takes herself off to the Bryant Park Grill -- after reading great literature into a tape recorder for the blind, -- for a splendiferous lunch. Following which she takes a whirl on the the old restored Bryant Park Carousel. Every week! Mary has made numerous little "performance" videos -- one about her experimentation with hats (she wore a coquettish black hat with a veil to her gynecologist some years back just to see what he would say. As you'd expect, he didn't say a thing.) And does millions of tap dancing performances which she posts on Youtube (type in Mary McHugh). Mary has great legs. Mary is also a writer, and whenever we get together she's effusing about her latest idea or telling me about the upcoming publication of one of her books of Mary (hilarious) advice. They're small books that could literally fit in your pocket with titles like Eat This! 365 Reasons to Stop Dieting or, my favorite, How Not to be a Little Old Lady.

I joined Mary for lunch last week (she had come from reading Camus -- in French -- into the tape recorder) and after the usual light chatting that you do when you meet up with a friend you haven't seen in many months, we got down to a hard kernel of common personal truth, that at the moment took my breath away.

Mary and I (and millions of others) share being "Special Siblings," which is also the title of one of Mary's books. Special siblings refers to having a sibling with an 'intellectual disability,' what used to be called a developmental disability, and before that, terms which are no longer considered politically correct. (no comment) Mary's light blue eyes fixed on me and she said, in a voice that is so light, almost frothy -- 'the really bad thing was that we had to be good. I was so good!' 'Yes!' I said, meaning it from the bottom of my heart. Amazingly, that was the worst part of it all. It's still a problem, of course. Mary and I also shared the common fate of having had our siblings institutionalized. Perhaps that's why being "good" in ways that are so hard to describe and name, even to ourselves, may have stood out for us as the central problem, while kids today who have "special sibs" deal with much more concrete difficulties, or, anyway, different problems.

(If my parents could read this, they'd laugh hysterically. I think they thought I was plenty bad. And I probably was) But Mary and I knew what we meant. It was a moment of perfect understanding about a core part of ourselves. I didn't hear a thing other than Mary, or see anything other than her face. It was that kind of moment. So time stood still for a split second and then we went on with lunch. Mary chatted with all the servers, and everyone else who worked at the restaurant. She knew them all by name, and knew what book, or album, or trip they were working on. And then we shared a dessert and polished it all off with a ride on the carousel.

until next time,

Susan

filmmaker/sibling

Without Apology, a film I made about my brother

One~eyedCat productions

Hopper

2010-09-18T19:11:00.001-07:00

HOPPER

Today I spent the better part of the day in the Kerhonkson Synagogue, an adorable, toaster-shaped shul, in the Catskill Mountains, about 100 miles North of New York City, and as some of the readers of this may know, it was because today was Yom Kippur, the day of atonement -- prayer, seeking and offering forgiveness. I find it's really hard to locate and identify my own "sins," (a word I"m not too comfortable with, so take it with a grain of salt) though like everyone, I'm always pretty good at identifying the sins that have been comitted against me. So I've usually spent Yom Kippur dispensing forgiveness, and not being too clear on where and from whom I should be beseeching it. If I got upset, and had a bit of a fit, well, it was for good reason! I wonder -- is an outburst always something to regret? If you seek forgiveness for something you did, does that always mean you shouldn't have done it? How do you know when you transgress? I have a feeling it happens in large and small ways a few times a day. If I only had a really good mirror I know I'd see how I'm hypersensitive, alternating with control freakishness. Small things throw me and I overreact. I see cross-eyed when Al doesn't take his shoes off as soon as he comes through the door. I'm a mess. I know.

A childhood acquaintance, Meg Charlop, who died in a flukey bicycle accident this year, was on my mind often during the week. I stood for her over and over, every time Kaddish was being recited. An extraordinary person, someone you might call out-sized, someone who embraced life and people like noone else I've ever known had a line that seems to be governing me lately -- "It's better to seek forgiveness than to ask permission."

But the rabbi today didn't get into the fine points, looking for the possibility of purposeful transgression, and that was fine. You get the feeling that the day is not about parsing the word "forgive." But after hours, over a wonderful break fast meal prepared by a friend, my friend wonders, like me, "Forgive. What does that mean?!" How are you supposed to feel after you've forgiven someone? Al, in reply, quoted Robert F. Kennedy. "Forgive your enemies but never forget their names." But Rabbie Mallen, in the Kerhonkson Synagogue, admonishes us to not just "forget" about an act you regret, but to do something about it. To CHANGE. aarghhh. He looks around the small historical room, inviting personal confessions. No way. I feel like a cat caught under the sheets (panic stricken) when someone makes that suggestion. Change. It's great advice, and I'm sure what all those prayers and stories are getting at, especially Isaiah who blows my mind every year, but ... What would that mean for me? Probably get a grip on my temper for starters. (though it seems God has quite a temper) Then there's really going for it.

Hopper comes to mind. Hopper -- a volunteer with HOPE Project -- who I met in Violet, St. Bernard, La. did an amazing thing out of personal regret. A construction manager who worked for an insurance company, Hopper (aka Nate) was sent to New Orleans as an insurance adjuster, which is to say, he was told to pay out as little for damages as he could. That was his job. So for about a year, he turned down one desparate homeowner after another until he couldn't do it any more, and indeed felt pretty damn awful about what he'd been doing. And so he took a "vow of poverty," moving his home from somewhere like Wyoming, down to a gutted house in a devastated section of the New Orleans environs, and deciding that for a year he wouldn't earn any money or do any other work but help New Orleanians rebuild -- all on his own dime, except for the cost of materials.

Project HOPE (Helping Other People with Everything) was an ever-changing cast of 10 or so characters, devoted to rebuilding homes. They had as little of their own infrastructure as possible and seemed to enjoy all that came with that -- the anarchy, and even the dirt. When I met them they had just moved from the floor of a gutted church to an empty shell of a donated house. Since it didn't have running water or electricity, they camped out essentially, cooking all their meals late at night (a typical dinner was served close to midnight) over a camp fire, and capturing rainwater for essentials. Boy, those dinners. They weren't just hot dogs and hamburgers. Hopper rolled out his own tortillas, and spiced the chile filling to perfection. Somehow there were always cases of beer on hand, and other intoxicants. And during the day, Hopper and his co-Saint, Mike, managed crews of green volunteers, kids who'd never held a hammer, turning them in a week's time into competent sheetrock hangers, painters, roofers, even electrical line stringers. Maybe a half dozen homes were rebuilt over the course of a year. And the incredibly grateful homeowners, who might to this day, still be waiting for their Road Home money, served up meals and crawfish boils, medicinal plants, hot showers.

Hopper and I ran into each other three weeks ago. Actually, Hopper called me on my cell, on a hunch I'd be there, on the 5th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. I screamed when I heard his voice on the other end. Yes, I am here!!!

We met up the next day, on an overcast afternoon, and I showed him the acre where a few of us hope to start a community garden, named by Mama Sue, Garden of HOPE (yup). Mama Sue joined us and we all drove over to this example of a gazebo that Sue envisions claiming the center, the heart, of the garden. Can we build something like it? As soon as we walked into the space, which you need to enter on a walkway that crosses over a pond, Hopper paced the interior, eyeballed the height, made a few suggestions and said without hesitation he'd build it -- at no charge.

So that's Hopper. Redeemed.

l'shana tova

2010-09-11T13:01:00.000-07:00

I spoke to this seagull yesterday. Not at great length, but in a friendly way, and in a low voice so as not to frighten him. (I've decided, for no ornithological reason, that it was a he) I've found this with birds, and with small reptiles. They're interested in me. They cock their heads and we make eye contact, and they're able to hold it for an unnerving amount of time. Mr. Seagull in fact held my gaze for about five minutes, while I prattled on about something or other (I tried to be reassuring - and also honest about my ability to feed it anything.)

Yesterday was the day I decided to visit my mother, who died New Year's eve 1992, as a result of a cardiac surgeon's slip. This doctor admitted it to my father and me a few days after my mother's surgery (yes, incredible) But I don't want to dwell on that awful revelation, and confession, both of which should never have happened, but on how I find my mother at the beach on Rosh HaShanah. I skipped services at this nurturing, permissive, disciplined, sometimes unconventional, free-thinking and often irreverant house of worship I've joined, Kolot Chayeinu, a tiny bit guilt-ridden. I told a fellow member who asked whether I was coming to the second day of RH services nothing about my plans.

I decided yesterday, after a many year break, to partake in the family ritual that my mother had established for us. A bit of background on my mother, Mitzi, as everyone called her, or Amitia, her given name or Shulamit Bathsheba Berger, her Hebrew name, whose initials (SBB) are etched on a gold ring I've worn for more than thirty years: A non-God fearing, but Jewish-identified, somewhat self-hating Jew, with good reason perhaps in her case due to her father, a domineering rabbi she seemed to loathe. She told me more than once, her voice shaking, about the rituals that were observed to the 'T' in their home, such as plunging all the silverware in the flower pots in the week before Passover while her father, who gave her not a second's worth of religious education, and who could hurl a plate of prunes across the dining room, indulged in lobster sandwiches on his paid holiday from his congregation down in Long Beach, Long Island, hundreds of unseen miles from his home in Montreal. My mother cooked a ham for her first Passover meal. (I often wondered what my father, who was far more conventional, must have thought when the glazed ham -- and I'm sure it was perfectly cooked and irresistible -- reached the table. Actually he probably wasn't as chagrined as you might think. Probably did NOT think he'd made a big mistake in marrying my mother. He told me about how, when a teenager, he'd "tested" God by playing ball one Saturday in lieu of attending synagogue and when nothing at all happened to him, it made him think. But I know he scratched his head in misery when he came home one day and found my mother painting the piano blue. )

So, with nothing but venom in her heart for all things to do with religious observance, every year my mother, father and I drove out to Jones Beach for Rosh HaShanah, walked the boardwalk, or sometimes right along the shore and we all agreed that God dwelt here. It was usually a bit cool, and we'd buy clam chowder and find a picnic table in the sun.

There's no doubt about it, he - God -- does dwell at Jones Beach. It is a perfect choice of a place for a non-observant Jew. Yesterday, which was the first day of the year I'd made it to the beach at all, I found the scene nothing short of mesmerising. Because the cool, constantly changing colors, the endless stretch of sand, the horizon that confounds water and sky screams -- the infinite, the source of everything, the beginning of time.

I tried to think weighty thoughts like these. But I became quickly aware of thinking, which I didn't want to be doing. I wanted to be feeling, and remembering. And luckily, these thoughts didn't stick. They slid away when I began to talk to the birds I came across as I walked in my bare feet "down the beach." Which is something my mother would have done. She spoke endearingly to to all kinds of creatures, as though she were their mother. 'You poor thing!' she might have said to the miniscule sandpiper that was hopping along on one leg. I did it too, not out of a sense of modelling my mom's ways -- I think that would have been somehow a bit sappy -- but out of a sense that it was what the occasion called for. I spoke to this little bird. And I was, I'm pretty sure, terrifying the one-legged sandpiper and myself, I felt suddenly overwhelmed. I felt connected to my mother like no other thought or photograph or scrap of her writing might have done. 'How come you have only one leg? What happened to you? But look how well you're doing!' This small amazing bird, which was part of a swarm of sandpipers that flowed in and out with the waves, to snack on the grubby life that was left exposed by their retreat, kept up with her swarm remarkably well. Then suddenly, she let the other leg drop. She actually had two legs!

When I finally sat down on a towel I'd brought, and watched the sky turn dark and the sea turn to slate, and caught the alien eye of the seagull and began to ask the bird what it wanted, and to assure it I had nothing for it...I felt content. Content and completely at peace.

5 years later

2010-08-31T07:58:00.000-07:00

Happened to be down in NOLA (New Orleans La) this past weekend, not becuz it was the 5th anniversary, but because Lorna Donaldson, that straw bale maven, was arriving in NOLA and I needed to gather a little bit of pick up footage. The timing seemed to meld with our personal missions perfectly.. Only after I booked my flight did I realize...good lord. Five years to the day. And the TV was , excuse me, flooded with mini and maxi documentaries, all of which I watched. I'm afraid nothing totally lit my jets. No, not even Spike Lee's If God willing an da Creek Don't Rise. Harrowing scenes, and the pain Lee found was painted in living color, and it was terrible to watch but there was something else I wanted to see and exactly what that is, I don't know.

Lorna has been loaned a double shot gun, which is a house design that has an unfortunate connotation, but refers to the possibility (ONLY please, the connotation, but good god, not the reality though it sometimes is) -- of firing a shotgun and having the bullet sail cleanly through the front and back doors, passing through the living room, a bedroom, another bedroom the kitchen a wash room -- every room in the long narrow house. In New York, we call them railroad apartments. The function of the shotgun design is to allow fan stirred breezes to cool things down. And they do. Beautifully. In the mornings of my four day stay, I threw open the inner solid doors, front and back, kept the wrought iron gates latched, turned on all four fans, and did my I Chuan exercises, and it was exhilerating to feel the breezes whipping through the house. Traditionally, the shotguns in the Lower 9th ward didn't have doors (according to mama sue) and the hard wood floors have mostly become linoleum.

The stats say that only 25% of the residents of the Lower 9th have returned. Here are four shotguns I took pictures of. One (right) has been rebuilt to a faretheewell, including a sweet front yard flower garden. The house has been painted meticulously, but amazingly, AROUND, not effacing, the crude 'X' that the City inspectors drew in the days after the storm, noting three things -- at the top, the date, the initials of the inspector and in one space inside the intersecting lines whether any dead bodies had been found. Or dead or living animals. The owners of this house, as with many around the city of NO, have chosen to preserve the X and the hastily written code. No, we don't want to forget how it looked. That 'X' was the best bit of memorializing "art" I've seen.

So many have become overgrown with vines, the land and power of nature drawing them back into the dense Mississippi delta mud. The one at the top of the post I worried had been left to rot, but I'm hopeful still someone might adopt it. There's someone who cares, at least a little. A small business card with the owner's name is wedged into the brand spanking new chain link fence that has put up to guard against the crackheads who are causing mischief up and down the streets. I was -- strangely, I know -- tempted to jot the e-mail address down. I loved the way it was set back from the street, and boasted a second story. Imagine the breeze on that upper balcony. I'd keep the strangling vines.

The one Lorna and I stayed in (above) has been rebuilt, painted a sober New England gray, the 'X' covered over, for what seems to be an investment. In about four months, after which Lorna will mostly likely have left, paying tenants will live in them. But down the road, in the farther along the way future, when the fate of the Lower 9th has been decided, these shotguns might fetch a good price.

So, our lovely double Shotgun begs the question: What will happen when the city of NO decides enough is enough and the 50+ percent of these houses have to be razed? Who is going to lay claim to the land, the real estate of the Lower Ninth? That's what I haven't seen in the gut wrenching films that have chosen to revisit the Katrina disaster. The wailing continues in the poor districts, and among the poor in general. I know from Mama Sue how the debt to that storm will never be paid off. But now it's time to look into the board rooms, and back rooms. Have yet to see some fine journalism on that subject.

But for me, looking at the face of an aging Katrina meant looking at the clapboard shotgun houses. How are they looking five years later?

2010-08-23T10:21:00.000-07:00

The main thing this week -- or the one I'm writing about -- is about August's computer. My plea for a donated laptop, so that August could be connected to the plans and ideas for the Garden of H.O.P.E. (Helping Other People with Everything) Being as I worry he's not connected with we planners and plotters and since we do most of our communicating on the internet, shouldn't he be able to read and "talk" back to us?

One lead and conversation leads to another, and after mentioning my wish for a donated computer to a friend I learn about Alan of Alans Affordable Computers and Repair. Alan is noted for his computer donation program. He donates computers to poor school children around the U.S., veterans groups, dozens of computers are sent to people living in Gaza. Alan loved the mission of our Garden down there in St. B.

Long story short. Two nights ago, one came in! in. Keys had been pulled out by the previous owner’s children, the screen is a little funky but very serviceable. It's def internet-worthy, Alan said. Ran down Saturday a.m. to get it. And sure enough – it works!

The great thing is I found a neighborhood cafe (on - line of course) called Kitchen Cafe, around THE CORNER from August's house (I couldn't believe this. There's not much in that part of the Parish and at first I could only find places with names like Latte Cafe up in Meraux and no way August was going to spring for a $3.-- cup of coffee in the "wrong" that is white part of town. (There's that crazy gap – racial gap I mean. It’s closing, in all the corners of the Parish, but there are folks who still feel that it hasn’t, and sometimes I think August fits into that group but I know I don’t know what the real story is. And to be sure there are some who wish that it isn’t) So yesterday, tooling around for the second time on the web, when I found the Kitchen Cafe, walking distance from where August lives on Guerra Drive, there was that feeling of aha! A new spot, whose owner, Selma (as in Selma, Alabama she told me) was in the process of hooking up her router. She has a high counter where people who just want a cup of coffee and to spend time on the internet can sit. And too, Selma is very interested in the Garden, or at least the affordable organic produce that is soon going to be available. I was pleased, talking to Selma, networking like this. Let’s hope things keep on keepin' on like this.

I leave Thursday for New Orleans and will be staying in a house in the Lower 9^th that some very kind woman, a hydrologist, is loaning Lorna, our straw bale maven.

Will try to post something every day if I can figure out how to do it on my phone.

Many pieces still to be put in place, like how hundreds of straw bales are going to be transported from somewhere in the mid-west to New Orleans. Like how they will get from the train yard to the acre in Canaervon. Like who will unload them. Like finding the funds for a ton of compost and finding yet more funds for a nice fence. I insist that it not be chain link. Want those square holes and how wonderful if the posts could be round, to match the posts of our future gazebo.

Wish us luck and send money!

Straw Bale Gardening Here We Come!

2010-08-15T05:28:00.000-07:00

Mama Sue has surfaced! Shot me an e-mail to say she's home, looking forward to seeing me. She's been moody. Hmph. That's a euphemism for somethin'

But this post is exclusively about The Garden of HOPE, a name which Sue gave our proposed garden, which she says stands for Helping Other People with Everything. This was a field of dreams for Mama Sue, August, Lettie Lee. Not a baseball diamond, a real garden, a community garden with different fantasies for each person. Mama Sue envisioned a "place of peace." With all her infirmities, she wasn't goin' to do no plantin' but what she wanted was to recreate a bit of the feeling she had as the neighborhood "mama," who kept a pond in her front yard full of minnows, small turtles, gold fish and what all, where kids would stop by, and in delight watch these specimans of small aquatic life. This is how she got the moniker -- Mama Sue. Hurricane K swept it all away. If she could sit in the Garden's gazebo which she envisions is surrounded by a small stream and four little bridges crossing into it, and tell stories to the kids who'd drop by...(the pic you see here is of a gazebo that sits in a pond in a park "upriver" in St. Bernard and this is the idea Sue has for our -- for her -- gazebo in the Garden of H. It's nautical with its round piling-like posts, and such a lovely bit of architecture, but convincing the hard-nosed gardener types who are involved with us that we need a gazebo at all is requiring all our skills of persuasion.)

August envisions a place where he would work the land, and teach the youth of Guerra Drive (August always shakes his head and smiles ruefully when he says "Guerra Drive.") Give 'em something' to do, he says. And we both know that if he could turn one kid on to growing and harvesting, he'd have accomplished something. The Garden of HOPE Is far from Guerra Drive. You need a car (bus lines were swept away by Hurricane K) but they'd get down there with help from a parent or August himself, and in time, the idea would "ketch on." and they could start small gardens on the empty lots all along Guerra Drive - which are abundant, little reminders of the houses that used to exist before Katrina. Thousands of cement slabs waiting to be torn up are all over St. Bernard. The pop. in St. B is down by about half.

Lettie Lee just likes the idea. She's got a black thumb she says -- all her house plants die promptly under her care -- but she's very civic minded and like August thinks that this might be good for the children of St. Bernard Parish.

But our green acre has in all honesty been going nowhere. I've envisioned what it would sound like if it were a sound effect which is like a car in the deep trenches of winter that grinds painfully and you know is not going to start up. Or a computer that whirs quietly and pitifully and won't boot up. I have to be honest, it warn't goin nowhere. We have exactly $400 in our bank account, nitrogen-poor soil that needs major amending, the promise of a free tractor, which has yet to materialize, and receding hopes.

Until Lorna Donaldson, a retired organic farmer from Tennessee got wind of our garden, our dreams for it, and swooped in like a fairy godmother to say she'd help us get the full acre planted this fall. Seeds to be donated by Baker Heirloom Seeds. Yes! Since, like all of us, she watched in disbelief as the BP spill ended most of this season's (we all know it might be much longer) fishing along the Gulf, she's thought long and hard about what can be done -- what she can do.

Lorna is promoting an old, but little used method of growing called Straw Bale Gardening. Instead of soil, you use bales of hay (or straw), covered with a thin layer -- 1 - 2 inches -- of compost. You don't need to mess with soil, bugs are minimal, back aches are less severe because you're not bending down so far. And she will give us enough straw bales to cover the entire acre, and help raise the money for the compost and the fence (didn't have the heart to mention our need of a fence) and provide August a bit of training. But I don't think he'll need more than five minutes. I hope only that there's no disagreement about what our first crop should consist of. The dark greens of course -- collards, and what not, tomatoes, okra (gumbo ingredient) Someone who lives down in St. B told me that African women would stow okra seeds in their hair as they were being hauled away to slavery. So okra has to go in there.

Our plans are to meet in a week and a half, a week from Thursday -- all of us -- Mama Sue, August, Lettie Lee -- over a plate of red beans and rice somewhere in da Parish talking it all through with Lorna and get this ball rolling. Please -- no hitches please!

I'm looking forward to seeing my old friends. Plan on shooting an hour of August describing his boyhood when I have a feeling practically his only pleasure was simple gardening. A 9 year old boy enjoying nothing more than growing beans. August has told me stories about how it was the nuns in the orphanage where he grew up - in the 50's -- who taught him how to grow things. So much detail I've wanted to glean, but which he hasn't parted with. But I've learned that he raised chicks too and the nuns gave him baskets of eggs to take door to door. August has bemoaned (miserably) growing up in an orphanage. He's also told me that he'd be another lost soul if he hadn't. I'm very curious to see what he'll teach these boys on Guerra Drive to do.

A plea here. If you happen to have a laptop, notebook, iPad, netbook that is available to donate to the Garden of HOPE. Totally tax deductible. August is going to have to be in e-mail touch. Is going to have to receive materials from Lorna, and myself and be able to send us information far more easily than he's been able to with his very temperamental cell phone. His phone is frankly a pain in the ass. Thanks!

More info on the garden (and lots of other stuff) can be found on my website: www.oneeyedcatproductions.com/ along with a way to get in direct touch if you happen to have a laptop or $5,000 for a fence. Website still a little rough in places. Why I haven't mentioned it till now.

Family Reunion

2010-08-05T08:55:00.001-07:00

Sometimes, as with the demonstration in behalf of the mosque being built in Brooklyn -- and I have to add an update on that soon because the ADL has really pissed me off -- things in my own life become front and center. Going back a couple o years to describe my live as a hapless videographer in a disaster zone which I've been attempting to do -- even that recedes into the settled past. And anyway, Mama Sue has not surfaced. She's back in Texas maybe, still comforting an ex-, whose wife recently died. And I can only wonder...has she reunited with Anthony? Is she dumping Lou? She's the subject of my film, the sole focus of my strange task, and it seems I should try to find out. Then, too, the lines dividing filmmaker and subject have tangled, and we have become (in a way) friends. But it's also possible she's dumping me. Maybe my camera and my eternal questions are one more part of the Katrina aftermath, and when she said at one point "I am remaking me" she hinted that she was going to decide that that included ultimately throwing over her chronicler (me).

But the last week I've been -- whew! -- engaged in a family reunion. A friend wrote in an email, 'Hope your reunion wasn't too stressful, as family gatherings can sometimes be (or maybe always are!).'

The night we were supposed to be watching a slide presentation of our geneaology, which stretches back only three generations before mine (born in the 50's) child of the WWII generation, and grandchild of immigrants from the shtetls), I was curled up under the covers, unable to face the crowd. Cousins gently knocked on the door and offered reasons to ignore the slights and join them down in the hotel dining room. If for no other reason than it would please our Aunt Sylvia -- our elder, at nearly 98. And our younger cousin, who has been washing and cleaning old photos by the hundreds, and wading bravely into geneaological software, was camped out at the side of the road in New Hampshire, similarly unable to face it all.

This was Day One of the family reunion. We, young geneaologist and myself, had been cajoling others to not forsake us, and to attend the presentation of photographs, videos and an extended diagram of our family tree, but as camped-out younger cousin noted, "not everyone is interested in our family history." So we had to plead, and by the end when younger cousin, our slaving over chemical trays cousin herself grew lightheaded, couldn't drive any farther and e-mailing from a library begged for our forgiveness, there I was, weeping. But what is a family reunion without weeping and the *star* freaking out on the roadside?

And then Aunt Evelyn cracked me up, when all was forgiven and we'd washed our faces and came to the table, threw the family geneaology up on the computer screen -- when she said with her trademark startling honesty -- it -- geneaology -- is "boring." And to be honest, it's not that interesting. The chart with little circles for female relatives and squares for males (or maybe it's the other way around) And names in tiny print stretching sideways so far, you have to scroll the page left or right to take them in, the page lurching haphazardly towards one wing or another. Who cares?! That I have second cousins in Akron, or that so and so married and has three children?

Until I learned that my grandmother's brother, Charlie, had scarlet fever at age 4, and became deaf and wound up in a Catholic (or Protestant) boarding school for the deaf (all this was in Montreal, back in the 20's) where he flourished, marrying Pansy, also deaf, and mute as well. We murmured when we learned that they remained Protestants, or Catholics -- out of gratitude we all assumed. Back then, people stared solemnly into the camera, as though they were sitting for an oil portrait, but not my great grandmother, Channa (changed to Anna by immigration). Her smile was crooked, wide, rich. From the gut. What/Who gave her that supremely contented smile? With her big floppy hat, and sun dresses in every shot, we all agreed she could have been part of the impressionist movement of painters. Widowed three times (though first husband is only a rumor. Who was he we murmured) she stood, like a pioneer woman, looking square into the camera, her daughter, granddaughter and occasionally great grand daughter in the shot with her. Young cousin geneaologist remarked repeatedly -- "the four matriarchs!" David Zvi, whose name matches that of a name on a list found in an on-line note, that of a tinker in the tiny shtetl, Pode Illoie, in Rumania, where we had the Rumanian spelling of our name -- Hahamovici -- moved to then-Palestine, and started a family line one of whom marrired into a line that changed their name to Gur. Gur? Like the name of the Hebrews you read about in the Bible?! Was that their idea? Were they Biblically-oriented immigrants? Why did they take on the name Gur? The Hahamys, the offspring of that fleeing resident of Pode Illoie struck out for a life in Palestine, while my grandparents, after a new tax on the Jews of Pode Illoie, scrambled for enough money for steerage to Canada. Pa (as my grandfather was called) sought to bring his sister Fagie over, and with his brother Louis received permission, even though she was not going to be a farmer, which as one document our geneaologist uncovered, was the sole skill sought after by Canadian Immigration. But if she were free of diseases, if she were literate, and if she would promise to work in their coffee and tea business...then she could come. And she did. Our Uncle Dave, who had remained silent whenever asked about his experiences in WWII, a "just war," he said, revealed his memories. When Uncle Dave, a self described Socialist, knew he was dying, he finally spoke about it, answering a dozen questions posed to him by our family historian. It was nearing 1 a.m. and a few of us read his words over each others' shoulders. He had ridden onto the beaches of Normandy two weeks after D-Day. (young cousin, the interlocutor) Q: 'What were you feeling then?' He replied, 'What was I -- a Jewish kid from Montreal -- doing here?' 'He must have other thoughts and feelings' I said aloud. 'That was a cover up for something more.' 'No, that was it!' the historian replied. 'That says it all.' We read, we pored over the pictures, discussed, argued and glanced at the spindly, many armed tree.

The past. It throws as much mystery at you as it provides information. But it's the mystery of it that gives you a kind of thrill. And there's a feeling of arriving at corroboration. History is real, it's true! Finding my place in the common history of the world has a sort of wonder in it and somehow -- it's strange how intense the feeling is -- it fills me with joy. And I feel literally connected. Those long skinny lines, taking left and right turns and dropping down and down like the thread of a spider, until there I am, a circle below a circle and a square. A square (or a circle) next to me, labelled Al. Some day maybe there'll be a descendant of my wing sitting on the floor around a coffee table with a bunch of cousins and someone will throw out a detail about their distant cousin, a generation or two above them on the "family tree." And that as yet unborn being will muse, "I think she was a filmmaker" Someone else as yet unborn: "Oh yeah?"

She's a Survivor

2010-07-28T04:05:00.000-07:00

Back to Mama Sue. When I think of Mama Sue now, I see a rapidly aging woman, a woman growing old way before her time. With an eye out for "the Katrina story" I would always ask, was this -- your unravelling health -- or your marital, um, stew -- or your lack of work -- or... -- the result of Katrina or would you have been "miserable" anyway? Strange things to be asking. Looking back, not a necessary question at all.

But Sue, though in her mid 50's, hobbles with rheumatoid arthritis and fibromyalgia. And, as a result of Katrina, which she survived through a set of events, decisions, quick thinking, and as Sue would say, with the intervention of "God or the deity of your choice," she developed the nastiest of foot infections and had a few front teeth knocked out. But hair was gelled and she was wearing maybe a touch of mascara when she sat down opposite me to relate her Katrina tale, and I could see she'd been a "beauty." She loved to tell me about her straight chestnut hair so long she could sit on it.

When I moved down to Violet, three years ago, one of the first things I did was invite Sue over for dinner. Sue is now heavy, and due to the pain, she has a stiff kneed gait and she walks leaning forward slightly. After she made it to my door, my landlord called to ask if everything were OK. I don't know what he saw when he saw Sue come into my apartment, but whatever it was it worried him. As I poured the wine, which Sue couldn't drink with all the medication she took, but probably politely raised and lowered, she told me I was her only friend. Thankfully I didn't ask whether that was a Katrina problem. Anyway, I knew the answer.

Sue isn't good at chit chat. It seemed as thought she's cursed with -- the artist's curse maybe. The need to organize her thoughts wholly according to an inner light. Often it seemed she was (is. She is still very much alive! though I do worry about that constantly) musing so hard she'd forget she was in company. I'm painting a picture of a distracted genius. No, not that at all. Maybe Sue is an Outsider Artist. She planted her front garden with plastic flowers after the storm. "Nothing would grow," she said, "everything's dead." (hence the name of my film, mama sue's garden). The front garden was ablaze with bright pink and yellow flowers, and they were pretty! Not tacky at all. Mama Sue has a hearty laugh, she can be wicked, can get hopelessly tangled up in petty BS with a neighbor but who can't, was (is?) a great friend and companion to her daughter, April, who was finishing up her last year of high school. Anyone looking at the two of them, would see a couple in love.

A couple of weeks later, maybe less, I found a large brown envelope under my windshield wiper. Inside was Sue's memoir, 200+ pages of Sue's life. I got to it within a day, and could not put it down. Whether I knew Sue or not, I think I'd have read until dawn. It read like a potboiler, that is fiction, bodice ripping scenes included. Such as married to a dashing navy enlistee and living with him in his idyllic Hawaiin posting. Followed by infidelities and the mean and heart rending lows of husband number two, whose drug addiction and physical abuse never for a minute it seemed stopped her from loving him. To the next guy, Lou, who she hardly mentions at all.

And Katrina, which doesn't appear for a 100 pages, and then reads like a film starring Clint Eastwood, an early one, with so many moments when you think, this couldn't really happen. Like a CE movie, you know from the beginning that she makes it but all the way through you're on the edge of your seat.

Sue loves that she survived the storm on her rooftop. She told me more than once that she'd do it again. The first time she said that I think my jaw dropped. I don't understand people who climb Mt. Everest. But I'm beginning to get it. To know that you can survive the worst natural disaster with nothing but the intelligence of your muscles and quick wittedness. To confront it without -- nuthin.' Just you, as everything that had that ever held you up, let you sit, provided food and warmth, as all of it turns into an obstacle, an enemy even (as her refrigerator did when it floated towards the door and formed a blockade, as her roof did as it shredded between her fingers, while she was attempting to pull, climb, stretch and haul her body onto it) and everything you depended on vanishes one by one and then flies at you in 150 mile an hour winds "as though you had a bullseye painted on your back." Baking in the sun and as the days wore on, joined by two of her dogs, who'd chase away the rats. Other small animals, seeking high ground, were allowed to stay. At night she'd sleep in a pirogue which had floated by. "You sent me a boat God?" Survival of the elements. But surviving with faith, as Sue did, conversing the whole while with God or thedeityofyourchoice. It is something to be proud of. As my editor said the other day -- Sue was a heroine.

overslept

2010-07-21T07:47:00.000-07:00

Hey Sue,

I had called you this morning and left a message, then two minutes ago, got a call back from Lou. learned from him that you left for TX this morning. Missed you by a hair! Damn!

2 things urgent. Want to send you the herbal hepatitis capsules. A box of them has just arrived and can get them in Saturday's mail.

Then -- got a call from August. He wants his copy of the contract y'all signed for the land. He wants to start tilling, as you suggested, but is afraid to go out there without that piece of paper. A black man in Canaervon kind of thing. Is sure he'd be arrested and jailed.

So, if you could tell your husband where that piece of paper is, and perhaps August could go pick it up? Is that possible? Or will the two of them be some kind of absurd unhappy about making direct contact. Perhaps Lettie can pick it up from your house and bring it to Aug. That would probably be the simplest

So - hoping you get back to me soon. And hoping you're doing OK! Been leaving messages for you, and got around 12 hours too late to calling.

Regards to Timmy and family.

much love,

The above a message sent to Sue about a week ago, after August got to thinking that if he went down to our lot, without a tractor, but just a hand tiller, or just to mess around, that more than likely he'd be arrested and jailed. And as though getting arrested and jailed for wandering around on a plot of empty land was predictable and by some stretch of logic, acceptable, he added that that kind of thing 'stays on your record.' August was more perturbed about his criminal record it seemed than getting arrested and jailed. I was ready to jump in right there and say, "oh come on." Though I wouldn't say 'you're being paranoid,' or that 'we're not in Jim Crow times any more. You have to give people credit for growing out of their old and base ignorant ways of thinking.'

Thankfully, I say instead, 'let me call Sue and see whether she can run you over the contract.' August was one of the signatories on the ten year lease for this luminous acre hard by the Mississippi levee in the village of Canaervon.

But, I learned the next morning Sue had left for Texas. She'd gone, without telling me, her chronicler, her personal memoirist, that she was going anywhere! Felt as though she owed me an explanation! How dare you move around the country without informing your filmmaker? Well, she had -- had left for Texas to be with her son for two weeks and whatever else she wasn't telling me. I had no way of reaching her, Sue's cell has long ago run out of minutes, so tried in vain by e-mail (see above) tho' haven't gotten an e-mail reply from Sue in weeks and this one is no different. Why do I feel so responsible for the success of this garden? for Sue? For August? That's a question for a shrink/guru, neither of which I have at the moment. Maybe only a filmmaker, who's got 100+ hours of footage on her cluttered study floor would understand. Finally made contact with Sue that evening by phone and was told that the contract was buried in a "black suitcase in my closet." She'd get Lou to find it.

Lou, Sue's husband, is not a paper kind of guy. He doesn't make out his own checks, you never see him with a book, newspaper or pencil, unless he's making a mark on a piece of lumber in preparation for cutting it with a power saw. Lou is very handy and his humanity is in his construction and repair projects. There's even a hint of whimsy in some of them. Lou built a floating chair after the storm waters of Katrina had subsided out of a lawn chair, somehow sticking the legs into two oblong pieces of styrofoam. This adorable contraption floated even with the weight of an average size St. Bernardian! Lou and Mama Sue called it their pontoon chair and Lou sat in it and paddled out into this newly existing body of water to retrieve a sunken trailer. The painted, polished and gleaming black trailer (not the kind you live in, but the kind you use to haul stuff) now sits in his driveway, pride written all over it. Lou still refers to black folk sometimes as "coloreds." Sue rolls her eyes.

Asking Lou to find the contract in the black suitcase in the closet in Sue's den and arrange to hand it over to August, who in turn thinks of Lou's kind with utmost wariness had me tied in knots. Should I instead ask Lettie Lee to pick the contract up and bring it over to August's place? But that would have been solidifying some old habits of thinking, wouldn't it? I wouldn't be helping to change a situation that damn well has to change if we're going to start farming a plot of land with a racially integrated team next to a somewhat racially integrated church in a white neighborhood and I wasn't going to be any part of the old way of doing things!

Katrina had some good effects. When I went that Spring of '07, less than two years after Katrina, with Lettie Lee to Easter Mass, I was surprised to see black and white people in dresses and suits heading together for the doorway of the church. When I asked Lettie about this she told me that there just weren't enough churches that had been able to rebuild for the old segregated patterns to continue. In other words Katrina had shoved black and white into the same church.

He was hesitant. 'August, you'll stick your hand out, take the piece of paper from Lou, say thank you and leave.' He laughed and asked for directions. The next day August was at Lou's house at noon, as Lou had asked him to be. When no one came to the door, August called. No answer. August went home. All of this was told me last night by Lou, who hadn't woken up until 4 pm that day, and didn't hear the doorbell.

p.s. Lou did the right thing -- two days later, he brought the contract over to August.

cell phones

2010-07-16T05:09:00.000-07:00

I don’t mean this as a digression from where I left off last week. But I want to convey the fabric of a community, and a snapshot of the times, the moment that I happened on mama sue, or she on me. More on mama sue… coming next week

So, before I get to Mama Sue, and that whole tangled yarn, I have to ask…is it true? That the oil has stopped gushing into the Gulf? I hadn’t heard the news yet while watching footage shot three years ago, of August baiting a hook and casting into one of the still, still rivers of Delacroix Island, which isn’t really an island, but the name of a neighborhood at the southern end of St. Bernard Parish. I couldn’t help but be wistful watching his relaxed way of handling the hooks and lines and setting the rods down on the beach. That day I managed to hook a catfish and he pulled in a striped drum. I was wondering as I logged the scenes of this afternoon hour - so casual I might have forgotten it if I hadn’t caught in on tape – whether August would thread a hook with shrimp pieces again in his life. No, I wouldn’t have forgotten. It was an unusual day, a beautiful, languid, somewhat unnerving day. The water, air, trees, sky all utterly still and it seemed untouched by human beings. And unnerving because I hate fishing. I never go. And here I was with a virtual stranger, who was teaching me how to attach a tiny piece of bait… I was horrified when I actually caught a fish! I didn’t have the strength to haul the thing in. It was heavy, or it was fighting. I couldn’t tell. August, so pleased with me, and himself I think for having taught me how to do any of this, reeled it in. “She caught a fish before August!” he declared. I was a good filmmaker, I thought, keeping focus on the catfish as it thrashed around on the dropped-down gate of August’s pick-up.

And I haven’t forgotten the first afternoon (spring, '07) I returned to my new temporary apartment – a one bedroom on the second floor, above a soon-to-be-renovated row of stores. They, the future stores, all sat empty, holes in sheetrock which would soon accept electric panels, plumbing fixtures. Grimy windows which would one day be clear and showcase some kind of retail activity. Up an exterior iron stair, there were about 6 small, unadorned apartments, all except mine rented by laborers from Latin America. Only one of these construction worker had come with his family – his wife and young daughter – who prepared out of their tiny kitchen (I had the same four impossible electric burners) dozens of tacos every day for sale to the Mexicans who’d relocated up in the NOLA area for Katrina work. The rest shared with one or two other men. Only one of my neighbors spoke any English.

I didn’t know any of these details when I returned home from my first major shop at the newly rebuilt Winn-Dixie, back seat and trunk filled with at least 20 small bags of cereal, soy milk, frozen crawfish pies. It was night, and completely dark. I was startled – putting it mildly – to see at least three small trucks parked in the lot that adjoined our apartment strip, where I too had pulled in, in my Prius. I was surrounded – or so it felt – by a posse of lone-man occupied trucks. All I could think – since I was on Guerra Drive, a street everyone spoke about in dejected terms, shaking their heads – that they were doing drug deals. I froze. Here was I, a gringa woman who lived alone. How could I get out and start carting my grocery bags up the stairs? They would see I saw them making their deals and maybe not that night, but some night not too far in the future, they’d come for me. My thoughts about what “come for me” meant were vague. I think I assumed they’d shoot me. I sat for what seemed like an hour. Then, when the men all seemed to be not going anywhere, I decided that I could either sit all night with my lettuce, or be brave and get out of the car and go to my apartment.

I learned not too long after that evening that these men used the nighttime hours after work to place calls to their families in Central and South America. They were sitting in their trucks, clutching their cell phones and receiving -- who knows? Perhaps stories about this relative or that, reports of illness, death, a new baby, the marriage of a cousin, any news they could strain to hear about their native country in their native language. They were probably describing their day. By March when it started to get warm, I’d look up at at our common balcony, if you want to call that narrow cement strip that ran outside our apartments a balcony, and see many of the men leaning over the metal railing, for hours, the tiny lights on their phones glinting like fireflies. The man who lived in apartment #1, the one who spoke some English, worked part time for our landlord as a sort of super. He’d helped me assemble my sofa bed. One afternoon, he tapped on my door. I opened it hesitantly – still not absolutely sure of things, though by this point I was sure that I didn’t know a thing about my neighbors – and he asked if he could use my laptop to look at the CD his wife had sent. When he sat down at my computer, and the images of four adorable girls, his daughters, the oldest twelve I think, popped into view, he told me that he had left for the United States one afternoon, without letting his wife in on his plans until after he’d reached the States. He hadn’t seen his wife or children in the seven years since.

Never say never

2010-07-10T06:26:00.000-07:00

Under-exposed. The stuff that’s not in the film

That was originally going to be name of my blog -- "under-exposed." But boy was it taken, by every blog system there is. And so now I'm going to post something about these experience, these feelings, I experienced while shooting, kind of aimlessly at first, on the modest streets of St. Bernard, a year after the storm. How it all began. After Katrina, I said to myself that I would never make a film about such a huge event. Hundreds of filmmakers would be heading down there, and I wasn’t going to be one of them. I wasn’t going to enter what was an unmistakable feeding frenzy (albeit a slow one).

Yeah, you guessed it. Never say never. Fast forward three years. I am waist deep in footage about a woman who barely made it through Hurricane Katrina. Mama Sue is the name she goes by, and now entering post production, spanning three years, the film in progress is called “mama sue’s garden.” (there's a website, if you want to learn more about the film, www.mamasuesgarden.com/)

It’s always interesting to trace your steps from never to never say never. I started out with a cleaver volunteering for ten days with a small, funky organization – now defunct – cutting onions and making sandwiches for a community kitchen. With a lot of enthusiastic support from the young folk who were running Emergency Communities, I’d packed my camera in the trunk, and in the evenings, offered people – Katrina people – the chance to record their stories. What everyone said they missed more than anything, more than their homes, cars, flatware was their photographic and film record of themselves and their families. Finding a salvageable photograph of a wedding, or a legible diary, would bring tears of joy to their owners.

Would people want to talk to this New Yorker with her Northern ways? One weathered gentleman -- who looked as though he’s spent more days on a boat with a line out for catfish – asked whether I were a psychologist. A lot of shrinks had come down, and so here were these fishermen and hunters, carpenters and oil rig workers chowing down on the food we'd prepared -- suddenly sophisticated about this urban and urbane avocation. And the sense I got was that they didn't see much use. But, to my surprise, a couple of people, at the appointed hour, peered into the lounge off the dining room where I’d set up shop and … entered.

One of them was Susan Veronica Boutwell LaGrange, aka Mama Sue of course, accompanied by her teenage daughter, April. Both talked to my camera for two hours and asked if they could return the next day. I said yes.

Five months later, I'd cleared the decks of work, assured my husband I loved him, and drove my car down to this place and tried to insinuate myself into the abnormal rhythms of a jimmy rigged society of volunteers and weary residents, of ruin, of illness, and poverty, and the sound of boats calling from the Mississippi, crawfish Fridays, which I never got used to. Come Friday evening, lots of homes would religiously drag a large collapsible table out into their backyard, put up a huge pot of seasoned water -- everyone used the identical seasoning that came in a box. damn, what's that box's name? - and boil hundreds of these little crustaceans. You didn't have to be invited. Just walk up to any table with its pyramid of crawfish, say "hi" and pull one off the pile, laid without any fanfare directly on the table. Have you ever pulled the head off a crawfish and sucked out the innards?

And the best thing of all, though -- I know I've said this before, but I continue to miss it -- the way total strangers wished me a good morning. Occasionally, to be able to feel better about myself, I toted a hammer. I also ran a documentary workshop, but more and more I wound up at Mama Sue’s colorful home -- pestering her as she went about her daily activities, and, was gratefully amazed when she handed me the key to the workings of her mind..

The Accordianiste

2010-07-02T19:27:00.000-07:00

I took this photo -- the one on the right-- a couple weeks ago. Yes, it is a small orchestra made up entirely of accordianists. Would you have been able to resist running down to hear this extremely ad hoc group, who had been collected together by the man in the foreground, to create, as he put it, "a forest of accordians?"

When I heard they were going to perform, for one time only as part of a day called Make Music New York (held every summer solstice, or June 21st) from Staten Island to the Bronx, and all places inbetween, I called my good friend and neighbor, sure she would be as excited as I. Would you like to go with me to see, and hear a forest of accordians? Brett said that as far as she was concerned, one accordian is grating. I don't think there could have been anything less appealing to Brett than the thought of forty of them echoing and reverberating as an ensemble. But the accordian. No seat at the orchestra for the accordian. It's the orphan of instruments. I associate it with Paris or Berlin "between the wars." In the movies of the era, there's an old man in a beret, shambling down a cobble stoned street, playing for pennies. It's the instrument of the European blues, the accordian accompanies the down and out, Edith Piaf... It's regret and Regrette. (Who doesn't love The Accordianiste? I wonder if Brett doesn't) I know that the accordian has found its "serious" modern and American interpreters. Have had the wonderful pleasure to hear Pauline Oliveros, an accordianiste who has successfully escaped the French and the shmaltz.

But, still. How disappointing when the "forest" didn't succumb just this last time to the je ne regrette themes I so much wanted to hear! Instead, the conductor, a conceptualist of some kind, had one of those schemes, in this case impossible to decipher. All these accordianistes, as far as I could tell, were to waft between a few notes, coming in one at a time, at random, and then mush around until everyone had joined in. It wasn't a forest so much as a fog. After five minutes, I fled, and hung out by this "cool" jazz combo across the street in front of The Gate, a local bar which is always packed and tantalizingly rowdy.

The picture on the left is of an unknown accordianiste, spotted in an alcove of the stairway of the downtown A train. He probably couldn't get a permit to play on the platform -- yes, you need to audition to play on the subway platforms! And if you don't get the permit, you play, for pennies, in small out of the way hideouts, hopefully outside the notice of the transit police or whoever enforces these wild laws. So there he was -- yards away from the platform, in a spot where people rush by, not where they hang out waiting for the train. And he played the heart-breaking, Piaf-era tunes. Though it was unexpected, and I was rushing...there he was, the man in the beret so to speak.

If I don't have anything more to write this week about what's happening down in St. Bernard Parish with "World" or Mama Sue or Lettie Lee, it's because ... I wonder if the terrible things that are happening in the Gulf and to the Gulf are unravelling our -- imaginations, our faith in the project. In other words, we're drifting. I'm being a tad melodramatic. What's really happening is we're on a wild goose chase of a search for a tractor and of all yuck, coincidences, an oil company has snagged the one and only rental tractor in the entire Parish -- to cut the grass around its refinery.

I've been listening to "misery's the river of the world," by Tom Waits with the pleasure you get listening to incredibly sad music. Imagine these lines sung in the deep, impossibly gravelly growl of Mr. Waits:

for want of a a bird, the sky was lost, for want of a nail, the shoe was lost, for want of a toy, the child was lost, for want of a knife, a life was lost...

For want of a plow, the land was lost. So we can't find a plow, or we have to wait, the rental place said, until the oil company is finished with it, which may be a month from now, or longer. He implied the length of the wait is really completely uncertain. Kind of like the oil spill itself. Why should a month's or so delay bum me out like this?

It feels like "the last straw," I worry that the garden may be doomed, but Al assures me that it most definitely isn't. But bummed I am. Anyway, this post is dedicated to the tragic musicians of the world -- those seers.

the children of abraham

2010-06-27T19:28:00.000-07:00

A post about me - about prayer, about Brooklyn and of course Mama Sue. How all of these are intertwined for me.

Mama Sue, for newcomers, is the subject of a documentary, called Mama Sue's Garden, that I'm in the throes of completing.

But starting with prayer. I'm Jewish and I belong to a (fabulous) congregation here in Park Slope Brooklyn -- Kolot Chayeinu, which translated from the Hebrew means, Voices of our Lives. But...I seldom go to services of my wonderful congregation. Instead I go to their Palestinian-Israeli study group meetings where we discuss books written by Palestinian and Israeli, and occasionally American and French writers. (more on this group later.)

But there are times that I want to go, and when I do, I feel at sea, even though I have a great time. I find myself singing along -- the songs in ancient Hebrew are actually catchy. And I love the usually witty and smart dvar (discourse) on the week's Torah portion, the way I liked analyzing a good novel in high school English class. At these visits to my *house of prayer,* though, I'm uncomfortably aware that I don't know how to pray. I marvel at how my friends down in St. Bernard, La. seem to be able to pray at the drop of a hat and indeed they're always praying. Not pretend prayer, not obligatory, conformist prayer on days alotted for it, but through an intimate, deeply felt, believing sense of connection to a spiritual, all-seeing, caring being. Mama Sue has a direct line to "God." When she knew the storm, that is, Katrina, was going to be bad, she sat on her daughter's bed and had a little "talk with god." And throughout one of the most harrowing tales I've ever heard, she told me she'd kept up a running conversation. She thanked God when a wooden boat -- which became her bed for two nights and her shelter during the scorching days -- floated by her rooftop. "You're sending me a boat? Thank you, God!!" One day she turned to me and asked -- did I think God was male or female?

No, I'm not going to get into what religion means/doesn't mean to me, or what gender my god is, if I have a god, and if god has a gender. But I don't rule any of it out. If I were to try to define it at all, it's oddly, a "label" that reaches to my core. It's the source of anger at some groups I don't agree with. I'm angry in this way, at these groups, because I'm Jewish. Those guys are "crazy," and those over there are more "reasonable." It's a deep and rich part of my identity, but I can't figure out where faith comes into it.

Sometimes, though, things seem clear. And it felt incredibly clear when Rabbi Lippman sent out notices to everyone that on June 10, we were invited to participate in the seventh annual Children of Abraham Peace Walk, I made a mental note -- this was something I had to attend. The Children of Abraham -- great name isn't it? -- Muslim, Christian, Jew. Every year, the three offspring of that mythic patriarch join hands, figuratively, and walk through a few neighborhoods in this polyglot, amazingly diverse place called Brooklyn. The organizers didn't envision it being anything more than this, though getting reps from three of the world's quarreling religions together in a cooperative stroll doesn't seem trivial. Still, it wasn't political -- nothing about the Middle East in there, no speeches about *unity* or 9/11. Simple declarations of ... brother/sisterhood. That's how it appeared to me, and the comments of the first priest who spoke that day confirmed that.

Before we set out, we (well more than 100 of us) took seats in the pews of a Korean Methodist church for some talking to -- I think it was for some unity, without calling it by name. Looking around, I noticed we were covered alternately in head scarves [the muslim women], baseball caps [me and a lot of the kids] sun hats, rain hats and no head coverings at all. Father Perry's talk was brief and I thought brilliant about this plainly evident diversity. All he said was -- "the differences that I see in this room today God does not see. "

(Memory may have made a change or two in his sentence, but its import and message I'm positive I've recorded accurately.) Anyway, that was it. That was the beginning and end of Father Perry's talk to us. Then we were on to the minister, who spoke for a much longer time but I confess I don't remember any of it. Ellen Lippman, my rabbi, was suffering from a very bad case of laryngitis and couldn't say anything.

But the speakers didn't make a big deal about the protest and solidarity that would mark this year's walk. We were going to leave this charmingly peeling church and walk about a mile over to the site of a proposed mosque, smack dab in the heart of a Russian immigrant neighborhood. Church, mosque, both in Sheepshead Bay. (The church we were originally supposed to meet at had bowed out of the ritual walk for some reason.)

Rabbi Lippman has cautioned me not to see the area as monolithically Russian. Of course it isn't. Happily, there really isn't any place in Brooklyn that you'd say is monolithically anything. You're really forced to be tolerant. (OK OK, not saying that every last Brooklynite is such a paragon.) But the high density of our housing makes us have to ... make room. It's humorous in it way -- how we all, with all our really minor differences are made to cohabit, kind of like first year college roommates. You get along, you complain to yourself, roll your eyes, and somehow, jeez, get along. NOT SO FAST.

One of the first things I saw when I emerged that afternoon from the Sheepshead Bay subway station was a Citibank, with a sign declaring -- Russian, Chinese, Spanish, Italian spoken here. So the Russian neighborhood where we heading was definitely not entirely Russian. And among those Russians, they most likely were not entirely Jewish, in spite of their emphatic insistence. But in whatever ethnic mixture the nabe within a nabe was, they were not looking forward to the mosque being built. They had hired lawyers, in fact, and through sputterings about "traffic" ... "masses of people praying in the middle of the street" ... "a nearby school," they were and are attempting to block its construction.

So we were going to walk calmly along the bay's shore, past large apartment buildings and into this neighborhood, which consists of strips of squat brick row houses. We would end up at the narrow dirt lot, that interrupts this string of homes, where a local Iman is proposing that a small mosque be built. Now, he told me, they had to travel out to Bay Ridge to find a mosque, a trip of about an hour by subway. To placate the community, he'd agreed that there would be no electronically amplified -- or any outdoor -- calls to prayer.

When we wound up at Voorhies Avenue., we were met by a wall of hand-written signs attached to the fences. The residents were out on their tiny lawns glumly watching the head scarves, prelate collars and baseball caps amble towards our obvious destination. I was glad we weren't shouting any slogans, and extremely glad that they weren't saying-- or chanting -- anything either.

And I was glad when a friend from Kolot whispered, " I get it." That is, she got why the neighbors were so upset. I had to make my thinking catch up to my walking companion's. What was Betsy seeing? I peered at our surroundings. We were on an entirely uniform residential block. The houses -- the people themselves -- seemed clustered together. They had come to the curb and they stared at us silently, uncomfortably, mouths closed tightly, for the time being. I surmised that these people shared a language, a background, a history -- an outlook.

After I'd scarfed my cheese sandwich, I crossed the street to meet these neighbors. They were only to happy to talk to me. Well, talk isn't the right verb. They were almost wailing, shouting, pleading, imploring me to, what. To sympathize? To see their point of view? To agree. These are some of the things they said. I'm quoting them in no particular order and the lines don't necessarily have a relationship with one another:

*** A school is on the corner! *** Remember 9-11? *** Not all Muslims are terrorists, but all terrorists are Muslim. ***

Myself: I suggested that we had home-grown, non-Mulsim terrorists as well. We had the Oklahoma City bomber for example.

*That was only one!* someone countered.

*Would you like to have a mosque in the middle of your neighborhood?* someone said, getting uncomfortably close.

I thought maybe I could throw a little levity into the conversation. "Well, this is what Brooklyn is! We're all on top of each other!" I intertwined my fingers and tried to shrug, like 'hey, lighten up,' without saying it.

They were envisioning a horde of men, prostrating themselves in the middle of their block, perhaps many tmes a day. And had that been the future of this new community, I think I too might have been a little wary. But when I returned to *my* side of the street and asked whether there'd be any street prostrations, a Muslim woman replied -- what was the point of building a mosque if you were going to pray outside. They were fully intending to use the interior of the mosque.

The angry neighbors across the street were envisioning harm being done to the children who came to the corner school. And then I remembered. Those who had come from Russia no doubt remembered when some crazed Chechen psychopath had snuck into an elementary school in Belsan one morning and opened fire with an automatic rifle, killing dozens of children and teachers. The carnage was horrible. There had been other incidents. And Russian draftees were sent to Chechenya province, where they were despised and -- if the revolutionary or state-building or sesessionist Chechens -- however you wanted to see it -- could manage it, they were killed.

I'll lump the neighbors into one unified group for a moment in the interest of making a point. See what making a point made me do? Already I know I'm distorting the situation. I'm tempted to go there -- into how I know I'm getting heavy into guesswork. But I know that no one would read this blog if I started writing about how easy it is to be inaccurate. How life almost dictates it. Couldn't hardly talk otherwise. But I wonder if those "irate" neighbors were mistrustful because they saw history and ethnicity through a distinctively Russian lens, with its unique way of dividing people into "the crazies" and "the reasonable. "

I was beginning to see what Betsy had noticed immediately. The task at hand, of inserting a new group, and not just any group, into their midst, involved more than a march of solidarity. One angry woman startled me when she asked, rhetorically perhaps, why hadn't we invited them to join us at the conclusion of our walk, on our dirt plot, home of the proposed mosque? Why weren't they breaking bread with us? Indeed, why hadn't we? Even if she didn't really mean it (guessing again), wasn't our task to begin to break down these invisible, fear-driven divisions, imported intact from somewhere else? You can't do that only through confrontation and marching -- how we might have appeared at first blush to have arrived -- marching. And maybe we seemed massive, I don't know. Though we were pretty much a hodge podge, we might have looked like a weird -- clan, laughing in headscarves and baseball caps over our thick submarine sandwiches.

Lettie Lee Asks a Question, the movie

2010-06-16T19:09:00.001-07:00

As promised -- Lettie Lee asks a Question, the movie. Lettie made it as part of a documentary workshop, which I ran back in Spring, 2007 for survivors of Hurricane Katrina. It may be the only funny Katrina film you'll see.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=paSpP0iCgeI

Danger: Men at Work

2010-06-03T05:17:00.000-07:00

Danger:

Men at Work

My mother and I had a private joke about that oft-displayed warning sign, DANGER: MEN AT WORK placed at the edges of construction sites. I notice that it's not used as much these days, probably because it would violate the Equal Opportunity in Employment laws. And yes, of course, women might do something as stupid as all those guys working for BP, but it's still a good bit of dark humor, I think.

Though, if you pressed me, I think there was some machismo and very traditional boss-man on underling power play at work in the decision to push on through known weaknesses in those systems we've been hearing about ad nauseum -- the blowback prevention system and well casing. Watch the red, terrified faces of the engineers responding to Congressional questioning. They knew. They knew! And they were forced to go on. The BP staffer in command -- I believe someone w/o any real knowledge of things geological and deepwater engineering -- said, in spite of just being told 'this is risky,' DO IT. (that is, drill baby and shut up)

The question tickling my brain insistently, mosquitolike is -- why? Why override the recommendatiaons of the guys who knew? The engineers with their eyes glued to the pressure gauges, water flow rates, oil flow rates, that troubling spot on the monitor, glaring at them like an enlarged wart.... the experts. OK, maybe it wasn't machismo. It was, some will say, pure and simple -- greed. That's black gold down there... I guess it doesn't matter. In the end.

Rudy, who cuts my hair occasionally, and prattles non-stop about his latest projects -- these charming black paper masks, Barcelona and lately geology -- wonders whether we're not disturbing something vital by sucking so much oil out of the earth. Maybe that's what keeps the techtonic plates from crashing into one another he muses. snip. snip. Earthquakes seem common lately. Or is it just a coincidence? We'll find out later. Snip.

He happened to be cutting a client's hair, he told me today, and she happened to be a geologist. From the Middle East. I stopped watching how much hair he was snipping off, to my later regret. 'And I led her through telling me what she does' he went on, clearly proud of his drawing out technique. 'She consults for oil companies. ' It must be great to have them asking you for your advice.' Rudy finally, as he was gelling her bangs, asked this geologist client what she thought about sucking all this oil out of the earth's crust. Was it a risk? She didn't know. And if she doesn't know, who does? Rudy said, gelling my bangs.

That oil isn't there so we can drive SUVs he pronounced. No, it's not. Where do we start? I thought that one entryway into revising 'how we do things' is through, well, the basics. Like attitude. Back to the lowly engineer, doing his job, but without any say-so, authority. Without respect, aauughhh, it sounds so beside the point, complaining about the lack of respect awarded a man on the bottom rung of the ladder, when an ecology is being killed. But maybe it isn't. Ignoring that man had huge consequences. Yes, there were formal precuations that should have been place. Rules. And maybe they will be installed (as always, after the horse has bolted). But there will always be crises, moments when you've gone past the chance for thoughtful, bureucratic review. You're up against it. And there are two, three ten of you. What happened was the failure to really inbibe what was being said, and to respond... The head is cut off from the body. And the body, well, dies.

I recommend you see the film, Secret of the Eyes, (Secreto de los Ojos. From Argentina, it won the Academy Award this year for best foreign film.) where the filmmaker makes a concerted point -- amid several subtle and wonderfully suspenseful, intertwining plots -- about this kind of bullying top down, and poor fellow/drunkards attempting to bully up, and just, well, between and among all these guys, half the time ending in threats and blows. These tipos. In this film, whenever two or more guys talk with one another it's to shrink their supposed opponent to the dimensions of a worm. But moments of friendship -- kind, warm relating between men -- happen, and when they do -- as between the main (Pacino-like) protagonist, Benjamin Esposito and his office-mate, Senor Sandoval -- it's like an oasis, a respite in this otherwise brutal assaulting mode of conversation.

Here's to oases.

!hasta luego

2010-05-21T21:01:00.000-07:00

Lettie during an interview

marching in a Second Line

I haven't written much about Lettie Lee, yet as you can see from the photo on the left, Lettie is one of those people who gets involved.

Or to put another way, Lettie Lee is fully engaged, but unlike many engagists, she does it in an utterly unassuming cheerful way, knowing to the minute what's going on in her Parish, St. Bernard, where she was born and has lived her entire 70+ years. Engaged in working for councilmembers, the sheriff candidate she supports, staffing the election tables.

Whenever I go down for a visit, she gives me a large paper bag to take home, full of unexpected things -- newspaper clippings, beads, travel brochures, tee shirts. She'll give you anything of hers too, if you admire it for longer than a second.

I met Lettie while I was living down in "da Parish" as it's known, where I was drumming up business for a documentary film class I was offering, thinking I'd offer people a way to give voice to their lives, firsthand. Thought it wasn't my job to make a film as an outsider looking in, though that in the end is what I've wound up doing.

In the end a dozen people signed up, maybe two thirds of whom actually came regularly -- all of them hesitant, having come out of curiosity or hope. I'd say without a doubt that they were all overwhelmed. James T, a truck driver came to the introductory session, brimming with religious fervor and but it turned out absolutely no interest in giving voice to anything but the Almighty and James didn't come back, though he lived across the street from me and gave me a huge smile and a wave whenever I walked past. A young woman who spoke in a voice that barely rose above a whisper hoped she'd find a way out of her depression. She never came back. A high school student showed up, who'd had an extra family move in with his into their FEMA trailer. Many came for a class or two, leave, maybe return for another class. About five hung with the full ten weeks. (I should give a huge thank you to the New Orleans Video Access Center, NOVAC, who loaned me four cameras for this workshop. www.novacvideo.org)

While I was wondering whether what I'd begun was really a good idea, Lettie Lee, who I don't think ever owned a camera, called and left a message on my voice mail. Carefully enunciating her words and in a loud voice she asked if she could register for my workshop. I knew this woman! She sounded just like the elderly Jewish women from the Borough Park section of Brooklyn where I used to work as a tenant organizer. As she spelled her name, and repeated her phone number, I could see her neat as a pin home, curtains and windows closed, smell her lingering smells of cooking...

Lettie Lee is not Jewish. She's a descendant of the Islenos, 18th century immigrants from the Canary Islands. The Islenos came to St. Bernard because it was warm, because they could, because it was surrounded by water and they knew how to fish. Proud Spaniards, they became Southern to the core, and they rooted themselves in the Parish, giving names like Nunez and Perez to the roads and schools. Lettie does not keep a neat home, she doesn't like to cook.

Like everyone down in this part of the world, it seems, Lettie has a very long name (Lettie Anne-Marie, something something Lee Henderson...) a few middle names, a name received at Communion, a maiden name, a married name. None are foresaken. But she calls herself Lettie Lee.

When I met her I immediately felt like Lettie was family, from the side that's rock solid. Reliable, emotionally stable. Lettie always looks and sounds as though she's had a good night's sleep. Of course I was wrong. One afternoon, her broad, sunny face relaxed and grew drawn, as she mumbled, barely in earshot -- 'Katrina ruined everything.'

She spoke these words as she was heading into her tin can of a FEMA trailer, where she lived alone. Lettie's husband died in the 60's from an electrical explosion on the job. Lettie makes ends meet now by working as a driver for Enterprise Rent-a-Car. Lettie's trailer was lined up with 150 others in a flat, featureless FEMA trailer park. Dreary, like in refugee camp dreary. How come there was not the smallest amenity? Like -- a bench? These homes were small. You needed a place outside to sit, and to find companionship. The place could use a planter I thought, with geraniums. 'Temporary' rang out from every detail, although the residents of this FEMA park had been there for over a year, so you'd think that temporary wasn't the right attitude on the part of the government who'd doled them out, painfully slowly, often years after the storm. I'm a complainer. Lettie does not often complain. It's a roof over my head she'd say. without a hint of despair as she moved her clothes over so she could get into bed at night (there was no other place to store her clothes, so they were arranged in no particular order on one half of the bed)

The first assignment, that chestnut beloved by documentary teachers -- the vox populi, voice of the people "man on the street" interview. Ask a half dozen people the exact same (single) question.

OK everybody. You're going to work in partners, one person holding the camera, the other handling the social aspect of the project -- deciding on a question, choosing the spot you'll stand to find your populi, the people, and then ingratiating yourself with these total strangers and convincing them to stop for a moment and talk to you. Then you'll switch roles.

I paired Lettie up with a man about the same age, whose name I no longer remember, though I remember his shiny bald head, his sad smile. Like Lettie, unfailingly polite. He called me in the afternoon to apologize. He couldn't accompany Lettie on her assignment that evening. He sounded tired. Because he'd had a heart attack that morning. He was very sorry.

So I went with Lettie that evening, taking the job of cameraperson. The place she wanted to start was her FEMA trailer park. Under a bright street light (I forgot. There was one amenity. Blazing lights which went on at dusk, and flooded the park with light till dawn) Lettie found a security guard. Would he talk to us? I was sure I knew the answer, but Lettie would never assume. She asked would he talk to us. No. He wouldn't answer any questions, especially (as I'd asked) not the name of his employer, whether it was the same outfit -- Blackwater -- that was earning notoriety in Iraq. (It was.)

But we weren't there to investigate. Lettie was there for what she's best at -- coaxing conversation through gentle and genuine interest and a touch of hilarity. We left the park in search of a subject, and we found one after another outside the Walgreens, at the busy intersection of Judge Perez and Paris Road. Who would have guessed that Lettie -- my little old Jewish lady student -- would be so magnificently suited to this kind of activity.

"Do you have a junk drawer?"

I don't think there will ever be a better vox populi question. Not ever.

A couple stopped and happily responded to this apparently innocent query.

Man: 'Yes, it's where I keep keys, socks, photos of old girlfriends ... and many many slides.'

After I go, my hope is that my wife [whose standing right next to him] will go through them.

Wife: I plan on getting remarried.

Lettie: How will you find the time to find someone if you're going through all those slides?

Second interview subject: My FEMA trailer is a junk drawer. Entergy promises to turn on the electricity soon. Hey Herman (calling over to a grizzled toothless man standing by their car, a dozen yards from us) You gotta junk drawer?

Yes ma'am.

Whaddya got in it?

Junk. [grin]

A heavyset man who calls himself Slim pulls a pair of crab forks out of his pocket. I forget why he did this but you can tell he adores his crab forks. Lettie talked to Slim and his eerily cheerful wife, Elsie, until she found out they couldn't return to their home because of some bureaucratic detail -- like no deed for the trailer they'd lived in for their entired married life. I heard of a woman who drowned in the attempt to return home to retrieve her documents.

And so Lettie, as she would unfailingly do every time she encountered a stranger who was overwhelmed by the problems of returning home, offered to help. If I find something out, she tells Slim and Elsie, I'll come find you. Tell me where do you live? She smiles, laughs, Slim and Elsie laugh, roar even.

I promise to post a piece of the interview -- which we edited down to a 15 minute film that won 2nd place in the shorts category at that year's Nunez College - sponsored Pelican D'Or Film Fesitval.

Lettie, of course, gave me the statue of a pelican she received.

2010-05-11T20:22:00.000-07:00

These amazing stockings were spotted at the Broadway-Lafayette station, waiting for the F train.

And this photos has nothing to do with the continuing saga of the Garden of H.O.P.E. (Helping People With Everything) and the work to finish Mama Sue's Garden, my film about three people recovering each in his or her own way from Hurricane Katrina. And St. Bernard Parish.

I just loved this beautiful pose against the grit of the subway. This is where I live, but I'm spending a lot of time looking at the people of my film, subjects, we filmmakers call them, as they were three years ago. Strange, to be living in the recent past like this. They're moving forward, and I'm kind of stuck.

Today I logged a tape of Mama Sue sitting on her front porch -- of a very unfinished house -- dragging away on her cigarette as she explains how different she is from her husband Lou. In two weeks I hope to go into the editing room.

But we're all together in the present, fantacizing about our garden, drafting proposals (one is going off to Post Cereal and I hope you vote for it. It's one of those) and until just two weeks ago, that felt great. Then...I get a call from August, who is called in the proposal .. master gardener. He's some gardener. He really is.

August's voice -- far away, there's a frantic note.

"Call me. Please. " Followed by a lot of inaudible noise. "We might have to postpone this garden." He leaves a second and a third message, before I get the first one.

He's referring to the oil spill that's spreading like a curse across the Gulf of Mexico. Tonight's news doesn't say where the oil is any more. They're talking about whose to blame. When I look at the diagrams of the area, it seems to be heading in the direction of St. Bernard Parish. But they only mention the Chandleur Islands. St. Bernard lies behind them. And unlike those barrier Islands, St. Bernard is inhabited, and fishing is a way of life, not just for the fishermen and their families, but for everyone. One afternoon I remember seeing a boy commandeer a pirogue -- a little wooden motor boat. This one was painted, in intricate henna like designs - out on the 40 aubit canal. I assume he was headed down into the bayous. It was in the afternoon, and I thought -- wow! This is what kids do after school? He looked so calm, centered, strong -- likeHuck Finn. It's a strong belief of mine that all boys at the age of 13 should be sent down the Mississippi in a raft. Keep 'em out of trouble. The scene I remember of this teenage boy looking so utterly serene proves me right I think.

St. Bernard -- where I filmed for four months and where I dove, willy nilly, without much careful thought into the creation of a community garden on empty land. There's so much empty land now -- where houses used to stand. We thought...this is a good idea! We've battled the exhaustion, illnesses, entropy of this parish. It's hard for people to sign on to this project, Lettie Lee keeps telling me. People don't have the energy. They don't have the time But we want them to, all of us -- Mama Sue, World (World is August's nickname, gotten from his DJ days cause he was World-wise) Lettie Lee, David, and me -- even though we really don't know how we're going to accomplish it.

So I called August back and he didn't pick up. I called again, and again, no answer.

I wondered -- is it because I didn't call back soon enough? Is he so bummed out by what's threatening to happen to his Parish (even though he badmouths St. Bernard for being behind the times, a bastion of racism and so on, it's a haven for the likes of World, who spends long stretches of time on the banks of a bayou, pulling one catfish out after another) that he can't even talk about how he feels? He's pissed, I imagine. Or he's just completely depressed. One of these days he'll pick up the phone and I"ll find out.

To have your home and land die twice. That's a good excuse for anything.

2010-02-15T08:46:00.001-08:00

It's been way too long, I know, between posts. Since the last post, Al and I travelled down to Nicaragua. A working vacation, we stayed in a small language school/inn and studied Spanish and toured the countryside with our wonderful hosts. A plug. I must. Escuela de Espanole de Mariposa. (oh dear. I'm sure I've done the grammar wrong on this. My Spanish is still, I'm afriad, very shaky) Paulette Goudge runs the school, and is one of those unusual people who does good things for her community, while seemingly having a wonderful time. She's got an understated British sense of humor, that made me not mind getting up at 7 a.m. for class, knowing she'd be at the breakfast table, chugging her coffee, cigarette in hand, with a sardonic twinkle in her eye. She pays her staff well -- and they taught us well! -- rescues horses, dogs, whatever and they loll about everywhere in her lushly planted mini jungle. (Not the horses. The dogs and cats loll.) And plows whatever profit she earns into the very poor lives of her surrounding neighbors, meanwhile demonstrating to them the benefits of solar energy and chemical toilets. In other words, Paulette really really rocks.

After a week at La Mariposa, we headed down to Granada and then to the Pacific coast.

Our first night in Granada, in the central square, we stopped to listen to a small band of troubadors serenading a little girl on her birthday. Just a little family gathering, and three or four musicians. Her father (I'm assuming) noticed us, and of course noted we were gringos. Was it because of that that he, smiling from ear to ear, sent us via one of his nieces, or whomever, a huge piece of birthday cake each and a cup of soda? This was lucky because that night, as on at least one other, a blackout plunged the city in darkness for about two hours, Without the cake, we would have had no dinner at all. Lack of electricity (and water) throughout the country are doggedly intractable problems.

Despite people all over Nica. adopting American dress and names (One of my teachers was named Jimmy, whose son was Steve, e.g.) it's got roots back in Europe, from a long ago century. Kind of like New Orleans. In fact, I remember telling Al -- Granada has something of the feel of New Orleans. The width of the streets, height of curbs, central square all brought me back to my adopted city. And when a group of churchmen, headed down the street with a statue of Jesus, playing a cacaphonous, dark, dirge-like brass number , reminiscent of a Second Line (but without any of New Orleanian irreverence and hi jinx) the link had been secured.

Next post: We got the land! We got the land! the Garden of H.O.P.E. signed the contract!

more to follow.....

The First Time

2009-12-28T22:09:00.000-08:00

The first time I went down to New Orleans, it was with a common purpose. I travelled down like thousands of others wanting do something concrete, with my own hands, to add a tiny smidgen of relief. It was 2006, and a year, to the week, after Hurricane Katrina. I went down with Al, my husband and comrade, driving from New York, for what we figured would be a week's worth of something physical. Maybe so many people wanted to "get physical" because they [we] were so angry. A new way to give meaning to "if I had a hammer." Because Al is asthmatic, we couldn't sign on with Habitat for Humanity

This is Al. you'll have to tilt your head to the

left, I'm afraid. Can't figure out how to

rotate my pics yet. They came un-done once

uploaded. Beginning blogger, what can I say?

to do house gutting which would put us in contact with vast amounts of mold, dust and unnamed harmful substances. We perused our options on the web. We found an easygoing, come-on-give-us-what you-can little organization called Emergency Communities. We liked what we read. Come chop onions, serve the residents up glop, serve the house gutting Habitat people, bring your own tools, massage tables, hands, songs...They were the next generation hippies? Myself from the Baby Boomer Generation, they sounded like our people. We took our time getting down there, as we wanted to explore some of the South. We stopped in at Lexington, Va, visited the tomb of Stonewall Jackson, a dark tall monument in the local graveyard -- I always go to the gravesites of famous people. Something always...happens -- and checked in on in one of the houses he'd lived in briefly. I asked the guide, who I guessed was retired, and a volunteer, whether Jackson -- who was a widower by then -- had slept with his house slave. Something about the situation there... Him alone, a woman devoted to his care...I would have been surprised if things were otherwise. Mr. Volunteer Guide grew taciturn and hustled us out of the tour so fast. We strolled through a Fiddler's Convention in Galax, Va. If you go, don't bother with the competition performances. The performers seem so nervous to be on stage and not in the comfort of their front porches, They stand stiffly, seem to want to close their eyes to avoid seeing the hundreds of people in folding chairs in front of them, and saw, or painfully plunk their way through three minutes of music they've...rehearsed. You don't want to witness rehearsed fiddling. Go instead to the trailers, where the musicians live and jam, at night. You'll find the same people you saw in the afternoon, but they're alive. They stand around in the light spilling out of the trailers, or prop up a flashlight and in small pick up bands fiddle, strum, sing their hearts out. Requests? Salty Dog! I shouted. It was glorious! From there we drove down to Birmingham and visited the Civil Rights Museum, listened as the congregation of the 16th Street Baptist Church, where the four African American girls had been killed by a bomb nearly fifty years prior, just a block from the Museum, belted forth its Sunday Gospel. Though a latecomer beckoned us inside, we wavered. I should say, Al wavered. I would have dashed through the doors. But Al said, no, we're not meant to be there. Al, a student -- in the depest sense -- of American history knows the story of the Civil Rights movement in complete detail. As full recall as though he'd been present at each march and act of civil disobedience, sit in and strike. Al isn't a tourist or voyeur when it comes to living history. I didn't question his judgement. We stayed outside, as the church doors closed.

Picture of church was intended for this spot. How DO you put a second pic up

with blogger? It's a small, red brick church, on the corner, with a white steeple. It's pretty but normally, you wouldn't look twice.

We drove on, stopping in Montgomery, Ala for the night. Snapped a pic of a really beautiful monument outside the office of the SPLC (Southern Poverty Law Center) -- and I'll get that up too, once I've mastered the system -- and then headed for lunch at this famous diner/restaurant in Mobile -- lot of b&w photos of previous owners, you know the format. Then headed due West on Rte 90 right on the edge of the Gulf through Missippipi, where out to the left we saw nothing but white sand where dozens of gambling resorts had once stood. We detoured around Bay St. Louie where the bridge was still down a year later, and on the sixth day drove into New Orleans.

one for fox, one for crow

2009-12-28T04:45:00.000-08:00

Portrait of August: sometime in the Spring of 2007

Violet, La.

August had come through Katrina decently, with the help of Georgiana's car. Georgiana is the woman he lives with, down on Guerra Drive.

Decently is a strange word to use of course. But I mean it in the sense that the travels, which they could never have afforded to undertake without the largesse of strangers and and the money supplied by FEMA, was an eye opener to him. Many times I heard him talk about just how nice the people in Beaumont, Texas were. I think it taught him firsthand the lesson that he was aching to learn -- that hospitality and generosity abound in certain places in this country. According to August, just not in St. Bernard.

August's penchant is for the countryside ... and solitude. It's not for his home town of New Orleans, cities, people. And I get it. St. Bernard, for all its stuckness, is where you'll still find traces of the old Louisiana -- the independent fisherman, trapper and rough builder. Everyone joked that St. Bernardians were a good group to get wholloped like they did, cause they're "handy."

Anyway, St. B. It's flat as a pancake, but as you head South towards the Gulf, and the Parish dead ends at a place called "End of the World" right at the Gulf of Mexico, you'll see nothing but an emerald expanse of marshland, crisscrossed by bayous and canals. Egrets in droves, something that looks like a cross between a duck and a heron, and those wonderfully droopy beaked ibis.

Boys head out on pirogues (old wooden rowboats) on weekends to fish in these water-roads. Alligators course through them. Deer, coon, rabbit on the banks provide ready food, (and these were welcome to the refugees of Katrina who'd dared to come home.) I was startled very early one morning, to see a man skinning a coon in the middle of the road. Alligator meat is a delicacy served up at weekend barbecues.

So August loves the southern end of St. Bernard. I don't know what he means by the "Fish Pond," but that's where he heads on most days he can't find a day job and I'm sure it's somewhere on a bayou down in that green nothingness.

Three years after "the storm," the brick house he and Georgiana lived in on Guerra Drive had been rebuilt and their FEMA trailer towed away. The government had left the cinderblocks that had supported the trailers behind and August found the perfect use for them. He took groups of four or eight into the backyard and arranged them into small enclosures. He'd drive down to some farmers he knew and collect horse manure and fold it into the tiny plots and inside each one he planted seedlings -- and occasionaly seed right into the "serl." His okra, tomatoes, mellaton (a Louisianan fruit I've still never tasted) broccoli, cauliflower, mustard greens grew up under his care tasty and almost always abundantly and strong. He spent lots of time with them, even, he told me, singing to them. He quotes me an Indian saying and I take every opportunity to repeat it. "One for Fox, One for Crow, One to Rot, one to Grow" (an Indian saying) Seemed like he's figured out all you need to know to get an organic garden going.

So August has been chosen to be the Master Gardener of the garden that we're starting. He wants nothing to do with the planning of the garden -- how we actually get it going, and more on that roller coaster of a trip in a later post, or how we raise the money for it -- or nuthin' and there's some resentment about that. He doesn't want to go to seminars or workshops. I nearly killed him when he opted to not go hear Will Allen --master (Afr.-Amer) urban farmer up in Minneapolis -- speak about composting when he came to the Lower 9th for a fundraiser. The Lower 9th, August! It's not the hated Arabi! No, I didn't actually say that. But that's who he is. One of those "I want to be alone" types. Somehow ya gotta respect it.

August, aka World

2009-12-21T12:12:00.000-08:00

Two days later...the blizzard ended, of course. The clouds blew over, revealing blue skies.

I stirred from a dream this morning, in which two of the subjects of my film were talking quietly to one another. This would not happen in reality. August is a 63 yr old African American man living in a rundown section of Violet, which is a community in St. Bernard Parish, La and Mama Sue is a chatty, voluble woman, 55, with too many problems. She really has them all, I'm afraid. Just one I feel at liberty to share -- her daughter is due to be married New Year's eve in a bright red dress, and Mama Sue can't afford to get herself there -- Phoenix, Az from NOLA (new orleans) is a hefty ticket next week. So April will, what, walk herself down the aisle?

But that's not the least of it! The woman carries just a ton of burdens. Sue wants to talk to a receptive ear -- who doesn't -- but it aint gonna be August's ear.

Mama Sue is white and I can see how race plays a large role in the direction of friendship. Sue unburdening herself to August?! Literally -- in my dreams.

August -- aka World. Down in Violet, the black men of a certain age have street names, known only to each other. "World" must have an ironic tinge, because August hadn't ever left the state of Louisiana until Katrina demanded it. He and his partner, Georgiana, spent the better part of the three months after K travelling to Belmont TX and then settling in Lafayette, La. for three months.

I met August one evening when I was walking Violet -- my dog -- down Guerra Drive, one run down, down home long street that stretches from the 40 orbit canal to the Mississippi. It's about a mile long. I was living at the corner of Guerra Dr. and East Judge Perez. (You'll want to find out who Judge Perez was. Later. It's another irony that the black community of St. Bernard Parish straddles E. Judge Perez Boulevard.)

So walking Violet (my foster catahoula) down Guerra, stopping to say 'hi' and wave to my neighbors, everyone one of whom spent their evening outdoors, escaping the heat of their FEMA trailers, I met August and his friend Phil, aka Pipe (so named I guess because he's tall and very thin). Like everyone else, they were sitting on garden chairs, imbibing beer and chewin' the fat.

August and Pipe liked dogs, and I'd stop to let mine run with a neighbor's dog in front of his trailer. I'd hoped to interest the two men in joining my workshop -- making documentary films. But, August was quick to tell me that he wouldn't travel up to the Arabi, in the Community Center, where my workshop was held. A shake of his head, and large knowing smile. Nooo, I'm not goin up there. He didn't explain, but I understood.

Old habits die hard. Habit, though? Or old, historically-born, legitimate fear. Twenty years ago, or even less, a black person "knew his place" and Arabi, or Chalmette, just South of Arabi, or Meraux, further south, were *not* his place. A black man in his right mind wouldn't think twice...

But now, changes are in the wind. August has told my camera how much he'd like to be able to walk into white domains. Black and white shouldn't be in different parts of the City, different bars. Georgiana, his partner, disagreed firmly -- no the two races shouldn't party together -- then later said she regretted saying that.

We're -- all of us, Mama Sue, August and a couple more -- working hand in hand to develop a community garden down there. It's called Garden of H.O.P.E. which stands for Helping Other People With Everything. The name was borrowed from a now defunct group of volunteers, the most anarchic, disorganized, sometimes macho, free-spirited to the nth, and as warm-hearted a group as you'd hope to find. Anyway, they may reappear in my tale -- I hope so -- to come down for a long weekend, to help build the garden. The garden will be the second thread in this blog, along with the film, which soon, soon, I promise, I'll get to.

After returning from my walk in the Park today, I called August. We need to test the soil in the two lots we've been offered by Mr. Dean, the millionaire who owns land all over the Parish and who has one generous, eccentric heart. We can have one, and eventually more, of his one acre lots. One lot has a high level of zinc, but it's in a beautiful spot. It backs up against the Mississippi levee and the towers of freighters can be glimpsed travelling up and back down to the Gulf. You can't get a more romantic location I sigh, every time I see it. I try to will the zinc away. It's probably in a tiny, localized spot, I pronounce, hopefully. Mr. Dean, who owns the land, is almost incensed. How can his land be flawed? I want to see the report on that he tells me in his clipped, authoritative way.

August depends on me to make phone calls to "the man." If I were to give him the phone number of the Ag-extension contact in the next Parish over, Plaqueminnes, who'll handle the soil sample, he'd demur. There'd be a confusing, garbled excuse.

Plaqueminnes is maybe even worse in terms of its history than St. Bernard. Judge Leander Perez was based down in that Parish. If I were Afr. American, I can tell you, I'd steer clear of Plaquemmines. The things I heard on my first visit to Plaqueminnes. Unh uh. Unbridled, 50's -era racism. Or would I? I don't know. What is the extent of white racism against black? And the other way. I've heard stories about broken windows, and taunts from Mama Sue's daughter in law. August's friends tell him it's not safe for a black man to attempt what he's doing -- work an acre down there by the Belle Chasse Ferry, the crossing point into Plaqueminnes. August blows them off. It's left that I'll make the call to the the Ag-Extension and August will call when he's collected the samples.

So, ha!, August and Mama Sue were talking when I stirred this morning, readying myself to get to the park before off-leash hours ended. I miss New Orleans when I'm in Prospect Park. Joggers, cyclists and other dog walkers pass and we don't make eye contact, let alone exchange the hearty 'hi, how are yous?' I'd be graced with on my travels up and down Guerra Drive. True, no one walks a dog in Violet. They're free to wander the streets, but mostly, they're tied up. They're guard dogs. I must have been the "northern novelty," carrying plastic bags with me on my daily walks with Violet to the levee.

in Prospect Parks' field

2009-12-20T09:52:00.000-08:00

My first post should be my introduction. So allow me ... I'm a documentary filmmaker which is to say I've finished a film and am working to complete the second -- it's a Katrina film -- and this one has opened up a world that has as they say expanded horizons.

But before getting into what happened, why I'm bursting with questions and have lots of problems and wonder how to go about negotiating the intersection of life with film...let me tell you that the snow that fell on Prospect Park last night was nothing short of miraculous.

I headed out with my two dogs -- catahoula curs and if you don't know what one is, google it. They're beautiful, and very energetic dogs. They're not recommended for city life. I live in a city (Brooklyn) I wind up walking a lot, which is probably good for me.

Together with Princess JO and Violet, I headed into the onrushing blizzard, and into the Long Meadow of Prospect Park. Although it was night, the dome of the sky was -- glowing with the falling snow. The sounds of the streets had gone quiet, the buildngs that look down on the park had disappeared.

I had a Monk/Coltrane concert on my iPod. You know how sometimes the music is the perfect accompaniment for what you're looking at? Bach, eg is perfect for a crowd of pedestrians crossing the street. But now, Monk and Coltrane had melded into just.the.right music for the melancholy beauty of the snow in the night. The dogs were subdued (for a change) I dropped their leashes and I started to dance. Just me -- out in the vastness. I even started to really dance.

My first post ever,