August is a trickster – a deception. It is the last full month in summer, and with humidity laden upon its territory it can hold its own with July. However, for people like me who dread the sixth floor pre-heated oven state, it offers the beginning of relief. Gone are the 101º spikes and heat domes that test survival itself.

The Earth’s reliable and eternal tilt pushes the North Pole away from the sun as it has been doing since late June when the summer solstice declared an end to the spring. August may go from 94º by a mid afternoon doldrum to a breezy 58º at night, giving one the assurance that this fall preview will actually lead to something breathable once more.

Never mind that August brings the potential for violent weather – even minor tornadoes to East Coast cities. It’s good news auguring much needed change. The cool is returning, with days that feel autumnal until one notices only green leaves and flowers.

Shadows begin to lengthen, bringing with them that eerie sensation of time passing around the calendar. Haven’t we been here before? Did we think we wouldn’t arrive? Never mind the fantasy of the cool and dry (which is always accompanied by encroaching darkness), given that the perfect combination is always fleeting. It’s always now, and now always brings that weary sensation of survival, no matter how crystalline the atmosphere or how dank.

August is a tease, where the sun now vanishes below its escarpment an hour earlier, yet still has the potential to heat us and slow us down. It’s still summer – a diet we almost want to keep. Interestingly, traditional astronomical fall occurs during the last third of September, while meteorological fall is actually September 1^st, so that while our official record states that our change of season happens as October nears, we already feel summer’s end a lot sooner – hence that “last weekend of summer” which is proclaimed every Labor Day. Something leaves us that weekend – that sensation of all-is-stopped and that pressures and schedules are but shadows of the future.

We are very quickly retaking our positions at the battlements of life.

Steam, heat, and long days. One wears a July day – even a July night, like a bear rug. Late in the day - heat lightning to the West and to the North, but nothing overhead.

I dread the coming of July throughout the remaining seasons, for of all the months this is the one for which one has the fewest defenses. Imagine an apartment under the roof and sidewalks down below reflecting the white-hot sun. Air conditioning can’t compete with the high dew point where any bodily coverage brings a shvitz, and without it one suffers late night chills. We may as well be planted in the ground, to await rebirth in October when work can again commence.

Tempers are gathered in tight groups. Joints complain of gravity. The body heat of fellow travelers makes one sit or stand bolt still. Don’t even breathe. Pull out the ice water later. Search for a breeze. The AC on board is too good, but it chills only in spots. Windows frost up. Now out into the station, where steam takes on a new definition. All the showering of that morning is gone. Keep civility; no fights, no contests, just – out. The street brings brilliant sun and a kind of relief as it is incrementally drier, though the air still weighs like a canvas flag.

At work day’s end (when the thorough cooling of the workplace begins to waft away) one enters the apartment that no machine can cool until the sun is truly tucked behind buildings across the street. The roof, walls, and floors have all been absorbing one-hundred-four-degree heat throughout the day, as that is the exterior temperature my outdoor thermometer remembers. The thermometer on the living room wall reads 93º at least once during Julius Caesar’s month.

Yet July is the time for summer camp and outdoor music festivals – even airshows. Were it not for possible heat stroke, it’d more fun. In Newport, July is where the crowds attend open air concerts in suits and ties, assuring themselves that the evening breezes are actually cool as they silently drift into sweaty dazes at The Breakers.

By late July comes a meridian of hope – that advent of mid-Summer and its slow journey toward the crunchy mesa of Fall and desired relief.

July demonstrates just how close we are to that medium-sized star, and we are indeed alive, if only stuck to the couch.

Dear Readers,

The tumblers of my thoughts keep on turning, never leaving a clean line. Until I can draw something out of them, I continue to acclimate to familiar bedroom air conditioning (which, in January, seems years off), and I take a green leaf from the book of here and now and note how good it all is.

Shadows at noon are never smaller than they are this week. The air is still mainly hot and fine, before Gulf air and its related Bermuda highs smack our atmosphere onto our bodies like seaweed wraps. By mid-July, January seems years away, but here in June we can still breathe and even enjoy the new heat and the long days and early light. In New York the sunset time hovers at 8:31 for days, while the morning provides first light in later increments of a minute or so every day. The wobble is already taking us back to winter.

In June even the breezes tickle. Pant legs shuffle and slap like flags in a gale. Colors by day are so intense as to burn. Shade is still cool, and the contrast is almost lunar. The continent is still celebrating the shift, still surprised at the familiar return of the verdant overture to the more strenuous weeks of heat and humidity that are pure summer. June is still relinquishing spring, which was our bridge to winter when the light gradually opened up. Waves of northern air still flood our nights.

While it is still this month of June, take the sun as it comes. Figure that your phone screens are made unreadable for good purpose. Watch anything else, like the vanishing lines of your walk into blooms, new forests of leaves, and air which is still sent down from the provinces and the Great Lakes. June is busting out all over. You may quote me.

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Calendar years are a bit burdensome. The calendar grid falls over life in a way that doesn’t really correspond to true beginnings and proper endings. Space and time doesn’t even really know when it’s Saturday, but we in our procession imagine that the week is actually ending. We are ending something and beginning something else. Therefore, the idea of “mindfulness” (the rage of which is kind of ebbing now) is the one true thing we have - now. We have a now which one we may miss in a little while. The mindfulness craze was and is all about holding on to that reality for a moment. It’s miracle of now.

In a related spirit, were I to ascribe to a list of wishes (rather than resolutions) moving forward, as we are still, right now, in the dead of Winter (a naturalistic term if ever there were one), I would look for

• Less smartphone time. Oh, if only I could convince people that ‘now’ is not just significant but that ‘here and now’ is. The saddest procession is watching the slow-gait-with-phone-in-hand, providing an apparent fantasy world that mussels people coming the other way, impedes them on the stairs, and browbeats them on the subway, as both elbowing and bright screen setting means that this phone is the center of all here and now. Go away. You don’t even need to read a book, but please develop some thoughts!

• Less phone time while in the agora. Find a secluded corner for your phone conversations, if they are that important. Give others’ ears and inner thoughts a rest.

• Less panic in the herd. Follow fewer crowds - particularly online. Again - it’s not all in the phone. The world isn’t really a series of personalized news feeds. So much is noise, and that is noise designed to keep thoughts at bay. On the other hand, there is reaction, and that goes straight to the bottom line. There is even a clothing line with that title. React less, and consider more.

• Do read. Read classic literature. If Bleak House by Dickens is too long for you, enjoy a chapter of it. Pull out a brilliant short story by Chekhov; read the first pages of Sense and Sensibility and recognize contemporary attitudes while traipsing about Georgian England. Find Fahrenheit 451 and see if you can put it down. Many of the older novels and works are online for free, but try the book version and see how uncluttered print without interruption can be. Find a book that becomes your whole world for a while.

• Do write. Write by hand. Write a long letter to someone. Use a real envelope and stamp and surprise someone. Send a postcard. Use the US Mail while it still exists and delivers! Write a journal, and setup a time to add to it, daily.

• Smile at a stranger on occasion. Smile at a cashier. Make a joke. Acknowledge that life passes on like a Train à Grande Vitesse or the Shinkansen. It may as well be worth it, and you will remember it.

• Create order where you can. Walk up the right side of the stairs. Hold the door. Let them out first. Make it possible for everyone to get through the day while suffering less.

These ideas pale in comparison to what’s happening in war zones and areas of public discord, protest, and violence. Yes - those things are happening, terrible things, but if you’re among the lucky to simply have a day, have it, and have it in the best of health for a new year.

I’ll see you soon.

It’s not just the experience of leaping over crowds waiting in long lines. It’s much more of what happens once inside the familiar trappings of the museum, past the Bell-47 helicopter suspended from the ceiling and the gigantic two-story installations of contemporary creators, plus the video screens comprising entire walls, attempting to shock and challenge.

I walk or ride up to the fifth floor, as I did on my last visit, and eventually see some of the most celebrated sculptural and painterly art ever produced in the known world. At times, on some visits, I spend more time watching the watchers – seeing where they stop, seeing what they capture with a device and move on, sometimes noting where they put down and rest in front of a work.

Finally, my own dialogue emerges where I realize I’m standing before an actual Picasso or Brancusi, de Chirico, or Van Gogh. On this last visit I stared at the swirls of paint in Starry Night, during a momentary lull where otherwise deep crowds might intercede. There it was in all its still-new brightness, colors as fresh as on the day they were applied. The protective non-reflective glass was doing its best to vanish completely, helping the illusion that one could reach forward and feel the texture of the paint.

I said to myself, “I’m looking right at a Van Gogh painting”, remarking at the stunning availability of this and other works, if I would only walk over to see them.

Back at work, I generally would not have the opportunity to look right at a Van Gogh painting. That painting, brighter than any possible reproduction, took me back to a state of order in its stillness containing its vibrant kinetic will. This is why they all had flown in from around the world and why they were so keen to capture it in some way – to take the magic back home with them. I could walk the magic back to work ten blocks away.

When I did get back to my job, I could feel the transformation of possibility. I had seen particular works arranged in a room as not before – famous artists influenced in a certain era by the others, only later to break free in direction, never to return to that point of singularity. It was frozen communication but contemporary in feeling, so well-preserved, as in the moment I stepped into the room. “All of this – available to me?” I thought. It was like arriving in the great city anew. As a musician in dance education, that day I was aware that inspiration was a little easier to find and trust, thanks to the combing and liberating quality of great art.

This makes, as I often ruminate, a case for the inner life – the imagination. The galleries in a great museum, per one of the hackneyed terms of the day, are “curated”. They are carefully prepared. One may notice that framed works on walls are placed evenly throughout the room. In some rooms, as in the case of the longest waterlily rendering of Claude Monet (41 feet) a single work may be the only thing on the wall. That allowance of space is precious in a city that doesn’t allow much space or even the ability to stand and watch.

In preparing to write this article, I looked through my image library and found a photograph I had taken in 2012 at MoMA. It was of a “Self Portrait” by Charles Sheeler, painted in 1923. Sheeler liked industrial themes as with his “Stacks in Celebration” from 1954, which I had enjoyed at the Dayton Art Institute when I lived in that city. Here was something intimate coming from an artist I liked.

Going back to the photograph, I was surprised to realize that I had inadvertently superimposed myself into the work. What I initially thought was the subject of the self-portrait was in fact me, holding up a small camera. The artist, I noticed only a moment later, was standing to my right, even overlapping me. The non-reflective glass had deftly inserted me into the picture. Because of the dark and light hues, I only appeared in the window pane, just like Sheeler in his smock, suit, and tie. I couldn’t have been happier to be seen in his work, if only for a visit.

In summary, a good museum (even a great one) like the Museum of Modern Art can provide a sense of calm, order, and control, even through displays of chaos and disharmony. The galleries are places of safety where thought and imagination are the principal commodities. Your inner thoughts meet the arts’ inner thoughts. And nobody tells you to move along. What could be better?

Unexpectedly, it was on a recent Subway ride downtown that I started flashing on memories of eating on a plane. Hard as it may be for me to believe, at age twelve I remember counting up the number of flights I had been on in my life. I could still remember them. It came to forty or so. I think I had even promised myself that I’d keep a running tally flying forward, but that fell away decades ago. The memory in focus, however, was food. Eating on a plane was always a particular joy in the age of boys wearing suits and stewardesses accompanying them to the cockpit to see all the dials and controls glowing in the dark, and even welcoming remarks of the crew.

I was that boy, and I loved it. To add to my joys, there were junior pilot wings made of shiny metal, decks of playing cards, cocktail stirs, and my favorite color form boards. Beyond even that was the food, and it wasn’t just the idea of eating it so much as having it set down in front of me, with foil-topped dishes, metal flatware (of course with logos), and the triangular Melamine teacup-in-saucer. What I recall is that like at any good Automat, the food was great.

Food service left a charming glow of memory, particularly on TWA flights which were sometimes wedded to early memories of the super modernistic Ero Saarinen TWA Flight Center and its kinetic arrival and departure board. On one afternoon I remember sitting at the mezzanine restaurant with my mother, watching brand-new 747s nosed up to the windows like corralled horses. On Pan Am flights there were odd florescent reading lamps embedded in seats. On Eastern Airlines, playing cards were handed out in stacks. I digress, however, as this is a food reverie.

The memories I was unearthing were more recent recollections. Some were from the days of my own travels, having worked for fourteen years or so for a global corporation. Those flights meant a sort of a spiritual upgrade, with every kind of perk. And then there were the earlier flights on my own that must have started the whole memory exercise. Those were the flights home. Piedmont Airlines had an operation hub at the Dayton International Airport, and it offered non-stops to New York that were particularly comfortable and cheap.

I was on that train finding myself suddenly enumerating food items I used to get in those flights. That included little waxen Bon Belle cheese wheels and Walker’s Shortbread. I saw in my mind the cloth napkin and the branded extruded plastic flatware which I’d always take (forgetting a drawer full of them in a Queens apartment once). Then there were the little wrapped rectangle cookies. What were they? …Ah yes – Biscoff. It was then that I started tearing up. It was unexpected, but I guess it was the vision of a flight during times lost going back to see my parents and aunt when they were all there. Eventually, and far too early, it became only my father and my aunt. I was twenty-five when she went away. Yes. Biscoff.

Food is always that great act of kindness for animal and man, and it leaves its memory – even at 40,000 feet. I started writing down the references. I remembered the Pan Am charter flight to West Germany in 1979 from JFK. 180 high school kids and I were doing our AFS (exchange service) summer program excursion – a more exciting prospect there could not have been. I have a tape from that journey (a second one having been burgled in Brooklyn years later), and that includes a Pan Am gate agent announcing to our group that teriyaki steak awaited us on the plane, to a rousing television audience “oooh!” from the crowd. The mature and very German stewardess (yes – still called that) on board later informed us that tray tables had to be down for meal service “otherwise, vee gonna pass you by.”

Then there was the halting way my colleagues were addressed on a later college trip to West Germany, where the food aboard a much less comfortable airline (Capital Air) consisted of veal or lasagna. Many who requested veal were told “Vee are out of veal. Lasagna!” What arrived was truly the first miserable airline food I ever had – given the gift of heat while swaddled in shrink wrap. Capital landed permanently three years later.

I was happy about one last Pan Am adventure. Sometime in the late 80’s I needed to get to Tufts University to audition for a dance musician job. The tape I sent had been well liked, and Tufts agreed to buy me a ticket on the Pan Am Shuttle (competitor, interestingly, of the Eastern Airlines Shuttle). That airline, happily for me, flew out of the Marine Air Terminal at LaGuardia - one of the great art deco remnants of early commercial flight. I got to see the WPA murals and leave from an intimate 1930’s terminal.

On board there was a gift box for each passenger, which included a bottle of Samuel Adams Boston Lager. This was both my first beer on a plane and my first Sam Adams. I’ve since been a fan. In a little while I found need for some buffering given the steep and rapid descent into Boston – a city crowded from the street to the air. Though the round trip was a nice adventure, I stayed in New York.

On some domestic flights, I ordered the kosher meal, which seemed to be twice as substantial as the regular meal (lot of white meat chicken) and always good, with a little bit of rabbinical love of inspection on the box. I think of airline food standup jokes, and I will say that I never agreed with them, only there was never enough of it. On trips to Japan, halfway over the Pacific, I’d awaken – padded down with sleep mask, blanket, and Bose headphones, freezing at 42,000 feet, feeling true gastric emptiness. After a fitful wait there would finally be the aroma of breakfast from a convection oven, whose trail was like the oft-seen cartoon hand beckoning the hungry with an imagined entreating forefinger. Please let there be breakfast.

My romance with airline food started to come to a halt with my last flights across the country. Coach fares no longer got you treated like the little 1960’s kid in a double-breasted blazer. On a non-stop to the coast a dozen years ago the attendant brought me a pale plastic-wrapped, deli sandwich. Only this for three thousand miles? I told her I’d gladly pay for a full meal, which were being enjoyed in the two more expensive sections of the plane. Mockingly, she told me that I’d simply have to spend more money for a ticket next time. Well, thanks. I won’t close with that, though.

About 16 years ago I had to catch a connecting flight in Chicago to Seattle with no time even to buy a snack, which was a horrible thought as the flight was likely post-dinner. An attendant, a steward, a hero, call him what you will, informed me that no meal service was ahead but that he’d find me some biscuits, butter, and honey, which he did in a large pile. I felt like a refugee from distant shores finally being offered a sustaining morsel. Such riches! The rest of the flight was spent talking to a man bound for Microsoft, who explained all about new phone lenses that focused like a human eye.

And there it was – a glance at an ad on the train brought back a train of memories and the feeling of being taken care of.

==//==

A little while ago, I left a Facebook comment on an Ohio art gallery’s post of an oil painting depicting an Arab woman cradling a swaddled form – seemingly that of a dead child. According to commentary by the artist, the image was inspired by a photograph of a young woman named Samia al-Atrash (a journalist) who, I have since discovered, had apparently experienced a bombing raid by the Israel Defense Forces in Rafah in October of 2023, weeks after the bloody Hamas incursion into Israel.

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I’m now twice as old as I once was. Consequently, I’m carrying around many years of memorized brick-a-brack and facts - a veritable history of reference.

The idea that the day starts with a bang is greatly exaggerated. I decide that 7:10am is a good time to rise. I make every effort to walk with a certain articulation of my feet, making certain that I don’t avoid tending to the area below my vision where tragedies happen. Even the accidental kicking of a shoe can bring on the pain of surprise or the surprise of pain. I get to the kitchen and start the fuel – the coffee. A gift from a neighbor has resulted in a grinder/brewer that produces a mug of coffee from whole beans in about 2 minutes. This allows me to start up the computer and have at the intellectual challenge of New York Times puzzles – the famous mini-crossword, Wordl, and Connections (which usually waits until the afternoon – part of a habit from my bifurcated days as a staff musician where I’d take the subway home in the middle of the day, solving it the puzzle onboard).

This morning, while addressing the uncovering of mystery words, and experiencing a coffee high, thoughts start racing: associations of the past, analyses of the news or of movies and old TV shows – maybe even a book that proved too sour in its direction. The oddity today was the way my brain had of stacking connections of its own, pertaining to well-known people. I think of a congressional panel – an oversight committee where a certain secretary of state was recently being effectively grilled by a famous senator – oh what IS her name? Terrible. The name isn’t simply there on the table to pick up. I have to put in my call slip at the research library of my mind and ask who she is. Ah! Warren. It’s Warren. But which Warren? I realize I haven’t gone over this name in any rational way lately; whatever underpinnings produces that reference is still being searched by the librarian of whom I have confidence – the librarian who knows that the stacks are complete but not yet fully activated.

Meanwhile, I think of the movie I’d seen the night before – all about the Blacklist. Who was the young actress (unrelated to this movie) who was scuttled by the list for twelve years? No answer from my librarian. Okay – the associations. I know She played Mrs. Colbert on In the Heat of the Night, but who was the deputy in that movie? That’s gone. Well, she was in Shampoo as well, opposite – gosh, again, a blank.

As all this is grinding forth, the librarian has started to produce the answers I am seeking. Warren is Elizabeth! That’s who knocked around the secretary of state. And just as this is causing me to shake my head with wonderment, I remember that it was Warren Oates who briefly assisted that mystery actress. Guess what the Shampoo answer was -- Warren Beatty!

Somehow, my mind has decided that it is play time. From the mystery of one Senator Warren’s first name, I create two new mysteries of people whose first name is Warren. And still, the name of the actress playing opposite two of them is missing. That name comes hours later in the sunny afternoon, after I have long given up fretting about forgetting it. In comes Lee Grant. It had probably never occurred to me that Lee isn’t that common a name for a woman. Without the nascent references to any onomatopoeic images, the name just floats in its own private pond until it is moored to something more readily available. I do this a lot with certain names – particularly those I have already convinced myself that I never remember. I have to craft references that eventually become invisible, so that the name simply rises up when I need it.

I leave the mental library after a while and pursue a more comforting world where memory struggle is, well, forgotten.

Las Noticias del Mundo:

Not to be outdone by Mount Etna and its recent eruptions,

Pompeii and neighboring Herculaneum, ancient Roman towns, in a freak act of nature, were completely buried once again by volcanic ash and pyroclastic flows from a recalcitrant and recently-erupted Mount Vesuvius which famously erupted in 79 AD, burying the Roman towns. Some of the archeological recovery workers, caught in the explosions, will now be represented by new plaster casts - the first to appear on the sites in 2000 years.

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Alexa Poetry Slam

In an unexpected twist, Amazon is changing the way people speak to their Alexa devices. In a concern for security, proving that you are a human, users will now have to address their devices in verse. An example:

Dear Alexa, make it right,

Please, for all, turn out the light.

Hi Alexa, how’s your cheer?

Find a pub that serves my beer.

Alexa, Alexa, shopping spree,

Buy me pods and frozen Brie.

For more serious poetry fans, Prime users will be able to use free verse.

Alexa, tables of material delights,

Procured from clouds

Our ones, our zeroes in infinite pickets

Of yea and nay

Availing our need for goods

That fill our closet and our cup

Please order toilet paper and free-trade decaf.

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All Mobile Revue!

In the name of innovation and technology, and as a way of capturing new audiences, classic plays are coming to Broadway as all-cell productions, where the actors text one another on-stage. Barefoot in the Park, The Mad Woman of Chaillot, and Picnic will be among the featured plays in the series, where audiences will receive a group text from each actor, with each line. In addition, the stage production will be streamed so that members of the seated crowd can see the play without looking up.

Intermission will feature coffee, sponge cake, and a vast charging outlet. Each show will begin with a reminder to turn your cell phone on.

===

More thoughts, as they accumulate.

A few days ago I was watching a BBC documentary on the life and music of Mozart. The story eventually arrived at his very famous (sehr bekannt) Serenade No. 13 in G, K. 525, usually referred to as “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik”. Often when this piece is mentioned, I think back to the 45 rpm record I received from my father when I was a child. Actually it was part of a small stack of classical 45s encompassing a range of works. I played these discs throughout my young years, gradually damaging them on inferior record players. No matter. Most of them were German and Dutch monaural pressings, owing to our location in Aruba – a Dutch island. My father managed the one large hotel resort there. I was told that at some point these records had been used as background music in the dining room or maybe the casino.

The serenade, in four movements, was divided between sides 1 and 2 of the record (performed by Fritz Reiner and the Chicago Symphony). I knew nothing of the origin of the music – when it had been composed or possibly even who composed it as I wouldn’t have been able to read the label. Just the same, I intimately knew the sound of the work by the age of 5 or so. It was deeply set in my mind and seem to represent some elegant place in the universe that in some way seemed to float. I saw patterns and forms in my head. It didn’t matter that the music had been composed about 180 years before it reached my record player. To me it simply existed and it became one of my most regal possessions.

Just having these records, being an only child, I had many occasions to play them. The discs included excerpts on a Fontana 45 of the Tchaikovsky piano concerto no 1, the Brahms Hungarian Dance No. 6, the Soldiers’ Chorus from the opera Margarete (aka Faust) by Gounod, L’Angelus de la Mer by G. Goublier and L. Darocher, Ave Maria by Franz Schubert, another Faustian soldiers’ chorus track, and the Barcarolle from Tales of Hoffman by Offenbach. There was also Solveig’s Song by Grieg (which I particularly loved) and a lush rendition by Dutch Cortot disciple Marinus Flipse of the C sharp minor prelude by Rachmaninoff. Another Philips 45 offered Johan Strauss Jr’s Emperor Waltz followed by Land of Hope and Glory by Elgar. There was yet another Philips 45 of the Stenka Rasin (aka Volga Volga) sung by a huge chorus and then a track of an uncredited piano solo (Marinus again?) of the Waltz no. 1 by Brahms.

Two more American 45s offered Kostelanetz’s excerpts of Puccini’s La boheme on sides 1 and 2. I remember that the introduction sounded like impossibly complex music to me, seeming to swim into oceanic folds of sound – astounding, really. Lastly, there was a Capitol 45 of Addinsell’s Warsaw Concerto played by the Hollywood Symphony Orchestra with Leonard Pennario at the piano and Carmen Dragon conducting. Most of this material had been recorded in the 1950s.

What a collection! They informed a rather romantic notion of the world while connecting me in a styllized sense to the world my father, a refugee, had left behind in Europe. There may have been some conscious intent in my receiving these records, as both of my parents wanted me to absorb art and music – actually, just about anything. Well I did. This emphasis on classical music is likely why the popular music of my time took longer to get to me. The jazz I knew was actually from live performances in the hotels, but a true understanding of that genre had to wait until my first trip to Europe.

Classical music had also come through a good pair of headphones. When I was about six, my father rigged up our Braun stereo to play through a SONY 4-track tape recorder, and one afternoon he offered to let me listen to something. “Be careful; it might be loud for you,” was his warning. I eagerly awaited the loud sound and heard the beginning of Beethoven’s “Kreutzer Sonata” with Heifetz, sounding like the violin was inches from my head. If anything, it was loud enough and also rivetting.

Eventually, as one might expect, classical music had a lot to do with my professional life. It continues to weave through my existence. In college I learned to accompany modern dance and ballet, on piano. I became a good improviser, and I eventually took this skill to New York and found work at Juilliard and Martha Graham (plus a host of other schools and companies). In 1993, I debuted a piece of my own at the 92^nd Street Y and next year at the Kaye Playhouse. About four years after that I became a coordinator and later director of the classical artist program at Yamaha Corporation of America. That was about thirteen years of work. I found myself laid off somewhat into the economic global banking credit crisis and discovered that a similar job was nowhere to be found.

Gradually I came back to the music and dance world and felt strangely at home. Aside from other sidelines in graphics and photography, I was back at the piano, feeling as if I had left the dance world only weeks before, even though it had been seventeen years. The corporate world had offered comforts and periods of security and adventure, but it could not be depended to last or for that matter even satisfy artistically. It was a hard lesson to accept at the time of my last day.

To start, I had a few rounds of piano lessons when I was five – sitting down with a cocktail pianist at the hotel in San Juan. I still have the Thompson book we used. According to letters of the time he gave my mother stellar reviews, but circumstances ended the lessons. At home I had a little electric reed organ with chord buttons on the side – hardly the on-ramp for expressive piano pieces. We finally settled in the States when I was nine, and one of the first acquisitions was a big used upright piano. Lessons followed almost immediately with a nice elderly woman (Mrs. Bowman) who had me learning from Michael Aaron books on her girlhood Steinway. Again, raves from the teacher that I was learning like an adult. I was actually catching up for lost time.

I studied with various teachers in various living rooms until college, and then I found my way (past the photojournalism I had chosen) to the piano again via dance accompanying, where I studied with a brilliant improviser named Eileen. It was an unconventional course of study, and I’m still making up for lost time, still surprised at what I can do and how I can learn.

Back to the records – they were the key to orienting me. An only child, I spent so many hours over the years just having them play without interruptions. As I grew up, there were even found records from dumpster dives (bringing in classic Broadway musicals and standards that I’d never heard of) and my parents’ own classical record collection which included mysteries of its own. All of this stoked my imagination and gave my world more depth.

Early influences are vital to a good inner life. Some years ago I discovered a small reel-to-reel audio tape, the kind our family used to send like letters between the States and the Caribbean. On the tape I’m about two and half years old. My mother is showing me off for the microphone, and she begins to sing lyrics to George and Ira Gershwin’s “Summertime”. She sings half a line, and I finish the phrase – speaking the words. At one point I finish the demonstration by uttering “…with Mommy and Daddy standing by”.

I was astounded by this act my mother and I had rehearsed, as I had no recollection of it. Just the same, Porgy & Bess still includes some of my favorite music, and that does include “Summertime” which my mother would often sing to me as we put out the light. I still play it in dance technique classes, as it makes a perfect adagio. The early influences again take root.

My point is this: These early years of life form the very soul of it, releasing their bounty all through one’s existence. The musical experiences I had, just listening to these discs, gave me the gallery and the concert hall I carry around to this day.

JMS February 2025

(André Kostelanetz: two minutes of side one of his 1955 Puccini “La Bohème” Columbia 45. I found the music astounding and incomprehensible as a child.)

2025 did indeed happen. I saw it coming in 2024, and each time I looked, it got closer. Even so, the unwatched pot finally boiled. The year fell away. Just the same, I don’t really subscribe to resolutions of the year – as if each January requires some kind of feigned beginning which could just as easily start in early November. Nevertheless, I’ll try to pick up where I left off. Some people are paying, after all.

I’ll say this. Have a good start. Look favorably on this tilt-o-whirl as we slowly approach the next season. Live for now, though. Enjoy each moment as a lovely gift, and accept the fact that it too will fade to black. There will usually be another even so. Some of us may feel daunted, even cheated, but balance will come – being the nature of things. There’s even amusement in being cheated. Let it roll on.

Above all, have a good start to a new calendar year, and expect something new and bright soon.

Cheers,
James

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The famous faces of New York,
That cross your path today,
Will offer you nod, a smile,
And in your heart will stay.

From my first month, even week, in New York, I spotted the well-known.  It seemed almost as a small reward for the hard-tack existence required of the newly-arrived.  Years before cellphone cameras, the famous strutted about, fielding the occasional stare – even the autograph seeker.  No one carried a camera with them around the clock, and even the concept of the de rigueur selfie hadn’t yet met the pen-and-paper carrying public.  Therefore most just looked on for that fleeting encounter.  Some celebrities were just there, somewhere in view to be acknowledged.

Sightings are now rarer now – the result of endless mobile cameras ready in a heartbeat to upload the latest sighting to the Internet as “news”.  Movies capture misbehavior and even end careers.  Everyone’s a TMZ now.  It’s a jungle out there.  You may quote me.

Nevertheless, I’ve often taken a little historical inventory of the well-known people I have seen – quite a few no longer here.  They inform little cultural markers for me.  I have gathered twenty-four names of people I once saw while out and about.  Since I have worked closely with the music industry, I am omitting all but people sighted in public places – most of them seen on the sidewalks of New York, each with a tiny story and an image in my head.  I’ll start with

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Such a wonderful moment of connection and imagination from a city 700 miles away. I know my mother and I looked at one another. Central Park sounded wonderful, magical.

In brief tribute, here’s a recording I made of the station one night around what I think is 1980, from Dayton. That beacon call always set my imagination up to the giant contours of the great city - tones echoing through endless streets and walls of granite and glass in the city that never slept. Five years later, I moved there.

The format sounds verily like a Broadway chorus. The someone in the world sings of a great city while it gently crumbles. This is the TV city of Archie and Edith, Felix and Oscar, Oscar and Cookie Monster, Barbara Walters at TODAY, Johnny Carson at 30 Rock, telethon Tony Orlando at the Waldorf, Louis Rukeyser nightly discussing Wall Street, Walter Cronkite at 6:30, Captain Kangaroo and his ring of many keys, and the origins of all those Broadway cast albums in my parents’ stereo cabinet.

Nothing described all of that better than a radio beam coming from the city at night. May WCBS Newsradio 88 and the times it covered be long remembered.

My workday routine starts at 7am.  Coffee comes from two level scoops of grounds (sometimes more mountainous ones if I’m in the mood), brewed in my old Zojirushi machine purchased at the now vanished J&R Music World on Park Row in Manhattan.  That first cup brings out trains of thoughts, often in multiple streams. As I sit down I am faced with an imperfect world.  The shouting, the posturing, the posing, the media, the influencing, the conforming, the manipulating, and the complaining all line up to receive me on my tablet and my computer – even on my little radio telephone hand computer.  I tune in because it is out there, and I feel need to connect to something, but I sometimes wonder why I feel like the sole observer.  This morning I thought back to an old tape and how I could relate it to something in my current thoughts.

Many years ago, still in my teens, I was preparing to leave the country for an exchange program in Europe – certainly a most exciting event.  Considering that I would be away for the summer, I looked around the elements of my life for souvenirs to bring along.  I had a small reporter’s cassette recorder that my mother had lent me, and I thought to record some familiar television audio - something familiar like the Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson.  I happened to record most of a segment (having missed the introduction) with an eccentric guest, an author Johnny addressed as “Mr. Mitchell”.  This would have been one of those last half hour guests – frequently writers who were booked to round out the nightly ninety-minute show.

This Mr. Mitchell was prattling on in a very expressive voice about language and how it related to precision or the lack thereof which in his opinion had resulted in accidents like the recent Three Mile Island radiation leak or the loss of a DC10 engine on American Airlines Flight 191 where everyone died.  He likened it, shockingly, to a disregarding of language and spelling.  To the audience’s apparent amusement he singled out the National Council of Teachers of English as the party to blame.  Johnny seemed to be a captive audience, but Mitchell was received as an enlightened clown.  Even so, there was a sense of truth being revealed – that not caring about spelling (and other subjects) had led to not caring about habits of precision (of standards) in general.  Who can forget his comment “English teachers lie behind that.”?

Mr. Mitchell, I found out much later, was English professor and New York Times contributor Richard Mitchell (who died in 2002) – author of a well-received book, among others, entitled The Leaning Tower of Babel (and other affronts from the UNDERGROUND GRAMMARIAN).  Over the years, Mitchell’s Tonight Show diatribe began to appear less funny and more prophetic.  He was looking after a certain level of consciousness and awareness of meanings and details.

The age of the Internet (from about 1996 on) has proved that true thoughtfulness and habits of precision have been increasingly put aside for profitability, ratings, and clicks.  A certain increasing trend has emerged that would have driven Richard Mitchell (who died in 2002) crazy.  Language has been, through this method, under assault through subtle means.

Marketing found the Internet and became social media.  Even the term “social media” seemed like two floating bodies happening to meet in cyberspace.  This was no concept of simply chatting on-line, which had existed for years, but was now transmogrified into communicating while on an imagined stage attended by peers and near-peers, sponsored by advertisers.  Because of the pressures of sociability and the need to dumb everything down, imitating and repeating became steadily more intense.  Everyone wanted to have “news” of their own to share – whether from selfies (arm’s length self-photographs made possible by wide angle lenses on mobile phones) or via news from other sources.  To aid this process, the English language adapted itself to short codes – words and phrases that sufficed for broader and broader use. 

Companies now want to tell you how to “grow your business” – kind of a joke originally, like raising house plants.  Now it’s practically the standard phrase for the idea of increasing of one’s profits.  Everything is “impacted”, even though impact isn’t traditionally a verb-transitive, unless you’re a dentist or an engineer.  Somehow, people like the way it sounds.  Hardly anyone uses the more apt “affected” in its place, which I find slightly jarring.  It’s really a further example of casual wear now meeting language.  Elegance and regality are more and more taking the back seat.

The example of this shift that started grabbing my attention (and frequent ire) was the near-constant use of the word “iconic”.  It burst out from the Internet in the late 90’s and into the verbiage of reporters, journalists, and advertisers – unquestioned in its blanket use for everything other than its original definition.  I took out my 80’s edition Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary and looked up “icon”.  Here’s what the book said:

“A usually pictorial representation or a conventional religious image typically painted on a small wooden panel and used in the devotions of Eastern Christians.”  There was also “an object of uncritical devotion”.  Finally, it offered the word as “an emblem or symbol” (a representation of a broader subject).  The late great World Trade Towers were iconic, in that they represented American industry, wealth, and focus, much as the Empire State Building had represented the city and country’s power and status to the entire world.  Cleverly, Xerox had placed “icons” (small pictographs representing files) on its 1973 Alto computer screen.  This was a literal adaptation (and also a humorous variation) of the traditional meaning of the word.  Since then, even cheeseburgers and ballpoint pens have become iconic.

The missing words are all the synonyms like famous, celebrated, well-known, representative, emblematic, recognizable, distinctive, and familiar.  Instead of bothering with thesauruses and dictionaries, it’s so much easier to keep on using “iconic”, because everyone will sort of know what you mean.  Just the same, the language itself becomes just that much less colorful and interesting.  The frightening thing to me about this is the unexamined status of expression.  Ask anyone who uses ‘iconic’ in a sentence to offer a few synonyms, and they may be stumped.  Yet at the same time it’s still uttered as something original and profound.

Marketers encourage an acceptance of thoughts and claims without skepticism.  This includes cheapening and simplifying the language for the sake of profitability and ease in a kind of grim standardization.  Reversing the topic a bit, imagine going out to buy Iconic Amos Cookies or vising the Hollywood Walk of Iconicity.  It’s just not the same.  There is magic in certain words.

This leads to a broader topic of one’s inner life and imagination, which I believe is seen as an enemy of advertising, even though imagination is required at the top of it.  At the level of consumers it is to be discouraged.  The clichés roll on.  Perhaps that’s just part of the comfort of our times, but it can also lead to some of the hysteria seen on worldwide college campuses within the last several years.  For me, it hearkens back to George Orwell’s Animal Farm in which the sheep on Mr. Jones’ farm are bleating “four legs good, two legs bad!” without any further examination.

As Richard Mitchell was trying to relay to the free audience at NBC Burbank and to a bleary-eyed audience at home, small mistakes actually do matter.  Being conscious is harder but important.  Learning how to do things well is good for you, good for me, and good for everyone.  It gives us some hope that the next chapter might actually be better.

Swell.  I just started up Microsoft Word on a computer that I bought in August 2011 (now 13 years ago) and had thought lost to time.  When I purchased it I was about to travel for an unexpected jaunt to Azerbaijan where music industry friends wanted me to attend a classical music festival to be held in the Azeri hills at a resort called Gabala.  There was no sense in dragging my expensive and somewhat heavy laptop computer through customs and whatever else I might encounter in a country that bordered Iran, so I purchased an ASUS EE PC Seashell series – a low-priced notebook computer.

As to the trip, arranged by my hosts, it came and it went.  Turkish Airlines, via Istanbul, took me to Baku, where I was forbidden to take photographs in the special arrival lounge (being a guest of the chamber of commerce).  There was always tea, soda, and candy.  An hours-long van conveyance took me and a Berlin-based film crew up a winding two-lane road into the mountains, well past sunset, passing roadside stores of displayed preserves, interspersed with expensive car dealers.  I saw a barbershop whose chairs were outside.  The heat of the day made indoor work in this former republic of the Soviet Union tough.  Yet, oil money had brought in the luxuries for some.  The highlights of the evening were stopping for more tea and hard candy plus nearly ramming into an oblivious cow standing in the middle of the lane.  Much to my surprise, the resort itself (reached at about ten at night) looked as if it belonged on the Vegas strip, complete with lines of glorious fountains and a pink marble entrance.  I accepted the luxuries graciously.

The opportunities promised through the exhausting adventure (which included the layover in Istanbul where men dressed in terrycloth robes as they roamed the ample airport terminal) didn’t exactly materialize.  My hosts were mainly interested, as it turned out, in what they thought was my money, having just left a large company after 14 years.  I was taken to a piano factory one day and told of glorious business plans to sell the instruments in the US.  The wife of my hosts – a well-respected concert pianist, seemed to expect me to produce a series of recitals for her back in New York. 

Given that I showed no interest in investing in either of their ventures I was sent home without even a tour of Baku.  I had been looking for a job.  They had been looking for an investor.  I did at least get to hear some decent music, including a bizarre Tchaikovsky concerto performance with a soloist who is now banned from performing in the states due to his unwavering friendship with Vladimir Putin.  The evenings of Azeri mugham and its indelible quarter tones were memorable just the same.  I even got to meet and dine with a famous violinist I had seen in college as part of an arts series.  There were other greats floating around, giving the trip a kind of surreal sense of having been almost made up.

I jetted back home, disappointed and tired.  The little Asus machine (running the now-unsupported Windows 7), having served me as needed, gently aged into relative obsolescence.  In recent years, even the little backup battery expired, necessitating a clock and date reset every time the machine was cold started.  Weeks ago, my main and coveted home office PC – another relic, still running Windows 10, began to show signs of failing health.  It would start up and immediately shut down.  On a second try it might find its way to a green screen where I would have to ask it to continue.  Then I’d usually get to Windows, which represented a hallowed plateau each time.  I had started to back up some important folders when on a recent morning the machine refused to find its way to Windows.  No routine of repair or restoration was apparently possible without more research or expertise.  For the time being I had to pick up pieces with other machines  – the phone, the iPad, and a revived Macbook Pro, also a relic but now running a fast flash drive with more RAM.  I was surprised with what still worked well and grateful for the other gadgets and programs still retaining all my user names and passwords.

A long-time photographer, I had backed up my camera work on other drives, even if, for now, I couldn’t really edit them properly, should a purchase arise.  Lying in bed, suffering from the loss of my computer family member I would see the neoprene carrycase for the little seldom-visited Asus machine.  It had no extra drives, minimal RAM, a twelve-inch screen, tiny speakers, and a dyspeptic processor that made video calling look like a demo from a 70s science museum.  Yet it was a computer.

I was quickly coming to the conclusion that it might not even be allowed on the Internet anymore, just like my ancient Windows 98 machine (still guarding a hard drive from 25 seasons past) and my still-somewhat communicative Windows XP machine from twenty-one years ago.  Both of those machines had participated in a fairly recent midi music project where floppy discs and long-expired programs were needed.  Getting any information at all out of the 98 machine meant only using the floppy drive.  It was like reaching a catatonic patient.  Such is the entropy of technological progress.

Again out of the neoprene case, I started up the Windows 7 machine (upon which I am writing this piece) and was immediately faced with the terrible realization that I had forgotten the local password that I thought I knew.  Perhaps I had changed it within the last few years and had blocked out the memory.  I was informed by the machine’s lock screen that one could make a password recovery tool using a floppy disc or USB thumb drive, but I only had one working PC – the one I couldn’t enter.  The Mac couldn’t help.  I was resigned to the possibility that I might never be able to guess the ‘new’ password, even with the hint I had supplied on the screen.  I couldn’t interpret the hint!

But then, the mind works this way – memories are assembled and ancient mnemonic files are re-opened.  Gradually the memory is placed back into the frame.  After scores of attempts I suddenly flashed on what the hint meant, put in the password, and was instantly met with my old desktop – a nice moment.  Thereafter, I realized that the password was quite familiar, a slight variation of others I had used again and again.  I just hadn’t needed the use of that memory for a time until the desk staff in my brain could look it up.

After another hour or so of configuring and updating, I found that I had a decent functioning computer – even one with browsing privileges, though it couldn’t officially be upgraded beyond Windows 7.  Given the Internet access I had with my other devices, such a feature ran second to the fact that I could write on it.

The keyboard was great (and still new), and Word 2010 was on-board.  I could now think of the machine as a typewriter with extras.  There would be no checking for e-mail, no clicking on social media time wasters (at least not so easily, given the processor), and writing to the screen was zippy.

I own several typewriters – one of which, the one my mother bought in 1958, still works like new.  I had it serviced and rebuilt years ago by a man who even baked the metal parts in oil.  This was the machine I took to college.  Years before that, I’d hear my mother banging on it for hours as she crafted dispatches, with carbons, to our stateside family units from our Caribbean addresses in Aruba, and later Puerto Rico.  I realize that the bell on that Olympia Deluxe SM3, signaling the approaching margin, is my earliest preserved unchanged sound memory.  I confess that I am working up the courage to begin writing with it again.  Having a writing machine creates the needed on ramp for simply producing, in the spirit of that typewriter which told so many tales.

I hate making mistakes on a typewriter, and even my piano hands have to get used to the key tension, but I love that sense of roaring down the textual straightaway when all the keys are flying right and fast, and the sentence comes out practically whole.  It’s nothing but you and the blank page and thoughts that ensue – so hard to find in the age of diversions.

I will finish writing my observations on this resurrected and nearly-obsolete, Intel-Atom-powered, super-light, no frills, virtual typewriter.  I’ll gently pull up the imagined paper (always making it two sheets to protect the platen) and enjoy the zipping gears.  At least I can thank Azerbaijan for that.

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This article was prompted if not inspired by a sighting, on my way to the Subway in Manhattan.  I was heading home from work ten days ago and saw that someone had decided to hang a Palestinian flag inside their fifth floor living room window at the intersection of Eighth Avenue and West Fifty-Seventh Street.  It was large enough to be visible for blocks south of the window.  I stewed at this outpouring of hostility, as its only purpose could have been to support a supposed Palestinian cause at the expense of Israel’s most recent cause and those who support Israel unconditionally – principally Jews.

That this was being unfurled in Midtown Manhattan was particularly shocking – adding to a sense of unease harkening back to the earlier Nazi days of Germany and Austria.  So many Jewish families (including my own) had stayed put until it was too late, having assumed that any true hostilities would eventually pass.  In that historic time, they not only did not pass but fulminated into the greatest movement of mass-murder ever known.

Around the time I was about six I went to summer camp in the countryside of Puerto Rico.  My Vienna-born father and Dayton-born mother and I lived in an apartment in San Juan’s Santurce section.  My father was a holocaust survivor and as a refugee in America after the war had obtained a New York Community College degree in applied sciences, relating to the hospitality field.  As a result, we were on the island because of my father’s position managing a resort hotel on the Ashford Avenue strip.

Summer camp in Puerto Rico had been a strange adventure for me, but I took to it.  Busses and vans would gather campers up from the city and take them into the western countryside – awash with great trees and roads of clay which had to be negotiated by foot during rain spells.  To say the campus was primitive would understate it a little.  During fall, winter, and spring months the property became a school which I ended up attending through the first grade.

I was about a half hour from leaving the camp one afternoon when I happened to wander into the wood shop.  A staffer was cutting shapes out of thin plywood with a jigsaw, and one of them fascinated me.  To my joy he asked me if I’d like him to make me one, and I readily accepted.  I remember him penciling in the shape, then cutting it, then applying the hole for a string so that I could wear it.  I took my shape away proudly, and no one took much notice, although I had a habit of wearing a cloth windbreaker even in the constant warmth of a tropical island, and it may have been covered up.

The vehicle let me off in front of my apartment house back in the city, and I went up to the third floor where my mother would undoubtedly be expecting me.  The moment she saw me adorned with the new shape she turned pale white.  I had worn a three-inch-wide swastika home.  Whether this was a clockwise Swastika of the NAZI movement or the ancient Tibetan one which pointed the other way, it couldn’t have mattered less.  It was removed from my neck after the obligatory “where did you get this” and taken straight to the incinerator door just outside of our back entrance.

While I recovered from my surprise and my mother from shock, she explained to me that my father would have been horrified to see the item I’d brought home.  He had been in a war, you see, and frankly… I’m not sure how she put it, save that something about that shape was just terrible and would have hurt him.  Not much more was said about it, but it started my awareness that something enormous had come to pass in the storied history of my father’s life, and I had no comprehension of it.  I accepted the loss of my new object with a certain disappointment, but the mood had been cast.

Gradually, I discovered, in chapters, just how horrendous my father’s story had been, resulting in the final tile, where both of us in 2005 received notice of official US records that my father’s parents had been shot to death at the camp called Riga to which they had been forcibly taken.  I was to discover that he himself (having stayed alive in the underground in Vienna) had been rounded up near war’s end and placed on a boxcar with many others and that, knowing Auschwitz was its destination had decided to jump from it in the middle of the night.  He managed to do that but later than intended, when pre-dawn light was in the sky, and broke bones all over one side of his body.  An SS man sighting him in the dim light, aboard the train, had shot into him as the train pulled away – the bullet shattering his ankle.  That wound was still visible on the day I brought home the shape.

The result of the long and harrowing story is that he survived to liberation by Russian troops at the Theresienstadt ghetto (now in the Czech Republic) in April 1945, wherein he weighed about 90 pounds.  Other members of his family had been killed, making him the sole survivor of the immediate group.

Through an extensive testimony recorded in 1979 at Wright State University (a copy of which is now part of the US Holocaust Museum and Memorial collection) I was able to get a storied account of the years 1938 through 1945, plus time leading up to the war and further chapters afterward.  He and I had talked about some war matters, but it was only after I came of age that the enormity and incomprehension of the calamitous period began to form a continuous story in my head.

There are moments of the story I cannot resist thinking about over and over, including the evening of Kristallnacht (November 1938).  On the recording he recounts in a most innocuous way “I think I was out with the dog…”.  He was in Berlin, taking the walk, and saw a smashed shop window.  A couple walking by noted wryly “here’s your great German culture”.

At that time there was still the ability to note what was happening with some detachment.  Three or so years later, my grandparents, having been ghettoized with other Jews in Berlin dwellings, were loaded onto a train on January 22, 1942 (a day before my grandmother’s 48^th birthday), and transported to the fledgling camp at Riga, where, likely within months, possibly even on arrival, they were shot in the head and buried in a mass grave.  My father relayed to me, years after his testimony, that he’d tried to commit suicide when he heard that his parents had been taken away.  The poison that he swallowed fortunately came back up.

After the war my father eventually emigrated to the United States, eventually met my mother, and eventually had me.  Gradually I discovered that being Jewish was some kind of exception to the norm and that there were possibly consequences for it.  Even so, I was generally safe from harm – at least from being singled out as a Jew, much as my father had grown up in Europe where the same could be said.  In fact, my grandparents did not believe in any practical consequences to the rise of Nazism until escape was made progressively difficult and eventually impossible.

I came to New York when I was 23 – to a land, practically a country, that was known for an almost hyper-liberalism and a sense of freedom to be able to talk about anything, but all the while it was a largely Jewish city – the largest concentration of Jews outside of Israel.  Yiddish expressions were known throughout.  Jewish food was everywhere.  In the Midwest where I lived for fifteen years, I was part of a minority sometimes misunderstood for my background.  Nothing alarming took place with me (save for a few attempts to convert me and that my Jewish middle school was vandalized one weekend), but that sense of being something slightly outside – something even foreign – was one I carried around.  New York, then, was a great liberalization in a sense.  Even if you encountered people who were prejudiced you had the city to protect you.  You were a part of it, and you were something not foreign.

In the ensuing years that I continued in New York, my parents managed to travel to Israel.  My father described the two of them weeping at the site of the Western Wall – itself a reference to and symbol of the world’s disdain for the children of Israel.  The tears at the wall come from loss and the concepts that persist.  In my parents’ case, they had reconnected to this place about a year before my mother died of cancer, having survived about 4 and half years with it.

Years of skirmishes, wars, and terror attacks occurred in Israel over its existence, but that sense of danger or threat was somehow always contained here.  Even the horror of 9/11 which featured a strong element of Jew-hatred in its planning never saw its essence spread in that regard.  If anything, it backfired on its perpetrators – creating a new national topic called “Islamophobia”.  Though some initially grumbled about Israel’s policies inspiring the attacks, the general consensus was that these acts were anti-American and thus the springboard for eventual war – one of which in Afghanistan was only recently ended.

Whatever balance existed prior to the attacks of October 7^th, though, vanished.  The news came in gradually, sounding at first like another terrible act of terrorism in another isolated instance.  That sense evaporated when replaced by the reality that Israel was, in an instant, officially at war over an attack so gruesome it was being compared to murders of the Holocaust.

What was revealed was at first hard to believe or stomach – that over a thousand people had been killed and over two-hundred abducted into Gaza from which the attacks emanated.  It was a massacre of Israelis, and Jews were the target.  Such a thing hadn’t happened in Israel since its founding in 1948.  It felt like accounts of raids by Cossacks during Pogroms where entire Shtetls disappeared.  Its thoroughness was heartbreaking, but what was truly the turning point was the world’s reaction.

Images of Israeli flags at first appeared throughout Europe and North America, projected onto familiar objects like the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe, and the Empire State Building, but even more comforting were the displays of Israeli solidarity at Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate – only steps from former Nazi headquarters, and the Arch of Titus in Rome with its sculpted celebration of the sacking of Jerusalem in the first century of the Common Era.  The world was assuring us that we were safe.  But then came the next wave.

Campuses in the United States and the UK began to erupt in bitter condemnation – blaming the attack on the Jews themselves.  The claim was that the attackers – Hamas, long a declared foe of the country called Israel, had been provoked into group murder and extreme acts of barbarism and cruelty by the supposed occupation of their land by Israel, leaving out the fact that Israel had withdrawn from Gaza in 2005.  What was happening around the world was the unwrapping of a general resentment toward Jews and their associated country, while forgiving and even supporting an unapologetic torrent of vitriol, death, and mutilation.

Surely the beginnings of the Holocaust, the Shoah, had sounded very much like this.  When the Nazis burned synagogues and businesses throughout Germany in 1938, Jews were handed the bill for damages as if they had touched off their own burning and plundering.

Israel launched a tactical response of missile bombings beginning the all-out war on Hamas.  It followed that with a dreaded ground invasion (deadly to both sides), but with a goal that seemed logical and understandable – to end the constant and undeserved threat of terror and death.  It was also understood that despite warnings from the Israeli Defense Forces to flee the area, civilians would die (partly at the behest of Hamas who would use the carnage to further inspire condemnation of Israel around the world).  Whatever mistakes Israel had made in judging the years and months leading up to the murders and abductions would have to be dealt with too.

In New York came the hostage posters all over town and occasional instances where someone defaced them or tried to tear them down.  There was the outcry and even the apology for this act, and yet other posters and stickers started appearing proclaiming that Israel was committing “genocide” by going into Gaza or that Hamas was simply applying “resistance” to an occupation, many equating that organization with the Palestinians themselves, as if the whole massacre was simple a reaction to a sin.  Israel in the press became England, and the Palestinians became India.

After a virulent late November pro-Palestine protest event in Manhattan (where the New York Public Library had to spend $75,000 cleaning graffiti from its historic main branch), I discovered that slogans supporting “Palestine” (the self-proclaimed state that occupies Gaza and the West Bank) were now dotting the streetscape, including windows of the Museum of Arts and Design at Columbus Circle.  I encountered the “Palestine will be free” promise rendered in fat marker on those windows every evening that I took the train home – using a Subway entrance next to the windows.

Incensed, I wrote a few pointed letters to executives at the museum, at which point the graffiti was removed, two weeks after it appeared.  I was a little disturbed that the letters were necessary, as if sentiment wishing away the world’s only Jewish country were somehow a valid thing to have brandished on its building in a city with 1.6 million Jewish people.

Going further back into history, the term “Palestine” was for centuries a Jewish reference to its intended land of refuge, later in the spirit of Theodore Herzl’s Zionism movement, meant as a solution to mounting European Antisemitism in the Nineteenth Century.  Palestine is where Jerusalem was after all – the place we’d all be “next year”.  Now it is used as a slogan against Jews everywhere.

Recently, the South African delegation to the UN outright proclaimed that Israel was committing what they termed genocide in Gaza.  This from the country that had invented apartheid.  The word genocide, most would have to know, is an ironic one to use against Israel given what was attempted against Jewish Europe during the Holocaust.  That genocide – quite successful in some quadrants – was the primary reason that Israel was officially recognized as a country by the UN in 1948.  Hardly colonization or that other trigger word “occupation”.

All of this craziness, from the attacks of early October to the unboxing of worldwide bitterness against Jewish people had an unsettling and depressing effect on Jews all over the world.  There was a realization that so much of what had been assumed to be progress may never have happened below the surface – that the old hates had merely been shelved for a time, ready to be brought out fresh and unrumpled.  I found it particularly strange to find myself in New York City where wearing a yarmulke or a star of David might now be provocative.  It may have only been a feeling, but that feeling hadn’t existed before – not there.  What overt antisemitism had been burgeoning in Paris, London, and Berlin had finally started arriving in New York City in force.  The nearest synagogue to home is flanked by a police cruiser with lights flashing and circling, anytime there is a prayer service there.

My father recalled that Nazi propaganda during the war was so thorough even he had to remind himself that he wasn’t actually Germany’s problem or a criminal needing to be ridded of society.  I have found myself being swayed by various news organizations, including the New York Times, leaning on the value of Gaza destruction and death stories over even Israeli hostage escapes, IDF deaths, and accounts of bestial treatment and mass murder in Israel.  A little rational thought clears this, yet I am not happy about war deaths that include civilians. The number in Gaza is painful, but I’m mindful too that the source of that number is the same duplicitous organization that started the unprovoked murdering on October the 7^th.  The truth, therefore, lies somewhat in the eye of the reporter and the editorial policy of its employer.

MSNBC, as an example, featured Rachel Maddow discussing the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital bombing which happened ten days after the attacks.  The IDF declared that Israel hadn’t bombed the hospital, per evidence from a number of sources.  “Still, the world deserves to know,” was her pensive and grave response, as if perhaps Israel had done the deed despite its official denial.  It seemed that trusting Israel’s account had to be somehow suspect.  This kind of equivocation (basically describing Israel vs. Hamas as some kind of egalitarian contest) is as pervasive as it ever was, even though one constitutes a semi-covertly funded terror group with tacit support from Iran and Lebanese Hezbola with power as its goal, total destruction of Israel, and not what we’d call liberation.

What it comes down to is a belief by some, stated in public life, that Israel has no particular reason to exist especially if that existence constitutes inconvenience or pain for others.  An understanding of history might change some minds, but the myths and smears seem indelible.

Amid an avalanche of stories of Jewish students being blackballed from organizations at Universities like Columbia, Harvard, and Berkeley, amid a social media cyberverse crammed with Jew-hatred, Israel desecration, general accusations, and even a return to blood libels, it seems like a great clock has been turned back roughly a century.  The moral equivalency of my plywood swastika has begun to make a return, only this time it won’t burn so easily.

An addendum:

February 27, 2024:
As I was heading home for a midday rest between morning and evening work, I discovered that an Israeli flag had been added to an apartment window sill on the same floor as the Palestinian flag display.

Someone wanted to balance the protest in favor of a country that has had a particularly hard time for almost five months now. It was good to see.

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