Impressionism vs. Contemporary Realism

It would be fun to claim this as deliberative art, but the truth is my hands are shaky when I hold a camera, thus this result.



More of the same.



Meanwhile, my athletic 12-year-old cleaned my clock today on our backyard basketball court. He shoots with a deadly precision I have never achieved in my life. Swish, swish, swish. What a star!
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Meanwhile, inside my house, my daughter was doing sit-ups and other exercises. I gather that her soccer coach's admonition -- that she should become more "challenging," i.e., more aggressive, has hit home.



Meanwhile, my aspiring film director discovered David Mamet's book about film directing.


At the end of the day, these little people are kids, sweet kids, carrying so many hopes and dreams not only of their own but of their parents, as well...

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Rant

First, this is my four hundred and fiftieth post to this blogsite. It is also St. Patrick's Day (night, now), which is the one night each year I refuse to go out driving in San Francisco. After all, this is an Irish city, as well as an Italian city, a Mexican city, and a Chinese city. There are now many more of us who do not fit into any of these categories, including Indians, South Pacific Islanders, Jews, Koreans, Hawaiians, Germans, Russians, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Afghans, Pakistanis, Japanese, not to mention Michiganders, Kansans, Texans, and Bostonians. Yes, and so many more.

The fog coated us this morning, chilling this morning's soccer practice at St. Mary's. Can you believe it is spring soccer season already?

But by this afternoon, the sun had returned, at least here in The Mission.

***

I hate "Borat." Why? Because I have lived in Central Asia and known the real people Sasha Whatever Cohen so blithely makes fun of in this very popular movie. His portrayal of a people so imaginably different from his own comfortable existence in England contains so many cheap shots that I felt obliged while watching it last Saturday night in New York with 10-year-old Dylan to object to his blatant negative objectification of people much less privileged than he is.

Which brings me to the cruelty of humor. Yes, I have watched the Aristocrats, and in my opinion it sucks. Of course, humor wells up out of our inner pain. But when the best you can do is make fun of others who are different than you, you are only partway toward the goal of knowledge, and of wisdom.

Think about it. I have traveled in the part of the world "Borat" ridicules. What his portrait misses entirely is the deeply imbedded sense of hospitality that these ancient cultures maintain. If you show up at their door, they will take care of you.

Compare that with the wasted guy under the freeway as you drive by, begging for a quarter.

I know this is not a "cool" post. But I've never aspired to be cool. I am angry, angry at all injustices. You can't just choose your favorites -- the victims of Katrina, the Jews who escaped the Holocaust, the Palestinians, the Native Taiwanese, the African-Americans, or the Disabled.

Nope. All of God's Children deserve your empathy. Borat is a moral failure. May it be consigned to the dustbin of history's errors.

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Seeing love

I know that I am not a skilled photographer, but I have shot my kids and lovers and friends many times, trying to capture some of what I find so special about them. This is my son Dylan, without his Red Army Cossack hat -- therefore a rare glimpse at his lovely hair.



This is Michelle, as captured by her gifted photojournalist friend, Jeffrey Lau, last weekend in New York.

The rest of these images are of Dylan and me as we moved around Murray Hill, through Jeffrey's lens.



Nothing tells a story as effectively as a skilled photographer's work.



I could attempt to compete with words, but they would only get in the way of Jeffrey's storytelling.



Pictures are, and always have been, worth a thousand words, as we all know.



If you think about it, you see why a writer (and a bad photographer) like me, has to labor so long, and create so many words, in a hopeless attempt to tell you what you can clearly glimpse in these masterful photos.

These are, after all, images of love.

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Loving space, time

Today, I couldn't help but notice, outside of my accountant's office down on The Embarcadero, the large wireframe sculpture of a woman and her child called "The Wanderer." Elliott joked that this sculpture is supposed to be move around the city every six months, but it's been outside his window for eight months now, and he doubts it will be moving.

That brought to mind the lyrics of one of our city's most famous songs, "San Francisco,"

San Francisco, open your golden gate
You let no stranger wait outside your door.
San Francisco, here is your wanderin' one
Saying "I'll wander no more."
Other places only make me love you best,
Tell me you're the heart of all the golden west.
San Francisco, welcome me home again;
I'm coming home to go roaming no more!



***

This is the first spring in a number of years that I won't have a son playing little league baseball.

The air here is warm tonight, the city feels sultry, open to possibilities. Baseball season is approaching, which means I soon will be happily following my favorite teams, the Giants and the Tigers and the A's.

Plus, I'll be drafting the players for my Mud Lake Mafia fantasy team soon.

But there won't be any reports from my softball team, the Michigan Mafia, because we are now defunct. And, of course, there won't be any more reports from Aidan's little league games, because those are now done, too.

On nights like this, with warm air and sweet-smelling blossoms, I love my city, and I wouldn't be anywhere else. But I also am cognizant that everything passes, all we know is temporary.

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Love Making

Early Sunset

As the sun goes down over the city, far to our west over the Pacific, a man's mind turns to the women he has known.

Deep Sunset

As the colors in the sky deepen, so does the intensity of his memory.

To hold a woman, to touch her, on a bed, in a car, on a beach is as close to heaven on earth as I can imagine.

Tonight, I am imagining running my hands slowly from a woman's fingertips up to her slender wrist and all the way up her long arm to her shoulder.

I turn her around, so her back is facing me, and I slowly start massaging her shoulders. All the women I have known hold tension in their shoulder muscles. A woman's back is so different from a man's!

Ours are rippled with muscles that suddenly appeared on our bodies long after puberty, in our early 20s. Theirs, too, have muscles, but much smaller, softer, and more pliable.

These muscles hold tensions from her day. Kneading them softly elicits little cries of pain from her mouth. You kiss her hair, her neck, breathe in her ear.

I would never be one to presume that I know this for sure, but as all of this is happening, it is my impression that a woman remains acutely aware of her environment. She has to feel safe, normally -- the sounds and smells have to be familiar or otherwise attractive; all of her senses are now engaged.

As the lovemaking continues, eventually a woman surrenders to you completely. You can tell when she becomes incredibly soft and no longer even aware of where she is or even (it seems) what is happening.

For a man, at these moments, is to be acutely aware of exactly what is happening. I move this way and you move that. I lift this and you surrender that. I remove that and you open this. You reach here, and gasp, and I stroke you there, and you gasp.

Our bodies are perfectly in rhythm now -- they know what to do. Both of us are carried along in the heat of the primal connection, which is where children are made.

The intensity of these connections rivals the depth of the greatest sunset, and it is every bit as natural. Afterwards, as the sky grows purple, then black, we lie back, sweating, catching our breaths.

Such is love.

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Love the future.

photos by Karen Klein
Aidan Dribbling

The hardest part of traveling to New York last week was that I had to miss my 12-year-old son Aidan's JV basketball city league championship game.

At the foul line

His team lost, 29-25, but he apparently played well, scoring 5 points, and grabbing "eight or so" rebounds.

Ready to rebound

Another of the parents who was at Friday's game, Karen Klein, sent me this description, (as well as some photos from a game last month.)

Hi David --
The boys JV final score was 29-25. They were in the lead almost the whole first half, but then the other team pulled it together and stopped letting them get out ahead. They also had one very tall guy who could stand under the basket and grab rebounds. I think that also Synergy just lost some steam. Only the same 7-8 guys were playing for the whole game. Aidan was particularly focused and aggressive in the last quarter, in a really positive way. Very impressive. Really helped make a last push at the very end.
Cheers --
Karen

***

At my lowest moments in my adult life, I've been able to bounce back because of my children. Do I believe in the future? Of course; I have to. It would be a cop-out to stop doing whatever I can toward a better world, because I brought these six people into this world, and they will be here long after I've gone.

Now that the next generation has arrived in the person of James, my grandson, I'm thinking 80 years out -- late in the 21st century. Global climate change will have altered many aspects of human life on earth by then.

The decisions over how to limit the most deleterious effects have to be taken now. Those of us old enough to have any kind of standing in the world need to figure out how we can help the human race survive.

It's not necessary to have your own children to love children and therefore to love the future. My friends Nan and Michelle were so attentive to Dylan in New York last weekend, and neither of them are mothers -- yet.

But whenever any friend asks me what I think about her becoming a parent, I am supportive. We all get to connect to the past through our parents and grandparents. Children and grandchildren project us out into times only yet dimly imagined.

I love talking about the future with my kids, even though there are many scary prospects -- terrorism, nuclear war, global warming -- to contemplate. We are here and we have the intelligence and the tools to reverse harmful courses and help steer in a more sustainable direction. I want my kids to be part of the search for solutions.

Maybe the memories of our talks will be useful in that regard. I hope so.

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Looking at Love

It comes in so many forms, the only special human emotion. You heard me right, love is the only feeling we can muster that differentiates us from the "lower" life forms. But, to be absolutely clear, it is not an exclusive differentiator -- many other animals clearly have the capacity to love each other. None of them combine this one special quality with all of our hateful skills.

As a species, we kill, maim, rape, pillage, torture and massacre one another, not for food, but for grandiose fantasies that have no place on this planet, if life in our form is to survive here.

I've campaigned against war and violence and racism all my adult life. I have never killed, maimed, raped, pillaged, tortured, or massacred anyone, but I did once break a friend's nose in a football game, and also, in what was my worst crime, I hit one of my cousins over the head with a shovel, I think.

Both of my victims survived; the nasty move with the shovel inflicted just a minor gash, and the broken nose was an accident.

Nevertheless, I offer these incidents as proof that I, too, have been a bad steward of our common planet. Not only that, I confess to having sprayed household pesticides against ants when they invaded my houses, against all of my published principles.

Now we've got that out of the way, I want to write about the love we all have for one another.

My recent trip to New York yielded some images that may help make my case.

My lovely companion is Michelle Won, one of the best students when I was teaching at Stanford. Michelle is now a TV reporter in Trenton, N.J., and you can view some of her recent work at Michelle's Demo .

It's pretty thankless work for a reporter who loves to do investigative stories and has a wonderful sense of humor to chronicle the sad tales of senseless murder, preventable car accidents, and so on, in one of the places most Americans tend to ignore, but that is what she does, with grace and empathy. The New York TV market is hard to crack, but I look forward to day that one of the local stations discovers her, because Michelle is a talent waiting to be found by one of these stations competing fiercely for eyeballs.

This photo of the two of us walking in the Murray Hill district was shot by an extremely talented photographer, Jeffrey Lau, several of whose photos I have posted on my site tonight. You can get an idea of how Jeffrey uses his sense of perspective and commitment to honesty by viewing his work at Jeff's site , and I urge you to do so. This is a young photojournalist who would be a major find for one of the New York media companies that need new talent.



I look this photo last fall, on my previous trip to New York. My friend Nan is talking with my daughter Julia in this photo. I love their expressions. Nan grew up in China, then Japan, and came to the U.S., where she married an American. Now she is working on her PhD in Japanese Literature at Columbia, and is that university lucky or what? I have never met any other person who can so thoroughly integrate in her speech, manner, and insight these three great, but distinct cultures -- Chinese, Japanese, and American.



Tonight it is warm and sexy in San Francisco. Green leaves have joined the blossoms on our plum tree. It is the season that babies get conceived and fruits get born. Love is in our air.



Every person mentioned in this post is somebody I love. Yet, none of them, obviously, is my lover. The largest portion of love between people is based on our emotional connections with one another.

I will write about additional types of love this week, but I wanted to start with this one, the universal ability to connect with each other and appreciate one another's creative gifts. This is, IMHO, the type of love that can help carry our species forward, in a time of many hazards, that if not checked, may well obliterate all of us from this planet, for all time, our screams floating endlessly out in a universe much vaster than we can possibly appreciate.

If our lives mean anything, they mean we should love each other to our fullest capacity, in all ways, and at all times.

That should be my epitaph.

Against the wind, crossing seasons

Returning home west, against the headwinds, is always much slower than being pushed eastward by the tailwinds. Thus, jet-lag is much worse once we get back here.



Much of the continent below looked frozen, white. Although New York's weather improved, so that we no longer needed gloves and scarves, landing in San Francisco was a true shock.



Here, the spring has arrived with a bang, and the thermometer has risen into the 70s. Windows are open, folks are standing around, drinking, no one needs more than a tank top or a tee shirt.



It's always disorienting to me to criss-cross the country in 72 hours (plus change), even though I've done it hundreds of times. I just can't quite comprehend how our bodies can be moved around so easily, while our thoughts, feelings, and desires may be left far behind, or remain far ahead.



We have so many cliches, like "home is where the heart is," etc. But, in my adult life of frequent travel, where 100,000 miles on an airline has never been hard to achieve, I've often found myself in one place, only to have left my shadow in another.



I've been looking out an airplane's window, at an alien landscape below, flying away from someone, some feeling, some instinct. I've scribbled letters, and handed them to airline attendants who offered to mail them for me, from one port to another.

Such is the confusing romance of travel. For some of us, the heart's home may truly be on the road.

But not, ultimately, for me, at least not now. Home is in my flat in the Mission, my kids asleep nearby, my music playing, my books beckoning, and the memories of lovemaking right here, in this room, on this bed, so vitally alive.

Since it is now springtime, with the government's Daylight Savings move confirming the season's arrival, my thoughts -- and posts -- now will turn mainly to love.

I will write about love and loving this week.

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