Ken's Blog

Today I am in the city of Utrecht. A hop, skip and a jump from home – a flight to Amsterdam, followed by a short hop on a train. I suppose that’s more of a jump and a hop, isn’t it? The image shows the canal, the part of the city where I had dinner this evening with some friends. The old canal dates back to Medieval times, when it served as a moat to protect the Dutch against us foreigners.

A certain quality of the Dutch comes across very clearly the moment you arrive. The people are friendly, cheerful and efficient, while the streets, buildings and interiors are clean, sturdy and well made, like the Dutch psyche. There seems to be a complete absence of any tone of romantic moodiness (van Gogh was a notable exception).

I am struck by the contrast between this place and almost all places I have visited in more equatorial climes, where the blood seems to run far hotter in peoples’ veins. I remember once, after coming back home from a visit to Sicily, remarking to a Sicilian colleague in New York how friendly everyone had seemed. “Yes,” he replied with a rueful look, “Sicilians are either the friendliest people in the world – or exactly the opposite.” As he spoke, I could almost hear the ominous and melancholy strains of Nino Rota’s theme for The Godfather.

You don’t seem to get much of that here. The Netherlands is a place you could raise your kids safely, and keep a house without fear of crime or other disaster. But it doesn’t seem like the sort of place where you’d want to rent that candle-lit garret walk-up, drown your heart’s dark torment in absynthe, and compose mad feverish odes to the agonies and ecstasies of Love Unrequited.

This morning, in the midst of my mad dash to get things done before boarding a flight to Europe, I managed to race over to the Old Arsenal at 64th St. and 5th Avenue, where they have, on exhibit – for only the third time in the 150 years since its creation – Central Park’s original map – the winning entry by Olmsted and Vaux in a competition to design the park (seen here turned on its side). The park today hews remarkably closely to that brilliant original plan. There are a few differences – what was to be a floral garden is now the Conservatory Pond, and the Great Lawn was a later edition – but the essential vision was all there in the original. A vast and lovely oasis in the heart of some of the most densely packed and fought over real estate in the world, it is not just the beauty of our park that is so striking, but its philosophy as well. Rather than make a park reserved for use only by the wealthy few (which was the standard at the time) the city planners had the great temerity to commission a park that would, from the ground up, be designed for everyone to enjoy. I am incredibly proud I to live in a city that had the foresight to make a “people’s park” 150 years ago, when most of the Western world’s cities were still taking a far more elitist view.

This evening I was at dinner with some friends, one of whom talked about dealing with her five year old daughter’s reaction when their dog died. The topic turned to what such finality might mean to a five year old.

We started sharing different stories on the topic, and I told my friends that my grandfather had died when I was almost five, and that I could remember walking along a country road at my parents’ summer place right after he died, thinking about what it might mean to die. I still remember my thoughts at that moment very clearly. I realized that my grandfather no longer existed. I didn’t think of him as being in heaven, but rather as being in the past – except within my memories. My next thought was the realization that this would happen to me one day.

I remember wondering what, if anything, it would mean for other people to continue to exist after the point of my death. I thought to myself that in a sense the moment of my death would be, as far as I was concerned, the end of the universe, and so maybe it wouldn’t matter what happened after that. After all, it’s not as though I would care anymore about that or about anything else.

Looking back on this now, I am amazed by the self-centered thinking of the little kid that I was, but I guess that is the point of view of a five year old. Is that what religion is for? To protect us all from our ruthless little inner five year olds?

Today I am visiting my parents. They get The Wall Street Journal, and I saw that it had a story today on the front page entitled “When Dogs and Robots Collide, Somebody Needs a Talking To”. The gist of the story is that pets get upset at robotic entities like the Roomba vacuum cleaner, or the Pleo, a robotic toy dinosaur (by the same guy who made the Ferbie!). There was much discussion about how people convince their animal companions that these electronic contraptions are not actually threats. The lead story was about a man whose dog, apparently feeling threatened by his Roomba, kept attacking it. The man, following advice in an on-line forum, made a deliberate show of chastising his Roomba in front of the dog, and saying “Bad Roomba!” Which apparently did the trick.

There was some weird stuff in the article about people deliberately bringing strange robotic gadgets into their homes just so they could film their dogs and cats freaking out in fear or anger, and then post the results on YouTube. I found that to be really creepy. I wonder whether these people dress up in monster suits and lie in wait for their kids to come home from school so they can chase the terrified little tykes around the house and then amuse themselves by continuing to make scary noises while their traumatized children huddle, quivering and sobbing in abject terror, in the bedroom closet. Well, to give them the benefit of the doubt, I’m sure these folks would only do such a thing if it would make a good YouTube video.

But what really threw me for a loop was the last anecdote of the article. Have you ever had an experience where you’re reading about something, you’re telling yourself that there are multiple sides to every issue, and that you’re ok with that, and suddenly you realize that what you are reading is just completely and utterly looney tunes? Well, that’s kind of what happened here. After yet another story about a dog trying to adjust to a robotic Pleo toy, here’s what I read next:

Another Pleo owner, Maggie Spencer, has gone as far as to broach the idea of robot-to-robot interaction with her Roomba.

She showed the Pleo, named Linus, the vacuum in its turned-off state and warned Linus that the cleaner would make noise when it started up. “When the Roomba hit him, he was fine,” says Ms. Spencer, a Harrisburg, PA., psychotherapist. “I raise him like I did any other pet, not to be afraid of things.”

Well, I have to say that reading something like that makes me very afraid. I’m still trying to wrap my head around the fact that this person is a psychotherapist. And I am left wondering whether the author of the article knew that this last anecdote speaks to an entirely different issue – one that is, on several levels, deeply disturbing. In any case, as the title of the article said: Somebody needs a talking to.

This evening I went to McSorley’s Old Ale House (New York City’s oldest continuously operated saloon) with my friend Rachel. We went to escape the hot muggy weather that hung over the city like a thick blanket. McSorley’s is only about one short city block from the #6 train, which Rachel needed to take to get home. We got about a quarter of the way to the subway – literally a minute away from the subway entrance – when we encountered a weather event. It got very suddenly cooler, the sky lit up in a flash of lightning, followed by a loud clap of thunder, and although not a drop of water had fallen, something in the air had changed.

Without really thinking about what I was saying, I told Rachel that it was just about to rain very dramatically. She wanted to make a dash for the subway entrance, but I told her not to bother, since there was no way we were going to make it in time, for in about twenty seconds it was going to start to rain very hard, which would only be the beginning of something far more intense in the twenty seconds or so after that.

The way I described it – even as we dashed for the nearest shelter – was that a giant mass of water several thousand feet above our heads was falling fast; when it hit, all hell would break loose. I already knew that what we were about to experience was to rain as TNT is to a firecracker.

Sure enough, in the twenty seconds it took us to get ourselves over to the porch of Cooper Union, the heavens opened up, and a solid wall of water descended, inundating everything in its path, an powerful explosion of rainfall gone wild that was thick enough to obscure the view even across a city street,

From the safety of the porch we looked in awe at this oceanic deluge, and Rachel asked me how long it would last. I told her it would be all over in just about two minutes, and then we’d have a clear cool evening, and we’d be able to walk to the subway entrance without getting wet at all.

Sure enough, that’s precisely what transpired – down to the smallest detail.

What is fascinating to me about this is that I knew just what would happen from that first moment, well enough to narrate each step before the fact, even though such a weather event is extremely rare. Comparing notes afterward, we realized that it must be because I grew up in New York, whereas Rachel grew up in San Francisco. She said that she has similar moments of sensory clarity just before the fog rolls in. In situations like this you are utilizing skills you developed when you were seven years old, or even younger.

I didn’t have conscious access to all the things going on in my head in those few seconds, but I suspect that I was tapping into childhood memories of smell, air pressure, sound quality, light, and many other subtle sensory cues. I couldn’t tell you now what the moment before a flash thunderstorm smells like, but I certainly knew when I was smelling such a moment.

It’s so fascinating to get even such a small glimpse into the vast world of heavy mental lifting that our brains are doing all the time. We are so used to the illusion that our processing of the world is confined mainly to our conscious thoughts. How nice to be reminded that something far richer is always going on in our heads, just below the surface of our conscious awareness – subtle knowledge we possess about the world around us, that seems to come to us in a flash.

        It’s four in the morning, the end of December…

 

When he appears on stage your first impression is of a somewhat frail old man, sharply dressed but of humble demeanor. The iconic features have grown even wearier with time, if such a thing is possible. He removes the microphone from its stand, cradles it close to his body, leans gently down into it.

And then that voice emerges, a deep, low rumbling, full of power. Leonard Cohen’s voice has improved over the decades. He is now seventy five, and somehow, despite all the years of too much drink and cigarettes, his voice has a newly magisterial quality.

        My friends are gone and my hair is gray,
        I ache in the places where I used to play…

 

And then, singing his great song The Future, he gets to the line “white man dancing”, and he begins to dance lightly about the stage, with a graceful lilting spring in his step, and you realize that the old man was only an illusion, you remember that he has been a Buddhist monk for these past years, and that he really is coming to us from a place where deep spiritual reflection has led him to a kind of untroubled joy.

The love from the audience that flows to this man in continual waves is unlike the mere adulation one sees at other music concerts. This audience knows each of these songs inside out, from decades of intense listening and reflection. With the very first chord of each intro comes a collective cry of pleasure. It is clear that for this joyful crowd this is well loved country. These songs are that path behind your parents’ house where you used to pick blueberries when you were a kid, that oak tree you used to climb with your brother before they chopped it down. Cohen is singing people’s own lives back to them, deeply, unhurriedly, with powerful gentleness, and the mutual energy flowing between the man and his audience is something beyond mere gratitude.

        Like a bird on a wire
        Like a drunk in a midnight choir
        I have tried in my way to be free…

 

His tone remains humble, unhurried, serenely joyful, as he leads the audience to drink from one deep well after another. Hearing him sing these iconic songs, you understand how many have been his children: Jeff Buckley breaking your heart in Hallelujah, Antony lending his angelic voice to If It Be Your Will, and so many others whom Leonard Cohen has helped to find their own place in the tower of song.

While he sings, your mind goes to other songs, the vast tapestry starts connecting, the story of a long life deeply thought about, shared through the decades in poetry and verse with such unrelenting honest and generosity. This one man is an entire world, a world that connects to our own inner worlds on so many levels. I realize that in times of crisis I often hear his words running through my head, helping me to make sense of things.

        And what can I tell you
        My brother, my killer
        What can I possibly say?

        I guess that I miss you,
        I guess I forgive you,
        I’m glad that you stood in my way…

 

He never does get around to the sad personal story songs – Famous Blue Raincoat or Chelsea Hotel No 2, and I can understand why. He is no longer in that place of the vulnerable rueful lover. He’s moved to another place entirely now. When he sings I’m Your Man there is no longer any sense of complaint in his rendering of the absurdity of love and lust. There is only humor, a joyful appreciation that people are so delightfully strange in the ways they try to connect one to the other. And yet, all the songs he never sings run through your head anyway, tumbling together.

        I remember you well at the Chelsea Hotel
        You were famous, your heart was a legend
        You told me then you preferred handsome men
        But for me you would make an exception

        And clenching your fist for the ones like us
        Who are oppressed by the the figures of beauty
        You fixed yourself, you said “Well, never mind,
        We are ugly, but we have the music…”

 

You realize how much he has helped you to work through the emotions of loss, of transience, the way that intimacy has a way of slipping away before our eyes, and learning to accept such loss as a part of life.

        He’ll say one day you caused his will
        To weaken with your love and warmth and shelter
        And then taking from his wallet an old schedule of trains
        He’ll say I told you when I came I was a strange

        I told you when I came I was a stranger…

 

When, quite late in the concert, he finally begins to sing Suzanne, the audience falls to a hushed, slightly stunned silence. For some (myself included), this was the starting point, the song in which we first discovered how music can describe a state of transcendence, can reveal the connection between spiritual and sexual longing. For some in the audience that journey began perhaps forty years ago or more, when the world itself was a very different place. And somehow, after such a long road, this man is still here, still able to convey his soft amazement at the intensity of his feelings for the young girl who had once lain by his side:

      Now Suzanne takes your hand and she leads you to the river
      She is wearing rags and feathers from Salvation Army counters
      And the sun pours down like honey on our Lady of the Harbor
      And she shows you where to look among the garbage and the flowers

      There are heroes in the seaweed
      There are children in the morning
      They are leaning out for love and they will lean that way forever

      While Suzanne holds the mirror…

 

Well, almost everyone was sitting in hushed silence. My companion, generally a very aware and sophisticated intellectual, a professor of media arts, had the opposite reaction. She began to sing the words aloud, happily, obliviously, forgetting who or where she was, completely transformed into a gleeful five year old child. She told me afterward that she had had absolutely no idea that she was the only one singing aloud.

When the concert was over, my friend and I realized that this had been a defining moment for both of us – certainly a defining moment for our friendship. I suspect that many others had the same reaction.

There are indeed holy beings who walk among us, who have much to teach us from the wisdom of their old souls, from souls that have perhaps always been old. And every once in a while, we find ourselves fortunate enough to be in a place where we are prepared to listen. And if we are very fortunate indeed, we might even remember what we have been taught: to be humble, to really pay attention, and to be grateful for the beauty to be found in each other, not in spite of our flaws, but because of them.

        Ring the bells that still can ring
        Forget your perfect offering
        There is a crack, a crack in everything
        That’s how the light gets in.

 

So I did something somewhat crazy, which might have been one of the sanest things I’ve done in a long time. I bought tix for the Leonard Cohen concert in Toronto, figuring I would somehow get myself to Toronto when the time came. The tix were outrageously expensive, the plan utterly insane. I hopped on a train from NY to Toronto on Thursday, spent a few days visiting friends, and tomorrow morning will take the train back to NY. The train from NY to Toronto takes about the same time as the direct flight from NY to Beijing. Having done both, I would definitely recommend the train to Toronto. The seats are way roomier.

Friends that I’ve been running into all weekend in Toronto have been reacting ruefully to the news that I was going to the Leonard Cohen concert, as though I had told them I was planning to live out the secret dream of their childhood. Even the immigration officer on the train seemed jealous, and a little awestruck. Tonight was the concert, and it was a pure slice of heaven.

The experience of seeing Leonard Cohen in concert at this point in his career – he has said it will be his last tour – is so overwhelming, so transcendently unlike anything else, that I’m not going to attempt to describe it now. I will take a day, ruminate, think upon it, let my dreams of the experience collide and debate with one another tonight. Then tomorrow, when I have come back down to earth, I will make the attempt. Meanwhile, I will leave you with this bit of cautious wisdom, courtesy of Mr. Cohen:

        There is a crack … in everything
        That’s how the light gets in.

 

Hearing Paulo Szot sing Some Enchanted Evening in the recent production of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s South Pacific at the Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center will probably go down as one of the high points of my life. Knowing that my dear sweet Sophie, sitting beside me, had never seen this musical, and hearing that soaring baritone voice describe with such uncanny accuracy my feelings toward her, has made for one of the most thrilling experiences in my recent memory. When the song ended I leaned over and kissed her, in sheer appreciation of the privilege of being alive and in the company of someone I love.

Paulo Szot and Kelli O’Hara in South Pacific

I remember that the first time I saw the film, when I was a teenager, I had thought that the premise of its basic conflict was hopelessly out of date. In short: We are introduced to a romantic couple who clearly belong together. The conflict, introduced at the end of Act I, is that one half of the couple turns out to be a racist, repulsed by the fact that the other had once been married to a Polynesian.

I remember wondering when I first saw the film how any modern audience member could expect to identify with or be sympathetic to the plight of someone who holds such absurd beliefs. Perhaps it made sense in 1949, when the play first opened on Broadway, or in 1958, when the film premiered, but certainly not in modern times.

In the play, the racist character eventually overcomes this prejudice, and is rewarded by becoming capable of experiencing true happiness within a relationship. But I remember as a teenager losing all sympathy for the character at the end of Act I. To me the play’s central dramatic device seemed fatally flawed: Why would an audience continue to care about someone after witnessing such ugliness within their soul?

But now, seeing it again, I realize that this is a theme that never goes out of date, because irrational prejudice is always with us, and I now understand it to be an illness, albeit one that can simultaneously afflict millions of people. Rather than turning away in disgust from the afflicted, we need to maintain our belief that they can overcome their limitations. The audience is being asked to continue to have love and compassion for someone in spite of their racism, and to understand that they are capable of redemption.

In the current U.S. political climate we are being told that some Americans might refuse to vote for Barack Obama merely because of his mixed race heritage. This in spite of the fact that, unlike John McCain, Obama as president would clearly begin the long healing process our nation needs after the self-inflicted wounds of the last seven long years – the polls indicate that Americans are well aware of this need. The idea that anybody would not vote for this beautiful and inspiring man because of some nonsensical construct in their own heads would once have inspired in me nothing but an uncomfortable sense of disgust. But now I’ve come to realize that racism is indeed a kind of illness, one that sometimes can be cured.

Yes, there are many people still walking around with, in essence, ugly festering sores upon their souls. But those sores are curable and these people can be helped. Barack Obama might just be the catalyst that motivates Americans to heal their wounded souls. If we can help people to realize the sheer absurdity of applying nonsensical labels to a man who is possessed of such lovely ideas and eloquence of expression, we might very well be helping to transform and heal our culture.

After seven years of misuse of military force, erosion of both civil liberties and judicial independence, massive unnecessary death of innocents abroad, rising poverty at home, and astonishing incompetence in the face of human suffering all around, our nation is at long last nearing the sunset of the Bush presidency. With luck and sufficient compassion for those among us who need to be helped to find their better natures, that sunset may just turn out to be an enchanted evening.

I found out today that a friend of mine, who is not quite fourteen years old, is writing and directing a play. A realist drama in fact. It sounds like quite a good drama too from the brief description I heard. I guess it takes a certain kind of focus to not only write a play, but also to gather your peers together, cast a play, direct it, navigate past the egos of your fellow fourteen year olds, and on top of all that find a friendly adult willing to act as a hands-off official “advisor” so that the other adults will leave you alone to follow your vision and create your art.

How many of us have written and directed a play by the age of fourteen? How many of us have written and directed a play at any age? Maybe it is something everyone should do. Would that really be so bad?

Yesterday the closing talk at the Games for Change Festival was Sandra Day O’Connor. She was introduced by Bob Kerrey (now president of the New School, which hosted the festival), who quite eloquently said that ignorance of the populace is the single greatest threat to a democracy. He went on to point out that currently millions of U.S. citizens have firmly held beliefs in things that are just plain factually wrong, and they make decisions based on those mistaken ideas.

He also pointed out that the Judicial branch of government is the only one that allows individual citizens to successfully challenge laws that infringe on their rights. By appealing to the judiciary, a single citizen can successfully sue to strike down an unwisely framed law, even though that law has passed both houses of congress. He rightly pointed out that this balance of power in our government is remarkable. He talked about how brilliantly these principles were layed out by Alexander Hamilton and James Madison in The Federalist Papers, which he suggested everyone should read.

All of which was an excellent way to introduce former justice O’Connor. She walked up to the podium, a pleasant looking little white haired lady. And then she began to speak, and it was like a light went on in the room. You realized immediately you were in the presence of a remarkable and powerful intelligence. Everything she said was straighforward, down to earth, unadorned, but I was struck by the clarity of her thought and the intellectual force behind each sentence.

She began by noting the recent vitreolic attacks by some in the legislative and executive branch on what they called “activist judges”. Her response: “I always thought that an activist judge is one who got up in the morning and got to work.”

She went on to point out that the better educated are our citizens, the better equipped they will be to preserve the system of government we have. And she described a partnership she is starting with Arizona State University to create an on-line computer game or 7-9 grade kids to play, where they get to argue real legal issues against the computer and against each other.

Along the way, she pointed out that one unintended effect of the No Child Left Behind Act, which emphasizes math and science education,is that it has squeezed out civics education, because there is no longer any funding available for civics courses. And she cited some remarkable statistics, such as: Only one in ten U.S. citizens can name even one Supreme Court justice, whereas two out of three can name at least one judge on American Idol.

In answer to a question about the effectiveness of games as a vehicle for learning, she pointed out that people learn by doing. We remember concepts better through active engagement than when we just read a textook or hear a teacher in a classroom. She even outlined a series of experiments that neuroscientists might do to study how different parts of the brain are stimulated through active versus passive learning.

She summed up by saying: “I think things learned in this manner stick with us longer That’s what I think. What do you think? Do you agree?” The response in the room was wild applause.

While I was sitting there listening, I surfed on-line and downloaded a copy of The Federalist Papers. I’ve started reading them, and my eyes are popping from the specificity of Hamilton’s detailed and lucid descriptions, over two hundred years ago, of internal threats to a representative democracy posed by an overzealous executive branch, a cowed and coopted legislature, or attacks upon an independent judiciary. It feels like I am reading current events.

And so I wonder, should I just read The Federalist Papers, or should I make them into a computer game?