Loss-Rain-Sunshine-Gain

The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.

Pluses and Minuses Since Friday

• Loss: No more bonus stimulation of part-time graduate school.
• Gain: Columbia-blue regalia ownership, and opportunity to don the ensemble for graduation on 15-16 May.
• Loss: Friend Riva being in metro-New York for just a few days.
• Gain: Friend Riva teaching me about pouncing as we toured Dürer and Beyond at the Met.
• Loss: Pat leaving for her annual golf trip in Tennessee.
• Gain: Renewal of my appreciation for Pat while missing her presence.
• Loss: Finishing my colleague Alysa Turkowitz's dissertation on how LGBT grad students navigate the classroom; I wanted it to continue, like a good movie or book.
• Gain: Honor at having been among the interviewees included in Alysa's dissertation.
• Loss: Sunday relaxation.
• Gain: The opportunity to prepare for a hugely important meeting at work.
• Loss: Lap-time with our feline daughter Phoebe during a two-day, off-site workshop in New York City.
• Gain: Two-day workshop on how to help a key population with its learning needs.
• Loss: My cousin Joe Silverman (z"l), to Parkinson's, Pneumonia and a stroke, just a couple of nights ago.
• Gain: Memories of Joe's and Joy, his wife's, kindness to my family after the death of my dad (z"l) in 1982.
• Loss: Maurice Sendak (z"l), an icon from my childhood, who drew the most appealing stories he could imagine.
• Gain: Learning that Maurice Sendak was gay and had a 50-year companion via this obituary
• Loss: Rain on and off since Friday.
• Gain: A front-garden full of pale- and dark-purple irises.

Art in Tough Times

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies or opinions.

These Are Boom-times for Art

On October 19th, I went to Twitter and tweeted, "Thinking that art of all sorts, including comedy, will become more interesting during this tumultuous time." Some of the best music I ever loved emerged when my dad was unemployed during the recession in the '70s. "Saturday Night Live" was at its peak then, too, and rose like a phoenix during this unparalleled election season.

What a huge consolation-prize for having less money in our pockets or 401Ks -- to have artists be inspired by the calamities of this cash-crunch. (A colleague of mine created a Facebook group about his "201K," which I almost joined, but I became a Facebook fan of Suze Orman instead.)

This morning, I read about a "New Yorker" cartoon exhibit on money based on the collection of Melvin R. Seiden. The critic loved it, but wished the collection of cartoons had not ended with those of two years ago. The critic reminded readers of the hilarious/tragic cartoons that have been emerging in the magazine lately, including a recent favorite of mine, where a teacher tells the class that since the school can't afford Halloween pumpkins, the students will be carving raisins this year."

Gorging Won't Be an Option, But Feasting Selectively, Surely

Don't hard times beg for laughter? For escape from self-absorption, whether into transformative or easy entertainment? From an art standpoint -- including works like those of my friends Aimee Hertog or Allan Chapman or Saydi Kaufman or Riva Lehrer or Amanda Mathews -- during this period of economic famine, I think we're in for a treat for which we hunger!

Coincidentally, exactly a month after I first tweeted about art as a topic, I tweeted again: "Wondering who buys art in challenging times like these. Does art give comfort, and so more people buy it, or is it seen as a luxury?"

More of the people who follow me on Twitter responded to that tweet than to any other so far. The consensus was that they buy less volume, but that art, above all in times like these, gives them comfort and pleasure that they need to survive.

I Heart Art

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies or opinions.

I Crave It, Too

The only good part of the summer during which my father was dying was my tour-guide internship at the Museum of Philosphy, which had space at Hunter College in New York City for only a single stretch of several months. With my dad, wasting away at Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital uptown, I was feeling pretty philosophical, though I had never before been attracted to Philosophy.

That summer, I learned about Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill among many other philosophers. This week's "New Yorker" includes an article on Mill and I enjoyed reading it and being reminded of that heavy, delightful, heavy summer.

Before reading the article, I never knew that Mill had suffered from a crushing depression and had gotten himself out of it two years later, in 1828, by reading poetry, particularly that of Wordsworth and Coleridge. And then Mill also became a fan of the art displayed in Italian churches of that time, and loved Mozart.

The "New Yorker" critic made Mill delicious to me:

Mill's theory of freedom...-- that people want a rich life where knowledge increases, new discoveries are made, and new ideas found, where art flourishes and science advances. If you don't want that kind of society, you don't want liberty, in Mill's sense.

What a perfect vision of liberty -- to include people, making and valuing art.

Art Gives My Rabbi, and Me, Hope

Rabbi Kleinbaum opted to deliver her sermon for Rosh Hashanah, Day 1, in town-hall style this year, and invited live questions from the congregants. The last of them asked, "What still makes you hopeful?"

"Art, and human relationships and the natural world," she responded.

I love art, too, and tonight, especially the R&B-musical kind. Driving home from my haircut and dinner with my mom, I blasted WBLS-FM and KISS-FM alternately, depending on which one was playing the best song.

Robin Thicke's "Magic Touch" came on and a bunch from the late-80s, including an all-time favorite, Shalamar's "Second Time Around." A new song I didn't hear, unfortunately, was Estelle's "American Boy," featuring Kanye West. Mozart, it's not, and I love it!

Last weekend, I saw a reference to Oliver Sacks' book on music and the brain, Musicophilia. I wish I had time to read it...maybe at the end of December, between semesters.

I'm just now recalling how touched I was, driving over the Tappan Zee Bridge to Armonk last week, radio channel-surfing until I stopped at WCBS-FM; the DJ was saying, "In honor of Rosh Hashanah, we're showcasing Jewish artists, and here's 'One Fine Day' by Carole King."

What a contrast to the invisibility/inaudibility of Rosh Hashanah while we were in India last year.

Art, and Artists, as Imperative

A couple of weeks ago, a visual artist-friend showed a bunch of us a presidential-campaign-related painting she had just finished.

"It's too angry, too political, I know," she said, looking at the floor.

"No, don't apologize," said another visual artist, "That's the artist's job. It's your job [to paint social commentary if that's what you're moved to paint. Who else can comment so profoundly?]"

I'm reminded of a conversation from last night. Since non-Jewish friends were visiting from Florida, we didn't go to synagogue for Shabbat services. Instead, we ate at the new Falafel Hut on Bellevue in Upper Montclair. Over baba ghanouj and chicken kabob, I described some of the art of my friend Riva Lehrer.

"Riva does portraits of people with disabilities, illuminating their humanity," I said, and started describing the one that featured a guy in a wheelchair, holding an umbrella, with lit Chanukah candles, sticking out of the end of each umbrella-spoke. "The skill she has is phenomenal, and her art is all so utterly original, and she's an amazing writer, communicator. You could talk with her for hours and not feel that much time had passed."

How lucky I am to know someone with Riva's brain and artistic gifts. She's the friend that told me some months ago that I didn't necessarily need to be a best-selling writer, but that certainly, I was endowed with a unique voice that was no one else's and for that reason, I was entitled, and welcome, to write. All of us are...or to paint, draw, sing, play and/or write music, dance, sculpt, film-make....No one else has our voice.

Three People Who Demonstrated...

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies or opinions.

...that Bodies Really are Secondary

This posting was going to be about how I needed to be more consciously inclusive of bisexual people because I had my consciousness raised at the recent Out & Equal Workplace Summit and had been wanting to write about the workshop, where it happened, but that posting-theme has been hijacked by even more pressing thoughts -- thoughts that were cousins, I guess, of some bisexuals' struggles to be understood, but not twins:

Bodies as Objects to Transcend

The brilliant Riva Lehrer's latest exhibit and accompanying book were the most amazing demo of her art yet! Riva's writing knocked me out as much as her visual art. In "Totems and Familiars," which went with the exhibit, she wrote:

...if one inhabits a socially challenged body, it virtually guarantees a struggle between the seeming of appearance and the truth of the self. The visibly 'different' person must develop inner resources in order to survive.

Just a couple of hours prior to seeing Riva's artful words and images, I had posted the following at the new Transworkplace network:

From my experience, the top factors in my success or lack of in the workplace have been my:

• Skills
  
• Reputation
  
• Appearance
  
• Enthusiasm
  
• Sense of humor.
  

These factors seem obvious, and I want to give an example re: appearance: I'll never be the cute, small, curvaceous type of woman that makes some conventional men most comfortable to work with. Instead, I'm tall, with a gender-ambiguous voice, features and energy, and a number of transwomen have assumed I'm post-op (I'm not, but rather, have always been just over the border of female) and so I try to have a winning personality that people want to be around, since I know that most people are afraid of ambiguity. That strategy has served me well so far....

The First Person

So I, myself, was the first person to whom I was referring, who has managed to some degree to demonstrate that bodies are secondary, i.e., a lesbian woman loves me and finds me attractive, which is a sign of success, since I'm also lesbian, and I'm relatively successful in my career as well, no matter my gender-ambiguity.

The Second Person

Riva's narrative reminded me that she was the second person. For a short time, when I lived in Chicago, more than 17 years ago, Riva and I had had a romantic relationship. It had ended naturally and fairly swiftly because maybe both of us had romance-ADD back then.

When Riva and I met in New York this past spring, I was feeling a bit guilty that Pat was not with me; I hadn't predicted that I would feel that way. I thought that our quick time together was ancient history and I didn't bargain for any desire to make new history with Riva.

That was my short-sightedness, as it turned out. I did not tell Riva how I was feeling at the time because I did not wish to betray Pat, and it was a lovely dinner with marvelous conversation, but the evening would have turned ugly, if I had tried to realize any of my amorous thoughts, since not only was I not sure that Riva felt the same way, and not only did she already have a partner herself, but also, the deal I had with Pat was that we were monogamous -- and had been so for 16 years so far, and planned to be till either one's death...and probably past then, even.

What being with Riva reminded me, though, was that people's brains are primary, and their bodies, secondary, as Riva's body is affected by scoliosis, and is not average...and then, as I wrote above, neither is my body average. What is average?

The Third Person

In a Talmud class that I took at my synagogue a number of years ago, one of my classmates was a transwoman. She was the smartest, most interesting and most endearing person in the whole course, including the teacher. One night, I gave her a ride home after class. She was so, so appealing as we drove and then parked to talk a bit more in front of the brownstone, where she lived. I found myself wishing I didn't have to say goodbye to her. Again, I felt guilty, as I was already partnered with Pat, and I did say goodbye and nothing un-kosher ever happened between us. I don't know if she felt the same way and of course, I never checked. She's now blissfully married to another woman in our congregation.

While driving home, I remember that I felt really wistful because it hit me that my classmate still had her male genitals and it was during the time that I was trying to get pregnant by IUI, using an anonymous donor's sperm. Ugh, I could probably get pregnant more easily if only she and I were free for her to impregnate me, I remember feeling.

Really, doesn't this make the case for bisexuality? Or for the wider-than-conventionally-realized human capacity for love and desire? Maybe I don't need to write that posting on bisexuality afterall. Why not just acknowledge that all of us have the capacity to be attracted to anyone who's attractive for whatever reason he or she is attractive -- and in my case, the reason has always been any person's dazzling brain even more than any person's dazzling body.

"The Bliss of Struggle"

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies or opinions.

Learning to Welcome It

"That's what's so great about friends, who have known you for a long time," said my sister Deb, "They can compare you with the you of years ago."

She was referring to the conversation I'd had at dinner last night with Riva Lehrer, a friend with whom I had a romance, pre-Pat, 17 years ago, and a preeminent artist in the disability culture, who said to me before getting out of my car, "I haven't seen you for a decade and you've accomplished so much in that time, and yet you sound the same as back then -- so self-dissatisfied."

"My mother's always telling me, 'Sarah, why don't you let yourself live?'"

My friend made a disapproving face and said, "I don't mean that you should change, but rather that you should make art out of those feelings....It's the bliss of struggle."

"The bliss of struggle! I love that. Did you make it up?"

"I think so."

"I do try to channel it into my writing, but I've also felt ashamed of the struggle, too. Pat has a T-shirt that I wear; it features a quote from Frederick Douglass, 'Without struggle, there is no progress.'"

"I read something that appealed to me that said, 'An artist has to be at home with embarrassment,' [so that the shame is usable, rather than paralyzing]."

Hoping

The postings on this site ares my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies or opinions.

Possibilities Are Endless

A developmentally-disabled guy is bagging our groceries at Shoprite earlier today.

He asks, "Did you get that hat in India?"

"Yes, I did. I lived there for six months and just got back. It's a cricket cap. Cricket is like baseball --"

"I know what cricket is. It's like baseball, but the bat is wide and you throw like this [he winds his arm up and throws an invisible ball overhand toward the floor]."

"That's right. I didn't know what cricket was, really, till I went to India."

Pat says to him, "You know more about it than most people [in this country]."

We thank him and wish him a happy new year. I walk away inspired.

Straightening up for the New Year's dinner we'll host for our friends David and Gerard, I see a postcard of a show for an artist with whom I was friendly when I lived in Chicago, Riva Lehrer. Much of Riva's art focuses on physical disability.

Riva's work and the conversation with the grocery bagger this afternoon remind me that all of us have gifts and ought to express them. Also, the qualities that society sometimes thinks ought to limit us differentiate us and can serve as our core motivation and means to connect with others.