les zazous

trolling the net to see what's going on out there, came across this lovely and obscure piece in the telegraph:

"A French wartime subculture gave rise to the modern DJ, says Frank Broughton

Exactly 100 years ago, by broadcasting Handel to some very surprised ships' radio operators, Canadian inventor Reginald Fessenden became the world's first DJ. To celebrate the disc jockey's centenary, Bill Brewster and I have greatly expanded our book Last Night a DJ Saved My Life - The History of the Disc Jockey (Headline). Most think of DJs as mere entertainers, players piggybacking on other people's talent. We argue that the DJ is central to the story of popular music - that as taste-maker and musical gatekeeper, he has been the main motive force in its evolution. By championing the obscure, by importing and cross-pollinating different styles, and by gleefully splintering recorded sound in ways that have horrified musicians, the DJ has been music's most ardent revolutionary.

Research for the new edition took in acid house, the births of drum and bass and UK garage, and the strange Galapagos Islands of dance music which blossomed in mainland Europe when disco dried up. But for me most pressing was the part of our story that was slipping from living memory: the birth of the modern nightclub in Paris. Exactly why does the discothèque bear a French name? Tracing the answer took us all the way back to smoky cellars in occupied Paris. It also revealed one of the most bizarre youth movements in history.

Imagine, amid the grey serge of wartime France, a tribe of youngsters with all the colourful decadence of punks or teddy boys. Wearing zoot suits cut off at the knee (the better to show off their brightly coloured socks), with hair sculpted into grand quiffs, and shoes with triple-height soles - looking like glam-rock footwear 30 years early - these were the kids who would lay the foundations of nightclubbing. Ladies and gentlemen, les Zazous.

The Zazou look was completed with high collars, impossibly tight ties and long sheepskin-lined jackets, with a curved-handled umbrella carried at all times (copied from British prime minister Neville Chamberlain, regarded as quite a style icon). Female Zazous wore short skirts, shabby furs, wooden platform shoes and dark glasses with big lenses, and chose to go hatless, to better show off the single lock of hair they had bleached or dyed. They took their name from the Cab Calloway-style scatting in a song Je Suis Swing, by their hero, French jazz singer Johnny Hess.

Like peacock versions of Hamburg's swing kids, the Zazous thrived in opposition to the Nazis' hatred of jazz. When Goebbels issued edicts banning the "rhythms of belly-dancing negroes", the remnants of Montmartre's jazz community were deported, interned, or at very least unemployed. The scene that had raised Josephine Baker to legend resorted to home-grown musicians playing US jazz standards, renamed on programmes to fool the censors.

While the adults skirted the Nazi regulations, their younger counterparts favoured far more public defiance. Raising a finger to the world, the Zazous would shout "Swing", give a little hop, then cry out, "Zazou hey, hey, hey, za Zazou!," followed by three slaps on the hip, two shrugs of the shoulder and a turn of the head. Not surprisingly, Zazous were regular targets for the boot-boys of the collaborationist Vichy government, suffering organised beatings, having their heads shaved and being cast out to sweat in the fields.

As the pogroms began, some Zazous went even further and took to wearing yellow stars of David to show solidarity with the Jews. To underline their outlaw musical taste, they wrote "swing" across them. Several found themselves in internment camps as a result. Even stranger, when liberation was imminent, female Zazous blacked up their faces to show their love for jazz and America.

Crucially, it was the Zazous who gave Paris its enduring taste for dancing in cellars to records. Unable to congregate openly, they took their precious swing 78s underground, for les bals clandestins in cafés off the Champs-Élysées or in the Latin Quarter. There, they would throw English slang at each other, swap American novels and jitterbug to all hours.

In Paris, les Zazous remain a potent symbol of resistance - against both the Nazis and the stuffiness of an older generation. They were also the first club kids. After the liberation, Eddie Barclay, wartime jazz pianist, legendary lounge lizard and founder of the French record industry, followed their example and established the first nightclub to dispense with live music. So while the precise etymology of discothèque has so far defied discovery, we know that the concept of an intimate underground record club is ours thanks to the Third Reich and the jazz-loving layabouts who defied it."

kiss pandas

kiss pandas
Originally uploaded by ravaj.

:-)

cabrera just homered for the yanks!

cabrera just homered for the yanks!
Originally uploaded by ravaj.

i wore this shirt when we flew out to florida. explained to d. what it meant, but as a mets fan she really didn't think much of it :-)

in the airport in florida a woman pointed out the shirt to her daughter and said, 'look, cabrera!' and i smiled.

fyi

the grauniad on the leeds game

sorry for all the footie stuff (although i'm not really) but here is a lovely snippet from rob smyth today that i just had to share:

"QPR equalised from nowhere in the 81st minute, when Martin Rowlands fired home an excellent penalty after Stephen Crainey had been punished for a soft foul on Gareth Ainsworth. "These days," fumed Blackwell, "you only have to fart in the box to get a penalty."

Any wind there was was taken out of QPR's sails within a minute of the equaliser, however, when Geoff Horsfield cushioned a volley into the corner from Steve Stone's defence-splitting flick but somehow Leeds threw it away again. Terrorised by Jones, a beast of a centre-forward, they were struggling to hang on when Ainsworth's cross was turned in at the near post by Baidoo."

feeling a bit homesick for an antiquated british sense of humour - think i'll go look for my copy of 'carry on up the khyber' ...

government-sanctioned courtesy

from the bbc online today:

"Baby badges for Japan commuters

Rail companies in Tokyo are handing out badges to pregnant women in the hope they prompt commuters to give up their seats on the capital's crowded trains. The badges come in pink and blue and have the words "There is a baby in my stomach" printed on them. Health officials said people sometimes could not tell if a woman was pregnant, especially in the early stages.

Japan is worried about a population decline and is seeking ways to make pregnancy and having children easier.

Rail officials have been handing out the badges at stations since 1 August.

One commuter welcomed the initiative.

"When I was three months pregnant and got on the train, no-one would really notice me and I couldn't really ask them to give me a seat," Yoshiko Kato told Reuters news agency.

Japan's fertility rate has continued to fall in recent years, hitting a new low in June.

Officials have predicted a serious effect on the economy and have introduced a variety of initiatives to persuade women to have more children.

These have included expanding child-care facilities, improving employment conditions for mothers and even government-sponsored speed-dating."

qpr's first point!

06 rowly vs leeds
Originally uploaded by ravaj.

for all the newspaper stuff about qpr, the qpr report link on the right is really good.

we drew with leeds 2-2 at home, but it was one of those games when we equalised in injury time and snatched the point. the magnificently-named shabazz baidoo was the scorer.

amazing how a little thing like that goal can raise the spirits of thousands of people.

o yes, and england won the test match against pakistan ... now to see if the yankees can make it 3 out of 3

religion without services or ritual?

an article from today's daily telegraph:

"Religion off the agenda in 'church of laughter'
By Jonathan Petre, Religion Correspondent

(Filed: 07/08/2006)

For those who are curious about Christianity but disillusioned by the institutional Church, there is a novel solution - drop the religion.

The Rev Ian Gregory, a cleric well known to readers of The Daily Telegraph for launching the Campaign for Courtesy in an attempt to improve manners, has embarked on a new project which he calls "Christianity without religion".

Out goes the "archaic mumbo-jumbo" of church services and the "silly arguments about things that don't and shouldn't matter"; in come chats about anything that makes you feel good and the world's first dedicated "laughter room" because "laughter is as important as prayer".

Mr Gregory, a congregational minister who retired last year after 20 years, is launching the radical experiment in an unused chapel in Cheadle, Staffs.

He said that he had recently realised that much of his ministry had missed the point.

"I look back on the past 20 years and think, what the Dickens was I doing? I now advise people who are bored with church not to go," he said.

"People are fed up with religion. The bar-room talk is that it causes too much trouble in the world. But people are intrigued by spirituality and by figures such as Jesus and Buddha."

The traditional Sunday morning service will be replaced by "coffee and laughter" - videos of classic comedy films during which people will be able to come and go or read the Sunday papers over tea and toast.

Mr Gregory, a colourful figure who prefers bright ties and a trilby to clerical garb, will then be available to people for "one to one personal consultations" and "healing prayers".

He will also launch a course devoted to people's self-image and confidence, with sessions entitled "Have you a right to be happy?" and "The art of conversation."

In a concession to more traditional religion, he will hold Christian worship on some Sunday afternoons, which will consist of a mixture of hymns, prayers, readings and discussions.

Mr Gregory said that religion-free Christianity was first promoted by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German theologian who was hanged by the Nazis in 1945 for his part in a plot to kill Hitler.

"He saw the way people were disillusioned with church, but attracted to Jesus Christ," said Mr Gregory. "I'm convinced that Jesus Christ had profound and important things to say to people, but they have got lost in squabbles and worries about church buildings.

"The politics has taken over and the message has been obscured."

The Church of England has been experimenting with new ways to attract people back to the pews, but none so extreme that they dispose of institutional religion altogether.

The Rev Mark Ireland, the Church of England Missioner for the Diocese of Litchfield, wondered whether Mr Gregory's church was proclaiming the "good news of Jesus Christ" in what he was doing.

"People are very interested in the good news but not so interested in church," he said. "We have to accommodate that. But church is an indispensible part of the package. Being part of a worshipping missionary community is how we encounter God.""

i love the idea about the importance of laughter. i have, however, 2 big problems with this approach: i think music is as important and effective as laughter; and then there is the issue of comfort and support at times when you and/or the world are in trouble. i just finished reading the david mccullough biography of president john adams, and right at the end noted the following quotes:

"Admire and adore the Author of the telescopic universe, love and esteem the work, do all in your power to lessen ill, and increase good, but never assume to comprehend." (p 630)

&

(to his grand-daughter) "You are not singular in your suspicions that you know but little. The longer I live, the more I read, the more patiently I think, and the more anxiously I inquire, the less I seem to know ... Do justly. Love mercy. Walk humbly. This is enough ... So questions and so answers your affectionate grandfather." (p 650)

is it not possible to accept that there are things we cannot know, and at the same time aspire to grow in knowledge? does it have to be faith or reason? i believe that religion developed precisely in order to encourage ethical behaviour in the face of a sense of powerlessness about our world and the things that happen there. and the core of ethical behaviour is how we relate to each other. thus, i suspect that getting rid of communal services in favour of individual chats may not be as helpful as the minister hopes, since it removes a major opportunity to be in community.

i'd be happy to stay after services to watch a bit of 'little britain' though!

reuters admits doctoring of photo

big surprise - some of the photos of what is going on in lebanon, and presumably everywhere else, have been digitally 'enhanced'.

see here for a link to the reuters story.

lies, damn lies, etc.

from today's sunday times

"The Sunday Times August 06, 2006

What the British Jews think of Israel's war
There are doubts about tactics, but also resentment of media bias, says David Rowan

When two shipwrecked Jews were finally discovered on a tiny desert island their rescuers could not understand why they had spent their days building three synagogues. “Isn’t it obvious?” one of the dishevelled survivors shrugged. “An Orthodox one for me, a Reform one for him — and a third that neither of us would ever set foot in.”

When I began editing The Jewish Chronicle three months ago I was warned that this ever-so-slightly opinionated community of 300,000 or so people might drive me to empathise with Golda Meir’s supposed complaint to Harry Truman: that if he thought he had problems, she had to run a country comprising a couple of million prime ministers. Maybe it’s the centuries of Talmudic debate, but oy, do the Jews love a good argument.

So it is remarkable, amid all the juicy communal rows and furious falling-outs that normally tumble like manna onto our news pages, to see such a high degree of unity in support of Israel’s assault on Hezbollah. Even after Israel’s disastrous and widely condemned airstrike on the Lebanese village of Qana last Sunday barely a handful of our readers have been willing to voice open criticism of Ehud Olmert, the prime minister.

In private conversations with rabbis, activists, educators and ordinary secular and religious Jews from Gateshead to Golders Green, I heard all sorts of nuanced views last week, ranging from deep sadness at the suffering on both sides and reservations that Israel’s bombing campaigns might be undermining its longer-term security to anger at a perceived media bias in Hezbollah’s favour.

But publicly, for all the doubts being expressed about the efficacy of Olmert’s military strategy, there remains an extraordinary degree of agreement that he is absolutely morally justified in pursuing his lonely battle against the terror force next door. Because this conflict, it is widely understood, is a battle for Israel’s very survival against an enemy — backed by Iran and Syria — committed to eliminating the Jewish state.

For a mere newspaper editor to claim to speak for the diversity of British Jewry would be to invite an e-mail rocket assault as ferocious as anything raining onto Haifa and the Galilee. So what we have been doing, as the paper where the debate is taking place, is listening to readers’ views, asking questions and reflecting the breadth of opinion, from gung-ho heads of public companies to liberal Peace Now activists, even holding our breath to acknowledge ultra-religious anti-Zionist extremists such as Neturei Karta, whose rabbis march alongside Hezbollah flags and befriend Iranian Holocaust-deniers in their mutual quest to terminate the state of Israel.

Shortly before Qana we sent our reporters out on the streets across Britain to ask Jews, in roughly proportionate numbers to the community’s population distribution according to the census, whether they supported Israel’s actions in Lebanon. Of the 100 who responded 84 said “Yes” and just six said “No”. When asked, more specifically, whether they felt that Israel had overreacted in its response to Hezbollah, 70% felt that it had not, and only 20% felt that it had — a marked contrast to surveys in the national press.

Last week, as media coverage conveyed an increasingly decontextualised picture of Israel as the aggressor in this conflict, and commentators felt daily less restrained from making shameful assertions about its “genocide” and “Nazi-style collective punishment”, we repeated the exercise by talking to a range of public Jewish figures in fields from academia to the arts.

This time, with many respondents expressing heartfelt concern about civilian deaths in both countries, a widespread sympathy for Israel’s need to respond determinedly was tempered by an increasingly outspoken minority view that in practice its military strategy had proved flawed.

Authors such as Dannie Abse and Lisa Appignanesi told us that Israel’s military response to Hezbollah had indeed been “disproportionate”; the playwright Arnold Wesker, while blaming Hezbollah and the Lebanese government for the conflict, worried that “hollow Israeli apologies” for Qana demonstrated a “blind(ness) to the image they are allowing to be presented to the world”.

Such increasingly open criticisms are still far from the dominant views of mainstream British Jews, for whom the psychological safe haven that is Israel must be protected at all costs from enemies committed to its extinction. More representative of our mailbag are the comments we reported from the writer Simon Sebag-Montefiore, who berated the few “silly Jews in comfortable Hampstead villas” who failed to see that “Israel has every right to defend itself against Hezbollah, a powerful anti-western, Iran-backed terror state-within-a-state [that had] fired missiles from civilian areas precisely to provoke tragedy”.

Maureen Lipman, too, was contemptuous of “assimilated, sometimes self-despising Jews such as Gerald Kaufman and Harold Pinter” who had been openly critical of Jerusalem. “What exactly is a proportionate response to unprovoked attacks on a country’s borders and to the kidnapping of members of its armed forces?” she asked. “A letter? A sanction? A slapped wrist?”

But if openly articulated dissent within this community is beginning to grow amid deep soul-searching about Olmert’s dangerously overbullish military assessments, his forces’ poor intelligence gathering, and the wider consequences of such widespread destruction of Lebanese infrastructure and services — not to mention the heart-stopping images of dead children beamed around the world’s television networks — there are two aspects of this conflict that continue to unite most readers in agreement.

First, there is a widespread perception that much of the British media — in particular the BBC — is failing to report the conflict fairly. With more than 2,000 Hezbollah rockets pouring into Israel, with hundreds of thousands of Israeli civilians displaced, with loose talk on broadcast discussions of Israeli “war crimes” and rather less focus on Hezbollah’s own breaches of international law — there is an assumption among many of our readers of an instinctive anti-Israel bias.

Second, and far more significantly, there is a fear that events in Lebanon will make life more difficult for diaspora Jews wherever they stand on Lebanon. In last week’s paper we covered the desecration of Berlin’s Holocaust memorial, the vandalism of Jewish shops and synagogues from Sydney to Rome, and Mel Gibson’s outburst about Jews being “responsible for all the wars in the world”. We also reported on growing evidence of anti-semitic attacks in Britain including the swastikas and phrase “Kill all Jews” daubed onto a Jewish doctor’s home in Hampstead Garden Suburb.

That, in essence, is why what unites British Jews matters more at a time like this than what divides us. Because, as a rabbi reminded me last week, when a Lebanese-born Hezbollah suicide bomber killed 85 Jews in Argentina 12 years ago, he didn’t stop to inquire where they each stood on the war.

David Rowan is editor of The Jewish Chronicle"

plus ca change

burnley 2-0 qpr :-(
Originally uploaded by ravaj.

did anybody expect us to win? perhaps not. did anybody hope we would? absolutely! honestly, what a day ... rangers lose, the yanks are blanked, and pakistan put on a great 3rd-wicket stand against england.

on the other hand, this evening over at d's i discovered the dog whisperer on television. after watching 3 episodes i am now a much more confident human. i just have to remember the power of the pack

space centre piglet

piglet @ the challenger launch pad
Originally uploaded by ravaj.

another picture from florida. don't you think piglet actually looks like the space shuttle here? it's the arms ...

the game has started.

uuuuu rrrrr's!!!!!

qpr qpr qpr

06-07 ward in action by nico
Originally uploaded by ravaj.

am v. excited - the season proper begins in 10 minutes. am ready to listen live online, and meanwhile have the test match cricket scoreboard on my desktop. these are the lovely last days of summer!

great big ooooops & sorry

turns out it was LARRY miller not dennis and i have been hoist by an internet canard. apologies to all millers and their friends. thought my source was reliable. he thought his source was reliable. sadly, a fine example of lashon hara, and i apologise to all of you also. here is the explanation from www.snopes.com:

"Dennis Miller is celebrated for his R-rated, no-holds-barred political commentaries because they cut to the heart of disturbing issues by using humor as a lens through which to view current events. His "rants" make us laugh, but they also make us think, which lifts his form of humor above mere entertainment and into the realm of provocative editorializing that so often helps folks see old situations in a new light.

The voice of the Internet essay now attributed to him seems to many to be his, and its appearance in their inboxes emblazoned with a notation that it's "from Dennis Miller" confirms this perception. Yet the piece now being laid at his feet is not his work; it's the effort of another social commentator who bears a similar name.

This diatribe is actually part of a column by humorist Larry Miller which appeared in the Daily Standard on 22 April 2002. It is a reaction piece to a 10 April 2002 FOX News Network

interview conducted by Greta van Susteren with Ishmael Abu-Shanab, spokesman for the Hamas political wing in the Gaza strip, and American attorney Stanley Cohen, who has represented the head of Hamas.

The version circulating on the Internet omits a four-paragraph lead-in about the ludicrosity of anyone named Cohen's defending Hamas, the Palestinian organization responsible for the 27 March Passover bombing that killed 19 and injured 100 at a hotel in Netanya, as well as many other bombings. It also leaves off the five-paragraph finish primarily devoted to a discussion of Colin Powell's (then) projected peace mission and disparagement of van Susteren's politeness to her two guests. The core of the article — the "brief overview" — is reproduced faithfully.

This was not the first piece by Larry Miller to have gained widespread Internet circulation while attributed to a different source. In March 2002, his essay decrying a tendency to minimalize the horror of terrorism and society's washing its hands of problems that don't yield to easy solutions ("You Say You Want a Resolution") rocketed through cyberspace attributed to Gen. Richard E. Hawley, a United States Air Force general.

Larry Miller suffers the unenviable fate of seeing not one, but two of his essays acclaimed by the masses but attributed to other writers. This is not the sort of fame every author aspires to."

a message from mel gibson?

just found this on yahoo news:


"Rabbi invites Mel Gibson to speak at Yom Kippur
Wed Aug 2, 4:29 PM ET

LOS ANGELES (AFP) - A well-known American rabbi has invited actor Mel Gibson, who has come under fire for recent anti-Semitic remarks, to speak at his synagogue for Yom Kippur.

"I wish to invite you to come and speak in order that you might directly express to the Jewish community your remorse," Rabbi David Baron, of the Beverly Hills-based Temple of the Arts, wrote in a letter to the actor dated August 1.

Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement, falls on October 1 this year.

Gibson, who checked into a detoxification program on Monday, apologized to the Jewish community on Tuesday for anti-Semitic remarks he uttered while being arrested for drunken driving and asked to meet Jewish leaders to make amends.

"I am not just asking for forgiveness," he said. "I would like to take it one step further, and meet with the leaders in the Jewish community, with whom I can have a one-on-one discussion to discern the appropriate path for healing."

The TMZ.com celebrity website released a police report in which the devout Catholic director of the blockbuster "The Passion of the Christ" referred to "f...ing Jews" after his car was pulled over in the dawn hours Friday at twice the legal speed limit.

"The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world," he was quoted as saying in the report after first asking the arresting police officer: "Are you a Jew?"

Rabbi Baron, who describes his Temple in a letter posted on the TMZ.com website as "the largest entertainment industry synagogue in the United States," said that the key to Gibson's apology "is the sincerity of the individual and it must be demonstrated in word and deed."

Every year Baron invites a high-profile celebrity to speak at his synagogue for Yom Kippur. In 2005 New York Senator Hillary Clinton spoke about personal forgiveness, the letter read."

o dear o dear o dear
cynical ravaj says great shot rabbi - maybe if i had ideas like that i would have a much more successful career in the congregational rabbinate.
non-cynical ravaj is already asleep - i should go join her ...

a message from dennis miller

a very old friend out west just sent me the following words, attributed to dennis miller. what do you think of them? meanwhile, a new friend with whom i had a fine indian meal last night said to me it is better to let israel go than to behave intolerably in order to save it. what do you think of that?

"For those who don't know, Dennis Miller is a comedian who has a show called Dennis Miller Live on HBO. He is not Jewish.
He recently said the following about the Mideast situation:

"A brief overview of the situation is always valuable, so as a service to all Americans who still don't get it, I now offer you the story of the Middle East in just a few paragraphs, which is all you really need.

Here we go:

The Palestinians want their own country. There's just one thing about that: There are no Palestinians. It's a made up word. Israel was called Palestine for two thousand years. Like "Wiccan," "Palestinian" sounds ancient but is really a modern invention

Before the Israelis won the land in the 1967 war, Gaza was owned by Egypt, the West Bank was owned by Jordan, and there were no "Palestinians."

As soon as the Jews took over and started growing oranges as big as basketballs, what do you know, say hello to the "Palestinians," weeping for their deep bond with their lost "land" and "nation."

So for the sake of honesty, let's not use the word "Palestinian" anymore to describe these delightful folks, who dance for joy
at our deaths, until someone points out they're being taped. Instead, let's call them what they are:
"Other Arabs Who Can't Accomplish Anything In Life And Would Rather Wrap Themselves In The Seductive Melodrama Of Eternal Struggle And Death."

I know that's a bit unwieldy to expect to see on CNN. How about this, then: "Adjacent Jew-Haters." Okay, so the Adjacent Jew-Haters want their own country. Oops, just one more thing. No, they don't. They could've had their own country any time in the last thirty years, especially two years ago at Camp David but if you have your own country, you have to have traffic lights and garbage trucks and Chambers of Commerce, and, worse, you actually have to figure out some way to make a living.

That's no fun. No, they want what all the other Jew-Haters in the region want: Israel. They also want a big pile of dead Jews, of course -- that's where the real fun is -- but mostly they want Israel.

Why? For one thing, trying to destroy Israel - or "The Zionist Entity" as their textbooks call it -- for the last fifty years has allowed the rulers of Arab countries to divert the attention of their own people away from the fact that they're the blue-ribbon most illiterate, poorest, and tribally backward on God's Earth, and if you've ever been around God's Earth . . you know
that's really saying something.

It makes me roll my eyes every time one of our pundits waxes poetic about the great history and culture of the Muslim Middle-east. Unless I'm missing something, the Arabs haven't given anything to the world since Algebra, and, by the way, thanks a hell of a lot for that one.

Chew this around & spit it out: 500 million Arabs; 5 million Jews. Think of all the Arab countries as a football field, and Israel as a pack of matches sitting in the middle of it. And now these same folks swear that, if Israel gives them half of that pack of matches, everyone will be pals..

Really? Wow, what neat news. Hey, but what about the string of wars to obliterate the tiny country and the constant din
of rabid blood oaths to drive every Jew into the sea? Oh, that? We were just kidding.

My friend Kevin Rooney made a gorgeous point the other day: Just reverse the Numbers. Imagine 500 million Jews and 5 million Arabs. I was stunned at the simple brilliance of it. Can anyone picture the Jews strapping belts of razor blades and dynamite to themselves? Of course not.

Or marshaling every fiber and force at their disposal for generations to drive a tiny Arab State into the sea? Nonsense. Or dancing for joy at the murder of innocents? Impossible. Or spreading and believing horrible lies about the Arabs baking their
bread with the blood of children? Disgusting.

No, as you know, left to themselves in a world of peace, the worst Jews would ever do to people is debate them to death.

Mr. Bush, God bless him, is walking a tightrope. I understand that, with vital operations in Iraq and others, it's in our interest, as Americans, to try to stabilize our Arab allies as much as possible, and, after all, that can't be much harder than stabilizing a roomful of super models who've just had their drugs taken away.

However, in any big-picture strategy, there's always a danger of losing moral weight. We've already lost some. After September 11th, our president told us and the world he was going to root out all terrorists and the countries that supported them. Beautiful. Then the Israelis, after months and months of having the equivalent of an Oklahoma City every week (and then every day), start to do the same thing we did, and we tell them to show restraint.

If America were being attacked with an Oklahoma City every day, we would all very shortly be screaming for the administration to just be done with it and kill everything south of the Mediterranean and east of the Jordan."

you may not appreciate the manner in which this is presented ... consider, however, how much of what he refers to is accurate.

l'shalom

wiki-albert

my sister n. has just made a page for our father (who art in heaven, we hope) on wikipedia. while searching for it, i also found the following on a website for jewish humour, and thought you may enjoy it:

Rabbi Albert H. Friedlander of England's Westminster synagogue, who is known for his soft, melodious voice, often tells this story when visiting a community and preaching a sermon.

"Before I begin my sermon (talk), I must make a confession. It is not really a confession, because you have already begun to realize that I have a soft, quiet voice. To be honest: IT PUTS PEOPLE TO SLEEP. And why not? A fifteen minute snooze might help a congregant far more than anything else I can do for him or her.

However, I really object when the president of my congregation always falls asleep within two minutes of my starting the sermon. Once, I challenged him: "Max, WHY do you always fall asleep as soon as I begin to preach?" "Rabbi," he said firmly, "I trust you."

he told this story to the congregation at my installation in virginia a few years ago. a couple of weeks later, as i stood up to begin my sermon, mrs clayman called out from her seat in the second row, "don't worry, rabbi - i trust you!"

what the ****?

yes i am biased since i am a jew but i am neither absolutist nor fundamentalist. how are these incidents going to help the growth of peace?

berlin holocaust memorial vandalised

sydney synagogue attacked

the passionate anti-semitism of mel gibson

attack on seattle jews - one death

fear the oink

fear the oink
Originally uploaded by ravaj.

ok - i need to know - who are the ariel ballhogs? found nothing on google. we were driving around the florida mall, and i saw this slogan on the truck. upon closer inspection there was another van which said 'go ballhogs' and had a sticker for the ariel ballhogs. it's a great piglet pic. i just need to know more!

piglet meets his disney friends

piglet meets his disney friends
Originally uploaded by ravaj.

last but not least, classic piglet makes peace with his disney counterparts.

epcot piglet

piglet & space mickey/goofy
Originally uploaded by ravaj.

awwww look how sweet mickey & goofy are being - holding piglet's paws.

have to admit that i've always been more of a warner brothers sista.

guess where we've been all week!

piglet & cinderella's castle
Originally uploaded by ravaj.

what can i say? when you get a bargain on a week at a resort just by sea world, and you really need a holiday, and when you get there it is all marshes and gators and timeshares and themeparks, and you are on holiday so you can do whatever you want ... and piglet's never been there ... yes, we have just given many dollars to disney.

reggae boy

06-07 damion stewart by nico
Originally uploaded by ravaj.

finally for today here is a pic of damion stewart. he played against england for jamaica in a world cup warm-up. i scanned the screen intently each time he appeared, and came to the conclusion that he has an oddly-shaped head. this has nothing to do with his official nickname, which appears to be "stew-peas".

the boy from oz

06-07 nick ward by nico
Originally uploaded by ravaj.

i've always felt that i only really know my team when i can recognise players from a distance by the way they hold themselves and move.

there are so many new faces at qpr this season, so i am posting a couple of shots by nico from the dot org to help me begin to learn.

this is nick ward who just signed from perth glory.

pre-season prep

06-07 qpr ballet by nico
Originally uploaded by ravaj.

yes the world cup is only just over and they are still debating how to punish the head-butter and the trash-talker but in less than a fortnight the championship season begins again and my beloved qpr start to play for real. with a new manager, and several new players, we have no sense of how the team might be this year. this photo is from an inter-squad game, and the guy on the left is our new striker from poland. i am hoping that the ball is out of picture on the right rather than the left. still, before a ball is kicked in anger, one may hope, eh?

kudos to the freeway blogger

and thanks echidne of the snakes for the link:

check this out

there are still a few civil disobedients out there

peter hawkins r.i.p.

it is said that jesters have a place in the world to come. peter hawkins was not famous, but he entertained millions. my favourite characters that he voiced included the daleks, bill and ben the flowerpot men, and the laughing martian robots in the smash ads. thank you sir.

family matters

samuel hoschander
Originally uploaded by ravaj.

this is a photograph of my great-grandfather, samuel hoschander. he came from a religious family in poland, but emigrated to berlin at some point possibly after WW1. he was a sofer, and i have a small wooden yad that he carved.

yesterday i received a call from california in response to a letter i wrote to a kibbutz in israel a couple of months ago. more hoschanders! they also are descended from a samuel who went to berlin maybe around the same time. our excitement is palpable!

tables are turned :-)

2006 hbt aj worships at piglet's feet
Originally uploaded by ravaj.

d. took this picture with her mobile of me taking a picture of the pig at holy blossom temple in toronto. possibly looks a bit like i am paying homage ...

oprah says she isn't gay :-(

darn, eh?

octavia e. butler

d. lent me this book to read a couple of days ago, and i just sat down with it this afternoon. would not have stopped to write here, except i am trying to savour the last few chapters and not finish too greedily.

"A lot of people seem to believe in a big-daddy-God or a big-cop-God or a big-king-God. They believe in a kind of super-person. A few believe God is another word for nature. And nature turns out to mean just about anything they happen not to understand or feel in control of.

Some say God is a spirit, a force, an ultimate reality. Ask seven people what all of that means and you'll get seven different answers. So what is God? Just another name for whatever makes you feel special and protected?" Parable of the Sower pp 13-14

and if it helps, and does not hurt anyone else, what is the problem with that?

she also writes a few pages later:

"God is Power -
Infinite,
Irresistible,
Inexorable,
Indifferent.
And yet, God is Pliable -
Trickster,
Teacher,
Chaos,
Clay.
God exists to be shaped.
God is Change.

This is the literal truth.

God can't be resisted or stopped, but can be shaped and focused. This means God is not to be prayed to. Prayers only help the person doing the praying, and then, only if they strengthen and focus that person's resolve. If they're used that way, they can help us in our only real relationship with God. They help us to shape God and to accept and work with the shapes that God imposes on us. God is power, and in the end, God prevails.

But we can rig the game in our own favor if we understand that God exists to be shaped, and will be shaped, with or without our forethought, with or without our intent." ibid p 24

kind of alongside the buddhist idea that all our suffering derives from attachment to material things ... as if having stuff makes us real, because we own it, have power over it ... what i hear her saying this evening is we should shed the illusion that god is a deity that may indulge our whims upon supplication. god has god's own plan. our choice is to accept that and deal with the hands we are given, or not. if we do not, shit still happens. if we do, things may be different. or not. but at least we take part in our own destiny.

off to play ping-pong. small objects that may be struck with great force and yet suffer no damage nor cause it to other persons and objects. excellent.

multiculture

oink on eglinton
Originally uploaded by ravaj.

way way back many centuries ago not long after the internet began, i lived in toronto for a bit. one of the things they used to say was that it was the most multicultural city in the world. this does not, of course, mean that everyone mingles and shares and learns. rather it seems that there many neighbourhoods abutting each other. here, piglet visits the hamlet of swinetown :-)

the power of thought!

n's friend mark really does write about some interesting subjects in the science pages of the times. today it is about a chip in the brain of a paralysed man that helps him to operate machinery. here are some extracts:

The man who can open his e-mails by power of thought
By Mark Henderson
Paralysed knife victim says implant has changed his life

A MAN paralysed from the neck down has learnt to move a computer cursor and an artificial arm by the power of thought alone. The brain implant that has allowed him to do so could be used eventually to control wheelchairs and prosthetic limbs.
The first detailed scientific report on the case of Matthew Nagle, 25, whose spinal cord was severed in a knife attack, shows how sensors that measure brainwaves could allow paralysed patients to improve their quality of life greatly.

Mr Nagle, from Massachusetts, has been fitted with a 4mm-square chip that reads signals in the primary motor cortex of his brain, the region that would control movement if he had the use of his limbs.

When he imagines moving his paralysed body, the implant’s 100 sensors record the activity in his brain and transmit these signals to a computer that controls various devices. In nine months, he has learnt to move a cursor on a computer screen, open e-mails, play simple computer games and adjust the volume of his television. He has also learnt to operate a simple robotic arm.

A paper published today in the journal Nature describes his progress. He can move a cursor to a target on a computer screen with 75 to 85 per cent accuracy. He can also perform many of these actions while conducting a conversation. This suggests that total concentration will not be necessary to operate mind-controlled prosthetic limbs, a critical factor if they are to become part of everyday life.

A second patient, a 55-year-old man with a spinal injury, has also been implanted with the device, called BrainGate, though he has yet to achieve similar results.



Mr Nagle had been paralysed for four years before the study. The results indicate that brain activity involved in motion persists long after spinal injury and can be channelled to control computerised devices. This is important, as many scientists had predicted that the necessary nerve cells might wither with lack of use, making it difficult to harness their signals.

“What is also encouraging is the immediate response from the brain,” Dr Donoghue said. “When asked to ‘think right’ or ‘think left’, patients were able to change their neural activity immediately. And their use of the device is seemingly easy. Patients can control the computer cursor and carry on a conversation at the same time, just as we can simultaneously talk and use our computers.”

i guess it's a toss-up between being excited at the amazing things we humans can learn to do, and going all 1984 on it.

i just finished reading 'never let me go' by kazuo ishiguro which is a tale told by and about a clone developed for organ donation. for me the part that really got to me was the shrinking horror of the 'normal' people when coming into contact with the clones ... not willing to give up the longer lives and greater health they receive from this scheme, they have to demonise these other living beings.

today, however, i am excited that mr nagle, while rooted physically to the spot by his injuries, may now surf the world through his computer.

for eddy

1946 groningen palms
Originally uploaded by ravaj.

this is a photograph from 60 years ago. one of the recent successes of my family tree project was to find the young man in this picture. i tried to e-mail the photo to him but it didn't work out so i am putting it here instead. greetings eddy, and i hope the rest of you enjoy this lovely photo for itself!

where have all my cousins gone?

i have a little time on my hands for the next few days, and so i have decided to declare officially that my dabbling in researching my family tree is now my hobby. i haven't had a hobby for a long time. this is something from which not only do i derive great pleasure, but also it has no calories whatsoever.

a couple of years ago i did quite well with the hoschander family from my father's mother's side (except for one guy in london who probably thinks i am stalking him but all i want is to see if we have any shared past).

now i am looking at my mother's father's family. it takes time, but i find it so exciting when i get a lead.

i was wondering why i am so drawn to this?

first of all, i think the detective work is appealing ... and the idea that with a methodical approach one may build the picture. there is no fantasy here, except perhaps that coming from such a small family i am somehow building it up if only on paper.

o, that was the second thing! the relatives that were cut down by nazi evil, and those that therefore never got to exist ... i want to know who they were, or at least where they were born and lived.

i know that birth families are not necessarily the most nurturing kind, and that we may create our own. there is a lot that i know, and of course much more that i do not. this has more, however, to do with feelings, i think :-)

since i am unlikely ever to become a parent, (i know i know but time marches on etc.) and am currently denied access to my niece, i wonder who will remember me in the following generations. egotistical perhaps, but i feel sad about it. nu - maybe part of the finding family members is so i can remember them and thus also have a little hope that i may one day be remembered also even if only for being a girl with a boy's name.

wimbledon women's final

CAWLEY_Evonne_1980_GH_R
Originally uploaded by ravaj.

i remember sitting down with my little sister to watch evonne goolagong that was (although being smartarses we liked to call her evonne dinnergong ... and then of course there was jelly bean king my other favourite) and saying we had to support her because she was a mother and a mother hadn't won wimbledon before. she was also a bloody good tennis player. i wonder whatever happened to her? hang on a sec ...

well, correction number one (thank you google) is that she was the first mother to win in 66 years.

i also found:

"When Evonne's mother, Linda, died in 1991, Evonne realised she didn't know much about her Aboriginal history. Since then, she's discovered a great deal about her past and has written a book about her life.

"I didn't have a history before when I did my first book and found out about my family. I want something else to pass down to my kids so that they have a history there to pass down to theirs. To me, it's probably the best thing that's ever happened to me.""

and

"She returned to Australia to live in 1991 at Noosa Heads on the Sunshine Coast in Queensland and has travelled around Australia, coming to understand the importance of her Aboriginal heritage and introducing her American born children to their indigenous culture. She was a member of the Board of the Australian Sports Commission from 1995-1997. Since 1997, she has held the position of Sports Ambassador to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island Communities."

o, and i'd really like mauresmo to win, because, well a lot because she's queer and a lot because i like seeing people getting over their insecurities and becoming mentally and emotionally tougher. i suspect, however, that since henin-hardenne already is that much tougher, she will probably make her career grand slam. now, though, i should go to bed to have any chance of waking up in time to listen to some of it live!

rabbi dr albert h friedlander z"l

2005 ahf stone 2
Originally uploaded by ravaj.

abbale
we love you and miss you

african violence

a tip o' the nib to m. who gave me this title while standing in a phonebooth in paris :-)

i was just standing by my windowsill, looking out at the street, and i noticed the two african violet plants that the temple sent me when i was last in hospital. despite the fact that i had pulled out all the flowers (hey, when they were dead!), they are flowering again. blooming resilient, eh?

a time to grin

1997 cheeky fuzzy ahf
Originally uploaded by ravaj.

my mother observes the gregorian date so we do also. i observe the british date, although it was the previous day here. whenever we observe, however, it is still two years since we lost my father. he should be watching the world cup, and telling us gently not to be so hard on cristiano ronaldo. this picture reminds me of his mischievous side. a time to mourn, but also a time to grin.

on the shoulders of giants

i just heard that rabbi dr. louis jacobs died this past week. in honour of the 350th anniversary of the return of the jews to england, he was voted the top british jew of all time in the jewish chronicle newspaper, ahead of such luminaries as benjamin disraeli and moses montefiore. his official career, however did not run smoothly. he was banned by the chief rabbi ...

the times notes that:

"The cause of this intervention lay in a little book that Jacobs had published in l956 called We Have Reason to Believe. In that he set out the accepted views of the biblical scholarship of the late 19th and 20th centuries, that the first five books of the Bible, known in Judaism as Torah, were the product of several authors and editors.

In his later and greater work, Principles of the Jewish Faith, Jacobs insisted that he accepted Halakha, Jewish religious law, in all its scope and severity, and as such he remained “orthodox” or “neo-orthodox”.

Although those statements would not raise an eyebrow among the bulk of Anglo-Jewry, they were anathema to Brodie and those around him. Their “orthodoxy” continued to demand that the Five Books of Moses be regarded as having been dictated, word for word, by God to Moses on Mount Sinai around the year 1250BC. For daring to challenge that view with scholarship, Jacobs was deemed by Brodie and the rabbis around him as unfit either to run Jews’ College or to return to his Bayswater pulpit, as he was invited to do. The ban meant that, from the moment in l962 that Brodie pronounced it until Jacobs died, he was barred from preaching or otherwise officiating in any of the 63 congregations of the United Synagogue, and in dozens more that accepted the authority of the Chief Rabbinate."

through my father, i met r. jacobs a few times, the last of which must have been nearly 20 years ago when he and his wife came to albert's 60th birthday party (as did john rayner, z"l; hyam maccoby z"l o dear many now dead friends). i know him more, however, through his books. for teaching at a beginner's level, i ofter refer to the book of jewish belief as well as 'the book of jewish practice'. organised, clear, traditional but in a 20th-century way, i trust what he has to say, whether or not i agree with it. i inherited many of r. jacobs' books from my father and brought some home from the office to look at in the coming week.

the times concludes with:

"His place in history is forever secure as the man who sought heroically to bring Anglo-Jewish orthodoxy into the 20th century, and was rewarded with martyrdom. And the pellucid clarity and profound scholarship of his writings on all aspects of Judaism secure his place as a lasting teacher."

(nb from dictionary.com: "Admitting the passage of light; transparent or translucent. Transparently clear in style or meaning: pellucid prose.")

another of the gedolei ha-dor bites the dust.

again i ask - is it easier to have integrity when there is someone at home who cooks for you and cleans for you and does your laundry and sleeps with you and cares for your children and holds you and says there there darling they are all horrid and you are the best?

meanwhile, the second yahrzeit of my darling father is this shabbat. there are so many giants on whose shoulders i stand, but his most of all.

nu - i found some quotes re the origin of the phrase ... enjoy (or not):

"i say with didacus stella, a dwarf standing on the shoulders of a giant may see farther than a giant himself."
'democritus to the reader'
by robert burton (1576/7-1640)

i also had quotes by george herbert & by samuel taylor coleridge, but the wikipedia article has them all and more so i'll just end with a bit of latin to show off :-)

"pigmaei gigantum humeris impositi plusquam ipsi gigantes vident"
(pigmies placed on the shoulders of giants see more than the giants themselves)
by didacus stella

healthy listening

from margaret cho's blog today:

"Kind of like when I used to diet, but now instead of limiting calories, I will not allow negative self talk. I cut out insults like I cut out carbs and it is hard as hell because I crave self abuse like hot, fresh sourdough bread, but you know you have to be nice to you if you are going to live together. "

what a novel idea!

bye bye beckham

of all the reports, articles and posts i have read regarding the resignation of england football captain david beckham in the wake of england's elimination from the world cup, this is the one i appreciated the most:

"For a footballer to wear a sarong and pink nail varnish took courage
Notebook by Matthew Parris (The Times Online)

IT IS TOO early for the obituaries, but here’s a modest three cheers from a columnist with no interest in football. I have never met David Beckham and don’t expect to, but I admire him. Beyond his footballing, I think he has shown real moral courage as a role model. Anyone who had suggested ten years ago that there would be a natural place in our sporting pantheon for a fellow who wore a sarong, experimented with pink nail varnish and funny hairstyles, sported male jewellery and agreed to an interview with the gay lifestyle magazine, Attitude, would have been laughed to scorn. That Beckham is plainly completely heterosexual made it seem all the more eccentric to risk the inevitable sneers about being a wuss. He went on to bring his family and babies into the picture, and to be portrayed as a loving father, a New Man and a gentle man. Yet here is someone whose primary audience is football supporters; whose primary stage is that most brutally laddish of institutions, the English football match; and whose intermediaries with the wider world are a hard-bitten and unsentimental cadre: Fleet Street sports reporters.

I’m not suggesting that Beckham sees himself as a one-man mission to civilise sporting culture: he and his wife had self-interested reasons to establish a distinctive brand. But the brand he chose says something to the world — to his world in particular — about his own tolerant instincts and his openness to difference, to experiment, to beauty and to style. It took guts to present this version of himself to his natural supporters. Plenty were ready to say: “We told you so.”

But it succeeded. This tells us something about the changing face of British popular culture which Beckham has done more than reflect: he has helped to symbolise and lead."

mr. parris does not refer to the 'footballer's wives'-like scenes from beckham's personal life, when holding becks up as a role model. but then i happen to think that even famous people deserve to have their private life stay private. ok ok i do read 'people' magazine sometimes, and have a link to entertainment news on my yahoo. i am, however, naive enough to assume that most of those stories are published with the assent of those who feature in them.

meanwhile, a lot of lads have had beckham's positive example before them, and i'd love to think it will make a difference!

what has it got in its pocketses?

well, if you actually want to know that, the answer right now is since i am wearing girly shorts i have no back pockets and small ones in front so not very much. i vaguely remember but cannot swear to reading in a charlotte perkins gilman book that women will only truly be emancipated when they have pockets in their clothing. and that was written less than 100 years ago.

i was, however, planning to write down a list of what i have in the boot of my car. or at least some of the things ... some may be too embarrassing ...

how about this: 10 things i have in the boot of my car by ravaj

1. toilet paper

2. portable plastic fold-up captain's chair that cost $7 and has a pocket to put your cup in

3. emergency work shoes with heels and pointy toes

4. shiva bag with prayerbooks and kippot

5. ugly horrible mug that i cannot throw out because it was a gift from a congregant but i just cannot bear for it to touch my lips

6. snow brush that i bought in canada and did not get to use until i got to virginia 2 years later

7. random coat hangers (metal)

8. nottinghamshire county cricket club seat cushion (needs new duct tape)

9. batting gloves (from my 3-game career in women's softball)

10. something dark and gooey-looking in the far corner just beyond my reach

utter trivia - just right for my mood. we are not mentioning the world cup (nor the fact that each team i root for seems to go out immediately: england, brazil, germany. nevertheless arse/france must beat portugal and then i don't care any more.). poor gilad shalit is in my heart but what is going on over there is too distressing to think about tonight; as are spanish trains crashing, north korean weapons tests, space shuttles, dubya telling the troops they will continue to fight so that over 2500 deaths will not have been in vain (?????) ... too much to get my head round.

so, nu ... what's your favourite list?

tallitot

tallitot
Originally uploaded by ravaj.

this is just my favourite picture that i took that day.

do not like digicams ... no good for action (well, not the cheaper ones). if anyone moved then the focus went.

but i do like this picture.

a public private moment

a&a getting married
Originally uploaded by ravaj.

after the ceremony, there was a chocolate reception. everything was made out of, or included chocolate. a wonderful idea, just right for the two of them. and my idea of hell :-(

remember - i am diabetic :-(

everybody else had an amazing time though.

a&a 2 wedding rings

a&a 2 wedding rings
Originally uploaded by ravaj.

d&i went to toronto for the wedding of my liebling a & his darling a. it was extremely exciting because it was the first legal gay wedding we had ever attended. the civil service was in the registry office, and then there was a chuppah in the sienna's back garden.

pigzilla

pigzilla
Originally uploaded by ravaj.

the wait to get to the pod at the top of the tower was 90 minutes, and we didn't really feel up to it, so we went to the shop instead. d. wanted a souvenir long-sleeved (for the cold cold plane ride) canada shirt, and i got a lovely soft royal canadian air force sweatshirt (for the cold cold future). meanwhile, piglet hung out at the top of the tower ...

just back from toronto

piglet @ the cn tower on canada day
Originally uploaded by ravaj.

here are a few pictures for you to enjoy. first of all, the tourist ones that piglet shot as he returned to his old stomping ground. we begin with a visit to the cn tower on canada day.

reading psalms

r. steve said if you cannot sleep try reading tehillim. it just so happened that for some reason yesterday i brought home a handy paperback selection of psalms sent to me by the ny board of rabbis.

i said to steve that i didn't think a bunch of poems talking about how god would save me if i trust in him could be much help to me at the moment. steve said if one didn't work try the next.

i'd finished my free copies of go ny & the advocate. i'd read every handout and flyer that made it home with me from pride weekend. i was too tired to do sudoku and couldn't remember where to find a fresh ink cartridge for my favourite pen to do ny sunday times crosswords. i didn't want to get out of bed because there are carbs in the kitchen and it was the wrong time in every time zone to call anyone. so i just read a bit in the handy paperback. and wrote. this is what i wrote:

first up under "help when struggling with loss, depression and general woe" is psalm 27.

"when evil men assail me to devour my flesh -
it is they, my foes and my enemies, who stumble and fall."

no, this is not one for tonight - nobody has stumbled or fallen yet and i'm not in the mood just now to wait any longer.

next is psalm 42. verse 4 is promising:

"my tears have been my food day and night;
i am ever taunted with, 'where is your god?'"

but then the psalmist tells himself to:

"have hope in god;
i will yet praise him for his saving presence." (v. 6)

and i am not yet ready to stop being angry. neither is the psalmist, who asks god:

"why have you forgotten me,
why must i walk in gloom, oppressed by my enemy?" (v. 10)

but s/he has to end up with the glass half full, repeating verse 6. i decide this section is not helping my depression and inner woe. i look at the other sections - not into repentance tonight, nor joy & praise, nor yahrzeit reflections. the nearest i can get is "seeking hope and inner strength".

first option - psalm 3. i like verse 8:

"arise, o lord, deliver me, o my god
for you slap all my enemies in the face,
you break the teeth of the wicked."

i'd like to ask for that but

a. i don't think that's how it works, otherwise there would be a whole lot more spontaneous combustions and dentists

b. i am extremely conflicted between my initial emotional demand for revenge, i.e., causing pain to those who hurt me, so they will know what they have done to me and how it feels ... and my follow-up rational response that wants to preserve my sense of my integrity by not entering the fray and perpetuating the violence. my sister told me once that sometimes it just makes you feel better to be mean back. i might be able to do it, except i cannot handle the guilt!

next offering - psalm 15 - a fine description of an ideal world, which just serves to remind me how far we are from that. psalm 34, verse 12:

"come, my children, listen to me;
i will teach you what it is to fear the lord."

i wish i could believe this, i do i do i do i do i do (cue cowardly lion). on the other hand, how do i know that i have not already been offered this teaching - it's just that i cannot yet hear it?

getting fed up with all this, i resolve to try for one more. psalm 142.

"5. look at my right and see -
i have no friend;
there is nowhere i can flee,
no one cares about me
6. so i cry to you, o lord;
i say, 'you are my refuge,
all i have in the land of the living.'
7. listen to my cry, for i have been brought very low;
save me from my pursuers,
for they are too strong for me."

certainly sounds like how i feel.

last week, a student asked me if i call on god when i am in distress. i told her that, like a child, when my parents were sick i lay in bed and said aloud, "please god don't let her/him die." god's average is currently 50%.

last night steve asked me what my relationship with god was like. i told him i thought it was in a very early stage. i also said that the strength i've found in these last sleepless stressful sugar-high days had to come from somewhere and i would not necessarily argue that god would not be an explanation for that.

but i am embarrassed to say that. especially after my glbtq-pride infusion of the past few days. it it possible for me to have faith and still be a realist? is it possible for me to accept a god that, if god does intervene in human affairs, does so randomly? what role is there in my life for a god that may be with me when i despair; but does not, cannot make it better? i tell people all the time that for a child god is like a parent who *can* kiss and make it better. pediatric theology. when we grow up we realise there are many things our parents cannot fix. hopefully, we forgive them, and continue to love them. why don't we do the same for god? superman and his ilk are wishful thinking.

so what might an adult view of god look like? after the shoah, my father told me many times that god sits and weeps with us. this is what our friends do - stay with us when the pursuers are too strong for us. their love helps us get stronger. how may i learn to see god as a friend like that?

a lesbian independent catholic minister sat at our table at the gotham comedy club on saturday night (we went to see judy gold. we really needed to laugh). we saw her again at a booth at pride, and there was a sign proclaiming mychal judge as a saint. i asked about praying to saints and the minister said that one makes specific requests and the saints intercede with god on one's behalf. i didn't want to be rude and ask what happens if you don't get an answer. still, i sometimes wish i could believe that completely.

starting to get light outside - will try and sleep now.

feminism & heroism

just found a new site called the f word that i have added to my bloglist on the right. once again cannot sleep so composed a reply to the article the link is for. here are some snippets from the end that got me writing to them:

"For what it's worth though, I am compelled to come up with a quick show of my female idols as antidotes to FHM's Sexiest Woman list that is a product of our unavoidably gender-divided and gender-obsessed society. My own list encompasses many fields from the usual feminist suspects: musicians Tori Amos, Kate Bush, PJ Harvey and Ani DiFranco and some riot grrl pioneers, to Mariella Frostrup, Alison Goldfrapp, comedienne Margaret Cho, actresses Rachel Stirling (star of Tipping The Velvet: about as down-to-earth as you can be when your mother's Dame Diana Rigg) Miranda Richardson, Emma Fielding, Helen Grace and socialist-feminist Saffron Burrows. This is of course, a very personal and non-exhaustive list but you get the idea, and there's bound to be something for everyone in there.

Some I celebrate for their eccentricity and their expressed which to deviate from "the norm", some I celebrate because they can live out bland everyday existences whilst still maintaining a presence or charm that separates them from everyone else in their situation. The list isn't age-restricted (for God's sake, if we're going to celebrate women as a distinctive category, let's not exclude those over 25). Most importantly, it doesn't look at the scale of their impact in terms of how many column inches they occupy in magazines or how many people buy what they produce - but the scale of the impact they've had on the individuals who are touched by their work, in whatever way, however many or few that may be. Perhaps this, better than anything, answers the question: what makes a woman a heroine? I may have mellowed since my days of reading press cuttings in the bath, but it's still a question that matters to me, and probably to many young women and girls trapped in suburbia grasping for any scrap of inspiration they can get their hands on..."


responding to fhm & female heroines

not having come out to myself until i was nearly 30, i didn't quite get that my adoration of beautiful women (ingrid bergman, lauren bacall, katharine hepburn through to michelle pfeiffer, candice bergen et al) might have been a message to myself :-)

from my perspective as a teacher of religion, i believe that so many of the people with whom i have worked have an innate yearning for a hero/ine & model. since organised religion outside its most orthodox forms is rarely seen as the source of ethical behaviour - religion is blamed by so many as the cause of most of the ills in our world - there is a vacuum now where once religion stood firm. what is attempting to fill it? capitalism, materialism, consumerism - call it what you will. and its heroes are the pretty young things.

maybe i'm just an angry old bourgeois-socialist bleeding-heart liberal dyke who should return to my andrea dworkin shrine and ask my panda spirit guide for serenity. i'll try and quench my fears for michael owen's acl, and stop reading through 'people' magazine before buying it for my mother. i do, however, have hope that we can learn to be kinder and also be entertained by those with gifts for acting, etc..

meanwhile, here are some of my heroines:

my mother - for making a new life after the death of my father 2 years ago.

my father - one of my favourite feminists & g/l/b/t/q advocates

laura flanders - who, beginning in school and ever since, has sought her truth and reported it in a variety of media.

sarah waters

katherine hepburn

maya angelou, audre lord, alice walker

rabbi sheila shulman

jury still out on angelina jolie ...

honorary mention for the 1970's rodney marsh because i have always been a fanatical qpr supporter

on the outside looking in

wb piglet
Originally uploaded by ravaj.

here is piglet stalking the animaniacs at the warner brothers lot in los angeles a couple of years ago.

i miss freakazoid

happiness is a warm puppy part deux

just read this quote from the guardian book extracts online:

"Any society's well-being can be measured according to the gap between the aspirations of its members and their attainability. Such invidious comparisons dominate the contemporary understanding of what it is to be happy. The economist Richard Layard explores in his book Happiness what he calls "the first world paradox" of a society that delivers greater wealth than ever but is little happier. Freud believed that the two central components for a happy life were love and work. A few years ago, the psychiatrist Anthony Clare offered an interviewer a more detailed prescription for happiness: "One, cultivate a passion ... Next, be a leaf on a tree. You have to be both an individual - you have to have a sense that you are you and that you matter - and at the same time you have to be connected to a bigger organism, a family, a community ... My third rule, avoid introspection. Next, don't resist change ... And finally, live in the moment; live now.""

here is the whole piece extracted from "the story of childhood" by libby brooks

leaf on a tree, eh? a bit pantheistic, but i like it. certainly i have a sense that a lot of the distress i see in my work comes from the tension between individual and group needs. maybe i can go a bit further and say that i notice a tendency to focus on the individual with little, if any, consideration of the effect this may have on the group. o dear - getting a bit wordy again. it's back to what i was saying the other day about context. i believe i need to understand that i am part of the tree as well as a leaf on my own. the well-being of the tree is vital to my own, as is mine to the tree. hmmmmm

as for what dr. clare says about avoiding introspection ... just not even going there!

what qpr fans do in the off-season

i believe this is the same mark henderson who has had a season ticket in the loft next to my sister for a few years. interesting thing about humour ... but first, read this:

"Serious side to clowning around
by Mark Henderson

THERAPEUTIC clowning may be a way to help IVF patients.
Research at the Assaf Harofeh Medical Centre near Tel Aviv suggested that entertaining women with a clown as they recovered from IVF treatment could nearly double the chances of success.

Patients who were visited by a clown soon after embryos were transferred to the womb — one of the most stressful IVF phases — had a pregnancy rate of 35.5 per cent compared with 19.3 per cent among women on non-humour treatment.

Using a clown was the idea of Shevach Friedler, a fertility doctor, who had also done a course at the Jacques Lecoq school of mime and theatre in Paris. “I have a theatrical background from one of the best movement and mime schools in France,” Dr Friedler said. “My background is clowning and movement. I’m also a physician who works in IVF. I thought we could combine the two.

“We know that fertility patients are very stressed. Everybody knows that humour is an effective way to reduce stress.”

Clowns are sometimes used in child medicine but rarely for helping adults.

Dr Friedler recruited his friend Shlomi Algussi, a restaurant chef and clown, to help his patients. They eschewed the typical red-nosed clown and invented a new character — a chef in a striped vest — to appeal to adult women. He performs magic tricks and tells jokes on a culinary theme.

The findings were based on a study of 93 patients and 93 controls"

wish i could remember the reference, think it is talmudic, anyway ... there is a story about a man in the marketplace who sees the prophet elijah and asks him who there will go to olam ha-ba (heaven). elijah points to a couple of guys across the way. the man rushes over to them and asks them what they do for a living. they tell him that they are jesters, that they make people laugh.

if you think about it, when you laugh, your stuff/burden/cares is/are lifted from your shoulders momentarily, and you get a bit of a rest, and build up a bit more strength to deal with it all when it lands on you again. good one dr. friedler!

liberal islam?

just read andy apostolou's review of "the caged virgin" by ayaan hirsi ali. i don't know much about liberal islam ... until i met irshad manji in toronto a few years ago i did not even know there was any such thing. i am sympathetic to a lot of what she says, but suspect that not too many people who need to listen will pay attention to the words of a woman and a lesbian, noch. in the wake of recent events in canada, she wrote in the globe and mail:

"How can we muslims allow our leaders to continue blaming the world for what we're doing to ourselves? ... above all, non-muslims in canada should ask themselves a basic question: what makes so many of us afraid to ask about what's happening in the muslim community? the easy answer is multiculturalism, according to which all cultures and religions are equal and off-limits to scrutiny.

but multiculturalism, like any belief system, becomes a stale orthodoxy if taken literally. by definition, orthodoxies anesthetize our brains, deny our consciences, suppress our voices and compel us to abandon the critical spirit that keeps any open society open. this past weekend, canadians received a wake-up call. let us all re-discover our spines - and our minds."

not just multiculturalism, methinks, but being bloody scared as well :-(

tea with zeffirelli

just spoke to my mother regarding the photo of ahf in the straw hat.

a. my father hated that hat! his friend david insisted he wear it in the sun, and ahf kept 'losing' it, and david kept finding it. the hat never did make it back to england.

b. the square in which he was sitting is in the village where franco zeffirelli was filming 'tea with mussolini'. franco invited him back the next day to meet the dames, but they couldn't go, and franco never spoke to him again.

c. it was, however, a beautiful day.

i love goalies!

wc keller saves from del piero
Originally uploaded by ravaj.

without cable or any tv reception i am currently following the world cup via the internet. with the usa down to 8 outfield players and italy down to 9, kasey keller pulled off this stunning save from alessandro del piero to keep the score tied. wish i'd seen it live!

under the tuscan sun

2001 tuscan albert
Originally uploaded by ravaj.

i also love this kind of godfathery pic. ahf looks relaxed. he looks happy. we should all have days like this!

lemonade from lemons

2002? ahf on a panel somewhere
Originally uploaded by ravaj.

so here is an adorable picture of ahf. he is amused, and probably rather amusing to those who are listening at this moment.

this picture makes me smile too.

happy day of the father to you all.

350 years of jews in england

here is today's op-ed from the daily telegraph online. i am pasting the whole thing because i want you to read it all and because i want to remember it. the last two paragraphs are the ones that i think relate to us all.

"How Cromwell gave us Joan Collins and other luminaries
By Charles Moore
(Filed: 17/06/2006)

Exactly 350 years ago, we began to be a multi-racial society. 1656 marked the return of Jews to England. They had been driven out by an edict of Edward I in 1290. In the intervening centuries - known as the Middle Period - Jews quite often came to this country on business, but they were not permitted to reside here or practise their religion. Their status, in fact, was that of Christians (and Jews) in Saudi Arabia today. In 1656, Cromwell let 300 of them return, and Jews have been here ever since.

Among the eventual consequences of this re-admission have been Benjamin Disraeli, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Yehudi Menuhin, Peter Sellers, Joan Collins, Arthur Koestler, Alan Sugar, Nigella Lawson, Lucien Freud, Tom Stoppard and Sid James.

And why not add Max Perutz, Ali G, Ernst Chain, Jimmy Goldsmith, Miriam Rothschild, Melanie Klein, Alfred Brendel, Bernard Lewis, Emeric Pressburger, Harold Pinter, Sigmund Warburg, Keith Joseph, George Weidenfeld, Karl Popper, Ronald Harwood, Ernst Gombrich, Simon Schama, Jonathan Miller, Philip Green, Rachel Weisz and Robert Winston?

Or Isaiah Berlin, Jacob Bronowski, Rosalind Franklin, Harold Abrahams, Alexander Korda, George Solti, Denis Norden, Muriel Spark, Siegfried Sassoon, Jacob Epstein, Daniel Day-Lewis, Nigel Lawson, Janet Reger, Marjorie Proops, Sam Mendes, Stirling Moss and Bernard Levin? It is even claimed that David Beckham, if not technically a Jew, is, as the old joke has it, Jew-ish.

(And since into each life a little rain must fall, one might also note Michael Winner, Esther Rantzen, Eric Hobsbawm, Jerry Springer, Edwina Currie and Robert Maxwell on the debit side of the ledger.)

Anyone who has ever studied at a university, needed good doctors, shopped at Marks & Spencer or Tesco, benefited from scientific invention, listened to classical music, sought accountants or lawyers, watched a film, bought a book or needed his head examined, has gained from Cromwell's decision. The Jewish contribution is so great that it pervades almost all aspects of British society.

I have named individual Jews deliberately because, though it is always dangerous to generalise, even favourably, about race, it does seem to my gentile eyes that there is more prodigious ability and energy per Jew than per the rest of us. The community here has never been enormous - at present, it is somewhere between 250,000 and 400,000 - but it has achievements out of proportion to its size. I like Herbert Samuel's claim that "The Jews are the same as everybody else, only more so".

But the interesting thing for British society today is to ask why such a people have been able to overcome prejudices that at first excluded them absolutely and later accepted them only on qualified terms (Jews could not sit in Parliament until the mid-19th century, for example). The answer could be useful for everyone.

The key, perhaps, is to be found in one of the earliest reports of Jews in England after their return. On October 14, 1663, Samuel Pepys found a way of visiting a synagogue in London (something very unusual for a Gentile at that time). In his diary, he described the service which he witnessed. He did not like it ("I never… could have imagined there had been any religion in the whole world so absurdly performed as this"), but he also noted that the Jews said a special prayer for the King. In other words, they accepted the civil power.

The Jews did not do this just to save their skins by sucking up to Charles II: they did it because it was part of their religious duty. It still is. No believing Jew will obey a civil law that forces him to disobey his religious law - eat pork, for example. But if there is no conflict, his religion teaches him that he must obey the law of the land. In the Talmud, the question arises of whether you should pay taxes to a secular king. Yes, comes the answer, because "The law of the kingdom is the law". In the standard collection, called Ethics of the Fathers, which brings together rabbinical wisdom over the centuries, Jews are told: "Pray for the welfare of the government, for, without the fear of it, people will swallow one another alive."

Even the most cursory study of Jewish life shows that it is full of disputes. There are splits between orthodox and reformed Jews, and within orthodoxy. There are thousands of secular Jews who feel very Jewish, but refuse to have their Jewishness defined by religion. There is ceaseless, often angry argument: when you read the Christian Gospels, you find that one of the most common scenes is of learned men quarrelling. That is still the case in Jewish culture.

But because of this basic agreement among Jews about the status of the secular law, the effect of these quarrels on the wider society is minimal. It is significant that virtually no one reading this article will have heard of Dayan Chanoch Ehrentreu. He is the chief justice of the Beth Din, the Chief Rabbi's court which adjudicates on the endless delicate points of Jewish law, often relating to diet or Sabbath observance, which come up within the community.

If Judaism were an aggressive religion, seeking to lay down its law for all mankind, then this supremely learned old gentleman could acquire menacing power. Like the Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran after 1979, Dayan Ehrentreu could tell people to kill in the name of God. Instead, his effect is the opposite. By policing so meticulously the difference between the precise duties of Jews and the duty to society at large, this scholar helps define the space necessary for people with beliefs quite at variance with those of the majority to live harmoniously among them. In this sense, people can be "fundamentalist" and yet perfectly at home in a society which is not. For 2,000 years, Jews have developed a subtle understanding of the difference between the ideal society that would exist if God's laws prevailed everywhere and the world as it is.

Without this understanding, people do indeed "swallow one another alive" and - one might add in the era of suicide bombings - swallow themselves in the process.

With this understanding, a minority community can develop enough confidence and win enough acceptance to do good beyond the confines of itself. The Jewish concept of mitzvah, on which David Cameron dwelt when he made a speech celebrating the 350 years last week, means a good deed done for its own sake. Such deeds are visible in the importance that Jews attach to charity and to education. British society needs a lot more mitzvahs. There is also the idea of "chesed", man's kindness to all men, as first shown by Abraham when he entertained angels unawares. Thus does a potentially very closed community open itself out. The difference between majority and minority is very real - but not antagonistic.

In the past half-century, Muslims have come where the Jews came earlier, and in much larger numbers. Like such Jews, they have sometimes experienced the unhappiness that comes when one's religion is misunderstood or derided. Unlike the Jews, too many of their leaders tend to teach them that such slights must be avenged, that existence as a minority is just a temporary misfortune, not a state to be lived with, and that the law of England is virtually no law at all. If that attitude continues, society is reduced to a conflict about who will swallow whom alive. To avoid that is a huge and urgent task.

fathers' day tomorrow :-(

2004 ahf @ lbc ordination
Originally uploaded by ravaj.

just now, after shabbat services, someone behind me wished someone in front of me a happy fathers' day (or is it father's day?) and my stomach dropped like i missed a step.

on 8th july it will be two years since ahf died.

this is the last known picture of my father - speaking at the leo baeck college ordination on the sunday. that afternoon was the final of the european championships, and we spoke a little before he handed the phone over to my mother and went to watch the game on television. a while later he picked up the extension to say, "the greeks have scored!" and a while later than that he picked up again to announce with glee, "the greeks have won!"

those were the last words i heard him say. and they were about football. he died on the wednesday.

i have this photo on the wall of my office. he never could keep his tallit on straight. neither can i :-)

loadsa piglet

loadsa piglet 2
Originally uploaded by ravaj.

what would an incredible event like the quarter project be like without a piglet picture to commemorate it?!

here he is, getting ready to help spread the coins on the floor.