Asterism

I dreamed last night that I was looking at the moon, and saw, to its right and a little closer to the zenith, a fantastically bright spot of light. I thought at first it must be a supernova. The point of light moved toward the moon, taking only a couple of seconds to move what to my view looked like about an inch. The object landed on the moon with a tremendous momentum, spewing up a mushroom cloud of regolith. In a second installment of the dream, I saw an explosion on the moon, obviously of tremendous force, throwing up huge gouts of dust and smoke.

Quite literally, a disaster, or “bad star.”

I have a great job, and I feel lucky to have it – and I hope I keep it as long as I can work! Or until I find something as good, but much closer. So I check job boards… semi-regularly. Maybe Rand will post something for a Technical Writer Editor. If I got that, I could bicycle to work, not to mention work near the beach!

A recent job posting for a related job was to work with Reasons to Believe, which turns out to be a Christian apologist (apologetic? doesn’t sound quite right…) site, focusing on scientific questions and how they justify, or at any rate fail to contradict, Christian tenets. The focus seems to be on emphasizing that no matter how small the Gap seems to be (from God of the Gaps), there still is one, and it will always be there. A statement with which I don’t think any reasonable person would argue, by the way. In fact, with better and better instrumentation, the gaps, namely questions and the unknown, seems to grow. (And how wonderful is that, by the way!)

I thought that would be an interesting job (though an atheist, I am interested in religion as I am in other human cultural products). But one of their criteria for applicants is “Growing Christian.” Sort of confusing phrasing… if I already had that job as editor, I would ask, did they mean “having had a Christian childhood”? Or maybe “becoming more and more Christian every day”? Hints at a lot of things, doesn’t mean anything much – but maybe it’s a sort of jargon that is used in Christian communities, and is intended to exclude me.

So that disqualifies me. I was raised in a secular, half-Jewish and half-lapsed-Catholic household, and I am a stone atheist today. In fact, for anyone who cares (and why should anyone, but this is a blog post), here’s my “statement of faith” – I think a Biblical God is vanishingly unlikely; moreover, I find it surprising that anyone would turn to ancient texts to explain phenomena at all. Turning to those texts, or any texts, for moral guidance, historical interest, or insight into human nature, makes perfect sense – I’m not sure what else one would turn to but human cultural products (part of my statement of faith is that the Bible is a human cultural product, and a central one, right along with other great literature, Beethoven symphonies, and Monet’s paintings) to determine what it is to be human and how to live a good life. Along with introspection.

But to determine what life and death are? To probe the beginnings of the universe? For anything phenomenal at all? Might as well read Moby Dick – you’d learn something about the ocean and whaling, but not enough to crew a ship. On the other hand, you’d learn quite a lot about hubris, humility, and what it is to be human in extremis.

So, just as an interesting article on Reasons.org probes various meanings of the word evolution, I thought I would probe the word “Belief”:

Phenomenal Belief: Say I believe that matter bends space, and makes light waves curve. I do the math, and decide that, if that is the case, a star which one would expect to appear at a particular point in the sky (from many prior measurements) will appear at a different point in the sky due to the intervention of a massive object. I publish this prediction. Others point their telescopes to that point in the sky and, lo and behold, they see the star at the spot I predicted. From then on, they start to believe what I have written as the explanation – namely, that mass bends space, and that light takes the shortest distance, which in curved space isn’t exactly a straight line. This belief, contingent as it is on observation of phenomena, I’ll call phenomenal belief.

Situational Belief: A softer version of the above. I believe day-to-day things that I expect to happen because they happened yesterday – this belief is often upended as products I buy vanish from shelves, businesses close, people move or die, etc. Until they are gone, I have a convenient belief that they will continue.

Allegiance Belief: People believe what their team believes. If your community – ethnic, religious, familial – has a credo, you’ll tend to claim belief in it, which strengthens the bonds in your community. Either we’re better for some reason, or we have a task to perform, or we have certain characteristics (favorite food; weakness for certain sins; resistance to certain other sins). These beliefs are generally partly true, partly silly. Random chance indicates that there will be individuals all over the map vis-a-vis stereotypical characteristics. My childhood exposure to a “nice Jewish family” with a violent, drinking father inoculated me to the Allegiance Belief that Jewish men didn’t drink or beat their family. Maybe they cheated on their wives, certainly they gambled, but no hitting or boozing. Where these stereotypes are concerned, we have strong confirmation biases, supporting our belief that the “vast majority” of whoever conforms to the stereotype, and those who don’t are “rare exceptions.”

More later… have errands to run.

In a previous post, I expressed my unease at the state of Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me. Peter Sagal and his new partner Bill Kurtis didn’t seem to be getting along, and I found that very distressing! I depend on them every Monday morning to start off my week. I’m happy to say that everything seems fine with them. Bill has toned down his rather over-hilarious (in the sense of boisterously merry) delivery, and Peter isn’t subtly putting him down in his scripted ripostes.

All is once again love and light, and I can relax.

On the other hand, I’m detecting a little subtext in Warren Olney’s To the Point and Which Way L.A., shows which ought not have any subtext. Like Shakespeare, they are their text, right there on the surface.

Thankfully, the subtext is not in the show proper, but in the promos for other podcasts, which apparently all NPR podcast hosts have to do now. Planet Money does it for the Ted Radio Hour, even This American Life does it. Warren has been tasked with promoting DNA, hosted by Frances Anderton. Warren pronounces it “Fraunces” (like New York’s famous Fraunce’s Tavern), which seems odd. Maybe she’s English and he’s deferring to her own pronunciation? But what I noticed in his promo is the strange stilted delivery and writing. He says the podcast is called “DNA, which, as the name suggests, is about design, art, and architecture.”

The name doesn’t suggest that at all. It suggests microbiology. I have to say, “huh?”

Further, he insists, in a strained voice, that, “she’s wonderfully qualified” and “you’ll really enjoy it.” I feel about that the way I feel about restaurants that have “Wholesome” in the name – if they have to say it, I have to wonder what’s going on in the kitchen.

Also, he says that she edited an architectural magazine, but doesn’t say which one. A quick google reveals that it was probably London’s Architectural Review. Why not say that? It sounds impressive to me.

The thing about Warren (can I call him Warren? Uncle Warren? Mr. Olney?) is his utter straightforwardness. It so cheers me up when, after one of his guests has utterly demolished another guest, Warren turns to them and just says, “Well, what about that?” This curt query is followed by a pause, as the guest waits for waffling or equivocation, but they won’t get that from Warren. Not ol’ Uncle Warren. He just asks the question and lets the guest try and dig their way out.

Doesn’t always work. The guest will often be evasive and jump to a preferred topic, and Warren doesn’t always insist on a direct answer. He does sometimes, which is bracing, but I suppose in the interest of time, he lets the answer stand on its own, and allows the audience decide whom they want to believe.

So hearing him do this awkward promo cuts into my mood. Sorry Warren, I love your shows, and I’m sure Frances’s podcast is terrific (actually, it seems that it isn’t called DNA, but rather DnA – hard to get that distinction across on the radio). But someone needs to take a look at rewriting those promos.

Note – there is a second version of the promo which is much more direct, and in which he doesn’t insist on how much we’ll enjoy it, or how “wonderfully qualified” she is. Better.

Best regards.

This is well-known as one of the most self-centered, rude things to do – nobody wants to hear your dreams. Absolutely nobody. Maybe my mother did, for a little bit when I was about ten. That’s it.

You can pay people to listen to your dreams; that’s true. But aside from that, it’s the ultimate conversation killer.

Which makes it the perfect subject for the InvisiBlog.

I’ve been taking an antibiotic for my nose (never mind… long MEDICAL story; another thing you’re not supposed to talk about in company), and I think it’s been affecting my dreams. I’m now having epic, action-packed dreams, full of meaning and portent, teeming with characters, rooms that lead to other rooms that disgorge onto sunbaked, weed-strewn outdoor stages amid cliffs and tumbled stone walls.

Last night (here we go) I was making a movie, but it seemed more of a play. I think I was acting in it. My wife was there, I think she was directing, but she wasn’t my wife. I was younger and better-looking than I really am, and there was a beautiful young WASP woman, reminiscent of Catherine Blanc (remember her? First grade? No? Both Eric and I wanted to sit next to her… who knows why; we were six!), but in her mid-20s. She seemed strangely available to me. Events would happen, like I would be in a scene in a white costume, on a stage in what looked like a run-down 18th century theater, partly outdoors, with just a few audience members; or I would be on a concrete platform outdoors, in the country, with colleagues, and I was so happy to be working with them all again (the implication was that we worked together intensely on projects, then didn’t see each other for months, but had a great time every time). And between these events, I would wander down halls, go into a room, and she’d be there, lounging about, with a wry smile, and dressed for a regatta, or a tennis tourney.

There were parts of this dream I can only remember impressionistically, where I am asked to explain a bit of text, and it seemed to me that in our, regular, world, the text was meaningless, but in this, parallel, world, it had the deepest implications. I wish I could remember the words – it was only two words. The kind of magic word, like Shazam, that if you could remember it and invoke it in the waking world, something crazy might happen.

Anyway… now it’s out of my system, I suppose. I’d like to see those words again.

I had to put in a few extra hours on an editing job, so I got permission to work remotely, and on the weekend. Lucky! I decided to try out the new Santa Monica Library Pico Branch, behind the Saturday Farmers Market. Very nice, clean, new, with just a few too many noisy families in the children’s section. Still, lovely library.
So I decided to switch up and move to the Main Library, on Santa Monica Blvd and Fifth St. This is a very well-stocked library – Ellen uses it all the time – and I booked a study room.
Much quieter – wherever the children’s section is, it’s not around  here, which is great. On the other hand, there is a definite funk…. the kind of smell, worse than an odor, not as bad as a miasma, which is common around those of no fixed abode. Men with bushy, yet non-ironic, beards, women with a fierce look and a number of bags, people who need a safe clean place to go.
I get that, and if the smell isn’t too bad, I don’t mind. I do kind of draw a line at personal grooming in the stacks. Someone applying spray sunblock, for instance, behind a wall of books.
One more thing – every few minutes there is a brief, 7 second, sound of a stream of liquid hitting a metal plate. No idea what it is… I thought at first what you’re thinking, but I don’t think it is someone peeing. For starters, it’s too regularly spaced and timed. For another, it’s audible everywhere, as if it is happening in the air ducts. I expect it is some kind of unexpected side-effect of HVAC.
Who knows.
All I can say is I’m grateful to be a member of the libraries of Santa Monica, Los Angeles, Los Angeles County, Beverly Hills, and Pasadena/Glendale. Not to mention, of course, New York, the last vestige of my being a New Yorker.

Terrible morning. I got into a horrific traffic jam on the 110, and was all irritated and self-righteous (how dare they delay me!), when I saw the terrible accident causing it. It looked like it had to be fatal – the car was a charred mass of twisted metal and plastic. And, as I learned in the LA Times, it was fatal. So I felt guilty, too, for dwelling on my own inconvenience. in the face of someone’s terror and pain.

And then, of course, the daily dose of Ukraine and Gaza. And antisemitic rallies (with an anti-Israel or anti-Zionist fig leaf, of course) all over Europe.

Upsetting morning. Made me think of a job I had in the mid-80s, as a tour guide at the United Nations. There were two words I heard a lot then, revanchism and irredentism. Click on the words for the definitions. I didn’t bother looking them up at the time – I wasn’t all that interested, and none of my tour groups ever asked. Basically, they mean that once international boundaries are decided, you don’t get to turn around later say, “you know, that part of your country that has all those offshore oil reserves, that was ours for, like, forever. Thanks for taking care of it, but I need it now.”

Anyway, lucky in so many ways, most of all to be alive and reasonably safe (as long as I, and those around me, drive carefully).

I was shopping at Trader Joe’s, and looking for some cheese. My wife is out of town, and so I indulge (much to my stepdaughter’s amusement) in things like chips and cheese. Not just a decorous three crackers with a bit of cheese and some kind of herbal garnish to lend it an air of artisanalship (?) but a quarter of a bag of chips and a quarter of a however much they sell cheese in of cheese.

Pretty awful, and I tire of it after a couple of days, but I get it out of my system.

Anyway, I decided I wanted to buy some münster cheese (muenster, to you). Sadly, you can’t always find it in blocks. I had to buy it in pre-sliced bits. But I thought how much my old mom loved münster. And other bland foods – yogurt, cottage cheese. Dairy with a little tang in it. She had one of those Oster yogurt makers. She thought it was the most amazing device. You start with a bit of boughten yogurt, and the device is an incubator. The culture grows, and you make more and more.

And I missed her, and I wept a little bit in the store, looking at the cheese shelf, with its slabs of yellow and white and occasionally mottled bricks and wedges. She would have been so relieved to see me happily married to a beautiful, brilliant, prickly wife, with two beautiful, funny stepchildren. Yes, she would have rolled her eyes at my stepson and what he is into, but she would have loved him, as we all do. And she would have appreciated his kindness and wit. And she would have been impressed with, and jealous of, my stepdaughter.

Beauty was 85% of everything for my mother. There was room for other virtues – intelligence, kindness, ruthlessness, energy, focus, “talent”… but mainly, it was beauty. And high heels.

Just yesterday, or the day before, Bel Kaufmann’s (sp?) obituary ran in the Times. My mother knew, and admired, Bel. Bel lived to 103, and when my mom knew her, six years ago, Bel wore high heels and ballroom danced. My mother, a former Great Beauty, was bent and crippled with arthritis, osteoporosis, and pointless desperate surgery. If a doctor had a head of hair and an accent, and any optimism at all (and they tend to have that), she would go under the knife.

As it turned out, surgery didn’t agree with her. Poor thing. I miss her.

And I thought of my father, too. And wondered… As happy as my mom would be to see me now, undeservedly prosperous, with a loving family and an interesting job (her dad, she said, worked on the team that designed the Lunar Module’s feet, basing them, she was delighted to know, on camel’s feet … they can walk on sand, you see). My father, however he would have been impressed by my nice house and pretty stepkids, he would have been annoyed at my doing a job he didn’t quite understand.

If there’s any way I am better than him, and there are few, one of them is if there is something I don’t understand, I am delighted at something else to learn. He was a little ashamed at anything he didn’t understand. He felt it belittled him – that people wouldn’t “respect” him as much.

Poor thing. I feel bad for his fear and continual attempts to look important. He was generous to me, when I had troubles, and I had a couple. He tried to help any way he could. He would give money generously, understanding that one twist of international affairs, one lurch in the economy, one belch of antisemitism, and he’d have nothing, just as his family had lost everything so many times. Only through talent and artistry did they manage, and they managed pretty well.

As do I, I suppose. I like to think he would have learned to respect both my children, even if they didn’t act fascinated by him. I like to think he would have found that generosity within him.

Anyway, here’s to mommy and daddy – münster cheese and salty chips. They lived quite well.

I want to write a fan letter to Sandra Tsing Loh. Innocent enough, you’d think. I picked up a copy of her best-selling book, Depth Takes a Holiday, at a yard sale at an Obon festival at a Buddhist temple downtown. I went for the tea ceremony demonstration, but stayed for the yard sale and the pupusa stand, and to be a tourist in the Arts District of downtown LA (try Pie Hole – it’s great!). The book is so funny and witty that I want to read it aloud, in order to create an illusion that it’s actually me that’s smart and witty (typical actor!).

But how would my letter be viewed? Would it be creepy? I mean, let’s unpack what one expects from a fan letter. First, the recipient will be charmed, and read my note once, then again because they find my turn of phrase particularly original and piquant. They’ll think about whether they should write me back. They’ll want to, of course, but don’t want to seem desperate. But then they’ll decide it’s not every day they get a note like this, what the hell – they’ll write back.

Once I wrote to Caleb Deschanel, the legendary cinematographer (and father of Zooey), who directed a movie called The Escape Artist. I watched it on TV late at night (at the dawn of cable, in the late 80s or something), and was strangely moved. I wrote him a brief note, and a few weeks later I got a letter back! It was personal and hand-written, and grateful for my having noticed his movie! I was thrilled. I had touched, if not greatness, then certainly goodness.

I had never met Caleb Deschanel, so my note was perfectly anonymous. I wrote a fan note to Jim Woodring, the incredible artist of the hallucinatory Frank comics. They are so detailed and dense with hinted-at meaning that it feels less like a comic than a window onto a wildly alien world, yet perfectly plausible on its own terms. He wrote me back, which was exciting, and even broke the veil of perfect anonymity by asking if I was related to the photographer Peter Basch (yes, I am – he was my father). So I felt we had bonded. I keep thinking I want to offer him one of my father’s photographs (perhaps a portrait of Stan Lee) in exchange for original art.

But writing a fan letter to someone I’ve actually met, but not spoken to in years, seems maybe a little weird.

Backstory: I had a brief two-year stint taking meetings in Hollywood. Chronologically, I was a youthful 40, but emotionally I was a troubled 19. Besides, I was swinishly ignorant about the industry. No fault there, we’re not born knowing how sitcoms are produced, or what a hiatus is, or when pilot season is. I certainly didn’t know that I’d have to write a kick-ass spec script every three months in order to be taken seriously. I may have a lot of virtues, but that kind of work ethic I haven’t got. That’s why ex-lawyers make good TV writers; they’re used to all-nighters. Not me. What my representation (agent + manager) should have done, if they had wanted me to have a career as a writer, was recognize that my ass and my elbow were, to me, indistinguishable, and encouraged me to get a job as a writer’s assistant. Instead, they wanted me to hit it big right away – a dicey proposition, and with a likelihood of (in retrospect) 0%. Maybe they thought I was too old to be a writer’s assistant. Maybe, but I would have been great at it. Oh, well, life paths not taken…

ANYWAY, one of the things that happened in that period was I was introduced to Jeffrey Lane, a legendary showrunner, who asked me to write a freelance script for his show, Ink, with Ted Danson and Mary Steenburgen (I know, IMDB lists Diane English as the showrunner; that’s because a month after I met Jeffrey Lane, he was separated from the show, and Diane English brought on; didn’t help the show, and it certainly didn’t help me; she didn’t share Jeffrey’s interest in a NY playwright). Jeffrey’s co-executive producer was Jeffrey Klarik. He was perfectly nice to me, and when I pitched a few jokes, they got into the show (which never made it to the air; my jokes are in a vault somewhere, on 3/4″ tape, I suppose, never to be seen again).

Later, Jeffrey Klarik, along with David Crane, created Episodes, one of the funniest shows ever to be on TV, and certainly the funniest one on now (it’s about to start its fourth season). I love the show, so I wrote him a note. I reminded him that we had met, told him that I wasn’t in the business any more, that I am a tech writer at JPL, and that if he ever wanted a tour I’d be thrilled to show him around the rockets and stuff.

He never wrote back, and naturally, being an unregenerate solipsist, I assumed it was because he did remember me and was embarrassed by the whole thing; after all, in a real way I had failed – I had come to Hwood, taken meetings, and not made a career. On sober reflection, he probably doesn’t remember me, or if he does, he doesn’t care one way or the other. In fact, he may never have received the letter, because I sent it to his agent.

Back to STL (Sandra Tsing Loh; I love her idea of renaming the San Fernando Valley SFV to make it hipper, so I’ll call her STL). I met her in around 1996 at the HBO New Writers Project, when she was developing her one-woman show, and (as I remember) experimenting with different performance styles. STL is a magnetic performer – impressively tall, energetic, expressive, very pretty, and has little lightning-bolts of intelligence sparking off her head. It’s like her own micro-weather system of charisma. Yeah, okay, I got a little art-crush on her. But I was ripe for that at the time – I soon met my wife, who shares those characteristics (except for the tall part). So, as I contemplate writing STL a note, I worry that it would have to be so short and innocuous as to provoke no reaction at all, or be a little longer and make her think I was creepy. And how does it sound, to say I bought your book at a yard sale, and think that you were really funny back in 1996? Not the way to a writer’s heart. And if I add that I saw her on the Bill Maher show recently, it veers into the stalkerish.

As my kids would say, 1st world problems.

A colleague at work said that we should observe the day by wondering what it would have been like had the Revolutionary War not been fought. Since I’m a loudmouth, and have never quite internalized the truth that if I never spoke at all, everyone would probably be better off, I said that it would be like that dystopia, Canada.

Immediately a rather conservative colleague mentioned Canada’s reduced deficit, and how great that is. I can’t go into that (because I don’t know much about it, frankly), but I brought up their healthy banking system, too. It’s boring and regulated, and therefore very healthy and contributes to the strength of the nation instead of latching itself to it’s host country’s vitals like a parasite, the way ours does. Then I was immediately sorry I responded to him. I really want to not have any political or religious debates at work.

As proud as I am of Canada’s health care system, its sane immigration policies, its politeness, its good treatment of its native peoples, and Quebec, I am also kind of embarrassed by the Harper gov’ts being such a snivelling toady to the extraction industries, to the point of closing science libraries! Shocking.

Anyway, happy fourth. Let’s learn something from Canada’s politeness.

I went for a haircut yesterday, and my “stylist” (barber? haircutter?) and I were chatting about my job for a NASA lab. We were talking about “ancient astronaut” theories, and I deride those who think that just because they, personally, couldn’t have built, say, a pyramid, then aliens must have done it. She agreed with me, and added that those who say that stories of angels were actually based on alien sightings were equally misguided. I said nothing. She said that of course we had a celestial realm, just as surely as the Egyptians had engineers, and that it was silly to put it all down to aliens.

Made me think. If there’s a celestial realm, there’s also an infernal realm. It stands to “reason.” And if there are aliens (and she believes in aliens, as do I – why would we be the only ones? Even if intelligent life is a one-in-a-trillion chance, there are way more than a trillion candidate planets out there)… if there are aliens, do they have their own celestial and infernal realms? And do we share said realms? Or are their angels as alien to our angels as the aliens are to us? And what would our demons think of their demons?

And, of course, if they have their own transcendent realms, do they have their own creators? Is the presumed creator of the Universe really just a local creator? There would then be all sorts of creators out there? What would they think of one another? Would they each claim to have created everything? I suppose that a creator god would say they created everything that mattered. After all, didn’t the god of the bible start out as the god simply of a mountain? And then used Moses to expand his reach and compete against the dominant franchise of the time, the Egyptian gods?

Talk about disruption!