Of Dix and Spontini

OK—it’s not really a day when you want to look at island news. The New Day couldn’t be clearer: 53% think things are going muy mal (very badly) and 40% think things are bastante mal (fairly badly). Oh—and bad news for the governor, who promised everybody that he would create 50,000 new jobs in the first 18 months of his…err, reign. Because 73% say that there are few jobs, and only 2% believe that there are many (hard to believe that the governor’s family is so big….)

Prices? 90% think they’ve risen in the past three months. Oh, and what about the threatened degradation of our credit into junk status? Well, 61% of us don’t understand at all or only a little the whole thing, but 67% think it would affect them personally. 41% rate the quality of life in Puerto Rico as bad or very bad, and guess what? Fully 33% think it likely to some extent that they will leave the island in the next four years.

Right—take that razor blade away from your wrist, Dear Reader!

(Note—all of these data appear in the print edition of El Nuevo Día of 4 November 2013, which I bought for 75 cents yesterday at the grocery store. Unfortunately, the survey is available only through the “paper” paper or a “digital” (read “for sale”) paper. Two choices, Readers! Trust me, or send me a comment, and I’ll scan the paper….)

Into this grim situation steps the governor, who electronically is reported as admitting that the situation, the mood on the island is “pesimismo.” He then wonderfully retreats to his delusional world by stating the following:

“El crimen se ha reducido, el desempleo se ha reducido, la luz se ha reducido, el agua hay que reducirla”, expuso sobre las metas que se ha propuesto o cumplido para acabar con la imagen negativa.

Here it is: “Crime has been reduced, unemployment has been reduced, electricity has been reduced, and water has been reduced,” he stated about the goals that he had proposed or achieved to put a finish to the negative image.

Well, well—time to check up on the gov, which I can now do, since I am one of the 22% of the population without a job. So let’s google “costo de agua Puerto Rico.” Right, and halfway down the first page is this, from El Nuevo Día of 31 August 2013:

Sube la tarifa del agua en los condominios en Puerto Rico

Subir—to rise, go up, increase, mount.

Electricity?

La electricidad de la Isla es la segunda más cara en EE.UU.

OK—that’s from two years ago, but according to WAPA television, as of 1 October 2013, the price may rise.

Look, do I need to go on? Is there any good news, anywhere?

In fact, there is: the world just got 1500 pieces of art back; here’s The New York Times on the subject:

The trove includes works by Picasso, Marc Chagall, Auguste Renoir, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and the German artists Max Beckmann, Max Liebermann, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Carl Spitzweg, said Siegfried Klöble, the head of the Munich customs office, which oversaw the operation to recover the art.

Hey, great news—though it does come with an opportunity, as I used to say in my corporate days. And that is? Well, most of this stuff was either looted or bought at rock bottom price from Jews wanting out of Nazi Germany. So how do you figure out who owned what, and who sold what for what? Here, according to the Times, is what art historian Meike Hoffmann had to say:

She stressed that it is extremely difficult to nail down the origin and the ownership history of some of the works and that she has only begun initial research on some 500 of the works. Further research, she said, could take years.

Among other things found, by the way, was an unknown self-portrait of Otto Dix, about whom I knew nothing: here’s another self-portrait:

Right—so now we have two!

Oh—and good news in the world of opera: the Times is reporting renewed appreciation of the works of Spontini.

Spontini?

Damn—it’s one thing after another, the stuff I don’t know. So who was the guy?

Wikipedia to the rescue!

Gaspare Luigi Pacifico Spontini (14 November 1774 – 24 January 1851) was an Italian opera composer and conductor, extremely celebrated in his time, though largely forgotten after his death.

Right—that made me feel better. And if our governor can live in his own private Puerto Rico, can’t I create a nice delusional cocoon myself. Why not listen to a 1954 recording of Maria Callas singing Spontini? So I ambled over to YouTube and dug her up.

Verdict?

Not sure—but why does the term “justly forgotten” spring to mind?

All Twitty

I’m beginning to feel what my mother must have meant when she said, towards the end of her life, that things were all twitty. Because today, I find myself absolutely unable to do anything—write, print labels, find anything to write about.

It may be the cat that got me into this mood. We’ve had Kitty for 16 years, ever since I heard him yowling on the top of a wheel on a parked car outside. OK—moral proximity: if a cat needs help outside your house, what can you do? So there we were, lying on our stomachs on the sidewalk, peering under the car. And there Kitty was, wisely deciding to retreat deep into the chassis of the car. After all, did he know who we were?

The solution was tuna fish, we realized, and it became clear: we were only going to get one chance; this was one smart cat. Fortunately, we lured him into the cage, and spirited him up to the apartment, where we put him into the one room that actually has a door, the guest bathroom.

The kitten at this point fit comfortably in Mr. Fernández’s hand—it was at that stage where the ears were seemingly bigger than the head. And speaking of the ears, there was a huge oil smear on the right ear; Mr. Fernández got to work on that the next day.

Which I found then, when I came upon Fernández sitting on the toilet, alternately drying and kissing Kitty. “I like this cat,” he crooned, and that was it. True, he was / is an orange cat, and none too beautiful. But that wasn’t the point; probably because of the vitamins we shoveled down him, he’s a truly intelligent cat.

(Sorry to disabuse you here, but most cats? Stupid as posts, despite their appearance….)

Smart enough, in fact, to break out of the guest bathroom after a few days. And how did he do it, since the door was still closed? By climbing up and then down an 8-foot louvered door—it was the only way.

So there he was, casually casing the place, completely unfazed be the three other adult cats who were tailing him. 

Over the years, it became obvious—this was Raf’s cat, not mine. Kitty sleeps by Raf at night, and stays sleeping on his pillow during the day. And at one point, Raf had a dream in which Kitty was talking to him.

“Kitty, you can talk!” exclaimed Raf.

“Of course I can talk,” said Kitty irritably. It was sort of an Alice and Wonderland moment….

Which last Monday was not. That’s when I took Kitty in to the vet, since he hadn’t been eating, and was looking lethargic. He knew, of course, what was coming the moment his saw the red carrying case; characteristically, he offered no complaint.

I knew, too, what was going to happen. I knew it the moment I saw the vet palpating Kitty’s lower abdomen.

“It’s always the kidneys in older cats,” said Jeanne over the weekend. At that point, Kitty had just come home from five days in the hospital, getting IV fluids, and enduring the constant barking of the neighboring dogs. And yes, he had cost us just under a thousand bucks.

We had to spend it, of course. But I can tell you now—we might as well have taken a vacation, instead. Despite Raf’s optimism—based on the statement by the vet that Kitty might last another two years—I don’t think this cat’s gonna be around long.

So he’s in the back bedroom now—isolated so we can see if he urinates and give him the diet he needs. And I puzzled this morning when I was feeding him, how strange life worked. I had a job, I had an office, I had a place to be on Monday mornings. And now? I was alone with an old, feeble cat—a cat we will one day put in the red carrying case, and head weeping—as I am now—for the vet…

…one last time. 

Olympic Hypocrisy

Wow—wonderful what this blog can do! True, I had to keep harping about it, and I do apologize to any reader who may have gone a bit crazy, hearing my rants over and over. But admit it, dear Readers: Aren’t you glad we kept up the pressure? Because now we have it from a new-found friend, no less than Vladimir Putin himself, that the Winter Olympics in Sochi will be… OK, here’s The New York Times itself:

Speaking at a meeting with leaders of Russian winter sports federations, which was also attended by Thomas Bach, the president of the International Olympic Committee, Mr. Putin said Sochi would be fully tolerant. 

Oh, and the name of this article? Putin Says Sochi Welcomes Gays!

Guys?

Look, I have lived over half a century, and I’m hard pressed to think of a more blatantly false and outrageously self-serving statement. And memo to Putin? Gay people, generally speaking, are not fools. So if you think this statement gets you off the hook, think again.

The question, of course, is who is more turpid—sorry, computer, but I looked it up, and Nabokov used the word too—here: Putin and his heinous laws that criminalize even talking about homosexuality, or the Olympic Committee, which sat around and watched Putin enact these laws without raising a word of protest. Then, of course, things got hot, so the Olympic guys had to go and put pressure on the Russian president to make this ridiculous statement.

Well, this was not the only news about LGBT issues in the Times, today, because Frank Bruni had a story about Paul Singer, a billionaire Republican who gave a pot of money to Mitt Romney, but who is also giving money to the Human Rights Campaign. Why? Well, Singer among other things has a gay son—and a gay son-in-law. And he thinks support for gay rights is not incompatible with the Republican Party. Here’s what Bruni has to say:

In Singer’s view, gay rights are consistent with a Republican philosophy of individual liberty, and gay marriage is “an augmenter of social stability, family stability and stability in raising kids.” In other words, it’s conservative.

Nor is Singer the only Republican to join with the HRC—there’s also Daniel S. Loeb; here’s what he has to say:

As we witnessed in its successful campaign to advance marriage equality in the United States, HRC is a uniquely effective organization that achieves what it sets out to do.

Right—so what’s the campaign about? Well, the HRC has decided it’s time to act globally and support the organizations in other countries that are struggling to advance the causes of LGBT folk. Here’s what Singer has to say about the campaign:

“Every day around the world, LGBT individuals face arrest, imprisonment, torture and even execution just for being who they are,” said Paul Singer.

And guess what? The situation is getting worse around the world, just as it’s getting better in the United States. And why is that? Because we are exporting our bigotry around the world, as evangelical Christians have given up on the domestic market. So what have people like Scott Lively done? They’ve run down to Uganda and over to Russia to stir up hate and urge draconian laws.

Which makes it all the interesting what Bruni says:

It (the campaign) intends to name and shame American religious zealots who sponsor antigay campaigns abroad. So Republican money may wind up challenging a constituency within the party. (We’re most definitely not in Kansas anymore.)

Well, it’s an interesting world presenting itself today: Republicans supporting LGBT issues, and our new buddy in the Kremlin. Is it that I have the cynical blood of journalism coursing through my veins? Because I’m back to suggesting this….

Get going, Readers: download your print-ready image here at no cost, and order your label sheets (in an appropriate printing size) here! (Suggested brand; $6.68 per 100 labels is not bad!)

Meeting my Outer Critic

Well, I said I’d do it, and so I did. And yes, I wish it had been easier, but let’s be real. I hadn’t played in public for five years at least, and like María João Pires, I’ve never been that comfortable on stage. Some people love it—remember Pavarotti? But it’s never been easy for me.

And there’s also the thing about being alone on the stage—if you’ve got even one other person, you have support. But alone? That’s a lot of eyes on you. Two of which, as well, were Ilia’s, my mother-in-law, who had come with her daughter Nydia. So that was a bit of pressure.

But let’s be honest: I have choked every time I played an audition, and the fear of doing it again was and is almost as bad as doing it. And so would I fall flat on my face?

Nor am I talking about a performance that I wasn’t particularly happy with—I’m talking about playing as badly as I did a year after I first took up the instrument. The bow was shaking on the strings, the fingerboard was awash in sweat, the tone was feeble and tight—do I have to go on? When the disembodied voice of—presumably—the conductor finally said “gracias,” is was an act of charity, for me as much as anyone else.

‘I can’t do this,’ I thought, and strongly considered just putting the cello in the case and going away. I know, think mechanistically: there’s no way I could be a graphic artist, much as I’d like to. And so if I can’t play in public, it’s fine. Some things you can do, others not. Nothing personal—nor is it a moral failure, as somehow I had gotten it into my head it was.

It seemed easier—all right, less embarrassing—just to keep playing. And then, it started, very slowly, to get better. I relaxed; rather, I got into focus. Which meant that I could stop with all the voices in my head which were saying, “you can’t do this are you messing up why can’t you get a decent tone this is nothing like the way you sounded you can do better,” and finally just look at the musician making music.

And then that guy came in.

I had met him before—Félix, who had studied classical guitar at the New England Conservatory of Music. Right, after Juilliard, it’s probably the best school of music in the country. And I had met him before, when he had interrupted my practicing with the question: “why aren’t you playing with the music?”

He had also insisted on talking about himself, about the Bach that he plays, about…

Who knows? I tuned him out, finding him mildly irritating.

And so he appeared, just as the music was beginning to sound good, and where did he sit? Of course, three feet to my right, and the criticism began. Didn’t I know that the courante should be faster? And what about the articulation….

OK—this was as café, not a concert hall, and thus more informal. Still I was in the middle of a Bach suite, and I wasn’t in the mood to be interrupted. The guy wouldn’t stop talking, so what did I do? Right—I just started playing.

And he kept talking.

That’s when I got pissed. And that, of course was the best thing that could have happened.

‘I no longer talk to myself that way,’ I remember thinking, ‘and I don’t like anyone else talking to me that way….’

And then, at the end, came the final criticism: “when are you going to play at tempo? Is the gigue going to be so slow too?”

I played the first bars as slowly as I could. And the rest of the piece? Whirlwind!

“Are you satisfied,” asked Nydia.

The guy said nothing.

“Well, that’s his answer,” said I.

Of course he wasn’t satisfied—the critics never are. But I was happy: I had moved my critic from inside to outside, I had met him and given him the musical bird. Raf had joined us, we had counted the money to be donated to charity, Ilia and Nydia went up the hill. Raf and I went down the hill, home to the cats dozing on the rugs, home to dinner that would get put on the table. I had met my critic…

…and left him behind.

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Chasing a Novel….

OK—I’ve read James Patterson, who tells me that I should lie to myself. I should tell myself that the novel I intend to write in National Novel Writing Month (abbreviated NaNoWriMo) is gonna be great, gonna sell a zillion copies, gonna make the 50 Shades of Grey lady look like a piker. And Patterson should know, because he holds the Guinness Book of Records for the most bestsellers on The New York Times list.

For the stuff that I want to do, I’m fairly disciplined—no surprise there, right? Which means that my house is a mess, but I write each day. So the discipline isn’t the problem—it’s the imagination.

Of which I have none….

Consider it—there is a couple three tables down from me at the café where I write. Shouldn’t I be able to think of a story, shouldn’t I be able to weave a tale, just from the slump of his shoulders, or the fact that she is looking at her phone, not at him.

They argued last night, of course. The same argument they’ve been having for a month: he wants them to have a baby, she doesn’t.

“I had enough SHIT FROM MY MOTHER,” she screamed at him. “I don’t want to do that to anyone. And my therapist says I’m not ready.”

“You’re never ready,” he said, trying to be reasonable. ‘Christ,’ he thought, ‘if only she could hear herself…’

“Maybe in a year,” she said.

“Said that last year…”

“Look, Jim, I just want time for us to be together as a couple. Too many couples have children and then they’re parents, not couples. And then they end up in thirty years not really knowing each other….”

‘She’s so beautiful,’ he thinks, ‘why don’t I believe her?’

‘The problem started after her mother visited,’ he thought. ‘She was so simple, so sweet before her mother came. It’s like all the mistrust and suspicion got dumped onto her. Christ, just because your mother had a rotten divorce, do you have to spoil your own marriage?’ 

He turned over in bed and feigned sleep.

It was his fault—he’d always had this thing for younger women. And now, here he was, in his third marriage to a girl in her early twenties. And he? Forties, still good looking, hair graying at the temples, but look…time runs out for men as well as women. It may be more psychological than biological, as it is for women, but it’s still there. He doesn’t want to be in his fifties with a newborn crying in the middle of the night. But he could handle it now.

Now, he looks at her, absorbed in her phone. He sees the way her earring falls from her earlobe, and remembers the thrill, the first time he had whispered, “I love you,” into that ear.

“Let’s not fight again,” he says. It seems as simple as that.

She tenses, and thinks that the issue will never go away, never get settled. It will end her marriage, as it ended her mother’s. Although that was another woman, not the kid thing. Would Jim stray? Had he already? Or did he have some lined up, someone in the wings?

“It’s not like I want to fight,” she says. Is he putting all this on her, again?

“Then let’s not….”

She gives him a wary smile, and looks back down at her phone.

“Michelle texted me—they’re at the Butterfly People, about to have lunch. You want to join them?”

He doesn’t like either Michelle or her partner, and he hates the pretension of the Butterfly People. But the silence between them? Wouldn’t it be better to have anything else but that?

“Sure,” he says, and tries to look happy about it.

She stands up, reaches for her purse, brushing her husband’s hand in the process; he was about to give it to her. The touch seems as fragile, as fleeting as the relationship itself.

She moves away, ahead of her husband, pushes the door to the café open, and steps into the street. She doesn’t know: in a week she will miss her period, in a month, Jason will be born.

Now then—can we tweet this to Patterson?

The Chief Flips the Bird

Well, the island collectively dropped its jaw when the news came out. Se fue muy molesto read the headline in The New Day, our local newspaper; “He Left Hot and Bothered,” would be the equivalent in English.

And the “he” is a pretty important he, since Héctor Pesquera is the head of the police department, which in turn is the second largest force in the United States (New York City is number 1).

Well, the question on everybody’s lips is, “why?” Granted, the job couldn’t have been much fun, since morale is low, public confidence in the police is virtually nil, the politicians are busy fighting each other—sometimes to the point of fisticuffs—and, to top it all off, the United States Department of Justice is suing the police department for violations of civil rights.

And was that the problem? Because yesterday, federal judge Gustavo Gelpí appointed Juan Mattos to be the federal monitor to assure that an 18-year reform of the Police Department was going according to plan.  

Pesquera denied that the appointment of Mattos has anything to do with his decision. However, Pesquera also refused to say why he was retiring and returning to his home in Florida.

And Mattos was presented to the public two days ago at the governor’s mansion, at which everybody and his brother showed up, except….right, you know who….

"Pesquera se cansó de las determinaciones apresuradas y el ridículo ayer, donde el Gobierno anunció un alegado monitor sin estar el Jefe de la Policía y sin dar detalles sobre la contratación, es el mejor ejemplo", dijo González.

Roughly, “Perquera got tired of political pressure, and the best example was the ridiculousness yesterday, when the government announced an alleged monitor without the chief being there and without giving details about how he was contracted,” said González.

“He works very hard—Saturday and Sunday, included—and he has the respect of the force,” said my friend Tony, who is the kind of guy who knows the inside story. What he didn’t do, apparently, was play the political game terribly well. And that’s crucial, because the reform won’t come cheap—it’s guesstimated that it will cost 300 million bucks over the course of a decade. Which means that any police chief is going to have to go to the capitol and press the flesh.

Pesquera made over a quarter of a million bucks annually, but guess what?

…wasn’t worth it.

Missing the Miracle

On the face of it, it looks like the classic “oh, fuck” moment. Or maybe like those dreams I still have, at age 57, of taking an exam for a class that I have somehow completely forgotten that I was taking.

So there the Portuguese pianist Maria João Pires is, sitting at the piano expecting one concerto, and guess what? Yup, the conductor starts off on another concerto completely.

In fact, I came across this last night as I was lurching out of a sleep to feed a body screaming for carbohydrates—in short, I was half asleep. So I wasn’t entirely sure—had I dreamed this? Was it my own nightmare? Had I somehow switched sexes and instruments?

I can now tell you—yes, it’s real. And this video below, shot in 1998, has now gone as viral as it gets in the classical music world; if not a million hits, it’s got a respectable 724,000. And people are saying, “wow, that’s amazing—she plays a concerto she wasn’t expecting, and she plays it perfectly! That’s incredible!”

Only Stephen Hough gets it right: it is and it isn’t.

Maria João Pires didn’t start playing piano a couple weeks ago—she gave her first recital at age 4 or 5. And she’s been practicing and playing ever since; she’s had half a century of grind at the piano. And she’s played this concerto every season in her life. More to the point, Mozart doesn’t pose the technical challenges that Chopin or—God forbid—Liszt do. So the real deal here is that she remembered a piano concerto, to which I say…

…big deal.

I say this because every musician is walking around with a lot of music stuffed between the ears. I sat down to play Bach suites a few weeks ago after an absence of five years, and did I drag out the music? Confession—I’m not even sure I have the music, since the termites have gotten into a lot of it. I had to throw a lot of music away….

Which meant comparatively little, since most of the repertoire is in my head. And yes, my memory is unusually good, but not that good. And not, of course, as good as it was: I could learn a piece without effort in a day or two. As Hough points out, the real miracle is that Pires is a marvelous pianist, and, as it turns out, an interesting person as well. How interesting? Well, check out this portion of an interview with David Patrick Stearns of the Philadelphia Inquirer:

DPS: But certainly you’ve spent a lot of time alone as a student practicing.

MJP: I never did it because I had no time. I was always very busy with other things…I had children very early and I had to take care of everything. I never had much time for the piano. I was always an amateur somehow. I did the career … it was not on purpose. It was not wanted and it was not very natural.

DPS: But you have such a natural facility for piano.

MJP: I don’t think so. I have small hands. Many technical problems – not many but some. Of course I found my own body language with the piano and my own way of getting out of my problems but they’re still problems. The other thing is I don’t really like to play concerts. I don’t like to be onstage. That’s not a comfortable thing for me.

An amateur? Well, as a Buddhist, Pires is saying it, but the rest of the world is. Here, ripped off from her biography on Deautsche Grammophon is a quote from The Times of London:

“I can’t think of a pianist with a more ideal command of Chopin’s style. Pires trips through the roulades with filigree dexterity, but her tone is so thoughtful, serious and weighty that they arrive with immense emotional profundity.”

OK—so an amateur with “filigree dexterity….”

Also an amateur who won the Beethoven Bicentennial Competition in 1970, and who has performed around the world ever since. Although not, incidentally, much in the United States: she was reluctant to play or travel to America during the Bush years.

And an amateur who really prefers to share the stage—her peeve with Chopin is not the pianistic difficulties he presents, but that he started the piano recital; it has bedeviled her all her life.

And in a field dominated by, well, dominating personalities, Maria João Pires is self-effacing. Or rather, her focus is outward—here’s what she says later in her interview with Stearns:

People care about careers and themselves and all the business that is around music. And that is, for me, somehow, nonsense. Art has nothing to do with that. Competitions take the soul out of the musicians. And the first moments you want to make music in your life it’s for reasons other than business. And in competition you feel like you have to kill someone to have his place. This is horrible. This is not art. So I would like to give young people the possibility of taking the mission of the society in the world. Not fighting against that but finding new ways. I’m not saying to change the world. This is very pretentious. What better than to have artists in projects in many places in the world where problems are big. It’s not decent that we’re eating a lot and having a lot of luxury and people are dying because they have no food or no water. Our mission should be to try to change things. And art is something that can give people their dignity back.

She started a school in Belgais, Portugal, and the experience wasn’t…well, wait. She says she learned a lot, and she might be, as a Buddhist, the last person to describe the experience as bad. At any rate, she applied for Brazilian nationality, and her relationship with her native country may be strained.

There are pianists who somehow win your heart, who manage to take on the prodigious technical demands on the piano, and throw them off completely. Martha Argerich is one, Radu Lupu another. They’re people who know: it’s not about them, still less about the piano. It’s all about the music.

Wow—Those Great Saudi Guys!

OK—it’s only been seen 5,595,531 times on YouTube in the three days that it’s been there, so it’s clear. Iguanas has to step in and lend a hand; check in on the video below, and help this video get this video out there!

So it’s hard to defend the Saudi Arabian treatment of women, but guess what? Here’s a Saudi woman with a defense:

In Saudi culture, women have their integrity and a special life that is separate from men. As a Saudi woman, I demand to have a guardian. My work requires me to go to different regions of Saudi Arabia, and during my business trips I always bring my husband or my brother. They ask nothing in return—they only want to be with me.

The image in the West is that we are dominated by men, but they always forget the aspect of love. People who aren’t familiar with Shariah often have the wrong idea. If you want stability and safety in your life, if you want a husband who takes care of you, you won’t find it except in Islam.

Wow—what a great deal! And what princes these guys are, who only want to be there for their women! The wonder is that—given that they must be exhausted, from all the care that they lavish on their women—they have the energy and desire to have two, three, or four wives. How do they do it?

And what, by the way, is wrong with our Western women, who can fail to see the obvious benefits of this good Sharia system? Consider—every woman has a guardian, who drives her, gives her “permission” to work, study, go places and even visit the doctor. Are our womenfolk so blind? Why aren’t they jumping at the chance?

And the best thing? Women get all this protection as early as nine, which most courts say is the youngest age for a girl to get married. Oh, and don’t think about marrying outside the tribe, because guess what? That’ll get you disinherited.

Even better, if you get a divorce? You won’t get stuck with the kids—who are the property of the father. Oh, and you’ll have to ask your son if you want to remarry. Oh wait—that may not even happen, since the groom will automatically be dealing with your guardian, not you.

Naturally, it takes some work to maintain this system; here’s Wikipedia on the subject:

In 2009, the Saudi Gazette reported that a 23-year-old unmarried woman was sentenced to one year in prison and 100 lashes for adultery. She had been gang-raped, become pregnant, and tried unsuccessfully to abort the fetus. The flogging was postponed until after the delivery.

Wow—postponing the flogging until after the delivery? Is there no kindness these guardians won’t shower on their women? Amazing!

Still people carp. For example, according to Wikipedia, “the World Economic Forum 2009 Global Gender Gap Report ranked Saudi Arabia 130th out of 134 countries for gender parity.” And even in Saudi Arabia, there are critics: here’s Wajeha Al-Huwaider:

The ownership of a woman is passed from one man to another. Ownership of the woman is passed from the father or the brother to another man, the husband. The woman is merely a piece of merchandise, which is passed over to someone else—her guardian ... Ultimately, I think women are greatly feared. When I compare the Saudi man with other Arab men, I can say that the Saudi is the only man who could not compete with the woman. He could not compete, so what did he do with her? ... The woman has capabilities. When women study, they compete with the men for jobs. All jobs are open to men. 90% of them are open to men. You do not feel any competition ... If you do not face competition from the Saudi woman ... you have the entire scene for yourself. All positions and jobs are reserved for you. Therefore, you are a spoiled and self-indulged man.

I’ve a friend, Harry, who once worked for an organization for Latinos. In his time there, the organization was asked to come out in support of a Mexican guy who had started a brawl in a bar. “Fighting in public,” said the lawyer defending the man, “played an integral part in the cultural life of the Mexican male,” or some such thing. Everybody thought about that for a bit…

…until Harry began to sing, “oh give me a home, where the bottles are thrown…”

Which is the way I’m starting to feel about Islam, at least Saudi Arabian-style. Come on, guys, I do my best to be respectful but…

..couldn’t you guys make it a little easier?

Blown Off, if Not Away....

OK—I have a simple policy about hurricanes: I take them all seriously.

Yes, all of them, barring the ones that are clearly too far north of us to have any effect whatsoever. But any storm coming low across the Atlantic? I’m on it.

Maybe I get it from Rose, who in the pre-Internet days would give me big paper maps of the Atlantic and Caribbean, on which we would put coordinates as NOAA announced them every six hours. Then, for five days or so, we would watch the storm coming, and slowly go into storm mode.

Which meant that you bought two gallons of water every day before the storm. This you did because you were on foot, not car, and anyway, if you waited until the government announced the storm? There would be pandemonium in the street, small riots in the stores, huge lines at gas stations, and reports of muggings for bags of ice.

A category three or above? In the early days, we took every picture from the walls, and lifted every rug from the floor. And I should tell you, I live on the second floor, probably 100 feet above sea level, and the walls of the building are three feet thick full of brick and stone.

And so, two years ago, I called to John and Jeanne—my middle brother and his wife—with the news that Hurricane Irene was not making me happy.

“Not a problem,” he said. “It’s just a tropical storm.”

“John, it’s been a hurricane category 2 for three days now….”

This exchange will tell you everything. I’m am in the tropics, worrying and monitoring the storm. John?

On the golf course!

Look, everybody deserves a vacation. And so they were reluctant to move from the house they had rented—a wooden house five streets away from the beach.

“FIVE STREETS!” I am almost shouting at John. “HAVE YOU HEARD ABOUT STORM SURGE?

“Well, we’ll go up to the second floor,,,,”

Is it because I’m the youngest? Because I swear—the more adamant I became that John had to leave, the more casual—no, admit it, here’s the word I want to say—cavalier John became. It ended with the promise that John would evacuate if the storm got too bad.

Well, it was a fight—but it ended with no serious hurt feelings. They both swore—they weren’t blowing me off, and the Fire Department had told them the morning of the storm to stay put.

I could have countered: of course the Fire Department is going to say that. But there were several reasons to have evacuated days before. First, you never really know where these storms are going to hit. Second, if you wait until the water is knee high in the streets, and those three mini Austins ahead of you can’t make it through….well? Oh, and the firemen prefer to do their rescues without too many vehicles on the road.

Of course you know what happened--Irene barely touched them, and they were able to call several days later and report that it barely rained. Irene, however, did major damage north of them.

I had been, it seemed, silly, alarmist, absurdly fatalistic. Was I OK—they asked? Was I having anxiety in other areas of my life? Perhaps I should call my therapist….

I learned—my brother blows me off. He had “been” through a hurricane up on Cape Cod—and that was a Category 2. So a Category 1 should have been no problem, right? And what was Marc worrying about, down in Puerto Rico?

A bit more than a year later, Hurricane Sandy blew through the Caribbean and it was obvious—this was going to be a bad storm. But I had learned—John is a big boy. He gets the Times delivered to his door. And if he’s not going to listen, why talk?

So I stayed silent, and then watched—as the rest of the nation did—as New Jersey and Staten island got smashed. When I flew in to the city in early November, they had just had a major snow storm on top of the super storm; I watched the local news of parka-covered rescue workers walking through the dark halls of city housing projects, trying to figure out who was who and what to do with them.

Up on the upper West Side, where John and Jeanne live, nothing again had happened. Sure, some tree branches had been lost. Was was hard to get—but that was the cab driver's problem—not mine or John and Jeanne’s.

“Who would have thought,” I heard Jeanne say to John in the kitchen, “that a storm could cause so much damage?”

Sitting in the living room, I silently raised my hand.

It’s now a year later—I watched the documentary below yesterday about Sandy, and thought about the devastation, and the many miracles among the tragedies there were. How could it be that in the fire that destroyed over 100 homes, not one life was lost?

Have we learned out lessons, the media are asking?

In one important way—no.

I generally like the National Hurricane Center—I can hear them breathing a sigh of relief up there in Miami—but there is one thing that they’ve got to do. We have got to give the public a better perception of how dangerous a storm is. Which means we have to kiss the Saffir-Simpson Scale goodbye.

Sandy, in fact, was not a hurricane when it hit the East coast; here’s what one writer said about it:

The National Hurricane Center was being infamously stubborn during the storm, refusing to issue hurricane warnings for New Jersey and New York City based on the technicality that Sandy would become extratropical (lose its tropical characteristics) before landfall. Sandy had all the effects of a hurricane, but because its structure wasn’t expected to fit the textbook definition of a tropical system by the time of landfall, no tropical storm or hurricane warnings were issued north of the North Carolina coast.

Whether a storm is extratropical or not makes pretty little difference when the water is rising to the second floor. And if all you have done is consider the Saffir-Simpson scale, and chosen to stay home and ride it out because it’s “just” a Category 1, you’ll have missed some other very important factors.

Such as?

How big is the storm? How much water is associated with it? If it hits, will it be at high tide, as it was for Sandy? How fast is it moving? A category 1 hurricane stalled over the house for 36 hours is not fun….

I left New York and took the now-running subway, in which I saw what I had never seen: a fight broke out between a well-dressed Wall Street type and a young black dude. I was quickly broken up, and people went about their day.

I got back and thought about the storms that come, the storms that fizzle. My brother blows me off—but you know what? He’s otherwise a very good brother—a guy who is fiercely protective and loyal to the ones he loves. Oh, and very guarded in a very public way. If you want to hide, the best place is out in the open.

“Not a problem,” he says to me at any ridiculous request I manage to cook up. So he plays golf when he should be evacuating? No big deal.

He gets away with it!