Back in Black < Parries

Please pardon the unannounced, unplanned and unbecoming two weeks off. Following are some memorable moments from them in the order they popped into mind.

Is the goal of Israel’s assault on Gaza to discourage Hamas from firing rockets, or is it to render Hamas incapable of firing rockets? These are two very different projects, yet we are hearing about both from the government, which worryingly suggests that the government isn’t quite sure.

Short-circuiting Place-based Longing

If there is one tangible benefit to having lived in a variety of places it’s that it furnishes evidence of the futility of longing to be elsewhere.

October 2008

Ebullience, Please

A President of the United States must be ebullient. At the presidential debates we should have seen McCain like we saw him at the Al Smith dinner.

September 2008

History Tonight, McCain vs. Obama

McCain pulled through but he’d better improve, better get relaxed. This was the big one, and Obama came off a 21st century Brat Packer.

Encounter at Wetherspoone’s

As if those glass double doors belong to a wild saloon wherein one must repulse brigands just for a peaceful drink.

August 2008

A Crawl Across Crawley, Part 1

Irit, the Jam and I walk from Brighton to Gatwick Airport.

July 2008

Suddenly Seymour

Time was, Seymour Hersh’s dispatches were a cause for minor celebration. They were full- and deep-throated journalistic tours de force, possible changers of paradigms. But his latest, “Preparing the Battlefield” on funding covert ops in Iran, leaves too many clues that reveal precisely where he’s coming from.

June 2008

Another End of Times

With the recent reported training exercises over Crete, perhaps Israel’s strike on the Iranian regime’s machinery of genocide has already begun.

Dead Till Eilenspiegel

Beyond steadfastness and vigor in prosecuting Islamofascism, John McCain seems an American president I’d love even more than the great liberator George W. Bush (most of you just left, I know) because he is more American on immigration than either his party or the other.

All So Simple

First, there is a general moode and desire to write.

March 2008

Why AAPL

Apple’s operating system will, I believe, become in time the dominant one, and with a current market share of only 6% or so, that’s a lot more computers to sell. And as the only operating system seller that also sells the computers it runs on, as well as owning the shops they’re sold from, Apple stands to become a colossus, even a frightening one.

Clash of the Midgets

My phone! One of the reasons I didn’t want an iPhone is that I’m invested in the T9 text entry method and like it. But while I do like the Nokia N95’s slider, it creates discomfort when entering text because all the weight in the phone is further up.

January 2008

Dangers of the Gaza-Egypt border breach

Hamas may try to use Egyptian territory to stage cross-border attacks on Israel, aiming to operate in parts of the Sinai as Hezballah does in southern Lebanon.

Glick Dismisses Gaza Border Breach

Caroline Glick, the strident Jerusalem Post columnist, seems to see the Gaza-Egypt border breach as yet another in a long line of Israeli strategic disasters by incompetent leaders. I’m not convinced however of her arguments, mainly because she doesn’t make any.

Israel’s Greatest Victory Since Osirak

The great tactician Ariel Sharon steamrolled through Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza and today we see another step in the unfolding of this masterplan to staunch the damage caused by the victory of the Six Day War in 1967.

I Do Like Mondays

First procedure: clean out the 2-cup mokka from the previous usage. The sink here is metal and I enjoy lightly bashing the coffee holder against it to knock the damp grains out then putting them in the rubbish before swilling out the remains under the tap. The sound is just the same as baristas make in cafes.

The Small Adventures - Part 2

There in the empty restaurant by the water at Dieppe I had toast with foie gras, a carafe of red wine, a huge plate of mussels and chips, and finally a creme brulee. Somehow, though I’ve eaten in restaurants hundreds of times, I felt grown up sitting there alone on my travels.

December 2007

The Small Adventures

Of course we were late for the train. We enquired frantically among the taxis for one who would accept the two dogs—mine and Davide’s—and take us to Termini Station so I could catch the 11pm train to Milan that would be one third of our journey to Britain.

Tony Blair and the Four-State Vision

Ariel Sharon’s disengagement policy reflected an understanding that ownership of the Palestinian issue is shared with Egypt and Jordan. Once Tony Blair acquires this view, he can help facilitate an end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Spooked, They’ll Annoint Rudy

Because of the recent US National Intelligence Report, the electorate will turn to someone who demonstrates not only the ideological conviction required to continue to prosecute Islamism, but also the administrative savvy to reform entrenched bureacracies.

October 2007

A Restoration and Return

There she was, sitting outside the apartment block! How did she do it? Dogs must have some sort of navigational sense we don’t understand.

Curs to Fate

Yesterday I lost Jam in Villa Borghese, the central park here in Rome. She has not turned up since.

This Trip’s Last Day

I went to Astor Place Haircutters. I crossed Manhattan Bridge on foot. I walked west along Canal St, seeking a bamboo steamer.

I, Thou and Pastor Bob

At Rome I felt queasy that they would paint and revere scenes that occured in Israel, but here, looking at the Calvary Church campus, I felt that the religious energy is actually here, that we are far enough away from the places of the events themselves that they can finally become abstracted and spiritualized and kept relevant. An ocean and a small continent separate Fort Lauderdale from Afula.

September 2007

The Big and Easy

The moon is shining through these tropical September clouds, directly above a neighbor’s palm tree, and it’s completely full. An airplane is landing at a nearby airfield. I ramble, unable to reach what I mean, perhaps because what I mean is an almost meaningless jumble of contradictory thoughts that are less thoughts than incomplete attempts to label fleeting tumbling emotions.

Flightblogging

With the squeaks from the front and the clatter from the bulkheads and the smell from the toilet, there’s a reason to prefer Gatwick and the train over Heathrow and the bus. It’s very misty but we’re here. Korean Air Cargo. A parking lot.

August 2007

A Drop in Time

To have a camera back again a personal epoch later feels like a time machine squared. Your chronicling device—itself a time machine of sorts—is suddenly back to what it was years ago, before much was changed, which in itself somewhat returns you to those times.

Sauna Losing Heat

Rather than reaching the heights, to exciting thoughts and feelings, I tend increasingly in the sauna to just sit and think about the work I’ve just done and the work I’m about to do after. Something’s missing.

A Ride to Gatwick Airport

Gatwick is my airport now, largely unchanged since 1986, so it now looks tawdry. Airports. They’re so charged, so symbolic, and so empty once you’re at one; I dream of them often.

July 2007

Busy, Busy City

There’s a bridge in London’s St. James’s park where you can see Buckingham Palace at one end of the pond and Whitehall at the other, with the London Eye behind. Whitehall looked less a thumping fast haven for bureaucrats than a fairytale town, with the improbable slowly-moving Eye completing the fantasy.

First Time in this House All Day

One reaction (in The Times) to Islamist terrorist doctors: “Nowhere can inequality be so devastatingly stark as in a well-resourced British hospital.” So now we know: it’s understandable that after removing an annoying woman’s varicose veins, why, one sets a car alight and drives it into an airport departure hall.

The Soft Ache of Cold Hotels

The back yard is now set up and quite effortlessly picturesque, with its greenage and raw brick walls. Until we start trying to grow wee vegetables nothing else need be done except the daily maintenance of clearing the butts from the ashtray and the leaves from the ground.

June 2007

Only the Rustle in the Trees

We all, like twinkles on a sunny day’s waves, shine briefly. That I do know to be true. Other perspectives are futile. Grief, loss—these are the great teachers surely. Understand that what one has will pass.

A Rash Appointment

I have a rash on my face these days, reaching from my forehead down the sides of my nose and to my mouth. It went away while I was in America but now back in Britain it’s returned. How can that be?

A Cabaret Old Chum

It’s a last bastion of civility, Brian mused ruefully (with that inability of his to be really rued), as we had a beer walking through Penn Station to his train. I realized that I don’t know people like him anymore: libertarian Democrats.

Fatahland and Hamastan

Wherein I obsess about developments in Gaza rather than recording the sights and sounds of New York City in the springtime.

Squelching in a Bath of Me

I rode the Metro subway for the first time—didn’t even known Los Angeles has one. It’s cheap and clean, but the problem is there just aren’t that many trains, as if the city sabotages its own public transport system and wants you to have a car.

Stars, Stripes and Superlatives

Here in Los Angeles I am bombarded with superlatives. Daniel’s record collection. The Bikram Yoga College of India world headquarters. Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm. Cutting-edge web applications by people down from the Bay Area. All mixed in with the most ravaging mediocrity.

Pursuit of Hashemesh

Welcome to three weeks in America. Top story in USA Today: Tiger Woods is going to design a golf course.

May 2007

Bikram’s Yoga, Meet David Allen’s GTD

Both systems are comprehensive in their respective realms and, controversially, ground-up rather than top-down.

Notes and Chords on the Levant Right Now

Palestinian Arabs, quasi-sovereign for the first time, are descending into civil war in Gaza. Lebanon, acting militarily for the first time, is going after al-Qaeda cells within its Palestinian camps. And Israel is undergoing political convulsions, hammering out a new political system it seems. And all these developments among the neighbors are in play each with the other.

My City to Your City

A bunch of loud white kids came running down from the promenade shouting vilely to each other. I was reminded of El Topo (we saw it yesterday at the fabulous Duke of York cinema) and I was reminded of the scene when the three bandits gradually build up their cackling harassment of the man in black as he rides into their valley.

Shite on Brighton

“Like many provincial towns,” the Private Eye reviewer stabs, “Brighton, as depicted in this hacked-together tribute, defines itself more by what it isn’t than by what it is. It’s not London, for one thing.”

From DisneyWorld to Watford

I needed my wallet more than the gypsies did.

Daily Yin

For my first test of the day as day, I open the back door and step outside to the little patio to see the sky and feel the air. I realize not everybody does this, so if people tell me I’m a miserable bastard then perhaps this little habit will correct their impression.

April 2007

Wetherspoones and Raisins

No that’s not right, said I, sipping strong tea just brewed. Klement wanted me to read over an email he wrote. “Thank you for taking your time to interview me,” it began. My Dad also called to tell me of his new socks.

Mind the Dream

Dreaming about our passed companions as if they are alive requires tricks to the dreaming mind to overcome what it believes and knows to be true.

The Meaning Addiction

I’m reading Shardik by Richard Adams, famous for Watership Down. I chose it because it’s about religion, and Adams demonstrated such insight there with the rabbits’ religion—“Oh Frith on the hill, he made it all for us!”—that he’s clearly a contributor to our understanding of ourselves and our meaning addiction.

Short Stuff

Persian civilization typefaces, Palestinian innovation, Flood worries, that’s life with websites, Brighton is slow, and bad Jajah.

lease pardon the unannounced, unplanned and unbecoming two weeks off. What happened? First, Mum and Emeline arrived from Israel for a week. Said I: I’ll skip a day, I’ve skipped ‘em before and I’ll skip ‘em again. Then the following day my Grandma came down from Birmingham to see us all. And the day after that my Dad and Aunt Myra did as well. That day was my birthday, May 2nd. The day after that I spent a few hours catching up with web work. So time rattled on and none carved out for Parries.

Beyond that has been the usual crisis of confidence. A handful of people do read these pages, which should keep me going, and they are for my own pleasure and record. But rather than being the icing on the cake, the bit of extra after a more serious, sustained and focused writing project, Parries is in fact the only thing I write, and it has loomed increasingly larger in my day as I ask myself what is there to write about it. Also, I fear that it’s pretty dreadful, that I’m a much stiffer, more wooden and trapped scribbler than I realized, that I lack the suppleness and vim I read in others and presumed also to have.

So: the negatives listed and exhausted, now the rebuttal. The alternative to having to think during the day about what might contribute to a hopefully interesting written take on same day is not thinking during the day about what might contribute to a hopefully interesting written take on the day. Having to do it keeps me more awake. Perhaps it also distances me from my experience, always having a separate self asking whether this or that would be interesting. Some might say that’s bad, but at this stage in life, where a fullness in the belly and large indecisions seem to dampen my affects anyway, having a little second self is a mere dot among any forces suppressing spontanaeity.

So it does no harm. It also does good, in that only putting in the hours will loosen and lubricate the sentence and paragraph muscles and let me write as I’ve enjoyed others’ writing. Even the master James Lileks visibly improved at the beginning (though admittedly he learned his game pretty quickly). It’s a pretty modest goal, Parries, a word that is cutesy short for paragraphs. That’s all it is—merely paragraphs. I need but produce a handful of ‘em a day.

So, some memorable moments from the past two weeks, in the order that they pop into mind:

Went to the circus here in Brighton with my mother, father and sister, a bizarre throwback to the time before my parents divorced in 1982 when we were a UK-based nuclear family.

Smoked cigarettes outside the Langham Hotel in London with a just-met French Jerusalemite relative, taking in the grandeur of Mayfair, and saying goodnight to other family before they hailed a taxi for a journey home to San Francisco, and feeling this is the life hinnit.

Stayed three nights in a nice big room at the very comfortable Hendon Hall hotel, getting a reminder of the comfort and luxury that many middle class Anglosphere Jews take as a given, and enjoying a very nice breakfast each morning, and this is the life hinnit as well.

Attended Saturday morning synagogue service for the first time in years and enjoyed the recitation of the Torah, even if the rank smell from the men’s collective breath started getting to me after a while; can’t they open a window on Shabbes?

Enjoyed a convivial lunch with my grandfather at the Knightsbridge casino where he’s a member, the first time we’ve hung out together in years. We were the only patrons in the restaurant, but it was just fine. Coffee and cigarettes afterward, even. [Interestingly, that’s the second time cigarettes have come up.]

Walked under the highway from the Brent Cross tube station to the shopping mall with Irit and my sister Emeline, not realizing it was not quite next door, but then catching a bus from the mall to Golders Green and discovering Hampstead Heath at last.

Got really disappointed with how awful Spiderman 3 was—as atrocious as S2 was terrific.

Rejoined a Bikram Yoga studio at last, and noted walking back from there tonight that the grim bridge over the Hove train station that leads to the studio has been painted from bad grafitti over white to green with stencils along its length of aloe vera plants. Kudos: The aloe vera stencil is ingenious and it’s significantly less grim. The bridge had been an emblem for me back in Rome, knowing that this would be my new way to yoga, rather less iconoclastic than riding a moped around the outskirts of the Vatican (used in Mission Impossible 3) to the little studio on Via Aurelia.