Picante

While we were shooting the Israeli documentary, we spent a bunch of time in the village of Sakhnin. Almost every day we shot there, we ate lunch at the same restaurant. The place served lunch Arab style: a first shared course with plate after plate of salads, breads, dips, pickles and olives. followed by a second course of grilled meat or fish.

Each lunch, we’d eat the all pickles and olives they’d brought out. But we’d leave behind the single pickled pepper that always sat on the same plate. After a week or so, the owner of the restaurant started ribbing us about the pepper.

“Too hot for you?” he’d ask, and laugh.

Four or five days later, just to shut the guy up, I ate one of the peppers.

“See,” I said. “Not so bad.”

“Oh,” he replied, “those peppers are only hot to Jewish people. I’ll get you the real peppers.”

He headed to the kitchen, reemerging a few minutes later with two small, green peppers on a plate. They weren’t more than an inch long, but they were the brightest colored food I’d ever seen.

“I’ll do it,” I said, “if Denny will eat one, too.”

Denny was our sound guy, about forty-five years old. He raced motocross, and he had done sound for TV news front-line war reporting. He was the guy sitting in the midst of gunshots and mortar fire, holding a boom mic overhead. If anybody else was stupid enough to eat one of these with me, it was Denny.

“Okay,” he shrugged.

So we toasted each other with the peppers, and then each took a big bite.

I chewed. I swallowed. It was hot, but not so terrible.

And then, about five seconds later, somebody set off an atomic bomb in my mouth.

I looked over at Denny, who was turning redder and redder. My eyes started running. As did my nose.

“Drink milk!” somebody yelled. “Eat some bread!”

But nothing helped. At some point, Denny and I started laughing hysterically about the whole thing. What else could you do?

We laughed and snotted and laughed for about fifteen minutes of searing pain, after which things started to cool down. About ten minutes later, I tried a bite of the original, less spicy pepper. It tasted like vinegar, a sign, apparently, that I’d temporarily blown out my ability to perceive spicy.

Over the following few weeks, the owner of the restaurant treated Denny and me better than the rest of the group. For at least a day, I think my core body temperature was up a degree or two. And, spicy as that pepper was on the way in, it was just as bad on the way back out.

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February 14, 2014

Cupped

About a decade ago, I was producing a documentary in Israel, shooting in little Arab villages up in the north of the Galilee.

The hospitality in the villages was intense, and if we were shooting within a hundred feet or so of someone’s home, the woman of the house would come out with a tray of cut fruit, homemade dessert and Turkish coffee.

On our first day of shooting, we had fruit and coffee in front of one house. We had fruit and coffee in front of a second. But when a woman came out from the third house we had moved in front of, the director and I – both Americans – politely declined.

After she headed back inside, however, our Arab Israeli producer pulled the two of us aside. We had, apparently, badly offended the woman by not accepting her fruit and coffee, he explained. For the good of the group, he made clear, we should certainly accept all such offers going forward.

So, later that day, we had fruit and coffee in front of the fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh house. After seven or eight straight shooting days, we were probably averaging 15–20 stops, sliced fruit and exceedingly strong shots of coffee at each.

At that point, we broke for a weekend, and the director and I headed back to Tel Aviv. Given our early call times while shooting, we took advantage and slept in. Until, at 11:00am or so, we both awoke, feeling absolutely terrible. By noon, we were curled on the floor in fetal positions. It took us until 1:00pm or so to realize that the terrible, terrible migraines were simply symptoms of severe caffeine withdrawal.

Post fix – a few shots of espresso later – we were totally fine. Once we tapered down our daily dose over the next week, all was well. But, to this day, when people tell me they ‘drink a lot of coffee’, I think, you have absolutely no idea what that really means.

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February 11, 2014

How to Speak Australian

Earlier this week, cleaning through a pile of cards in a box in our back closet, I found this:

aussie

Like most college students, I had a fake ID. Except mine was fake Australian.

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My rationale was actually pretty straightforward: any bouncer or liquor store clerk worth his salt had seen literally thousands of IDs from any of the 50 states. But most could probably count on one burly hand the number of Australian IDs that they’d seen. So even a fake that badly botched key details seemed likely to pass muster; after all, who’d be crazy enough to get a fake Australian ID?

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At liquor store registers, the clerk would eye me up and down with rightful suspicion. Freshman year, I weighted 120 pounds soaking wet, and barely looked old enough to drive.

So they’d whip out the book of IDs, searching through for the matching sample, to see how well mine matched. They’d thumb through Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkasanas, then hit California. They’d page back, then forwards, then backwards a few times.

“It’s not a state,” I would say, derisively, in thick Australian accent. “It’s a *country*. A foreign country.”

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The accent helped, obviously. I can’t do it now sober, but a couple of drinks in and the muscle memory returns.

My fake Australian accent was good enough that, most of time, it even faked out real Australians. Though I was aided by the fact that they were drunk, and I was drunk, and perhaps they simply assumed that my wonky accent was due to having lived too long in the US.

Only once, with an Australian bartender, did it not work at all. “Sorry mate,” he said with a laugh, handing the ID back to me.

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I did, on occasion, have to bullshit spectacularly to pull it off. I’d meet Americans who had visited Australia, and who had memories they wanted to share. I hadn’t – and still haven’t – ever actually been to Australia. So, mostly, I’d smile and nod, trying to keep my responses positive but vague.

At one point, I met a woman who was neck-deep in writing her PhD thesis on Australian public transportation. She had a slew of questions for me, wanted to know my experience as a presumed regular user of Melbourne’s buses, trains and trams. So, of course, I pulled answers out of my ass. Hopefully, none of it actually made it into her thesis.

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The real test of the ID was Quality Wine Shop, a liquor store in New Haven not far from my dorm at Yale.

The store was great – excellent selection of wines and liquors, knoweledgable and helpful staff. But they had no patience for under-age drinkers; the wall behind the register was lined by literally hundreds of confiscated fake IDs, pinned up in row after row after row.

Miraculously, my ID even worked there. And, over time, as that became my go-to liquor store, I gradually became friends with the staff. They would give me discounts, throw in extra bottles if we were stocking up for a party. Exceedingly nice.

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The summer between junior and senior year, I turned 21. Which left me with a serious conundrum: what to do about Quality Wine?

Should I continue feigning Australian-ness while shopping there? Switch back to my normal non-accent and hope nobody noticed? Or did I need to come clean? And, if so, how? I had trouble picturing a conversation where I explained that I wasn’t actually the person they thought they’d befriended at all, that I’d secretly been fucking with them the entire time they’d been so nice to me.

Perhaps not a big issue in the scheme of the world. But it seemed big to me. I genuinely lost sleep about it that summer. Which is why, when I returned to New Haven that fall, I was both saddened and somewhat relieved to discover that, priced out by Yale’s increasing retail rents, Quality Wine Shop had quietly closed over the summer, replaced by a gourmet deli.

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January 9, 2014

Follicular

It was about three and a half years back that I decided to grow a beard. I did it on a whim, as an exercise in sheer laziness, and for what, I assumed, would be a rather short stint.

But, after a month, having drawn nearly positive reviews, I decided to stick with it. I settled into a medium length – setting five on my now trusty Remington Precision MB-30 Beard Trimmer – and weathered such early bearded conundrum as whether I should shave pre-tropics, to ward off the apparent peril of inverted beard-tan should I stick with the beard in the short term, only to decide to lose it mid-fall.

As the priority of faux-aged gravitas waned in favor of general indie hipness, I clicked my Remington down to setting four, and then, about nine months back, to setting three. By now, even a day or two past setting three scruffiness (or, as per this weekend, four solid days past), I start to look and feel a bit too ‘man of the woods’ for my own taste. So, increasingly, I’ve taken to nearly daily trimming. And to nearly daily neck-hair trimming, a region I previously shaved completely, as it – if allowed to grow past its current merely scruffy state – yields a distressingly Amish look.

But, through it all, and despite subtly varying forms, I stuck with the beard. A few times along the way, I shaved completely, curious to see whether I still preferred my more hirsute self. And, each time, the beardless version looked, well, a bit less like me.

So, for the foreseeable future, at least, the beard stays in the picture. Which, taking into account savings on razors and shaving cream alone, should get me retired to the Bahamas just that much sooner. Albeit with a rather serious inverted beard tan.

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October 3, 2006

Instrumental

“Life is like playing a violin in public and learning the instrument as one goes on.”
– Samuel Butler

It’s been just less than two weeks since I bought a nylon-string classical guitar as a Chanukah gift to myself. And, in that time, I’ve been busily practicing away, enough that small callouses have begun to form on the tips of my left-hand fingers.

During the first week, I dutifully worked my way through introductory etudes and exercises, eventually reaching the point that I could play something resembling Au Clair De La Lune at barely lumbering speed.

Then, last weekend, thumbing through the back of the method book, I discovered a transcription of Packington’s Pound. I knew the song from Julian Bream’s The Woods So Wild, a classical lute record I loved so much as a child that I made my parents play it for me nightly as I fell asleep. Though Packington’s Pound was clearly well beyond my exceedingly limited guitar abilities, I set to work, beat by beat, trying to figure it out.

Through the weekend, I couldn’t play even a single full measure. But, by Wednesday, much to my own surprise, I found I could strum a fairly good likeness of the entire piece. I turned back to the front of the book, and the earlier etudes that had dogged me just one week before seemed effortlessly easy. Apparently, by throwing myself into musical depths way above my head, by painfully but consistently muddling through, I made progress far faster than I would have by taking the more sensible, incremental approach.

And, looking back on 2005, looking back over the last few years, I see that same approach borne out through nearly all of my life. In work and play, love and friendship, I’ve drank direct from the fire hose. I’ve made mistakes, of such number and magnitude that I can no longer keep track. And I’ve learned far more in the process than someone of 26 years has any right.

So, to those I’ve hurt, offended or wronged, my sincere apologies. I think, at least, that I can promise I won’t do it again in the same way, that I won’t make the same mistakes twice. But, at the same time, I’ll be spending 2006 swimming into deeper waters still. Preemptive apologies for the whole new collection of mistakes I’ll doubtless find my way to pioneer throughout this coming year.

Sure, jumping in head-first isn’t the easiest way to do things, but it’s the best I’ve found so far. Time to take another year’s worth of leaps.
—

For the past three or four days, I’ve been working on another far-too-difficult-for-me guitar piece, Snowflight, from Andrew York’s beautiful suite The 8 Discernments. While I have an exceedingly long way to go on figuring out how toplay it well, this morning I recorded a quick MP3 of my muddling through. Enjoy:

Snowflight, performed by Joshua Newman

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December 31, 2005

Indisposed

It is impossible to grow up in Northern California without becoming, at least at some subconscious level, a tree-hugging long-haired hippie environmentalist.

I remember actively resisting this at several points along the way – refusing to finish even the first week, for example, of a summer day camp on a farm commune that made us thank ‘the spirits of the fruits and grains’ before lunchtime PB&J’s.

But, despite my best efforts, the Earth Day attitude stuck. Just this morning, I caught myself turning off the water mid-toothbrushing, a long-standing habit that makes good sense in draught-ridden California, yet far less here in New York City, where rain has been pinging against my windowpanes all weekend long.

Water conservation aside, the thing that produces the greatest environmental guilt in me is disposability. Anything used once and then discarded, I envision piling atop the giant imaginary landfill dump that I carry around in the back of my brain. I can’t tear a sheet off a roll of paper towels without questioning whether the spill is sufficiently large to warrant it, can’t hear the inevitable register-side ‘paper or plastic?’ without chastising myself for not carrying around a canvas ‘think globally, act locally’ grocery bag.

So it is with great regret that I must admit to an intense and enduring crush on Procter & Gamble’s SwifferÆ line of products. Thanks to the WetJet, my kitchen and bathroom floors are, for the first time, if not clean enough to eat off of, at least no longer cause for alarmed comment from visiting friends.

Just this week, I similarly discovered the Swiffer Duster: little blue squares of what looks dismayingly like roofing insulation, strapped replaceably onto a long, blue, plastic pitchfork. Still, uninspiring appearance aside, with a thirty-second pass the Duster brought my bookshelves back to nearly new, saving me from the sneeze-inducing cloud that previously billowed with each volume pulled.

I’ve yet to fully accept the convenient, use-and-toss intentions of either of these products – I still occasionally cut deals with my conscience that require repeated use of the same cleaning pad if it’s still possible to see some semblance of the initial color. But, day by trash-full day, I’m getting the hang of this whole expendable consumerism thing. Pretty soon, I’ll be printing long internal documents on non-recycled paper with impunity, asking restaurants for more rather than less little napkins stuffed in the take-out bag.

Sure, I have years of ‘reuse, reduce, recycle’ to make up for, but I figure it still shouldn’t be more than a decade until I can visit barren clear-cut acres they’ll have named in my honor. And I’ll be sure to bring several boxes of WetJet refills along. Because I bet, during those long centuries of redwood old growth, nobody ever bothered to mop.

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May 22, 2005

Recess Eats

My father was always the lunch-packer in my family. Meticulous in his approach, he’d carefully construct the contents of each elementary school bound paper sack, from Ziploc-ed sandwich to frozen box juice.

The juice, in his system, served a sort of critical double-duty – both as a drink, and as an ice-pack to keep the sandwich fresh through a morning of backpack confines.

Problem was, as the box slowly thawed, the outside would accumulate moisture. By the time even the first recess rolled around, each day’s lunch bag had entirely soaked through, slowly turning into a moist brown pulp that stuck to the sides of my book bag, and wet textbook corners into slow fan-shaped expansion.

Having peeled off bag scraps, having piled the contents table-top in an undistinguished heap, the problems persisted. Because, even as the bag had been soaking, the contents of each sandwich, otherwise safe in plastic confines, had been similarly seeping through the bread.

Which, at the time, always took me by surprise. Certainly, given a few hours, ketchup should inevitably ooze through all but the hardiest whole wheats. But turkey? Who would guess that a slice of white meat’s meager moisture would be sufficient to soak your standard sandwich slice?

Some sense of elementary-school propriety prevented me from telling my father about the problems at the time, though, in retrospect, I’m sure he would have been more than happy to help me solve them. Still, laboring on against the slow disintegration of each home-packed lunch, I always looked forward to the days when I could buy lunch at school instead.

Buy, I suppose, is a relative term, as we traded in not money but tickets for our chicken nuggets and chocolate milk. But, for a seven-year old, those tickets were better than gold – tradable for tinfoil trays of such timeless yet nowhere-else-found classics as ‘Mexican Pizza’.

Even better were the prototypical Lunch Ladies serving up each meal, plump women at the far end of middle age, in hairnets and orthotics, hovering above us, spoon in hand, with menace and protective love in equal counts.

As I aged, as tinfoil and tater tots slowly gave way to Yale Dining Halls china and mashed ‘potato’ served with ice-cream scoops, even as I squared off against such incomprehensible foodstuffs as chunky, brown ‘Soylada’, school food always held a special place in my heart. Bland, monotonous, and devoid of nutritional value as it may have been, at least it was never a threat to the interior of my book bag, and simple to keep in its atomic, separated, individual, non-seeped-through parts.

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April 28, 2005

the law

When I was a little kid, say seven or eight years old, my internal alarm clock was completely broken. At four in the morning, while even most roosters snoozed, I’d pop out of bed, wide awake and ready to hit the day.

Obviously, my parents were less than thrilled with this. So, while our household normally had rather tightly controlled television rules (no watching on school days, etc.), that early in the morning, all bets were off. I was, in fact, even actively encourage to plop myself down on the couch, to watch (quietly!) whatever might be playing.

Unfortunately, ‘whatever might be playing’ at four in the morning is, well, not much. Mostly shows like that perennial favorite, “Modern Farmer”. Still, things only seriously ran into a hitch when, one morning, at 7:00 (the earliest acceptable parent wake-up time), I dashed into my parents room to wake the slugabeds with a quick bit of mattress bouncing.

Groggily, my father asked what I had been watching that morning. One of my favorites, I replied: The Law.

The law, he asked?

Yes, I replied. You know, Jesus is the Law.

It was at about that point, I seem to recall, that my parents started stocking up on video tapes and taught me to use the VCR.

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March 1, 2005

twenty-five

On July 16th, 1979, at 2:27pm in the Stanford Hospital, I popped my head into this world. And, from that moment, I couldn’t get enough of it.

In California, right after a baby is born, the nurse is required to put sliver nitrate drops into its eyes, to guard against infection. But those drops temporarily blur the baby’s vision, and the nurse, telling my mother that she didn’t remember ever seeing such an observant newborn, couldn’t remember a baby who was trying so hard and so instantly to take it all in, waited until the last legal minute to put those drops in my eyes.

That’s pretty much been the story of my first twenty-five years: cramming in as much as possible, trying to fit it all in. Take, for example, just this last year:

I got some excellent work done, and realized how very much more I have to do.

My heart broke, then mended into something more full and whole.

I made a mess of things by being constantly full of shit, and have been working on cleaning up the mess day by radically honest day.

I had some wonderful times and some horrible times.

I had some trying times and some rewarding times.

And as much as there were some things I’d do differently on a second pass, I wouldn’t possibly want to give up any of it.

Looking back, I can’t see how it all fit into just one year, or, really, how it all fit in to just twenty-five of them. Which, frankly, is sort of a relief, because I have at least that much to cram into the next twenty-five.

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July 15, 2004

back to the books

The very best part of the house in which I grew up was that it sat about a block and a half from the Palo Alto Children’s Library. The library and my house were separated by a single quiet street, and I remember vividly finally being old enough to cross that street alone – it meant I could head to the library whenever I wanted, or, more precisely, whenever I had finished a book. At the time, that meant trips nearly daily.

Walking in the library door, I was treated like a regular at the Four Seasons. Everyone greeted me by name. Recently purchased books I might like were set aside, ready for checking out. By my recommendation, books hidden deep in the shelves were moved to featured positions on the carrols. By the time I moved on to the adult library, I had gone through a stack of library cards, wearing the stripes off each.

I read voraciously through high school as well, pretending to be asleep when my parents would check on me so I could switch the bedside lamp back on and turn page after page until I finally finished a book in the small hours of the morning.

When I hit college, however, my pace slowed dramatically. Certainly, I accumulated a slew of class texts – but as a double major in neuroscience and computer science, there wasn’t much on my shelves that could be mistaken for pleasure reading. What little time and energy I might have had for further reading was eaten up by the companies I was starting, the musical groups with which I was playing, or my burgeoning alcoholism. Between it all, reading, and fiction reading in particular, fell by the wayside.

Post-college, I came back to reading fiction in fits and starts. I’d pick up a book and consume it whole. At its end, though, without another to leap immediately onto, whatever small momentum I had built petered. I’d go several weeks before picking up another novel or short story collection, enjoy it enough to curse myself for falling of the fiction wagon, then again wait several weeks more to start another.

Recently, however, the momentum I needed, the long stretch of one book after another it took to get me back into my old ways, came not from fiction, but rather from business books. Setting out to write one of my own, I piled for re-reading the ten or twelve such books I had drawn on most in my busienss past. Driven by the excitement about my own project, I blew through each with startling speed, taking notes along the way. Suddenly, wherever I was – in the kitchen cooking, riding the subway, waiting for a film screening to start – I had a book in hand, filling errant moments with as many paragraphs as I could sneak in.

Those books finished, and with nothing on my shelves calling out my name, I started invading the collections of my roommates. Both writers, they had each amassed row after row of fiction I’d never read. I’d pick up a book one evening, and by the next find I was 200 pages deep. At the end of each, I’d replace the suddenly lifeless block of paper on their shelves, and pluck out the next.

I’m on my fourth book of the past week. And I can’t help but think those Children’s Library librarians would be rather pleased.

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April 27, 2004