I went to a relative’s bar mitzvah today and found myself mildly fascinated by the totality of the event. While I did not stay for the reception/dinner, I was at the service, held at a Jewish Community Center in New Jersey.
What was found?

• Being around adults and a small kid all the time, thirteen-year old boys and girls look, to me, a bit like weird eight-year olds. They all have that funny, estranged look of angst and cynicism on their faces but their bodies themselves are essentially twigs with sticks coming out where their extremities shoud be.
• For some reason, the boys all sat in the same row and the girls all sat in another row. There seemed to be little if any contact between the two rows. When I was thirteen, we did this, too. Little did I know that at this age, I probably would have had more luck with the ladies than three short years later when I actually wanted “luck.”
• The bar mitzvah boy did a stellar job of reading from the Torah. However, back in the day, I had to read about three or four times that amount of text. I don’t know if this is a measure of current attention spans, the time of day (5:30 p.m.), or a new custom – but he got off easy.
• I was impressed that the Hebrew school he had attended required all students there to work with a community organization as part of their learning process. He chose to work with a group that helps physically challenged kids play sports and will continue to work with them throughout this year.
• The bar mitzvah itself was a kind of non-event. And yet, in America, it does truly mark one’s mild transition to adulthood and adult responsibility. I found it odd that a one-hour service could have the stature of major transformation. And then I remembered that marriage, childbirth, and going to a funeral can all take place within a matter of one solitary hour.

On Saturday, our block had its first-ever block party. For many reason, including just plain old forgetfulness, it was scheduled on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the year for Jews.
We stepped out in the morning to people preparing for the day of games, rides, food, and fun. Most of the block consists of old-time Park Slopers — real Park Slopers, perhaps, people who have lived here for a few generations with their families on the same few blocks of houses, lined with trees and cars. People on this block are predominantly white, middle class, Irish Catholic, and they are amazingly insular. For the majority of my eight years on this block, only a few of neighbors have said more than a word to me, though I’ve tried. Other blocks, I might note, are very different and more diverse.
Anyway, what was interesting about the block party on Saturday/Yom Kippur was our coming home. It was around 6:00 pm, and all of the families on the street (and there were many) were sitting among folding tables, eating BBQ and drinking and carousing. At first, it felt like we lived in another part of the world, perhaps Pittsburgh, but then as we moved down the street toward the apartment, feeling increasingly alone and unwelcome, it felt like New York, perhaps not at its finest. The few Jews on the block were not there and the two newly transplanted Southeast Asian families were nowhere to be seen.
It was not exclusion, nor indifference that I felt. Nor did I feel persecuted, disenfranchised, or scorned.
Rather, I felt like this was why I had moved to New York, to be part of the great mass of anonymity, to be a part of everything and yet have no one know you enough to acknowledge, credit or blame you for anything (unless you’re famous). I couldn’t blame anyone, including myself, for those feelings. I’m assuming my neighbors see me as an interloper, a temporary resident, a non-Catholic, a minimal participant in the life of the neighborhood, a recipient of the general safety and benefits of the area. And they are right.

I listened eagerly to author Dean Hamer today on the radio, who argued that religiosity and faithfulness are directly inherited in our DNA. Mr. Hamer’s new book, The God Gene : How Faith is Hardwired into our Genes, sounds absolutely fascinating, even though Publisher’s Weekly and others have panned him, in part because he is the scientist behind the “gay gene.”
Mr. Hamer is going out on an evolutionary limb with this hypothesis that, buried deep within our system, is a genetic code that, to varying degrees, provides transmissable expressions, feelings, and assumptions about spirituality, the afterlife, and our place in the world. Mr. Hamer, perhaps most provocatively, makes the case that this can be scientifically proven. I want to believe him that my own faith in some kind of godhead inheres within my physical being and is not a pure result of cultural modifcation and socialization. I’d like to believe, too, that all animals have some correlary to this gene, that their connectedness to us and us to them is physically enabled. And I’d like to believe that my own, particularly Jewish, faith is connected to 4000+ years of historical inheritance.
Of course, I haven’t read this yet. But for the longest time, I’ve felt that the interconnectedness of the world could be both physically and spiritually based, that circumstance and superstition are a subset of reality, and that ecstatic love and passionate prayer are intimated in our primordial and unconscious lives. Pushing this further, I wonder if ultimately these are the same things, the physical and the intangible, for which we’ve created artificial divides, much thanks to the Ancients.
This is from the inside flap of the book: “Popular science at its best, The God Gene is an in-depth, fully accessible inquiry into the cutting-edge research that is changing the way we think about ourselves, our world, and our culture. Written with balance and integrity, without seeking to confirm or deny the existence of God, The God Gene brilliantly illuminates the mechanism by which belief itself is biologically fostered.

For those of us, like me, who continue to thinking that surfing is what one does when clicking from random webpage to random webpage, this video of a
surfer on a 75 foot swell may change such thoughts. (And yes, apparently, the vid is real. Thanks to J. Kottke.)

Last night marked the first night of the Jewish New Year, a typically happy occasion. But it was sadly marked by the death of our small black cat, CD.
I miss her tremendously and only hope that she passed through the eternal wall in peace. She was a tough cat, a street-fighting cat, and she brought her instincts into her house and our hearts.
We were always slightly scared of her but her personality and occasional sweetness was rich and strong. The world feels emptier without her and I have many feelings of guilt for not reading the very odd behavior she exhibited yesterday all day.
We still don’t know how she could have passed away so suddenly but I’m sad that she’s not here, now.

Before I begin to sound like the Manitoba Tourist Board, I thought I would do my best to show the possibly more harsh reality (albeit a commonly accepted one) of a city like Winnipeg. The sucky factors are:

• It’s seriously cold in the winter. The average temperature in January is 7 degrees Fahrenheit.
• The closest largish Canadian city is Regina, in the province of Saskatchewan. The closest city in the U.S. is Minneapolis, Minnesota about an eight hour drive. One of the closest towns in the U.S., however, is Fargo, North Dakota.
• Getting to Winnipeg from NYC is about an eight hour trip altogether, with a layover in either Toronto, Chicago, or Minneapolis. Currently, there are no nonstop flights. (And the way airline industry is going, there may never be.)

As noted earlier, the temperature in Winnipeg can go down to -40 Celsius in the winter. It’s apparently unusual for it to get that cold but there is a reason that most non-Manitobans call the city “Winterpeg.”
The cold, unlike on the East Coast, is dry and less snowy — according to the folks I spoke with, the difference between -20 and -10 and 10 degrees is noticable but once it’s cold, it’s just cold.
Winnipeggers to a tee romanticize the cold weather. Guy Maddin, one of my favorite of directors, loves to play off the insanely cold the winter nights there. (J. Hoberman wrote a piece about Maddin and his latest in this week’s Voice.) Other artists and artisans there relish the cold because it gives them the privilege (well, necessity) of staying inside and producing.
One might think that all of this cold-love would make for a closeted culture. What I found in Winnipeg was that the winter’s grip allows groups of musicians, writers, readers, and other self-selected oddfellows to instead meet up, play, punctuate, or otherwise pontificate. There appears to be a livingroom-based, grassroots-like subculture to the place which then filters up to the rest of the city during the warmer months.
I realize that I’m going on too long about this fine city. I’ll stop after tomorrow.

One thing that fascinated me about living in Winnipeg last week was the sense that time itself had expanded, slightly. It wasn’t that we were on vacation or that there was no sense of urgency – work and urgency are continuous sources of stress on the nature of time in New York City. It was a palpable sense that time was alive in the place.
What I found in Winnipeg was that people live in time very differently. One friend works 2 days per week and spends the other three taking care of her two older kids and reads and works in the community. Another works 6 hour days while another took six months off to catch up on baseball and books. It’s not that these folks are unambitious, disinterested or slothful. In fact, it could be argued that their drive is governed by a different set of criteria which I don’t know or understand because I don’t own that set myself.
While in NYC, one is constantly working to catch up to where one was yesterday, it felt that, in Winnipeg, one worked to earn money to live well, which most people there do. The restaurants are by and large excellent, beautiful homes can be had for 1/3 the price of other cities, and events are very often free. It could be argued that this pleasuring of time is the Canadian Government’s fault. By ensuring that all of its citizens have health insurance, people are not governed by survival alone as many people in the U.S. are; their family will be well-cared for by a doctor no matter what — job or no job, career or temporary, sick or healthy.
I’ve always felt that this was the hidden benefit of government-provided health insurance and I was proven correct last week. That benefit is freedom.

Was in Winnipeg, MB, the past week. [Sorry]
Pretty much the geographical center of Canada and perhaps one of the nicest North American cities I’ve had the pleasure of visiting.
Some quick notes on the stay:

• Lake Winnipeg, to the north of the city, is (apparently) the size of the U.K.
• The city is culturally sophisticated, diverse, kind, clean, and well-funded by the government and the Government
• Our car was stolen on Wednesday night, probably before 9:30 p.m. It was found, more or less intact, this afternoon.
• Pleasure seems to be as critical a component of Winnipeg life as it work is in New York.
• Designing products, signs, and websites for two languages throughout the country is difficult, fascinating, and politically problematic.
• The Mennonite and Jewish communities there are uniquely small and strong throughout the metropolis.
• Indians, or Aboriginals as the community is called there, are under-enfranchised; however, from my superficial observations, it appears that that community is given much more respect, attention, and historical placement in education and culture than African-Americans in this or any other state.
• It’s not unusual for the temp to reach -40 degrees Celsius in the winter. That’s about, well, -40 Fahrenheit.

I’m planning on devoting the rest of the week to the city, its environs, and its culture.

I was into Sonic Youth so long ago that it almost seems decadent or (decade-ent) to be speaking about them at all; I essentially grew up on the band. I probably saw them in concert three times and own everything, gut and but. But here they are again, the Grateful Dead of our time, releasing Sonic Nurse. My notes on the album:

• screeching is good both for the ears and to refresh the soul
• stealing from Godspeed You Black Emporer is good even if they stole from SY
• the song “I Love You Golden Blue” must be about the sun in the daylit sky
• SY is deliberately political in an arcane way, which I adore – the last song on the album, “Peace Attack,” speaks the line “nature sucks” which is funny and sad and the bass line is pure 1994, the end of our last (R) government
• Kim Gordon can still screech like the best of ’em