Gede in her prime

Believe it or not, I used to publish personal posts here about my family, pets, hobbies, etc.  But I found it less and less possible to do that because so many people want to invade the privacy of my loved ones in inappropriate ways.  But tonight I’ll make an exception for someone special.

My 11 year-old Labrador Retriever, Gede, is in failing health.  She’s a yellow Lab, with the sweetest, kindest disposition.  Never met anyone she didn’t like, especially if they had a treat for her.  She was a little smaller than the average Lab, so our breeder gave her to us because we wanted a dog whose disposition and size wouldn’t overwhelm our kids (when we had them).  We got her when she was eight weeks old and we could hold her as a tiny ball of fur in one hand.  By the time she was mature, she’d been so well trained (which wasn’t just due to a good trainer, but rather Gede’s incredible quickness and smartness in picking up her lessons) that we could walk her everywhere without a leash.

My wife’s uncle, who’s a great joker at heart, came to visit and offered her one of his highest compliments:

That dog doesn’t know she’s a dog, she thinks she’s a person.

I remember when we brought our first son home, at the dog trainer’s suggestion, I put the baby’s cradle down on the floor and then let Gede enter the room.  She proceeded to come over to sniff and lick our son, who probably didn’t relish the idea.  Little did Gede know, but she’d have to share us with the newborn.  But she was such a kindly, gentle dog that she never held anything against anyone.  You could step on her foot, the babies would try to ride her as if she was a pony.  She suffered through it all with great dignity.

She has the most soulful brown eyes and if a dog can think deep thoughts she did.  Maybe they weren’t deep in the human sense but she had so much soul.  A Great Dog Soul.

But now her abdomen is filling with fluid and she’s in great discomfort.  She may have an adrenal tumor or end-stage kidney failure.  We don’t know.  But our vet tells us that so much fluid in a dog’s abdomen is a sign of something seriously (meaning, terminally) wrong.  So we plan to put her to sleep tomorrow morning.

My wife keeps saying: “She’s my baby,” because we got Gede before we had our first child.  In fact, her name means “first-born” in Balinese.  We’d spent our honeymoon on Bali and met a young boy visiting a temple who’d been so irrepressibly happy and joyful to meet us, sticking out his hand in a very western gesture of friendship, that we named our dog after him (probably not a great honor in Balinese culture, but we meant it so).

So tomorrow she will be gone.  But we will not forget.

As I was making these sad plans today, I heard the following radio show, Two Enemies, One Heart, on KUOW here in Seattle and it changed my disposition entirely.  It is the story of two men, one Iraqi and one Iranian, who met on the battlefield during the Iran-Iraq war.  The Iranian saved the Iraqi’s life and did so almost at the cost of his own.  Both of them ended up at different times as prisoners of war.  One imprisoned for 17 years and the other for over two years.  Both suffered immense deprivation, one lost a fiancé in a bombing and the other came home and couldn’t find his wife or child whom he’d left behind to go to war.

Both of them, unbeknownst to the other, ended up migrating after their respective lives filled with horrors, to Vancouver, BC.  The Iranian, in despair after escaping from Iran and not knowing how to deal with his new-found freedom in the west, attempts suicide.  By some absolute miracle, they both end up in the waiting room of a clinic which provides therapy for torture survivors.  Through tentative chit-chat and then rushing questions and wild gesticulations, they come to understand that they are long-lost brothers in arms.  That is how the Iranian saved the Iraqi’s life during the war, and the Iraqi saved the Iranian’s life after the war.

This is a truly brilliant piece of radio journalism.  Not only do I strongly recommend it–I’d say the only reason not to listen is if you’re the happiest, best adjusted human being in the entire world.  If you’re not, then you need cheering up and this will make you realize that the human species is truly capable of greatness, especially in the midst of the absolute horrors that we can inflict on each other.

And if another reader here says a word about how primitive Middle Eastern culture is I might just ring their necks (but no, that would violate the spirit of this story)–or force them to listen to this.  These two men have hearts big enough to encompass an entire world.

Kate & Anna McGarrigle

KATE AND ANNA McGARRIGLE
Vocal duo, songwriters, guitarists, pianists, accordionists, banjoists. Anna, born Montreal, Quebec, Canada, December 4, 1944. Kate, born Montreal, Quebec, Canada, February 6, 1946.

Kate and Anna McGarrigle have not achieved the level of popularity and record sales of contemporary performers such as Linda Ronstadt, Emmylou Harris, the Roches, Leonard Cohen, or Maria Muldaur, but they comprise one of the most musically and lyrically gifted sister folk duos originating in the early 1970s second- generation folk-pop movement. They went their own musical way, never slavishly imitating anyone for the sake of tagging onto a popular style. Because of their iconoclasm they are all the more adored by their devoted musical followers.

Kate and Anna were born in 1940s Montreal. An older sister, Jane, also sang professionally with them for a short period. They grew up in St. Saveur-des-Mont, in the Laurentian Mountains of Quebec, about forty-five miles north of Montreal. Their interest in music came from their father, Frank, and his side of the family. Frank’s father became the first movie theater exhibitor in New Brunswick around 1906, according to an article by Mike Regenstreif, Kate & Anna McGarrigle: On Their Own Terms (in the February-March 1997 issue of Sing Out!). Between screenings, the young Frank and his sister, Anna, would sing Stephen Foster tunes and turn-of-the-century parlor songs.

“Music was always there at home,” Kate told Regenstreif. “My father would sit at the piano at night and play those songs. At parties, somebody would get up and sing, and my father would accompany them and sing the harmony. There were lots of friends and uncles and each would get up and give their big song.”

Kate continued, in an interview with Richard Silverstein: “We were children of the middle class. My dad played funny ditties and drinking songs from the 1930s. We didn’t really have an Irish folk tradition even though we were half Irish. . .There was no Irish folk tradition because they were subsumed under the prevailing English Canadian culture. The French, on the other hand, were quite the opposite. As an oppressed people, it was quite important for them to remember their language, history, and music. No conqueror would take that away from them.”

The McGarrigle sisters’ mom, Gaby, was also musical. She once played violin in the Bell Telephone Orchestra. Gaby loved the old music hall songs that were popular in the era after she was born (1904). The daughters told Regenstreif the story of their mother accompanying her father to the burlesque shows at Montreal’s legendary Gayety Theatre during World War I: “Gaby’s dad was French Canadian and didn’t understand English that well and she used to go to translate for him. ” One morning during that period, she came to school quite late. “Gabrielle, why are you late?” demanded a nun. “I had to go to the Gayety with my father,” she replied, to the consternation of her classmates.

The young McGarrigle sisters took piano lessons from the nuns of St. Saveur. At the age of ten, Kate remembers her dad showing her guitar chords. There were also a ukulele, a banuke (a banjo with a ukulele neck), and a zither around the house. In the 1950s Kate and Anna listened to popular music of the era: Carl Perkins and the Everly Brothers. “Janie had gone away to boarding school in Ontario when she was fourteen, and she really got into country blues and folksongs as well as McGarrigle originals. music. She introduced us to a lot of songs that otherwise we might not have heard,” Anna told Regenstreit. On Saturday nights “on a good night, the clear signal [of WWVA] from Wheeling, West Virginia, crossed hundreds of miles and international borders” to be heard by two sisters hungry for this music from another world. In the 1960s the McGarrigles were Montreal high school students. They once sneaked out of the house to see a Pete Seeger concert with an older friend of whom their parents disapproved. They discovered folk music and from that moment Kate wanted her own banjo. Then they saw the Weavers and quickly formed a folk- singing trio with a high school friend. They sang songs like Swing Low, Sweet Chariot and appeared at the Finjan, an early-’60s Montreal coffeehouse owned by Simon Asch.

In 1962, they met Peter Weldon and Jack Nissenson, members of a Montreal traditional folk group called Pharisees. Weldon and Nissenson knew folk legends like EwanMacColl and Peggy Seeger. They even owned Montreal’s first Joseph Spence albums. The McGarrigles joined Nissenson and Weldon as the Mountain City Four. Kate told Silverstein: “We entered into the folk scene through the records of Joan Baez and Bob Dylan. But when we met Nissenson and Weldon, they introduced us to music at the sources and said, Forget about Joan Baez! Go to the sources at all times. Don’t copy styles, just learn the original music.’ I think that’s why we have an original sound. We didn’t try to imitate anyone, with the possible exception of Dylan, who everyone tried to imitate at one time or another.” While performing with the Mountain City Four, Kate and Anna began singing traditional standards like Willie Moore; Carter Family songs like Lonesome Valley; French Canadian songs like V’La L’Bon Vent; contemporary folksongs like “Land of the Muskeg”; and Arthur Crudup’s Mean Old ‘Frisco” In the Montreal folk scene, the McGarrigles met Galt McDermott, who later composed the music for Hair; Broadway’s first rock musical. McDermott songs No Biscuit Blues and Cover Up My Head made it onto the McGarrigles’ second and third Warner Brothers albums, Dancer with Bruised Knees and Pronto Monto.

Eventually, Chaim Tannenbaum, Dane Lanken (who later married Anna), and others joined the Mountain City Four. Meanwhile, Kate studied engineering at McGill and Anna took painting courses at L’Ecole Beaux Arts. It was during this period they met the French lyricist Philippe Tatartcheff, who studied at McGill and eventually completed his Ph.D. at the Sorbonne in Paris.

Kate decided to pursue a musical career in New York after college. She and Roma Baran formed a duo with Kate on piano and Roma on guitar, performing old blues and folksongs as well as McGarrigle originals. They played the Gaslight and Gerde’s Folk City in New York. They received a record offer but turned it down. In this period, both Kate and Anna began to write their own songs. Anna’s first song was Heart Like a Wheel. Incredibly, (when one thinks of the song’s subsequent popularity after it was recorded by Linda Ronstadt), Anna had no performing ambitions. The way Anna tells it, her lack of interest in performing helped her hone her writing skills. Kate’s musical maturity came slower, until, inspired by the burgeoning folk songwriting scene, she wrote The Work Song and one of their most haunting ballads Talk to Me of Mendocino.

Kate and Roma’s musical breakthrough came at the 1970 Philadelphia Folk Festival, where their Saturday night performance drew a rave New York Times review. They opened for Jerry Jeff Walker at the Gaslight. When Jerry Jeff heard their closing tune, Heart Like a the Wheel, he asked for a demo tape to send to Linda Ronstadt, who was putting together songs for a solo album. In 1971, Roma and Kate split up. Roma returned to school and Kate married Loudon Wainwright III, who covered We’ve Come a Long Way. Maria Muldaur covered The Work Song. The group McKendree Spring recorded Heart Like a Wheel in 1972. Kate and Anna’s big break came in 1974, when Ronstadt put Heart Like a Wheel on her album by the same name. Maria Muldaur invited Kate to sing harmony on a gospel song for one of her records. Muldaur also chose to sing Anna’s Cool River, for which producer Joe Boyd asked Kate to play piano. As Regenstreif recounts, when Kate told him she didn’t know the piano track, he said, “What do you mean you don’t know it? You wrote it!” She explained that Anna, her sister, wrote the song. Soon Anna said good-bye to her coworkers in Montreal and boarded a plane to L.A. When they entered the studio to make a demo tape for Warner Brothers, they didn’t know each other’s tunes very well because they hadn’t performed together in years. “It was that afternoon [in 1974] that we became Kate and Anna McGarrigle,” Kate told Regenstreif.

In May 1974, Warners offered them their first record contract. During 1975, they recorded their first album; Kate and Anna McGarrigle. The McGarrigles and their two producers, Greg Prestopino and Joe Boyd, had conflicting musical visions during the recording process. “Warner, at first, thought we could become the next Laura Nyro,” Kate told Silverstein. “They saw us as soulful piano player chicks. When we first got into studio, there were fights between Greg, who wanted to have a pop sound with no folk instrumentation, [and] Joe (who claimed to have created the English folk-rock sound), who wanted an eclectic folk-pop sound. When they recorded Anna’s ‘Complainte Pour Ste. Catherine,’ for example, we heard it Cajun,” Kate recalls. “Greg heard it pop and Joe heard it reggae.”

Remarkably, they completed the album, which has gone down in history as a classic. It made an auspicious debut in February 1976. Stereo Review named it Record of the Year, and Melody Maker called it Top Rock Album.

The McGarrigles had a surprise in store for record executives who saw them as the “next Nyro.” It was their “quaint” idea to put childraising before their career. They never toured to support their first album- certain death for a new release-because Kate was pregnant with her second child when it came out. They went so far as to hire a band of studio musicians and book a series of dates at a Boston venue, but when they were dissatisfied with the band, they decided to bag the tour. Similarly, as they completed their second and third albums, Anna’s two pregnancies complicated plans for extensive touring-enough to drive record executives to an early grave.

The debut album contains the gorgeous Talk to Me of Mendocino, a description of a cross-country car trip in which the songwriter takes leave of the mountains of Quebec and other natural markers of her youth, only to come face-to-face with the majestic power of the Mendocino redwoods: Talk to me of Mendocino / Closing my eyes I hear the sea: / Must I wait? Must I follow? / Won’t you say: Come with me? Rarely have poetic image, natural sound, and musical setting wedded so touchingly.

In 1976, Kate’s marriage to Loudon Wainwright ill ended. Returning home to Montreal with her young children, Rufus (who now has a successful recording career) and Martha, she began to collaborate more closely with Anna. They made Dancer with Bruised Knees (1977), which contains the gothic, alternately charming and horrifying Perrine Etait Servante, in whose lyrics you have the diabolical charm of the McGarrigles’ star-crossed lovers mixed with the no- nonsense “make something funny and useful out of a hard life” attitude, which represents traditional French Canadian life.

Pronto Monto (1978) contained the wonderfully quirky NaCl, a song dedicated to the romantic possibilities inherent in physical chemistry: Just a little atom of chlorine, valence minus one / Swimming through the sea, digging the scene, just having fun . . .

They toured sporadically, joining Bonnie Raitt, playing New York’s Bottom Line, and doing foreign gigs in England and Holland. In 1980 they played Carnegie Hall and were featured in a National Film Board of Canada documentary.

Also in the 1980s, they released The French Record (1981) and Love Over and Over (1983) (re-released on CD in 1997 by Rykodisc). The former was originally commissioned at the height of the Québécois separatist movement. Says Kate: “There was a French-Canadian record company which wanted to extend a hand of friendship to us and asked us as English Canadians to produce a record for a French audience. It was a political gesture in a sense. The odd thing is that it never came out in France and we’ve never played in France and weve never played in France!”

When asked why, Kate suggests, “I think their music can be insular. Also, with few exceptions, music doesn’t play that large a role in French culture. You just don’t hear in French music the kind of cross-fertilization that you hear in American music, for example. If you listen to Chuck Berry, the influence of New Orleans blues is unmistakable.”

The French Record contains one of their finest efforts, a rocking Cajun rendition of Complainte pour Ste. Catherine, and their first collaboration with Philippe Tatartcheff.

Much of their recording during the 1980s came about through happenstance. The mid-1980s were a fallow time for the McGarrigles and their relationship with the industry. After a National Public Radio interview, a Private Music executive called and offered them a contract to make Heartbeats Accelerating, which came out in 1990. “Musically, Anna and I like all different styles of music. Heartbeats Accelerating was written completely on synthesizers. But the record company wanted more of a folk sound, so we toned it down for them.”

Kate bemoans the stresses and strains of a large touring band. “For a while that was fun,” she told Regenstreif. “But then it got to be less fun. We couldn’t say to so-and-so on the drums, ‘Why don’t you sit this one out.’”

The McGarrigles are sometimes compared to another folk-pop sister group, the Roches; in a strange coincidence, Loudon Wainwright later married Suzzy Roche. While the Roches are a trio of New Jersey native Irish-Americans whose first musical encouragement came from Paul Simon, the McGarrigles are usually a duo, except when sister Janie sings with them. The lyrics of both are lushly, even tragically, romantic. The Roches have slicker production values, and their sisterly harmonies are breathtakingly beautiful. Many listeners who enjoy the McGarrigles will also find themselves taking to the Roches.
Matapedia was the first new McGarrigle recording in six years. Bob Franke, the great songwriter, wrote an homage to the album: “Anna’s Goin’ Back to Harlan celebrates the role that traditional music took in the lives of those of us who first discovered it in the mid-1960s. The myths it offered were not the ones that our parents, damaged by the traumas of World War and Great Depression, sought to create. Ozzie and Harriet had little to offer us compared to the likes of Lord Thomas and Fair Ellender. The original singers of these songs had a different relationship to history and culture than our parents did.”

The McGarrigles’ songwriting is drenched in musical and lyrical references to traditional songs and heroes, from Shady Grove to Barbara Allen. “Anna and I make references in our own songs to traditional folk songs because these people lived lives of great drama,” Kate told Silverstein. “In modern life, you cannot find the same pure passion and romance. Yes, people love and die today, but where is the grand passion that unites the hearts of Barbara Allen and her lover?”

Kate’s brilliant Jacques et Gilles speaks to us in two ironic contexts. Again, to quote Franke: “She creates a myth-to a wonderful variation on the tune of the old nursery rhyme ‘Jack and Jill’-that turns a loving but not flattering eye on her mill worker forebears. In doing so she crosses a line, becoming a social historian, coming to terms with her history, [and becoming in turn] something of a tradition-bearer herself.”

Kate described how she came to be interested in the New England mill towns that she writes about in Jacques et Gilles: “I came to write it because of my interest in Jack Kerouac and On the Road. Ten years ago, I realized the similarities in Kerouac’s and my own backgrounds. Though he was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, his family came from the same Quebec region as mine. Like him, I learned French in school and spoke English at home. Both of our upbringings were terribly insular. Our contact with the outside world was minimal. Perhaps that’s why he wrote a book about traveling. But you’ll recall that all his traveling, searching for a better life, ended up back in his mother’s home, where he died a terrible death.

“I didn’t come to understand any of this until I took a trip to Lowell. I brought along a video camera and asked a local woman for permission to film the local cemetery, where Kerouac is buried, from her balcony. When we got to talking, I realized how similar her background was to Kerouac’s and my own. She was born in the States, yet she knew almost no English and spoke only French. I found it amazing that you could live in this country for so long, yet still be apart from it. This woman lives through French Canada. Those are the only photographs on her wall.

“It wasn’t until I began doing research on this subject that I discovered that fully half the population of French Canada left for the factory mills of New England! That’s an astounding fact, yet very few people are aware of it. Despite these huge numbers, French Canadians have had nowhere near the impact on the greater American culture that Italian, Irish, and Jewish Americans have. There are no traces of their cuisine, language, customs, etc. I think Kerouac responded to this insularity by writing On the Road. Yet his search for freedom and liberation ended with death.”

In the McGarrigles’ 1998 Rykodisc release, The McGarrigle Hour, they have created yet another under-stated musical masterpiece. They hit upon the brilliant idea of integrating all of the values in life that they hold dear, most notably family and music, in a single musical recording. As Jane McGarrigle states in her liner notes: The McGarrigle Hour reunited many of the same people who worked on the first Kate & Anna record in 1975.” It also brings together the sisters with their respective spouses, an ex-spouse (Loudon Wainwright III); their children, including Rufus and Martha Wainwright; several distinguished musical interpreters (Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris); and current and former musical collaborators (including Joe Boyd, producer of their first two recordings).

The song selection, too, epitomizes the celebrated McGarrigle eclecticism: new versions of previously recorded material (Talk to Me of Mendocino and NaCl), plus the old pop standards like Gentle Annie (Stephen Foster) and What’ll I Do (Irving Berlin). Unlike Matapedia, there is no newly written here; but neither is there anything stale or nostalgic about this record. It gives fresh new perspective on individuals we felt we knew all along.

In a professional music business increasingly dominated by a frenzy for the next sensation or smash hit, Rykodisc deserves enormous credit for its commitment to the McGarrigles’ musical canon.

In addition to releasing their previous Matapedia, it re-released on CD such long-out-of-print titles as Kate & Anna McGarrigle, Dancer with Bruised Knees, The French Record and Love Over and Over.

Yes, I know, a wee bit late.  Better late than…

Adin was a racecar driver and Miriam a mermaid princess for Halloween. Jonah–well, it’s a bit complicated. He cut out a round cardboard head meant to be a pumpkin. He attached a headband and wore it around his head. He taped a plastic bag to the pumpkin’s mouth and when he said “Trick or Treat” he said: “Feed the pumpkin,” and people put the candy right in the pumpkin’s “mouth!”

Rather ingenious.

One little bit was a drag though. We left out a huge bag of Costco candy by our front door for kids to take one each when we were away trick or treating and some errant teenager stole the entire bag. In Seattle, you generally trust people to behave decently but every once in a while you’re disappointed by human nature.

Now, how do you get the kids not to OD on all the candy they collected?!  To take a look at the last six months worth of photos visit my new Flickr “set.”  I’m just getting the hang of Flickr. I’d been using another photo gallery platform for many years and wanted to try out a service that might get more site traffic.

Only in Florida: glory to the garish (Sun Sentinel)

I’m a sucker for old pop song lyrics.  That old Simon & Garfunkle lyric is rattling around in my brain as my family returned from a week-long “vacation” (for the kids, not the grown-ups) in Sarasota, where their grandma lives.  They whiled away the hours in the hotel pool proudly displaying their swimming skills to mom and dad over, and over, and over, etc.

Sarasota (and all of Florida as far as I’m concerned) is a strange place.  Quite charming in some respects especially for its old antique historic charm as the winter home of the Ringling Bros. circus and the Ringling family.  There are musty old gems like the Children’s Garden (where I discovered that the founder’s daughter is daughter in law of Seattle Times columnist, Danny Westneat).  There are gorgeous beauties like the Marie Selby orchid garden.  But the new Sarasota can be garish and lurid.  Witness this horrid piece of Soviet-sized public sculpture that graces the most well-traveled intersection in town.  The sculpture is a rip off of a famous historic image of a sailor kissing a girl in Manhattan on V-E Day.

Google search for Coteret blog

Food in Sarasota can range from the perfunctory or just plain awful to the sublime.  We had a lovely meal at Derek’s Culinary Casual in the historic Rosemary District.  The restaurant combines two storefronts with 20 foot high ceilings and elegant decor.  We loved the fact that it was away from the hip, happnin’ Main Street restaurant/bar scene.  This being a town in which the average age hovered around 70 (pharmacies graced every street corner), portions were double what we’re used to in Seattle.

We loved the creamed spaetzle and I had a lucious desert humorously called Smores: chocolate pudding cunningly described as “chocolate pate” on the menu, topped with homemade marshmallow, with a honey graham crust below.

But home is really where I wanna be, as the song goes.

While I was away my Israeli blogging friend, Didi Remez, reported that one of his visitors used the following Google search terms to reach his blog, “Kill Richard Silverstein.”

Maybe it’s time to draw up a last will and testament.  I document weirdness like this because I haven’t been able to get either the Seattle Police Department or FBI to take the threats seriously.  If God forbid something did happen, I want this to be on the public record.

Abir Aramin (1996-2007)

In January 2007, steps from her East Jerusalem school, the life of 10 year old Abir Aramin was snuffed out by an Israeli border police grenade or bullet fired at her at close range as she was running away from the shooter. The projectile tore off part of her head as it killed her. This was not a random incident as the police had a history of driving their vehicles through the village provoking the schoolchildren with harsh insults to throw rocks at them. Upon being assaulted, the police, in a game of cat and mouse, escalated their response up to and including firing grenades and rubber bullets at unarmed children. Despite the fact that the Israeli NGO Yesh Din documented 14 eyewitnesses to this murder and an independent autopsy verified the conditions of her death, the attorney general closed the case for “lack of evidence.” The Israeli Supreme Court, supposed bastion of human rights according to Zionist liberals, turned down a request only last month to reopen the case. No one has been disciplined or punished for this heinous act.

Abir's garden at her Anata village school

Abir just happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong place which, come to think of it may describe most Palestinian children suffering under the Occupation. According to B’Tselem, over 1,000 Palestinian children have been killed since 2000 and only one perpetrator has been brought to justice.

The Rebuilding Alliance devised a project to memorialize Abir, a garden at her school where she was killed.  Here is how her grieving father described the project:

“I lost my heart, my child,” said Bassam Aramin, “We are here to tell Abir’s story, build the Abir’s Garden Project to give her classmates a safe place to play and to heal, and prove to our societies and the world that it is possible to break the cycle of violence through justice.”

You have an opportunity to strike a blow for Abir and against the Occupation by making a gift to this project which will be matched by a 30% match from Global Giving.  But you must make your gift before December 1st to get the match.  In this holiday season of thankgiving, let us do what we can to promote healing and improve the quality of life for the children of Palestine.

If you’re giving gifts for during the holiday season, I urge you to order them by visiting the Amazon website through the Tikun Olam store displayed in the sidebar below.  For any Amazon item you buy, I’ll receive a modest referral fee (5-1o%) which supports the important work on this blog.  Don’t just think books, CDs, mp3s, and DVDs, which are the standard items one thinks of when one thinks of Amazon.  In addition, it offers electronics and all manner of consumer products.

I gladly accept outright gifts as well through Paypal to support this blog (see Paypal button in sidebar).  If you want to put your philanthropic money where your mouth is then step up with a gift on behalf of the hard-hitting, muckraking work of Tikun Olam.

A little unintended irony as far as Madrona K-8 is concerned (Justin Baeder)

The Madison Park Times reports that a Madrona School 7th grader created a hand-made shank and assaulted an 8th grader in the cafeteria.  According to a police report (article available here and here):

The victim reported that the suspect walked up to him which what was reported to be a shank.  He walked behind him and grabbed him by the head.  The suspect pulled the victim’s head back and pressed the scissor against the back of his neck, then pulled the scissor down and pressed the pointed end of the scissor against his spine.

Apparently, the suspect and an accomplice were expelled from the school.

This is my neighborhood school and it has a long history of internal discipline and academic problems and hostile relations with the surrounding community.  Madrona K-8 has fallen below the No Child Left Behind academic standards several years running and its parents are now allowed to transfer their children to other schools with more successful records.  Regarding school violence, I personally know of a fight between a large group of unsupervised students at a neighboring park frequented by them which endangered my then very young children.

The principal, Kaaren Andrews, touted by the district a one of its wunderkind academic leaders, reacted by indirectly accusing two women who were caring for our children of insulting the students and disparaging the principal’s commitment to them (which never happened).  The clear implication raised by Andrews and a district employee who spoke at a public community meeting was that the nannies harbored racist attitudes toward the children (which was preposterous since the rowdy group was racially–mixed and included Anglo children).

When I called Andrews to report that her students had been fighting and unsupervised she reacted defensively and dismissively.  A call to Andrews’ supervisor at district headquarters, Ruth Metzger, went unanswered until I sent an e-mail to the district superintendent.

Regarding the most recent violent incident, the reporter notes unsurprisingly that a call to Kaaren Andrews was unanswered.  You’d think that after an incident like this that any sensitive educator would wish to reassure the community about the safety of her school and the measures taken to ensure the safety of her charges.  You’d think she’d have some training in crisis management and the concept of getting out ahead of a story; of telling the public the unvarnished truth about what happened and what she’s doing to ensure it won’t happen again; of reassuring the public that her top concern is the safety of her students more than even her own reputation and the school’s.  Not surprisingly, we heard none of that from Andrews.  She relied on a District bureaucrat to deal with the press.  And what a ‘deal’ it was.  Here are some of the choice passages from the article quoting a District manager:

“I have not seen any handmade shanks in one of our schools, so this was quite unusual for us, said Pegi McEvoy, manger of safety and security for the District.  “It certainly was an extreme case we hadn’t seen before.”

As for the tension between [7th and 8th] grades, McEvoy said every school experiences the challenges of “kids sorting through the pecking order.”

Indeed they do, and every school population sorts through these developmental issues by pulling shanks on each other, right?  Hey, I might expect this in state prison, but I don’t expect it in a Seattle middle school.

McEvoy continued with her apologetics for teenage school violence:

“This was more dramatic, absolutely…but we see it every place.  It’s something we’re attuned to…and we know every school year we have to work through this.  It’s part of the social structure of schools.

Consistency is not one of McEvoy’s strong suits.  The shank incident was “unusual” and “certainly an extreme case,” but something “we know every year we have to work through.”  Which one is it?

The District’s masterful performance continues:

“What we’re hearing from SPD (Seattle Police Department) and kids report to us, that there is an increase of gang activity in the community, but it’s not transferring into school behavior.”

Which is precisely contradicted by the incident she’s reporting.  Of course, the article doesn’t make clear whether the suspect was a gang member.  But the fact that his behavior mirrored gang-type actions is completely contradicted by McEvoy’s obfuscation.

And who’s really at fault if not gangs?  Certainly not the School, oh no.  Hold onto your hat: its’ the media.

According to McEvoy, outside media and environmental influences play a significant factor in an incident like this.

“Students learn through the TV and things that happen in the community and about how to respond to conflict…and unfortunately there have been media out there talking about making shanks, so we have kids who have copycatted that.

“We’re alway looking at media trends and alerting staff to say, ‘You may see this in the school,’” she added.

Well, now I feel so much better.  But this reassures me no end:

Another aspect to prevention hinges on older students acting as positive role models…

“Any time kids older behave well, that’s a role model, and when they don’t behave well, it’s still a role model.”

And part of the prevention stems from the district’s anti-bullying curriculum…[which] focuses on anger management, understanding social cues, making friends and anti-bullying.

It worked like a charm here, didn’t it?

The problem with the Seattle Public School District is that its representatives are dysfunctional, defensive and borderline competent.  They are common-sense challenged and wrapped up in petty bureaucratic infighting and turf protection.  They follow when they should be leading and lead when they should be following.  They don’t care about things they should care about and see their natural constituency, parents and the general public as the enemy.  The District bureaucrats measure school performance solely based on test scores and they reward failing schools like Madrona K-8 by noting the improvement in their test scores (which were failing to begin with) and disparage schools with successful curriculum and test scores because their scores allegedly are not improving.

The District superintendent is a petty tyrant who ignores School District policy when it suits.  She doesn’t consult with parents on decisions affecting their particular schools and acts in a totally peremptory way.  I’m guessing that because the District has had a bad history of choosing leaders since the last good one, John Stanford, passed away, that the Board of Education has declined to intercede as they should.  And the Board is a whole other kettle of fish responsible for a good part of the District’s problems as well.

And I say all these things not based on anecdotes but based on cold, hard personal experience.  I also say this as someone with a child in a Seattle public school (one of the good ones which is receiving little support from the District).

By the way, the Madison Park Times article is not on its website (it was the lead story in the print edition).  My e-mail to the reporter asking why the article isn’t online was unanswered.  Could it be that the District pressured the paper not to make it accessible?

My wife’s grandfather was Eli Freeman, who was born in the Ukraine around 1895. He came to this country as a teenager and later brought his mother and two brothers here. One of my wife’s Detroit (where Eli initially settled) relatives sent us two amazing historic photographs which we’re trying to decipher. The first image above (middle) is of Eli (the older boy, standing) his brothers Harry and Max and his mother, Udel (my wife’s great-grandmother). We figure the photo was taken around 1907 when Eli still lived in the Ukraine.

The back of the card is filled with Yiddish script in faded ink which I asked archivist Jesse Cohen and the folks at YIVO to help decipher. Under their good auspices, they came up with a rough (there is also dark felt adhesive which further obscures the script) translation:

Your cousin is sending you this card of himself with mother and with the children, and is asking you very much to save/rescue [us?] with God’s help. I can write you [that] by us in Postev, by mother, I met …. I greet [you], and mother greets you [unreadable].

So this would be Eli writing to a cousin already in America begging for help in immigrating to America. If he wrote this in 1907, it would be only four years after one of the most heinous acts of anti-Jewish violence in the region, the 1903 Kishniev pogrom, in which scores of Jews were murdered in cold blood by Ukrainian Cossacks and rioters. The reason Eli begs for help is that he probably worries that his town could be next and seeks to emigrate before further violence engulfs his family. The pogroms spurred a mass Jewish exodus to America and other lands which eventually caused one-third of all Russian Jews to leave.

If anyone viewing the script (enlarged in this image) can further decipher it please leave your translation as a comment or e mail me.

As near as we can tell, the image of the single woman might be Eli’s grandmother. She clearly looks like a Ukrainian peasant, though aside from that it’s hard to tell. No one even remembers what her name was and she never came to America.