Random happy thoughts about college tuitions:

(No, I'm not smoking anything hallucinogenic, thank you.)
Just got off the phone with Son 1's Financial Aid office finalizing some stuff for his frosh year at UARTS. May I brag for a moment? We got a nice package. High on the merit scholarships and grants. (Proud of the boy!) Low on the loans and out of pocket. TG!! One of my relatives is already mid-five figures into a bank for their child's education AT A STATE SCHOOL and the kid is only halfway through. I know this is a far more typical scenario than mine. And it upsets me.

Observation, with the way that states, especially PA are gutting their education budgets, (thank you Mr. Corbett) and Mr. Ryan's designs on Pell Grants, perhaps you're better off looking at private schools (with their more generous endowments) rather than state schools for a cost effective education. I know this sounds counter-intuitive, especially for folks of my generation, but this is my experience. I'm not saying that we were savvy when we started this process. Far from it. We were total newbies--more lucky than smart. I'm just a middle class guy, two working stiffs making middle class money and last year at this time I looked at the numbers and was convinced I wouldn't be able to send my son to college. Every time I looked at the mid-5 figure college tuitions, my BP shot up and I got pissed.

It's a "funny money" situation. Like healthcare. We say this procedure will cost $35k, but insurance will cover 90% and we'll accept it. Your out of pocket $25. Why can't medicine, like education, cut out the funny money business and just charge reasonable rates that middle class people can afford? Despite our good fortune, I'm convinced the system is broken.

Random Olympic closing observations

In no particular order:

Whether you found the opening and closing ceremonies quirkily entertaining or insufferably pompous and my FBF's already know where I stand, the Brits did an amazingly good job.

Brit pop music rocks. It has from the '60's when I was a kid and still does. Continue to invade at will, lads and lasses.

I don't know how they did from a budgeting/profit/loss standpoint, but they pulled the games off without Chinese overkill and with no major delays, no scandals, NO TERRORISM and all in one of the world's largest, busiest, most diverse cities. Well done, London!

This (or something like it) is what Mitt Romney should have said, but we already know he's no statesman or spokesman for American anything. Whatever he was asked when he made his infamous comment, he should have realized that his job wasn't to consult as a former Olympic organizer, but as an American dignitary. The hubris of the man. Epic fail on his part. Mr. PM and Mr. Mayor of London--well-said sirs!

The Dark Night of The Dark Knight

In answering critics who say that dark movies cause dark acts, movie industry apologists sound eerily similar to NRA apologists ....
by Rick Weiss (c) 2012 Trident Productions

As horrific as it is, the “The Dark Knight Rises” premiere massacre in Colorado is already fading from our “news-stream” mentality. Before it completely washes downstream, let’s throw a little keylight on two troubling, if related connections and see what we can learn from them, if anything.

We know from “Inception” that Chris Nolan can bend space and time and keep 4 or 5 different realities going simultaneously, but “The Dark Knight Rises” is even more ponderous, a kinda a big goofy allegorical soufflé. It rises, but falls flat soon after leaving the oven. Good girls and bad girls trade places with reality-defying aplomb. Batman is masked. Unmasked. Masked again. He needs to conquer his fear. He needs to learn to fear again. He's rich. He's poor. He's rich again. He's dead. Alive. Dead again, then alive again. The Scarecrow sits in judgment on the rich. The film’s best line is left to Catwoman:

"There's a storm coming, Mr. Wayne," she purrs. "You and your friends better batten down the hatches. Because when it hits, you're all going to wonder how you ever thought you could ever live so large and leave so little for the rest of us."

My Father's Clothes

Several times in the year or so after my father passed, my mother would call me over to one or two closets in which she'd neatly hung my father's clothes with a veneration reserved for a priest's vestments. "He hardly wore these," she'd say with a sad, delicate wave of her hand. I’d look in her eyes and what I'd see there was not so much her grief in the lengthening absence of her mate of over 53 years. What I'd see most, was her hope in my acceptance of the utility of the offer. These were reverential, intimate moments between the two of us. The third presence, the obvious one, Dad’s, was hanging on the clothes rack. So, each time, I selected two or three items that I liked more than the others and thanked her. 

It's an odd, sad and complex thing to walk around in your dead father's clothes. There are times I asked myself that if his clothes retain some essence of him, would I absorb it?  I already had 90% of his genetic makeup. Would the clothes make it complete? All his successes, setbacks, beliefs and experiences–would I inherit these by osmosis?

Dad was 5'9" and barrel-chested. I am 6'1" and barrel-chested. At the top, we are alike. Dad's legs were short, thick, muscle-knotted and bandy. I have my mother's longer, more graceful legs. Dad's scent is sweet and masculine. It is cinnamon, musk, Irish Spring soap, Old Spice aftershave, graham crackers and face stubble. I’ve known this scent/signature all my life. My own scent is much harder for me to describe, though I know it is similar to his.

I passed over his sportcoats, which I really did not like and assumed would not fit me properly. The first item I chose smelled the strongest of him, even though freshly washed. It's a navy blue zippered pullover. As I held it to my face, a flash of grief surged through me with the knowledge that once I took it, wore it and washed it, eventually my molecules would displace all his molecules and its scent would change, become entirely mine, not his. Everything fades. Molecular traces are replaced. Though I honor his memory by wearing Dad’s pullovers, I actively erase his imprint by doing so. This is not something one can do casually.

New Toy

Did I ask you for your love?

Did I ask you for your dedication?

I don't want, I don't want your love.

I don't want, I don't want your affection!


Dateline, June 31, 2004

8 years ago,
to the month, I plunked down good money ($1600) for the old desktop. Call it Big Blue Dell. Despite its long service, I don't really harbor any emotional attachment. People love and make love to their computers, mod them, endlessly customizing inside and out, imbue them with personalities—only to chuck them out too soon when the newest shiny box becomes available. But to a writer, a computer ideally, should just be a typewriter. Sure, a typewriter with endless time-squandering fingertip access to a world of knowledge and social engagement, but a typewriter nonetheless. Means to an end.

But when you're on your own, business-wise, your box is not just a toy—it's your work, your productivity, your revenue generator. And when you're on your own, you have to be your own IT and IT training department. So no, I'm not a tech, I don't program or solder, but I've learned a bit about everything. Even when I knew far less, every upgrade I opened my wallet for has to run this gauntlet:

1.    Is it going to make what I do easier, faster or better?
2.    Do I need it now?
3.    How soon can I afford it?

Most of my techno-fancies are felled by the first blow. Few survive all three. These are good rules. Abiding over all is the genetic predisposition to buy smart, agnostic and not very often. Modern technology and its advertising make this very difficult. Device manufacturers want you to buy early and often and that is how their advertising is geared. To build brand loyalty. When the bloom is off the rose and you want to find out how to keep older tech serviceable, well that requires some serious research skills.

I want a New Toy (oh ay oh), to keep my head expanding.
I want a New Toy (oh ay oh), nothing too demanding.
Then when everything is in roses, everything is static
Yeh my New Toy (oh ay oh), you'll find us in the attic.

Reflections of a Walker--Three Up, Three Down

Three up, three down. My after-dinner routine, 5-6 nights a week. We're talking the Rocky Steps, so roundtrip, that's 426 steps in all, not counting the long landings. I used to bring my music along, but lately, I go unplugged, to better hear what's in my head.

Steps are a metaphor for life. Steps are work done, effort expended, reward gained, new highs, interminable plateaus, repetition, repetition, religion, progress, process, meditation and more. From antiquity, we've climbed steps to seek absolution, gain power and worship gods.

These particular steps lead to Philadelphia's Art Museum, "the Parthenon of the Parkway," a temple to art. A quick, keylike turn around the fountain reveals the glittering city in expanse, at its feet. My neighborhood, Fairmount, predates the Museum's construction by a good two centuries. William Penn had originally planned to put his manor house here on the neighborhood's most prominent point. I am so spoiled, having six, now seven museums in a ten minute walk. Two of them are literally at my feet, across the street from my house.

This particular night, I did not veer across Pennsylvania Avenue, rather I stayed on it, skirting Mark di Suvero's "Iroquois," another of my favorite nightly visual markers, seen here photographed by Inquirer alumni and friend Eric Mencher. My evening peregrinations had another destination, the newest and most controversial of our "art temples," the home of the new Barnes Collection. My nocturnal crawl had become an "arts reconnaissance."

Much has been said about this building--not all of it complimentary, some of this naysaying dished by yours truly.  I called it second-class, dowdy and unworthy of its prominent place on the Parkway, Philadelphia's museum mile, which, did I mention, I am privileged to live at the crown of?

I compared The Barnes unfavorably with the Phoenix Museum of Art (same architects--Tod Williams and Billie Tsien) and wondered if it was something of an architectural slight on my people and place.  When I wrote my piece, an architect friend admonished me to keep a close eye and an open mind. So I did. I have watched The Barnes grow from a hole in the ground. Though I'm not entirely won over, lately a new notion has taken hold of me which I'm finding increasingly hard to shake.

I am not an architect or an architectural critic. But being a visual artist, living smack in the midst of a city where dramatic structures rise up with some regularity makes it hard to be neutral or ambivalent to your surroundings. You take sides. You form attachments. You walk the beat and research with your eyes, ears and feet. So, what I've been grappling with is the idea that perhaps The Barnes is not an architectural mediocrity after all. Quite possibly, it is a work of subtle and compelling genius.

OUT OF THE POORHOUSE

(c) September 24, 1989

In much delayed honor of my father on his 85th birthday

by Rick Weiss

When I was a little boy, we were poor. Oh no, not poor by the standard of the Third World's Poor. Nor were we poor like the poor Chinese and Biafrans that my mother constantly reminded us of when we gagged down the candied carrots or liver with spinach and kidney beans that she served up. We weren't even poor by the standards of the immigrant poor, our brave grandparents who flooded the Eastern America shores at the turn of the century.

Yet we were poor by the standards of the neighborhood that we lived in, the sprawling insular sixties suburban society. In our neighborhood, men and women of manifest vision built razor clean, unsparing split levels and colonials with oversized picture windows on generous, partially wooded tracts, chopping down, plowing under, manicuring the last vestiges of rural countryside to surround the eastern cities; fleeing their parents’ cities and blazing open the new frontiers of suburban America.

My father was one of those men. Having his honorable discharge from the Marines, he painstakingly scrimped, scraped, working two, sometimes three jobs, to produce the nest egg that moved my mother, me – aged three and my baby brother, out of a downtown two bedroom Pittsburgh rowhome and into a three bedroom ranch in a new development called Northwood Acres. A $19,000 GI loan bought him the property – three-quarters of an acre, cleared – and the construction of a split-level three bedroom orange brick ranch. Dad had "gotten in" early and built when prices were low. Only four properties dotted the development's ninety-some acre expanse when we first arrived. Years later, when we moved again, there were well over a hundred houses in Northwood Acres.

Moments that no pictures or words do justice to:

Reflections of a Walking Man #6:

Walking past the Franklin Institute yesterday, I came up behind a young fashionably-dressed mother and her little daughter in their Sunday best. The mother, with long blonde hair, wore a smart red coat with the ease that pretty young women wear bright things. She was walking, bent in an attitude of conversation with the tiny girl who barely reached her mother's waist. The daughter had long, glossy brunette hair and was decked out in a child's version of the mother's attire.

I didn't hear what was being said. I could just read their body language. It was a sweet image. As I closed my distance and they approached the curb, suddenly the little girl clutched her mother's leg. "What if they send you to a unit and I can't come with you?"

They crossed the street and I walked on.

It ain't necessarily so ... Political commentary

All I know is what I have words for.

– Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 1953

Time Magazine called the Protestor "Person of the Year." The first New Yorker of 2012, on my desk today shows Old Man 2011 eying Newt prancing about as the 1994 baby. Already, given the peripatetic nature of the Republican race, the New Yorker cover is obsolete before its cover date. I'm afraid the Time cover is too.

It ain't necessarily so

The t'ings dat yo' li'ble

To read in de Bible,

It ain't necessarily so.

Perhaps it's fitting to revisit this George Gershwin composition that has been recorded by so many of the greats. Like most things Gershwin, it was really quite before it's time. This song's time is now. Even the statement "these are cynical times" sounds breathlessly naïve. These are way beyond cynical times. These are times I have no better words for. What's more cynical than cynicism? Fatalism. Both assume the worst of inputs. The latter affixes inevitability to outcomes. As much as I abhor predetermination, there's only so long you can drive along saying, it's a wall, up ahead, coming closer, it's a wall, it's a wall, before you smack into something.

Let's play history rematch. I re-pair Ronnie Reagan, the Teflon optimist and Jimmy Carter, the one term president who preached austerity, mano e mano 2011 and wonder whether Carter would have been so convincingly trounced. We've got your New American Century right here, Ron. How do you like it?

While our president gets to play hail the conquering heroes to soldier boys and girls on airbases and transport ships coming home from Iraq, worldclass skeptic Trudy Rubin writes how profoundly and non-partisanly we've failed that country and the region.  It doesn't take a skeptic to see that wherever in the world we (mis)adventure, we unerringly make the wrong moves.  It makes some of what libertarian skeptic Ron Paul says make sense. Not the John Bircher stuff, but the "we should keep to ourselves stuff."

Once we invaded Iraq was there ever any positive exit to be had? Whatever happens there next, civil war, Armageddon, Iranian puppet statehood, Muslim sects running after each other with power tools, etc. ... America's first and biggest folly was to ever go there and we should never forget this. For a writer, that's like starting a sentence with a period. I see a lot of revisionist media about Iraq and it sickens me. Not so much because of the disinformation fed our own people, but the false hope stirred up in the Iraqis. We have abandoned the few secular, progressive Iraqis we've encouraged in our short stint there. Once branded American sympathizers, their fates are double-sealed. They should notice that the American dream did not flower in Iraq and flee their country while they can. This sort of abandonment happens with some regularity. Ask the Kurds under Saddam.

In Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, et.al, we hail "the will of the people," the triumph of the protest movement over multi-decade dictatorships but worry about what has replaced them. In America, we automatically assume that our way is the best and brightest beacon the world has to offer.  I'm less convinced than ever that the world wants what we offer. I'm not even so sure we ourselves still want it.

We watched our Congress bring the economy to the brink over the deficit limit, watched in horror as Standard and Poors downgraded U.S. Bonds from AAA to AA+ and decided, as individual investors and en masse that it really didn't matter. Congress doesn't matter. The Tea Party doesn't matter. The OWS doesn't seem to matter.  None of the Republican candidates matter. They all surface briefly like blips on the radar, then fade into the murk. Why? Because they appeal to our craving for novelty more than our desire for hard work and lasting solutions.

What matters? I say this to the Republican presidential wannabees as I say it to the Democratic president I voted for. Failed. All failed. What makes you worthy of another chance? Unbelievably enough, I'm going to give you one if only because I'm not yet a fatalist, but a failed fatalist, I'm reluctantly willing to listen. But I know that you're lying to me. Your lips are moving I know you're telling me what you think I want to hear.

Never has cynicism seemed like such a requisite and important virtue.

Wadoo, zim bam boddle-oo,

Hoodle ah da wa da,

Scatty wah !

Oh yeah !...

It ain't necessarily so. Happy New Year.

In defense of the (revised) liberal education

"This is a tough time to graduate from college. While unemployment is high across the board, recent grads face a brutal 9.3% unemployment rate -- the highest that statistic has been for them since the Great Recession began. Worse yet, studies have shown that fewer than half of recent college students are finding jobs that relate to their majors, and just more than half felt their jobs made use of what they learned as undergrads."

I came across this article by DailyFinance.com's Bruce Watson, thanks to an FBF and it made me think about how much things have changed since I was a starry-eyed student.

The old saw when we didn't have gray hair was that college was less valuable for what you learned and more valuable that you "learned how to learn." As a grad of communications, back further than I care to say, the attrition rate was appallingly high. Maybe 1 in 10 still working in the field. The one thing I got right back in my youth was that "you really have to want it" and I did. And I do. So here I am, still working in a field that is every bit as tough as it was when I got out of school, if not tougher.