Lifting the Spire into place
CLICK HERE TO WATCH THE VIDEO!
Holy shit! So many emotions as I watched.
First, I was glad I’d gone to the bathroom before I started otherwise I’d of peed in my pants. All words fail. Amazing! Yep! Nope. Too pale. Fantastic? Yeah…maybe. Nah, too dramatic. It’s got a beauty to it that one or two words, no matter how grand, cannot fill the space that this leaves in its wake. The slowness, the faint sound of the motor’s whirr, feed into the grandeur.
Then KA—chunnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnng!
For whom the bell tolls…it tolls for thee.
It picks up speed; the motor slightly louder.
Then at one point I notice the cars on the Westside Highway. Shortly after I start to weep. The men below, where it started, are no longer anything more then yellow specks that, if you didn’t know their significance, you’d dismiss as merely bits of “what’s down below”.
As they set it in place my mind, acting as director, asks, “How should this end?” Going back to my younger mind I shout, “A shot from the side. Have the camera swoop in on it. Yeah! Wow! Yeah, that’s the way to end it.” But then it stops, after the few men, so far above the City, settle it into place. Lovely. And far below I see the waters of the Memorial twinkling in the light.
Cut to black.
I’ve known Dean for many years so when I heard he’d started an Indiegogo project to raise money to finish his memoir I knew I wanted to get him back on Graffiti to talk about it as soon as possible.
Last Fall when he was on the show to talk about Rivering, his most recent volume of poetry, I asked him what was next he told me that he had another book of poetry that was very near to completion and the memoir he’d been working on for some time. At the time I remember thinking what could Dean possibly have to tell folks in a memoir. He is one of the most even-keeled, gentle people I know. So it was a bit of a shock when I opened up the link to his Indiegogo project and read the book’s title: Learning to Levitate: A Memoir of Bullying, Suicide & Survival.
Here’s an excerpt:
I didn’t know what made them hate me, but knew it was my fault. I studied myself, trying to identify what despicable thing I said, did, or gave off like an odor, so I could stop doing it. I could no longer simply be, like other kids. Unchecked, my revolting behavior—my crazy-germs—would make kids attack me. And who could blame them? I tried to uproot everything wrong with me. But even when I thought I’d succeeded, my behavior and voice provoked mockery and threats.
Listen tonight as Dean speaks with great candor about an incredibly difficult period in his life and about the need to keep the discussion about bullying and teen suicide open and active.
Here is a segment from Dean’s Indiegogo site:
Why this book is needed
Week after week, month after month, the faces of bullied teens who have taken their lives appear in the news and then, seemingly, vanish. I am haunted by them; their wraithlike faces won’t let me forget them. Although adolescent suicide has reached epidemic levels, we as a country still turn our backs on this problem. Nothing important has ever changed in our society without dialogue; this is no different. My memoir will act as a catalyst for dialogue to bring an end to this ongoing tragedy, which remains as urgent now as it was when I was a teen. According the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “For youths between the ages of 10 and 24, suicide is the third leading cause of death. 81% of the deaths were males and 19% are females.”
Another report from the CDC asserts:
LGBT youth are also at increased risk for suicidal thoughts and behaviors, suicide attempts, and suicide. A nationally representative study of adolescents in grades 7–12 found that lesbian, gay, and bisexual youth were more than twice as likely to have attempted suicide as their heterosexual peers.
However, the characters in Learning to Levitate are neither statistics nor sound bites. They are compelling personalities who will lodge in the reader’s heart, making the reader care about them, and by extension, this crisis.
CLICK HERE to listen to the conversation Dean and I had on May 2, 2013.
CLICK HERE to visit Dean’s Website
Let’s help Dean push past his goal.
My first memory of Rebetika comes from more than 20 years ago. It was before I started doing my show at Hellenic Public Radio. I was meeting someone who was already doing a show for HPR so she could tell me a bit about the types of shows she was planning to do in the future. I must admit to having some trepidation about starting down this path. After all what did I really
know about Greece? I’d travelled there and fallen in love with the culture, the history and the people but how could I possibly do a show week after week after week? In the weeks leading up to my first show, how many times had picked up the phone to call the station and tell them that the idea of me doing a show was ridiculous? A dozen? Two dozen? But each time that little voice in my head, the one that usually tells you that you CAN’T do something, told me that making that call would be something I’d regret for the rest of my life. The “What if’s” would be, in the long run, crushing.
The meeting with my friend almost pushed me over the edge though. After we sat and ordered she pulled a huge binder out of her bag and started leafing through showing me page after page of themes she wanted to explore. She was trying to help but this was 
daunting. I remember very few of those pages and themes but I do remember one in particular that stood out: REBETIKA. She had pictures of a few of the great practitioners—the only one I remember now is the one of Roza Eskenazi. So I asked what Rebetika was and her answer was three words: It’s Greek Blues.
I could go on but suffice to say that I was “sold”—hook, line and sinker.
This coming weekend at the Hellenic Cultural Center you’ll have the chance to experience Rebetika at its best.
CLICK HERE TO WATCH AND LISTEN TO A VIDEO FROM LAST YEARS CONCERT.
A Conversation with Alexandra Stratou, author of the “Cook[ειν] (Cookin’)” Cookbook, March 21, 2013
She starts with a number: 936.
936 Sunday lunches with family.
But Alexandra Stratou has many more ingredients to add before she’s done with this recipe.
2 years of cooking school
9 years of journal writing
2 slices of work
¾ cup of creativity
2 tbsp of love
Then there’s the more practical stuff that must be added:
1 photographer
1 graphic designer
1 printer
…and of course there are the recipes themselves…75 to 80 of those.
But she’s wise enough to understand that for every project like this, every meaningful event in life, there will be those moments when things aren’t so bright and shiny so she adds:
a pinch of anxiety
and a few drops of doubt
but she tops it all with a sprig from the tree of life.
Actually the last ingredient is a blessing.
A blessing for Alexandra Stratou and her Kickstarter project. A project designed to create, as she so eloquently writes:
A Greek cookbook honoring family, uncompromised tradition, cooking & life.
Tonight I’ll be speaking to Alexandra about her combining cutting edge technologies and concepts like crowd-funding and video with generations old family recipes to create something that is both old and new. I’ll talk to her about her quest to bring her cookbook Cook[ειν] (Cookin’) to life.
CLICK HERE TO GO TO ALEXANDRA’S KICKSTARTER PROJECT PAGE
A Conversation with Daniel Klein author of “Travels with Epicurus”. February 21, 2013.
A late-in-life reflection and modern-day philosophical exploration of what it means to age authentically.
Septuagenarian Klein (co-author: Heidegger and a Hippo Walk Through Those Pearly Gates, 2009) is on a personal quest to redeem the grizzled and gray-haired among us. Returning to the Greek island of Hydra, which he visited in his youth, he sought to watch and learn from a culture that, he writes, best 
embodies the grace of old age. Over leisurely glasses of retsina at the local tavern, he observed the “lived time” of his
aged, Greek friends and lamented the contemporary Western desire to extend the prime of life beyond its course. What do we lose, he asks, when we deny our hard-earned senior citizenship and opt instead for implants, Viagra and a second career? With the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus as his guide, Klein navigates a veritable sea of great thinkers and their treatises on aging. From Aristotle to Frank Sinatra, each philosopher offers a different take on what it means to live a meaningful life in one’s later years. For Epicureans, it’s a life devoted to simple, enduring pleasures and free of pain, particularly the pain we incur on ourselves by pursuing certain pleasures. As it turns out, there are no specific rules to living life well or to making peace with old age, but Klein suggests that perhaps the act of asking can be “some kind of end in itself.” Some readers, especially younger readers, will reply in the affirmative when Klein wonders aloud if he is simply “a befuddled old geezer barking at the moon.” Others will appreciate the slow, lighthearted amble of his discourse and the wise cast of characters that inhabit his journey.
Charming and accessible, this philosophical survey simply and accessibly makes academic philosophy relevant to ordinary human emotion.
FROM THE KIRKUS REVIEW October 2012
Click here for the Daniel’s official site for “Travels with Epicurus”.
Click here for the Daniel’s Wikipedia entry.
A Conversation with Daniel Mendelsohn author of “Waiting for the Barbarians”. February 7, 2013.
I like to drive. I’ll get in my car and drive till I get to places I’ve never been before. For me it’s meditation and it’s entertainment. Entertainment because I almost always have a “book” in my CD player. I lean toward mysteries and thrillers. I enjoy them and it doesn’t require a great deal of concentration for me to focus on the story. I’m just “along for the ride”…so to speak. One of the authors I like is Lee Child whose main character is the oh, so noble, yet incredibly deadly, Jack Reacher.
So when a friend of mine found a Q&A with Lee Child in the New York Times Book Review back in November,
she sent it to me. I got as far as his answer to the second question and was stopped dead in my tracks:
NYT: What was the last truly great book you read?
Child: The words “truly great book” set a very high bar, don’t they, in the context of the last couple of centuries. Therefore I’d have to pick “The Lost” by Daniel Mendelsohn. Nonfiction, but only incidentally. It’s a memoir, a Holocaust story, a detective story, both a rumination on and an analysis of narrative technique, a work of Old Testament and ancient Greek historiography, and a work of awful, heartbreaking, tragic suspense. A book of the decade, easily, and likely a book of the century.
Book of the Century! WOW!
Tonight I’ll be speaking to Daniel Mendelsohn about his new book “Waiting for the Barbarians: Essays from the Classics to Pop Culture”, and about his translation of the poetry of C.P. Cavafy. We’ll also talk about his upcoming discussion with John Freeman at the Morgan Library and Museum next Monday evening, February 11, at 7pm.
In the mean time if you want to know more about Daniel and his work please check out the links below.
CLICK HERE FOR THE LINK TO OUR CONVERSATION.
Click here for the link to Daniel’s Website.
Click here for the link to information about “Waiting for the Barbarians”.
Click here for the link to information about “C.P. Cavafy: Complete Poems”.
…and since I have your attention here’s one other piece of information you might find interesting. Viktor Koen, a friend and frequent guest on “Graffiti”, did a TED talk in Athens recently. Tomorrow night, Friday, February 8th, he’s inviting folks to watch the talk at 7:30 on Youtube. It will be a non-centralized gathering of friends, family and anyone else interested to watch his TED talk.
Click here for the link to Viktor Koen’s TED Talk that is already posted on Youtube.
