in Israel - Tel Aviv and the rest of the tour

My mom Jenny sat under some shade at a picnic table while everyone in the tour swam in the springs at Sachneh. It was very peaceful. There were lots of people there and everyone was friendly. When I went to change out of my wet swimsuit I found Jenny surrounded by about 50 students from Boston. They were mesmerized listening to her tell harrowing tales of surviving the concentration camps. What's amazing is how in this context she's a total rock star. They absolutely adored her. She just comes alive in a way I only see when she is up on stage singing Hebrew and Yiddish folk songs, partying at a simcha (a hebrew word for gladness or joy but used a lot for 'celebration'), mourning at a funeral, chatting with friends over tea, or other things like that. The rest of the time she is hard impenetrable and suffocatingly controlling. I was drawn into this circle of raptured youth and began telling more stories of her astounding trials and adventures. And then they started crushing on me. Jenny was beaming and I was flushed with pride. I guess I'm a lot like her in some ways. I like the attention and the free pass the Holocaust card gets you when it's played.

In Safed in an alley we stumbled on this guy making the best sandwiches on earth! It was some kind of Yeminte roti and man was he funny. Chatting away with everyone while he put on a show. It was delicious and we had to order more.

In the mountains we donned biblical garb in a village where we made bread and rode donkeys. It was fun. The tour guide was a big burly dude who had a very warm personality. His little daughter followed us around and man was she cute.

This tour guide took us underground through a museum that had been a hidden bullet factory during the Independence War.

The woman was our guide through the Armored Corp Museum at Latrun. All the Bar and Bat Mitzvah kids individually got presented the beret of the Israeli Armoured Corps while standing on a giant Merkava tank. It ruffled feathers at the Corps but as I mentioned, our tour guide had been a high level intelligence officer and finagled it. She was a lovely guide. She was from the US and had lost family in the Corps and was inspired to come to Israel and join up. We all teared up when she told her story and the stories of the warriors who had died.

On Masada the tour kids had their ceremonies. Jacob already Bar Mitzvahed in Jerusalem was invited to participate but he balked at the last moment feeling uncontrollably panicked. The entire conservative religious ritual is anathema to his sensibilities and he had to break away and go for a walk. We followed and consoled him. He just doesn't dig the sturm and drang of most religious ritual. Sturm and Drang being usually tranlated as "storm and stress". Jacob likes laid back.
Jacob loved the Independance Hall lecture in Tel Aviv. He liked getting up close and personal to the story of the history of the creation of the State of Israel. We're not Zionists but it's great to feel the tribal connections and if this trip were part of an online role playing game, Jacob's identity definitely got an upgrade.

Tessa and Jacob were inseparable for a few days after she arrived late to the tour with her mother. After a some intense companionship things cooled. Then they both began to chum up with the other kids on the bus, which was good for Jacob too.

in Israel - Jerusalem

This summer we went to Isreal for Jacob's Bar Mitzvah. We had the ceremony on the Goldman Promenade overlooking the Old City of Jerusalem. The promenade had a magnificent view. We could see Jordan and the sea of Galilea. Our tour group was comprised of several families having sons and daughters Bar and Bat Mitzvahed on Masada. We broke off to have our's seperately in Jerusalem. The 2 week trip was great. The weather wonderful. Paula adored Israel and could imagine living there. She is a born traveler. The best. My mom came with us. She loves Israel and would thrive there. She has so many friends here and she's a total Zionist.
Our tour guide Ofer was a former intelligence officer who takes groups to China and Russia as well. His wife is an artist. He was brilliant although heavy on the Zionist perspective. Jacob enjoyed connecting with the history of the place and the people. At first Ofer was pretty pissed off with us because my mom, who is 84, was almost always the last on the bus, us and another family with little kids and we loved that family. But he mellowed out when he got what a special lady my mom is. She put her charm spell on everyone. But for me she's still Kryptonite.
Our Rabbi for the ceremony was Michael Klein-Katz, an amazing guy. He's a Reform Rabbi from Philadelphia and he was perfect for us. Michael is also a medical clown and has a terrific sense of humor.
Yad Vashem is a museum and memorial to the Holocaust. I was there in 1971. It's much bigger now. It's got art galleries. The crowds of people from all over the world were immense. It was Disneyland packed.

Jacob has already been to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, but that was on more of a pleasure trip to D.C. Here he participated in a ceremony at a shrine and seemed to take it quite seriously. I guess he's growing up.

Our first dinner together was a mind blower. There was so much food it was insane. Course after course after course until we were dizzy.

Loop meeting

I'm part of a collective of artists called Loop. I joined last fall. This is a sketch of some Loop members at a committee meeting, held in a noisy cafe across from the AGO, to organize our Toronto International Art Fair booth.

Last night we had a big general meeting. I could only doodle at this thing. There was no way I could do portraits because I was sitting between Gary Clement and Eric Farache who are too funny to be able to do any serious drawing, so I just doodled all over the meeting handouts. Eric cracks me up. He should be doing stand-up. He's a natural. Gary had me going too. I was laughing so much I snorted and he turned to me and said did you just snort?

I wanted to do some caricatures like I did in grade school, but I was worried that someone might get offended if they saw one of my cartoons of them. I don't want to hurt anyones feelings. They're nice people. I grabbed something Gary's was drawing and scrawled on it a bit. It is now a collaborative drawing I said. I hate collaborative art he said. But when I flipped it back to him he drew a lot more on it and it turned out kind of interesting. I don't think Gary would admit that, and I should have got it back from him so I could scan it and post it here.

I think it would be fun to make the members doodle for the whole meeting, all over that fat pile of documents, then stick them up on a wall. Getting to see how all these good artists would doodle really interests me. I can't show most of my doodles from last night because the info on a lot of the printouts is confidential. I guess if I had read them I'd have figured that out and drawn on the 'OK for public viewing' pages. But I didn't because basically I'm a pretty lousy member.

I also started a new nipple in my Book Of Nipples, but the light was bad, and that's a problem because these are pretty tiny nipple drawings.

on the subway

I like drawing on the subway. The ride is smooth on the Toronto Transit Commission underground. The buses are almost impossible to sketch on. The drivers tear around the city like they're possessed, old people get trashed on the violent stops and starts. It's really brutal.
The seats are decent on the subway and the Torontonions public is generally oblivious to or accommodating of all my attention. Of course I've gotten pretty good at dealing with the tension that can develop when people notice what I'm up to and not liking it. I have 3 or 4 subjects going at the same time, so if I get a hairy eyeball I just switch it up.
If someone is outright hostile, I'll offer to tear out the work and give it to them. This works every time and almost no one ever demands I go through with ripping up my book.

This old lady was really cute. She fussed with her collar and stared at me oddly for about 8 stops. She was so pretty. I wondered what she looked like without her clothes. Once in art class we had a 70 year old model. Her body was beautiful and firm. Just such a surprise when she disrobed. We were all stunned. But the old guy we had 3 weeks later was a wreck.

in Germany

My mother Jenny survived Auschwitz together with her sister Regina and their mom Machela. In April Jenny and I, along with Regina and her daughter Sharon, went to Germany for the commemoration of the 65th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi concentration camp at Bergen Belsen. Sharon was born in Bergen Belsen right after the war. The German government footed the bill for our flights, accommodation, transportation and food for 10 days. Being stranded in Germany while an Icelandic volcano spewed ash into the airways created hardship for of the holocaust survivors attending the ceremonies. My mom and her contemporaries are mostly in their 80's and 90's. Some had just recovered from a bout of food poisoning courtesy of our five star hotel, The Maritin, in Hanover.

Bergen Belsen was a displaced persons camp for five years after the war. Now it's a British military base, a launch point for units deploying to Afghanistan and Iraq. Before it became a concentration camp, the Nazi's used this massive state of the art training facility to roll out Wermacht units.

With our flights grounded by the eruption, our hotel reservations expired and furthermore trumped by the attendees to Messe, a 13 tech trade show monster convention, our group was shuttled to the only decent hotel that wasn't fully booked, located on the outskirts of Hanover. Goodbye posh digs. Everyone anxiously waited for seats on jets, so I started making jokes about how Germany would have to reopen Bergen Belsen. That way all us Hebrews would have a place to stay if the clouds over the ocean stopped us from going home for a while like the media was forecasting. Ashes and Jews, it made for a macabre association. I got lots of laughs for that joke and I really milked it. I think I told it to almost everyone I could find who spoke English.

We walked past Bergen Belsen's memorials, encountering mass burial mounds numbered by their estimated body counts. Jenny and I visited her old barracks in in the DP camp, went into the old building and knocked at the door of her old room. A British soldier lived their now. Jenny looked uncharacteristically disoriented as she rejoined me and the Brit historians guiding us through the camp. She told me stories of my dad's post war smuggling days, when all the boys lived wild and crazy, as black marketeers, lost souls hunting for revenge and renewal.

Berlin was brilliant. I loved it. I want to move there. The art scene is fresh and the city feels alive There are so many young people and it's really energetic. I saw some great shows. They have incredible museums and on the weekend I went there, the city was quiet with hardly any traffic. A nice place to walk for miles. On the bullet train from Hanover, we stopped half-way because the driver had spotted a herd of miniature deer by the tracks. Everyone, even the drunk soccer fans, watched mesmerized. One tiny deer got lost behind a secondary fence adjacent to the tracks. We watched him run up and down frantically looking for a way out, the herd waiting restlessly. Finally after five minutes of this, he was free and they all took off away across a field and into a small forest. The young Japanese couple I woke to see this, thanked me profusely with lots of bows. They said it was the highlight of their trip to Europe. It was magical.

at readings

Paula and I have been going to poetry readings this fall. Lots of the poets in the Avantgarden series are Paula's friends from Margaret Christakos 'Influency' class at U of T. They are experimental poets. Liz Howard and Shannon Maguire are the co-cultivators of Avantgarden, and classmates of Paula. Cara Benson's performance was breath-taking. She brought deep spirituality to the room and her emotional vulnerability was moving. I found it easy to connect to her work. Sometimes she repeated sounds and words, chant-like. Cara did some really funny stuff like when for example a new visitor arrived, and as they clomped up the stairs, she would repeat with each clomp, "step", "step", "step"... like it was right out of her book. Really got us!

Sonia Greckol read her rapier-witty poems with such charm. Her work has an endearing blend of innocence and cynicism. The peices were comical and sharp. She seemed to find something new in every turn of phrase to amuse herself as she read on. It was a privelage to be in the same room as her as she invoked fresh interpretations of her material. She seemed to be reinventing herself on the spot, as if reading her own material for the first time, and really getting a kick out of discovering herself. How many times did I say that? Well it really impressed me.

Joan was the best storyteller of the night. She jammed up snippets of news reports and other media ephemera into a vast tragic-comic kaleidescope of epic proportions. Everyone loves this woman.

The Mansfield Press Launch was jam packed full of people and they were celebrating Mansfield's 10th anniversary. Many of their first published authors took a turn at the mike.

We're enjoying the This Is Not A Reading Series put on by Mark Glassman, with Charlie Huisken and his son Jesse, formerly of This Ain't the Rosedale Library. Much less reading and lots more of getting to know the authors. Eileen Myles at the Gladstone wowed the crowd. She is a dynamo. Very funny. So open and honest.

At this TINARS at Clinton's Joe Pernice sang and played guitar between insights into his life and work process during an interview with Stuart Ross, an editor at Mansfield Press and a prolific author himself. This is a drawing of Karl, our friend from a long time ago. We just ran into him this night after about 15 years. He's a therapist. He's out at 2 or 3 events every night! He found this one boring.

I was disappointed too.

The Descant 'Hear Hear' this summer was fun. Lots of accessible writing with punch. Mark Laliberte wears more than one hat editing at both Descant and Carousel. And he also wears some pretty cool hats. The guy has some style going.

The last time Paula and I were in the Free Times Cafe was on the way back to her old place on Euclid, on our first date. We stopped for cider in November. We walked arm in arm for hours. It was the start of something big.

the Q&A at loop

The new solo shows at Loop Gallery are of artists Yael Brotman and Candida Girling. I'm a member of this collective. All the while I've been there I thought Candida was Candice. I think that's because of Candy Silverstein, my first big crush back in grade 5, plus everyone at the Q&A was calling Candida Candy. So I was a little bit right and lot wrong, but now I've got it right. Candida and Yael timed their shows to coincide with Printopolis. Both artists have work employing printmaking.

There were lots of people at the Q&A. It was packed. When I did a Q&A at Loop with Heather Carey back in January, moderated by David Holt, we had one guest. Oh, plus my wife. It was fun. The large audience at this one would have made me nervous. Yael and Candida both did a great job. They were very engaging and warm. William Huffman, the Q&A moderator, is a born ring master. His is timing is deft. Part way through the Q&A he had the throng stroll around the gallery to review work on the walls. He had picked just the right moment to wind things down in a sensitive way.

There was this tinge of academic pall though that did permeate the proceedings, but I guess that's Loop and it's constituency. Maybe the presence of that many degree's in one room at the same time was too much for me. I'm trying to get used to it and I can get a little bored, waiting for the speakers to work their way to what they are trying to get at, but by drawing the whole session I could handle it. I still haven't mastered sitting and listening to cultural art-speak without my hand needing to be busy. I don't think I ever will. And I can see now that if I had drawn my way through boring classes at The Ontario College of Art when I went there back in the early 70's, I might have survived long enough to get my degree too.

around the ashes

Drawing people, trying to make a portrait with good detail and accuracy, while they are moving,

talking, eating, drinking, it's hard and frustrating. On a plane it really sucks, it's so cramped. Everyone is watching you. They are captivated. They all want to look and comment. It's the best.

at Naco

This is a drawing of Julian Calleros, the owner of Naco Gallery Cafe. Met there last week with him, artist Sylvia Temis and musician Dennis Duffin. Sylvia and I are doing a mural there for the Day of the Dead. We all chatted and drank coffee in the sunny front room. Dennis played some guitar, I drew, Sylvia and Julien organized timelines. Opening night is going to be fun with Flamenco music and Mexican traditional songs by Shirley Pincay "La Pili" singing and Dennis on guitar with some musician friends. I think Sylvia is going to get in costume and dance Flameco, which she is mad for. Sylvia was my student at The Art Institute of Toronto a few years ago. What a creative dynamo. She's from Mexico. The cafe is great. Nice location on Dundas West. Julian always has interesting installations and shows up on the walls.