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Archive for the 'Goldberg' CategoryThe true religionDecember 1st, 2012 BY ED GOLDBERG This would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it. I write about religion a lot, so I may be plowing some old ground here. Religion permeates every corner of our world, its politics, its laws, its culture, its personal relationships. The golden rule exists in some form in the religions I know something about, and is honored more in the breach than in the observance. The priest, or what you may call him, too often loses sight of the distance between himself and the deity he serves. Sadly, the ministry to the flock becomes camouflage for unspeakable acts, from larceny to child abuse, more and more in our time. Or are we just more willing to expose it these days? Among Christians, the rock on which Jesus founded his church is gravel, in pieces. There are some big ones, like the Catholic Church, and some whose entire membership can fit into a storefront on a side street in a small town. Ecumenism, the idea that the Christian shards should be more united, can’t work. The Interfaith movement, attempting the same unity among all religions, is a delusion, a feel-good will o’ the wisp.
Posted by: The Editors The eyes have itSome thoughts on the nature of evil & how to recognize itAugust 1st, 2012 BY ED GOLDBERG Evil is easy, and has infinite forms. I have been ruminating on Evil. The first thing I realized is that I wasn’t even sure what it meant. It wouldn’t be in the religious sense, because those definitions are narrow and self-serving: masturbation and extra-marital sex are evil, but slaughtering heretics, i.e., anyone whose idea of god is different from yours, isn’t?
I was disappointed to find that Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary does not define the word. I also knew that the similarity between evil and devil is simply a coincidence of spelling. There is no etymological connection. The devil will be absent from this discussion. I think.
Posted by: The Editors Once is not enoughIs what's worth doing worth re-doing?March 1st, 2012 BY ED GOLDBERG One more time! I once wrote a throwaway bit for a radio show I was doing. It was a phony underwriter, the Once Is Not Enough Café, specializing in twice-baked potatoes, double-cooked pork, and refried beans. Once was enough for that one, because I couldn’t come up with any more examples of food done twice. In my distant youth, the “do-over” had an honorable place on the sandlots and schoolyards. If there was an unresolvable dispute between two teams, you did a do-over, ran the play over. It was an article of faith, back when I still had some, that the do-over would set things right. It was considered good sportsmanship to accept the result without (much) grumbling. Gloating was very rare, and looked on as bad form. Would that the world ran on the moral tracks of sandlot baseball.
Posted by: The Editors The anniversary schmalzJanuary 1st, 2012 BY ED GOLDBERG Number 9, Number 9, Number 9…. This is the ninth anniversary of the Black Lamb monthly, and congratulations to Terry Ross for his perseverance, and for reading and enjoying my brain droppings for these years. I have relished the soapbox for my views on everything from the moribund condition of the literary novel, to the state of pop music in twenty-first-century America, to why George Romero’s zombie movies transcend their own genre. I have received mostly positive comments, even from people who may disagree with me. Recently, Terry printed a dyspeptic rant from someone who found my politics to be, oh, bullshit, I guess. It was a great piece of verbal psychodrama and talking-point bile, and did nothing but reinforce everything I wrote. (Just to set the record straight, I do not own a bumper-sticker festooned Volvo, but a Ford hybrid with no stickers. Unlike, say, Sarah Palin, everything I believe can’t be reduced to a slogan. And, does he still deny that Rick Perry is a preening ass and moral leper? I am not a red, although there’s nothing wrong with that, but I am deeply pink. I also take pleasure in the fact that the writer lives in Berkeley, and every day for him must be a vista of hell. Nyuk nyuk nyuk.) Nine is a fraught number. In its printed form, it is not unlike a spermatozoa, or a stylized embryo. Human gestation lasts nine months. One is high on Cloud 9, or in the Ninth Circle of Dante’s Inferno. The pop geniuses Lieber and Stoller knew that the real-deal love potion was Number 9, and the literary lion Kurt Vonnegut made the apocalyptic substance that destroyed the earth Ice-nine. There used to be nine planets. (Sorry, Pluto.)
Posted by: The Editors Third time a charm?April 1st, 2007 BY ED GOLDBERG Today’s the day we’ll say “I do,” and we’ll never be lonely anymore…. No one jerks off more than married men. One woman told me that if we got married we’d always have a date for New Year’s Eve. So we did, and it was true. I have always had a date that night, just not with her. We had a big (200-plus people) wedding, rabbis, flower girls, my best man smoking weed in the crapper before the ceremony. I’ve been married three times really, but only twice legally. You see, back in the dark ages of the 1960s, divorce was illegal in New York, owing to the gigantic influence of the cardinal who perched in St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Yes, in wicked, sinful New York divorce was not an option. So, the usual sham substitute was an annulment based on breach of contract: Yes, your honor, she/he told me we would have children, but now she/he doesn’t want any.
Posted by: The Editors Monkey see, monkey doMarch 1st, 2007 BY ED GOLDBERG I recently saw a news photo in The New York Times of a miserably poor town in what was once a fairly prosperous Latin American country: tumble-down shanties, garbage and sewage in the streets, pretty grim. There are many explanations available, none of which makes much sense, except that it is a manifestation of bullying. (Not a gang sign or a marker for drug activity. The phenomenon existed long before the current gang/drug culture.) The weakest, dorkiest or fattest kid got his US Keds tied together and launched over the wires. With the price of sneakers what it is now, this can be a financial hardship. (One small bit of civic pride. Here in Portland, home of high-quality eccentricity and creative nonsense, one may see conjoined spike heels or dog booties or baby shoes dangling from wires. No received wisdom here in Little Beirut. One town’s bullying is another’s artistic statement.)
Posted by: The Editors You don’t have to S&D to have fun (ha-ha)November 1st, 2006 BY ED GOLDBERG I started smoking when I was twelve but waited another year to begin drinking.
Posted by: The Editors Grab the antenna and stand over thereMarch 1st, 2006
The Boob Tube. The Idiot Box. The Vast Wasteland. The Plug-in Drug. All of these terms and more have been leveled at television and with justification. I’ll be surprised if one or more do not appear elsewhere in these pages. To say that ninety percent of everything on the tube is crap is to say nothing; ninety percent of everything is crap, except for poetry, where the number is more like ninety-six percent.
Posted by: The Editors ‘Tis the seasonDecember 1st, 2004 BY ED GOLDBERG I have always liked Christmas, but as an outsider I’ve had a peculiar relationship to it. Being a Jew in America, or a Zoroastrian for that matter, means being marinated in the larger Christian culture, like it or not. Christians are oblivious to the phenomenon, as in the old conundrum: does a fish know it’s in water? These days, what with political correctness and the brother/sisterhood of all people, a perfunctory nod is given to ecumenicism, so we will see the odd Hanukkah menorah, Kwanzaa candelabra, or hear the mention of Ramadan. Don’t mean nothin’, Clyde. Christmas is what’s happening.
Posted by: The Editors Hope and despairSeptember 1st, 2003 BY ED GOLDBERG
So I’ll cheat a bit. In 1951 King Kong was re-released, and my mother took me to see it. It was the first movie that knocked me out, and it put me on the movie-slut road. The Marx Brothers laid the foundation for my view of the universe as essentially unknowable, but funny. The Wild One warped my social sensibilities; La Strada and The Seventh Seal introduced me to, ahem, film. And John Waters’ Pink Flamingoes became not just one of my favorite movies, but a test of friendship: if you sat through this movie with me and were still my friend, it was true love. But, there are two movies — and they work as “films” as well — that informed my world view and politics more than any others: Casablanca and The Third Man.
Posted by: The Editors |
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