April 17, 2025 : Wondercab Mini (89A)
PASSOVER POTLUCK
AN ARTWALK CONVERGENCE
Late last week, the day before this year’s first Passover seder, I went to see the exquisite Neue Sachlichtkeit show limning the New Objectivity movement in Weimar Germany between the wars (featuring the likes of George Grosz, Otto Dix, Christian Shad, Lionel Feininger and others—my own composer grandfather Ernst Toch having been a prominent member of the movement’s musical subdivision) at the Neue Galerie in New York City. It’s a sensational show, superbly curated and highly recommended, and if you still can, you should really try to go see it before it closes on May 26th.
As it happens, the small cohort joining me on this little junket were Art Spiegelman, R. Crumb, and Dan Nadel, the author of the bracing new Crumb biography, just out. So many images snagged our attention during our visit, not least of which was George Scholz’s allegorically-pitched portrait of three early Weimar potentates (American banker-middleman Frank Vanderlip, Foreign Minister Walter Rathenau, and industrialist Hugo Stinnes)
(in retrospect they seem to be standing on the very razor-sharp grating through which the entire Republic would indeed soon be melting)—a specific picture I only mention here because of how uncannily it overlaps, I now realize, with a vantage I myself subsequently snagged of my three artwalk companions outside the Gallery Bookshop:
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ON PASSING THINGS OVER, WITH A VENGEANCE
Coming home that evening (again this was the day before Pesach), I found an e-solicitation on my laptop from the perpetual schnorrers over at the Anti-Defamation League (Motto: Fighting Hate for Good) (I have no idea how I ever got on their list), tugging as usual at my threadworn sleeve, especially at this time of year, for, as they noted
The Passover holiday is one of the Jewish community’s most enduring celebrations. It is both a vow that in every generation we will fight antisemitism and other forms of hate, and a statement that freedom and redemption are central to our lives.
This year, that message is so vital. It has been over 550 days since the Hamas attack on Israel. Our sisters and brothers remain in cruel captivity in Gaza. Jewish communities across the globe are confronting unprecedented levels of antisemitism. And others around the world suffer as well, including Gazans stuck living under the harsh hand of Hamas.
To which, all I could think was, Really? Seriously? the harsh hand (in itself a decidedly coy euphemism) the Gazans were living under was that of Hamas?
That in turn reminded me of a conversation I had been having just a few days earlier with an Israeli-American friend who in turn was telling me about a conversation he had had a few days before that with some friends back in Israel whom he had asked to what degree they were aware of what was actually going on in Gaza, to which came the answer, “We know enough to know that we don’t want to know.”
Which it occurs to me would make a much better actual motto for the ADL. Or hell, for that matter for the entire state of Israel these bloody days. Should be embroidered right onto the flag:
"אני יודע מספיק כדי לדעת שאני לא רוצה לדעת יותר"
As for my own feelings about Passover this year, I defer once again to Naomi Klein’s sage remarks from the last one—a full year having passed, and following a blatant cease fire breach and in the midst of its starvation siege, things have only gotten worse, much worse, for the Gazans under Israel’s heedless thumb. (And, as the situation’s ongoing funders, of course, under our own thumb as well.)
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SOFTBALL RAY RECALIBRATES OUR DEAR LEADER’S MEASURE
Veterans of this ‘Stack will know how, starting with Issue 20, we have occasionally checked in on the regular Tuesday-midnight e-missives through which my kid brother Ray has endeavored to keep his Berkeley softball game going, week in and week out, for coming on almost 30 years now, summarizing the previous Sunday’s match while groveling for enough of his minions to register for the next Sunday’s play to be able to achieve the requisite twenty-person quorum, with occasional spinout divagations into wider political and cultural commentary. Well, last week he was trying to explain why he as team manager had decided to keep his struggling pitcher Steve on the mound across a disastrous inning, when suddenly he swerved onto wider community concerns. To wit:
To be sure, sometimes you have to stay the course, and sometimes ya gotta accept that things have changed and it’s time to recalibrate, but that’s not always an easy call. Well, I only mention this since when thinking of both my faith in Steve and the quickly evolving clusterfuck du monde, it suddenly occurred to me that the amalgamated pastiche of the current Wanker-in-Chief that I thought up last year is already clearly dated. As you may recall, it was an equally weighted melding of Mussolini, Al Capone, P.T. Barnum, Bernie Madoff, a generic 14 year old schoolyard bully, and the most annoying colicky baby to ever sit near you on a plane. Luckily, I recently realized there was now a missing piece from the earliest days of my callow little TV-addled youth, and that piece is none other than the legendary Anthony Fremont . . .
Click here:
The point is not that Rod Serling predicted both the cowardice of party sycophants and the dilemma of foreign leaders 63 years ahead of time, but rather that both softball and TV can be great escapes as well as a ceaseless source of potential recalibration. So, for example, a new season of Love on the Spectrum has thankfully just dropped, but the second season of Extraordinary Attorney Woo is now a year late, and yet, I will not panic or throw things. No, amigos mios, I will simply continue to provide the succor of weekly aerobic release, and, having tweaked my expectations, I will patiently wait for the joy of Woo’s return to distract me anew from the emetically petulant little Fremontian man-child-slimeball in question. And therefore there will be a game at Codornices this Sunday at 11 IF I get enough commits by this Friday morning . . . Raymond
Which, I believe you will concur, sums things up pretty nicely.
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See you next week!