Category Archives: de rebus familiaribus

HSPVA-bound! Congratulations Georgia!

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Ever since the girls entered the Suzuki strings music program at Parker Elementary, we have been dreaming that one day they would attend Houston’s Kinder High School for the Performing and Visual Arts, one of the top performing arts schools in the country.

It’s been a long and winding road since Georgia first picked up her violin (and later switched to viola), paved with honest hard work and genuine sacrifice.

Yesterday we learned that she has been accepted into the conservatory program there. Tears are welling in my eyes as I write this.

Congratulations, Georgia! Beautiful child, brainy teen, “old soul” (as so many people call you), you are a dream come true. You are my dream come true.

Not long before she died, my mother wondered out loud if she should have supported me more in my own music journey.

“Watching all you do for the girls’ music,” she said, “it makes me think I should have done that for you.” I really didn’t know what to say. “But you did all right without me,” she added.

Because of the tragedies unfolding in our lives during my teenage years, Judy didn’t have the bandwidth or energy to take interest in my creative or academic life. I was on my own. But I did “alright,” as she told me that day not so long ago.

Watching Georgia thrive and achieve a highest of heights feels like an empty space in my soul is finally being filled up with joy and promise. Had Georgia pursued a different field or path I would be just as happy. But that she’s doing music… wow… man… The dreams deferred (who gets the reference?) are making way for a soul fulfilled.

Congratulations wonderful Georgia! Mommy and I couldn’t be more proud, more happy, and more excited for your bright future! We love you! We love you!

How I finally found the family where I belong. (And they’re all coming over for Passover tonight!)

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One of the wildest stories of my crazy life is how I finally found the family where I belong.

Not long after I moved to Austin to be with Tracie (good move!), a man named Marty Levy started calling me from Houston. I knew who he was — my father’s first cousin. Beyond that, he and his family were strangers to me. That’s because he and my father stopped speaking in the early 1980s when I was a teenager.

As it turns out, Marty and his family like fine dining. Before long, I was commuting to Houston every week for one of the best gigs that I’ve ever had. It was thanks to Marty, a personal friend of Tony Vallone, that I began working with the legendary Texas restaurant Tony’s. The job and the Levys are why we moved here to Houston, a city that I love.

Over the years, the Levy and (Texas) Parzen families have shared countless meals and holidays. We have a lot in common (music, food, wine, academia) and we genuinely love hanging out and caring for one another.

Let’s face it: my San Diego family has never liked me. I used to be close to my older brother. That ended when he became a lawyer more than 30 years ago. My little brother and his wife have shunned me since college. In the run-up to our mother’s death, they seemed to want to have a relationship. But it ultimately emerged that they wanted me to side with them against my older brother. Nice, right? No dice.

Why is my original nuclear family so messed up? I attribute the fracture to the black cloud that has followed us in the wake of horrific crimes committed by our father. It’s not easy to love your own family, I guess, when your dad is featured in the local paper for being a prolific asshole.

Tonight the Levys are coming over for Passover. There will be nearly 20 of us breaking matzos together. It’s a miracle. I came to Texas for Tracie. But Texas gave me the family that loves me. Man, I’m one lucky son of a gun to have escaped the misery of Parzen family California. Gut Yontif! Happy Passover! I’m finally home.

To dream the impossible dream: Talarico for Texas.

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One of the most compelling speeches I’ve ever heard in my life was devoted not to the politics of nation but the politics of wine.

Back when the debate over Brunello di Montalcino was raging (in the wake of Brunellogate, where Brunello bottlers were caught adding unauthorized grapes to their wines, giving them an unfair and illegal market advantage), the appellation held a controversial and closely followed referendum: should Brunello be made with 100 percent Sangiovese grapes, the historic local variety, as tradition encouraged and law required? or should bottlers be allowed to add “international” grapes like Merlot, ostensibly making their wines more market-ready?

It was the legendary Barolo grower, Teobaldo Cappellano, who blew me away with his contribution to a debate streamed over the internets. He was for keeping Brunello the traditional monovarietal wine (just Sangiovese, as it had been made at least since the 1960s).

“Sometimes the battles most worth fighting are the ones you know you are going to lose,” said Baldo as he was known. To dream the impossible dream, as it were.

I’ve lived in Texas for nearly two decades. I can’t remember a year when democratic pundits didn’t claim that “this is the year we are going to turn Texas blue,” or at least “purple.” Rubber tree plants aside, it still hasn’t happened.

That won’t stop our family for believing in and block-walking for Talarico for Texas. Politically and electorally, our state remains Republican dominant. But that doesn’t mean that nearly half of our state’s residents are people like Tracie and me.

For the record here’s the opening of Talarico’s mission statement:

“Our economy is broken. Our politics are broken. Even our relationships with each other feel broken. That’s because the most powerful people in the world want it that way. The biggest divide in this country is not left vs. right. It’s top vs. bottom. Billionaires want us looking left and right at each other instead of looking up at them.”

To dream the impossible dream
To fight the unbeatable foe
To bear with unbearable sorrow
To run where the brave dare not go

To right the unrightable wrong
To be better far than you are
To try when your arms are too weary
To reach the unreachable star

This is my quest, to follow that star
No matter how hopeless, no matter how far

No matter whom you support, please vote this November 3.

WWIII is here and children are dying. We must save the children.

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When I first moved to Texas to be with Tracie, her father was still working as the pastor of a modest church in Orange where Tracie was born and grew up — a small Texas town straight out of central casting. I began helping out with the church website and we attended services regularly.

I’ll never forget Randy leading a prayer for “enemy combatants” (Obama was president and there were troop surges in Afghanistan and Iraq during those years). I’m not a Christian. I’m a Jew. But I was profoundly inspired by his prayers. This, I thought to myself, is what true Christianity is about: knowing, first and foremost, that all people are the children of G-d. Even enemy combatants.

Today, children of G-d are dying every day in Iran, Lebanon, Gaza, Israel, and Ukraine. Lives of honest, earnest young people are being destroyed for wars over weapons and oil: who gets to keep the weapons and who gets to keep the oil.

World War III is here. In Ukraine, it’s Russia vs. the West. In the Middle East, it is the U.S. and Israel who havelaunched a war of aggression on Iran, a conflict that has drawn in multiple countries in the region and beyond. The crusades of all actors are deeply intertwined.

The current American president campaigned on — let me see if I can get this right! — immigration, the economy, and world peace. When it comes to the first issue, he has delivered what he promised. I vehemently disagree with the policy and the tactics. But he has partially achieved what he set out to do. Fair enough.

But when it comes to the economy and world peace, we are clearly moving in the opposite direction from his stated goals.

Now, as always, is a time to pray for vulnerable children. But it’s also time to stand up and speak out: the war on Iran is wrong! It’s being driven by the interests of the powerful. Children — innocent children — are paying the price for the imperial aspirations of world leaders in their 70s.

There are so many things I’d like to be writing about here. But I can’t scribble another word until I say this. War is wrong. Children are dying. Stop the wars now! G-d bless the children. G-d bless us all.

“We’re cooked.” A 12-year-old’s take on the world wars.

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“At least we’re not invading North Korea.”

That’s what our 12-year-old daughter said wryly we watched the evening news yesterday. The president of the U.S. had just said that the U.S. plans to take control of Cuba.

“I think I can do anything I want with it,” said the leader of the (no longer) free world as we watched.

Either way, said our daughter, “we’re cooked.”

Tracie and I struggle with how to talk to our girls about the world wars that unfold nightly on television. We feel strongly that they need to be engaged with world events. They will be exposed to the news, our thinking goes, no matter what we do. But we can help them deal with their feelings by guiding them through nuanced issues they may not understand. Giving them the opportunity to articulate their emotions is the key to their better health, we believe.

But how do you talk to your 12- and 14-year-olds when you can’t contain your weeping at the sight of children dying every day?

Here in America, it can be easy to tune out the wars. In other parts of the world, from what we can see, that’s not the case.

I have an Italian friend, a woman roughly my age, who posts updates on the number of children killed in Iran and Gaza nearly every day. She has kids not much older than ours. As hard as it is to see each night, I try to check in with her feed regularly. We mustn’t ever forget, I say to myself over and over, that children are dying every day in imperial wars driven by petroleum and humans’ will to power.

“All things are subject to interpretation,” wrote Nietzsche. “Whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.” The philosopher’s (in)famous aphorism seems more relevant than ever, especially in the age and rage of social media.

We teach our children to look beyond the projections of power, to seek truth, however ethereal it may be.

Our truth? We must stop these wars before more children die. G-d bless the children.

Image: “Boy seated in wreckage of building after a bombing raid of London during World War II,” Library of Congress, 1945.

The Oscars won’t be the same without her.

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Everyone who knows me well knows that I used to speak to my mother nearly every day.

Even when I was living in New York in the late 1990s, we always made time to catch up, if not every day, then every other day.

After she passed in October of last year, it’s been really hard to fill those 30 minutes we would spend on the phone.

This is the time of year that she would be telling me about the Oscars, one of her favorite events of the year.

She would watch nearly all the films in competition and handicap them with her friends. And then on Oscars night, she would cook dinner and host a watch party for a friend (usually Marie; I would provide the wine).

It was a sine qua non day in her calendar.

There’s a great line from the song Gram Parsons wrote for his mother, “Brass Buttons”: “And the sun gets up without her/doesn’t know she’s gone.”

That’s how I’m feeling today knowing that I can’t call Judy and ask her who her favorites-to-win are. And she won’t be drinking that bottle of Etna white that I left her in her fridge.

Tracie, the girls, and I will watch the red carpet tonight. It’s the first year of the Oscars without Judy. I miss her so much.

A need for joy as the world falls to pieces.

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As a 19-year-old student of Italian, I was obsessed with Neorealist cinema.

That’s a shot from the closing scene of “Rome Open City,” Roberto Rossellini’s iconic 1945 film, one of the most famous works made during the war era.

Watching those movies — “Paison,” “Bitter Rice,” “Bicycle Thieves”… — as a young adult was a life-changing experience for me. Their characters were superhumans in my mind, capable of facing the worst that life could deal them: war, persecution, hunger, loss of liberty, death. It helped me to understand the hardship endured by my paternal great-grandparents, who were born into deep poverty in Russia (they fled the Cossacks in the first decade of the last century).

Yet those characters, often real people who had been recruited from the street, were also all too human. Italian filmmakers’ brilliant work brought their suffering to the screen in a (neo) real way that the world had never seen before.

I dreamed that I could be as strong when confronted by the life-and-death decisions that people in war are forced to make. I hoped that I could be as graceful were I ever to find myself in the bellic worst-case-scenario like those victims of imperialist war.

Today, Tracie, the girls, and I watch scenes on TV that seem plucked from a Neorealist film: the raids targeting brown people in our country, protesters being shot by federal agents, the concentration camps where brown people are treated like animals (see Pontecorvo’s “Kapò”), the imperial wars in Iran and Ukraine, the plight of Palestinian children…

Sometimes I wonder if we are just another bourgeois family in 1933 quietly pretending that the world isn’t falling apart. Actually, it’s more like 1939 at this point.

At our dinner table, we talk every night about the tragedies unfolding across our planet.

But like those Neorealist characters, we also try to find beauty and joy in the world around us, in the mundane as it were, in each other. If we didn’t, all would be lost. Maybe it was those characters’ fleeting joy, however ephemeral, that gave them the courage to withstand the unthinkable. I hope so.

Stop using the word “ghetto” unless you really know what it means!

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Something that blew my mind: when my post about my support for Jasmine Crockett blew up (300+ comments and counting), people assailing me from both hard right and hard left used the word “ghetto” in their attacks.

Do they even know what the term means?

Many will be surprised to learn that the word ghetto is Italian in origin. And to be more exact, Venetian in origin.

The first ghetto in history was founded in Venice in the early 16th century, in the neighborhood where the city’s foundries were located. The word “gheto” in Venetian dialect denotes “foundry” (its Latin origins bring it back to iectare, “to throw,” gettare in Italian).

That was the first ghetto in history, created by the Venetians to concentrate the Jews.

The term spread through Europe as other cities mirrored the Venetians’ racist policy.

By the mid-19th century, ghetto came to denote a place where a racial or ethnic group was segregated from the greater community.

The Oxford English Dictionary gives this definition from 1855 forward: “Any area occupied predominantly by a particular social or ethnic group, esp. a densely populated urban area which is subject to social and economic pressures, tending to restrict its demographic profile; an enclave. Also in extended (and sometimes ironic) use.”

An example from Melville: “The belittered Ghetto, forward of the main-mast, wholly occupied by the blacks.”

By the late 19th century, a new meaning emerged: “Originally and chiefly in the United States: a socially and economically disadvantaged inner-city area predominantly populated by African American people” (Oxford English Dictionary).

We don’t use or teach our children to use the word in our house. It’s a historic term in our view, a word that has been used to disparage Black people in our country since before I was born.

If you didn’t vote for Jasmine Crockett because she’s Black and you think that other white people wouldn’t vote for her, well, I’ve got news for you. Your doubly racist. (I’m echoing the words of one of my favorite Houston-based political bloggers, Erika Harrison, @blackgirlswhobrunch; thank you Erika for your awesome writing on the campaign!)

And oh yeah, stop using the word ghetto unless you are going to use it correctly and respectfully!

Photo credit: “Venezia – Cartello di ingresso al Ghetto” by Luca Paolini, CC BY-ND 2.0.

American trolls: 200+ comments, many racist and nasty, from people I don’t know.

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Since when is temperate civil discourse about politics considered intolerable in this country?

Oh yeah, I forgot, it became officially intolerable when in 2016 when Trump disparaged Ted Cruz’s wife and Rubio’s hands.

In case you had any doubts, in May 2024, Taylor Green insulted Jasmine Crockett about her eyelashes and we barely batted one. Crockett responded by commenting on Taylor Green’s “bleach-blonde, bad-built, butch body.”

When I posted my preference for Crockett in yesterday’s Texas primary race, I was expecting to get maybe 30-40 interactions.

Instead I got three times that much and more than 200 comments, many of the overtly racist and nasty, from people I don’t know.

The trolls on Facebook have been out to get me for a while (since I started posting about FIEL). But the oversized response to my simple expression of political joy and hope shows that people like me are targets.

I’ve lived in Texas now for nearly 20 years. Over those decades, I’ve observed the trollification of our state government and the Texasification of the federal government.

One of the best overviews of the Texan political panorama I’ve read is “Paxton Is a Texas-Size Troll. Is That What G.O.P. Voters Want?” by conservative political commentator Kevin Williamson, published today by the Times.

“Texas is more closely divided than you might think,” writes Williamson. “That is in part because Texas is no longer entirely the land of ‘wide open spaces’ but an increasingly urban state, home to six of the 25 largest cities in the country and two of the five largest metropolitan areas. Republicans do not typically fare well in urban areas — they haven’t won a mayoral election in Houston in more than 40 years.”

Williamson calls out Paxton for his corruption and trolling (see the title): “Paxton might be described, without exaggeration, as the most scandal-plagued politician in the country.”

He also calls out Jasmine Crockett for her own brand of trolling: “Ms. Crockett rode that pony a long way.”

I’m disappointed by Crockett’s loss but am giving my 1,000 percent support to Talarico. Let’s hope it’s Paxton v. Talarico, that’s a fight I’d like to see.

Vote Jasmine Crockett! Texas isn’t just a bunch of John Waynes (despite what the white people think)!

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One of my favorite California-Texas put-downs was voiced by sister-in-law, my little brother’s wife.

“How can you live in Texas with all those awful people?” she chided me not long after I moved here to be with Tracie.

People outside our state love to put us down.

Back when she said that to me, I wanted to (but didn’t) tell her: what about all the Brown and Black people who live in my state? Are they awful, too? Or is it only the white people who look like you?

Guess what! There is more to Texas than John Wayne and the movies!

Anyone who’s ever spent time here knows the answer to that, unless they’ve only hung out in the Woodlands and at the Yacht Club.

According to the pundits, Texas has the largest number of eligible Black voters in the U.S.

And a lot of folks here are getting excited about Jasmine Crockett’s campaign for senate.

I like both James Talarico and Jasmine Crockett. But I am convinced that she is the stronger candidate for the moment.

I believe that she can mount a more compelling campaign against Cornyn or Paxton.

Can you imagine a race between Paxton, one of the most corrupt politicians in Texas history (and that’s saying a lot!), and Crockett? Even if she didn’t prevail, her ability to reveal GOP hypocrisy would further our cause.

G-d bless both Dems. But my vote is with Jasmine!

If you haven’t already, please vote, my fellow Texans! Either way, we need to show up on voting day if we want to change our country’s racist and imperial policies.

We’ll send all the awful people to San Diego to be with my brother and his wife. They deserve each other.