Maybe not for the $5 gift pile...

"When I listen to music, I want to hear a person and a person that I trust. I don't want to hear the sound of a culture..."
-David Berman

I am not Jewish. I was brought up a light and liberal Catholic. As a teen I remember almost wishing I was a Jew. I guess I saw it as a culturally rich, underdog ritual... kind of like punk music but with cultural richness. I didn't know if my culture was a culture and I saw this as a bad thing.

For Christmas, I was going to give myself a portrait of David Berman but I couldn't find an online image good enough to render fully (there he is in caricature form below the Menorah). I've been into his music and poetry very much lately. Even his drawings have a great clumsy kind of truth to them... like an American David Shrigley.

Other Jews featured above:

Celluloid Loyd, owner of a video rental called "Watch This" in downtown Portland.
We share coffee and smokes after work sometimes. He has a great sense of humor and knows his movies well. If you shop at his store, don't call him Celluloid Loyd.

On the bottom left is Franz Kafka. Last night I read an old national geographic article from the seventies called "Six Months Alone in a Cave". The author, Michel Siffre, spent six months sealed in a Texas cave (one-hundred feet under ground) to study the internal rhythms of humans when all calendars, clocks, and daylight are removed. The experience did not go well for him. About three months into it, he panicked, certain that he had inhaled the evaporated urine of rabies infected bats. I did not know that rabies could be transmitted this way, but it can. Reading this, I couldn't help thinking about Kafka's "The Burrow". Though Siffre's account is more of a "fish out of water" tale, both stories share a certain panicked ego and a fear of time wasted. Something I can relate to.

On the top is Mathieu Schneider. All time leading Jewish scorer in NHL history.

I guess this drawing was going to be a cheap sort of tribute to some interesting Jews, for the $5 or less gift pile of our Christmas/Chanukah wine-athon. I must disclaim that the inclusion of the plug-in Menorah and Jewish wine is maybe even too garish for me. Oh well. I'll give it to my buddy Adam (you know, as a joke) and throw some red and green lighters on the pile.

Happy Holidays...