CRUSHING NUTS

Somewhere between the Via Dolorosa and the Boulevard of Broken Dreams there is a lurking state grace that the holiday season has the potential of bringing out.

I’m not one of those sentimental centurions of custom and hearth who look forward to the festive good cheer of late December like a hobo on a bread line. Quite the contrary. If a surge were called for in the War on Christmas I would be the first to re-enlist. But the winter ritual that never fails to move me and the one I partake in without the slightest reservation is the annual Los Angeles Artist Cookie Bake-Off.

Started over thirty years ago by the doyenne of Southern California post-feminist theory, Shira Hadasha, the event has evolved into something like the Burning Man of the chocolate chip. From the pink-haired post-grad party chicks of Echo Park to the humorless academics of Santa Clarita the whole range of eccentric artist types show up to participate. Within the past couple of years we started including gallerists and curators as well, turning the thing into a shmoozy, boozy networking shangri-la.

As one would expect with a group of creative, high achieving professional women the competition is backbiting and fierce. Vying for the distinction of Best Cookie has turned into a venal blood sport where nascent animosities blossom into full-blown vendettas over issues like gluten, lactose and the prohibitive cost of saffron. For the past few years we’ve enlisted a couple of pajama-patchoulied blissed-out urban orphans from Hare Krishna to act as our impartial judges but even that fails to mollify our most militant competitors.

I love being around women or more precisely, I enjoy the absence of men. The best and the worst of us comes out in an uninhibited, unrestrained way that would be impossible if there were guys present. I’m certain that if we’re not the smarter sex we’re at least the better dressed. We have a lower incidence of bad breath and body odor and when we’re drunk and belligerent we seldom resort to physical violence.

I made a batch of double-baked oatmeal cranberry biscuits this year from a recipe I stole from a woman who moved to New Haven to teach at Yale.  They were a bit too buttery and I ended up feeding most of them to my dog.

He couldn’t tell the difference. He has no taste. He doesn’t care. He’d eat anything. He’s just a raging, slobbering sequence of unreflective appetites and impetuous impulses.

Like most guys.

INSIPID LUTES NEED NOT APPLY: THE HOLIDAYS

I have always considered myself a seeker. The path to enlightenment is a jagged thicket of possibilities. For a while I dabbled in Sufi mysticism. Later I joined an ashram near Seattle where all the female acolytes were expected to offer themselves to the residing guru, a hairy former drummer for the short-lived country western band The Devil You Know. When I finished graduate school I had a lot of time on my hands and I started taking classes on Zen Buddhism at the local community college. That led me to a trip to Japan where I stayed for over ten months retracing the Tokaido Road and meditating of the transitory nature of our lives.

By far, the most serenity and the greatest wisdom that I have found to date was in the Kabbalistic speculations of the ecstatic Los Angeles rabbi Malkizedek Obah Rivli. I have, what you might call, your typical history of drug use – I was particularly fond of Peyote buttons, crushed into a gummy paste and smoked through a hookah – but I have never experienced a high so blissfully profound as the one I get humming a Hasidic niggun with Reb Malki.

The ecstatic Los Angeles Rabbi Malkizedek Obah Rivli, 2011

Coupled with the intense study of Midrash and the Zohar, the mesmeric singing of Eastern European Jewish melodies have elevated me to an entirely new plane of existence. What I love about Reb Malki’s approach is that he is completely uninterested in the religious taboos typically associated with the major faiths. He somehow finds in the Scripture justification for all the pleasures one associates with contemporary life. He is extremely articulate, charming, charismatic and cute and I simply love being around him.

Happy Hanukka!!