Christopher Noxon

Art and ancestors and that feeling of “this is IT”

https://www.christophernoxon.com//art_and_ancestors_and_that_feeling_of_this_is_it

I struggle with the words to describe how good it feels to have my first real show alongside Betty, how it connects me to her and my dad and also Charlie, whose presence and absence was such a powerful force in the creation of these pictures.  I don’t understand how these static, two-dimensional rectangular depictions have this power, a kind of mysterious charge that electrifies the connective threads between the here and there, the living and the dead, the seen and unseen, the known and not.

Written for a monograph to accompany exhibit showing at Sullivan Goss Gallery in Santa Barbara, through May 22: “Betty Lane and Christopher Noxon: From One Generation to the Next”:

—-

Betty Lane is my favorite artist. Of course she is - my whole idea of what an artist is and does was formed growing up looking at her pictures and visiting her little A-frame house in the woods of Cape Cod. She was witchy, stylish, a near-mythic figure representative of worlds far removed from where I grew up in sunny, showbiz-adjacent LA. She played viola in a classical quartet, wore necklaces fashioned from eucalyptus pods and sent my sister Marti and me rambling, weirdly adult letters in a scrawl that only my dad could decipher.

And she’s the main reason I make art today.

How that happened is complicated -  I came to painting in midlife, twenty-odd years after she died, and when I think back over our times together I can only remember once when she directly encouraged me. When I was seven or eight I made what I called a “busy picture,” with jagged orange mountains and a spotted green sky and the remainder of the page jigsawed with trees and bushes and roads and horses and, curiously, an entire city with skyscrapers the same scale as the bushes.

I remember her seeing it and grinning, clasping her hands in front of her face, heavy rings clanking together. Then she put my busy picture in a frame and hung it up in her house, right alongside the “real art.” (It’s not lost on me that the work I’m doing today looks an awful like that busy picture - so much for growing up!)

My memories of her will always be tied up in that house. You entered from the basement, where she did most of her work. Bits of colored glass hung in the window. A stuffed dinosaur sat on the chair for models. Everywhere there were paintings, stack upon stack, many on both sides of a single sheet of particle board.

Upstairs, the wooden skeleton of a pterodactyl spun slowly over a rollout desk stuffed with letters and postcards. Shelf tops were crammed with a crazy assortment of stuff—a chunk of mosaic, a swath of fishing net, a patchwork pillow, a model of a double decker bus, the inner workings of a music box. She didn’t keep these things as ornaments—she seemed to carry on a relationship with even the littlest of objects, and most gave her real pleasure. A few did not—I remember a compact disc by Bobby McFerrin had been marked with a piece of masking tape, printed with the words, “No! No!” (“Don’t Worry Be Happy” was not Grandbetty’s jam).

By the time I moved to the Cape in 1992, Betty had stopped making art. Her hands jittered, she said. She was past 80, rail thin and fiercely independent. She still tore around in her little Accord, a string of fading yarn tied to the antenna, a sticker for Michael Dukakis’ failed presidential bid on the bumper. She walked with a stoop and had a hard time getting up from a chair, but her eyesight was perfect—she took great pleasure playing a video of her cataract operation. “My eye!” she giggled, pointing at the television picture of a quivering pink glob.

I visited her on my days off work. She always made a fuss at first, shuffling around the house fetching things. A peanut butter jar filled with old raisins. A ceramic dish filled with unsalted peanuts. Cold white wine in a shrimp cocktail glass. We would talk local politics, the new New Yorker, the threat of snow.

She died a few years after I’d moved away. My father Nick and his wife Nicky helped organize an exhibit at the Cape Cod Museum of Fine Arts; family flew in for the show. In the following years Nick took on the job of sorting through her art, diaries and ephemera, assembling a biography made up mostly of her extraordinary diary entries and promoting her work in ways she was either too proud or shy to do herself.

It’s moving to think of my dad poring over all this material, filling stacks of legal pads with notes on her paintings and chapters of her life, including a frank, brutal account of her pregnancy, the chilly and mostly distant relationship with Nick’s father and various tortured, passionate love affairs (with a Jewish divorcé named Harry, a family friend and a man only identified as “Mr X.”)

I began looking after Betty’s paintings and papers a few years ago shortly after a big shift in my own life. I had recently moved out of LA to the small mountain town of Ojai and was dealing with the aftermath of a divorce and the sudden death of my eldest son.

Grieving is exhausting and infuriating - the feelings rage, the voices in your head run on repeat and everything seems to hit a dead end (he’s gone, she’s gone, they’re gone, you’ll be dead soon too…). While I had no formal training, I took up painting, holing up in a studio tucked in a grove of olive trees. Art offered an escape from the doom loop, a place where I didn’t really know who was doing the work, where the best I could do was get out of the way and let whatever needed to come arrive. I painted to get lost, to lose myself, to connect with something bigger and beyond me.

And Betty was my teacher. Early on I did a series of pictures modeled on hers, pairing portraits she’d done of subjects from the 60s and 70s beside pictures of my Ojai friends and neighbors and looking at Betty’s landscapes of Canada and Cape Cod while working on my own pictures of the landforms and skies I saw on walks near my new home.

As inspiring as her work was, Betty’s a tough teacher. She went through so many stages, so many modes, from gloomy surrealism to moddish satire. She was obviously a modern artist, but she wasn’t interested in categories like surreal, expressionist, primitive, writing at one point that “the more I work the less important style seems, the less essential. One is either good, and has it, or one hasn’t. Style is only the means.”

That’s a tough lesson for someone starting out - either you’re good or you’re not. But elsewhere in the diaries I found more encouraging ideas. In 1942 Betty was living in rural Canada, raising my dad and occasionally venturing out into the countryside to paint. She described a trip into the sand dunes of southeast Ontario:

There is a beautiful Petrified Forest of dead and somewhat submerged cedar trees. I walked towards this in pure delight feeling that indefinable, this-is-it feeling….I have been here before. There it is, clean and dead and still there, and one cannot not paint it.

That’s how it is - you see something, some particular combination of things, some brilliant scene of light or color or form and you feel deep down in your bones: one cannot not paint it.  What Betty is describing - the this is it feeling - is the mysterious act of art, the verb not the noun, the aligning of an interior unknowingness and an external sensory reality, the transcendent sense of YESness, or order and harmony and congruence: THIS IS IT.

I struggle with the words to describe how good it feels to have my first real show alongside Betty, how it connects me to her and my dad and also Charlie, whose presence and absence was such a powerful force in the creation of these pictures.  I don’t understand how these static, two-dimensional rectangular depictions have this power, a kind of mysterious charge that electrifies the connective threads between the here and there, the living and the dead, the seen and unseen, the known and not.

Back in 1936, Betty wrote the following in her diary:

“I am no intellectual and no genius, but I am capable of experience, and I am still discovering things which make me feel alive, so that you others may shout your heads off about this theory and that. With me, life is going on, and nothing else matters.”

That’s why Betty painted, and I why I do too.

 

Posted on 04.20.23 at 12:05 pm

But what does it MEAN?

https://www.christophernoxon.com//but_what_does_it_mean

A confession: I’m at a loss when it comes to art talk. Which is weird - I spent a career working as a journalist and author and while I only started painting seriously three years ago, I feel like I shouldn’t have any problem putting my work in words, or appreciating and fully comprehending writing about art.

Nope. I get clammy and tongue-tied describing why I paint what I paint, where it “comes from,” and what I love in the work of artists I revere. Meanwhile most writing about art leaves me baffled and confused and vaguely annoyed.

During a recent trip to a contemporary art museum, for example, my daughter and I entered an entirely empty room with only a faint scent of…  what? Was it air freshener? A wall label had a long paragraph that ended with this sentence:

“With its invisibility, this sculpture of odors lacks materiality and captures the nature of the painting to convey an olfactory memory.”

Leaving aside my feelings about this particular piece – which, with its “invisibility” and “lack of materiality,” hit me like the height of fancy-pants hokum – I was stuck by this peak example of offputting, gobbledegook art talk. Maybe, as my artist friends tell me, it’s a coded language used by gallerists and dealers to justify value for the highfalutin academic crowd.

Or maybe it’s just like my daughter put it: “Word salad.”

Of course there’s a lot of great writing about art - I’ve loved discovering Jerry Saltz, the former long haul truck driver now chief critic at New York Magazine (Recent Tweet: “Do not ask what a work of art means. Ask what a work of art does to you. Art is not a thing, or a noun. Art is a verb. Art is something that does something to you.”) And a few months ago I was fortunate enough to be reviewed by the art critic for the LA Weekly, who wrote that my “riotously chromatic, time- and space-bending canvases seek the energy of the landscape’s wild places, infused with the pluripotentiality of the mind’s eye… Noxon’s investigations in form and color mirror the adventures unfolding in his consciousness - and the persistent sense that everything is alive and fundamentally connected, even beyond what our eyes can see.”

Wow, right? I had to look up “pluripotentiality” (defined as the “ability to develop in any one of several different ways, or to affect more than one organ or tissue”) but I was grateful for the new word – and in deploying her arsenal of art theoretics, she identified something in my pictures that I hadn’t known consciously but is unmistakably there.

Meanwhile in my studio when people come to visit – and I’ll be open March 11 all day as part of the Ojai Studio Artists Second Saturday program, come by! – I’m still mostly tongue-tied when asked about a painting. I can handle the most common questions: where is that? What kind of paint are you using? But I’m totally unhelpful when it comes to the question: what does it MEAN?

Sometimes I’ll start out with an idea in mind - about the interconnectedness of nature or the way landscapes have been historically used as promotion in the exploitation or settling of wild lands.  But then the tools take over, the paint starts moving and honestly I’m not thinking at all. Painting for me is a feeling, an experience, a devotional practice that exists way beyond words.

So I guess my only answer to the question of what does it mean is another question:

How does it make you feel?

So I’ll keep feeling and studying and hoping that over time, the work leads me to more new places and even some better words to describe it.

Posted on 03.09.23 at 08:54 am

LA Weekly Q&A

https://www.christophernoxon.com//la_weekly_qa

Thrilled to be featured in the LA Weekly - arts editor Shana Nys Dambrot offered a critical assessment of my work and a Q&A that featured this exchange:

L.A. WEEKLY: When did you first know you were an artist?
CHRISTOPHER NOXON: Oh man the capital-A Artist question — that’s a doozy and one I’ve struggled with a lot, especially since I spent most of my life as a capital-W Writer, working as a journalist and writing books while compulsively sketching in journals and eventually getting into illustration. I started painting seriously in midlife so I’d rather just say I make art, which vibes with my two core beliefs that 1) identity is a trap, and 2) verbs over nouns.

The timing is terrific, with my landscape “Awha’y 2” appearing in a show opening Dec 10 at Gallery 825 on La Cienega curated by MoCA curator Rebecca Lowery. This is my first time showing in my old stomping grounds - excited to bring my “wild idyl” art to the big city!

Posted on 12.02.22 at 05:36 pm

Matilija Canyon (Big Weirdie 1)

https://www.christophernoxon.com//matilija_canyon_big_weirdie_1

Posted on 09.29.22 at 01:19 pm

Home and inner pages

https://www.christophernoxon.com//home_and_inner_pages

Posted on 09.28.22 at 12:44 pm

Matilija Canyon (Big Weirdie 1)

https://www.christophernoxon.com//matilija_canyon_big_weirdie_1

Posted on 09.26.22 at 10:46 am

Making pictures

https://www.christophernoxon.com//ojai_open_studio

For those of you who know me mostly from my writing, a recap: I started painting seriously after moving to Ojai in 2020. I was wrecked from the loss of my son and started working in the studio behind my house mainly as something to do besides feel miserable. Writing has always been super hard for me - I love having written but the truth is I kinda hate to write. I literally have to set a timer to make myself do it (OK for the next 30 minutes ONLY NEW WORDS NO CHECKING EMAIL OR DICKING AROUND). I know if I concentrate and work really hard, I can get the words to sound something like me. Making art isn’t like that. I’m out of my head. The truth is I don’t know what I’m doing. I sometimes have to set a timer to know when to STOP. I love all the materials and techniques and colors and layers. And the best part is I don’t know what’s going to happen or how something will turn out. I feel like I’m a witness more than a maker.

When I started I was mostly doing paintings of crowds, scenes of protest marches similar to the illustrations in my book “Good Trouble: Lessons from the Civil Rights Playbook.” In those pictures of bodies forming big abstract patterns, I was trying to capture the feeling of being in a group gathered around a higher purpose. I was also, it only occurred to me after many months and many paintings, using art to fill a more personal need (isn’t that always the case?). It was the height of the pandemic and like so many of us, I felt isolated and lonely and terrified at the state of the world. I craved crowds. I was like a cartoon man crawling across a desert, drawing pictures of pitchers of cold water.

At a certain point I switched from people to places. I can tell you precisely when that happened - it was a bright early summer morning and I was sitting in my studio, looking out the barn doors at an enormous outcropping of pricky pear cactus. In a flash, heads and bodies appeared in the shapes, a whole gathering right outside my door.

I made a so-so painting of those cacti and was off to the races, chasing scenes and panoramas and shapes and colors from walks and hikes and travels around Ojai and the surrounding wilderness. The work has gone from flat and graphic to layered and scratchy and abstractly patterned. I try to let the pictures tell me what they want and get out of the way. I believe it: the vortex is real. There’s an energy and spirit in this place, as tangible and powerful as the feeling you get amid crowds of people raising their voices together. It’s a simultaneous feeling of awe and humility, of togetherness and singularity, of personal insignificance and limitless possibility. The landscape contains it all.

Posted on 09.22.22 at 03:47 pm

To Charlie (on your 23rd birthday)

https://www.christophernoxon.com//to_charlie_on_your_23rd_birthday

Twenty three - where would you be?
(Also, for real: where are you now?)
Imagine you in grad school, or abroad, or doing a fancy fellowship.
Maybe a junior diplomat or working for the CIA.
Please tell me you’re not toiling in a hedge fund.
Or maybe you’re floundering.
Stuck in a stupid job, roving the world, out on Rumspringa.
Finding your way.
It’s fine, really!
Just remember to call home, answer texts, don’t worry so much.
It’ll all work out.
You’ll be OK.
Ha.

Up until recently
When we called your cell we could hear your voice
(OUTGOING MESSAGE, how perfect).
So sweet and sad to hear you:
Smart, funny, gracious, silly, deep, scattered, eager to please.
It felt good and bad: the love of you, the loss of you.
Then one day this summer Oscar called and nothing.
Line disconnected.

It hit hard - harder than it should’ve (of course the line went dead what did we expect).
Still, it brought out one of the few things I’ve learned about all this:
Disconnection is not OK.
There’s so much that’s senseless and unknowable
(Why? How? What now?)
But this much is true:
You cannot be disconnected, erased, forgotten, deleted, moved past.
There is no “letting you go.”
(Fuck right off, “Ghost” and those tales of spirits freed once loved ones “move on” - that’s just toxic propaganda so non-grievers can feel less uncomfortable).

And so we hang on to what we can get:
Memories, reminders, breakdowns, “deathaversaries” and birthdays.
Feelings and rituals and visits to your grave
Saying the kaddish and being there for others in pain
Toasts at family meals and sharing of photos and stories
And nurturing and prioritizing and asking the question:
How do I honor you?
How do I make you proud?
How do I keep you here?

So happy 23rd, wherever you are.
We’re all here loving and remembering and celebrating you
As best we can.

Love,
Dad

Posted on 09.19.22 at 12:30 pm

Meditation Mount (Big Weirdie 2)

https://www.christophernoxon.com//meditation_mount_big_weirdie_2

Posted on 09.19.22 at 12:03 pm

Can We Talk about Israel?: A Guide for the Curious, Confused, and Conflicted

https://www.christophernoxon.com//can_we_talk_about_israel_a_guide_for_the_curious_confused_and_conflicted

Order the book from Bookshop.org

Can We Talk about Israel?: A Guide for the Curious, Confused, and Conflicted

A clear-headed, even-handed, plain-spoken primer on the state of Israel, Can We Talk About Israel? A Guide for the Curious, Confused and Conflicted is what happens when you make a book you wish existed. Written by my dear friend Daniel Sokatch with illustrations, graphs and maps by me, it’s an incisive overview of the history and political dynamics in Israel and a must for anyone who wants to understand what’s happening over there without the posturing or heavy-handed polemics.

“Can’t you just explain the Israel situation to me? In, like, 10 minutes or less?” This is the question Daniel is used to answering on an almost daily basis as the head of the New Israel Fund, an organization dedicated to equality and democracy for all Israelis, not just Jews.

Can We Talk About Israel? is the story of that conflict, and of why so many people feel so strongly about it without actually understanding it very well at all. It is an attempt to grapple with a century-long struggle between two peoples that both perceive themselves as (and indeed are) victims. And it’s an attempt to explain why Israel (and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict) inspires such extreme feelings-why it seems like Israel is the answer to “what is wrong with the world” for half the people in it, and “what is right with the world” for the other half. Is there any other topic about which so many intelligent, educated and sophisticated people express such strongly and passionately held convictions, and about which they actually know so little?

• “If you fall into the camp of the “curious, confused, and conflicted,” then this book is for you. [Sokatch] promises the reader that “after you’ve read it, you’ll be able to hold your own in any Israel conversation, at any dinner party.” He delivers on this promise, providing an engaging and evenhanded … history of the conflict, from its 19th-century origins to the most recent mini-war between Israel and Hamas in May 2021.” -The New York Times Book Review

• “We live in an age diseased with certainty, but Daniel Sokatch has the bravery to come along with an antidote that suggests that there is always so much more than one truth. Sokatch embraces the Whitmanesque notion that we are large and we contain multitudes. He allows us to understand that it is more difficult-but exceedingly more rewarding-to think kaleidoscopically about others. He disrupts and therefore re-nuances the accepted narratives, and he does this with great generosity of style and spirit. This is an important book, exceedingly well written, full of insight and empathy and even humor in the face of all available evidence.” ―Colum McCann, National Book Award-winning author of LET THE GREAT WORLD SPIN and APEIROGON

• “Everything that so often seems lacking in our thoughts, feelings, and arguments about Israel and Palestine-clarity, fair-mindedness, and universal compassion-can be found in this elegantly written and surprisingly entertaining book.” ―Michael Chabon & Ayelet Waldman

Posted on 12.02.21 at 05:15 pm

Op-Ed: Book banning in 2021? Why my book has been removed from school shelves

Op-Ed on the banning of “Good Trouble” in Virginia Beach schools.

Amid the Virginia governor’s race, in which conservatives are furiously campaigning to activate their base, a proposed book ban in Virginia Beach schools is playing out a familiar piece of political theater: whipping up moral panic over public education while stoking racial fears. In fact, banning books from schools has become a favorite tactic in the runup to elections around the country.

Among the six books being challenged in Virginia Beach are Toni Morrison’s novel “The Bluest Eye”; “Gender Queer,” a graphic memoir by Maia Kobabe; “Beyond Magenta: Transgender Teens Speak Out” by Susan Kuklin; “Lawn Boy” by Jonathan Evison; and “A Lesson Before Dying” by Ernest J. Gaines. Backers of the ban describe the books as “abhorrent” and “pornographic,” with one parent claiming at a school board meeting last week that the books “groom” young people for sexual predators.

Also in this lot is a book I wrote and illustrated: “Good Trouble: Lessons From the Civil Rights Playbook.” The inclusion of this history of the civil rights movement is both curious and confounding as it is devoid of both sex and profanity, two frequent reasons cited for banning books in schools.

I could pretend to be shocked and horrified, but the truth is, the controversy has helped “Good Trouble.” While my book has been removed from three high school libraries while under review, the ban has raised curiosity among readers about the kind of institutional oppression and racism described in its pages.

Maybe I shouldn’t get too excited, since I’ve learned that Evison, the author of “Lawn Boy” — a widely praised coming-of-age novel — received threats and was called a “pedo” and “sicko” after a video of a mom reading from an explicit scene from the book to a Texas school board went viral on TikTok.

According to the school district, none of the six books had been previously flagged by parents as objectionable. Nevertheless, school board member Victoria Manning and a minority bloc of conservative members on the 11-member board succeeded in having the six titles yanked from school libraries pending review.

That review process is ongoing for five of the titles, and “Gender Queer” has been removed permanently after review by the district superintendent and staff, with a spokesperson saying the book’s images did not meet the division’s “expectations for instructional value.”

“I would like to ask that you pull these books from the shelves and also block electronic access by students to getting these books IMMEDIATELY,” Manning wrote school administrators.

“I’m sickened by what I’ve just looked at and read.”

As far as my book goes, Manning told the Virginian-Pilot that she had not read it and didn’t have concerns with it, but other parents brought it to her attention. Curious to understand more about my offense, I reached out to her and three other board members via phone and email. No word back as yet.

The only specific objection to “Good Trouble” raised so far relates to an illustration in the opening chapter of activists at the National Policy Institute giving a Nazi salute celebrating the election of Donald Trump. Divisive? Surely — also factual.

Still, it’s not hard to guess what backers of the ban find so dangerous about a book about civil rights, one that takes its title from Congressman John Lewis’ rallying cry to take action against injustice. It’s just one more cynical effort by entrenched powers to harness fear of “otherness” to win elections and reverse the fight for racial equality.

“Good Trouble” was written before the current furor over critical race theory, but no doubt its detractors view it as another attempt to rewrite and complicate the usual triumphant “look how far we’ve come” narrative. This seems to be dangerous stuff to conservatives like Manning, who has appeared on “Fox & Friends” to decry teaching about racism and who keeps a “wokeness checker” on her personal blog to fight the district’s equity policy.

Last month the Virginia Beach school board voted on a similar “equity resolution” that, among other things, would have barred teaching the idea that white people bear any responsibility for actions taken in the past by others of their race. That resolution failed to pass — permanently banning the five books still under review may too. District officials say they expect a final decision on the books by mid-December. Still, backers of the ban have succeeded in their real aim: getting so-called “objectionable” books removed from shelves and stoking fear and outrage to shore up the conservative base.

Make no mistake: Banning certain books from schools isn’t about protecting children from pornography. Once there are permanent bans on works like “Gender Queer,” the forces that find books dangerous will predictably throw in books like “Good Trouble,” which embraces the idea that conservatives are likely to find most infuriating of all: “Civil rights didn’t begin with Rosa Parks and it didn’t end with the Civil Rights Act. The story of oppression and resistance is as old as the country, and as current as today’s news.”

LA Times, Nov 2, 2021

SLOW

https://www.christophernoxon.com//slow

Posted on 11.10.21 at 01:47 pm

Signs

https://www.christophernoxon.com//signs

Posted on 11.10.21 at 01:29 pm

Orchard paintings

https://www.christophernoxon.com//orchard_paintings

Posted on 11.10.21 at 01:01 pm

Agave

https://www.christophernoxon.com//agave

Posted on 11.10.21 at 12:58 pm

My book was banned and it’s awful/amazing; I am horrified/honored

https://www.christophernoxon.com//my_book_was_banned_and_its_awful_amazing_i_am_horrified_honored

Book ban, Good Trouble, Virginia Beach

The LA Times just published my Op-Ed about how power and politics is playing out in a ban on “Good Trouble.” I appeared on LA Times Today to discuss the ban with host Lisa McRee.

News that “Good Trouble” is among six books targeted in a ban by conservative school board members in Virginia Beach is disturbing and outrageous - it’s also great for “Good Trouble.” A book that was previously languishing in the stacks of three school libraries in the district is now on a well-publicized hit list of Forbidden Material - what could be more attractive to curious readers than that?

There’s lots to say about the ban and why they included my book in their list, but my basic take is this: the ban isn’t about “protecting” kids from “critical race theory” or “pornography.” It’s about power and oppression and cynical efforts to win elections by whipping up fear among fearful white conservatives (the six books on the list include two prominent Black authors, three that deal with gender and sexuality and my book - huh).

If you haven’t already, please get a copy of “Good Trouble” and/or leave a review on Amazon, donate a copy to a school library, gift it to any and all the people in your life looking for inspiration and knowhow about how to answer oppression with big-hearted, community-minded, multi-racial direct action and reconciliation.

Posted on 11.02.21 at 07:20 am

Dear Charlie (on your 22nd birthday)

https://www.christophernoxon.com//dear_charlie_on_your_22nd_birthday

Dear Charlie,

Hey kiddo! Dad here, writing to you at 3 am on a Wednesday, up with my fuzzy emotional support dog snoozing against my leg and a big mug of ginger tea and the feeling that I’ve spent way too much time ruminating over this TRIBUTE I need to deliver to you in my Grief Group tomorrow.

It’s freaking me out. What I’ve been stuck on is HOW. I don’t want to do a speech or PERFORM anything. I don’t want to pick out emotional songs for a memorial playlist, or make anything that turns you into some kind of mythical figure.

Point is, there’s simply no way to get across all the ways you’re important to me, or the ways you were unique, or what your passing has meant to your brother and sister and friends and so many people beyond.

It’s all too much.

Our hearts are shattered. They always will be. That’s just what we get, After Charlie (AC).

But you don’t need to hear about all that SADNESS. We’ve had enough of that in the last 500 days. 502 to be precise. That’s a lot of days, and God Charlie so much has HAPPENED - a global pandemic, civil unrest, attacks on democracy, fires and floods and ever more evidence that the world is spinning closer and closer to some kind of Great Unraveling.

I said it a lot in the months after your death but it’s still true: your passing seemed to kick off a cascading chain - things got knocked off their foundations when you went. The normal order is out of whack, all over.

Thank God the family is mostly OK. Not that everyone’s not damaged and fucked up, obviously. Grandpam died back in March and that was as painful and drawn-out as your death was shocking and sudden. But as we approach what would’ve been your 22nd birthday, it feels like everyone’s fine, knock wood. No one got COVID - and Bubbie beat her pancreatic cancer and will probably outlive us all.

You should see Oscar - he grew like two feet and started WORKING OUT - he’s now almost as tall as you and looks like some kind of soulful Tim Riggins jock. Plus he’s getting all-As and just got his driver’s license and has an actual girlfriend, a nice Jewish girl from the Valley who plays guitar in an inde rock band and does KARATE. He still gives the best hugs ever and is free with his feelings about losing you, but basically, yeah - he’s killing it at being a teenager… in a way both you and your sister never quite managed. You’d be proud, and prolly a little jealous.

Eliza spent the year of lockdown holed up in New York, doing a Zoom job for the Jewish Book Council, then went back to Brown over the summer and seems to have hit her stride. Just like you seemed to take every course that sounded hard and impressive-sounding, she’s taking everything weird and wonderful. She’s designing her own major: “interdisciplinary artistic practice,” which sounds impressive but will hopefully allow her to keep on using her Ivy League education to do things like build wooden boats, make fires with electronic instruments and decorate a porta-potty on campus with streamers and pom poms for an immersive theater project called “Porta-Party.”

Also she’s been dating a little - she doesn’t share much, but I take it she’s worked her way through two guys in her Dungeons and Dragons campaign - one of whom is a THEY. So that’s very intriguing, tho I guess just how it goes these days? You’re always on her mind.

Now this is sounding like one of those braggy Christmas letters. And why am I bothering: don’t you KNOW all this already? Aren’t you following along? Who am I trying to IMPRESS?

I guess I’m doing what I do when I visit your grave. Telling you the latest family news keeps you in the mix. And something tells me you ARE still aware of us, still keeping tabs, still PRESENT somehow. I picture you at camp or maybe on a fellowship in some remote spot in China. I can feel you smiling, hearing all this. And that makes me feel a little better.

But this is not a Christmas letter and you are not in China - this is meant to be a TRIBUTE to you, Charlie, the Remarkable Human. I know I’m your dad, plus you’re dead, so there’s every reason for me to overstate and lionize and romanticize. But come on - You really were EXCEPTIONAL. You spoke Latin and Mandarin and a fair helping of Hebrew, you worked in a university robotics lab at 16, you read everything from trashy fantasy novels to St. Augustine, you loved babies and dogs and your mother.

You were also clinically depressed, deeply contrary, painfully argumentative and seemed entirely unsure and anxious about what to do in the world. I’ve been reading over some of your schoolwork, and from those essays in philosophy it’s clear you KNEW you possessed a brilliant mind - but it’s also clear that beyond getting everyone around you to ALSO recognize your brilliance you had NO IDEA AT ALL what to DO with that mind.

But hey: that’s what being 20 is all about. You were figuring it out. (And for what it’s worth I’m 52 and still don’t know what I’m going to do when I grow up.)

No matter what you ultimately decided, there was never any doubt about who you WERE. Through all your stages and phases, from the soft curly-haired boy slurping noodles… to the weird tween practicing violin in his pajamas and Ninja mask… to the tall gracious man wandering the streets of New York puffing a Dunhill… you always had the same basic Charlie essence - thoughtful, warm, cordial, goofy, a little troubled. You came into the world apologizing and asking permission and ruminating on how things worked.

And mostly, that big brilliant brain of yours led you to rational, scientific conclusions. No one would have described you as mystical or woo-woo. I remember the day we stopped off at that place in Oregon, the VORTEX HOUSE OF MYSTERY, where the normal rules of reality supposedly go haywire - balls roll uphill and short people appear tall, like that. Eliza and I were all in, excited at the spectacle and open to the weirdness. Not you, no way. You arched that eyebrow, crossed your arms and answered every mystery with a rational, probably quite correct, explanation.

But whether or not you believed in it, you had magic in you. You possessed powers. I know it.

You were a sucker for fantasy and world-building and the supremacy of imagination over so-called reality. As a kid, it was all about trains - so many hours spent splayed on the carpet, connecting tracks, rolling those bright wooden models around. Then it was LEGOS and BIONICLES, robots and vehicles and structures you built and displayed and swooped around the room. You moved on to that crazy complicated card game Magic: The Gathering and then the irritatingly addictive World of Warcraft video game and then all those other games and anime worlds.

But I have a special place in my heart for the summer you got into closeup magic - remember that tutor we found you, who came to the house to teach you how to palm cards? Somewhere in your room there’s a stack of business cards your aunt Blair gave you for a birthday printed with the words: CHARLIE NOXON: MAGICIAN.

And it’s true.

The real proof is these stories that turned up a few months after you died. I first heard about one in particular in a taped conversation between your classmates at Columbia - your girlfriend Izzy sent over a few. The one about Jesus returning to the earth is amazing, and did you hear the college literary magazine published it a few months ago?

But the one I keep thinking about is called “Again.” It’s set in the afterlife. It begins: “The first time Elmer lived again, he stuck mostly to the way things had been.”

So this guy Elmer is a regular schmo who dies and is given the choice to run through his life again, moment by moment, from birth to death, as fast or slow as he likes, until he dies and comes back to a stucco, fluorescent-lit room, facing a desk with figure known as the capital-R Receptionist. The Receptionist welcomes him back and asks whether he’s “ready to proceed.” He can either go through a door to the unknown, or return through the door from which he came and run through his life again, as an observer, unable to alter any of his experiences.

The story follows Elmer as he recaps again and again, lingering on favorite moments and learning to speed through painful or boring portions. He learns to fast-forward through childbirth and the toddler years - “you only ever want to do that once,” he says - “the crying, the fighting, the near constant smell of your own shit” - and then to slow down and savor the best parts. He spends a month in an orgasm.

The story is written from a distance, describing how Elmer comes to operate in this newexistence. There’s just one fleshed-out, dramatized scene. It comes right at the end of the story. Elmer is seven years old and on a skiing vacation with his grandpa. The story goes:

“Coming down a slope, grandpa weaving a path behind him, Elmer closed his eyes. Everything was passing too quickly. The trees were blurs. The snow was shiny and fresh, scattering shafts of sunlight over the scenery. It’s too much. Little Elmer closes his eyes, because the darkness makes sense.”

The first time I read that scene I stopped cold.

It’s CRAZY you wrote that a year or so before your own fatal skiing accident. I wondered: is it a clue? Maybe you were up there on that mountain and you felt the same way Elmer did - maybe you shut your eyes because it was all too much and ONLY THE DARKNESS MAKES SENSE?

But I don’t think so, honestly. There’s no part of me that thinks you were that foolish or that you wanted to die. We’d just spent a solid week together and you were in such a good place, happy and confident and full of promise and joy. You were shushing down a sunlit mountain on a clear beautiful day. Your lovely and amazing girlfriend was texting you cute memes and sweet messages. It was New Year’s Eve. We had massages booked.

You were not Elmer.

But what you were was a really good writer, and a builder of worlds, and somehow in writing that story I think you folded the field of time and space and foresaw some of the circumstances of your own passage. You made a story out of it.

And that gives me hope. Hope that there is more than the raw emptiness of your absence, that the past and present and future are not as fixed and inescapable as they seem, that maybe there really is a world in which you are not gone at all.

It also offers an answer to my never ending, nagging question: WHAT DO I DO? By which I mean, how do I turn the loss and shock and incomprehension and self pity into something REAL going forward? How do I keep that precious Charlie essence alive in the world?

Some things seem obvious. I’ll keep talking about you and sharing memories. I’ll resist the urge to treat you as a Thing Too Painful to Mention and keep your pictures and stories around. I’ll keep saying kaddish and showing up for others experiencing loss. I’ll treasure Eliza and Oscar and do everything I can to be there for them in their grief and growth, never putting your absence ahead of their presence, feeling your love for them in our times together.

I can also keep your essence alive by simply doing the things you did, learning from your example. Like how you used to buy strangers cups of coffee. Or take long aimless walks in the city. Or seek out old people and little kids at parties. Or take care to share little pleasures with those around me, whether that means sending giddy texts when it snows or preparing fancy expressos for visitors or gifting friends with bags of exotic Yuzu gummi candies.

And I won’t forget that story. How you reached into the future with your imagination. In the story, Elmer crashes and breaks a leg - he doesn’t die. But from that scene, you flashed to the Receptionist, who asks whether he wants to go over it all again, relive and recapitulate his life, or if he’s ready to proceed to Whatever Happens Next.

“I think I’m ready,” says Elmer, at last. “Here goes nothing.”

It’s a great ending, kid.

I love you.

Always,
Dad.

Posted on 09.10.21 at 01:14 am

Tree comic in Modern Loss

https://www.christophernoxon.com//tree_comic_in_modern_loss

My stepmom Pam died last March, five weeks after the death of Charlie. She died after a long bout with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. It’s a rough way to go. She and my mom were together 30-plus years - they were among the first gay couples to get married when it was made legal in California.

Her passing was everything Charlie’s was not—anticipated, painful, drawn out, medically complicated. Being there for her and my mom in those last days at Kaiser Hollywood was intense and difficult and ultimately beautiful. As the hospital chaplain Daniel (happily, a rabbi!) put it, she had a good death.

Then Covid hit and we weren’t able to have a proper memorial. A few months ago my mom started planning a Zoom service and firing off emails about going to the LA Arboretum to pick out a memorial tree. I was not at all excited about schlepping to LA to pick her up and take her out to Arcadia… but the experience turned out to be amazing.

I made a comic about it for Pam’s service; it was published last week by the website Modern Loss. Check it out in the illustrations section on this site, or here.

A week before the memorial we planted Pam in a biodegradable container below the root ball of a peach tree in mom’s back yard. We took turns pouring her chalky grey remains from the plastic bag into the hole. The whole process was strange and oddly normal, like most momentous events. The container where Pam now rests was made of cheap cardboard. It looked like shipping material. Which I guess it was.

Posted on 03.29.21 at 11:29 am

Not rarin’

https://www.christophernoxon.com//not_rarin

“People are rarin’ to go,” someone said on a Zoom the other day, and she was right. You can feel it, the yearning to gather and hug and congregate and get past this godawful year of limitation and loss.

I get it, even as that cautious excitement lands in my heart with a resounding NO.

I am not rarin’. Not even a little.

I don’t want to get on a plane or ride on a subway or yell across a crowded table in a restaurant. I don’t want to wait in a line or push up against people in a nightclub for a better view of the band.

I’m OK here, thanks. I miss movies and restaurants and live music and theater, but I’m just fine in the weird state of suspended animation, highlights of my weeks sloshes through nearby creeks and pots of white bean stew. “Dude be careful,” a friend told me this morning. “You’re gonna end up a crusty Ojai hermit, going off grid and growing your own kale.”

Sounds pretty fucking good.

Maybe I’m just old (is 52 old? It’s definitely not young). Maybe the lockdown put my burgeoning codgerdom on a high steady temperature, hardening a relatively active, flexible social animal into a dense block of immobility.

Or maybe it’s the grief. It’s always there, a weighted blanket covering every movement. Fourteen months have passed since Charlie died (432 AC to be exact) and I’m doing a lot better than I was. But even now the world feels wrong and dangerous and empty.

The pandemic is awful and disruptive and terrifying, yes. But it has also been weirdly accommodating of those of us in mourning, slowing everyone down and focusing energies on deeper and more difficult truths.

Anyway none of this is over, obviously. We may never return to “normal.” Perhaps I’ll feel differently when I get my own shot. For now, I’m staying put.

Posted on 03.09.21 at 12:47 pm

Memorial tree

https://www.christophernoxon.com//memorial_tree

Posted on 03.08.21 at 10:54 am

March paintings

https://www.christophernoxon.com//march_paintings

Posted on 02.20.21 at 12:40 pm

Inner Self Portraits

https://www.christophernoxon.com//inner_self_portraits

Posted on 02.20.21 at 12:34 pm

Patron Saints

https://www.christophernoxon.com//patron_saints

Posted on 02.20.21 at 12:11 pm

If I was my…

https://www.christophernoxon.com//if_i_was_my

Posted on 02.20.21 at 12:01 pm

Yahrzeit

https://www.christophernoxon.com//yahrzeit

A year has passed. It feels like 20. For everyone, sure - but for us especially. That makes it sadder, somehow. I want the time when he was here to not be so far away. I want him closer, always.

A friend told me the other day he was sorry our tragedy was so rudely preempted by a worldwide pandemic. I told him it’s fine, really. Yes, our loss has now become that awful thing that happened just before the epic year of uncertainty and upset and grief. But I see all that and I think: yes, exactly. The outsides match the insides. Loss is loss. There’s plenty to go around.

I’m less OK with the anniversary falling on this day. All our future New Years, all our Winter Wonderdays are now shot through with his absence. Then again, it’s not like there’s a better day. Every day is now overlaid with this dark filter. That’s just the way it is now. It’s like how when people apologize for bringing up Charlie. I explain it’s not like I’m NOT thinking about him. It’s better to mention him often, keep him in the world, have the outsides match the insides.

We had a lot of back-and-forth about the epitaph. We agreed to include a quote from Talmud that Charlie liked - he talked about maybe getting it as a tattoo. “The world was made for me” on one arm, “I am but dust and ashes” on the other, quoting the Talmudic teaching about carrying those messages on slips of paper as a constant reminder of one’s simultaneous importance and irrelevance. That feels very Charlie. If it was good enough for skin it’s good enough for stone.

We had a harder time with the other message. We wanted something personal, something that summed up Charlie specifically. Oscar, bless his 15-year-old heart, suggested the following:

Charlie Noxon: Extraordinary Human. Mediocre Skier.

Oof, right? Solid joke - but I was really not looking forward to seeing that joke every time I went to visit. Thankfully, he was kidding - in the same way he and his siblings constantly razz one another, and us—about how Charlie mispronounced words (ORGY!), or how he licked his lips in that weird way or how I wish I was Black, apparently.

“That’s what love looks like,” says Eliza.

The epitaph we went with is not a razz but a callback. Credit to Jenji for coming up with it. To explain: when Charlie was 11 or 12 we took a family trip to Ireland - he was in his full chubby-pubescent, newsie-cap phase. One rainy day on the Ring of Kerry we drove out to a nature preserve. Charlie wanted to stay in the car and read his book, but we insisted - this wasn’t optional, and we’d brought a bunch of exotic Irish candies as bribes. Charlie wasn’t having it. As we trudged up a grassy ridge he got madder and madder, hollering at us red-faced about the unfairness of it all. Near the top, I turned around and looked and the clouds had parted and you could see shafts of light coming down on these impossibly green fields, with flocks of fluffy sheep and glittering lakes and, no kidding, TWO full rainbows.

“CHARLIE, LOOK!” I said, triumphantly. “It’s BEAUTIFUL!”

He turned his head, gave the scene a quick look and announced:

“Beauty only lasts ten seconds. Then it’s just familiar.”

That became a favorite story, part of our family lore - Charlie’s Hike Rage. It was partly funny because he wasn’t really wrong—beauty does have a way of becoming ordinary. Also, we’d apparently forgotten the lesson from that Alaskan cruise when the kids were little: children could give two shits about scenery.

So sure, yes Charlie: beauty is brief. Yours was full of insight and humor and sweetness and soulfulness. And yes, it was all-too-brief. Unfairly, cruelly so. But your mom is right to use this epitaph to correct you on one thing—your beauty did not last ten seconds. We never got sick of it. It grew and expanded and deepened in your life, as you went from soulful child with fabulous Jew-fro to stupendously smart man who could do anything you put your mind to. You had some of my childlike wonder and some of your mom’s courage to call bullshit, and a whole lot ELSE that was all yours, all Charlie, forever beautiful. And we will miss you for the rest of our lives.

Posted on 01.11.21 at 02:34 pm

Second Coming

https://www.christophernoxon.com//second_coming

Charlie studied cryptography, robotics, philosophy, economics, Mandarin—if it was difficult (or sounded impressive), Charlie was into it.

Still, he had no idea what he wanted to “do” after college. I worried he’d get recruited by the CIA or, worse, get into hedge funds. At one point he said he’d probably go to law school “to delay the inevitable.”

I hoped he’d use that big brain to save the world or invent something or cure a disease—we wouldn’t be Jews if we didn’t want a doctor in the family – but the “inevitable” he talked about was almost certainly writing. Our family is lousy with writers – his dad, mom, aunt, uncle, two granddads and grandmas were writers, not to mention a whole slew of novelists and poets and journalists among his extended family.

And from early on, Charlie was a sucker for a good story. He read like a fiend as a kid, ripping through fantasy series and dressing up as an actual BOOK for Halloween one year. As a teen he started reading DeLillo and Murakami and famously carted around the Kissinger biography to high school hangouts (was it any wonder he didn’t make many friends his own age until college?). Recently I asked his girlfriend Izzy what books he talked about while they dated, remembering how I’d attempted to seduce women with the swoony-romantic novels by EM Forster. “Kant and St. Augustine,” came the reply.

So it wasn’t exactly a surprise that in college, between lab science and economic classes, he started turning out stories on the sly, for fun. Then in his sophomore year he took a fiction workshop and started writing strange, speculative, ambitious, death-obsessed stories. No tortured autobiographical slices-of-life for Charlie. In one story he imagined a near-future in which the destitute pay off their debts by harvesting their organs. Another followed the soul of a recently deceased man as he ran through his life over and over.

Then there’s “Second Coming,” a comic story about the return of an all-powerful, all-forgiving savior. I was initially surprised Charlie had chosen Jesus as a subject—the Christian Lord & Savior didn’t get much play around the house and while I’m from Quaker stock, whatever spiritual yearnings I possessed as a kid were satisfied by “Star Wars.” The spooky guy on the cross held zero interest to me; I was good with Obi-Wan. So it was especially moving to read Charlie’s version of the Jesus story, with the Savior appearing in multiple bodies as friend and confidante to anyone who calls on him. His Jesus is compassionate, comforting and not a little bit annoying. After losing his job and girlfriend to a far more suitable replacement (how can you compete with Christ himself?) a sadsack nonbeliever named Theo confronts his lord and savior in a scene that’s equal parts George Saunders and George Romero.

He may not have identified as a fiction writer, but Charlie wasn’t shy about his work. After he died I learned that Charlie had submitted “Second Coming” to the New Yorker, receiving a form rejection that he proudly displayed in his dorm room (One measure of what different people we were: I waited until my 40s with a sure-fire piece before daring to approach that particular mountaintop).

It turns out he also submitted the story to the Columbia literary magazine Quarto. And this month the magazine published it with the following note:

Quarto received an online submission from our late peer Charlie Noxon in early November of 2019. As an editorial board, with the support of his family, we chose to honor his writing in our 2020 Spring Print Edition and are posting it to our website now. We offer our sincerest condolences to his family, friends, and loved ones.

Posted on 10.14.20 at 11:44 am

As birthdays go

https://www.christophernoxon.com//as_birthdays_go

As birthdays go, 21 wouldn’t have mattered all that much to Charlie. He was already such a grown-up in so many ways. Obviously reaching the drinking age didn’t matter much – in his first year at Columbia he and some friends got on the dark web and ordered ridiculously real IDs - his had his real name and photo, along with a watermark and a scannable strip on the back. He liked going to old man bars and ordering a Long Island Iced Tea (ugh - maybe he wasn’t so mature).

Then again, he probably would’ve loved the official milestoney-ness of 21. He definitely wanted to be seen as adult - or anyway he liked the props of maturity. He famously read the Kissinger biography for fun and had an elaborate cappuccino maker in his dorm room. He also had a secret stash of Dunhill cigarettes - and tried to quit at one point by taking up a pipe.

At the same time he could be so silly and childlike. He loved anime, fantasy novels, and the FB group Dogspotting. When we went to a family gathering he’d hang out with the little kids (and then the older folks - skipping the kids his age entirely). His summer wardrobe mostly consisted of T-shirts picturing cartoon bears. As a kid he was obsessed with trains and close-up magic and Star Wars - and he never saw the point in putting away childish things.

Which leads me to a memory from Winter Wonderday a few days before the accident. It’s painful to describe but it’s super vivid and feels important to remember today.

Winter Wonderday is the made-up holiday our family celebrates as a kind of alternative Xmas - we duct-tape our pants over the fireplace (bigger than socks!) and leave offerings to Irving the Snowchicken. This past year the kids and I spent the holiday at a hotel in Utah. We stuffed ourselves with the traditional chicken and waffles and made gingerbread chicken coops. Before bed, we wrote notes to Irving before lighting them on fire.

Charlie read his aloud:

“Hello Mr. Snowchicken! Here are things I want:
- Love
- Mommy and daddy together again (JK LOL shit’s toxic)
- Personal fulfillment
- Solace and stability
- Cool things and stuff.
Love, Charlie.”

Before bed, Charlie looked over from the armchair where he’d curled up and asked if I’d come over. “Pick me up!” he demanded. I did my best, heaving him up and taking a few labored steps around the room.

“Baaaabeee!” he called, laughing and looking me right in the eyes. “Baabeee!”

Then he picked me up and I did the same bit, saying over and over in a silly voice: baby, baby, baby. Then Oscar got a turn, and Eliza too. It was so sweet and crazy and funny and it only occurred to me later that we were basically acting out an exercise an attachment therapist might have an adult child do with an estranged parent.

The next morning, after he’d opened his presents, Charlie put on his new Chewbacca pajamas, cradled his Lego James Bond Aston Martin set and said, over and over,

“I’m an ADULT.”

Happy birthday Charlie. I love you.

Posted on 09.18.20 at 10:12 am

Awake the Morning After

https://www.christophernoxon.com//awake_the_morning_after

I did a dumb thing last night.
I drank whiskey and watched
As the criminal clown rallied his cult.
Whipping up fear
Mangling truth
Whoring the flag.
Drumming up his people to fight the radical mob
(meaning me, meaning us, meaning war).
So galling so shameless so deeply deeply terrifying.

And this morning was Torah study
(virtually, obvi, it’s all virtual now).
To learn about the shofar
From a smart & soulful rabbi.

So the shofar we know is a ram’s horn that sounds a blast a tone a long and holy honk.
In Torah it’s first of all a call to arms.
The sound of vanquishing enemies conquering cities taking slaves.
(Today’s parsha says hey maybe wait 30 days before taking a slave as a wife to give her time to grieve, because you know: ethics. UGH this book sometimes I can’t even.)

We dig deeper in the book and find more meanings (because this is what we Jews do, forever turning things over and over and God I love that so much):
At Mt. Sinai, the shofar blew in smoke and thunder above trembling masses.
It signaled revelation and the awesome power of God Almighty.

And in Isaah there it is again, sounding to the exiles
Bidding them to leave their slavery in Egypt and return to the holy place.

And the soulful rabbi says: also remember Rambam.
Who summed up the shofar as
An alarm clock.
Waking us up.
Reminding us to reject vanity and idleness.
The sound says, care for your soul, improve your ways, get with God.

The soulful rabbi says that’s it:
Let it crack your heart.
Let it wake you let it open you.
At this moment of strife and fear and plague and reckoning
We need awakening.

And the soulful rabbi says:
What’s your shofar? What’s waking you up? What’s calling you to action and revelation and atonement?

And so we offer our answers:
What about the seven shots in Kenosha
That paralyzed Jacob Blake
Setting off another mass spasm of outrage awakening reckoning
That’s a shofar.

Or what about the fireworks over the White House last night
The air thick with smoke and anger and aerosolized virus
Pop go the explosions.
Roar goes the crowd.
That’s a shofar.

Then there are the voices on the family Zoom the faces on the TV the bots on the socials;
A din of shofars, all day all night, a neverending cacophony of alarm.
Everyone sounding the call, announcing the crisis:
“Why is no one talking about this?”
A deafening din of horns of battle cries of declarations of war.
You can’t hear anything through the sound.

And I think
Right now we don’t need a rams horn.
Our fight or flight alarm is blasting nonstop.
The whole goddamn world is blaring shofars.
Maybe this is the year we
Put down the horn.

Maybe this year we need an INVERSE SHOFAR
Not a battle cry but a sweet silence.
An anti-noisemaker that produces a tingle
(Something like that crazy ASMR).
A wave of calm not a roar.
A deeper reverberation.
Something to quiet us.
To tune us to what’s inside.
To that small still voice.

Yes a great conflict awaits us.
And oh yes it’s crucial we win.
But as the polls and trolls and calls for war go out
Let us study Torah and Rambam and also the Hindus and Satyagraha
Which was taken up by Dr. King and the good Rev. James Lawson and Saint Lewis
Which says: the war will never end
If you seek to dominate and subdue.
The only way out
Is to quiet down, calm down, and (yes you know this is how this ends):
Love
Love
Love

Posted on 08.28.20 at 01:19 pm

Strange sick summer

https://www.christophernoxon.com//strange_sick_summer

As this strange summer stretches on
And sickness spreads
And tempers and cities flare
I wake with a jolt and think:
All that matters now
is the election.
Nothing else matters. Nothing.

Not work.
Not diet or exercise or sleep.
Not IG or TikTok or FB or TV or the GDP.
Not my drawings.
Not my grief
(which is here for good and not going anywhere - ever. That much I’ve learned, 213 days out from unfathomable loss: there’s no getting Over It).

It’s the worst of times
And the only hope of recovery is in
the election of actual adults with empathy and expertise:
Biden and Bubser and Gascon and Gideon and Kelly,
Adults who’ll work to repair the incalculable damage
Of the last three - no, hell: 244 years.

We need to win.
And not even because we need the victory
But because (oh here’s the real truth):
They need to lose
(all of them, the ring-kissing enablers the cynical cheaters the sleazy conspirators and the whole stinking shitpile of them, but but really, mostly, you know: HIM)

And I sit in that for a while
Savoring the image of Mitch and Kellyanne and Ted and Don getting
Ushered out and kicked in the asses and handcuffed,
dragged by their collars,
sputtering, red-faced, pathetic,
exiled, expunged, humiliated.

And then I stop and think:
Hoo boy maybe time to slow down the doom scrolling.
Maybe it’s not so bad.
Maybe this isn’t actually the end-all be-all, good-versus-evil, boss-battle showdown.
Politics is a game, a sport, a fiction.
It has always been thus.
The worst of times? Try 1969 or 1939 or 1913 or 1865 or 1616.
This current crop of goons didn’t invent fascist flim flammery.
Andrew Jackson Joseph McCarthy George Wallace
Could teach these dumb-dumbs a thing or two.

And then I’m stopped short again, thinking: 
How bout I quit it with the name calling.
Goons, dumb-dumbs, lumbering dumptster barges, the ass menagerie - ha ha ha.
Yes they do the same and worse, yes they’re awful & yes it’s infuriating
But stop and see
See how retribution and revenge and oppression feed on one another
See how tit follows tat
See how when this election is done
There will another and another with progress and backlash and so on (unless democracy is done and the world is actually ending and these really are endtimes O God)
But really now:
See how malevolence and loss and humiliation is a never-ending fire that’s fueled & whipped up
By news cycles and powers that be

So yes donate and draw and protest and phonebank and wax poetic
Yes stand with the black bandana’d agitators kicking back tear gas canisters
Yes link arms with woke kids and POCs and old hippies and grizzled vets and horrified moderates and women in yellow T-shirts.

And all the while remember dear departed Saint Lewis, the Boy from Troy, the man in the white trenchcoat on the bridge in Selma
(who marched in the footsteps of Ghandi and CT Viviian and Ella Baker and Dr. King)
Who didn’t give in to hate or despair or hopelessness
Who absorbed the blows of opporessers and looked them in the eye and said, over and over:
Love
Love
Love

Posted on 08.05.20 at 09:29 am

Blackout Tuesday

https://www.christophernoxon.com//close_your_eyes

In the days after Charlie died, I learned something I had somehow never known before. It’s a tool, a trick, a way of being in the world when the world spins out of control:

Close your eyes.

Do it when the visible world around you feels charged with pain and you can’t bear to look. Do it when loss swells up in your throat. Do it when you’re talking and words feel insufficient and meaningless and hopelessly futile.

Close your eyes. Keep talking, keep thinking, keep feeling - just take a moment to be in darkness. Reduce the input. Breathe.

Our hearts break for George Floyd, whose breath was taken before our eyes. The brutality of the cops, the pleading of bystanders, the calls of Floyd for his mother - this was slow-motion murder, an unambiguous recapitulation and embodimet of centuries of state brutality against Black people. Michael Brown, Freddie Gray, Eric Garner, Philando Castile, Alton Sterling, Delrawn Small - how many names, how many bodies do we need to see erased before we say: enough.

And oh yeah: we’re in the midst of a global pandemic and our president is a red hot pig without an ounce of empathy.

So here we are, the air swirling with smoke and aerosolized virus, deep in upheaval and upset and uprising. The past rears up to bark, the future bends and branches, events are charged with history. It is a terrifying and overwhelming time to be alive.

Working on “Good Trouble: Lessons from the Civil Rights Playbook” revealed knowhow that feels especially relevant right now - especially about the deep spiritual and tactical value of nonviolence and the redemptive power of suffering. But now is not the moment.

Now I’m not a reporter or a writer or a person with opinions about the world. I’m a grieving father and what I know about this moment is this: close your eyes.

I mean it in the same way that activists have called on people to mark Blackout Tuesday. We’re not closing our eyes to pain we normally ignore that we now cannot. We are right to shout and rage and take to the streets. By all means, open your eyes for that (and for godsakes, wear a fucking face mask).

We need clarity and courage to get through this. And that means taking moments to stop, go dark and find that small quiet voice. It has vastly more valuable things to say than anything we see around us.

Posted on 06.02.20 at 11:03 am

Grief in COVIDtimes

https://www.christophernoxon.com//grief_in_covidtimes

When your child dies, people say: I’m so sorry. I can’t imagine.

That’s what the ER doctor in Salt Lake City said. I was like, fuck you doc. *I* can’t imagine. (Also, what are you sorry for? What did you do? Is there something you’re not telling me?)

A week or so later I was out in the world and I was like: fuck all y’all. People on the street, in cars, in shops, chatting and texting and sipping their beverages and going about their lives. The clouds in the sky and the birds in the trees and even the trees themselves - how could everything just go on?

Then coronavirus hit and everyone lost their minds. The world literally stopped. People said they’d never experienced anything like it - this mysterious, disassociated, uncomfortable feeling.

Turns out there’s a word for it. The word is grief.

Welcome, friends. Settle in. There’s no getting over this. Or as LA Mayor Eric Garcetti said the other day: “We are not moving past Covid-19; we are learning to live with it.”

As it is with covid, so it is with grief.

That’s the thing about dealing with a global health emergency during a period of soul-shaking grief: the crisis doesn’t seem so bad. As anxiety has escalated in the world at large, mine has stabilized. Suddenly I’ve got company. Beyond our family and all the people who knew and loved Charlie – suddenly everyone is beside themselves, raw and anxious and weirdly dislocated.

Really, it feels like I was just becoming aware of a terrifying truth about the world when suddenly everyone was forced to confront the same reality.

Mainly: we are mortal, fragile beings and everything we build our lives upon can go in a second. There’s no escaping it - things go sideways, the center will not hold, death and disorder are closer than we ever knew. The safety and security we take for granted to operate in the world is an illusion. Safety can really only be achieved in moments, and even then it is mostly a story we tell ourselves.

Reckoning with this truth makes us crazy. These are intense, insane, heightened, upsetting, unsettling,traumatizing, historic, spooky, sad times. We feel fundamentally unsafe. Everyone - literally everyone, even those who claim everyone else is overreacting - has been forced to respond to a mutating biological force that upsets the expected order of things, busts through barriers, and kills. Death is crashing over countries. It’s passing through our bodies in tiny spiked balls, attaching to airways, suffocating the ill and elderly and poor and plenty of others besides.

The question for all of us is clear: what do we do with this awful truth? How do we keep moving forward knowing the ground beneath our feet is so shaky, that every step forward moves us deeper into the abyss?

A lot of us don’t do so well. Many spin out in anxiety and worry, holing up in hidey holes of isolation and inaction. Others are in full denial, pretending nothing has actually changed and if we just plow forward everything will return to “normal.”

But all around us, you can see others discover deep reserves of resiliency. They’ve found ways to help, to make use of what they have, to appreciate their loved ones. They’ve awoken to disparities previously treated as rhetorical social “issues.” They’ve at last embraced mutual aid, paid leave, essential work.

Right after Charlie died I felt a strong resistance toward anything that felt even a little bit like a silver lining. I refused to entertain any suggestion of a “growth opportunity” or “life lesson.” His death was a tragedy and it made no sense and nothing good would come from it. Anything beyond that felt like a betrayal.

But as the months and weeks have gone on - today is day 145 AC - I am sensing the arrival of another, equally foundational but less terrifying set of truths. I felt it in the first days of grief, learning that on the other side of the world, 172 people had died in a Syrian airliner crash - I was struck by how awful it must be for all those families, how hard it is to lose someone with such uncertainty. And then I felt it with the helicopter crash that killed Kobe Bryant and eight others, how agonizing it would be to lose someone with so much attention from strangers. And again with the news of the first coronavirus fatalities, isolated in crowded ICUs, separated from their loved ones, suffocating and terrified.

And there it was, an unintended result of unimaginable loss: an expansion of empathy, some small growth in my capacity for compassion.

I now look at these losses and can say, really for the first time: I am so sorry; I can imagine.

Posted on 05.24.20 at 02:31 pm

NY Times Illustrated Piece on Refugees and ‘Fiddler’

For World Refugee Day, the producers of the Yiddish-language rendition of “Fiddler on the Roof” invited 500 refugees from around the globe to see the show. I was on hand to interview and draw attendees to record how their own tales dovetailed with the story of Tevye and the townspeople of Anatevka.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/17/theater/fiddler-on-the-roof-refugees.html

New York Times, Sunday Arts & Leisure, July 2019

100 AC

https://www.christophernoxon.com//100_ac

One hundred days after Charlie.

There’s so much you should know about this kid - he was such a brilliant, kind, curious soul, and one of the big things I’ve learned this year is that while it’s important to talk about his death, it’s better to talk about his life.*

But today is 100 AC. And so today I want to talk about that number.

Lately I’ve noticed people use “AC” to mark the before and after of Coronavirus. I get it: the world feels different now. We’re all looking for a way to wrap our heads around it. But I felt a pang when I first heard AC in a post by someone who was forced to stay home and miss spring break and how it was “the worst thing ever.”

No, sorry: it really isn’t.

Then today I learned a crazy fact. The New York Times timeline of the pandemic begins with the government in Wuhan China confirming cases of coronovirus on… Dec 31 2019.

The same day Charlie died.

Which means we’re ALL at 100 AC.

This is spooky and strange and does nothing to relieve the temptation I feel to conflate Charlie’s death with all this craziness. It’s hard not to feel like whatever caused his accident is also responsible for all the current chaos, misfortune, and unease. It feels like something’s been knocked out of place in the foundation of things and the whole Jenga tower is teetering.

Of course the two things have nothing to do with one another. Charlie’s death was sudden, definitive, senseless. It came out of nowhere. It was singular. It was like the crack of a tree branch on a windless day.

This is different. The pandemic is ominous, looming, amorphous. We can see it coming. It’s happening to all of us, all over the world. And for most of us, it’s preventable. We stay in our homes and hunker down inside our tight protective pods. We tell ourselves: we’ll get through this. A lot of us are itching to get back to “normal.”

But it’s feeling more and more like there’s no normal to get back to. There’s no erasing or recovering from a shift this big - there’s only learning to live with it.

And learning to feel it.

The author and grief expert David Kessler was interviewed this week about this moment. Our days feel unreal and scary. Something horrible happened and everything is the same and eerily different. Death feels close.

In moments like this, Kessler says it’s crucial to name the feelings and let them come:

“So many have told me in the past week, ‘I’m telling my coworkers I’m having a hard time,’ or ‘I cried last night.’ When you name it, you feel it and it moves through you. Emotions need motion. It’s important we acknowledge what we go through. One unfortunate byproduct of the self-help movement is we’re the first generation to have feelings about our feelings. We tell ourselves things like, I feel sad, but I shouldn’t feel that; other people have it worse. We can — we should — stop at the first feeling. I feel sad. Let me go for five minutes to feel sad. Your work is to feel your sadness and fear and anger whether or not someone else is feeling something. Fighting it doesn’t help because your body is producing the feeling. If we allow the feelings to happen, they’ll happen in an orderly way, and it empowers us. Then we’re not victims.”


Boy, can I relate. Over the past 100 days I’ve learned a ton about feelings about feelings.

I feel bad about feeling normal. The world goes on. I’m in it. But then in a second the loss comes rushing back and I’m struck with the overpowering sense of: how can I - how can anyone - just go on?

Other times I think about Charlie and it hurts, physically. I clench up. My throat tightens. I feel acid creep up the back of my throat. Call it Grief-Flux. I learned a word from the flight medic who treated Charlie on the helicopter that took him off the mountain: AGONAL. It describes a pattern of breathing and brainstem reflex. It’s involuntary. It happens after the heart stops beating. I can’t get that word out of my head. And then I feel bad about feeling bad.

And then there are times I feel OK, good even. The truth is that over the past 100 days I’ve been connected to the world and the people I love in ways I never have before. Sunsets have been more vivid, jokes have been funnier, conversations have been deeper and more vulnerable. So many good people have shown up, people I haven’t seen in ages, laying themselves bare, opening up about their own losses.

And then I feel bad about that.

But Kessler is right: there’s no use ranking our losses or feeling bad about how we feel. We’re better off riding the feelings as they happen.

Right now people in New York and Italy and elsewhere are banging on pots and yelling from windows every night to honor emergency response workers. I hear that some are taking the opportunity to release howls of grief and shouts of frustration.

I like this idea very much. A lot of us could use a good primal scream right now.

In crisis there will be moments of normalcy, boredom, heart-wrenching agony and intense connection and satisfaction. The only way out is through.

It’s too early to talk about how we can all come out better from this - trying to frame this is as a “growth opportunity” feels offensive or worse, a betrayal. The loved ones we lost don’t get to “grow.”

But at the same time I’m hoping that my friend Michaela is right - the other day on a Zoom call she said what’s happening around the world now feels like “a hard reset.” We’ve unplugged, stopped moving, powered down. We’re taking walks, cooking for ourselves, doing the dishes, holing up with our nearest and dearest.

And from this semi-quarantine I send out my sincerest hope that we’ll all emerge from 100 AC with a deeper appreciation of life and what comes after.


* Among the stories I keep thinking about: the time Charlie gave a campaign speech at Harvard Westlake about how the entire student government system was a sham. Or the time he had a heart palpitation while working in a robotics lab at UC Berkeley, and how he befriended the cardiologist who treated him, and how he ended up getting an internship in that cardiologist’s lab. The time just before surgery to repair his heart condition, as the drugs were flowing through the IV, he said again and again, “I must retain my faculties!”

Posted on 04.09.20 at 04:37 am

How does this story go?

https://www.christophernoxon.com//how_does_this_story_go

A friend texted the other day: the show must go on.

Must it?

I keep hearing his voice, seeing his smile or the arch of his eyebrow. It’s not that I think he’s still alive - it’s just that I keep feeling how it was when he walked in a room or picked up the phone: the warmth, the kindness, the formality, that brilliant Charlie essence.

The point is: he was just here.

In stories, people die at key moments - they’re sacrificed or struck down or lost as part of a larger struggle or narrative.

So how does this story go? Is there really no lesson, no reason, no sense, no story, no sacrifice, no purpose? How does a complex, brilliant, soulful 20-year-old boy-man just cease to be?
There are no answers, obviously. No sense to be made. There is only the loss and the living with it.

Meanwhile my stepmom Pam is seriously ill, hooked up to a breathing apparatus at Kaiser with advanced COPD. She’s 82 and fierce; she and my mom (her wife of 40 years) are coping as best they can, but it’s not looking great.  Sitting with her over days and weeks, watching her make her final departure, it felt like the absolute reverse of what happened with Charlie: this was drawn-out, painful, medically complicated. Between the two, we got the full range of death.

All of which is only underscoring an unavoidable truth: life is precious and fragile and the end is coming for us all.

Hurray!

I will say I’ve gotten a lot of relief from a mysterious but super effective therapy called EMDR, and I feel better writing and drawing and walking - getting up and moving connects me to Charlie in a real embodied way. It has also been great to read Charlie’s writing - short stories have been trickling in from friends at Columbia, and they’re amazing and also spooky (one includes a ski accident, another involves organ donation). Also, crucially, I’ve been helped by friends near and far who’ve reached out with well wishes and prayers and love - the only real consolation in any of this is a feeling I can only describe as “with-ness.” Thank you for being with.

About that: I worried about posting this message, and others like it, to social media. I don’t for a moment want to be seen to be performing or seeking sympathy with periodic #griefupdates. Honestly, I shared these because #1) writing and drawing are just what I do, and I’m not stopping now, #2) it’s draining and difficult re-processing with everyone I care about, so I share in part to let my close and extended circles know how it’s going, and, most importantly, #3) writing these feels like putting more Charlie in the world and keeping his memory alive - and that makes this feel less horrible.

Posted on 02.19.20 at 03:29 am

Pure, unwavering band of light

https://www.christophernoxon.com//pure_unwavering_band_of_light

My mom gave me a paperback of “Breakfast of Champions” when I was fourteen. I devoured it, then “Cat’s Cradle” and “Sirens of Titan” and “Mother Night” and eventually all of Vonnegut - he was my first literary love, the first writer who seemed to speak TO me. He was deep, strange, sad and playful - and he drew pictures! Like the doodly star shape in “BoC” which he included with this note: “To give an idea of the maturity of my illustrations for this book, here is a picture of my asshole:”

When Charlie was fourteen I found that old paperback and passed it on to him. He loved it too. He read a few more Vonneguts but moved on to Neil Gaiman, Haruki Murakami and Don DeLillo (plus a ton of genre fantasy writers like VE Schwab and Brandon Sanderson). During our week in Park City we went to a bookstore in town and got Raymond Carver’s “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” and Ben Lerner’s “The Topeka School.” He gobbled up the Carver the day before the accident. He loved it and we had a good talk about how Carver managed to create whole worlds with so few words.

This week I re-read “Breakfast of Champions.” Happy to report it holds up - it’s just as deep and gonzo as it was when I was sixteen (it’s also, happily, smart about sex and race - the 1973 version of woke). I’d forgotten that Vonnegut wrote it as a 50th birthday present to himself - this felt especially meaningful now as I creak past 51. The ending is rough - there’s a burst of violence and hopelessness that was not at all the inspirational message I was hoping for.

But there’s one passage I love and that has something to say about this moment and Charlie and how it feels to grieve him. It comes during a scene in a hotel cocktail lounge, where the townsfolk of Midland confront an abstract painter about a work recently purchased by the town for $50,000:

The original was twenty feet wide and sixteen feet high. The field was Hawaiian Avocado, a green wall paint manufactured by the O’Hare Paint and Varnish Company in Hellertown, Pennsylvania. The vertical stripe was day-glo orange reflecting tape. This was the most expensive piece of art, not counting buildings and tombstones, and not counting the statue of Abraham Lincoln in front of the old (black) high school.

The painter is named Rabo Karabekian (Vonnegut is up there with Pynchon in his love of names - the heroes of the book are Kilgore Trout and Dwayne Hoover). A cocktail waitress tells him that his painting is stupid and bad and that she’s “seen better pictures by a five-year old.” Here’s what happens next:

Karabekian slid off his bar stool so he could face all those enemies standing up… “Listen—” he said so calmly, “I have read the editorials against my painting in your wonderful newspaper. I have read every word of the hate mail you have been thoughtful enough to send to New York.”

“The painting did not exist until I made it.” Karabekian went on. “Now that it does exist, nothing would make me happier than to have it reproduced again and again, and vastly improved upon, by all the five-year-olds in town. I would love for your children to find pleasantly and playfully what it took me many angry years to find.

“I now give you my work of honor,” he went on, “that the picture your city owns shows everything about life which truly matters, with nothing left out. It is a picture of the awareness of every animal. It is the immaterial core of every animal–the ‘I am’ to which all messages are sent. It is all that is alive in any of us–in a mouse, in a deer, in a cocktail waitress. It is unwavering and pure, no matter what preposterous adventure may befall us. A sacred picture of Saint Anthony alone is one vertical, unwavering band of light. If a cockroach were near him, or a cocktail waitress, the picture would show two such bands of light. Our awareness is all that is alive and maybe sacred in any of us. Everything else about us is dead machinery.”

That’s it - the unwavering and pure band of light. I’m holding on to Charlie’s, summoning it as best I can and hoping that even though he’s gone, we can keep it here on earth.

 

Posted on 02.06.20 at 03:11 am

Shloshim. He’s Still Gone.

https://www.christophernoxon.com//shloshim._hes_still_gone

It’s 31 AC/ one month after Charlie. Or as the Jews have it, it’s Shloshim—which means I can now get a haircut and sit on an actual chair but I still shouldn’t go to a concert or redecorate my house.

Update: he’s still gone.

I’m against it.

Things that help: hot and sour soup, saying the kaddish, walking.

Today I listened to a recording Charlie’s girlfriend Izzy made of friends from Columbia sharing memories. One girl remembered how she once mentioned she didn’t know what yuzu was; he showed up at her door that night offering a package of yuzu gummies. A number of friends talked about how he liked to wander the city, how he made a big show of drawing the perfect espresso from the inappropriately fancy machine in his dorm, how he got into heated debates at parties over his preference for Camus over Sartre and his belief that Toni Morrison was derivative of William Faulkner. Also his love of dogs, “wholesome memes,” and super complicated puzzle games.

“There were so many moments that felt like secret worlds for him,” one friend said. “You could see him doing his own thing and he entered a secret world that you suddenly got to be a part of.”

For me, this is all happening in present tense: Present. And tense. Charlie is walking those streets, pouring that perfect coffee, exploring those secret worlds.

And after a month of full-time processing, I’m trying to get back into some regular routine. Eliza and Oscar are back at school and doing pretty well (Oscar is just starting the new baseball season and doing the lighting on a school play; Eliza has a full schedule and is excited about her new classes). Hoping grief can be a part time job - albeit a really intense one. I can’t tell you how grateful I am to the friends and loved ones who’ve rallied around - one of the strangest things about this experience is how it brings you into such close, intimate and vulnerable contact with the best people in the world—at your absolute worst. There is no consolation, God doesn’t have a plan and there is no sense to be made. But I feel surrounded by love and so very grateful to our family and community.

Posted on 01.31.20 at 03:05 am

Tell Me Why

https://www.christophernoxon.com//tell_me_why

Posted on 01.27.20 at 03:03 am

He is gone, he is here

https://www.christophernoxon.com//he_is_gone_he_is_here

I keep thinking about Charlie as a little kid. I like looking at pictures of him - that amazing ‘fro, the brief chubby phase, the incredible costumes (Lego piece! Book! Lincoln!). He was and is all those things. He is gone and he is here.

All the love and razzing and study and arguments and travel and movies and music and food and adventure collected in that sweet soul.

He was just starting to really use it all on his own, to find his own way. There is nothing, nothing, good about his death. He had just really set out on his own and begun to taste a little, not nearly enough, of what it is to be fully awake and aware of his own weird brilliant self. And then he died. And it is not OK, not right, there has been a horrible mistake.

But it is also true that his life was beautiful and it ended in a split second on a mountaintop doing something he loved on a rolling stretch of downhill that was smooth and sweet.

Posted on 01.24.20 at 02:54 am

Dear Charlie,

https://www.christophernoxon.com//dear_charlie

Eulogy for Charlie Noxon, 9/10/1999- 12/31/2019

Dear Charlie,

When you were little and in a snit - upset or wiggly or whatever - we had a trick: we’d look in your face and tell you a story.

It could be about anything, really. I used to make up crazy stories for you about a made-up race of creatures called the Wallawalladoodads. They had alien bodies and drank grape soda and they always shared their toys. Remember?

The point is, the minute we looked in your face and started talking, no matter how upset you felt, you’d get this intense narcotic look, and just lock in and listen.

Right now I want to tell you another story. It’s really sad - but I promise, it’s really good.

Today we put you in the underground, where we all began, and where we’re all going… dust to dust, all that. So much happens down there that scientists barely understand. Microbes move, nutrients fertilize and roots from different trees pleach together and communicate. Down there life and death are forever mixing, mutating and expanding.

And today you’re going down there, going on adventure. Don’t be worried.

As I say this stuff about nutrients and microbes I can feel you stirring, needing to say something. Your dad’s getting all woo woo and weird and vaguely mystical. You need to tell me about how you just read something about soil ecosystems and you disagree. You’ve got a study to cite and an article from the Economist to call up on your shitty old iPhone that proves you’re right.

And of course Charlie - you’re right - you’re pretty much always right. You lapped me on smarts (and height and handsomeness) years and years ago.

Oscar’s 14 and he just did the same thing. It’s killing me.

It’s not, I’m joking. Of course you know we’ll never stop being impressed by how much you know, how many books you’ve read, and opinions you’ve considered and languages you speak. It’s a pleasure to watch you speed across the vast network of data and knowledge you carry around in that big brain of yours.

Don’t think we’ll ever stop finding ways to tell people that our son missed one question on the SAT - and that was only because he left that question blank and he was pissed about it.

But I need to say that’s not what we really love about you Charlie. There’s so much else.

It’s all the stuff that makes you so kind and sweet and soulful. It’s what you wrote in your Dvar Torah about the spiritual value of apology and how God in the Torah has to answer for his mistakes—TELL ME ABOUT IT.

This week I’ve been thinking to honor Charlie we should all get into the streets to demand impeachment - of God. Talk about high crimes and misdemeanors.

Anyway. What we love is how you chase down random dogs on the street to give them pets. It’s how on Halloween in freshman year at Columbia… you dressed up as Ignatius T. Reilly from Confederacy of Dunces… and didn’t mind all that much that zero-point-zero-one percent of your classmates had any idea who you were. It’s how you and Eliza laugh and razz and love one another, no matter where you are.

It’s how you’re always the first guy at a family gathering to connect with a little kid. 

You’ve also struggled a lot, I know. It’s just not easy being Charlie Noxon. You’ve had a hard time socially, and with girls and rejection and authority. You have strong opinions and a little bit of a fascist streak. You’ve wrestled with deep existential loneliness and thought a lot about whether this is even a world you want to live in.

But just look. Look how you grew. Look at how you came into yourself. Look at how over the past year or so you found such poise and confidence and happiness.

This is why YOU being the person of ALL people who died on a mountain far from home on New Year’s Eve can be something more than a tragedy. It is SO hard to see any pattern or sense in this at all… but even in this horrific week I can see the beautiful arc of your life.

What I mean is that lives are as long as they are. And yours is - WAS - too fucking short.

But just look at how you grew, look at all the incredible people who adore you, look at the communities you touched and changed and brought life to. Look at how over the past three months you found intimacy and connection and the first gorgeous, intense phases of love.

Of course we’ll never stop wishing we could know what you’d go on to do from here - the discoveries and things you’d make, your career and family and all the rest of it. Thinking about that absolutely breaks all our hearts.

But look again at that beautiful arc. Look at the sweet, lonely, pained kid in the newsie cap - and how he grew into that beautiful man, who just a few days ago was shushing down a hill with his brother and sister and me, feeling good, riding so high, on the cusp of a new year and a big life.

It’s a good story Charlie. And we all know you love a good story.

I love you Charlie. And I always will.

Love,
Dad

Eulogy for Charlie Noxon, 9/10/1999- 12/31/2019

Dear Charlie,

When you were little and in a snit - upset or wiggly or whatever - we had a trick: we’d look in your face and tell you a story.

It could be about anything, really. I used to make up crazy stories for you about a made-up race of creatures called the Wallawalladoodads. They had alien bodies and drank grape soda and they always shared their toys. Remember?

The point is, the minute we looked in your face and started talking, no matter how upset you felt, you’d get this intense narcotic look, and just lock in and listen.

Right now I want to tell you another story. It’s really sad - but I promise, it’s really good.

Today we put you in the underground, where we all began, and where we’re all going… dust to dust, all that. So much happens down there that scientists barely understand. Microbes move, nutrients fertilize and roots from different trees pleach together and communicate. Down there life and death are forever mixing, mutating and expanding.

And today you’re going down there, going on adventure. Don’t be worried.

As I say this stuff about nutrients and microbes I can feel you stirring, needing to say something. Your dad’s getting all woo woo and weird and vaguely mystical. You need to tell me about how you just read something about soil ecosystems and you disagree. You’ve got a study to cite and an article from the Economist to call up on your shitty old iPhone that proves you’re right.

And of course Charlie - you’re right - you’re pretty much always right. You lapped me on smarts (and height and handsomeness) years and years ago.

Oscar’s 14 and he just did the same thing. It’s killing me.

It’s not, I’m joking. Of course you know we’ll never stop being impressed by how much you know, how many books you’ve read, and opinions you’ve considered and languages you speak. It’s a pleasure to watch you speed across the vast network of data and knowledge you carry around in that big brain of yours.

Don’t think we’ll ever stop finding ways to tell people that our son missed one question on the SAT - and that was only because he left that question blank and he was pissed about it.

But I need to say that’s not what we really love about you Charlie. There’s so much else.

It’s all the stuff that makes you so kind and sweet and soulful. It’s what you wrote in your Dvar Torah about the spiritual value of apology and how God in the Torah has to answer for his mistakes—TELL ME ABOUT IT.

This week I’ve been thinking to honor Charlie we should all get into the streets to demand impeachment - of God. Talk about high crimes and misdemeanors.

Anyway. What we love is how you chase down random dogs on the street to give them pets. It’s how on Halloween in freshman year at Columbia… you dressed up as Ignatius T. Reilly from Confederacy of Dunces… and didn’t mind all that much that zero-point-zero-one percent of your classmates had any idea who you were. It’s how you and Eliza laugh and razz and love one another, no matter where you are.

It’s how you’re always the first guy at a family gathering to connect with a little kid. 

You’ve also struggled a lot, I know. It’s just not easy being Charlie Noxon. You’ve had a hard time socially, and with girls and rejection and authority. You have strong opinions and a little bit of a fascist streak. You’ve wrestled with deep existential loneliness and thought a lot about whether this is even a world you want to live in.

But just look. Look how you grew. Look at how you came into yourself. Look at how over the past year or so you found such poise and confidence and happiness.

This is why YOU being the person of ALL people who died on a mountain far from home on New Year’s Eve can be something more than a tragedy. It is SO hard to see any pattern or sense in this at all… but even in this horrific week I can see the beautiful arc of your life.

What I mean is that lives are as long as they are. And yours is - WAS - too fucking short.

But just look at how you grew, look at all the incredible people who adore you, look at the communities you touched and changed and brought life to. Look at how over the past three months you found intimacy and connection and the first gorgeous, intense phases of love.

Of course we’ll never stop wishing we could know what you’d go on to do from here - the discoveries and things you’d make, your career and family and all the rest of it. Thinking about that absolutely breaks all our hearts.

But look again at that beautiful arc. Look at the sweet, lonely, pained kid in the newsie cap - and how he grew into that beautiful man, who just a few days ago was shushing down a hill with his brother and sister and me, feeling good, riding so high, on the cusp of a new year and a big life.

It’s a good story Charlie. And we all know you love a good story.

I love you Charlie. And I always will.

Love,
Dad

Posted on 01.07.20 at 04:05 pm

Barbara Johns and Student Strikers

https://www.christophernoxon.com//barbara_johns_and_student_strikers

Posted on 10.22.19 at 02:51 pm

Art exhibit, speaking dates

https://www.christophernoxon.com//art_exhibit_speaking_dates

Civil Rights, Virginia Beach, art, social justice, literary events, Good Trouble

The Leon Family Gallery in Virginia Beach is putting up 25 giclée prints from “Good Trouble” and five original watercolors, with an opening and gallery talk on Monday Nov 4 at 6 pm.

It’s my first ever exhibit, and I’m overcome with excitement (and terror) at the prospect of seeing pictures scrawled in my journal blown up, framed and available for sale - all proceeds go to the Center for Popular Democracy and the United Jewish Federation of Tidewater. I’m happy to have these images seen outside a book, and doubly excited to unveil five new (full size, full color, actual AHHT) pieces based on interviews and research into racial justice in Virginia (landing site of the first slave ship, home to activists who protested school and bus segregation years before Rosa Parks or Little Rock). 

If you’re anywhere near VA (or have VA friends or relatives into art or, you know, justice), come on out!

Or check out my Instagram: @noxonpics, where I post stuff all the time.

I’m also speaking at the Virginia Wesleyan University on Tuesday Nov 5 at 11 am, Agape Church at 10 am on Sunday Nov 3. Details below:


Monday Nov 4, 6 pm
United Jewish Federation of Tidewater
Virginia Beach
Leon Family Gallery

Tuesday Nov 5, 11 am
Virginia Wesleyan University

Posted on 10.22.19 at 01:46 pm

Refugee Sketches in NY Times

https://www.christophernoxon.com//refugee_sketches_in_ny_times

Posted on 06.30.19 at 01:42 pm

Refugee Sketches in NY Times

https://www.christophernoxon.com//refugee_sketches_in_ny_times

I got a chance to interview and draw portraits of refugees and asylum seekers who saw reflections of their own experience in the musical masterpiece “Fiddler on the Roof.” Those words and pictures were printed in the New York Times Arts & Leisure section on Sunday. These faces and stories need to be seen in a time of hostility and fear. Check out the drawings in “ILLUSTRATIONS.”

I got a chance to interview and draw portraits of refugees and asylum seekers who saw reflections of their own experience in the musical masterpiece “Fiddler on the Roof.” Those words and pictures were printed in the New York Times Arts & Leisure section on Sunday. These faces and stories need to be seen in a time of hostility and fear. Check out the drawings in “ILLUSTRATIONS.”

Posted on 06.30.19 at 01:35 pm

Jewish Book Council sketch-a-palooza

https://www.christophernoxon.com//jewish_book_council_sketch_a_palooza

It was such a thrill to be back in NYC last week to pitch “Good Trouble” to the Jewish Book Council. The conference itself is a trip - I joined 45 other authors in a room packed with people who book writers at JCCs, synagogues and book festivals. Each writer gets exactly two minutes to talk about their book. It’s like literary speed dating. To calm my nerves while I waited I sketched all the other writers - in previous years those sketches have been published in the JBC literary magazine Paper Brigade. Check out 20 of the least-monstrous on my IG: @noxonpics.

It was such a thrill to be back in NYC last week to pitch “Good Trouble” to the Jewish Book Council. The conference itself is a trip - I joined 45 other authors in a room packed with people who book writers at JCCs, synagogues and book festivals. Each writer gets exactly two minutes to talk about their book. It’s like literary speed dating. To calm my nerves while I waited I sketched all the other writers - in previous years those sketches have been published in the JBC literary magazine Paper Brigade. Check out 20 of the least-monstrous on my IG: @noxonpics.

Posted on 05.28.19 at 09:36 am

Publication Party at the Strand, NYC

https://www.christophernoxon.com//pub_party_at_strand_nyc

So excited to celebrate the publication of GOOD TROUBLE Tuesday, January 8, in New York City at arguably the greatest book store on earth, Strand Books on Broadway.

I’ll have stories to tell and pictures to share and a conversation with Jennifer Epps-Addison, the inspiring and fearless activist who heads the Center for Popular Democracy.

Please join:

https://z-upload.facebook.com/events/756492608038620/

So excited to celebrate the publication of GOOD TROUBLE Tuesday, January 8, in New York City at arguably the greatest book store on earth, Strand Books on Broadway.

I’ll have stories to tell and pictures to share and a conversation with Jennifer Epps-Addison, the inspiring and fearless activist who heads the Center for Popular Democracy.

Please join:

https://z-upload.facebook.com/events/756492608038620/

Posted on 01.02.19 at 06:21 pm

Good Trouble: Lessons from the Civil Rights Playbook

https://www.christophernoxon.com//good_trouble_lessons_from_the_civil_rights_playbook

Order the book from Amazon

Read the book banned in Virginia Beach schools, along with Toni Morrison’s “Bluest Eye,” Ernest Gaines’ “A Lesson Before Dying” and four other “objectionable” titles.

Good Trouble: Lessons from the Civil Rights Playbook“Christopher Noxon’s elegant sketches and visceral use of words brilliantly capture the urgent courage and integrity required of the men and women who stepped up for the civil rights movement. Noxon’s personal and emotional storytelling walks us right into the story so that, as each page goes by, we begin to see not a history lesson but instead feel a riveting call to action for our own present day. At this moment in time, when leadership feels like it’s on life support and we are all aching for something to believe in, Good Trouble is not just good medicine—it’s the best medicine.”
—Shonda Rhimes

Good Trouble is the helpful antidote to all the pessimism and name-calling that is permeating today’s political and social dialogues. Revisiting episodes from the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s, it highlights the essential lessons that modern-day activists and the civically minded can extract and embrace in order to move forward and create change. In words and vivid pen-and-watercolor illustrations, journalist Christopher Noxon dives into the real stories behind the front lines of the Montgomery bus boycott and the Greensboro lunch counter sit-ins and notable figures such as Rosa Parks and Bayard Rustin, all while exploring the parallels between the civil rights movement era and the present moment. This thoughtful, fresh approach is sure to inspire conversation, action, and, most importantly, hope.

Posted on 12.26.18 at 07:51 pm

Good Trouble cover

https://www.christophernoxon.com//good_trouble_cover

Posted on 06.06.18 at 05:12 pm

GOOD TROUBLE drops Jan 7

https://www.christophernoxon.com//good_trouble_drops_jan_7

Super excited to share my first book of words and pictures, GOOD TROUBLE. Publication is set for January 7. Here’s the back cover copy from Abrams:

Overwhelmed by today’s political climate and accompanying pessimism, journalist and illustrator Christopher Noxon found encouragement on a visit to the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis. He came away inspired and determined to learn the deeper lessons of the movement that would lead to progress today. Good Trouble is the result of that reckoning. In words and vivid pen-and-watercolor illustrations, Noxon dives into the real stories behind the front lines of the Montgomery bus boycott and the Greensboro lunch counter sit-ins and illuminates notable figures like Rosa Parks and Bayard Rustin, all while exploring the parallels between the Civil Rights movement and the present moment. With a fresh look at historic episodes and new interviews with its heroes, Good Trouble gleans essential wisdom and tactics modern day activists can embrace, urging them forward to create change. Good Trouble is evidence that the past could be the best roadmap in inspiring action and hope not just for now, but for all times.

Super excited to share my first book of words and pictures, GOOD TROUBLE. Publication is set for January 7. Here’s the back cover copy from Abrams:

Overwhelmed by today’s political climate and accompanying pessimism, journalist and illustrator Christopher Noxon found encouragement on a visit to the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis. He came away inspired and determined to learn the deeper lessons of the movement that would lead to progress today. Good Trouble is the result of that reckoning. In words and vivid pen-and-watercolor illustrations, Noxon dives into the real stories behind the front lines of the Montgomery bus boycott and the Greensboro lunch counter sit-ins and illuminates notable figures like Rosa Parks and Bayard Rustin, all while exploring the parallels between the Civil Rights movement and the present moment. With a fresh look at historic episodes and new interviews with its heroes, Good Trouble gleans essential wisdom and tactics modern day activists can embrace, urging them forward to create change. Good Trouble is evidence that the past could be the best roadmap in inspiring action and hope not just for now, but for all times.

Posted on 06.06.18 at 05:06 pm

March sketchbook

https://www.christophernoxon.com//march_sketchbook

Posted on 05.02.17 at 11:17 am

Ghosts of the St. Louis

https://www.christophernoxon.com//ghosts_of_the_st._louis

Posted on 05.02.17 at 09:01 am

Lessons from Memphis

https://www.christophernoxon.com//lessons_from_memphis

Posted on 01.12.17 at 02:07 pm

Cuba Notebook

https://www.christophernoxon.com//cuba_notebook

Posted on 01.04.17 at 02:38 pm

Author Speed Dating

https://www.christophernoxon.com//author_speed_dating

Posted on 11.22.16 at 09:03 am

Radio & Podcasts

https://www.christophernoxon.com//radio1

The banning of “Good Trouble” in Virginia is the topic of this interview on the Spectrum TV program, LA Times Today.

Appearing on The Colbert Report was just as exciting and fun as you’d imagine.

Thrilled to be a return guest to talk about “Good Trouble,” civil rights and my son’s Jews Your Own Adventure bar mitzvah. Stick around for a chat with Bernard-Henri Lévi.

Lovely in-depth chat with communications coach Drew Kugler on his podcast “Tell Me What to Say.” 

Appearance on the podcast Unorthodox to discuss Plus One and conversion to Judaism.

Comedy duo Ronna & Beverly delight and torture me over book, wife and kids in this hour-long podcast.

Lively chat with KPPC’s Alex Cohen about Holllywood, househusbands and the novel Plus One for the program “Take Two”.

KCRW’s Madeleine Brand conducts this interview about what it’s like being a “domestic first responder”.

Interview with NPR’s “Talk of the Nation” about the book Rejuvenile and backlash among more traditionally minded adults.

The banning of “Good Trouble” in Virginia is the topic of this interview on the Spectrum TV program, LA Times Today.

Appearing on The Colbert Report was just as exciting and fun as you’d imagine. I did this interview the same day I appeared live on the “Today” show to promote the release of my first book “Rejuvenile” - and while the network morning show was stilted and superficial (they paired me with a perky teevee psychologist who gassed on about why doggonit are adults acting so silly?), Colbert was both insightful and fun.

Thrilled to be a return guest on “Unorthodox” to talk about “Good Trouble,” civil rights and my son’s Jews Your Own Adventure bar mitzvah. Stick around for a chat with Bernard-Henri Lévi.

Lovely in-depth chat with communications coach Drew Kugler on his podcast “Tell Me What to Say.” 

Appearance on the podcast Unorthodox to discuss Plus One and conversion to Judaism.

Comedy duo Ronna & Beverly delight and torture me over book, wife and kids in this hour-long podcast.

Lively chat with KPPC’s Alex Cohen about Holllywood, househusbands and the novel Plus One for the program “Take Two”.

KCRW’s Madeleine Brand conducts this interview about what it’s like being a “domestic first responder”.

Interview with NPR’s “Talk of the Nation” about the book Rejuvenile and backlash among more traditionally minded adults.

Posted on 11.15.16 at 07:17 am

Plus One Party Plan

https://www.christophernoxon.com//plus_one_party_plan

Posted on 11.01.16 at 02:52 pm

Heroes

https://www.christophernoxon.com//heroes

Posted on 11.01.16 at 02:49 pm

Food

https://www.christophernoxon.com//food

Posted on 11.01.16 at 02:45 pm

Faces

https://www.christophernoxon.com//faces

Posted on 11.01.16 at 02:35 pm

Buildings

https://www.christophernoxon.com//buildings

Posted on 11.01.16 at 02:20 pm

Acrylics

https://www.christophernoxon.com//acrylics

Posted on 11.01.16 at 08:21 am

LA Times Review of ‘Out on Wire’

Jessica Abel’s graphic novel on the rise of narrative nonfiction radio (think This American Life and Radiolab) is a love letter from one blossoming genre to another.

http://www.latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/la-ca-jc-jessica-abel-20150823-story.html

Writing about music, the saying goes, is like “dancing about architecture.” In “Out on the Wire,” Jessica Abel attempts an equally unlikely trick: drawing about radio.

The Chicago-born graphic novelist and storytelling teacher is nothing if not ambitious, employing a medium commonly known for sight gags and superheroes to describe and deconstruct a new radio genre awkwardly labeled here as “narrative nonfiction.” While tough to classify (much less draw), this sort of radio is well known to the listeners of such program-slash-podcasts as “This American Life,” “Radiolab,” “Snap Judgment” and “The Moth.”

Going behind-the-mike at those programs and several others, Abel promises to reveal the “storytelling secrets” that make this new wave of radio so compelling, tips she promises in her introduction will benefit anyone called on to write a business report or make a sales call or even create a Facebook profile.

That general interest pitch is a stretch, like a line left over from a book proposal or marketing pitch. Mostly, it’s unnecessary — “Out on the Wire” is a terrific book for radio superfans and would-be producers, a niche audience that isn’t so niche anymore. With the breakout success of shows like “Serial” and the explosion in amateur podcasting, radio is undergoing the sort of DIY revolution that journalism faced with the advent of blogs. If “Out on the Wire” helps convince the legions of amateur podcasters that good radio is far more than recording hour upon hour of unedited gabbing, it will be not only useful and fun but that much rarer thing: a public service.

An early fan of “This American Life,” Abel was recruited by host Ira Glass to create a 1999 pledge drive premium called “Radio: An Illustrated Guide.” A portion of that comic is included here, which makes for some unfortunate redundancies but also serves to demonstrate how far Abel — and the form itself — have advanced.

Dark, sketchy and composed largely of rectangular panels packed with talking heads, Abel’s first attempt to explain narrative radio was comparatively flat-footed and literal. In the 16 years since, Abel has written five graphic novels and two comic textbooks, and her new work goes well beyond the pleasure of seeing caricatures of radio personalities emitting speech bubbles filled with edited-for-size quotes. In the new book, Abel transposes her real-life subjects into metaphorical landscapes, letting them loose in imaginary jungles and cityscapes and even dreamlike planes of consciousness that bring to mind the bright white stockroom of “The Matrix” or the Abstract Thought room in “Inside Out.” She also depicts actual stories produced by the programs she describes, intercutting a Israeli shootout and a Thai boat ride with story meetings where reporters and producers debate the minutia of creating that ineffable, magical thing they all aspire to: “great tape.”

The producers Abel features largely agree on what makes great tape great: “compelling” characters, “big” questions, “authentic” voices and “robust” narrative. Good sound also helps (producers describe sweetening their stories with sound effects, music cues and dramatic pauses). Most of the best stories follow a fairly standard dramatic structure boiled down to a seemingly simple formula. A character listeners identify with goes through a conflict, has a resolution and comes to an unexpected conclusion.

Simple, right? The big takeaway here is how difficult those elements are to generate and how long it can take to create the right mix. It may surprise listeners of “This American Life” to learn that stories on the program typically take four or five months to produce, with Glass admitting to spending four full days adding and subtracting the “ums” “ahs” and breaths in the narration of a six-minute story. Even a show like “The Moth,” which features stories told live without notes, workshops its pieces for months before tapings, reworking and refining the material over and over before recording.

And while the bulk of “Out on the Wire” is a love-fest between public radio idealists, conflicts do emerge. Abel dramatizes a few ferocious story meetings where junior producers face the criticism of senior staff. She also describes a fundamental schism between two schools of the genre, personified by the affable Glass and the more combative Glynn Washington, host of “Snap Judgment.”

In its most simplified form, Glass says the typical “This American Life” story follows a tried-and-true, even ancient formula: anecdote followed by reflection. First a story, then a moral. It’s a surprisingly strict rule on a show that seems resolutely casual and free-form: No story ends without someone — usually the reporter but sometimes the host — wrapping up the piece in a neat narrative bow. It’s usually so artfully tied that it doesn’t feel intrusive, but it’s nearly always there. Washington rejects that approach outright. The Oakland-based “Snap Judgment” strenuously avoids any sort of reflection from producers on the grounds that the subjects are the only people qualified to lend their stories meaning. According to Washington, radio storytellers are in no position to reflect: “It’s like, I’m Mr. Educated Public Media Announcer Guy, and I will sit back and interpret your actions for you to the rest of my knowing clan while we look at you as a specimen for our radio zoo project.”

Dustups like these touch on deep questions of narrative and would make for good fodder in any book — but they’re even more compelling rendered in Abel’s boundary-pushing comic, a love letter from one blossoming new media to another.

LA Times

Huffpo Essay on Douchebag Dads

Face it daddies: we can be real douchebags.

Thus begins click-baity, confessional essay I wrote for the Huffington Post on stay-at-home dads in which I come clean about my own insecurities and the grain of insecure inspiration that spawned PLUS ONE.

Face it, daddies: We can be real douchebags.

I speak from experience. I have three kids, ages 9, 13 and 15, and because my wife works like a madwoman and provides the bulk of our family income, my main job is managing the house and looking after the kids.

That makes me a “house husband”—which I’d call myself if it weren’t for the fact that saying that word out loud mysteriously shrinks my gonads to the size and firmness of month-old blueberries.

A while back, I started calling myself a “domestic first responder.”

Much manlier, right?

The fact that I’ve gone to such lengths to butch-up my job title gets at a problem caretaking guys know all too well: While breadwinning women are now more common than ever (The Pew Research Center reports that women are now primary breadwinners in 40 percent of U.S. households), male householders are often gripped by a potent mix of shame, pride, isolation, frustration, delight and ambivalence. Even those rare guys who are completely at peace with their place in the family and world routinely bump up against assumptions that they secretly resent their wives, tolerate their children and down deep, kind of hate their lives.

Are you OK? As Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg has pointed out, this is the question men get when their wives succeed (while women married to successful men are told, “Congratulations!”)

“That’s the problem,” Sandberg says. “The problem is we demand and expect professional success from men. It’s optional and even threatening from women.”

No matter how loosey-goosey and boundary-smashing the world may seem in certain blue state bubbles, age-old stereotypes die hard. Boil it down and many if not most people will tell you guys are really knuckle-draggers who harbor secret fantasies of standing on a mountain with their woman chained next to them in a bikini. When confronted with a male caretaker, a guy in a schlumpy V-neck flecked with partially masticated Cheerios, the world thinks, oof. Must be hard on his manhood. Must make up for it in other ways.

All that can make for some seriously bad behavior. You know who I’m talking about—the irritable schlubs at the playground madly thumbing their phones while mommies dole out the snacks. The grandstanding daddies who turn diaper changes into acts of performance art when company is around but who otherwise leave the dirty jobs to mom. The high-fiving fun dads who devote weekends to X-Box, but who get flummoxed by school registration forms or stinky hampers of laundry.

Confession: I’ve been all those dads.

My novel Plus One is about one of those daddies, a marketing executive who quits his job to stay home when his wife’s career takes off. In so doing I spun out all my craziest anxieties and deepest insecurities. I also talked to a bunch of guys in similar circumstances and many told me they feel privileged to be home with the kids, but diminished and belittled out in the world.

To a certain extent, householding guys are just now facing the same hard realities women have been dealing with for generations. After all, guys like me have spent the last 20 or so years drifting into our masculine selves, trying this and that, peripatetically following our bliss. During the same period, our sisters have engaged in open and public warfare over their roles at home and in the workforce. They’re toughened-up, battle-hardened and found their balance.

Lord knows it ‘aint easy for any caretaker, man or woman, but by and large women are just better at it. I’m thinking here of a woman I know who raises four boys, runs a boutique architecture firm and gives extensive notes on the scripts of her husband’s crazy-successful television show. Plus, she keeps to a strict exercise regimen and shows up at award dinners and parties looking super hot in vintage minidresses.

Meanwhile, most of the “Plus One” men I know are either embittered or entitled or seem to overcompensate for the fear they’re either mooching or emasculated. While I was working on the book, I was invited to a gun club by the husband of a woman who makes network television. He recounted two weeks of racing a modified Lamborghini in a European gumball rally while demonstrating how to load and fire a 12-gauge shotgun. My ultimate judgment may have been clouded by the fact that I can’t even spell Lamborghini and I hit three of the 100 targets he nailed, but the whole exercise seemed desperate. We both had children and women at home to attend to; why, I kept thinking, were we out here with these grizzled Nugents, stinking up our hands with gunpowder?

Another guy I know worked as a gaffer before meeting a woman who writes big studio movies and makes big studio money. He quit the job, had two kids and then hired a posse of assistants to schedule and schlep the children. These days, he keeps busy leveling-up in World of Warcraft, adding wings to the family’s ranch house-cum-English cottage, logging hours for his certification as a scuba dive master and working out with a tai kwon do master. It’s a good life and he’s a lovely guy, chatty and entertaining, but it’s hard to get through five minutes of conversation without hearing the granular details about life as a level-50 Elf, dive master and black belt. Sure, life has conspired to make me a pussy, he seems to say. So I’ll be the alpha pussy. (Sidenote: “Alpha Pussy” was my working title until it was explained to me that no halfway tasteful or self-respecting reader would ever pick that up at Barnes & Noble.)

Of course there are biological differences between men and women, but we have to give men more credit. Despite the occasional weird outburst or awkward social interaction (I still remember a mommy at Gymboree asking, “What are you doing here?” as if I was an Angie’s List birthday clown), I’m a pretty good dad—at least I try to be. I for one feel deeply blessed to have that role with my kids and wife, to be available to my kids in a way I hope will create deep and lasting bonds, and to do the things that need doing so my wife can lead the professional life she does. That’s a huge privilege. The fact that the culture sidelines anyone doing that work—man or woman—must change for the sake of all our well-being. Men can be natural caretakers and the world has got to stop assuming that we’re all threatened and emasculated.

So, a call to my fellow caretaking dudes: enough with the douchebaggery. There’s nothing shameful in taking care of a family. Stop with the apologizing, the grandstanding, the hyphenating, the dodging and weaving. The time has come to own our place. Let’s all try laughing at our failings rather than blotting them out with macho posturing.

When someone asks what you do, say it loud and proud.

I’m a Plus One, and I’m done apologizing for it.

Huffington Post

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https://www.christophernoxon.com//cn_not_found

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Posted on 05.11.15 at 02:47 pm

Plus One

https://www.christophernoxon.com//plus_one_a_novel

Plus One novel is a comedic take on bread-winning women & stay-at-home husbands in contemporary Los Angeles.

Order the book from Amazon

Read the first chapter as a PDF

Plus One Novel: A Hollywood House Husband Story by Christopher Noxon, House Husband Freelance Writer“Noxon reveals the inner workings of that [Plus One] role with wit, warmth and candor.”
—New York Times Sunday Book Review.

“{It} reads like a series of intimate conversations about the inner workings of family units… There are so many universal, recurring themes about retaining your personhood and being self-possessed. But then there’s also the idea of sacrificing yourself for the greater good of a family.”
— Sean Fitz-Gerald, Los Angeles Magazine

“Plus One provides a comic view of Hollywood excesses, but at its heart is a family reclaiming what’s important. Christopher Noxon’s Plus One describes a family struck by sudden good fortune in Hollywood. It’s a laugh-out-loud, big-hearted novel of a marriage threatened by the success of the wife while the husband scrambles to find his place. ”
—Foreword Reviews

“The book is a lot of fun, it’s very well-written and funny, but also touching”
—Hollywood Reporter

“A rather delicious read.”
—Elle

“This, faithful readers, is a hilarious book. There were times when I laughed so hard, I thought I pulled a stomach muscle.”
— Vox Libris

“Plus One explores the world of Hollywood and modern relationships with hysterical insight.”
—The Absolute Mag

“Plus One is a smart and funny novel about Hollywood, but where it truly shines is in Noxon’s stunning and painfully accurate depiction of the complex rhythms and growing pains of a marriage.”
— Jonathan Tropper, author of This Is Where I Leave You and One Last Thing Before I Go

“Behind every great man there’s a great woman… and in Noxon’s telling, behind every great woman there’s a charming, deeply conflicted guy (sometimes holding a very expensive handbag). Hilarious and unflinching, Plus One is a funny, sharply observed, heartbreaking look at love, power, and happily-ever-after in Hollywood.”
— Jennifer Weiner, author of All Fall Down, The Next Best Thing, and Good in Bed

“A funny, sharply observed novel about a guy with a first-world problem—a wife who’s a hugely successful TV writer and producer—and the identity crisis that goes along with it. Noxon has reimagined the Hollywood novel from a whole new perspective.”
— Tom Perrotta, author of Election, Little Children, and The Leftovers

“Well observed, honest, and laugh-out-loud funny, Plus One deftly tells a story from the inside of show business about being on the outside.”
—Matthew Weiner, creator of Mad Men

“A page-turning peek into the world of TV and families and money, this is Hollywood L.A. as seen from a newcomer’s ambivalent perspective. I found it both fun and fascinating and unsettling to delve into this world, built convincingly by Noxon’s gift with scenes and voices.”
— Aimee Bender, author of The Color Master and The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

“Hilarious and whip-smart, with a big beating heart at its center. I love this book, and so will you.”
—Dana Reinhardt, author of We are the Goldens and The Things a Brother Know

Alex Sherman-Zicklin is a mid-level marketing executive whose wife’s fourteenth attempt at a TV pilot is produced, ordered to series, and awarded an Emmy. Overnight, she’s sucked into a mad show business vortex, and Alex is tasked with managing their new high-profile Hollywood lifestyle. It’s a world of Salvadoran nannies and secret pop-up restaurants, competitive charity fundraisers and elite elementary schools. As Figgy deals with meddling network executives and a Yale-educated, Ozarks-born lead actress who complains that the hit show is “nothing I want to be associated with,” Alex falls in with a posse of fellow Plus Ones, men married to women whose success, income, and public recognition far surpass their own. To keep himself and his family intact, he’ll face the meddling of his Birkenstock lesbian mother, the temptation of a seductive lady butcher, and an opportunity that just might lift him out of the long shadow cast by his powerful spouse. Then again, he faces the possibility that his powerful spouse will trade up in favor of a newer, better model of man.

Posted on 03.26.15 at 02:17 pm

Rejuvenile: Kickball, Cartoons, Cupcakes and the Reinvention of the American Grown-Up

https://www.christophernoxon.com//rejuvenile_kickball_cartoons_cupcakes_and_the_reinvention_of_the_american_g

Rejuvenile is a sympathetic yet probing look at new breed of playful adult that is redefining maturity in the twenty-first century—and fast becoming a lucrative market for forward-thinking corporations.

Why are more adults delaying marriage and parenthood? How is it that DisneyWorld is now the world’s top vacation destination for adults? Can it be true that the average age of video game players is twenty-nine and rising? Why is Hollywood overtly marketing childhood fairytales to adults?

Challenging the notion that one’s age should dictate one’s activities and mind-set, Rejuvenile explores the world of adults who compete in spelling bees, working professionals who play “all-ages tag,” mothers who learn skateboarding to be closer to their teenage sons, grown-ups who dress and party like they did in high school, and couples who visit a Disney park once a month (without the kids).

Identifying the demographic forces shaping this phenomenon, Noxon describes how rejuveniles are forcing marketers and social scientists to rethink canonical rules of their business. Citing companies that are now repackaging and redesigning their products for this new target market, Rejuvenile examines the “toyification” of consumer goods and shows how CEOs are investing millions of dollars to release, for example, new Strawberry Shortcake dolls, Ferarri Barbies, and Executive Set Sea Monkeys.

Noxon’s thought-provoking analysis of rejuvenile parents and their effect on the family offers a contrary take on traditional methods of parenting. Through extensive interviews and a survey of research on family dynamics, Noxon argues that the men and women he calls Playalong Parents forge stronger bonds with children and enhance their authority.

Noxon also considers the arguments of the “Harrumphing Codgers”—social critics who see the rejuvenile as a threat to social order—but he ultimately believes that rejuveniles’ refusal to give up cherished qualities of childhood has bettered themselves and the world. True play, he argues—as ridiculous and meaningless as it might appear—is a way of reconnecting with a basic part of ourselves and tapping into our creativity. Rejuvenile is a fascinating look at a shift that is causing a profound cultural change, arguably for the better.

For excerpts, interviews and additional material, see the Rejuvenile website.

Posted on 03.26.15 at 02:17 pm

Atlantic essay on Plus Ones

https://www.christophernoxon.com//atlantic_essay_on_plus_ones

Let the Coattail Promotional Tour begin. In advance of Monday’s Emmys, the Atlantic published my essay on men on the red carpet and “the plight” (really?) of the Plus One. Read on for the true story of a wardrobe malfunction fictionalized in the first chapter of the upcoming novel…

Let the Coattail Promotional Tour begin. In advance of Monday’s Emmys, the Atlantic published my essay on men on the red carpet and “the plight” (really?) of the Plus One. Read on for the true story of a wardrobe malfunction fictionalized in the first chapter of the upcoming novel…

Posted on 08.24.14 at 06:03 pm

Tanning Bed

https://www.christophernoxon.com//tanning_bed

Posted on 08.20.14 at 04:57 pm

Shoe

https://www.christophernoxon.com//shoe

Posted on 08.20.14 at 04:57 pm

Monster

https://www.christophernoxon.com//monster

Posted on 08.20.14 at 04:56 pm

Snack

https://www.christophernoxon.com//snack

Posted on 08.20.14 at 04:56 pm

Flowers

https://www.christophernoxon.com//flowers

Posted on 08.20.14 at 04:55 pm

Coffee Maker

https://www.christophernoxon.com//coffee_maker

Posted on 08.20.14 at 04:55 pm

Rat

https://www.christophernoxon.com//rat

Posted on 08.20.14 at 04:54 pm

Sketchbook Project

https://www.christophernoxon.com//sketchbook_project

Posted on 02.28.14 at 08:39 am

Plus One chapter drawings

https://www.christophernoxon.com//plus_one_chapter_drawings

Posted on 02.28.14 at 08:38 am

Undoodles

https://www.christophernoxon.com//undoodles

Posted on 02.24.14 at 12:59 pm

Baby names

https://www.christophernoxon.com//baby_names

Posted on 02.24.14 at 12:53 pm

NYC buildings

https://www.christophernoxon.com//nyc_buildings

Posted on 02.21.14 at 01:19 pm

New Yorker Talk of the Town: Prodigy

My piece on teen chef Flynn McGarry brought national attention to a culinary wunderkind who had been serving up elaborate 10-course tasting meals in his mom’s living room.

One recent Friday afternoon in the San Fernando Valley, Flynn McGarry snuck into a neighbor’s yard. McGarry, who is thirteen, was on an urgent mission.

“Rosemary flowers,” he said. “I saw them growing there and I knew they’d be amazing in my farro dish. Unfortunately, this neighbor’s not so nice, so I had to be kind of sneaky.” The blossoms appeared the next evening, in a ring of pickled onions, crumbled pistachios, slivered carrots, and a dozen or so other ingredients.  The dish was the midpoint of a ten-course tasting menu at Eureka, the monthly pop-up restaurant that McGarry runs out of the house he shares with his mother, his sister, his grandparents, and a tubby terrier named Digby.

McGarry, who is fair-haired and slender, with tan freckles across his nose, has been cooking seriously since he was ten. According to his mom, Meg, a screenwriter, who serves as general manager and reluctant dishwasher at Eureka, Flynn’s obsession took hold soon after she and her husband divorced. “Things were lonely and weird at home,” she said. “Flynn started cooking for me.”

After working his way through “The French Laundry Cookbook,” McGarry began studying culinary videos on You-Tube and poring over food blogs, eventually replicating a six-course meal by Grant Achatz, whom he calls his “current food God” (“Except I didn’t do the turtle soup - I couldn’t get the meat”). He started homeschooling a year ago and now interns two days a week at Ray’s, a Patina Group restaurant at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. He recently spent a week in the kitchen at Eleven Madison Park. Daniel Humm, the chef there, said, “Flynn’s focus, passion, and interest in cooking ares rarely found in any cook - let alone a thirteen-year-old.”

But McGarry’s main focus these days is Eureka, an unlikely hit in a city teeming with food trucks, ethnic holes-in- the-wall, and novelty restaurants. One of the seventeen customers who paid fifty dollars for McGarry’s latest meal referred to Eureka as “the pre-pube pop-up.” (The tab recently went up to a hundred dollars.)

“I’ve got to say I was a little worried walking up here,” a music-business executive named Susan Genco said. “The kid’s bike is chained up outside! But his sunchoke soup - my God.” At another table, the mother of a twelve-year-old tasted the soup, put down her spoon, and said, “I’m trying to picture my kid around a sunchoke. I just can’t do it.”

Diners grew more excited with each course. Someone said he’d heard that Kazunori Nozawa, the Japanese sushi guru, had sampled McGarry’s food and come up with a theory: because no alcohol or tobacco has ever passed his lips, his palate is “pure.”

Among the other guests, Rob Cohen, a reality-TV producer with bushy muttonchops and a Western shirt, declared McGarry “impossibly adorable.” He sat across from John Sedlar, the executive chef and owner of the restaurants Rivera and Playa. Sedlar pronounced the farro dish “formidable,” but said the real standouts were courses six and seven - sous vide salmon with pink cara cara orange, followed by short ribs with coffee celeriac puree and wild mushrooms.

“He’s an artist,” Sedlar said, scraping clean a plate from McGarry’s great- grandparents’ china. “His approach to composition and organization is very precise, very European.”

Sedlar then ducked into a back room to spy on the chef at work. McGarry’s bedroom has been stripped of all traces of boyhood - there are no video games (“boring”), sports equipment (“no interest”), or any sign of clothes or even bedding (his rollaway bed and dresser are stashed away on restaurant days). Instead, McGarry has assembled - with help from his dad, Ikea, and “a lot of debt from American Express,” his mother said - a miniature version of the kitchen setup at Grant Achatz’s Alinea, with stainless-steel-topped counters, four induction burners, and a prep station in the closet.

McGarry’s staff for the evening numbered five, including his seventeen-year-old sister, Paris, and a guy from Ray’s, but he is in charge. In the kitchen even his mom and dad call him “boss” or “chef.” McGarry is exacting. He is, by his own reckoning, “odd.” “I’m shy and weird,” he said. “But every chef I’ve met is weird, basically. We want to work long days, it’s really stressful, it’s hot, you get cut, it’s brutal. But we love it. We live for it.”

When the last course had been cleared and his mother began loading the dishwasher, McGarry took off his chef’s coat and opened a package of green apple gummy rolls. Then he headed out with a friend to grab a late-night burger. “I’m starving,” he said.

The New Yorker

Unscrolled anthology published

https://www.christophernoxon.com//unscrolled_anthology_published

I have an illustrated piece in the new anthology Unscrolled: Writers and Artists Wrestle With The Torah.” Published by Workman Publishing Co., the book is a fascinating exercise in Biblical reinterpretation, with contributors (including Aimee Bender, Damon Lindelof and Sam Lipsyte) tackling one of the traditional parshas in the form of transcripts, essays, memoirs, letters, infographics and stories. My piece, titled “Gomer & Gazzam,” is a spin on the old “Goofus & Gallant” cartoon in Highlights Magazine.

I have an illustrated piece in the new anthology Unscrolled: Writers and Artists Wrestle With The Torah.” Published by Workman Publishing Co., the book is a fascinating exercise in Biblical reinterpretation, with contributors (including Aimee Bender, Damon Lindelof and Sam Lipsyte) tackling one of the traditional parshas in the form of transcripts, essays, memoirs, letters, infographics and stories. My piece, titled “Gomer & Gazzam,” is a spin on the old “Goofus & Gallant” cartoon in Highlights Magazine.

Posted on 09.09.13 at 12:35 pm

Sh’ma Essay: Nouns Versus Verbs

https://www.christophernoxon.com//shma_essay_nouns_versus_verbs

The Jewish journal Sh’ma published my essay on being “Jewish adjacent” for an issue “on the communal impact - over the past decade or so - as Jews by choice and ‘fellow travelers’ have assumed positions of communal leadership.”

The Jewish journal Sh’ma published my essay on being “Jewish adjacent” for an issue “on the communal impact - over the past decade or so - as Jews by choice and ‘fellow travelers’ have assumed positions of communal leadership.”

Posted on 09.08.13 at 01:31 pm

Sh’ma Essay: Nouns Versus Verbs

I was asked to contribute an essay for a special issue “on the communal impact - over the past decade or so - as Jews by choice and ‘fellow travelers’ have assumed positions of communal leadership.”

The question comes up all the time, usually over coffee and danish at the end of an overlong meeting to discuss turnout at the text study, or staffing at the tashlich event, or funding for the upcoming Jewish learning-event-ritual-happening-whatever.

Am I, um, Jewish?

It’s my name - that’s why I get the question. Never mind that my mom, a fan of A.A. Milne, named me for Christopher Robin; I may as well be called Jesus. When I started dating my wife, the first thing out of her mother’s mouth was, “well I can never put that on a wedding invitation.”

So, no, I’m not Jewish. The only religious instruction I received growing up came after my parents divorced and my atheist dad sent me to a Catholic school to spite my Beatnik-Buddhist mother. Whatever spiritual yearnings I had were satisfied by “Star Wars.” At school they prayed to a spooky guy on a cross; I preferred Obi-Wan. Then I fell madly in love with a Jewish girl from Beverly Hills. After a long bout of soul searching and a course at the University of Judaism, I decided against conversion, for reasons both small (ritual bloodletting? really?) and large (an apparent inability to connect with anything resembling this thing called God).

Still, I happily consented to my wife’s demand that we raise our children as Jews. Whatever personal opinions I had about the Almighty or gefilte fish, I figured our three children would only benefit from a solid foundation in what I understood to be a deep and durable tradition of the Western civilized world. If all else failed, I figured it would give them something to rebel against besides their crazy goy dad.

And that was that; I was content to remain on the sidelines, Jew-adjacent but proudly “unchosen.” At the synagogue day school where we enrolled our children, when they talked about “interfaith families,” I proudly identified myself as the inter.

But a funny thing happened along the way to a happy, unaffiliated, intermarried life. Every year got progressively Jewier.

Today, I’m active in three Jewish organizations - the national nonprofit Reboot, the upstart collective East Side Jews, and the Silver Lake Independent Jewish Community Center. Last year, I launched Undo, an online publication for people seeking to reinvigorate the practice of Shabbat. I fast on Yom Kippur, pay dues at two synagogues, use babysitter nights to attend Jewish community organizing meetings, and have deeply felt opinions about the best pastrami in Los Angeles (Langer’s) and the greatest baked good of all time (Zabar’s chocolate babka).

And all the while, the question keeps resurfacing: Am I Jewish?

I could call myself a ger toshav, a biblical phrase loosely meaning “landed immigrant” or “resident alien.” Many communities, I’m told, have adopted the phrase to clarify the status of non-Jews who are nonetheless welcomed in the community. And yet I’m not sure that framing my status as a guy with a green card but no permanent papers really helps. Other communities are looking for alternate ways of naming this amorphous group of Jewey non-Jews: A group of Oakland-based conservative rabbis have proposed the name k’rov Yisrael, a friend or relative of Israel, which they describe as “like an amicus curiae, a friend of the court.”

Both options are good, but they both miss a central point about this growing group of the community.  That point came into focus for me at a Reboot group discussion with Rabbi Ed Feinstein. He’d come to talk with us about Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel’s teachings on the role of awe in prayer, the notion of radical amazement, and the concept of God not as an omnipotent force but as an ongoing action of creativity and caring. Like any great simple truth, this one - God as verb, not noun -  got under my skin and seeped into my thinking. After years of exposure if not active participation in Jewish learning, I’d reached a threshold. I was changed, prompted to seek the sacred in everyday acts of love and opened up to new ways of thinking about questions big and small. Like, for instance, the question of my religion.

Whether or not I officially qualify as Jewish is far less interesting to me now than how I live. Whether or not those around me are Jewish is also beside the point; it’s how we live that counts. This, of course, is a central tenet of Judaism; it’s a faith of deeds not creeds. And that has given me permission to draw on Judaism’s rich traditions and practices without worrying too much about the labels. Jewish, intermarried, ger toshav, k’rov Yisrael - what we call ourselves matters, but only inasmuch as it defines our actions.

The nouns count. But ultimately, I’m much more interested in the verbs.

Published in Sh'ma, a monthly Jewish journal

Details feature: Fetishization of the Jewess

The December issue of Details includes my feature on the fetishization of hot Jewish women. Read on for quick, snappy, not-terribly-deep take on “JILFS,” semi-observant hardcore queen Joanna Angel and the glory of frum porn.

Redheads. Piercings. Big natural boobs. Now add another item to the list of America’s favorite sexual fixations: Ladies of the tribe. 

That’s right - Jewish women are the latest fetish ethnicity. On a recent poll of readers of the porn blog Fleshbot, “Jewish girls” came in number two in a list of top ten kinks (edging out “girls on bikes” but falling short of the number one entry: “freckles”).

Jewesses aren’t just the rage of the triple-X realm: they’re wooing goyim with their wily ways on “Mad Men” and “Glee” and giving movie geeks conniptions over reports that Darren Aronfsky’s upcoming feature “Black Swan” features choice JILF-on-JILF action between Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis. And what would “I’m Fucking Matt Damon” have been without the hot-smutty-incredibly-Jewy Sarah Silverman?

America, it seems, suddenly can’t get enough hot Semite tush. That’s all the more remarkable given that Jews represent a truly tiny minority (2.2% at last count) that just finished serving up a similarly overwhelming wave of their menfolk—the so-called Jew Crew of Ben Stiller, Judd Apatow and his gang of lovable zhlubs (Seth Rogan, Paul Rudd, Jonah Hill, Jason Segal, et al.)

Unlike their funnymen frat brothers, Jewish girls have to contend with that old stinging JAP stereotype of frigidity, whininess and big hair. But the Fran Drescher rep has given way to a more smoldering, exotic mold - think Rachel Weisz, Emmannulle Chirqui, Jennifer Connelly or Scarlett Johansson. “The dark hair, the olive skin, the dark eyes - it’s the whole physical type,” says Harry Pallenberg, a documentary filmmaker from Italian-German stock who dated a number of Jews before marrying one. “It’s not a religious thing - the more observant the Jew, the less I’m attracted.”

Not that there’s anything wrong with that. How else to account for “Frum porn,” dirty pictures of religious Jews getting busy that’s earned a devoted following far outside the faith from those who find something impossibly smutty and exotic watching a girl in a sheitel give a blowjob. “It’s something like the Catholic schoolgirl fetish,” says Jewish porn star James Deen. “We all want to defile that purity and wholesomeness.”

Jews are of course no strangers to porn—the Hebrew hardcore hall of fame includes Ron Jeremy, Nina Hartley and Seymore Butts. Only recently, however, have porn performers begun to actively embrace their ethnicity. “I never in a million years thought my Jewishness would be an asset,” says Joanna Angel, who grew up in a strict Orthodox family and went on to star in films with titles like “Cum on My Tattoo” and “Porny Monster.” While she’s hardly observant, she still fasts on Yom Kippur, avoids bacon and checks in with her New Jersey mother more than is strictly necessary. She often finds herself wandering around porn sets in stiletto heels and corsets asking if everyone in cast and crew has had enough to eat.

“I embody a lot of Jewish stereotypes - I have a Jewish nose and Jewish hair and I kind of talk like I’m Jewish,” she says. “I also own my own company and I feel guilty all the time.”

It’s no secret that Jews are comparatively cool about sex - from the racy Purim story of that hottie concubine Queen Esther to the masturbatory fiction of Philip Roth and Erica Jong, the Jewish tradition is a veritable orgy compared to more restrained if not repressive Christian traditions. Jews don’t talk much about “hell” or even “sin” and Rabbis hector their congregants that it’s a “double mitzvah” to get busy on shabbos. While official teaching frowns on sex outside of matrimony, the dirty jokes and astonishing number of Craigslist ads for casual encounters among hot-bodied Jews suggest a lasciviousness that many outside the tribe find irresistible. And while it’s possible that these women might question the intentions of their pursuers—and indeed, there’s something creepy about some guys’ desire to dominate a Jewish chick—most accept the attraction and the fact that that their genetics have delivered some pretty seductive traits.

Many in this Jew-loving camp find their way to dating sites like JDate, which lists 13% of its 650,000 members as religiously “unaffiliated.” Some of these so-called “goyfriends” are seeking educated, marriage-minded partners; others are simply looking to hook up with a hot Jewess. “It’s really annoying—I get emails from guys saying things like, ‘I never regretted not being Jewish so much as when I saw your profile,’” says a New York nonprofit professional who asked to remain nameless, given that her extracurricular hours are spent running a group called Kinky Jews, a social group for those who enjoy mixing religious observance with whips, spiked heels and partner swapping. Goy gatecrashers are not unheard-of at the group’s annual Kinky Seder, a Passover party in which the bondage of ancient Hebrews is honored with chocolate licorice whips and the sharing of “favorite kink items.”

Likewise, non-Jews have been unexpectedly enamored with “The Year of the Jewish Woman,” a 2009 self-published calendar in which writer-actress Jamie Sneider poses nude blowing a shofar and elsewhere covers her 32-Ds with strategically placed bagels, latkes and brisket. While she’s heard from a few Jews who find the images sacrilegious, the calendar has been a hit outside the tribe, getting distributed on a USO tour of Iraq and landing Sneider on Playboy radio. “This is about taking my power as a Jewish woman back,” says Sneider. “I can be a Jewish woman and not be uptight and in fact be really proud of my sexuality and my body.”

For her part, the porn star Angel says while she’s open to girl-on-girl, double penetration and all sorts of stuff that will never earn her the approval of her orthodox relatives, there are certain things a good Jew just won’t do. She’s rejected offers to make a holiday porn in the mold of this year’s “Dr. Suzy’s Porn & Purim DVD Bacchanal,” which mixed group sex with groggers and hamentaschen. “I’ve totally desecrated Christian traditions before,” she says. “In one video I put a cross-shaped dildo inside me, but I’d never do anything with a menorah—that’s just creepy.”

Details magazine

Details feature: Fetishization of the Jewess

https://www.christophernoxon.com//details_feature_rise_of_the_hot_jewish_girl

The December issue of Details includes my feature on the fetishization of hot Jewish women. Read on for quick, snappy, not-terribly-deep take on “JILFS,” semi-observant hardcore queen Joanna Angel and the glory of frum porn.

The December issue of Details includes my feature on the fetishization of hot Jewish women. Read on for quick, snappy, not-terribly-deep take on “JILFS,” semi-observant hardcore queen Joanna Angel and the glory of frum porn.

Posted on 12.09.09 at 12:49 pm

Details feature: “Are You Jealous of Your Kid?”

https://www.christophernoxon.com//details_feature_are_you_jealous_of_your_kid

Details magazine ran this feature I did for the September issue about wellspring of resentment that builds up among over-involved parents as they create ever-more-awesome educational and enrichment opportunities for their precious progeny.

Details magazine ran this feature I did for the September issue about wellspring of resentment that builds up among over-involved parents as they create ever-more-awesome educational and enrichment opportunities for their precious progeny.

Posted on 08.18.09 at 12:11 pm

Details feature: “Are You Jealous of Your Kid?”

Flame-bating feature on wellspring of resentment that builds up among over-involved parents as they create ever-more-awesome educational and enrichment opportunities for their precious progeny.

You’re an involved and attuned father. You’ve provided top-notch educational opportunities and excellent footwear. Your kids are smart, savvy and discerning. They sneer at Hannah Montana, revere Johnny Cash and glide through their go-go calendars with aplomb. You couldn’t be prouder, really.

Then one day that parental pride takes a dark new turn. It happens all at once, while driving carpool to surf camp, getting your ass handed to you in a Super Mario Galaxy matchup by your nine year old, or watching your son IM with six girls simultaneously. That’s when you feel it, bubbling up from the same dark wellspring of feeling that stirs when you behold your friend’s new high-def A/V setup or hear about your boss’ trip to Tahiti: You’re jealous.

Let’s be honest: there’s plenty to begrudge. Your kids have a far sweeter setup than you have now or ever had as a kid, back in the bygone days when 16-bit drivel like Galaga ruled and the best porn you could find was in your sister’s Judy Blume. While you fret and hustle and schlep, they merrily feast on a smorgasbord of awesome social, educational and entertainment options. Not only have they got massive multiplayer online games—they’ve got the time to play them. Not only do they know the difference between sushi and sashimi—they get those cool bendy attachments that make chopsticks a cinch (plus they never have to pick up the tab). They keep getting smarter and stronger and more savvy while you wince from that torn ACL and struggle to summon a halfway clever opinion about Lady Gaga.

“It doesn’t make much sense, but yeah, there’s definitely envy,” says Jason Avant, founder and editor of the blog Dadcentric.com and father to daughter Zoe and son Lucas, who at five has become quite the badass in karate - which is all well and good except for the fact that dad can’t quite let go of the fact that he was pretty good at martial arts himself before his training was cut short by a blown knee. “‘I’m watching him getting better and better and realizing I’ll never have that chance,” he says. “It sounds silly, but I’m suddenly become aware that I’ll never be in five-year-old shape again.”

That may be the most common strain of paternal envy -– just as many women resent their daughters as they begin to bloom and fill out and attract the sidelong glances they once enjoyed, dads are often peppered by pangs of jealousy when their boys drop their childish spazziness and come into their own physically.

But well beyond athletics, many dads can’t help but feel jealous of the sheer diversity of options. Whit Honea, a fellow daddy blogger and father of 6-year-old Atticus and 3-year-old Zane, recently moved to a cozy, family-friendly community near Seattle that offers juvenile instruction in yoga and glassblowing. Glassblowing! “These kids are like little artisans with apprenticeships!” he says. “Here they are living a life of arts and leisure, and I’m living a life of grindstone and stress.”

Parental envy is nothing new -– it burns in all its green-eyed glory in the Grim Brother’s tale of an aging queen (later recast as wicked stepmother) ordering a hit on her far-hotter daughter Snow White. And no doubt there were a few Ozzie and Harriet-era parents who wished they’d been given a societal pass to frolic naked in the sun like their hippy progeny. But lately parental envy has reached dizzying new heights, driven by a wave of parental overindulgence and seismic upgrades in what might be called the Juvenile Enrichment Complex.

Even in our recession-addled age, the routine path through childhood begins with music and movement playgroups and deluxe indoor playgrounds and quickly advances into afterschool hip hop classes and under-21 dance clubs.

For fucksakes, they even get Ritalin.

All of which can create deep wellsprings of jealousy among the parents doing all the arranging, planning and financing. So who’s responsible for the jealousy? Go ahead and lie to yourself if you like, duck responsibility, tell yourself you’re simply giving your kids every available opportunity in a competitive world. But you know who’s to blame. You strive to be more fun, more giving, more understanding than your own authoritarian-slash-unreliable-slash-absent parents. Now you reap the reward: kids who are way more privileged and assured and worldly and hipper than you’ve ever been.

That, in the end, is what stings most of all: they’re cooler! It’s pathetic that you even care. After all, your own middle-aged parents settled into a routine of regularity and lameness without much fuss. Not you. You decided long ago not to let the kids slow your roll. You still go to shows, still rummage for bargains at the sample sales, still consider yourself reasonably in-touch. But your kids don’t even have to try. They look good in hats and t-shirts and ties together. They can actually pull off Zac Efron’s haircut. They rule Halo 3. Meanwhile you’re exhausted at nine and feeling entirely unsure whether those new A.P.C. jeans make you look more like Olivier Martinez or Gerard Depardieu.

It’s no wonder therapists like Austin Texas psychologst Carl Pickhardt, author of many books on parenting including The Connected Father, so often encounters parents with the same age-old complaint: “My kids have no idea how lucky they are.”

Few parents can identify the true source of this ungratefulness: themselves. “Parents are entirely complicit,” he says. “They give to their kids what they never got and then get angry at their kids for not being appreciative. But of course the kids don’t know. All they know is this abundance and affluence. How could they ever be appreciative?”

They can’t, and resenting kids for how great their lives are can lead to dark places indeed. One need look no further than that high priestess of parental jealousy, Dina Lohan, for a scary object lesson. Surely Mama Lohan has, at some point, felt unadulterated pride at her daughter’s success, but her strenuous attempts to out-glam, out-do and out-party her own child speak to a particularly awful outcome of parental envy.

The trouble comes in overcoming what feels like an unassailable impulse: the need to provide the best for your kids. Too often, that desire can mutate into a drive to furnish your kids with all the stuff you actually want yourself. Bruce Miller, a television writer and father of three from Los Angeles, had his reckoning with while touring private schools with his son. “These places were amazing – way better than any college I’d ever seen,” he says. One school offered courses in Chinese and a swim team coached by an Olympic gold medalist. “It made me want to go to middle school,” he says. “All I remember about middle school not being able to open my locker and fear of an ill-timed erection. And here my kid was walking into this amazing idealized version of middle school. It wasn’t fair. I wanted a do-over.”

Miller got over it once he realized that his son’s actual experience at school had very little to do with all the stuff that so captivated dad. “He cares about skin and girls and trigonometry,” he says. “It might look good to me now, but middle school still sucks.”

Recalling that the actual experience of growing up is terrifying and awful in ways we conveniently forget is one of the keys to easing the envy, family therapists say. You might also try laying off the perks and think a little less about what to do for your kids and more about what to do with them. “Switch it around,” says Timothy Smith, a Gallup researcher in family issues, author and family coach who counsels parents in Thousand Oaks, California. “Team up and plan stuff together—let them know about your limitations and budgets and priorities.” Translation: if you practice Rock Band with your kid instead of sulk about his shredding, you might even be able to show him how “Through the Fire and Flames” is really done…

On a deeper and perhaps far scarier level, the trick to defusing jealousy is letting your kids off the hook for the moat of resentment that’s built up around the castle you’ve created. “In the end it’s not jealousy—it’s loss for whatever you missed that you wish you had,” says Pickhardt. “It’s sadness. Once you realize that, you don’t get angry at the kids. You can begin to appreciate that what you’re doing is providing for your kids what your parents weren’t able to give you.”

At which point you might just be able to allow them the pure pleasure of that laser tag extravaganza and settle back into a far more familiar sensation: resenting your parents for the shitty job they did raising you.

Details magazine

Michael Lewis book review in LA Times

Finally getting around to posting this review from LA Times of Michael Lewis’ daddy memoir. I love Lewis’ style, but in the end felt weirdly depressed reading his cynical take on the basic drudgery of raising kids…

Pity the poor modern dad. Or at least pity poor Michael Lewis, the father of three whose half-hearted, cranky and mostly clumsy attempts to live up to the modern ideal of fatherhood is breezily but brutally described in the new memoir Home Game.

Lewis, whose previous books have dealt mainly in the business of sports, here tackles the trickier territory of fatherhood—or more specifically, what he calls “the raw deal” dealt to dads today. Drawn from diaries he published in the online magazine Slate immediately following the births of his children Quinn, Dixie and Walker, Home Game mixes cringe-worthy tales of his own failings with repeated gripes about the no-win bind fathers today face.

On the one hand, he writes, fathers are now expected to join moms shoulder-to-shoulder in the trenches of childcare, changing diapers, resolving squabbles, divvying up bottles of pumped breast milk and otherwise at least appearing to share in the grunt work that previous generations of fathers shirked with mysterious impunity. But even as they pine for the days when the only real job requirement for fatherhood was a “capacity for detached amusement,” dads today are constantly reminded of their own irrelevance, incapability and essential uselessness. While the more-involved dad of today gets some credit, they’re mostly, he says, viewed with pity: “The world looks at him schlepping and fetching and sagging and moaning beneath his new burdens and thinks: OH… YOU… POOR… BASTARD.”

Lewis is a funny, frank and engaging writer and he gets a lot of comic mileage telling tales at his expense -?his experiences in a Parisian Gymboree class and a Hawaiian hotel pool are just the sort of laugh-out-loud anecdotes that fill warts-and-all parenting memoirs like Christine’s Mellor’s “The Three Martini Playdate” or Sandra Tsing Loh’s “Mother on Fire.” The difference here, of course, is the parent laying out the laundry - of the multitude of recent books that purport to comically expose the harsh realities of family life, precious few have been penned by dads (which may have something to do with conventional wisdom in publishing circles that guys are as likely to buy a book about parenting as they are in the latest by Jody Picoult - i.e. not at all).

Home Game may very well be the book to bury that sad stereotype, peppered as it is with guy-friendly sports and financial analogies and jibes at the nurturing, accommodating, doting ideal of the modern dad. But it’s also strangely dispiriting - those well-intentioned pops who actually buck industry thinking and read the book will likely finish it feeling, if possible, even less equipped and more demoralized in their efforts to overcome the example set by dads of previous generations who rarely changed a diaper and wouldn’t know a Baby Bjorn from a Bugaboo.

Still, it’s refreshing to hear a dad describe so vividly the uglier aspects of the job. The birth of his daughter, which a mushier dad might observe with humbled awe, inspires a particularly intense bout of harrumphing. “No one actually cares how dad is doing,” he writes. “His fatigue, his worries, his tedium, his disappointment at the contents of hospital vending machines - these are better unmentioned.” As for the act of childbirth itself, which fathers now routinely watch unfold in its entirety and possibly even videotape: “it’s a hideous secret to be kept.”

His list of grievances continues outside the delivery room. Inspiring particular ire are the host of newfangled parenting products, services and safeguards now considered mandatory parental accessories. That commercial pressure, combined with the heightened expectations in housework, add up to what he calls “a Dark Age of Fatherhood.”

But it it really so bad for dads? It’s hard to work up much sympathy for Lewis at least, who views the care and feeding of small children as miserable work and seems so preoccupied with his own predicament that he takes little note of what many parents, even the most detached dads, view as the true dividend of raising small kids: wonder. Yes, little kids are messy and bossy and unreasonable. They’re also miraculous and fascinating and often really, really funny. These are of course harder qualities to describe in a comic memoir—your precious three-year-old daughter’s etherial specialness is a lot less funny than the humdinger of a story about the time she peed in the hotel pool. 

While Lewis makes some noise toward the end about how the dirty work of parenting forges indelible bonds—you know, genuine parental feeling. And when confronted with a family crisis like a nasty respiratory virus or his wife’s debilitating bout of post-partrum panic, he displays the sort of compassion and accommodation that dads from what he longingly calls “the glory days” would surely find hopelessly wimpy. But even so, he’s clearly not going out without a gripe.

Published in book review section of LA Times

Salon feature: Is my son a dick, or is he two?

https://www.christophernoxon.com//is_my_son_a_dick_or_is_he_two

Salon just posted an expanded version of my essay about the psychosis of toddlerhood.

Salon just posted an expanded version of my essay about the psychosis of toddlerhood.

Posted on 07.16.08 at 10:15 am

Is my son a dick, or is he two?

My son bullies me, insults his mother and once punched an old man in the nuts. I know it’s probably just a phase. But what if it isn’t? Check out the insane letters of response here.

My son pooped on me this morning.

The pooping occurred at approximately 6 a.m. after the 2-year-old leaped into bed and suggested that he’d be most grateful if I got up, escorted him downstairs and turned on his favorite program, a quasi-educational cartoon about a bilingual girl and her pet monkey.

What he actually said was this: “Daddy, up! Dora show! Dora show now!”

On most days, “Dora the Explorer” is good for a solid half-hour of pre-breakfast calm. But not today. Today Oscar motioned to his midsection and said he “hurt.”

Woefully misunderstanding the situation, I kissed him on the head and loosened his diaper. At which point he tore off the nappy and grabbed hold of my leg.

And then he pooped on my foot.

This may or may not have been an accident. Looking up at me in the messy slow-motion moments that followed, his expression could only be described as satisfied.

I have two things to say about this. First: It is truly remarkable how tolerant of bodily waste one becomes raising small children. Before I became a dad, the news that my everyday routine would include being defecated upon would have sent me diving for a home vasectomy kit. It is some measure of how far I’ve come (or how low I’ve sunk) that Oscar’s outburst prompted little more than an exasperated moan as I backed away in search of industrial-grade cleaning supplies.

All of which is well and good—there’s no point getting overly worked up or grossed out over something so ubiquitous to family life that we parents simply call it “number two.”

The second thing I have to say is harder to reckon with. Because the truth is this mishap was entirely in keeping with the general climate of aggression, crankiness, impatience and determined messiness that has come to characterize Oscar’s personality over the last year or so. He demands. He resists. He screeches.

We’ve reached the point where I find myself seriously pondering the question: Is my kid a dick, or is he just 2?

Because you never know. As much as it goes against the current mode of progressive, project-management-style parenting, I take it for granted that some kids are trouble right out of the gate. They’re the preschool gangsters and playground terrorists, flicking boogers and insults at those they’ve identified as too weak to fight back. Just as some kids are born sweet-tempered and naturally gentle, others arrive as thuggish as HMO claims adjusters.

But heaven forbid you ever speak this basic truth among parents. Acknowledging a child’s dickishness is truly one of the last taboos of modern family life.

A child may have “behavioral issues” or “developmental challenges,” but the basic character of a kid must never be called into question. It’s always, “Cody must be tired,” or “Dakota needs a snack” and never, “Wow, Taylor’s kind of a prick.”

The trouble, of course, is that it’s exceedingly difficult to distinguish garden-variety assholery from the normal psychosis of toddlerhood.

Some naughtiness is entirely normal, I know. The pileup of parenting books on my bedside table assures me that kids between 13 and 36 months often experience “challenging developmental steps.” They’re testing limits, exploring their autonomy, learning to control their emotions.

One need look no further than the table of contents of the modern standard, “What to Expect: The Toddler Years,” to get a quick and terrifying picture of how toddlers operate. Whole sections are devoted to “antisocial behavior,” “caveperson language,” “crankiness,” “annoying habits picked up at play group,” “jealousy,” “biting,” “wall art and other destructive drawing,” “toothbrushing tantrums,” “coat combat,” “repeated ‘no’s’” and “impatience (now!)”

You’d never know it looking at him, but my son samples freely from the standard menu of misbehavior. In pictures he’s doughy and sweet with a mop of blond hair, big blue eyes and an irresistible grin. He couldn’t be cuter, really. Most of the time, especially when he’s at play, in the bath or asleep, he is by any measure the most perfect creature ever to grace the earth. Then he whacks you on the head with a spoon, laughs like a banshee and tells his mother that her new earrings are ugly and stupid.

Much of this nastiness is standard-issue obstinacy, but it mostly takes the form of an obsession with control. Control and honor. It often feels like I’m living with an embittered and incontinent samurai who must enforce his will and save face at all costs. As such, he’s ritualistic and rigid, demanding that I and not his mother unbuckle him from the minivan or that he receive one red and one purple Flintstones vitamin or that his diluted fruit juice go in the cup with the frog and not the one with the rabbit. Any deviation from the script is met with screams of protest and a flurry of little flailing fists.

We’ve tried discipline, distraction and even strict adherence to his demands, but the maddening fact is you never really know when he’s going to go ballistic. At an airport security checkpoint recently, he blew up when we removed his shoes and then found a new, more extravagant pitch of tantrum when we tried to put them on again. Later at a Chinese restaurant, he dumped his noodles on the floor and then ran among the tables, licking the tops of the Hoisin sauce containers. At a family barbecue last week, he greeted an elderly relative with a swift punch to the nuts (mercifully, he aimed left).

I wish I could say I take all this in stride, but the fact is it bothers me more than I can say. I’ve heard people without kids complain that parents have a blind spot when it comes to their own kids, that otherwise reasonable adults are only too happy to gush over the preciousness of their progeny while their little darlings run riot like English football hooligans.

I seem to have the opposite problem; instead of glossing over my son’s misdeeds (or, say, chalking them up to standard-issue tomfoolery), I latch on to them as terribly important signifiers of my kid’s true identity. Far more troubling than the chaos or general untidiness of parenthood is the ongoing agony of distinguishing passing phases from the first signs of what sort of person your child is and will forevermore be.

Never mind that his days are spent gnawing on blocks and smearing mucus across his cheek. Somehow, I can’t help feeling that he came in fully loaded, that his identity is complete and while he may get better at sharing his toys and using the potty, this is pretty much it. This is him. Behold my son, the dick.

No wonder so few parents are willing to acknowledge their own kids’ misbehavior. Doing so not only insults your offspring, it inevitably leads to reflection. For if my kid is a red-hot pig, what does that make me?

And the truth is I’m very familiar indeed with many of the despicable aspects of my 2-year-old. I too am often overwhelmed by a desire to kick and scream and punch creepy old strangers in the nuts. Like my son, I’m often irrational, hate being told what to do and cranky when sleep-deprived. But, really, who isn’t? Aren’t we all, on some deep and rarely acknowledged level, temperamental toddlers? We’re just better at hiding and managing it, thanks to helpful crutches like cocktails, reality TV and cardio boxing classes.

For now all I can hope is that my son finds some crutches sooner rather than later. He just turned 3, actually, graduating out of “terrible twos” and into a period rumored to be less traumatic and tumultuous. My two oldest kids are 6 and 8, and I like to think they’ve never been anything less than the sweet and mostly respectful darlings they are today. If I’m being entirely honest, however, I’m pretty sure I could recall a horror story or three.

None of which lessens today’s trauma. Developmental misbehavior may be a normal part of growing up, but pooping on your dad? That’s just wrong.

Published by Salon

Perils, Absurdities of Parenting Explored in Reuters Column

https://www.christophernoxon.com//perils_absurdities_of_parenting_explored_in_reuters_column

A parenting expert I’m not. Still, I do have three kids and many crazy stories and half-baked opinions about parents and kids and the importance of snacks and the efficacy of bribery. All of which explains why I’m now writing a column for Reuters called (wait for it) “Family Life” (I objected to the super-plain title—what about “Super Awesome Parent Stuff?” or “Goofy Fun Dad”? until it was explained to me that other Reuters columns are called “The Stock Market” and “Personal Finance.” Oh.) Over past three months I’ve written about over-the-top kiddie birthday parties, the art of the “playdate dump” and the time a hippy pediatrician tasted my wife’s breast milk. I’m archiving the stories on my author site here.

A parenting expert I’m not. Still, I do have three kids and many crazy stories and half-baked opinions about parents and kids and the importance of snacks and the efficacy of bribery. All of which explains why I’m now writing a column for Reuters called (wait for it) “Family Life” (I objected to the super-plain title—what about “Super Awesome Parent Stuff?” or “Goofy Fun Dad”? until it was explained to me that other Reuters columns are called “The Stock Market” and “Personal Finance.” Oh.) Over past three months I’ve written about over-the-top kiddie birthday parties, the art of the “playdate dump” and the time a hippy pediatrician tasted my wife’s breast milk. I’m archiving the stories on my author site here.

Posted on 05.14.08 at 08:57 am

Brandweek Op-Ed

https://www.christophernoxon.com//brandweek_op_ed

Brandweek magazine just published this editorial from me and colleague Bill Goodwin on why rejuvenile marketing so often elicits cringes among not-quite-grownups.

Brandweek magazine just published this editorial from me and colleague Bill Goodwin on why rejuvenile marketing so often elicits cringes among not-quite-grownups.

Posted on 04.18.08 at 12:58 pm

New York Speechifying

https://www.christophernoxon.com//new_york_speechif

I’m doing a presentation this week at the FUSE: Design & Culture Conference with my friend and colleague Bill Goodwin. We’ll be talking about “the rejuvenile aesthetic,” our fancy-pants phraseology for the cartoony, kiddie, whimsical, playful culture that now pops up everywhere from Web 2.0 font design to modern architecture to auto styling… I’ll also hang out to sign books and stalk my fellow presenter, Malcolm Gladwell… I’m on Tuesday April 15 at 2 pm. Registration and other info here.

I’m doing a presentation this week at the FUSE: Design & Culture Conference with my friend and colleague Bill Goodwin. We’ll be talking about “the rejuvenile aesthetic,” our fancy-pants phraseology for the cartoony, kiddie, whimsical, playful culture that now pops up everywhere from Web 2.0 font design to modern architecture to auto styling… I’ll also hang out to sign books and stalk my fellow presenter, Malcolm Gladwell… I’m on Tuesday April 15 at 2 pm. Registration and other info here.

Posted on 04.11.08 at 10:38 am

Please, don’t pander

https://www.christophernoxon.com//please_dont_pander

With few exceptions, ads aimed at rejuveniles evoke cringes, eye rolls and heavy sighs in the very people they’re designed to reach. A few manage to find a way to cleverly capture their fears and aspirations. But the vast majority fall horribly flat, either by regurgitating tired old clich’s about childish adults or mistaking garden-variety nostalgia or rebellion for rejuvenile’s complicated but ultimately hopeful natures.

Why do marketers have such a hard time understanding rejuveniles?

Long before social critics began fretting over “the death of the grown up,” marketers were tracking focus group findings on the quickly shifting values, affinities and loyalties of adult consumers (remember the “retro brand” craze of 2001, which relaunched everything from Converse to Radio Flyer?).

Given this early jump and expertise, you’d expect campaigns aimed at rejuveniles to be knowing, or at least reasonably on-target. But the sad fact is that, with few exceptions, ads aimed at rejuveniles evoke cringes, eye rolls and heavy sighs in the very people they’re designed to reach. A few manage to find a way to cleverly capture their fears and aspirations. But the vast majority fall horribly flat, either by regurgitating tired old clich’s about childish adults or mistaking garden-variety nostalgia or rebellion for rejuvenile’s complicated but ultimately hopeful natures.

Take the current ad for Oreos Candy Bites, which features a power-suited professional looking out the window of a cab at women blowing bubbles, jumping rope and playing hopscotch. Clearly responding to research showing more adults than ever gravitating toward a brand that has always been associated with kids, Oreo can think of nothing more to say than how wacky and unusual it is. Thus we get women playing hopscotch in heels in the Oreo ad, or worse, businessmen pogo-sticking and hula-hooping in Nestle Crunch’s egregious ?For the Kid in You? campaign, which reduced the entire rejuvenile phenomenon down to bubbles and hopscotch.

This is just the sort of cluelessness that causes conniptions in rejuveniles. They may appear silly, but make no mistake: rejuveniles can’t stand being pandered to. They hate seeing themselves represented as starry-eyed goofballs. Never mind that many of them —  focus groups, many will admit that they felt goofy and starry-eyed the first time they wore a Cocoa Puffs cuckoo bird T-shirt or took a spin on their kid’s tricycle. But the novelty has long since worn off. They’re now either doing those things entirely unselfconsciously, in which case these ads seem hopelessly unhip, or they’ve moved on to another kid centric activity (like assembling Lego spacecraft, or collecting American Girl dolls).

The point is simple: aim at the starting point of a moving target and you’ll miss every time. To keep pace with rejuveniles, you’re better off ignoring surfaces and creating associations with shared values, like their need to stay playful in the face of adult responsibilities, or their impulse to buck the forces of conformity and routine, or their belief that adults are inventing a more flexible, open-ended version of maturity.

Posted on 03.11.08 at 10:49 am

Irving the Snowchicken is Coming to Town

https://www.christophernoxon.com//irving_the_snowchicken_is_coming_to_town

Forget Christmakkah and Festivus. Our interfaith holiday involves a magical rooster who fills the children’s pants with presents… I wrote this essay on our family’s crazy-fun solution to “the December dilemma” entirely for my own amusement; it was miraculously given prominent play on Salon.com and has generated a ton of highly entertaining response (read the comments here)

Forget Christmakkah and Festivus. Our interfaith holiday involves a magical rooster who fills the children’s pants with presents… I wrote this essay on our family’s crazy-fun solution to “the December dilemma” entirely for my own amusement; it was miraculously given prominent play on Salon.com and has generated a ton of highly entertaining response (read the comments here)

Posted on 12.27.07 at 11:31 pm

Irving the Snowchicken is Coming to Town

Forget Christmakkah and Festivus. Our interfaith holiday involves a magical rooster who fills the children’s pants with presents.

I’ve never been particularly religious. I’ve got Canadian Quakers on my dad’s side and Midwestern Protestants on my mom’s, but growing up in ‘70s and ‘80s Los Angeles, whatever spiritual yearnings I possessed were satisfied via a consuming passion for “Star Wars.” My best friend Jimmy was an altar boy at a church where they prayed to a spooky guy on a cross. I was fine with Obi-Wan.

But then I grew up and fell in love with a Beverly Hills Jewess, and we got married by a cool Reform rabbi who, unlike my mother-in-law, didn’t mind that my first name began with the word “Christ.” And now we have three kids, who, by mysterious matriarchic law, became Jews the moment they touched down at Cedars-Sinai. All of which explains how I find myself a big goy surrounded by Jews. My kids go to a school called Temple Israel, where they’re drilled in Hebrew and the demands of their religious calling (nothing too major, just tikkun alum—heal the world). At school, there’s a name for families like ours: interfaith. The three kids and the wife, they’re the faithful. I’m the inter.

All of which is fine, really. Even as I stubbornly remain nonchosen, I love that my kids are part of such a deep and durable tradition. I love that they’re soaking up the high value placed on learning and argument, jokes and food. I’ve even come to love Shabbat at my in-laws’ every Friday. And while I don’t think I’ll ever understand gefilte fish, and I’ve been to a few bar and bat mitzvahs that contradicted everything I believe about decency and goodness, on balance I have no regrets about being the flaming shaygetz father figure of a proud Jewish household.

Still, the interfaith equation does get complicated. The biggest hitch emerged in our carefree pre-parenthood years, back when our fiercest arguments were over where to get takeout. Even then, we’d hit a rough patch a few weeks near the end of the year. It was like clockwork. On the day after Thanksgiving we entered the Season of the Perpetual Bicker. The particulars are too boring to detail here, but let’s just say we experienced irreconcilable differences over a holiday whose name shall not be mentioned. Turns out my lovely bride not only didn’t celebrate this holiday but kind of hated it.

She was unmoved by the irresistible aroma of fresh-cut pine and unconvinced that decorating our very own miserable/sweet Charlie Brown sapling with glass balls and paper ornaments was a cultural, not religious, tradition. She failed to see the charm in my abiding love for Claymation Rudolph or the Mormon Tabernacle Choir holiday album.

I began to yearn for the tree, the cookies, the stockings. I had vivid sense memories of tiptoeing out of my bedroom in footsie pajamas, sneaking into the living room to behold the glittering, obscene pileup. As an adult, I couldn’t write off all of that. I didn’t mind ditching Easter and had no trouble donning a kippah every Friday or spinning a dreidel on Chanukah or reading aloud from that wacky Passover booklet about pestilence and frogs. But I found I couldn’t go the extra step of abandoning the holiday whose name shall not be mentioned.

I began discussing our holiday plans with the neutrality and good cheer of a Fox News pundit. While my fellow besieged goyim got fired up in defense of God and faith and family, I felt the righteous call to defend the sanctity of superficial crap. I never gave two shits about tinsel before I got married. Now I wanted to coat our house in it.

And so we ended up where all bickering interfaith couples end up: couples therapy.

My wife picked the shrink. She told me not to make a big deal out of the fact that the shrink was Jewish. What, we should waste our time with one of the three non-Jewish psychiatrists in L.A.? And so we spent six sessions tromping recklessly through a minefield known in interfaith circles as “The December Dilemma.” Never before have the emotional dimensions of a tangerine in the toe of a sock ever been so fully explored. I demanded respect for the tangerine. She demanded respect for going to the movies and eating Chinese food.

Eventually, we arrived at our bottom lines. No matter how superficial or secular the holiday had become, she argued, it was still Christ’s birthday, and my beloved just couldn’t be party to that. No tree, no mistletoe, no Santa. I took stock and realized ... none of that mattered to me, either. I didn’t care about the trimmings—they were mostly tacky and meaningless anyway. What mattered to me, as both a grown-up and a parent, was the make-believe. When I boiled it down, all I wanted was someone magical to break into our house and leave us cool stuff.

It began, like all holidays and superheroes do, with an origin story. Late one night a few years ago, we told our children, a stranger appeared on our doorstep. It was a chicken, a Bantam rooster with pure white plumage and an impressive red crown and wattles. He was from the Snowy North. And he came with good news: He’d visit our family with gifts and good cheer every year on this night onward. All we had to do is write our wishes on a note and burn them before going to bed. He’d fly over our house, reassemble the ashes and then, while we slept, haul our goodies into the house and pack them into pants hung over the fireplace.

Every year the holiday gets more elaborate. That’s the thing about a customized holiday; since all the traditions were plucked from thin air, new ones materialize all the time. We now have a songbook of Winter Wonderday classics that includes a recording of “Born to Be Wild” with all-poultry vocals. While burning our wish lists, we now raise our voices in a song that includes a line written by 7-year-old Charlie: “Santa is fired from the job/ He gives presents like a slob.” We’ve also begun the custom of leaving out a tray of food near the pant-festooned mantle—Irving, the kids discovered, favors sunflower seeds and fruit juice. And we now go to great lengths to build a nest for Irving, the construction of which begins with a Winter Wonderhike to collect twigs and leaves, which we then stuff inside a ring of chicken wire (and which is mysteriously littered the next day with soft white feathers that look very much like they were clumsily extracted from an expensive pillow).

In recent years we’ve spent the evening with bowls of candy, frosting and cookie pieces, building entire encampments of Snowy North gingerbread chicken coops. And we’ve found that no Winter Wondereve is complete without a feast at Roscoe’s Chicken and Waffles, where we delight in the combination of maple-soaked fried dough and the sacrificial body of our host.

Friends and family are mostly supportive, but it has been suggested that Winter Wonderday may needlessly confuse our kids or expose them to ridicule from nonbelievers. One can only guess what the playground alpha boys and girls make of our kids’ wide-eyed reverie over the magical talking snowchicken who fills their pants with presents. I’m happy to report, however, that the kids take it in stride. To hear them tell it, our family has an exclusive contract with Irving, so it’s no wonder that other kids might not understand, or even be jealous. And instead of keeping quiet about the holiday, they embellish it—in their version of the myth, Irving works on an “ice farm” where all ice cream and popsicles are made and where he’s assisted by an army of fluffy white helper chicks. On the way to school today, my eldest son, Charlie, told me Irving selected our family over all others because he heard my wife and I bickering about the holiday all the way from the Snowy North.

Charlie is a smart, sophisticated third grader, but when it comes to Winter Wonderday, he still believes. He buried his doubts last year after obtaining what he believes is definitive proof of Irving’s existence. In the weeks leading up to the big day, we spent hours discussing plans to photograph or videotape Irving during his visit. The stakes were high, we understood. If the so-called Irving plot was discovered, our feathered friend might take back our presents and never visit us again. I rejected a proposal to stay up all night inside a hidden sofa cushion fort. Charlie accepted that we couldn’t justify the cost of a motion-activated video camera. And so we settled on a more straightforward strategy. Alongside the 800-twig-count nest, we left a note and a camera. “We want to see what you look like! We hope your feathers are sturdy enough to push the button!” And lo and behold, we awoke the next morning to discover not only a bounty of gifts but also a blurry but identifiable Polaroid self-portrait of a noble white chicken that could only be Irving himself.

The kids are 8, 6 and 2 now, and Winter Wonderday is much more than an in joke (no Festivus or Christmakkah for us!). Several other families join us each year. An old friend has even begun marking the holiday with his interfaith family all the way in Maui. And the kids have begun evangelizing to friends, pointing out all the ways Winter Wonderday is better than that other holiday. Nests are more eco-friendly than trees. Unlike Santa, who is so busy with his Coke billboards and shopping mall appearances that he often forgets presents and leaves behind a mess of chimney soot, Irving is courteous enough to enter through the (tinsel-decorated) dog door.

And perhaps, most important, pants are way bigger than stockings.

Published on Salon.com, December 22, 2007

Age Norms and Orangey Goodness

https://www.christophernoxon.com//age_norms_and_orangey_goodness

Listen to sociologists hold forth on the topic of age norms and you’d be forgiven for dismissing the topic as theoretical hoo-ha with little real-life relevance. But in the course of writing Rejuvenile I became convinced that age norms are in fact an enormously powerful and woefully underexamined social force that exerts influence in the unlikeliest of places.

Take your local gas station or convenience store. Check out the snackfood — ‘ve got your adult Cape Cod Potato Chips, your teen-leaning Doritos and your kid-targeted Cheetos. What adult in their right mind would eat a snack promoted by a sneaker-clad spokescat?  While snackfood giant Frito-Lay doesn’t release market research data, it seems clear that Cheetos have become a major flashpoint in rejuvenile’s assault on age norms—adults all over are embracing the orangey goodness of Chester Cheetah’s favorite snack. Many are content to causally gobble down a bag in the privacy of their workplace cubicle. Others publicly flaunt their Cheetos affiliation, proudly displaying their stained orange fingers to friends and coworkers or posting weird online video clips as proof of their playful, mischievous spirits. Eating ?em is just the beginning:

Listen to sociologists hold forth on the topic of age norms and you’d be forgiven for dismissing the topic as theoretical hoo-ha with little real-life relevance. But in the course of writing Rejuvenile I became convinced that age norms are in fact an enormously powerful and woefully underexamined social force that exerts influence in the unlikeliest of places.

Take your local convenience store. Check out the snack — you’ve got your adult Cape Cod Potato Chips, your teen-leaning Doritos and your kid-targeted Cheetos. What adult in their right mind would eat a snack promoted by a sneaker-clad spokescat? While snackfood giant Frito-Lay doesn’t release market research data, it seems clear that Cheetos have become a major flashpoint in rejuvenile’s assault on age norms. Many adults are content to causally gobble down a bag in the privacy of their workplace cubicle. Others publicly flaunt their Cheetos affiliation, proudly displaying their stained orange fingers to friends and coworkers or posting weird online video clips as proof of their playful, mischievous spirits. Eating ‘em is just the beginning:

??Members of the fabulous a-capella drag act the Kinsey Sicks stick ?em in their well-powdered noses.

??Pajama-clad brunette tosses ?em, gobbles ?em, spits ?em.

??Talkative co-ed colors her hair to match ?em.

??Science geeks light ?em up, dunk ?em in booze, then down the firey cheesy cocktail (ow!)

- Clearly understimulated Iowans celebrate ?em as prime tourist attraction.

Posted on 11.20.07 at 01:01 pm

Tilt-o-Wheel (formerly Paydates)

https://www.christophernoxon.com//tilt_o_wheel_formerly_paydates

Safely stow all personal belongings. Be advised that management is not responsible for injuries resulting from following rambunctious recitation of rejuvenile-flavored news nuggets?

Capture that Flag. An epic five-family game of Capture the Flag over the weekend has reawakened my love for this ridiculously involving kidgame. Players aged 5-50 got completely immersed in strategizing, sprinting and stealthy sneaking for two-plus hours. Only bummer was waking up next morning to find myself sore in all sorts of unmentionable nooks and crannies. Recuperating at home, play guru Bernie DeKoven tipped me off to this newfangled urban street version. The organizers are New Mind Space, a wildly commendable art-play gang that hosts rejuvenile street event/games/happenings like last week’s light saber battle, street pillow fights and “bubble battles.” Check their website for upcoming events in Toronto, New York, San Francisco, Boston, Chicago, Montreal and Vancouver.

Baffling toys. Bored by Barbie? Unmoved by Legos? Maybe it’s time to graduate to a new, weirder class of plaything. How about a she-male baby doll? Or a Playmobile Hazmat crew? The online edition of that long-lost juvenile humor mag Cracked has an amazing compendium of ?25 of the weirdest, most ill-conceived toys from around the globe.? I myself am now determined to get my own ?toilet training tiger,? complete with sound chip that blurts “Crap! Crap like a champion!” (Thanks to “Count” Conte for the tip).

Bad-ass toys. I like to think of myself as a conscientious parent. I generally avoid battery-operated, crash-bang toys in favor of puzzles and blocks and other playthings that encourage open-ended imaginative play and so on and we’re all free, free to be you and me whatever. The point is, I avoid toys that will turn my offspring into spastic, ultraviolent little maniacs. But sometimes a dad can’t help it. Two new recent arrivals in our household have inspired mad fits of fun in both the 8-year-old boy and his 30-something dad. The first is the V-Bot, a Transformer-like robot that, with the touch of a remote, twists and folds and turns into a respectable red sports car that can zoom and careen around the house and utterly terrify the family dog (Check out YouTube clip of astonishing transformation here). From the same manufacturer comes Battle Wheels, a line of remote controlled, anime-inspired wheeled robots that bash into each other, Rock Em Sock Em Robot-style. Both toys have inspired hours of unimaginative, closed-ended and entirely awesome fun.

Wiggleheads? Really? We all know kids go bananas for Australian kiddie pop TV stars The Wiggles. But somehow I thought that even the most golly-gee rejuveniles would be immune from their super-cheery, crazy-creepy shtick (is it just me, or does the guy in purple look like the kind of fellow who circles playgrounds in tinted-window vans?). But proving yet again that literally anything kids enjoy will be inevitably taken up by rejuveniles, the group has attracted a loyal adult fanbase that calls itself (wait for it) the Wiggleheads. Amusing/horrifying Q&As with die-hard Wiggles groupies here.

Safely stow all personal belongings. Be advised that management is not responsible for injuries resulting from following rambunctious recitation of rejuvenile-flavored news nuggets?

Capture that Flag. An epic five-family game of Capture the Flag over the weekend has reawakened my love for this ridiculously involving kidgame. Players aged 5-50 got completely immersed in strategizing, sprinting and stealthy sneaking for two-plus hours. Only bummer was waking up next morning to find myself sore in all sorts of unmentionable nooks and crannies. Recuperating at home, play guru Bernie DeKoven tipped me off to this newfangled urban street version. The organizers are New Mind Space, a wildly commendable art-play gang that hosts rejuvenile street event/games/happenings like last week’s light saber battle, street pillow fights and “bubble battles.” Check their website for upcoming events in Toronto, New York, San Francisco, Boston, Chicago, Montreal and Vancouver.

Baffling toys. Bored by Barbie? Unmoved by Legos? Maybe it’s time to graduate to a new, weirder class of plaything. How about a she-male baby doll? Or a Playmobile Hazmat crew? The online edition of that long-lost juvenile humor mag Cracked has an amazing compendium of ?25 of the weirdest, most ill-conceived toys from around the globe.? I myself am now determined to get my own ?toilet training tiger,? complete with sound chip that blurts “Crap! Crap like a champion!” (Thanks to “Count” Conte for the tip).

Bad-ass toys. I like to think of myself as a conscientious parent. I generally avoid battery-operated, crash-bang toys in favor of puzzles and blocks and other playthings that encourage open-ended imaginative play and so on and we’re all free, free to be you and me whatever. The point is, I avoid toys that will turn my offspring into spastic, ultraviolent little maniacs. But sometimes a dad can’t help it. Two new recent arrivals in our household have inspired mad fits of fun in both the 8-year-old boy and his 30-something dad. The first is the V-Bot, a Transformer-like robot that, with the touch of a remote, twists and folds and turns into a respectable red sports car that can zoom and careen around the house and utterly terrify the family dog (Check out YouTube clip of astonishing transformation here). From the same manufacturer comes Battle Wheels, a line of remote controlled, anime-inspired wheeled robots that bash into each other, Rock Em Sock Em Robot-style. Both toys have inspired hours of unimaginative, closed-ended and entirely awesome fun.

Wiggleheads? Really? We all know kids go bananas for Australian kiddie pop TV stars The Wiggles. But somehow I thought that even the most golly-gee rejuveniles would be immune from their super-cheery, crazy-creepy shtick (is it just me, or does the guy in purple look like the kind of fellow who circles playgrounds in tinted-window vans?). But proving yet again that literally anything kids enjoy will be inevitably taken up by rejuveniles, the group has attracted a loyal adult fanbase that calls itself (wait for it) the Wiggleheads. Amusing/horrifying Q&As with die-hard Wiggles groupies here.

Posted on 11.20.07 at 12:50 pm

Cheaper! Softer! Just as yellow!

https://www.christophernoxon.com//cheaper_softer_just_as_yellow

Did I forget to mention that Rejuvenile is in paperback? It is. It’s gorgeous, shiny-as-a-toy and at $11, quite reasonably priced. Order a copy today and tackle a few of the deep imponderables contained therein:
-re rejuveniles freespirited romantics or hopelessly gullible tools of a vast Madion Avenue conspiracy?
-hy didn’t rejuvenile greats J.M. Barrie, Dr. Seuss or Hans Christian Andersen ever have actual kids of their own?
-ow long until Nike launches a high performance shoe system for skipping?
-re adults who live at home with their parents forging a new interdependent family model or just suckers for mom’s lasagna?
-s the color of Rejuvenile’s dust jacket best described as yellow, buttercup or goldenrod?

Did I forget to mention that Rejuvenile is in paperback? It is. It’s gorgeous, shiny-as-a-toy and at $11, quite reasonably priced. Order a copy today and tackle a few of the deep imponderables contained therein:
-re rejuveniles freespirited romantics or hopelessly gullible tools of a vast Madion Avenue conspiracy?
-hy didn’t rejuvenile greats J.M. Barrie, Dr. Seuss or Hans Christian Andersen ever have actual kids of their own?
-ow long until Nike launches a high performance shoe system for skipping?
-re adults who live at home with their parents forging a new interdependent family model or just suckers for mom’s lasagna?
-s the color of Rejuvenile’s dust jacket best described as yellow, buttercup or goldenrod?

Posted on 06.04.07 at 09:11 am

TRBB

https://www.christophernoxon.com//trbb

Posted on 05.14.07 at 11:36 am

Robis

https://www.christophernoxon.com//robis

Posted on 05.14.07 at 11:33 am

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