Hum along with the Übermensch

The webpage featuring this year’s Cambridge University Press biography of Nietzsche also features 17 free downloadable musical compositions of the philosopher in mp3 format.

Friedrich Nietzsche – Cambridge University Press

The Nietzsche Music Project Home Page

Salvatore & Carmella Ingrassia Family 1914

In preparation for my wife’s family reunion, I spent four days fishing with my father-in-law in Canada where I sat in a boat all day listening to stories that went something like this: Your Uncle Paul’s cousin Annazette married a fella who works over at Newell Rubbermaid. Nice guy. His father and I were in Troop 38 together at Marmion and he’s in an investment club with your brother Eddie. Well, they don’t really invest in anything. They just get together once a week to drink and shoot the shit. But anyway, they came up here fishing and he caught a bass in that bay over there. A very nice fish. A real beauty.

Over the years, I’ve grown used to hearing these stories told in the same shaggy dog manner by cousins, brothers and other relatives because my wife comes from what you might call a large family in Rockford, Illinois, and they like nothing more than getting together with each other.

The immediate family comes from eight brothers and sisters born to Tony and Jean Domino in the 10 1/2 years from 1959 to 1970. (“What happened in the off-year?” I once asked him. “Color TV,” he said.) But Tony’s issue was nothing compared to his father’s father (11) or his mother’s father (13), so when the table was set last weekend for the descendants of Salvatore Ingrassia to celebrate his emigration from Sicily to the United States in 1884, it surprised no one that there were 267 placecards.

The Verdi Club

The reunion was held at Rockford’s Verdi Club, a red brick edifice along the Rock River, not to be confused with the other Italian ethnic clubs in Rockford – the Lombardi Club, the Venetian Club or the St. Ambrosia Society – because, as any Italian will tell you, the cultures of Sicily, Lombard, Venice and Rome are vastly different. The single factor that unites them was America’s disdain for all of them when they first arrived here.

As we entered, over the door of the Verdi Club. was a Budweiser sign advertising Bingo on Thursday and Sunday nights. Italian operas played inside over the public address system as the organizing committee handed out credentials. The tables were strewn with Italian flags and plastic artichokes stuffed with questions meant to get families talking about their heritage. (Sample: What is the most Italian thing about you?) And the agenda promised lessons in Bocce ball and Italian bingo after dinner, brief remarks and the requisite picture. But clearly, the main event was what in our family would be called schmoozing and consists in theirs of kissing elderly women on the cheek and enduring bear hug handshakes from the men.

The ten branches of the family (Two children died in infancy. A third became a nun.) were given color coded name tags, each delineated with the generation, lineage and status of the bearer. I was, for instance, the 3G spouse of Lucy Domino Jacobs. The oldest attendees were Aunt Vita and Aunt Frances, 96; and the youngest, a sixth-generation cherub appropriately named Isaiah. There was an award for the relative who came the farthest (from Holland) and the “most Italian,” the prize being a set of furry car dice.

I am not by nature a social person so I was drawn to the other spouses standing on the periphery. When pulled into conversation, I invariably found myself talking to someone named Tony, Paul, Lucy or Maryjo – family names that hang on the family tree like barnacles on a ship bottom – and explaining myself as co-ordinates on the Ingrassia map.

The Greatness of Italy

Reunions are a time to celebrate family, which often involves embellishing the past achievements of ancestors. The Ingrassias have not fed the American celebrity machine like, for instance, the Bushes, the Hiltons or the Lohans. The most famous ancestor turns out to be Anne Sterling, a B-movie actress in the 40’s best known for appearing on the cover of racy tabloids. But other Ingrassias have made their mark on the local stage, as one newspaper account put it, personifying, nurturing and defending “the spiritual and moral greatness of Italy.”

Thus, my father-in-law proudly boasts that his Uncle Tony was not just a lawyer, he was the first Italian-American lawyer in Rockford; his Uncle Nunzio was the first Italian-American alderman; his mother Lucy headed up the Catholic Foresters and was the first Italian-American woman from Rockford ever invited to the White House – “and come to think of it, probably the only one.”

But Salvatore himself was a piece of work, as he recalls.  “The truth is Grandpa Ingrassia was something of a tyrant,” he confides. One of his sons jumped from a second-story window to avoid a beating; another ran away for three months; another daughter, after getting tied to a post in the basement for coming home 10 minutes late from a dance, up and joined the convent.

The Family History

After dinner, they played home movies of a family gathering in the 1940’s almost as large as this one, and Tony Domino, a great grandson who has traveled back to Sicily many times to research records and talk with distant relatives, gave the family history. The original homestead was a grain mill in Camporeale, a bone dry, dirt poor small town in the mountains about 35 miles south of Palermo.

Salvatore Ingrassia was 26 when he followed his older brother Pasqualle to the United States, arriving at the customs house in New Orleans.  At the time, Louisiana was still trying to recover from the Civil War loss of slave labor so they offered discount fares in the poorer regions of Italy to anyone who would book passage through New Orleans.  Recruiters from local plantations would meet the arriving boats and put the workers up in quarter houses, former slave quarters the Italians shared with the remaining African-Americans and anyone else at the bottom of the economic ladder.

Grandpa Ingrassia brought with him his first wife, Francesca Sacco, and a one-year-old son Joseph. But the southern climate gave her consumption and she returned to Sicily after a year or two and died shortly after.  In 1889, he met and married his second wife, Carmela Musso, herself newly arrived from Sicily, and together they ran a small concession selling fruit and sandwiches, with Sal supplementing their income by going off for long periods to work on the railroads in Missouri.

Take Two

Ten years later, as the century came to an end, Sal decided to take his family back to Italy. He was going nowhere fast in America. Now burdened with five children, however, he discovered Sicily was no bargain either so he decided to try his luck again. This time, he booked passage through Ellis Island, but quickly moved back to New Orleans to open his first grocery store on Magazine Street in 1901.

The problem with the American Dream is that it rarely follows the path we pretend it does. Honesty, hard work, and perseverance are no guarantee of success. Although Sal was doing all right in New Orleans, his wife’s relatives had emigrated  to Rockford, and she wanted the comfort of family.

“We’ve tried it your way, “ Tony imagines Carmela saying, “Now I want to try it mine.” Tony’s presentation to the assembled Ingrassia relatives is crisp, authoritative and, for many, a revelation. Still, it sparks memories of tales other family members have heard about the move.

“Is that when he put the kids in an orphanage while he got established?” someone in the crowd asks.

“No, that was his brother Pasqualle, but that’s another story,” Tony replies.

The Melting Pot

Salvatore opened his first store in Rockford at 1211 Rock Street in 1905 selling “staples and fancy groceries”. By 1918, he was opening his third store on Loomis Avenue in partnership with his sons Nunzio (Del) and Ted.

But he will be remembered more for the accomplishments of his progeny than his own. One started a furniture store, another became a lawyer, a daughter mastered the insurance business, two others entered the liquor business (whether before or after the end of prohibition remains a topic of some dispute.) What is not in dispute is that the Ingrassias, in all their many third generation names and permutations, have become pillars of the Rockford community.

The most poignant stories about America often come from immigrants because they are simple stories of struggle: to get out of the old country, to rise up the economic ladder, to overcome language and cultural barriers, usually just to gain a foothold in America so the next generation can reap the full rewards. As Nathan Glazier and Daniel Moynihan would demonstrate in their 1960 collaboration “Beyond The Melting Pot,” very few immigrant cultures assimilated easily. The Italians, Irish, Jews, Poles and, more recently, Puerto Ricans and Mexicans have all faced discrimination; and one of the ways they overcame it was by self-segregating into their own communities and clinging to family vines, using them to pull each other up. The Ingrassia Family Reunion was a demonstration that it doesn’t happen overnight. Sometimes, it takes 116 years.

The Picture

To get a picture of the whole Ingrassia clan, the photographer brought a ladder and divided the families into three groups he would later seam into a panoramic shot. The first groups were the red, white and blue families. They took their places on four picnic tables and – wouldn’t you know ­– two of the tables collapsed. Nothing comes easy. Elderly aunts tumbled into little children, and three women were left with bruised ankles, one seriously enough to go to the hospital.

But nothing was going to hold back the family portrait. They climbed back into the frame for another go. The other color coded families took their turn in the spotlight, and the photos were completed just as thunder rolled in off the river.

As the family dispersed, my wife’s cousin Mike Cavataio suggested we make up a T-shirt saying “I survived the Ingrassia Reunion.”

“I’m down with that,” I said because it was a very nice reunion. A real beauty.

“Kapitoil”
By Teddy Wayne
Harper Perennial ($13.99, 293 pp.)

Karim Issar is a gifted programmer from Doha, Qatar. It is 1999, and all hands are on deck in New York to patch shortsighted computer programs scheduled to implode when the century rolls over. Y2K is our apocalypse, and thank God there is enough immigrant talent in the world to save our bacon. Schrub Equities hires Karim to fix its programs and insure that their profitable investment juggernaut of the 90’s doesn’t skip a beat. After days of head down code juggling in their World Trade Center cubicles, the slaves of New York are released to the techno cocktail and cocaine clubs while their bosses go birding in Connecticut mansions. Oh, those were the good old days.

In a sense “Kapitoil” is a pre-9/11 novel where author Teddy Wayne assumes we all know what is coming, and so his Islamic hero’s assimilation into a bustling New York of Yankee games, limos, mosques, downtown clubs, MOMA, the F train to Brooklyn, Zegna suits, Central Park, and pizza-by-the-slice reflects a world that is no longer with us. Today Karim probably couldn’t even get a visa to visit.

Curious, Analytical, Awkward

Teddy Wayne (if the name sounds like he should be on TV, it is because he is – making videos for Comedy Central) has created a wonderful character in the gentle, curious, analytical, and awkward Karim Issar. His first novel is told in the first person diary of Karim with a voice that perfectly captures the perspective of someone new to our language and culture but committed to learning every piece of it through experience and study. Each diary entry even ends with a glossary of newly learned English words and expressions. It is Karim’s voice and Wayne’s play with language which distinguish “Kapitoil” from the long legacy of “Stranger in a Strange Land” books before it.

Schrub Equities provides Karim with a furnished doorman apartment and a WTC 88th floor cubicle in a pod with three other Y2K programmers. Two of them are single guys whose fantasy baseball banter bewilders him, and the other, a single woman named Rebecca, bewilders him because…well, because she is a single working woman, an oddity in Qatar. So he listens and emails and programs; but he is too good at programming to fill his days with rote Y2K fixes, and instead creates an algorithm to predict the hourly world price of oil based on key word news searches for acts of violence and terror, especially in the Middle East. Investing phantom money, he beta runs this program he calls Kapitoil for a week and generates a 30% monthly return – a potential goldmine for Schrub.

When Karim shares Kapitoil with his bosses at Schrub, they begin to invest real money quietly in the oil markets… and begin to make a killing. The plot turns on Karim’s sudden high profile as he is promoted, bumped big time in salary, given a private corner office, and taken under wing by Mr. Schrub himself with invitations to his Racquet Club, Yankee box, charity dinners, and Connecticut estate. His pod mates envy his American Dream success – except Rebecca, who dreams of leaving Wall Street to become a teacher and has grown fond of Karim for his innocence and kindness rather than his new found wealth. The real story of “Kapitoil” is the love story between Rebecca and Karim.

Romance 101, Arabian Style

Rebecca initiates the relationship with a shared coffee here and there. Karim’s awkwardness charms her. Gradually, they do more things together discovering common interests. This is Romance 101, except in the way Wayne makes it fresh through Karim’s language and analytical attempt to understand his feelings. “I spent Monday brainstorming our date…it was more difficult than programming in many ways because in programming if you can’t predict results, you can test out new variables and use trial and error to arrive at a solution, but with people you typically have one opportunity and their motivations and reactions are more difficult to understand, especially with females.” Karim even builds a “pros and cons” list to choose a restaurant.

They have their ups and downs, misinterpreting each other now and then or arguing over little things. Karim however analyzes every nuance. “I hypothesized that she was still upset and my predicted outcomes weren’t optimistic, so I decided to wait for her to stabilize and let her initiate contact with me when she was ready.” When they finally find themselves in bed, even then his analysis and observation never stop, “I paid attention to which actions produced no effect and which yielded a net gain, as in a boosting algorithm, and I utilized the strong ones in variable patterns so they wouldn’t become predictable, but after a period of time I merely let myself enjoy our actions, even if I wasn’t the cream of the cream partner.” Who wouldn’t want such an attentive lover?

Ultimately Karim is uncomfortable with his innovative Kapitoil being used only to make profits on global violence, and he rewrites the program to predict and prevent world disease. He falls from favor at Schrub and loses his work visa. Now comfortably attached to Rebecca, he is left with no simple solution to stay with her. They both know the relationship will have to end, but both are better because of it. As Karim says, “I was most Karim-esque around Rebecca, and to boot, I was even learning to be Rebecca-esque, which was possibly what relationships were about more than they were merely about compromise.”

“Kapitoil” is not just a novel focused on what we have lost in the aftermath of 9/11 nor is it a diatribe on the excesses of Wall Street. It is a story of young people finding their ways and each other in a world that still crosses borders and cultures, despite a global paranoid shift to prevent it. Wayne tells the story in the voice of one good man who learns how shared languages and compassion bind us together regardless of political and religious efforts to keep us apart. Long after you have forgotten his plot, you will remember Wayne’s remarkable creation of Karim Issar.

From Pato Fu – Musica de Brinquedo.

Canadian cigarette health warning: Don’t sugar coat it, baby.

One of the most overlooked financial complications of collecting, or even buying art, is whether or not we actually own the piece we’ve acquired. Tainted provenance — or even worse — is a real problem in the art world.

Part of the art world’s appeal is attributable to the free spirited, unregulated, highly-volatile megabucks that whirl within it and the buyers and sellers who love the art — and the action. Which of course means it is rife with dealers under pressure, incapable of keeping their word (think Larry Salendar), dealers who are fully reputable and don’t know they are selling “dirty” goods (think artwork stolen by the Nazis and now back on the market), as well as crooks. (I know several former disreputable dealers who “went away” and are now back and are, as far as I can tell, still engaged in shady practices.)

What we are talking about are art crimes, which constitutes the third largest category of crime in the world.

Protect Yourself

The good news is that we, as collectors, have tools at our disposal to protect ourselves. Recent court decisions have returned works of art to former owners even after the statute of limitations has expired.

The Internet offers databases that allow the cross-referencing of art auctions and databases of stolen artworks — tools that make it easier for theft victims to mount court challenges.

The ownership history of artworks has become an increasingly sensitive issue for collectors and the folks they buy from. Just because you paid for it does not mean you own it. Collectors who don’t proceed with due diligence can put their art at risk, especially if they sell the artwork to someone else.

Of the 300,000 or so stolen, missing or looted artworks listed in the Art Loss Register, an international database, more than 15% were created after 1945 – that’s 45,000 works of art, created since WWII that are out there in the world, that if acquired by one of us would make our life miserable.

In the decades I was an art dealer there was more than one occasion where a client made a layaway purchase, made the payments and never ever picked up the artwork, and as far as I knew flat out disappeared. Who owns that art? (I’m still storing some six years after closing.) Or what about important artists who consign work to a gallery and then forget about it? (Do you really think all artists have fastidious records?) The question is: Who owns this treasure? What if a dealer sells you a drawing by a major living artist who was never paid, who died, and over time the $10,000 purchase becomes worth a quarter of a million and the artist’s heir, now in college, decides to track all of Mom or Dad’s sales, and your piece is undocumented? (I see some variation of this almost weekly.) What if an heir does their homework and decides to track down the missing art and knocks on your door? Of course you are innocent(?), but what are you going to do, and what is the impact on you? Or what if the art you acquire was not a victim of shoddy record-keeping, but was actually stolen? Add the wrinkle that the reputable gallery you bought it from didn’t even know. What does this mean to you?

Art Warranties

For a collector who has acquired a work of art, having the right to ownership disputed can come as both an emotional and financial shock. Even if the collector has secured a warranty of clear legal title from the seller at the time of purchase, he may not be able to rely on it, says Lawrence Shindell, the CEO of ARIS Corp. The upstream seller may no longer be in business, for instance, or may not have assets to stand behind the prior warranty, or may be hard to pursue if he is located in a foreign country where the warranty is hard to enforce.

Meanwhile, if the collector has become a seller of the work and hasn’t sought a third-party risk transfer solution, i.e. title insurance, and if the upstream seller isn’t around to recover money from, the collector himself can become liable to his or her downstream buyer if the ownership of the work is successfully challenged and the buyer then loses his money. The buyer can then sue the collector for damages, including the price he paid for the work — as well as possible appreciation — and for his legal expenses.

The Chubb Insurance Group has coverage that reimburses legal fees up to $100,000 incurred in a title dispute for scheduled works of art. Unfortunately, this benefit does not extend to the actual value of the work if the owner is required by the courts to forfeit the piece. Courts in the U.S. will generally “balance the equities,” meaning that the due diligence the buyer performed to avoid possession of stolen art will be measured against the steps the former owner made to recover the art. Nonetheless, the burden of discovery will usually weigh more heavily on the purchaser, who, it is assumed, has the sophistication and resources to authenticate the history of a purchase.

“If you wind up on the losing side of an ownership challenge,” says Jonathan Ziss, a partner at the law firm of Margolis Edelstein and a founder of Art Title Advisors, “the result can be perfectly awful: the loss of a valuable asset, the destruction of an estate plan and the loss of a charitable donation or bequest tax deduction, perhaps years after the time for filing an amended [tax] return has timed out.”

Fortunately, there are resources available to help collectors with their investigations into an artwork’s provenance. In their understandable enthusiasm to acquire beautiful works of art, collectors should not lose sight of this sometimes challenging, but fundamental imperative.

Paul Klein works with The Briddge Group, the art succession planning firm and writes and speaks frequently on the subject.

If it’s not an iPhone, why would I want it?