**If this image isn't for you, I totally get it.
It turns out that WIX makes me use all caps for the subject title. It bothers me as I try to write this, perhaps I'm really just neurotic beyond repair.
Making art is F-ing difficult. It probably wasn't as difficult as what these extraordinary partisans went through. But it's very difficult. I was recently thinking about the Bielski Partisans' apocryphal portrayal in the movie "Defiance" [aprocryphal meaning some right, some wrong], and I started to think about how they must have argued amongst themselves back then. I believe that in the movie, the partisans would get so contentious among themselves that it would come to literal blows. They were also apparently trying to prevent themselves from succumbing to cannibalism. It seems like being on your own with a bunch of family members and neighbors, doing ANYTHING TO KEEP YOUR WAY OF LIFE AND NOT SUCCUMB TO THE CONTROL OF FASCISM, would just be horrendous .
I sometimes wonder, though, what it could have been like if I were one of the Bielski Partisans. If I were in my own movie about them, set in the modern day. Maybe in this fantasy I'd be one of the brothers, the top dogs of their community. Maybe my brother got so mad at me that he left and joined the Chinese army. No, better yet, maybe I'M the brother that left. Because if I think about my situation, I'm just a hermit living in a one bedroom apartment and don't have roommates.
But, continuing with my modern day fantasy, let's confirm that I'd be the brother that left. Well, I'd imagine then that among the brothers that were still in the village, one of them was making a video game called Apple Pickle-Punk Circle 3124 and it was about a biker in a futuristic society that goes around a densely populated urban area leaving a trail of pickles behind as clues of his whereabouts, and in the game you're an analyst that follows him around and picks up his pickle trail and brings it to a laboratory to see if he has some kind of disease. And every time you run an analysis on a pickle a billionaire pays you 6 figures. Oh, and the billionaire is also your husband.
I would refuse to play the game, naturally, despite the fact that it would be a moderately popular game. I would have been offered a chance to make the sountrack to the game but would have declined the offer, trying to instead write music for the Chinese army.
Where I struggle to continue the fantasy is right after that. Did I successfully write music for the Chinese army? Did I finally collect the biker's pickle and make millions and move into a house in Brooklyn?
I think that the work of any person, which can feel excruciatingly difficult, is to deal with his partisan brothers every day, and realize that at any moment he might get sucker punched by one of them, and why was that? Maybe it was just a bout of only metaphorical cannibalism, because we are so lucky to live in this part of the world where even the poorest of us are still doing ok, in the grand scheme of things.
Just take it from me, in NYC even the homeless make fun of me for the way I carry myself while doing work on my bike. And no matter how much I yell back at them, someone is always going to lob some disrespect on me and I'm going to have to absorb it and suffer through it as it works its way through my body and I can't do anything because I'll never see that person again. Or if I do, I won't be in the right frame of mind to do anything but damage my standing in the company I'm working with.
Just to keep it on the level, there's nothing historic about what I'm writing here. These people suffered an amount that was beyond absurdity and I can't feel anything but respect for them and their will to defy being taken captive by some of human history's worst monsters. And it makes me realize that if they can go through what they went through, then MAYBE, just MAYBE, I can be as neurotic and sensitive as I am and still make a life for myself as an artist.
In any case, here I am writing for the army band, well of course in real life I have nothing to do with the chinese army, but times are changing, and I'm doing my best to deal with people the way only I can. Because when figurative push comes to figurative shove, we have to decide for each of ourselves, which part of us is like the Bielski Partisans that defies captivity, and which part of us wants to join the KGB and call it a day.
Happy Sunday, August 11, 2024, from NYC.
Tim Chernikoff
Comments