Wednesday, July 14, 2010

Death and the Matron

On the train yesterday, a slender figure in a long hooded black coat got on my car at 59th St. It wasn’t just a Goth thing-- it was obvious he either was channeling Death or, like a James Ensor updated, actually was using public transportation in real time.

Everyone was a little fidgety… even his shoes were zipped into the tight black fabric of his pants—a style you don’t see at Ian’s. No scythe, but you couldn’t exactly see his hands… he sat...blended...

My new approach, since I’m in full-blown middle age, is to approach tough kids and young gang-members with maternal affection. After my own parental wounds and badges, I’m versed in the lethal-weapon dialect of teenage emotion. So I’m thinking… what to say to Death? A one-liner…a Steven Wright approach? A Bergmann thing? Quote the Bible? Shakespeare? Embarrass the guy with my intellectual/literary superiority? Is the guy omniscient like God? I can’t remember… am trying to calculate how much reading Death might have done— is he partial to Goethe/Marlowe/Milton… the obvious parable stuff where he plays a role? An ego thing? Laughing nights over absinthe at a scrapbook of Seventh Seal and Darth Vader-esque characters ‘doing’ him? Does he read the classics… did he write them? Inspire as a muse? Does he listen to Sisters of Mercy or Muse? Wagner? The Mozart Requiem? Does he read obituaries and gloat? Use candles? See in the dark?

Well we’re approaching my stop in Chelsea… and the guy is getting ready to step out, with me. So I am now thinking--- maybe this is my personal caller—maybe I am the only person on the train who can even see the guy, and he knows my destination. I am a little nervous and decide to duck into the 8th Avenue Starbucks. Death does not go for a coffee. He is deliberately and stolidly making his way downtown. I breathe a sigh of relief, get myself a Venti black, and cut west on 22nd Street. At 10th Avenue, he reappears…. The light is against us. Will he walk into the traffic? No, he doesn’t. He waits. I am mustering all my courage and decide to look him in the eye, to make some small talk about the weather. After all, it is 101 degrees in Manhattan, I am drinking scalding Italian Roast and my companion here is draped like an Icelandic monk. Maybe he is allergic to the sun. Okay. I do it-- He is young and maybe Spanish—sort of beautiful in a vampiresque wasted way—with red-rimmed eyes and sensual lips.. but pale, pale, with the VMA-perfect shock of chemical black hair. It crosses my mind that my son’s Twilight-obsessed ex-girlfriend might even find him sexy, this young Death guy.

His youth and the hardness of his expression are disarming. For a quick minute I think--- will a bus veer off the road now, will it be heatstroke, a heart attack… will I gasp and then implode? But I am speechless. I let him walk ahead, for obvious reasons. I am thinking…maybe he is going to look at some art… maybe he will go straight for the Highline and melt in, until it is late enough to do the Meat Market nightclub thing. Maybe he will go for the Intrepid, or take a dip in the Hudson, curse the hero Sully for defying orders.
But there are no orders. Not for death, not for me today. I made it. I looked Death in the eye and lived.

Right. I looked at some adult-hating Twilight-obsessed delusional kid who is no less ridiculous than the Star Trek or Starwars nerds who dress up for those pathetic conventions…. An immature overgrown teen whose parents never sprung for the cool Spiderman costume for Halloween and he’s pissed. Some art-college Freshman pledging for the Goth fraternity… or a sacrilegious Catholic-School rebel offending the priests, dressing as a monk, about to do some serious drugs or rob an ATM machine or have gratuitous sex in a doorway while some cheap cellphone camera records it for youtube.

Having just finished Saramago’s Death with Interruptions, I choose to souvenir my little encounter… I choose to decide if I had photographed the guy there would be no image, that among all the crap and death-defying entries in the current competing spectacle of the artworld, I felt a little heartquake.

Amen.

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Wednesday, July 7, 2010

Lebron in the City

Forget the oil spill, the World Cup, Lindsay Lohan’s expiring Get–out-of-Jail-Free card…. Here’s … Lebron. Not only does his sheer stature occupy serious pixel real estate on your TV, but now his management has decided to play with prime –time TV in a new game where the odds are interesting gambling sites a good deal more than the recent play-offs.

Maybe he’s jealous that Lamar Odum is picking up an extra paycheck from the Kardashian show, or maybe he felt jilted that he wasn’t invited to the televised wedding. Suddenly the traditional meaning of ‘game’ is no longer enough… there has to be a press angle, a reality show. For a player who has the potential status of a Michael Jordan, this kind of publicity seems somehow unfitting… but now there is Hitchcock-worthy suspense, a media-spin signing competition with huge ESPN resonance, and no doubt advertising time is beginning to rival superbowl minutes.

The current boy-King is currently in Greenwich--- not a traditionally homey place for black people, unless, of course, you are a Knickerbocker or a Yankee star. This is hedge-fund territory, a town of no malls and many Ferraris, maybe the country’s largest per-capita wine cellar acreage.

Anyway, we will sit looking at our cellphones and take our place in an audience larger than that of any recent presidential address for a one-hour extension of a pronouncement which could at best be slowed down to a 30-second sentence, including family and professional appreciation. What will he be wearing? Armani? Tommy Hilfiger? Will it be blue and orange? Tommy has done these colors-- lives in Greenwich, along with Alan Houston, David Cone….getting warmer? Will he be holding his child, standing with his wife? Will she be wearing a hat? Will Mrs. Obama’s favorite designer be making an emergency trip to Greenwich? What does Mrs. James look like anyway and will she be signing up for the newest version of Housewives of Greenwich?

The suspense is killing me. Not. But speaking of TV, I was forced to sit in front of the set to witness one of those Project Art-star episodes, produced by the fashion-savvy Sarah Jessica Parker who is Bravo-friendly and not well-known for her art expertise. And Simon de Pury…. Was it not enough for Phillips to have sold out to a champagne company…now they belong to a Russian conglomerate whose ruthless retail philosophy has little to do with art but much ado about marketing? The Warholian joke has long been exhausted, and besides the numerous PBS documentaries and the prayer that the computer age will improve the art of television, there is little compatibility between art and the TV runway. Mr. de Pury looks and acts ridiculous and the so-called gallerists are over-styled and pathetically a-philosophical. The Brooklyn Museum must be more desperate than during the 1970’s.

I was frankly baffled by the thought process of each and every one of the ‘artists’, and found one of the bottom-3 pieces very slightly better than the signature work of the visiting art-star of the week whose work is a sad and sorry example of what passes today as bankable and collectible. Bring on the Russian influence--- the grunting sexy tennis stars and the botoxed new breed of Spies--- the litigious girlfriends and models, the histrionic drama-queen skating stars and dancers.

What happened to Tolstoy and Chekhov, Gontcharova and El Lissitsky? Okay, Chagall moved to Paris. What next… Lebron in Moscow? Something suspiciously Russian about all the drama… the Nets have gone Russian… Chelsea… but not many Nets players in Connecticut… So could it be that the Knicks are about to be bought? We’ll be watching at 9 PM… which is 2 AM Greenwich time? The one that’s closer to Moscow.

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