Give Me Back My Wig

Maybe 14 years ago-- maybe more, I was in Chelsea where I often 'sit' for a friend's gallery... and lo and behold... the street was closed off, all kinds of black official vehicles lined up, complete with NYPD and massive security.. Could President Obama be looking at art? But apparently the small mob was entering our building... the Balenciaga store, pre-Hurricane Sandy, was one flight below.  Within minutes, I was being asked by a man with a walkie-talkie to allow some VIP to get dressed in the space where I sat, quietly... often alone.  Well, okay... we had a sort of relationship with the store personnel... 

So it turned out it was not the First Lady or some veiled Princess, but Beyoncé herself.  For her entourage, all street commerce had been stopped, gallery traffic disallowed.  My doors were locked and guarded, and the pop 'queen' (she did kindly nod her head at me in appreciation) herself began to disrobe in our unwindowed packing area.  No photos, they requested, as she was quite exposed in my makeshift dressing room.  I never even looked.  In less than an hour the street was returned to its normal state-- all signs of the visitation had disappeared.  Presumably Balenciaga was significantly compensated in sales.

I admit I was a fan of the Crazy-in-Love phase... how could you not admire those thighs and her dancing?  For a second there, she had the Tina Turner star power-- she could sing and dance.  But then there was the blonde thing... I mean, for young black girls-- is this the model we want to admire?  What happened to natural hair and loving one's color?  I'm old but recent years have blurred the lines between the Kardashians, the Beyoncés, the pop stars.  All the wigging and facial modifications-- the make-up and the image-creation... 

And all these celebrities crossing lines-- athletes who act-- models who sing, actors promoting everything from Bitcoin to life-insurance... Subway.  Aren't they well-paid enough?  Or does their hungry management advise them to take on these mega-contracts and endorsements?  Beyoncé... she and Jay Z have created a mega-fortune.  Do we have to see her on Super Bowl commercials literally raking in the massive additional dollars and wearing a small fortune while half the world starves?  

Art, they called her new album cover, where she is not very believably or even actually side-saddling a white horse.  White is the operative word here-- the horse, the hair, the culture.  Her explanations don't make sense; I don't particularly want to explore my personal patriotism by mingling with MAGA hat wearers.  Not that the country image hasn't evolved, and not that its traditionally all-white audience and deeply embedded racism haven't been updated... but Cowboy Carter seems more like a massive bad joke than an image.

It's  not that I am bitter or envious or hateful; I admit I haven't much listened to the last 20 years of Beyonce.  I'm already sick of the constant cameos in our culture-- inaugurations, award shows... twitter feeds; it's unavoidable.  Suffice it to say, besides Hank Williams I have never been a huge fan of country music.  Touring with rock bands, the fundamental Christian reluctance of certain audiences to embrace science, the backwater racist and sexist comments sort of reinforced this.  Many of my purist Nashville friends shun the current wave of country pop stars as inauthentic.  Still... who can resist Dolly Parton? Beyoncé could take a few lessons from her brand of authenticity, wigs, make-up and plastic surgery notwithstanding. 

I guess when I heard snippets of the new version of Jolene-- unavoidable here-- well, that put the proverbial stop on things.  And I'm sorry if I've ruined someone's Easter... but I've heard at least a dozen covers of this iconic and heart-wrenching song... and to say this new one does not do it justice is kind of an understatement.  Coupled with that cover, the inherent irony... what is cowboy about Beyoncé besides the styling?  And the photo more like a Jeff Koons version of ad-absurdum with a little Richard Prince tagline left hanging.  Dave La Chapelle Does Dallas?  Lady Godiva at least had a sort of platform. 

Give me Roy Rogers and Dale Evans... National Velvet... I don't know... I was a cynic back when Elton John released Tumbleweed Connection.  A gay English cowboy? It seemed so inauthentic.  But now the whole banned-book narrative, the Tennessee political atmosphere-- the bigotry, the Bible-toting hypocrisy-- while the world burns.  What can we expect next-- Beyoncé on the throne, scepter and crown... but she's already been 'Queened'?  What is the damn message here?  I don't want to read or hear another commentary.  Let someone else search the internet for the white-horse symbolism and mythology.  It's Easter; Jesus rode into Jerusalem on a damn donkey. I just want my music with a little less pomp and airbrushing and a little more circumstance and soul. Aretha, we miss you so terribly.

The Loop

I've been reading Jacques Roubaud.  It's not simple; he's a mathematician, a poet-- a member of the Oulipo group, along with Queneau and Perec, who use restrictive writing techniques and exercises to create their work.  But he's also an obsessive observer and among the literary labyrinths and obstacles, there is this awareness of life that dazzles.  Walking, he says, decades before cellphones and technology were portable, is a conversation with time.  

My habits of running and distance-walking evolved as a kind of therapy for the grief I experienced in 2020, after the death of Alan. I'd circle the park, cover the half-empty city streets, and count to myself... as though the intimacy of numbers had some message for me... like a non-verbal language.  The way mathematicians think about numbers is beyond my simple comprehension, but there are patterns and colors somehow, that belong to certain sequences... and most poetry has always kept a certain musical count-- its rhythm, its meter.  

Photography, according to Roubaud, is a conversation with light. This, too, obviously way before the massive daily output of digitally cheap images. And also linked with time... the shutter speeds, the slowness, the developing. There were exactly three photographs of my Grandma in our house; only one vague image of her parents, posed formally and sepia-toned with a sort of monogram scratched into the corner of the paper. 

I confess I watched some minutes of the Academy awards... enough to see Billie Eilish whose delivery I have begun to find affected and pretentious.  I don't find her song 'winning' and her effort to avoid a body-image statement has resulted for me in a fashion overload.  It's like a doll with make-up and too many outfits.  I don't get it.  What is amazing is the technology to deliver an audio performance of breath... a far cry from the dive-bar culture where one sang one's throat out over loud guitars-- no earphones or monitors... sometimes nothing but amplifiers as a sound system.  And still, there is nothing I hear on these recent award shows that dazzles my ears like Mama Say Mama Sah Mama Coo Sah... or whatever he meant.  

Competing with the award show was a 60 Minutes piece on Jeff Koons-- a contemporary of mine whose financial success is boggling. Even his eyebrows were so artificially groomed I found it hard to look during the head-shots.  The factory, the Warhol comparisons-- well, simply... not not not.  The complete lack of imagination and the grandiosity of kitsch is no longer funny or amusing or artistic... it's just, especially in the world of today-- of war and violence and disparity-- a hideous lead-balloon tasteless joke. 

Walking rush-hour streets in the rain this week it occurred to me how few people observe the umbrella etiquette one used to find so natural in London... whether it's awkward tourists, or entitled women-- it seems there's little rain-chivalry and plenty of umbrella competition.  I often feel I no longer belong... block after block of shops that display but don't speak my language-- things that are strange and overpriced and even the ordering process of a simple coffee is overwhelming, as is the payment.  The doormen and groomed security guards outside buildings who look at people like me with haughty disdain.  Not the city into which I was born.  

I still circle the reservoir at sunset-- despite the crowds these days, it's still spectacular.  But last week some mediocre violinist set himself up with a loudspeaker that was enough to provoke a duck migration.  That woman who assaulted the subway cellist-- a criminal act, but I suddenly understood her.  Our privileged solitary moments-- our conversations with time--  are difficult enough without intrusions. So little silence in a city... musicians especially should be sensitive to the space between. 

So I guess I prefer to bury myself in a French novel and to sense the time it takes to walk from the West Village to Harlem-- sometimes with Coltrane in my headphones, sometimes Morphine or John Lee or even nothing... to speak occasionally with a man in a wheelchair who sits outside the projects with a boombox playing old R&B and tells me Pain might be his only friend now.  I could cry.  Worthy of an Albert King song.