We Can Be Mayors....

In the midst of the World Series, NBA season opening, football Sundays, I am a little obsessed with the mayoral race.  Of course my son taught me that in sports, there is a clear winner and something uniquely satisfying about clarity in this complicated world.  But in light of the recent gambling scandal, one begins to doubt.  Where politics is concerned, we have once again sunk back into petty messaging and accusations.  These pertain to the contest, I suppose... but once the voting is over, then the real game begins, and this is worrying.

I took an out-of-town break yesterday and visited the spectacular new art museum at my alma mater. The breathtaking concept of the architecture-- the way the building combined a sense of future with traditional breadth of collecting... was uplifting.  Unfortunately, even this project was stained by negative allegations against the architect; still, his design, which was already in progress, is stellar.

Cult of personality, when I was more naive, integrated one's work occasionally with who one was.  Now,  'persona' has eclipsed what they actually do. The whole lucrative business of branding bases itself on the concept that a celebrity can convince us to do/buy nearly anything. It's worrying... as though all of America has this teenage brain which is unable to separate fact and reality from fantasy and facade.

Visiting old universities and colleges, the 'scent' of academia is palpable and appealing.  I wondered what I'd be if I'd stayed with my art studies, as planned.  At this moment, I'd have probably aged out of the new curatorial generation and contented myself with restoring old paintings or regretting not having taken up the bass. Water under the bridge.  I did have some great conversations and reminisced about old days and my intimacy with the objects in the former museum building where I occasionally pored over manuscripts and painted treasures in a back room.

Sunday night I watched a Tarkovsky film-- Stalker.  It's an extraordinary piece of work with even the film texture a particular choice-- alternating from sepia-tone to rich color-- from depressing, dark reality to a kind of spiritual epiphany. Without doing a movie review, it is both terrifying and then reassuring-- from the ominous post-apocalyptic wasteland to the resilience of the human spirit.  The dialogue stands out; it's poetic, philosophical and inspiring.  One quote stayed with me 'Passion is nothing but the friction of the soul against the outside world'... something like that, which may actually have been lifted from Herman Hesse.

On the way back from Princeton it was cold and damp... leather jacket weather... but I found myself waiting on a train platform with a young student dressed in a sequined sort of bathing suit with a small skirt-- no sleeves, no jacket-- bare legs with high-heeled white boots.  Her flesh was on display;  ditto the fact that she did not shave or groom herself anywhere-- an odd combination.  She was freezing, on her way to a Sabrina Carpenter concert where she would go directly from the train to the venue.  No one really stared at her but in case she needed protection, we struck up a conversation-- about the concert, about her studies.  She worked as a valet summers and spent all her money on concert merch.  Within minutes another woman appeared -- in a pink satin mini dress-- bare arms, with gold fishnets and the same white boots.  They did not know one another.  It was extraordinary... the pink dress was studying neuro-biology and had only a bag with books.  A coat, she told me, would ruin her outfit.  She, too, was shivering. 

No judgment.  In my day we wore jeans to concerts-- there were few 'followers' or even pussy hats or costume choices, although the Zappa Halloween show was something to see.  These girls had the confidence to get on a commuter train-- alone, dressed this way... well, it is Halloween week... but this was something else. Still, I have to concede that their passion, their hero-- white pop-Disney-girlie-dress-up icon, was as valid as my Rolling Stones and Proust and Caspar David Friedrich schoolgirl obsessions.

I fail to understand the current culture of superhero movies, the custom of adults dressing up in costumes, imitating comic books.  Is life so terrifying that one needs to arm oneself against it, imagine one can bend reality with these powers and super traits? Superman reversing the spin of the world to reverse time and save his love-- was a novel idea, but the unlikely movie scenarios come one after another, at the expense of what used to be considered the 'art' of film. It seems not just juvenile but absurd. And while I understand little boys wearing sports jerseys and gear to games, I don't 'see' grown men vying for sports jerseys at auctions for millions of dollars-- or even collecting sneakers and dressing up for games. Then I think of the World Cup and there's something legitimately passionate and patriotic about the spectators. 

It all comes down to this nagging question in my head: who are we and have we changed?  I think we have.  I mean, I have to admire these two Princeton students-- not even 20, for committing to their passion...for wearing it in and out of context... like a movement for them, I suppose. The incredibly lucrative marketing of the merchandise-- the commodification of fame-- well, that's another story. In my day star athletes made a tiny fraction of what bench players now command. 

Getting back to the elections, I have a harder and harder time deciphering who the candidates are. Their opponents define them by their mistakes and failures; we the voters try to see beyond this to their leadership capabilities and their true commitment.  No one at this level is pure. Separating ambition from mission is difficult. I can't help seeing Mamdani in a mirror wearing a superhero cape; he seems too much of that generation to me, and I am also influenced by my son who met him as an aspiring rapper. It worries me.

We are no longer either what we eat, or what we say we are, in politics. Nor are we what we wear, as we learn from the athletes who switch teams and uniforms according to payout. Dressing as Sabrina Carpenter doesn't make us singers or superstars or beautiful, but it does take us a little out of our own reality... and it makes us part of something. Those two women made friends on the train... maybe lifelong friends. That matters. 

I am off to the polls at the moment; I am not thrilled with either choice and I am not defined by my vote. I think in my student days-- anticipating my first eligible Presidential election--I WAS that. Despite Watergate, I had belief and conviction... volunteered and worked for them. I was exploring my soul, trying to understand art and uncover my personal 'calling' by experiencing friction with the outside world. Fifty years later-- badly dressed, and certainly not in costume, I'll pick a candidate and tonight I'll watch the World Series, but I'll always take Tarkovsky.

What We Miss

To distract myself this week, I'm reading Annie Ernaux.  Turns out it's neither distracting nor particularly shattering.  It does remind me of this nagging voice begging for my own solution to memoir.  We're on a kind of cusp, at this age, where things surface like 8-ball messages, and one fears this will be the last appearance in the cranial integuum. The palimpsest sensation, Annie calls it, conjuring Proust-- uncontested master of the medium-- who never won a Nobel prize. 

I want to go home, my mom repeated over and over in the depths of her dementia.  I am beginning to understand this more as I adapt and re-adapt to a culture which increasingly relies on media for memory. One neither remembers nor forgets; it's all on Instagram. My older friends often post their small accomplishments, as if soliciting accolades they are no longer winning... musicians craving applause from their home studios and bedrooms. I try to be amused.  Like memoir, there is a boundary between resonance and sentimentality.  I still demand a certain level of creativity from myself and fear falling short. 

Thinking back over years with a predominant audio/visual memory, I separate personal eras by rooms-- by apartments, the series of homes we have as an urbanite.  I can still 'see' the nursery where I spent my first two years in a city apartment.  My psychiatrist friend finds this extraordinary; most of the 'frame' is attached to a moment of frustration-- wanting to climb out of my crib to join my family in the hallway. So it's primarily an emotional memory; the visual is something I reconstruct from looking around me, as though it's a photograph.

For some reason today I remembered the first weeks with my son; I'd come back from London, expecting to return, but ended up stuck here with no money, no job... shocked and unprepared for motherhood in a moment when post-natal syndromes were not discussed. On my own, I found a decent job, toured the day-care options.  On the upper east side there was a well-reviewed sort of nursery-- with kind women, clean facilities. Rows of hospital-style cribs held sleeping infants in their little happy pajamas... it was cheerful and peaceful. But suddenly I became maternal... I panicked. The idea of dropping my tiny son every morning to this strange 'home' seemed just wrong.

So I left... I cried, sat in a church pew asking Jesus what I should do-- temporarily living on a dollar bag of yesterday's doughnuts or rolls I picked up at the local Genovese store (how I miss it)-- to support my little family. Somehow I managed... wheeling a carriage up and downtown, getting up once a week at 5 AM and taking a commuter train to leave the baby with his Grandma for an 8-hour shift, returning at the end of the day... I was a little like that TV commercial with the waitress apologizing to her boss for her child, promising it would not happen again. And I was exhausted.  At night I did bass gigs to keep my sanity. Occasionally I dragged him to songwriting sessions and even studios.  Not ideal but we survived. 

I imagine not just my own childhood memories but his... where would they have been had he spent the first two years in a sterile room with twenty other infants?  Would he have become a basketball player? I doubt his little brain would have been the impressive street-smart product of extensive itineraries around the city. 

It occurs to me, watching the constant parade of young parents with their prams and strollers, how the technology has changed everything.  It is simpler to 'watch' one's infant with a caretaker, to access help in an emergency... and also to yield to the temptation to use the phone-- to chat, to respond-- to shop... order food, watch a movie... anything.  In my time I had only the baby for conversation-- I talked, sang to him-- I read Proust, incidentally, out loud.  It was the language-- the sounds... it didn't matter what I said-- it mattered that it was the two of us... a kind of dialogue. We bonded emotionally... we were stuck with one another. We went to the park and played. As he grew he followed our travels on the subway map and learned to read by navigating station signs. He was extraordinary and I loved every minute of those trying and sleep-deprived years. There was a phrase Annie used (trans.) referencing the use of 'life' in her writing: 'we drained reality dry'.

In this era of autism diagnoses, of blame games for learning disabilities, etc... we rarely look at our technology habits as a culprit. To me, there is an epidemic attention deficit; I rarely feel that conversational palpable intimacy... people are texting or receiving or making notes or looking at something. I don't see how children have not adapted to that by becoming less responsive, less investigative.  Babies too often hold tablets and phones and amuse themselves with a screen rather than a sandbox.  Maybe it's an urban thing... but I see it everywhere.  And I talk to babies; I love them. But society is chronically distracted. 

Dementia seems the complement to autism... the denouement of awareness and focus.  As a precursor, I am noticing adults failing to 'see' things... sensitive to being criticized but rarely able to access their own self-perception.  We are visually hyperconscious but socially a little myopic.  We miss things... how can one possibly sustain this statistically staggering screen time and the emotional connections daily life used to present as normalcy?  Random conversations, meetings, discoveries.  Meditations and daydreams. Unanticipated moonrises and spontaneous sunsets... that feeling one has lived a lifetime in a single spectacular unpredictable analogue day.  Where have they gone? 

I rue the time I spend texting on the phone my son makes me carry for safety... but it is mostly turned off. Some of my friends get annoyed that I do not answer calls unless I'm home on my landline and it's a genuine 'call', a conversational visit. Texts are deceptively two sides of an actually one-sided dialogue... I can't shake the feeling that increasing phone-use equates to missing life.  Thinking of giving it up altogether.  Digital memory is not the same, and forgetting is all too allowable when we feel the false security of instagram and Facebook records of moments.  The meaning and quality of memoir will surely change; I feel the urgency to transcribe what I recall; whether or not there will be audience is another quandary.