tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-63898860671925633442024-03-19T01:48:23.303-07:00mysocalledblog:An emerging writer's soundtrack from the inside out, in a mostly minor key.mysocalledwriterlessbloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00529007063456469103noreply@blogger.comBlogger424125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6389886067192563344.post-64877218419013605892024-03-12T23:16:00.000-07:002024-03-12T23:23:10.081-07:00The Loop<p>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. </p><p>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. </p><p>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. </p><p>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. </p><p>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. </p><p>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. </p><p>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. </p><p>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.</p>mysocalledwriterlessbloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00529007063456469103noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6389886067192563344.post-43077933196133322212024-02-29T12:53:00.000-08:002024-03-02T18:58:52.636-08:00Leap of Faith<p>I've always been a 29 sort of person. After all, it's the first two slashes of my birth date... and if you add up all the digits, including year, it's what you get-- sort of a secret numerical surname. Plenty of babies were born today... although mothers will celebrate most years on the 1st of March-- a misdeed, in my book. I mean, technically one is born on the day after 28, but February has a totally unique profile. And its oddity, its fluidity... well, it's calendar architecture-- like the mistake woven intentionally into Amish quilts, to remind of the fallibility of all things human. </p><p>For those who obsessively wish their Facebook friends a happy birthday, there was a bit of relief; only two names came up in my reminders, neither of which seemed familiar. My 'Memories' notifications brought back the previous February 29th activities-- gigs with my beloved Alan who just four sun-cycles ago, one leap year, was still vital and singing his damn heart out in the dive bars of downtown.</p><p>When I was young, I chose to see the 29th as a sort of holiday-- a temporal snow day-- the gift of extra time we only perceive on the arbitrary fall close of Daylight Saving Time... that odd hour I've always treated with a kind of reverence, even though it's taken back in the spring. </p><p>I spent much of the day returning phone calls, speaking to friends, finishing up a Brassai biography of Henry Miller complete with photos. For all the nostalgia this generation seems to have for our city in the 70's and 60's... it pales compared with the bohemians of New York in the 1930's. No one more punk and passionate than our Henry who lived a life on both continents. The edge. </p><p>Many of my friends seem stuck. Life since the pandemic has yet to return to normal... but there is no longer 'that' normal. It occurs to me that 'normal' is a hindsight kind of thing. I overheard my downstairs neighbor discussing with her 5-year old their 'new normal'. Like everything in this culture, the moments are shortened-- the eras are temporary, the semesters are eras, fashion is passé nearly before it emerges; the world is reborn in an instagram blink.</p><p>And yet I carry with me some sense of solidity... like one of those black-and-white photos of a wiry musician, half-starved, wearing a wifebeater, walking maybe a New Orleans street with his horn tucked under his arm-- no case. I can almost whistle the music in his head-- no cheap soundtrack: this is the real deal here, and it comforts me like a kind of visual rosary.</p><p>My niece is struggling. We endlessly discuss suicide-- not as an act, but a kind of boundary. It's bantered around so cheaply these days, and the ease of overdosing has made it constant conversation. Even Flaco the owl-- who's to say he didn't simply have enough? Tired of being an instagram sensation, tired of having his every move photographed and documented, of being stalked by birders in Central Park. He couldn't even enjoy a solitary meal. All things must pass. Besides, death changes everything. The dead Beatles will always be the more sacred for me. </p><p>Of all the visual poetics in my city, the bridges are perhaps my favorite... all of them... including the Hells Gate whose very name frightens. I love to walk across the East River and look down, between the slats... and wonder at the engineering challenge of past centuries-- these literal and conceptual linkages. Yet-- they have become symbols of another kind of leap-- the one without faith, the one of despair. These jumper dramas-- the narratives-- have become part of the lore... the river, the piles and the girders-- the soaring arcs-- the height, the distance.. the approach... the symbolisms. What we humans make of what we have made...</p><p>The way I see things, we all have a sort of room-- our solitary confinement. We leave, we travel, we love, we mess around-- but the proverbial room is our least common denominator-- our reset. for some it is the size of a closet, but this is delusion. Anyway, in one corner is the past-- which begins to hog space, to encroach. In another are the regrets and hauntings. Maybe another-- for my niece-- the appeal of drugs-- of escape-- the ultimate 'free' but that, too, is another closet-- a dead end, quite literally. And somewhere, when one throws open the curtains, is the window of suicide... the false window, actually, because the light is made of reflection-- not sunlight or even starlight but a kind of thick, stale, smoky yellow. </p><p>And then there is you... you are the room, with the possibilities and tools waiting in the most inviting corner, the one beneath the suicide window you will not use because you prefer risks and fear and passionate love... and a door that opens onto a house of dreams, in a world of your own design, where it matters less that you belong, than that you simply existed, and left your unique footprint, maybe even a multiple of 29.</p>mysocalledwriterlessbloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00529007063456469103noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6389886067192563344.post-85757317776008339322024-02-18T21:56:00.000-08:002024-02-18T22:28:56.212-08:00Crossing Delancey<p>Convalescence, as frustrating as it is, brings with it a few perks. No guilt about lying around watching films on occasional nights, and there is something truly innocent about any New York movies made pre-1990's. Especially the 70's-- the Woody Allens, the Elliot Goulds and Scorceses-- anything that gives us a glimpse of our city before it was 'glammed'. Apartments were human-scaled, not massive and blingy. People made phone calls from a booth, or waited home for a message.</p><p>At 3 AM the other night I watched Crossing Delancey-- something I'd probably shunned at the time, in my post-college snobbery. But there was Amy Irving-- Mrs. Spielberg, at the time, working in a bookshop-- navigating life as a single woman-- relatable, fallible. It occurred to me I'm now closer to the age of her Bubby, lol. And how I married the British writer asshole/flirt she was lucky enough to escape. The LES-- populated by pickle stores and shops in the days before even Dean & DeLuca... the bars, women waiting at tables... women sitting home eating Chinese take-out watching television. Does anything work out? She was Mrs. Spielberg, and then she wasn't. It must have hurt. The last time I crossed Delancey I was on my way home from an Alan Merrill gig-- exactly four years ago-- his birthday, I think; it seems like yesterday.</p><p>These associations have become permanent emotional fixtures... the way 2024 will be the year of the Taylor Swift Super Bowl. She has done much for football, especially among young teenage girls who will not remember the winning touchdown but the color lipstick Taylor wore. Tonight I remembered going to MOMA as a schoolgirl to look at the Jackson Pollocks. In those days, museums were fairly uncrowded. On that afternoon Joni Mitchell came in with Graham Nash.. they were dating, wearing sheepskin coats and furry boots... looking buoyant and in love and the three of us studying the paintings... it stayed with me. A perfect cultural collision. </p><p>The novel Septology is forever entwined with my January mishap, the way Saramago's The Gospel According to Jesus Christ helped me process the post-9/11 sorrow. How I tried hard last week to get into Lucy Ellman's Ducks,Newburyport but realized the voyeurism innate in following her personal associations, however close they are to mine-- was just excessive. I have my own. Time is limited and one must weigh carefully available literary projects. </p><p>There was a night I had food poisoning and watched a Tarkovsky film. I will forever associate the visuals with vomiting; somehow I think Tarkovsky would have approved. And a boy named Billy who pulled me out of a bathroom at a screening of Warhol's Trash which was a little much for my teenage sensibilities. He called me a hypocrite and it stuck... I swore I'd fight my failure to accommodate things that were difficult... </p><p>I remember the store where I bought my first Henry James novel-- The American-- 60 cents for which there is no longer a character on my laptop. But the smell of the place-- the paperback display, the style of the covers... and the feel of the pages as I read. I was simply entranced. Professor Lange reading Goethe to us... how sacred these moments... the associations and relationships, in a time now where influencers will link themselves with pretty much anything that will pay them a fortune. The greed-- the athletes and their branding-- the endless commercials, the ruthless marketing of vaccines and reverse mortgages by familiar faces which may not even be the people they represent.</p><p>Trump will surely bail himself out of debt with his golden sneakers... I wonder who made this suggestion-- which of his smarmy children or associates came up with yet another get-rich-quick scheme, and extort from people who can little afford these things. Contrast the effort it takes for someone like me to sell a single book.. it's just baffling. </p><p>And yet the rest of us-- we seem to spend so much effort running away from ourselves, styling a persona we think is presentable or desirable.. even desperate hipsters painting themselves with signs and attitudes. Are we not enough? </p><p>Navalny. The closest to a hero in these times-- a true hero who was unafraid and committed... I've been obsessed with the documentaries and the daily reports... there are few epic films, besides the Christ stories.. the martyrs and POWs... to rival his story. The fact that Taylor Swift has many more followers than Navalny. </p><p>The near future feels a little bleak, and I have come to know the deep comfort of a kind of pain. Jon Fosse reminds me that the winter is like a lover you know you must leave, that God is somewhere in these February chills. Fuck the groundhog-- we are wrapped in the God of winter, Whose hidden-ness is what we know. The clanking radiators remind me I am here, and perhaps God abandons us because His absence is sacred. The devil in the details, but God, in His absolute loneliness, in the shadows. Amen.</p>mysocalledwriterlessbloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00529007063456469103noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6389886067192563344.post-310771914086474182024-01-31T21:00:00.000-08:002024-02-02T21:27:19.280-08:00Handicapped<p>I recently overheard my neighbor and his friends discussing their golf handicaps. I've heard this term used re: horse racing and it always confused me. When I was young, the phrase 'Hire the handicapped' was bantered around. There were also ranks of parking spaces designated exclusively for these so-called unfortunates with the wheelchair icon painted on pavement. More recently the word has been designated insulting. Even 'disabled' is used with great care. </p><p>It's a weird word. I remember reading somewhere it came from 'cap in hand', a reference to street beggars in older times who often displayed (or faked) disabilities to collect alms in a hat. Whatever. It's become distasteful. It's used with a kind of irony among my friends who are suffering the indignities of illnesses and aging. One friend not only copes daily with the devastation of a brain tumor, but has lost the use of her hand. Another has not quite recovered from hip surgery... another wrist surgery; then there are musicians' hand issues, drummers' spinal woes, general anxiety and depression... cardiac problems. We are an aging generation... we have used and abused ourselves in various ways. </p><p>I am sympathetic; I've been lucky to survive and recover. Two weeks ago I had an accident-- not life-threatening but enough to limit my usual freedoms. I've become, in a temporary way, handicapped, as my friends joke... and it's jokable, not permanent, unworthy of a special parking space or license plate-- or hopefully not. </p><p>But I've been watching a good deal more television.. football, taking in the Taylor Swift/Travis Kelce phenomenon which I'm sorry to say makes me less fond of the Chiefs. I'd like to see an underdog in the Super Bowl, despite the political and social media feeding frenzy this celebrity serendipity has caused. I mean, if she changes the election, like Oprah did in 2008, well and good. But for me it's enough-- the money, the endless athlete's endorsements and influencing... the massive payments in addition to the fortune they are paid to play which makes the heroes of my era look like middle-class losers. </p><p>And these endless boring game shows-- with second-rate celebrity hosts and guests and absurd criteria and rules... who is watching this stuff? It just seems desperate and forgettable. </p><p>I'm reading Septology-- the seven-part masterpiece of this year's Nobel-winning author, Jon Fosse. He's quintessentially Norwegian and for the last decades I've considered Scandinavia my second home. I've left my heart there-- a couple of times, not to mention a beloved bass guitar waiting for me to tour again. Anyway, it's a wonderful winter read. The snow... the small towns of Norway-- the fjords, the boats, the childhood reminiscences. The narrator is a painter-- a loner who has suffered losses, but manages to find a kind of redemption in his work which I can almost see, somehow. And his quiet obsession with religion, his daily coming to terms with what is God-- in his art, in his simple way of life. It's sublime.</p><p>My temporary injury and this novel remind me of what has been lost-- and how we go on, we find our lives and our meaning day by day, reinventing our path to accommodate the normal indignities of age, the diminishing exterior 'light' of our presence as the years pass. And still, we find some spirit-- some determination-- we befriend the present and reintroduce the past like an old boyfriend who was amazing but no longer serves.</p><p>For many of us, this reveals and highlights our so-called handicaps. Some of us become defined by this alone. But for others, we begin to see the less inspiring narratives of our culture as the true handicapped-- the banal, silly, petty, appearance-obsessed, botox and Wegovy-dependent overpaid housewives, non-achieving but omnipresent celebrity image-makers whose contributions are well celebrated but are anything but world-changing. </p><p>Today I pray for my distressed and disabled friends. For me I have the blessing of choosing the option of rehabilitation-- of acceptance, of continuing to exist with some kind of muse pulling me along, coaxing and cajoling.. a deepened sense of what remains, of God in my small universe, whatever that means... of life... cap in hand not for pity but for reverence and awe. With grace I intend to recover from this small setback and shine as I can in this flawed and aging skin I've been so generously granted, God willing. </p>mysocalledwriterlessbloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00529007063456469103noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6389886067192563344.post-50483958102211460522024-01-09T20:32:00.000-08:002024-01-09T21:04:23.556-08:00The Vanishing<p> I've always been subject to a little claustrophobia. It could stem from a series of early childhood experiences locked in a closet but that's maybe too simple. A couple of malfunctioning elevator episodes didn't help. But the root of it feels deeper-- almost genetic. I've mentioned before that my father kept a packed suitcase in the closet at all times. As for me, in the deepest, most tender sweet spot of a promising relationship... at the very crux of mutual intimacy, I get the urge to run. It's a serious flaw; it's caused pain to others and I've paid a price. </p><p>Analyzing, I used to pout as a teenager and warn prospective boyfriends not to wall me in with their expectations. I even tried a psychiatrist who had the usual theories and a few more, but no cure. Of course, raising a child on my own, I easily laid aside my angst and put his priorities first. But these days there's nothing I love more than the sense of a new day like a blank canvas-- no calendar, no appointments-- just a wide open time-field waiting for my footprint. It's a sense of security for me-- perhaps a small reassuring exercise in personal freedom.</p><p>Last night, at the close of a fairly non-scripted day, I watched a late-night film called The Vanishing-- the one from 1988, in Dutch, based on a book called The Golden Egg in which the heroine suffers from a recurring nightmare of claustrophobia. In the film, she is part of a couple on a trip-- driving. They argue a bit; she vanishes at a gas station where she is abducted, unobserved, by a villainous character and never seen again. Newspapers publicize her disappearance, her boyfriend spends years trying to figure it out. But eventually the abductor begins to contact him. He will reveal the mystery, he says, if the boyfriend agrees to the very same fate. The obsession for truth overcomes him and he agrees-- is chloroformed and wakes up in the dark where his lighter reveals he is in a coffin, buried alive. Absolute horror. Double horror.</p><p>For anyone prone to claustrophobia and film-empathy, this makes for a sleepless night. Coupled with that, I learned of the death of a friend. In grief, I cannot help but explore afterlife theories. At least one member of the deceased's family is a devout Catholic and takes great comfort in the assurance of a heavenly transition. I, on the other hand, am not sure, have entertained all possibilities. </p><p>My mother who was interred above my father in a double grave feared burial and begged me to have her cremated. My older sister thought otherwise. Still, after six years, it haunts me. Although we know logically the dead do not think or feel, I regret that I was outvoted and could not give her this simple last relief. </p><p>In case we choose to ignore our age, the mailbox periodically reminds us with funeral options, cemetery real estate offers and hospice information. It's wearying and worrying... and while the ultimate choice remains to our heirs, I wish I could make some kind of peace with my ultimate destination. I find funerals-- while comforting in a way, also appalling. One of my friends was given a wake with a dramatic presentation in an open coffin. I kept hearing her implore me to tell people to fuck off and stop looking at her. Some of them she openly disliked. It was so unfair... as though here is our final worldly act and we don't get the last word. </p><p>My father the emotional claustrophobic had spent much time in the trenches during WWII. In the end he lay in his simple coffin, draped with the American flag as a hero, and seemed to embrace his fate in the same manner. It was as though death had been a kind of relief to a life as a 'tough-guy' with its anxieties and unvoiced issues. For us who have been raised with at least the illusion of free choice, the nightmare is being overruled-- told what to do-- held against our will or tied down or up.</p><p>I often wander through the Egyptian wing of the Metropolitan Museum. I must say, the custom of buryng the dead with their possessions-- with some space-- is appealing. Not practical for us Americans here. Even to name a fraction of a bench in Central Park for my Mom was impossible. They are taken... no waiting list for the dead... they are permanent.</p><p>Anyway, I will continue to struggle with my philosophies and ideals-- to weigh logic against belief, to pray for my friends, to deeply speak to God, to thank Jesus often, and nevertheless to wake up periodically in a nightmare of captivity, of immobility. Imagination? We get up, walk around, open a window, breathe. For now.</p><p><br /></p>mysocalledwriterlessbloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00529007063456469103noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6389886067192563344.post-86905344995666846602023-12-30T23:50:00.000-08:002023-12-31T13:09:29.880-08:00Past Imperfect<p>It's the time of year when I start interviewing prospective Freshmen for my alma mater. As I get older, the age gap grows. I am aware that turning the 'page' of another year means a great deal more when you're 17. </p><p>I just came uptown from the last 2023 gig on a crowded 6 train. There were two very young couples next to me-- at that age where kids are 'turning' from young teens to old teens-- hormones raging, and they've not quite mastered their 'personae'. Maybe their first time out without chaperones... it made me a little more sympathetic to these eager students that try so hard to make themselves memorable in a one-hour conversation-- on the brink of so many things, these kids.</p><p>We musicians so often worked on New Year's Eves... were paid decent money for the most part to celebrate with packed rooms of drunk customers. We made them dance, forget their problems... and by the time we packed up and went home, the page had already turned for us. We didn't have to plan, consider, arrange... and then suffer the disappointments and hangovers that plague so many partiers on this night. </p><p>Tonight I miss my mother-- her well-wishes for her children, our annual ritual of the last call of the year. And the ones I've crossed off my list-- each December we take inventory and find more names in the 'missing' column. Most of the 21st century parties were all about Alan Merrill-- the ultimate singer of classics, R&B-- a partying and soulful bandmate whose Pogues-esque version of Auld Lang Syne was incomparable and now, besides YouTube clips, a thing of memory only. </p><p>One of the kids I interviewed told me he's writing his autobiography. At 17, I can't imagine how this will end... or if it will... and then I remember Jackson Browne's 'These Days' written at 15 or 16... and think again about judging the wisdom of a teenager.</p><p>I've seen New Year's Eve fireworks and sunrises in tropical countries-- the Northern Lights from an airplane and heard revelers from inside the walls of a hospital Emergency Room with a sick child. When I was in the 6th grade, I got to sleep over in the attic room of the Hoffmann family behind our house. Three sisters and I blanketed in a double bed beneath a skylight where the winter starlight seemed to promise us every possible miracle. I had a crush on a Judge's son who'd gone to Las Vegas for Christmas and brought me a matchbook signed by Frank Sinatra. We giggled and confessed and the night air in those days smelled crisp and starry with the faintest hint of woodsmoke and hot chocolate.</p><p>Teenagers were always inclined to keep diaries-- journals-- a place to confide one's dreams and safely keep secrets. It was useful-- especially during those difficult weepy nights when we'd page back and reassure ourselves we could survive our sorrows and failures. Lists were equally useful-- things we needed, songs we loved, boys (in descending order), books, TV shows, movies, bands. </p><p>The internet has disturbed the quiet solace of diaries; it also affects memory. My son often forgets his preschool teachers or friends; I remember all of this-- not just mine but his-- although there is surely coming a day when I won't. </p><p>It occurred to me today the blessing of this night is memory-- the lists and sequences and growing pile of these through which I can leaf and uncover... the sadnesses and joys, the popping cork injuries and the mistakes-- the bad weather and the bandstands... the tuxedos and dresses, the masked balls and the sloppy punk dive bars. The various nights that were, that weren't, that have been and should have been-- the past perfect, the pluperfect, and my favorite-- the past imperfect. That grammatical term for me has always opened doors and windows of poetry-- like the translation of some Proustian chapter or the unclaimed title of my unwritten autobiography-- my life as a reel, as an unedited mass of tangled film... what remains, perhaps, eventually, to be forgotten. </p>mysocalledwriterlessbloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00529007063456469103noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6389886067192563344.post-65869068562239562932023-12-03T21:27:00.000-08:002023-12-03T21:35:29.798-08:00Sowing Oates<p>It occurs to me today that this is the quintessentially perfect Sunday... the relentless comfort of nonending rain, like a kind of temporary seascape, because we all seem to inherently believe the blue-sky reassurance will resume-- the status quo. Weather optimism doesn't exist for me; I prefer the grey interludes, wish that they would extend. There's a fishing port in Vestland, Norway where precipitation is near-constant; the mere thought comforts me. </p><p>My neighbor who hates discarding things has been leaving her New Yorker issues outside my door. While it's hard for me to turn down reading opportunities, I generally avoid magazines-- just so many books here wagging their paper fingers, reminding me of countdowns and lost hours. So this morning I read the recent Joyce Carol Oates profile. I can't seem to get enough of JCO biographical although I suspect she might have disliked this one-- at least the ending. She is the single most prolific writer in a present which seems unprecedentedly chocked with distraction. </p><p>JCO is an odd, quasi-Goth personification of the dark and odd and not pretty. And yet, she has had a life of rarely paralleled literary productivity and not one but two enviable marriages. I'm never sure which of these accomplishments I admire more, although a statistic was mentioned-- that one needs to write two pages daily to rack up a lifetime total of 100 novels. Remarkable the time one wastes.</p><p>One tends to compare one's life to that of these exemplary people. While JCO is a sort of flawed human, I have always admired her for what I assumed was her frank self-assessment and her lack of self-pity. So much of excessive compassion and charity is time-consuming. I am not just guilty, but guilty of the guilt-- one of those bleeding-heart characters who cannot sleep after a global tragedy, who absorbs the suffering of others and cannot turn away from a depressed friend. It is a choice, I know, and it has affected my output, although this, too, is a human choice. I try to dispense with regret the way JCO seems to have little patience for practicing empathy, except maybe with respect to her cats. And children-- well, not in the equation.</p><p>Of course I am not qualified to judge. Her novels are excellent, although, admittedly, I have never granted her the status of literary genius. She has her critics-- Truman Capote was harsh, Michiko Kakutani as well, and personally I have found myself arguing both for and against her talents. I am also not sure whether acknowledgment helps those few who have their own standards of excellence. We see them rarely in this polluted sea of celebrity and fame where social media followers fill virtual stadiums for performances that would otherwise remain where they belong-- inside a phone. </p><p>I have known some famous writers... through dates, acquaintances... I even babysat for one or two. When I moved to this apartment I was quietly stalked by one who lived on my block. He showed interest in my work; I was flattered. He even came to a couple of my solo gigs, wrote me literary postcards and gifted me small stacks of books and proofs for discovery. Years later, I realize he probably just wanted to mark me off as one of his many conquests, but I felt 'considered' sitting in his library, listening to his startling confessionals, being called late at night for an opinion on an essay he was writing. </p><p>It also occurs to me that I could have written a profile of this writer; others have done so, and the time we spent was more than any random interviewer might have received. Journalists craved his dialogue, and he seemed to shun publicity at a time when the act of doing so only solicited more curiosity. And yet while I coveted and collected our time together, I feared his disfavor more.</p><p>As happens so often with one's mentors, his 'disciples' were distinguishable by the stylistic choices on which he insisted. The women often slept with him; one stalked him noticeably, kept a jealous eye out. He openly spoke of his sexual encounters and the preferences and oddities of his writers. Not wanting to become one of his anecdotes, I kept a distance. After a while I began to tire of his editorial preferences; I could predict where his crossouts would come, how he would leave maybe three lines untouched in a long poem. </p><p>One day I wrote a sort of nasty piece which obviously featured my writer-neighbor in an unflattering character. He never again spoke to me. All our intimacies, our 'back-and-forths'-- the postcards, the gifts, the phone-calls-- they stopped. Dead. I went on to continue writing in my own way, without the critical 'eye' of my neighbor's editorial penmarks. It felt freeing. After a year or so, I apologized. I still deliver copies of my books; he does not reply. </p><p>I saw him on the street yesterday; he's old, but still commanding in a way. He's rich and a little powerful and has plenty of help and the kind of academic reverence an old writer merits. He doesn't like the work of Joyce Carol Oates; I know this. I'm not sure he likes his own work, at this point. He dislikes biographical pieces and yet collects them. He has written his own-- some as literature, and they are fairly brutal and quite good. I have a shelf of them-- most inscribed to me from several years ago, when I seemed to matter in his life, and it mattered to me that I did. </p><p>On these days when my reading matters more than any writing I produce, I conclude that an artist, in the end, is considered so when his output exceeds input in significance. By sheer number, Joyce Carol Oates has set in stone her reputation. Whether or not she will receive her Nobel prize, or be considered worthy by her peers, might matter or not. My neighbor will be written about, I suspect. As for me, I will never know whether it was my poetry, my bass-playing or the length of my legs that engaged him and deceived me into believing, for a time, in my own merit. And I suppose two pages a day is manageable. </p>mysocalledwriterlessbloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00529007063456469103noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6389886067192563344.post-13821168714544750522023-11-28T12:17:00.000-08:002023-11-28T12:24:02.248-08:00Scene Not Heard<p>I'm about to release a cd of original music. At these small benchmarks in our creative life, one becomes reflective. For me, performing seldom these days, I ask myself why I am still working-- day after day-- without audience, without goals or a plan. It occurred to me last night that when I was 3 years old I made a vinyl record. It was one of those amusement-park booths where you actually sing into a microphone and they press up one copy on some kind of bona-fide machinery. I sang Around the World I've Searched for You... a song I knew well from my mother who played a small repertoire of sheet music on the piano. I sang in perfect pitch-- didn't miss a lyric. After the little performance, my father announced me-- my age, my name... and then clearly, amid the audible background sounds of carnival, I ask my sister.. Wanna do it? She denied. Silence. Head shaking, I imagine.</p><p>At nursery school they acknowledged my musical abilities; they urged my parents to send me to a special school. Apparently I'd not only had the lead role in their little performances, but I wrote the songs. My teachers told me this, when I got older; my mother was terrified I'd have a miserable life on some cheap stage and tried her best to discourage me. I played all the instruments in my house-- not a genius, but it was comforting and felt like 'home'. I made up little melodies. In middle school and high school I was somewhat encouraged, and sang and danced in school performances. My older sister did as well... she was a natural drama queen, lol.</p><p>As a girl I was careful; it was the two of us, against conservative parents, and nothing was worth incurring the wrath of my older sister. She was, unlike the dark Barbie to which I compared her physically, barbed. She surveyed everything I acquired, suffered any accolade, and conspired to steal candy and gifts, which I freely gave her. She was older; she had a certifiable mean-girl power. Despite certain talents which I was given, inherently-- I hid under a sort of cloak of mediocrity. I had no ambition to be 'seen' or perform outside of the normal school parameters. I played our guitar quietly and secretly, shut myself up with books, early classic rock and Beethoven, and wrote my little stories and poems in notebooks which I've learned she discarded.</p><p>I've been reading Mann's Joseph and His Brothers. It's an old translation, slow-going-- deliberately Biblical. One must look up names and places and I've forgotten so much. But I've always been obsessed with the Jacob story-- the sibling rivalry, the stealing of the birthright. Deception is common in these legends-- one wonders if the switching of Leah for Rachel was payback of a sort. But clearly Jacob was the chosen brother... somehow the trickery was part of his destiny. And his acquired name, Israel, which I understand has something to do with struggle-- well, it all seems vaguely pertinent to the current situation in the Middle East.</p><p>Mann, at the beginning, touches on the Osiris legend. I've always loved that name, and even as a girl, I wandered the Egyptian corridors of the Metropolitan Museum looking at images. But Osiris married his sister... and was killed by his jealous brother, dug up and put back together by his sister for enough time to make a baby, Horus. It's endlessly complex and debatable and there are versions and tangents... but all of these histories seem to revolve around issues of parental favoritism, sibling jealousies... epic infighting. </p><p>Joseph, the son of Jacob's beloved Rachel, was the favorite. His fate-- both the good and the bad, seemed predetermined by the jealousy of his brothers. Also his persona. One molds oneself according to family peculiarities and dynamics. But even as an adolescent, standing at the well, being scolded by his father, Joseph-- like a Biblical Elvis-- seemed destined for stardom. While I am at the very beginning of this daunting novel and nearing the ending of a strange life, I can't help personalizing these issues. </p><p>I've always shunned self-promotion. Somehow it seems wrong for any kind of artist although it seems to have become not just prerequisite but part of the product. Of course they say success is generally the best revenge... but I'm not sure I ever wanted revenge. I just wanted not to be victimized. What a terrible attitude this seems, in these times when even disabilities and flaws are displayed with pride. </p><p>This new cd is the iceberg-tip of my productive output. Were it not for the producer and arranger here, I probably would not have released anything. I am grateful to him, for looking under the rock of my relative anonymity and wanting to chip away and bring a few of these to light. Way beyond the threat of sibling hatred as I am, there is maybe a small sense of relief. Like Thomas Mann and the limited fame of this epic novel-- his personal magnum opus-- one is so often praised for the things that come easily, and overlooked for that which is difficult. Unlike Mann, I will not be read by generations, or acknowledged by more than a small circle. I am thinking more, in terms of this world, how rivalries-- jealousies, familial and tribal resentments-- national and political competition-- have destroyed so much of what might have been good and so worth saving. </p>mysocalledwriterlessbloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00529007063456469103noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6389886067192563344.post-42814888390519537812023-11-14T23:06:00.000-08:002023-11-14T23:22:35.476-08:00Death Be Not Proud<p>I used to love Thanksgiving. This year-- with the threat of war everywhere-- my own friends unable to agree, people divided by religion and politics arguing-- the migrants everywhere in the city confused about their fate... the prospect of a holiday wears on me. The older I get, the less resistant I am to infection by societal ills. My son and I went to see Oppenheimer Sunday. I was very affected and wanted to talk about things... but like most of the theatre, we just went to have a coffee and life moved on for him. Not so for me; I am haunted. </p><p>And I'm no longer sure about things. When I was younger my beliefs seemed airtight-- had conviction. I had faith-- some kind of support system. Maybe it was watching my mother disintegrate, slowly... her generational beauty slipping from her like old skin. She saw devils and flocks of birds. Some days she sang it out in a midnight howl; other days she barely croaked a weak 'no'. She saw things-- she felt things. I backed her up, swearing I, too, could smell the black snakes coiled among the mattress springs; she slept in a chair. My architecture began to creak as her crooked future unraveled.</p><p>Every time I read in some news article that so-and-so died a peaceful death, surrounded by family, I think of my Lucia, standing in the stairwell like a skeleton, a thin sweater clinging to her ribcage like a clothes hanger. Until the last weeks she'd been too proud to ask for help, hid her illness from daylight, slipped out of her apartment in late evening to pick up some yoghurt or tea which would barely sustain her. </p><p>But the last weeks, for which I was conscripted, were beyond nightmarish. To comfort myself I wrote poems-- a living, rolling eulogy so her suffering might not be in vain, and so the unwilling witness I was could have some higher purpose. I had known birth-- the protracted minutes of agony, the endless crescendo of contractions until you were outside of your own body. But death, in these rooms, was a hideous slow drama of one... a whole-body soliloquy with no particular point. </p><p>I prayed; I left the room for some hours to visit various churches. I begged for her suffering to end. But it was the longest week, the last one, and death came not on cat feet but hovered like a hideous vulture stealing breaths and yet keeping her awake. Lyrics circled like songbirds, but anything above silence seemed more painful. I listened to the last groans of life, heard and smelled things for which I was totally unprepared... all because I could not bear to say no to this formerly beautiful woman who had completely run out of options.</p><p>In the end, it was like a coming of age, or the worst dream I'd ever had... not to mention the EMT workers who appeared to collect the body and screamed at me for executing the last wish of a dying woman I barely knew. I wasn't even sure if her assumed name was real. I only know we shared an intimacy few people will ever experience. And my life was never the same. </p><p>So I've grown to mistrust death-- to mistrust pain and diagnoses and illness... to respect the final authority of Time, with his companion Death, who will outlive us all-- each and every. And as these anniversaries present themselves, growing in number until (as my Mom warned me) the death dates far exceed the births in one's calendar, I am no less bothered by these statistics. In fact, today, it occurred to me that the toll exacted by these absences is what really ages one... we wear loss like an old face. </p><p>We do our best to comfort friends and family who have cruel diagnoses and accidents-- who lie in sickbeds and depend on us like children. Those of us who have watched death, who have sat bedside in final hours-- with or without medicines and drugs, we know. But most of us have not seen war. And yet, around the globe, there are wars-- there is artillery and explosives that are virtual death machines. Not even in beds, children and soldiers are lying now-- suffering, untended... victims, the prematurely violated, tortured... for principles of life and territory which can only be determined by negotiation, in the end. </p><p>Even Oppenheimer has died-- whatever his legacy-- both brilliant and terrible... he surely suffered the agony of death by cancer, and his words, via Hollywood, now resonate once again. We, the audience-- the successors of his generation, have access to great knowledge and opportunity. Yes, the science of life is such that Death will always author our final page, but we do not have to become his handmaidens. </p>mysocalledwriterlessbloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00529007063456469103noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6389886067192563344.post-172881279247940892023-10-29T14:22:00.008-07:002023-10-29T14:36:07.983-07:00Infinite Jest<p>The last few days I've spent in a sort of limbo haze. While the weather has been deceptively summer-nostalgic, the news is terrifying and coldly discouraging. Halloween is a mere hours away-- the costumed celebrators on the street seem oddly misplaced, and subdued. As usual, it's everyone's opportunity to either hide inside a disguise or become the incarnation one has always craved. Or feared. </p><p>Down the block two of my neighbors were dressed today as a priest and a nun. For some reason it was not amusing. I'm too much of a Sunday sucker to cancel the urge to slightly kneel or cross myself in the presence of a holy robe. I need this more than ever. The Jews may have had a September Day of Atonement, but Christians still have their weekly opportunity to clear their hearts. The hourly bells remind me of my responsibility. In the city, the sound of traffic and the sirens muffle their quiet melody.</p><p>In Manhattan most of us blend together. Few wear their beliefs as a daily costume, and it's difficult without signs or flags to distinguish Palestinian sympathizers from Zionist demonstrators. And all of us mourn the missing-- the dead and wounded-- the innocent. In the preface to Election Day a palpable pall hangs over us all-- a kind of looming judgement. We are both obliged and we are helpless. While we freely protest and profess our allegiances, the fabric of our country is threadbare and shopworn. </p><p>As a kind of preparation for the Oppenheimer film I'm still reading The Making of the Atomic Bomb. It's a little terrifying to consider the options and political climate of a sort of 'winning' America at the end of World War II. Not for me to judge the harsh decisions of 1945, but to better understand the roots of the Cold War that defined my childhood, and mushrooms into the difficult narratives that face our world today. With all our technology and science, I have less faith in the capacity of this world to find some kind of balance. Boundaries, threats, political greed and bullying blur the lessons of globalism and humanity. We are once again at some brink-- several brinks. It interrupts our sleep.</p><p>Personally, I've had a week of long conversations-- phone calls from close friends, ex husbands... family. They feel confessional and intimate... some necessary issues to face-- illness, deaths, decisions... but some simply a kind of need to unburden ourselves and share a personal moment. At my age I'm so aware of the significance of time-- it both slows and quickens, and I suffer over hours lost, or a day without any output. There's so much to read, and to learn... and then there is football-- the World Series. I have nothing against Taylor Swift but I prefer her on the entertainment pages, as an option-- not a newsworthy topic.</p><p>I can't help resenting the time-wasting 'panning' for information nuggets the media has required of us-- the massive sea of self-serving posts that blind and distract us like Halloween costumes on a subway. It's hard to know not just what is real, and harder to see what is right. This takes a toll. Even the pandemic which has shrunk to a lower priority level, still insists on some kind of daily media real estate. </p><p>In the midst of yet another utterly senseless mass killing, the pressing migrant issues which the city is visibly wearing, a young teenage boy drowned in the East River; a man tried to jump from a bridge. On the West Coast tonight, the actor Matthew Perry ended his life in a tub of water. </p><p>While I never watched Friends, I am aware of the actor's long and public struggle with substances-- with emotional and mental challenges- -with happiness and disappointment and things that most of us don't get to think about, because we are busy surviving-- providing for children, riding a bus to freedom and opportunity, or fighting for our lives. And still, this news shakes our human core-- the very celebrity largesse of it-- the way we all sigh and gasp and feel sad. </p><p>The utter horror of the first nuclear bombings is beyond human comprehension of terror-- beyond the bloody, gratuitously cruel and violent Halloween movies, a genre of which I could never really fathom a purpose. The aftermath and the historic future which followed seems to be rife with parallel issues, a world which is so uber-informed and so widely ignorant.</p><p>I read an article this morning written by one of David Foster Wallace's ex-girlfriends. He was wracked with emotional issues, depressions, suicidal behaviors. Some of them manifested in his work. Many of us relate to these cultural heroes to whom we refer in solitary moments, like a dark room.</p><p>The church of Sunday, for those like me who are fortunate enough to be out of harms way, is a blessing in itself. I file away the confessions of others, alongside those of my own, realizing I have become, as was suggested of David Foster Wallace, a lesser curator of loneliness. I wander the rooms of other thinkers who were more clever and deeper than I, with a kind of universal prayer that somehow their lessons and failures will rise to the surface of our daily fare of global disappointments, that they will penetrate and become a window onto the blacker rooms of this moment.</p>mysocalledwriterlessbloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00529007063456469103noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6389886067192563344.post-20384708029396446712023-10-13T21:20:00.007-07:002023-10-15T18:21:57.178-07:00Deadly Shames<p>When I was a teenager and my father was going through one of his PTSD post-war 'episodes', I hid in the upstairs hallway and eavesdropped on his conversations with my mother. Some things were inaudible, but after begging my mother to unravel the root of the latest patriarchal angst, she related a story as best she could. It seems when he was Captain of the 101st Airborne, he had a driver who happened to be a black man. They were close; my father was anything but a bigot, although he had his rules and boundaries. Anyway, on an especially perilous assignment, the driver asked him to promise that if he were ever mortally wounded, my father would go to see his family, in the midwest US, and explain in person what had happened. He wrote down all the particulars, and my father swore. </p><p>As it happened, a grenade hit their jeep; my father was wounded but his driver was killed. Certainly the family got the mandatory telegram and official condolence. My father recovered from the injuries, returned to active duty until August, 1945. He'd meant to keep his promise but never did. Before the end of his life, he apparently confessed this to a group of Old Guard veterans who finally, at 80-something, were facing their war-demons with the help of a professional psychiatrist, and maybe got some relief. He would not have shared this with me.</p><p>Years before, when my mother told her version of the story, she hoped I'd show some compassion for my father who was tough and harsh and suffering from not just combat but private guilts. It helped for minutes; but it occurred to me as well that it was not too late. </p><p>I've struggled in relationships with difficult men and alcoholics, like my father. The common denominator is not just the baggage of guilt, but the cult of shame. Shame allows one to continue to avoid difficult truths, and paves a future path that carries the limp of the past.</p><p>At the gallery where I work Saturdays, there's a fantastic Robert Gober show that deals with so many historic, emotional and ethical issues. One of the pieces he chose is an unpretentious ceramic sculpture by Mary Carlson. It is a tiny, fragile bust of a woman with long hair, covering her face with her hands. The artist credits Masaccio for inspiration. The genius of Gober's curation is that among the layers on layers of interrelated narrative, individual pieces resonate personally for the viewer; it's nearly impossible not to be moved by some object or juxtaposition. There is something for everyone, and for me it is this tiny sculpture. </p><p>I remember well in college visiting the Brancacci Chapel in Florence where I had ample time to study the Masaccio Expulsion of Adam and Eve. Unlike this tiny ceramic, the figures are monumental and heavy. When I saw them, in the 1970's, they still had the fig leaves which were painted in by order, and removed only in the 1980's after restoration. But the howling face of Eve, and that of Adam, covered by his hands, are the epitome of human shame. </p><p>Certainly Freudian and other psychologists and sociologists have dissected the subject. Gober, whose work is impressed with the tragedy and aftermath of the AIDS crisis in New York, is well aware. Studying religious art, I realized that sin is one thing, but shame is the emotional scar one carries. In the case of my father, and so many alcoholics, this grows-- it becomes ingrained, and often they manage to transfer it to their children-- like a sort of haunting they fail to exorcise. Shame, like disease, is contagious.</p><p>Forgiveness is a component of the antidote-- forgiving oneself as well as somehow atoning for whatever crime or oversight tripped us up in the first place. Most often, perpetrators lack shame, while innocents, overwhelmed with compassion and self-criticism, process their lives as failures, burden themselves with shame they have not earned. I have friends-- myself included, who feel they do not deserve a happy, healthy home, or some accolade that seems to have come too easily. </p><p>My first husband was a black man. He was a celebrated musician and a charming person, but interracial marriages were still the exception in those days. My father was livid. Both parents boycotted our wedding and basically excommunicated me. The marriage was tough enough; while we're still friends, my ex recently accused me of not wanting a half-black baby. Of course this couldn't be farther from the truth; I was young and we were both irresponsible. But I began to think about my father, and whether in his sickness he had interpreted the racial issue as a personal reminder of that failure to contact his driver's family-- a thorn which had accompanied his lifelong torment, or more likely simply the scapegoat of a horrific and lengthy war experience. Being decorated as he was, he always maintained the true heroes had passed away and it was not appropriate to celebrate oneself. </p><p>It's apparent to me that guilt precedes shame... but shame does not necessarily follow. Still, among the killings, the suicides, the longings and failures, the rejections and divorces, people are suffering; they are sorry, and they regret. And the legacy of shame distorts not just the narrative but its truth. The current violence not just in Israel but wherever it exists, will ripple down through grief, through pain and bloodshed, and through the lives of all those who perpetrate these acts, who have learned nothing from the past, from art, from the silent wounds that old soldiers hand down to families. It's never too late to repent of poor judgement, to pay for acts of violence which are in the current situation shameless. Looking at the little ceramic sculpture today, cut off as she is and nailed to a wooden table, I see not just shame but horror. This is a human reaction not a judgment. And a reminder that these issues, these conflicts... the lineage... goes farther back than those frescoes, farther than any of us can remember.</p>mysocalledwriterlessbloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00529007063456469103noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6389886067192563344.post-41531318183077258522023-09-30T19:59:00.005-07:002023-10-01T15:12:23.842-07:00Ficciones<p>My father was a great dancer. He had athletic grace and the kind of poise and balance that made him a good tennis player. The legend was that before the war, he'd worked upstate at the upscale resorts-- rolling out courts, teaching tennis... while at night he'd be paid tips to dance with the widows and spinsters. Growing up, he and my Mom shone at weddings, events, and holidays... whenever there was live music they'd be demonstrating all the traditional 1940's and 50's ensemble routines. Graced with that extra marital intimacy vibe, stepping and spinning like young professionals, they looked to us like movie stars, not parents.</p><p>When my mother had dementia late in life and the television became her companion, she loved Dancing with the Stars, although the anticipation was way more engaging than the actual show. I think she liked the music, and repeating the show title. She had always had a predilection for songs about stars-- When You Wish Upon a Star, Catch a Falling Star and Put it in Your Pocket, Starlight... she'd play and sing with the sheet music in her funny little voice. She used to read to us at night-- a book where there was a girl named Star and that was her favorite.</p><p>My first experience with altered realities was following my BFF's instructions on holding deep breaths until we fainted. It was like inhaling glue; we put on a Hendrix album and passed out... the record was on the last track when we came to, in a sort of musical backward swirl. It was a dangerous little experiment but I literally saw stars. I guess I was about 13/14. It stayed with me. It also scared me.</p><p>This week I was trying to distract myself from the depressing political news, and turned on the TV. In my mother's honor I tried Dancing with the Stars. It was shockingly lame. Just a stageful of B and C level celebrities, most of whom I barely recognized, trying desperately to invent themselves as some sort of ballroom contestant. Literally unwatchable. Also embarrassing, graceless, mortifying, pathetic. I mean-- I felt sorry for them all, for different reasons. Flipping around network television, the game shows, the convoluted reality shows-- it was like the downfall of culture, right there onscreen. Sad excuses for plots and contests--- who is watching this stuff? Back to my Indie films and documentary channels. Break for the republican candidate debate which was equally or more ridiculous. </p><p>I've been re-reading Borges-- always a treat. The story-telling, the humor- the plots and gaucho/macho heroes-- the sheer Arabian-Nights-variety of characters is entertainment. And then we have Borges himself. His autobiographical assessment is candid and humble. His accomplishments are dazzling, especially considering the genetic blindness that did not eclipse his trajectory; the poise and philosophical grace with which he adjusted... well, it's inspirational. </p><p>What struck me this round is his brutal assessment of his own early work. As opposed to our culture where everyone is shouting out on instagram, he had the taste and intelligence to self-criticize. He grew, and made sure that his work opened accordingly. He edited, translated, understood. The breadth of his literacy is overwhelming. He even cleverly uses Mark Twain to give his opinion of Jane Austen, and pokes fun at his own poetry. Hungering for the stars-- I remembered that line, from an early poem. Anyway, I was entertained... only disheartened by the sheer limit of his output, and my failure to grasp much besides English these days. </p><p>I tried to see the really terrible television fare as Borgesian characters... but it was impossible. Everyone seems to be tarted up, costumed and squeezed into some invented version of themselves. Where are the editors, where is honesty? People who aspire to become president of my country are petty and visionless. I doubt anyone was listening, and there wasn't much to listen to. There's this new standard of arguing and word-batting. Childishness and lack of poise. I think of my parents dancing as a couple, without the jerking and twerking and graceless posing. For that matter, any garden-variety strip club has better dancing. Why is America encouraging these shows? </p><p>It's kind of an irony that we call celebrities 'stars'... in fact it's rather absurd. When we were little we had Winky Dink, an animated little star who spoke to us. We drew with him on our television screens. My mother loved him, too... or her or them. I know little of star-gender.</p><p>Today would have been Marc Bolan's birthday. Another awesome talent gone too soon. Over and over in my head today 'you got a hubcap diamond star halo.' A lyric worthy of Hendrix.. . something that transported me, when I was a teenager-- it felt sexy and original. Dead at 29. These people took what they had and created things. Surely he's out there tonight, pushing celestial envelopes and stepping over astral swirls, while my parents perform a quiet tango of forgiveness and we here labor on, praying for some extra-planetary relief. </p>mysocalledwriterlessbloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00529007063456469103noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6389886067192563344.post-79953398615934538582023-09-04T00:49:00.004-07:002023-09-04T02:10:25.622-07:00The Waitress Said 'Come See Me'<p>My friends spend altogether too much time reminiscing. It seemed okay during the pandemic, when we'd call one another and just float time like a newspaper boat in a pond; but now it seems to waste precious moments we could be putting to use-- to age us.</p><p>Occasionally my son likes to see old photos of the Manhattan he recalls. He's still young, so it's not as depressing when we share memories. He thinks he recalls subway tokens-- and I go on about the price of things on old menus and window-displays. I remember when bus fare was increased to 35 cents. You needed to come up with that extra dime to throw in the till. </p><p>My first real post-college job was a gallery on 69th Street off Madison. Every morning I'd buy a coffee and a buttered roll for exactly 35 cents. I began to walk... to use my bus fare for breakfast. Inside at work we'd all sit and gab about the night before-- the 70's were exciting times in the city-- music, new restaurants... everyone seemed to know where everyone was. The art shows that changed monthly-- we could cover most of them in a week on our lunch hour-- Castelli, Schoelkopf, Wildenstein, Knoedler, Martha Jackson.</p><p>I came back to New York post-college, to pursue a career in art restoration. I'd worked hard to qualify for an exclusive dual-doctorate program affiliated with the Metropolitan Museum. Just acceptance here was like an award. I managed to score a house-sitting gig on the upper east side that first fall... I'd walk across 79th Street mornings and I'd pass this diner-- the kind you saw everywhere in those days, that no longer exist. I'd look in and see the waitress in her pink dress and her white apron going from table to table with the glass coffeepot, refilling the cups of mostly businessmen with open newspapers and an egg-plate pushed to the side. I'd stare in at this waitress with her hair in a French knot, her efficient white shoes and her white-stockinged legs, like a nurse. </p><p>Meanwhile my brain was memorizing images from 17th-century paintings, and Cathedral details from the Medieval Architecture course. I was deciphering formulae for the sciences of pigment analysis, X-ray spectroscopy and varnish-removal-- examining textiles and canvas weaves-- identifying geographic provenance from materials... distinguishing forgeries and re-paints from the authentic object. This fascinated me. </p><p>But more and more I thought about the waitress. I'd stop behind a telephone pole and watch her through the glass-- her every move and her signature gestures. I began to envy her, as though my then-boyfriend was her admirer. Her life-- it was so simple. I was so broke-- picking up extra jobs, baby-sitting at night, living on cheap supermarket past-sell-date items... walking, borrowing books. But the waitress--- her apron pocket full of change, she could break-- fix herself an egg-salad sandwich on rye toast (whisky down), smoke a few cigarettes with her coffee, read one of the tabloids a customer had left. And then she could go home where I imagined she had a neat little studio, maybe a cat-- a plant, curtains. She could do her nails and watch TV all night-- or meet someone for a drink. </p><p>The academic soup of my life began to sour. All that work-- four more years after eight intensive undergraduate semesters where I grew and learned and produced. I couldn't quite imagine myself at the end of the road, applying for a museum position-- spending a decade on a single Rembrandt painting-- analyzing, cleaning, in-painting, repairing. Who was I, I wondered, with this calling, to examine paintings, to fix things as though I were a doctor-- things that were dead, things that maybe were better off left alone, as they were? </p><p>On the other hand, the waitress served people-- lonely men with bored wives who no longer fixed their breakfast-- single bachelors whose newspaper time before work was the best part of the day-- where for less than a dollar they'd be served exactly what they ordered-- eggs over easy or sunnyside-up, with buttered toast and that wonderful bottomless cup of coffee that washed it down. A quarter for the waitress who provided exactly what they needed. </p><p>My boyfriend at the time was a guitar player. He worked clubs late hours; I tried to be there, but my class schedule was demanding and a sleep-deprived mind was noticeably inefficient. On weekends I'd hang out late; after gigs we'd go eat at a diner. The waitresses flirted with the musicians... at 4 AM it was mostly bands, bartenders... a few drunk party-goers... but the waitresses were like 'home' to these guys. They welcomed them, brought them food, ashtrays, coffee refills. One in particular was so beautiful... she slipped my boyfriend a note with her phone number. I found it in his pocket. She made silver jewelry in her spare time. She looked like Dylan's Susan... the perfect Greenwich Village silhouette. Downtown girls could wear jeans with their white shirts... they looked good. They were mostly kind to me, except one who had actually slept with my boyfriend. I tried not to be jealous.</p><p>It wasn't exactly the person, it was the simple symmetry of their life. They served, they laughed and talked, they smoked during breaks, they went home with full pockets. They shared shifts and gossip. They slept all day and woke up to work, like the musicians. How many songwriters have written odes to them, how many poets-- me included? </p><p>Waitressing doesn't seem to have the romance it did in those days-- when it was like a template for something. My morning trips past the diner haunted me beyond what was rational; I took a leave from graduate school, and never really regretted. When I started playing bass in bands, I referred to my gallery job as my 'waitress' gig. It enabled me to do what I needed to do at night where my life seemed to make sense.</p><p>Years later, as a young mother, I spent early mornings with the baby in a local diner, lingering over the breakfast special and looking wistfully at the passing cars. There was a career-waitress there who sat with me during breaks-- she had the deep voice of a chain-smoker and the hard 'r's of a New York accent. Cawfee, she said, and entered soprano-range when she cooed over my son. I loved her; I trusted her even though she had terrible boyfriends who stole from her and abused her. She didn't even make it to middle age; she got a brain tumor and suffered. All those people she served and cared for, smiled at and nicknamed... they disappeared like a pack of cigarettes. Her drug-addict boyfriend kept her rent-controlled studio for a time. I saw him pan-handling one afternoon and choked back the urge to smack him.</p><p>There should be, among the city statues and landmarks, a waitress figure-- a woman with her hair in a ponytail, or a net-- an apron, a pad and pencil... a menu. The real symbol of diner-lore, of the city... the person we've sung about and chatted up, the one who changed my life even though I never even spoke to her... who showed me maybe not the path to what I was to become, but the reality of what I was not.</p><p><br /></p>mysocalledwriterlessbloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00529007063456469103noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6389886067192563344.post-70382161714954850992023-08-25T13:08:00.005-07:002023-08-25T16:15:14.310-07:00Credit Karma<p>Years ago, when I was an emerging bassist with a passion for eighth-note pulse-rock, I was flown to London for a unique opportunity. The gig was to replace a weak album track for a well-known, high-charting band whose bassist was apparently struggling with issues. At the time, digital instruments were not common, machine-generated instruments were obvious and the management decided to 'fly in' another player. For the biggest paycheck I'd ever received, I was to lay down a simple, basic, eighth-note, pocket-heavy part, on what was to be a chart-topping single. I got to play along to a band whose music I paid for on vinyl, in those days. The catch was, I had to sign serious documents swearing I would never disclose my identity. </p><p>Of course I was told that my work only 'might' be used on the recording, although the authorship would be attributed to the regular band members. I signed, received a fat 4-figure check, a taxi back to Gatwick where I boarded a prepaid Virgin flight home. Not even an overnight stay. In New York City, the music scene for sidemen was pretty male-dominated. I felt like bragging but I couldn't. I'd sworn away my rights and I take these things seriously. So while I banked the check, I was stripped of the notch in my musical belt--the credit, the album listing-- things which musicians crave and hoard like trophies. Still, it gave me some personal swagger. I felt 'heard' if not seen. </p><p>Some years later, when Bill Wyman quit The Rolling Stones, bassists world-over were salivating to audition for the gig. I was a young single mother playing mostly bars in the city, unable to tour. One amazing Saturday night, at a well-known dive bar in the east Village, Bobby Keys came to drink and sit in with our band. He ended up playing an entire 7-hour marathon night-- insisting, during breaks, that I was going to be the next bassist for the Stones. I've heard a lot of alcohol-fueled talk in my day, and every single deserving career-bassist in New York was gunning for this miracle opportunity. Meanwhile, a sober Bobby called me during the week-- left messages on my voicemail. He'd talked to Keith, he said... and sure enough the management called me to schedule. But I declined. They called again. I declined again-- I had a young child-- that was my priority. Again, they offered babysitters... other kids were on the road. Just come... play... Well, I knew I'd be a sideman, not a band member... and did I want the larger-than-life thing? Me-- in a semi-glorified studio apartment with my little boy, my books and my 8-track tape machine? I was happy. And I couldn't really fathom Mick Jagger welcoming a woman as anything but a back-up singer. Bobby called back; again and again I declined. I also knew the shortlisted guys and they were my heroes... it was a place for which I didn't want to compete, nor did I really belong in their company. I mean-- Darryl Jones played with Miles. I worshipped him, saw him every chance I got.</p><p>A couple of weeks later I was on 48th Street and one of the store clerks actually noticed me... Hey, he remarked, I read you were on the Stones' shortlist. Not me, I answered. But from that moment on, I was given the retail-respect most players were used to. So while I didn't share, divulge or brag... there were some perks.</p><p>In and out of college, it's a thing... people ask.. will I get credit? It seems to make all the difference. I once judged one of those King of the Blues contests at Guitar Center alongside the late Bill Sims and the also late incomparable Hugh McCracken. Before the judging we had to fill out a form with our 'credits'. Hugh kept peeking at my pathetic sheet and asked me what he should put down. He played rhythm on BB King's The Thrill is Gone. Doesn't that just about knock us all out of the park? What a humble, quiet genius he was. Credit? Plenty. </p><p>But how about all those amazing pocket-players who graced the old records that made our hearts jump and our feet tap as kids? Some of them remain uncompensated, unnamed. I think about them-- about the great talents who died penniless or under-acknowledged while instagram celebrities of this culture are regaled and overpaid for nothing but popularity contracts... hype. It's hard to even know what these airbrushed people actually look like, let alone sound like, in the naked dark. </p><p>I wake up to my old clock-radio alarm and there's often some ironic reminder of my past. I Love Rock and Roll.. my dear best friend and bandmate Alan Merrill who struggled and strained for credit for his hit song. On a morning two weeks ago, 'my' song came on. Even with the plastic old speaker, I could recognize my bass fingers in a heartbeat. The song will live; the credit will die. It gave me a little jolt for about a minute-- me the aging old songwriter/poet whose anonymity is almost ensured. </p><p>Some of us get credit for what we didn't do... taking the rap for a friend. All those writers who claim they are responsible for anything we find in their poems or work. After a while, resonance is built-in-- a signature... a voice. I've been reading Javier Marias... he often played with the concept of authorship... in Tomorrow in the Battle..' he ghostwrites for a ghostwriter, shows up with the imposter's identity at a government office. It gets complicated. </p><p>Didn't you play with Patti Smith, a medical person asked me this week as I got up from his chair? No, I didn't, I replied. Browsing the shelves in Barnes and Noble, she has her own little section. Kind of amazing. The irony of life-- of fame, of random success or failure... the luck of some draw. My ex-husband, the poster child of under-acknowledged rock players, was once asked, as we sat down to eat in a restaurant, 'Aren't you famous?' He looked at me, looked at the flirtatious waitress, and replied... I'm hungry, pointing to the menu. </p><p>To the unacknowledged, undercredited greats, I salute you, my heroes... Heaven stands still.</p>mysocalledwriterlessbloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00529007063456469103noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6389886067192563344.post-30285332969167167202023-08-05T22:17:00.007-07:002023-08-06T11:30:52.848-07:00Tolite Hostias<p>When we set out as teenagers to find our so-called path, few of us consider what we will not be, how we will fail at our dreams. Of course, many of us lack the opportunities of more fortunate friends... and of those, few have the courage to fight the down-winds and up-currents that seem to prevent any version of success as we imagine it. Fewer still have the genuine nugget of talent that blossoms into valued accomplishment, and the vision and stamina to break new ground.</p><p>I could never stand my own writing. The gap between what I could do and what my 'heroes' did was just too broad. Be true to yourself, my mentors advised, and like so many, one winds up consciously or unconsciously mining one's own life for material. This is both our truth, and our betrayal. While a few ex-boyfriends and husbands might relish finding themselves written into a song, I am one of those people who cringes at old photographs. Facebook has always been the bitter pill I wash down with joyful memories of actually making music.</p><p>While I doubt posterity will be deciphering the messages in my songs and poems, I keep at it. A few of my friends are urging me to write memoirs; it seems I look back on things with a particular kind of telescopic/microscopic viewfinder that entertains them. Whether or not my narratives would appeal to a general public is ambiguous; it's hard enough enough to find sufficient audience to support my poetry projects. Few of us sell many cds, in my circle. I chose this path; like crime, it doesn't pay much.</p><p>My parents died several years ago, so I can no longer offend them. My friends-- well, I could flatter them, but I rarely flatter myself, and while I can show up badly dressed and confessional, it's hard to be truthful and not betray people in the process. Eulogies are kind to me... grief is my companion of late, and the songs I sing in memoriam are uncontested. </p><p>I grew up with a circle of girlfriends who were joined at the hip, at that age when intimacy is easy and secrets are passed like a shared lunchbox. One especially-- I met her in middle school-- at age eleven? She was sweet and beautiful in my eyes, although my mother described her as 'chubby'. She was terrible at sports, which was critical among the criteria for mean-girl popularity. She was not a mean girl. I defended her to that crowd... I held her hand and chose her. For me her talent-- her intelligence, and her artistic genius... well.. she had the natural ability of a da Vinci... she won the national Carnegie Mellon scholarship... I mean, her draughtsmanship was extraordinary. She made me things-- she drew me, my dogs. And we sang-- in choir, at school, in church-- on the way to school... she the alto, I the soprano... it was perfect. </p><p>She and I loved the Kinks, The Who, the Beatles, the Stones. She had this habit of buying multiple copies of whatever she loved. Albums in duplicate... Hendrix, Cream... The Who, Traffic.. the 60's... we loved most everything.. we sang. She introduced me to jazz... we listened to Beethoven, Miles, Ian and Sylvia, Tim Hardin, Simon and Garfunkel, Donovan, Dylan. A new release was a major event; we lay around at night reading album-cover notes like sacred texts... memorizing lyrics. I played guitar... she drew, I drew, but nothing like what she produced. It was like love... we slept in the same room most of the time... we roller-skated to school, we did our homework together... we crushed and suffered... she had an old red Valiant she called Red Devil... she picked me up and we had adventures... I was too young to drive. </p><p>Anyway, all through college we wrote, we visited one another... she met all my boyfriends; she married young, some someone with a kind of title who cheated on her with a teenager... and I think it devastated her. She was never quite the same... immersed herself in Buddhism, with work in a bakery, lived in a sort of ashram for a time. Nevertheless she faithfully attended gigs, exuded great love and support... had a strange new group of people but still came to my Thanksgiving, showed up at my rock and roll impromptu wedding with a home-baked cake, was thrilled when my son was born, etc. Never bitter, never competitive.. always sisterly and loving as my own sister was not. </p><p>So she suffered some terrible griefs and losses, began to shift focus to pathological resentment of her father. All our fathers post-war were fucked up. The war, their disappointments and responsibilities... PTSD, their drinking and their quiet suffering wives. I left mine at sixteen and tried not to let his mistakes become mine... but we are never sure about these things. We share our truths, their lies and deceits. </p><p>Anyway, my beloved friend ended up in and out of various hospitals with serious medical issues, then ensuing emotional problems.. eating disorders and syndromes.. it was relentless. She was on all kinds of meds... none seemed to help. Me-- I selfishly missed my beloved talented genius companion. I wanted to shake her out of her emotional quicksand, to get her on the track of extraordinary greatness she deserved, and could not. </p><p>There was an early Elvis Costello song in her name... we loved it. Her highschool boyfriend was a singer/songwriter and wrote one for her. I had this dream that I would become famous and call her up on stage to sing 'Tolite Hostias' or 'When Life Begins to Fail Me' a-cappella in two-part impeccable harmony. Her voice was pure and true. Like so many artists, she could see through music; she had a perfect ear. </p><p>At a point in middle age we parted ways. She refuses to speak to me although I have reached out to her many times. The tough-love approach I used with my son did not work with her. I am sure she found me harsh and uncompassionate... mean. Looking back, all these years later, trying to swim against some time-current, I remember she had encephalitis as a girl-- was so ill; perhaps this altered her brain environment. It was not all self-indulgence and metaphoric illness but a legitimate diagnosis. </p><p>Some of my old friends will recognize her here. I doubt she follows me; she unfriended me long ago and shuns me. Parts of life are unforgiving. I am surely betraying her here, although I have spared the devil in the details. In writing memoir, one discovers the devil is the details. I insist here (a perfect word for a proverbial sibling), the loveliness of her remains like a visual afterimage behind closed eyes.</p><p>Organizing a life, rather than milestone to milestone, we often skip from betrayal to betrayal. This is maybe the true value of autobiography; no one knows us like we know/reveal ourselves, at least the writers among us-- outside of a few of maybe our oldest companions-- the ones who propped themselves on the bed beside us at the windowsill, sketched us as we sketched them, harmonized, exchanged clothes, sang to us, read, memorized, cried, ached and longed with the innocent shared honesty of adolescence. It was not my job to keep her on some path to acknowledgement; it was her choice to veer off. </p><p>I miss her-- her large sedentary cat we called Brick, her red Valiant, her roller skates and her record collection-- our special created language only we spoke, her grace and beauty which like mine has wizened and aged into something unrecognizable. She is still mentioned in my nightly prayers-- along, tonight, with the request that she forgive me for this and other betrayals. </p>mysocalledwriterlessbloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00529007063456469103noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6389886067192563344.post-25995176321840580542023-07-22T14:57:00.006-07:002023-07-22T18:45:12.580-07:00La Recherche des Chaussettes Perdues<p>The other evening, skimming through a drawer in my son's old room, I came across an infant sock. In a Proustian moment, I was sucked into one of those emotional 'rivers' of the past. The tiny sock was decorated with charming colorful train cars, but like something one no longer sees. I could recall with some clarity how this was the first article of clothing that seemed to engage my baby boy at three or four months. He'd stare at his feet particularly in this pair of socks... wave them around and coo. No other pair-- no matter what color, pattern, picture-- had this effect, like a magic lantern-- they sparked him, gave him a kind of obvious joy.</p><p>But one day, as babies do, he must have over-enthusiastically kicked or pulled or randomly peeled during one of our marathon walks through the city... and a sock was gone-- missing. I retraced our steps, frantic... with that new-mother passion, but no success. There is some statistic somewhere, surely metaphorically speaking, about how humans spend six months of our lives looking for lost socks. That day added significantly to my total.</p><p>Perhaps because he is my genetic offspring, he somehow processed the loss... and while I still put the single train-sock on him, and it evoked the same cooing and chirping sounds of obvious happiness, I had to pair it with a blank. He looked at me; he gestured and seemed to even speak in baby gibberish. There is something not quite right, Mom, he wanted to express... something is <i>missing!</i></p><p>One of my all-time favorite photographic essays is Nicholas Nixon's ongoing visual chronicle of the Brown sisters. Featured in the New York Times several years ago, these are a series of group portraits of four sisters-- taken annually and chronologically-- through their lives. We see them as girls, then as young women, then slowly aging-- shifting positions subtly. We read on their faces their increasing maturity, their deepening texture and complexity, and their tiny sorrows and difficulties. Maybe because the elder sisters are around my age, I see myself in their composite. Of course in this era of AI, one can digitally age a face in seconds. But nearing fifty analogue years of 'chronicle', the project grows more and more compelling to those of my generation. </p><p>Having weathered both the standard griefs of a normal life as well as the unexpected losses of recent years, I can't help a sense of dread that one year a sister will be gone-- and like a gap tooth in a formerly joyful smile, it will be all about the one who is 'missing'. This is the reverse poetry of later life-- like the negative space of a photograph or the shadow which replaces its source, it is the absence that concerns me. And I can't help imposing my emotional prejudices and narratives-- reading in their faces a break-up or abandonment-- of pain or suffering-- current and future illness. There must be a dark one afflicted with some inherent unhappiness, a conflict or secret issue.</p><p>But they all seem so healthy... and so blessed in their sisterhood, their loving and tiny brushes against one another-- the gestures and casual affectionate touching. Both posed and unposed, bravely facing the camera in a sort of womanly and familial solidarity... despite the passage of time, the disappearance of youth, one cannot help but envy. Even the oldest, who is first to display the facial ravages of natural aging-- well, we know she is the fulcrum... especially loved by the photographer, her husband, whose compositional embrace is the 'extra'-- the 'other'-- less visible subject. </p><p>What we don't see, what we supply-- the loves, the children-- the careers and informational details of these women who we implicitly trust-- and maybe one more than the others. For me I am compelled by the eldest-- her womanly soul, her maternal-ness. She is slightly ahead of me in years, has outwardly changed herself the least (even her hair is quite the same)-- she who in her graceful aging is deeply long-loved by her husband, to the extent that the gestalt of the sisters became part of their intimacy. </p><p>A near-fifty-year marriage is like a sort of sea. The extremes-- the shifts, the rhythms and constant motion-- the storms and dramas, thrashings, drownings, and then the future goes on with or without. I never managed to log enough in either of mine to complete a journey; they were rather like crossings or explorations. A little landlocked and seasick, I disembarked before they fully revealed. Contemplating the Brown sisters, the rich chronology of lives, I feel a bit remiss. It's not exactly regret, but like my baby son sensing the lost sock in his underdeveloped intellect, you are not exactly sure but something seems to be missing. </p><p>More than anything, ironically, it is the unseen which I 'see'-- the omnipresent photographer who understood the joys and the tiny sorrows, through all the ages he had known. And for knowing-- for recognizing love, for somehow creating a future out of the present, and documenting a past which touches us all. God protect the Brown sisters, I say to myself almost selfishly. It is something to believe in-- something solid and real, bright and fading, old and new. </p><p>I doubt my son would remember the tiny sock, if I showed it to him... nor would he have the sentimental response, if I tried to impart the narrative, or the patience to listen. Sometimes I think he has taken a practical reverse life-lesson from me who has spent an inordinate amount of time searching for lost things, for sensing the missing even before it disappears. But maybe that is a clue to our lives-- that we must love what we have, here in the present-- even the small things, before they are washed away by the seas of life which will have their way with us all, in the end.</p>mysocalledwriterlessbloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00529007063456469103noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6389886067192563344.post-35763458304324260902023-07-15T13:24:00.002-07:002023-07-15T17:21:08.928-07:00THE ANTI-BARBIE<p>On the first day of second grade I was sort of the new girl, having skipped a year and moved up into a faster group. I sat in front of a blond-haired boy who shared his lunch with me on the playground. He was 7 and destined to become a high-school girl-chaser and an incurable romantic, but he'd singled me out (I was all of 6 years old) right there as his primary 'mate'. </p><p>On the first Friday of that term, a stack of comic books was left on the front stoop outside my house. A blond boy with a bicycle had delivered this, my neighbor announced. There must have been fifty or sixty-- the pile was quite as high as the milkbox. Some Nancy, some Richie Rich-- but mostly Superman, and various other galactic beings and heroes. As an early reader, I devoured books... took my wagon back and forth to the library where I loaded and unloaded. But comics? I'd never tried these, besides the Sunday strips which never interested me much.</p><p>It's sort of a love thing, my mother suggested... and being the youngest and smallest in my class, having a handsome attaché gave me status. So I delved into Superman-- Bizarro world, kryptonite, Mr Mxyzptlk-- Lois, Jimmy and Clark. Besides Elvis on the car-radio it was my first real foray into pop culture. It was also my first experience of peer-culture affecting my personal entertainment choices. And while I spent long afternoons playing at the blond boy's house with his dog and his siblings, he never really seemed that into comics. He could draw and paint, though, and we made things-- built things, played in the yard. We were sort of inseparable for years... until I hooked up in the 6th grade with his twin brother. By Middle School, we barely spoke. And besides occasional childhood Superman episodes and the 1978 movie, I had significantly more interest in rock and roll, folk music and anti-heroes. The only cartoons I indulged in were Robert Crumb-- Edward Gorey-- Beardsley... etc.</p><p>So it baffles me that the Marvel Universe has usurped a disproportionate sector of our entertainment bandwidth. Movies, Broadway-- as though the cult of the juvenile has infiltrated. I guess I can relate to science fiction-- horror, although I'm much more drawn to psychological thrillers and historical bio-pics. But all this costumery and the characters... with super-powers and fantastic abilities... it's fun to consider, but it's a multi-trillion dollar industry. Yes for children wearing capes on Halloween, even the dolls and figurines... but as grown-up film material? I'm missing something here.</p><p>Sometime in the early 90's I was looking for a new apartment and happened on a loft space filled with massive Lego projects. This was the home of a sophisticated architect and the structures and ideas were compelling; the sheer volume of tiny blocks was staggering. But now-- the cult of Lego has exploded. Movies-- theme parks... and of course one must appeal to parents who accompany their kids and buy the toys that engage the whole family. Well, it's educational-- the building part-- the geometry, the planning, the engineering factor. But the endless contests... in light of our overwhelming world issues... it seems way too much brain-time is occupied with play. </p><p>While we were all sleeping, or building Lego, watching Spiderman-- galactic fantasy and space wars... our own world is more than a little terrifying and overwhelmed. Was this the point? Instead of worrying about the new NATO and the Ukrainian cluster bombs, it seems we are all watching Barbie. We pay to have our brains distracted. More people will see this movie than vote in the primaries, sadly. </p><p>Apparently sixty-one percent of America does not believe in evolution. While the scientists were debating this week about the designation of an Anthropocene era, the majority ignores the math. Are these the same people who watch the Marvel films? Jurassic Park? Are the lines deliberately blurred between reality and fiction? While Hollywood was making all those techno-laced fantasy films, AI was slipping into our entertainment DNA and only this week the actors have decided it was terrifying enough to shut it all down?</p><p>Today I saw a news piece about a new cruise-ship that looked like it was manufactured in Candyland. The toy-culture rules the seas; five intelligent men boarded an expensive toy (directed by a Playstation controller!) and self-destructed on their way to a sort of deep-sea fantasy-fulfillment. I also saw a 75 year old woman wearing a pink tulle skirt and a Barbie handbag. Grown men in suits ride scooters around the city. They wear T-shirts and uniform replicas just like their own children. When did this begin? </p><p>The NYPL is commemorating HipHop with new cards to attract users. I got mine this morning... and I already miss the old one. I wanted to become part of this culture... and yes, I embraced Hip Hop... but now I feel a bit duped, like I traded in an old vintage Renault for a Lego car. Here I am, an incongruous specimen of mid-century obsolescence-- with my books and my records and my technological illiteracy. </p><p>Text me, my son says... and it sounds as though he is asking me to transform him into verbiage. There's a kind of poetry in my failure to adjust to the mainstream. I am not just gig-less but gigabyte-less. To me AI is and always will be the first name of the great artist Ai Weiwei. Irony? He seems to understand things. His Lego version of the Monet Waterlilies was spectacular. But I digress... a symptom of natural intelligence-- one of the flaws and distractions of not just curiosity but the aging me. God willing I will not descend into some intellectual childhood and betray my adult values. Victim or villain, persecuted or culturally excommunicated as I am occasionally by the consequences of my analogue stubbornness, I was surely born this way. </p>mysocalledwriterlessbloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00529007063456469103noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6389886067192563344.post-55284662620928433062023-06-30T15:33:00.006-07:002023-06-30T16:53:03.864-07:00SMOKE<p>Yesterday would have been my father's 104th birthday. He lived to nearly 97... fairly in compos mentis, surrounded by newspapers, brokerage statements, the bluish glow of Bloomberg on the television screen like a night-light... slipping in and out of consciousness toward the end, my mother in her medicated dementia watching from her recliner like a Whistler's Mother real-time tableau-- alternately panicky when he left the room, or wondering who this person on her sofa actually was-- her brother, maybe... certainly not her father who'd abandoned his family when she was very young.</p><p>My father was estranged from most of his own large family, seemed to have judged his parents as harshly as I maybe judged him. He was never happy to see me; he couldn't pretend, and children see these things, with their heart. My mother lit up when I came home from anywhere; even when she ignored me in my grungy jeans and motorcycle boots on Manhattan streets in the 1980's, it was a kind of wounded pride-- bourgeois disappointment.</p><p>But the month of June has always been about him-- his birthday, Father's Day since he was the true and only family patriarch... D-Day, on which he earned a slew of medals and honors. I stopped attending family festivities at a point; I began to process his disapproval of me as unhealthy and if my absence hurt his pride in any way he would only have cursed me further. </p><p>Having raised my son alone, we celebrated Father's and Mother's Day. Now so many of his friends have become parents, the meaning has been sort of re-branded. This year I watched the scores of Mexican families barbecuing in the northern fields of Central Park-- joyfully kicking soccer balls around, celebrating a day off. Most of these fathers work hard-- sometimes two jobs... the number of kitchen workers who shared the late-night uptown subway with me after gigs was impressive. Many slept-- exhausted, grateful for the air-conditioning as I was. </p><p>My father never seemed happy. He enjoyed certain men who visited; my parents socialized accordingly-- his tennis partners, commuting companions. Company seemed to provide relief that he didn't have to interact with his family. He failed to appreciate the gifts we gave; even things I made for him, or a little musical we'd put on... he seemed distracted and preoccupied. As a child, we take these things on-- we blame ourselves... we learn to judge ourselves harshly. </p><p>I've written so many poems grappling with this... trying to excise the knot of it. He was complicated, and I surely did not fathom his issues, his dark moods, his isolations, post-alcoholic depressions. Maddens, he once told my son, don't talk. But I, too, am a Madden... and I do, and I will.</p><p>My best childhood friend never let go of her father issues. To me, hers seemed comfortably flawed-- drank a little too much, crossed some lines... but he had pet-names for his sons and daughters... he was handsome and funny. His indiscretions seemed human to me... his wife was so 'perfect'... I saw him once or twice in the city with other women... but I kept it to myself. I saw my own father once with a beautiful young woman. I did not tell anyone. My sister and I invented little fictions about my mother-- that she had mysterious callers... I even brought anonymous flowers once... but she only blushed, and he barely looked up from the evening news.</p><p>We get over these things... or do we? I learned in my life that betrayals were inevitable. A parent failing their child is the first and worst of these. My own son has not heard from his father for nearly 28 years? Surely this has repercussions... and perhaps I engineered this in that perverse way psychologists point fingers at us for repeating generational pains and mistakes. Perhaps I picked my husband because I knew somewhere there would be this 'leaving'. It was like a prophecy-- a fulfillment. I see so many couples where one or the other has checked out... they are there, but they are missing. Some have shifted their heart elsewhere... some have simply died, in a way... like an old plant that no longer blossoms. </p><p>Are these punishments? Deep-rooted desires for self-sabotage? The meaning of family is so open to interpretation. Gender has been opened to 'not-binary'. But despite the extended boundaries of family-- so many of us seem stuck in this traditional and sometimes painful categorization. There is a Father's Day and a Mother's Day. Full stop. While I fretted over gifts and hand-made cards and cakes... I actually dreaded those Sunday mornings. The cookout or dinner or whatever... it was stilted and non-spontaneous. There was no joy, except in the company who eventually went home and left us to our ostensibly perfect family.</p><p>Recently I randomly went on my mother's 'Legacy' web-obituary. Mine were the only posts for some years... but suddenly there was a message from a girl who'd lived next door to us... she was older than I was.. she must be 80 now. She recalled my mother as a sympathetic, wonderful person... her version was the young mother with perhaps a harsh tough handsome husband. I remember this woman-- her father, too, was distant and off-putting. She lives in Boston now... and apparently was having one of those moments-- where the past surfaces and some small component-- like seaglass on the beach-- shines through. </p><p>We women weather life in a different way than our fathers did, all gender stereotypes aside. Our mothers accepted things; we do divorces and separations and we move on. Some days I look back and cherish my past love affairs as iconic and true... then sometimes I remember those brilliant guitarists and drummers and sax players... and I think... well, maybe they just wanted a gig. </p><p>On the cusp of another July, entering a holiday weekend with mixed feelings-- Independence Day, fireworks day... I am accustomed to a little isolation-- more-so tonight with our air quality issues warning us to limit outdoor activities. I'm glad in a way to leave the month of June behind, with its paternal connotations-- baggage, people call it. </p><p>Our Father Who Art in Heaven, I begin my prayers every night. Not my biological father, but my Holy Father who is vague and perhaps judgmental as well. As much as it amuses me that I do this, I do it... like a kind of vow... but it comforts, it reassures, it lifts me... has been with me since I can remember-- mine... available, the words... the sentiment, a kind of vague protection? Or forgiveness. Really the secret of life-- whether it's family or ourselves... we must let it go, but also acknowledge that (like the wildfire smoke, which is not even our doing) these things linger. </p><p><br /></p>mysocalledwriterlessbloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00529007063456469103noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6389886067192563344.post-74181874216973971782023-06-15T22:31:00.010-07:002023-06-17T21:47:46.601-07:00A WORLD APART<p>I was recently notified that due to offensive language in one of these 406 blogposts, I was going to be suspended from this platform. Fortunately the 'offending' words (a quotation) were identified, adjusted, and I was reinstated. There's a fine line between honesty and insult, I often caution my friends, and I have crossed it both ways like a Double-Dutch rope-jumper. I still err broadly on the side of truth, though it has cost me friendships (temporarily, for the most part) and nearly the online archive of 406 essays posted here with nominal censorship over the past 16 years. </p><p>My daily reading this month includes Gustaw Herling's acclaimed account of his experience in a Russian prison camp in a time and place where a slipped word or gesture resulted in years of forced labor which made death seem a kind of paradise. Nothing like prison literature or diaries to make one rejoice in the small liberties and joys of summer's cusp. But sarcasm aside, there are millions of people living under non-humane conditions-- without freedom of speech or thought, without adequate nutrition, without safety. </p><p>While most of us fret about our summer wardrobe, our hair products and cold-brews, right here on our streets the underserved are unavoidable. Some are here by choice, but most by circumstance. The charitable among us bring food, blankets... but most of these gestures have the effect of watering a diseased plant... we do little good. Last week's air pollution episode reminded us how small this world is-- how close we are to other's suffering and tragedy. For a day, the charred scent that permeated through even closed windows brought another dimension to the accidents and deaths that punctuate the media. The whole city was declared 'unsafe'. </p><p>When I bought my apartment years ago, I'd been robbed, mugged, stalked; as a young mother, I wanted to feel safe. I wanted to come home at night and know everything was as I'd left it. We changed locks, installed bars on accessible windows, did what we could to protect instruments and possessions. I am in utter awe at men who sleep face-up on the street. Some keep dogs, some huddle together... but for the most part, they are the poster-people of vulnerability. On June 7th when air quality rose to an all-time hazardous rating, I tried to question one about going to a shelter. Lighting up a cigarette, he squinted a watery eye and swore he didn't smell a thing.</p><p>On the way home that night I ran into a man with his hair molded into devil horns, carrying a baseball bat. What time is it, he asked me... as I nervously showed him my watch-- it was 7:05. It's a good thing, he remarked... I'm gonna hit someone but it won't be you. I felt blessed. Relieved for my friends who've been burdened with more recent deaths and losses than they can bear. </p><p>When I moved here, the building history resonated. Below me the old apartment floor had a hole dug into the wood planks where Pablo Casals had placed his cello-pin while he practiced. My own apartment had been inhabited in the 1930's by a Russian composer and I feel her ghost often-- welcoming me, patronizing me or taunting me to do some serious work. My neighbor, a great writer and editor, welcomed me with books by Cormac McCarthy. I was a little stuck in earlier literature-- Faulkner, Baldwin, Dostoyevsky, Mann... but one by one I went through the McCarthy novels, beginning with Blood Meridian, then reading back. Don't bother with the trilogy, he cautioned, and I still have not. But somehow the 'nesting' process here was accompanied by my rapture with McCarthy's writing.</p><p>His obituary this week was somehow inevitable; The Passenger and Stella Maris seemed to give us this message, grappling with death and in a way making it feel just a little safer. It's personally sad that his body of work has become finite... the way David Bowie's death marked a finality of oeuvre. </p><p>I can't imagine how 'safe' he must have felt knowing he will be read and revered by generations to come, that he emerged from the Faulknerian aura of his early work to become a fully developed and internationally awarded writer. And besides a few corny one-liners in The Passenger, one felt safely drawn into the world of yet another character whose heroism fell beneath conventional radar... and one learned things-- important things that made one feel a part of McCarthy's understated and inquisitive world. </p><p>So we grieve not only for our friends and family, but for these people whose product we keep on our shelves, who have taken the time to share their oeuvre with us, who have become part of our own history or intellectual architecture. We live with their characters for a few days or weeks, and we carry a torch for some of them. I often wonder how a human brain can separate the fictional acquaintances from real ones who live somewhere buried in our pasts. Many of the men and women living on the street are unable to separate these things. They tell remarkable tales and see the world with a different set of parameters. Tonight through my open window I hear one of them howling like a coyote. </p><p>There's a man I often see uptown who brings his foraged meals into a parked Citibike basket. He sits on the bicycle seat, sometimes unsteady if he's been able to buy himself enough malt liquor, and tucks a napkin into his throat, as though he's fine-dining somewhere. So he called me over last night and asked me to bring him some strawberry Häagen Dazs. It was an unreasonable request for the likes of me, living on foodstamps. I gave him the frayed dollar I've been carrying around for emergencies and he seemed pacified. But tonight, on the final chapters of my Gustaw Herling, I'm thinking I missed an opportunity here. Who am I to judge what a man on the street needs and doesn't need? </p><p>My neighbor no longer gives me books... it was a kind of literary flirting, I think, looking back. He and Cormac were exactly the same age; they were friends at a time and he must be personally mourning. Thinking back, the last time I had Häagen Dazs ice cream was in his immaculate kitchen, one sweltering July night in his un-airconditioned 8-room apartment on the 10th floor. Synchronicity. And death the final punctuation, in the McCarthy world where grief was ubiquitous. Unlike me, he hated the semi-colon; but regret, he said somewhere with characteristic wisdom, is a prison. </p><p>RIP. </p>mysocalledwriterlessbloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00529007063456469103noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6389886067192563344.post-89746426754346716322023-05-28T12:47:00.008-07:002023-05-29T23:33:14.940-07:00Stockholm Syndrome<p>I was in Sweden last week. There were those late-nights when nothing much was happening, including sleep, and I turned the television on in my hotel room. Not inclined to pay for premium or anything else, I am always surprised to see what if any of American pathetic reality-fare makes its way into Scandinavian standard broadcasting. The only thing I could find was Naked and Afraid, and a constant home-renovation network. So it was CNN for me, to get a little home-news. Unfortunately the big story my first day was the Harry-Meghan drama. Right away this did not seem viable. I can't imagine any kind of car-chase in Manhattan; it's just not feasible. But the endless hours of commentating, the speculations and comparisons and the drama... well, ad nauseam. There was virtually no other news. While I've given the demoted couple a certain benefit of doubt, it was a Trumpian moment for them. I placed a theoretical bet that it would take twenty-four hours for the correction, and there it was-- the humble cab driver, with a reality check. It made the King and his Queen-consort look immediately better. Even Oprah might regret all that money she doled out.</p><p>Then there was the Columbian plane-crash survivor-story. Yes, we all want to pray and believe in these miracles... but to replace reality with a fairy-tale is not only news-unworthy but fraudulent. Still, their fate is unclear. What is clear is the unreliability of these news platforms which in their desperation to achieve viewer popularity seem to have blurred the lines of journalism and reporting to succumb to the public hunger for drama. </p><p>Two young men came by to visit yesterday and we fell into the inevitable recurrent theme of 'the good old days' when not only originality was prized, but we took for granted the solidity of information. Fact checking, accuracy. The actual version-- the truth. It takes me way too much time and a semi-analytical brain to sort through daily accounts of events, medical claims and recommendations. Every news platform has a slightly different version of things. Like an old person's eyes, it takes a bit of time to gain clarity. Maybe it's the quick-firing in this internet age that encourages premature ejaculation of information before it is verified or chronologized.</p><p>One thing I'm here for, back in the US, is the basketball playoffs. And as I've said before, the beauty of sport is there is a clear winner. There are playbacks, disputed calls, a few disparities and bad behaviour, but for the most part, they even out in the end. Grudges and prejudices get diluted by the number of games... we watch over and over the replays and footage from all kinds of angles, and a decision is made. Hardly anyone blames the faulty hoop or the greased ball or the score-keeper. It's not an election, but isn't it a little pathetic that a large part of the population can't seem to process the official decision of a national political process? The electoral officiators do not seem to have the authority of a sports referee. </p><p>My son and I had a great discussion today about the athletes who refused the vaccine. My position was always a little controversial, but as a covid survivor who donated blood and plasma pre and post-vaccine, I still respect a decision by someone whose entire life depends on their physical health. Part of the problem here was the lack of transparency and clarity on the science. Once policy was determined, in a culture of personal freedom, we are not used to being compelled to do certain things. People were still getting sick; the data was not solid. And it shifted-- it evolved. The virus remained one step ahead of us, and that was worrying. </p><p>In Stockholm, aside from collecting dust on apothecary shelves, I saw not a single mask. Nor on the SAS crammed airplanes I took back and forth, despite perpetual coughing and sneezing and obviously ill passengers. As long as it was not Covid, no one took notice? The airline boarding forms, if one read the fine print, asked one to agree to wear a mask on the flight. This was obviously ignored. And back in New York City it's pretty much business as usual. The East Village bars, and Times Square are packed... clubs, restaurants seem more active than ever. People are joyful and unafraid. Yes, I still have a few acquaintances who cling to outdated virus-prevention like a dysfunctional marriage. But they are the unhealthy ones. What is undeniable is the skepticism toward information-- the mistrust. It is just misplaced.</p><p>Who is to tell us in whom we are to trust-- in God, as our money states? The value of the dollar fluctuates daily-- a few of our 'solid' banking institutions have crumbled recently; do we blame God for this? Greed? The compulsion to amass sums of money beyond the use of any human being? The competitive and swift transfer of multi-dollars for ideas? The very backbone of our government is tested by the debt ceiling. What happened to dollar-for-dollar economics? I worked my entire life to receive a meagre social security check every month. I put this money aside. As a self-employed struggling musician, I paid twice what a payrolled worked deducts. I was honest and reported and paid in. Am I to be punished for being a 'solid' citizen? </p><p>So I will still watch my man Jimmy Butler and Jayson Tatum competing for an NBA title-- men who are earning more in one game than I have earned in a lifetime. More than Babe Ruth maybe earned in a lifetime. I will watch the scores rise, and witness the baskets that make these up. Unlike the news which comes afterward-- the debt ceiling talks, the CDC pronouncements and the stock market numbers, all of which are questionable to the likes of me. I admire the basketball skill-- the performance-- the clarity of outcome. Let the talking heads discuss the upcoming election endlessly... for now, at least, in Basketball I trust. </p>mysocalledwriterlessbloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00529007063456469103noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6389886067192563344.post-72496417412307746082023-05-08T23:47:00.010-07:002023-05-09T17:35:25.129-07:00UNCOMMON SCENTS<p>The cusp of April/May in New York City is seasoned by foliage... in the parks, on the most unexpected streets where gutters are stalked by rats and vermin, garbage spillage is a constant... the breathtaking arcades of pink and white could be staging a coronation. Central Park is at its gala-finest... And then, the pink and white rain of petals. But summer is coming... </p><p>My country friends send me photos of their blooming lilac bushes. This seems sort of a Mother's Day reminder; while mine loved the color yellow, lilacs surrounded our house, grew in profusion without coaxing to touch the second-story and enter through open windows. Their sweetness was almost overpowering... they brought wasps and bees... the cuttings downstairs were overkill. </p><p>I've always thought children, like dogs, have incredibly sensitive noses. Young teenagers are beginning to discover scents-- their own, their peers', the kind that comes in a bottle. Home memories are so often olfactory... people's houses had a characteristic scent-- our kitchen, the faintest buttery ghost of piecrust and cinnamon... it permeated the house, like perfume. </p><p>My mother rarely wore perfume, although she had a collection of seductive bottles on her vanity-- for some reason they had to be French: Chanel, Arpège, Givenchy, Guerlain. I've written before about playing with these... the exotic bottles in their boxes and velvet casings... the prisms from the lamp-crystals making rainbows on the ceiling. I experimented by pouring them together, mixing them. I was banished to my room for weeks.</p><p>My older sister who had precocious boy-experience wore Shalimar. We'd lie on the bed on spring nights like tonight, when we shared a room, and the scent of lilacs mixed with her perfume is as vivid a memory as her fascinating stories about boys-- their hair, their bodies and their faces. Boys in middle school smelled like Old Spice and Canoe-- English Leather. It was awful to me. Some of them put stuff in their hair... </p><p>In 1970 I thought I fell in love with an older boy. I was 16; he was 23 and had been to Vietnam. His body was ripped and tan, his hair was long and streaked with what looked like gold. His eyes were blue and his teeth were crooked. He was bad; he flirted with my mother and she warned me. I was a toy, she said; he'll chew you up and spit out the bones... but that only made it worse. I lost sleep, I fantasized... I played Van Morrison over and over... Astral Weeks... Free... we went to concerts... he drove a Karmann Ghia that smelled of patchouli and hash. </p><p>Patchouli. All through the 1970's; I can almost smell it on old photographs. My great young loves all used it like an aphrodisiac. Patchouli and leather, carseats, grassy lawns, bedsheets and sleeping bags... </p><p>The first sign of Covid for me was the anosmia. I had a bottle of bleach, was trying to disinfect my guitar and equipment I'd had on a crowded, infected pre-quarantine subway and realized I could stick my nose in the bottle... and smell nothing. Even my doctor, mid-March 2020, was baffled. It went on.. and on... for weeks and weeks. Nothing. Food was strange, coffee was terrible. I thought I could taste grapes, or I imagined I could... but everything else was dull and wooden. After several months bad smells-- rotting garbage, burned food-- began to process as this strange ginger-cookie scent. It was weird. I was grieving, losing friend after friend-- isolated. I walked in the park... no lilacs, no roses, no spring rain moist-earth grassy fragrance. Nothing. Mother's Day was without joy.</p><p>My 12-string guitar, as if in pandemic sympathy, imploded. In early summer I borrowed Alan's Taylor... I carried it home with the broken handle I knew so well... it was heavy, that case... it took a few days for me to have the courage to open it... and when I did, there it was... the scent of Alan-- absolute and vivid, in the room.. like a genie from a bottle. I cried. I took it out and played Walk Away Renée, the way he used to... in D. After I played for a while, I put it back in the case... but the scent was on me... the sense of Alan. </p><p>For many months I had this souvenir. I took it out at 3 AM nearly every night; I wrote songs, I remembered, I cried sometimes... I talked to him. At a certain time, it lost its magic. My 12-string was repaired and I returned the Taylor which traveled to Virginia in a car. I began to recover my olfactory sense, but like my life, things were not the same. My coffee still doesn't resonate, try as I do to sample different beans and roasts. But I can smell my neighbor's brew at 6 AM when I am still awake playing my restored 12-string. I'm not sure which neighbor it is but I am sure they are awake and brewing. </p><p>As for me, I can now smell the lilacs both in the park and in my mind. Today I was in a shop and I heard 'Me and Mrs. Jones', my mother's favorite song from the 1970's, when men still flirted with her and her dreams went beyond kitchen narratives. Today I am so much older than she was at that moment in time... when I bought her the record so she could play it over and over. I could not stop the tears. While I have been a mother for thirty-three years, it will always be her holiday and it will always smell of lilacs.</p><p><br /></p>mysocalledwriterlessbloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00529007063456469103noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6389886067192563344.post-35897113393310676752023-04-30T17:38:00.005-07:002023-04-30T17:48:17.206-07:00The Ground Beneath My Feet<p>For maybe seventeen years, from my 27th birthday on, my home base was a modified studio apartment in a converted factory building. I call these my bachelorette years, despite the fact that I was married (twice), changed countries, became a mother; somehow this was where I ran, came back to roost, escaped, convalesced. When I first moved there, part of its charm was the Mobilgas flying horse directly outside my front window. Like a magical hovering hallucination, it witnessed and blessed my love affairs, my joys and sorrows, guested at my parties and celebrations. At a point the horse was removed and a multi-plex theatre was built. So there was still the rear window, where a sapling tree had grown tall enough to graze my sill and bring morning birds to sing to us in bed as we slept against the cracking interior brick wall of an old chimney. </p><p>It was a cool old building, and because the apartments were like small lofts and recently re-purposed, it was mostly populated by young singles-- artists, several fashion models, a pair of Rockettes, a stripper, two drummers, a hair-stylist... photographers, drug dealers. My motley friends and rock musicians were comfortable hanging out there, crashing there, getting high with the English hipsters down the hall, smoking on someone's balcony or sunbathing on the roof. It felt in a way more like a dormitory than a building. We had the best parties that often spilled out into the hallway where neighbors were only too happy to open doors and spread the cheer. </p><p>On Wednesday I went down to that neighborhood to preview an auction of great old rugs in what used to be a loft space but was now tarted up like a department store. I barely realized I was in my old neighborhood-- the street was stacked with multi-storied new constructions that looked crowded and crammed and airless. My old back window would have been hemmed in-- our little sill-sparrows, the maple tree-- would have been displaced. I walked up to Second Avenue-- the old supermarket-- A & P, then Sloan's, I think it was, then maybe Pioneer-- and now a sprawling Chase bank. My son's old school was sheathed in scaffolding and netting... even the movie theatre called Beekman was being demolished. I remember there was one huge modern apartment building which stood out... now it looked a little aged and dated-- dwarfed. Back then there were cyclical recessions; money was a little different. Yes, there were some affluent couples... but their luck changed and at our state-sponsored pre-school we were often all in the same boat-- crumbling marriages, unfaithful husbands, Visa problems... buying each other cheap bags of chips or sharing ice cream among the kids.</p><p>I remember sitting on a stoop with an English woman who'd had two babies in rapid succession. The children were adorable, but I was shocked to see they lived in this pricey high-rise with almost no furniture and a mess of clothing, toys, dirty plates and cups everywhere. I remember the toddlers so well-- Harley and Alison. Almost like twins... they were unwashed and wild, tough and spirited, and their mother seemed to have aged twenty years in three. Her husband had lost his job... one of those things... we young mothers spent long hours sitting on sandbox ledges, pushing swings, exchanging woes and intimacies. Where are they? Who will remember them? It has been some thirty years since I sat on the wall outside that building, astonished at the reality of what I'd imagined to be a charmed, rich life.</p><p>Forward to the rugs-- old, handmade things of great beauty. The online catalogue was spectacular and shining. It always touched me that the makers-- not just artisans but artists-- colorists-- took years of their life to create something that would be walked on. The metaphor of hand-woven carpets is a kind of poetry. So I wandered through the newly-renovated space like an explorer... hung and lined with yards and yards of these patterned wool tapestries... and somehow, without the online photos-- they became what they were-- just rugs. They were living, used... old, walked on... things of beauty but humble and quiet. The price tags were obscene. If they could speak, they would have been ashamed. </p><p>At some point in college my boyfriend and I decided to make a rug-- we would design and execute a hand-knotted creation. We looked in museums, bought a book from the Cooper Hewitt.. and I spent many nights turning pages, inhaling the colors and patterns. It was difficult; we were overwhelmed with studies and jobs and we abandoned our project. But in my 120 year-old apartment, I have one of these rugs of similar vintage. It was owned by others before me, and it occurs that it will go on living when I am gone. It is a thing of great beauty and soul-- the colors, the small discrepancies and mistakes woven in intentionally by a person who lived perhaps in a colorless landscape without flowers or trees, and yet created a rich, rich tapestry of floral and chromatic mastery. These rugs I assume were the gardens of desert cultures-- their windows and decor. </p><p>During the pandemic, I occasionally took a photograph... and a piece of my rug would appear, like a magic vision. It is always, unlike me, photogenic; it steals the stage, even in a tiny corner. I know all of its regions; I imagine the maker. When I write it is here.. when I play music, when I turn out the lights... it is still here. Unlike a garden, it asks for nothing and never fails me. I do cringe when my son visits and occasionally spills a little whatever... but they are resilient, these old things. Organic and uncomplaining. Voiceless, perennial... humble, rich, quiet and like a magic lamp maybe replete with more story than I can ever write, in this room we share-- my witness, my companion, my elder, urban floor-garden.</p>mysocalledwriterlessbloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00529007063456469103noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6389886067192563344.post-25058843379754936622023-04-14T22:46:00.008-07:002023-04-15T00:00:53.678-07:00Peace, Love and Understranding<p>Along with the unseasonably hot weather in New York City, there have been a few strange sitings: the coyote treading water like a dog in the East River... the dolphins, putting on a small show for the Upper East Side... and then the usual fires, suicides, shootings... a woman brutally attacked near the Central Park Reservoir. It's enough to make me nostalgic for the 1970's when a parallel April heat wave ushered in the unforgettable Summer of Sam. </p><p>I can remember browsing the stacks of the un-airconditioned Strand bookstore while my guitar-player boyfriend was setting up at Broadway Charly's across the street. Sometimes I'd leave my shoes at the club and sit barefoot on the old wood basement floor reading proofs and review copies which sold for less than $1. People hung out there--- the piles of books were intimidating... one by one the dedicated staff browsed and perused and classified and logged. If you were looking for something, you could call in... if they didn't call you back within 48 hours you'd assume the search was unsuccessful. But they were dedicated. The place was dusty and musty, as were the books... mice ran in and out of shelves; once or twice I witnessed some unsavory behavior but for the most part it was a haven for us book-people. We met and talked... we exchanged. Tom Verlaine was often there Friday nights, checking the review stacks. Ben McFall came a bit later.</p><p>So I have a new book out-- my fifth. The Strand has been a sort of platform for me; as a student I longed to be among their indie writers and seeing my first book on the New Poetry table was like winning a Pulitzer. Granted, the pandemic affected everyone... but this time, instead of delivering happily and being greeted or congratulated by the incomparable Ben, he has left the world... the Strand no longer takes telephone calls and their online search is punishing for small presses like mine. In fact, they managed to mis-read the title and post it incorrectly. Who is this author? I don't know, but it take some effort to even locate my name. Not so the major labels, the merchandise, the best-sellers... it feels remarkably like a slightly more dense version of Barnes and Noble. </p><p>No barefoot hippies, no intellectual clerks anxious to discuss and learn and find... it's a pressurized department store, the brands books instead of hoodies and sneakers. Actually, you can get your hoodies there, too. Surely they sell better than local urban poets who publish carefully and slowly without press or publicity machines. The cream no longer rises to the surface but paddles hopelessly like the coyote in the east river. </p><p>In the Summer of Sam I found a stray dog. When I moved further downriver, he leaped off the boardwalk at 59th Street and half-swam north while I yelled frantically, running uptown, until at the 96th Street pier a man with a boat helped me retrieve my wet animal from the swift current. No news media, no photos... but today's news resonated. </p><p>Tonight hoping for a dolphin-siting, I walked along the river... at the 111th St crossover, two boys were throwing rocks at the cars-- a dangerous pastime, but a sort of rite-of-passage for kids. Something about these moving targets-- and it's not as though they are trying to cause injury-- it's just the act. I remember doing the same as a girl, hitting someone in the eye and having to get scolded and shaken by the girl's father who warned me I was going to city court where they would put me in jail. I was terrified. I was nine. But there was just something so timeless and 'boy-mischievous' about these two tonight- on the cusp of adolescence... here I am this old white lady brushing by, asking them to spare me-- I'm someone's Grandma, and they let me pass, unthreatened. It was as though their life was sped up by the early summer-- their already-racing biological clocks were being pushed forward by the weather. </p><p>Three shootings last night. Jesus. The heat is always an incendiary. Summer is on... all bets are off. In my world the illnesses and deaths continue, like a relentless accelerating wheel. I look at my Facebook page and it is filled with sad notifications and griefs. News. We look at the obituaries daily with trepidation. In the rock and roll world so many people of my generation have disappeared-- it's as though each loss is somewhat diluted by the next... two on one day, three on the next... we have barely time to grieve.</p><p>Last night on the corner of 86th Street someone had left a few piles of books. A youngish man and his girlfriend were looking through. Good stuff. Biographies. Classics. On the sidewalk. I feel a certain simpatico with these piles of books; in some sense I am my own work-- the books which are increasingly disrespected by the corporate machine, the instagram world of branding which sends me poetry memes from people who have no sense of rhythm or lyricism... but unlike me have huge consumer audiences. </p><p>Yesterday I browsed the kiosk on Fifth Avenue by the Park... the classics are still considered best-sellers-- but the new titles... who am I, I thought, like one of those children's books? I felt like a misplaced coyote. There was a time when I'd visit friends and there on the shelves would be familiar things-- great things, like old comfort. If I had to wait for someone, I could take down a Faulkner or a Baldwin or an Anne Sexton... we all had these things-- Shakespeare, Proust. Now everyone sits everywhere consulting their phone like a God. People buy books like merchandise-- like souvenirs... many of them will end up on sidewalks, or on the Strand outdoor displays, unread, waiting to be rescued by the next owner like a stray dog, hoping, as I do, to be read. </p><p>As though they read my mind, The Paris Review today published a piece about Larry Campbell, one of those guys who had a used-book table on Sixth Avenue for decades. The interview had been conducted pre-pandemic across from the Strand which, over the years, sorted through his wares and picked out the valuable things. Where did he get them? Dead people, he used to say. There was a quotation in the Review: "The best books I've found are from people who died. Older people have the best shit." Larry is now 72. Amen. </p>mysocalledwriterlessbloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00529007063456469103noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6389886067192563344.post-35745282992014282662023-03-30T22:47:00.003-07:002023-03-30T23:09:54.366-07:00Playback is a Bitch<p>Last night in East Harlem a woman was sitting in her automated wheelchair, outside of a Duane Reade. It was hard not to look-- she was beautiful-- ageless and drawn from illness. She was breathing from a mouth device that looked at first glance like a sort of kazoo. I hesitated, but had to ask... she motioned her head with difficulty, toward the door... so weak, thin as a young child, she could barely manage the armrest controls. I held the door... it was an ordeal for her to just enter. She thanked me, barely speaking... using the mouthpiece... absolutely no breath of self-pity or bitterness, she went forward... </p><p>Me, the useless sympathy-soaked sponge of human compassion... Jesus, I asked, what sort of punishment is this for a human being-- what payback? As though there is any rationale for suffering-- for the homeless veterans, for the woman incinerated in a chocolate factory, for the souls crushed in last week's tornadoes, for my friend whose brain tumor has stripped her of her postural dignity, her grace. </p><p>People used to console me when my sister repeatedly forged and narrated to our disadvantage... don't worry, she'll get her payback. But she doesn't. Life doesn't work this way... childhood cancers, neuro-muscular diseases... they continue to ravage the good and the bad. Beloved wives are hit by drunk drivers, children fall from cliffs and brave men drown in cold seas. </p><p>I find myself struggling often with the occupational annoyances of most career musicians-- tinnitus, compromised audio issues. Few of us trust ourselves completely in the studio, mixing. Many bravely step out on stage and turn their amplifiers up without consideration. It's not intentional, but there's a certain competitive performance headspace volume which comes with the territory, despite the advice of sound engineers. </p><p>Last night I watched Woodstock: The Director's Cut... a longer version of the original which I had not seen for at least 40 years? It's become sort of a cliché to my generation... a landmark, a cultural monument to a time that seems further and further away than ever. I keep thinking the way I heard music back then was different from the way it sounds now. I play vinyl records occasionally... my headphones only underscore the sense that my ears are not created equal. Not that I would have done things differently...</p><p>Alvin Lee was incredible. I forgot how great... having had the opportunity to travel with him in the early 80's... I could only remember how privileged I was to sit in his dressing room while he messed around on his red Gibson 335, casually churning out jaw-dropping ideas and phrases. He was fairly quiet otherwise. And Hendrix, of course-- that improvisational ending of Purple Haze as though he gave up on his band and just played. You feel him move from 'stage-guitarist' into inspiration and truth. </p><p>But the innocence-- the vibe, of course... and most of all-- the lack of branding... no corporate sponsorship or signage except messages on T-shirts and flags. At the end of the film there's a reeling-off of musicians who have passed... and then of words-- things that have since lost their meaning-- integrity, compassion, kindness, etc... equality... </p><p>I have friends that work at the recently fallen banks. In the Woodstock days financial CEOs made a reasonable salary. Greed was not the religion of corporate culture. There was economic inequality but nothing like that of today. There's a website that lists the payment received by each artist at the festival. It's staggeringly modest. </p><p>No performers at Woodstock had earpieces or pitch correction; some of the bands were awful. Something musicians know-- the audience is often hearing something completely different. Stage volume is deceptive. If you played in dive bars, you never heard yourself sing. Someone had to play it back-- and it was rare that anyone recorded live performances. It required equipment and planning, like these festivals. Stephen Stills... in those days-- well, he was just so damn good, no matter what he became. </p><p>The pandemic musical intermission encouraged me to rethink musical priorities. Recently I rediscovered a singer I'd heard almost by accident in a Washington, D.C. club long ago-- Eva Cassidy. Yes, she was doing covers, but her guitar playing was excellent, and her voice-- well, up there with anyone. I was riveted. It was reassuring to listen to her performance which was so fortunately captured with little fanfare and alteration by some angel in 1996. It's humbling-- nearly perfect. Eva passed away just months after the recording. Unfortunately, there's now a pop-up message on every YouTube video reminding the listener that a new album has been released adding strings and orchestration to these magical tracks. Schmaltz it up, why don't you? Okay... it's a real orchestra, but doubtful she would have approved; unfortunately, we can't speak for the dead. Legacies and family members sell these people out. The likes of me cannot save them. Most often there is no Director's cut. </p><p>I am a huge Clifford Brown fan. He, too, died way too young; I have most all of his recorded material and among them my least favorite is the one with strings. I'm opinionated and stubborn, but why, I ask? And who will profit from this girl's brilliantly pristine performances now? I don't know. Current engineers can create nearly anything out of sound waves and a computer; they can even fool a dog or a whale. For the rest of us, playback, when we actually get to hear it, can be a bitch. </p>mysocalledwriterlessbloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00529007063456469103noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6389886067192563344.post-63561090549562270202023-03-19T23:42:00.007-07:002023-03-20T23:12:02.552-07:00March Sadness<p>I've binged on basketball this weekend to the point of exhaustion. My alma mater has slipped into Cinderella-hood with an unexpected victory and I cried out and fist-pumped in front of the screen my son forced me to install way back when he was still competing. It's fantastic, I must admit. I am fully committed to the madness, the passion-- the heartbreaking disappointments and the wins-- deserved or not. And it's free.</p><p>It was March when I began this blog-- exactly sixteen years ago, with the faint hope that leaving a trail of written crumbs might entice someone to discover a persona I was not quite sure I was. At that moment my son's hoop dreams were real and like a full moon on his teenage horizon. I was a NYC basketball mother-- no car, but I faithfully subway'ed it to every gym in the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens and Manhattan-- to church basements and city parks-- for tournaments, games, competitions. I yelled my head off and jumped around and embarrassed the hell out of him while he mostly ignored me or referred to me as his grandmother at Riverside Church. Uptown many of the parents were 15/16 years older than their kids... some still had hoop dreams of their own. </p><p>These days he's more of a bettor and an analyst. He's aged out of playing competitively and he's mature enough to realize his contribution is maybe managerial. The business of sports has changed, too, since he was in high school. The stakes are higher, the field is not quite so level. It's complicated, as they say.</p><p>March always had a sense of mystery for me-- our Mom read to us at night, and one of her favorites was Little Women. It didn't occur to me that the March sisters simply had a common last name; it was more of a designation, like the March hare I knew well from repeated Alice in Wonderland narrations. Beware the Ides of March, I recalled from some rhyme my Irish nanny recited. We had the piano sheet music for The Funeral March of a Marionette which gave me creeps-- how can you know when a puppet is dead, I asked my sister many times? </p><p>It seemed fitting that I was feeling under the weather this past week. Like a commemoration of the 2020 covid scourge which took my Alan but left me here forever changed. It was exactly three years since that Ides of March when he'd had symptoms, and mine arrived on St. Patrick's day, like a virus snake. </p><p>Tuesday is the randomly designated beginning of spring. Today's chill reminded us not to take things for granted. It occurred to me that my son's father was born in March-- maybe this very day. Surely there was a time when I baked a cake and celebrated. The first time I fell in love was March. But I can't seem to draw it out of the funereal doldrums that ring from its very name. There will always be an Alan-shaped hole, and terrible pandemic remembrances that sparked a chain of events I could not intercept. </p><p>Like most of these posts, I begin with an idea and stray far enough that I cannot recall my original intent. Basketball. Madness. It's a young sport. The basket. It's simple. Last week in the cold rain there were boys playing in relative darkness on one of the uptown courts. They were inspired by the tournament, maybe. They were soaked and the wet ball on puddled pavement was hard to manage. I stood in the streetlamp shadow and watched them like an old crow. The documentary Hoop Dreams was on some cable channel at 3 AM... I stayed awake until dawn watching. It was depressing, yes... but also the time-- before cellphones, before the internet-- felt innocent and more real. The uniforms were funny. The mothers-- the relentless routine of raising children-- the vicarious, deep disappointments... where are they now?</p><p>The banks are ailing, the world is in turmoil, but the games go on... Sport, before television, was the true narcotic entertainment of the people. We go from season to season, from World Series to World Cup to Super Bowl to March Madness. Admittedly I dread the coming of spring. I dislike daylight savings time-- I hoard long dark mornings and early sunset... reading by candlelight and the pointy scent of winter starlight. It occurred to me today, had I stayed in England, today would be Mother's Day. For the Brits, it maybe sweetens a dark month. </p><p>In the park this evening, a fat red robin stared me down. He was bold and a little early, I thought. His breast was the color of blood. If April is the cruelest month, I asked him silently, what can we name March? If the year was a deck of cards, we'd surely be a black suit. Tonight I watched Gonzaga beat out a heroic TCU. It was heartbreaking-- they played so hard, the underdogs. We're all underdogs... there's a rare victory out there if we can find it... and there's tragedy; there's April, with its cruelty, and for another ten days, the richly unpredictable madness of March. </p>mysocalledwriterlessbloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00529007063456469103noreply@blogger.com0