Brother Can You Spare...?

It's hard to lose myself in television distraction when the constant disturbing election ads insult our intellectual sobriety.  Both sides slinging perpetual political mud and manipulating information that warps any attempt to distinguish truth. The massive money spent on these contests that could be spent to ease world hunger or bail us out of this medical morass... new teeth for all. I can't find peace, nor any comforting scenario.  It's like watching my two least favorite teams duking it out in a pre-doomed Super Bowl that will surely end in a brawl. 

I lie in bed trying to imagine a third Constitutional Party which would represent equality and reason... but I also realize my moneyed friends are loath to give up more than a small pittance of the warehouse of gain they've put aside and invested. New York City, I am told, now represents three trillion dollars in wealth. If the banks kept their holdings in $100 bills they'd have to reach the size of the massive new Data Centres just to accommodate. Monopoly money, we called it in the good old days.  Now it's AI money, galactic proportions... 

As a longtime stubborn owner of a formerly inexpensive apartment, I've watched many friends reluctantly leave a city they loved. Rents rose more drastically than my HOA.  But now... I'm reaching a saturation point. Just a few years ago I used to visit a homey little midtown office and deliver my crumpled bar-money in an envelope to a kind man. I felt damned self-righteous and tough-- a single Mom earning a living and self-supporting my little family. Now new management requires electronic payment, sends bills with constant increases and assessments one cannot fight; no one replies.  For this automation they charge a huge fee and treat me with condescension and disrespect-- as though intelligence and wealth were bedfellows. After deducting my HOA I have barely enough to cover my crappy health insurance for which I am charged disproportionate fees while being notified once again my minimal plan is discontinued due to lack of profitability.  Health? Medicine?  That is secondary. We are a sick country.  

Here in the city we have elected a social democrat mayor but even he cannot remedy the massive discrepancy between rich and poor. Welfare is expensive here.  Most just receive their monthly benefits and shut up.  As for the low-end workers and artists and the struggling-- we are caught between extremes... the young are amassing debt and partying hard, the baby boomers often sit on family trusts, and the rest of us are being silenced. I enter my old age with trepidation and financial handicaps. I remind myself how I love to read, how my food stamps get me free access to museums, how I can still play my ass off when I get the underpaid opportunity. Lol. Occasionally the club buys one a drink and my Senior Omnicard gets me home for $1.50 where I do not dare turn on air conditioning or extra lights for fear my electric bill will be prohibitive.

I'm reading Saramago's 'Seeing' which begins with a foiled national election in which eighty-five percent of voters cast blank ballots.  It's kind of a revolutionary idea, and manages to stonewall a democratic process which, as the narrative goes on, is less and less a democratic demonstration than an opportunity for persecution and autocratic control.  It's a frightening scenario-- the sequel to his brilliant 'Blindness' which explored the societal consequences of an epidemic Oedipal metaphor. Paradoxically, the darkness of the subject is offset by exquisite weaving of language and vocabulary. One remains enthralled. 

US paper money is fairly ugly although finding a coin or quarter on the sidewalk always strikes me as a kind of sign.  Dimes are my favorite; they are so humble and unobtrusive. When I worked a cash register back in the early 1970's a roll of dimes had a special feel to it. In the final Dawn Powell New York novel one of the perpetually-broke and alcoholic characters describes the 'ecstasy' of finding a dime in the gutter. In those days, it was a 'tipping' coin.  I worked in a diner for a few weeks in high school and a cup of coffee was still ten cents. Cops left a quarter which made a generous tip. My little apron pockets were filled with dimes. Some people these days don't pick up coins; they don't want jingling pockets or excess weight... or maybe the germs we thought they carried during the pandemic.

Ironically Tencent Holdings despite the name is one of the largest media companies in the world.  Like many successful conglomerates they have interests in everything from the military to music publishing. When I was a girl my father gave me a few Japanese yen coins.  They were near-weightless and felt like toy money. Unlike our poor obsolete pennies, they are still being manufactured. 

One of the great pleasures of old noir films is watching the characters put a dime in a payphone. I remember so well the feeling of this-- how my Mom put dimes in our loafers so we could call her in an emergency. We'd walk to school and carry nothing but a small stack of books held together with a rubber strap.  I'd look down at my shoes and feel safe. The irony of this seems especially poignant tonight when I am straining to solve the challenges of this month-- the plumbing repair, the fuel surcharge, the insurance increase. I thank God I am still here--old enough to remember these tiny rich moments with which I try to feather my aging proverbial nest, from a time when a pair of dimes was all the insurance we required.   

Broken Ing-Lish

It's Oscar night.  I have little interest in watching the award show... diminishing returns for me who at one point, years ago, saw every nominee and felt a kind of excitement.  March Madness has more appeal.  My taste in film seems to hearken back to a high-school-era course which opened my eyes to European and experimental things and blew my moderated teenage mind.

I'm also editing a collection of lyrics.  This is a tedious and maddening process for me; having a quasi-indie label based in another country, there is really no one who can assist. Film editors are essential; they make masterpieces out of footage, make sense of lengthy narrative visuals and prevent the Director and cinematographer from indulgences which might leave an audience bored and apathetic. One must be popular, also.

The fact that I have sat through two showings of the 8-hour Satantango but cannot watch any of the Avengers or Spiderman or even Dune series is baffling to my son.  French New Wave cinema of the nineteen sixties seduced me with what I have called 'movies at the speed of life'.  I can watch documentaries, endless train footage, conversational exchanges à la My Dinner with Andre... but people in costumes brandishing weapons make me cringe.  It's overwhelming.

Long novels have always enchanted me-- nothing like the endless descriptions and loaded sentences of Proust. It takes a writer pages to describe a moment.  Film maybe has the advantage here... and audiences complain when features exceed three hours.  As though they have not spent at least that scrolling through their daily instagram.

Back to the editing.  I know my writing can be improved.  One tends to fall in love with spontaneous inspiration and to resist altering this, as though we might be sacrificing something irrecoverable.  My coming collection of lyrics seems archival more than impressive.  I am unemotionally deleting unnecessary punctuation and making minor layout choices, well aware that my audience is tiny.

Half a lifetime ago, new in my current neighborhood, I was waiting with my little boy in a 1990's bagel shop for an after-school snack. We were approached by a handsome white-haired man who commented on the Jeanette Winterson novel I was carrying.  It was obvious that he was well-read and intelligent. I don't even like Winterson all that much and didn't feel like defending my literary preferences.  But he followed me... he pursued me, in a way. He lived on my block which seemed safe enough.  Later that evening he delivered a pile of impressive and arcane books to me, with scrawled notes.

So I looked him up; he was Gordon Lish who had somehow not been on my personal radar despite the fact that I'd dated a writer via whom I'd met the cream of the city literati, including Joan Didion and William Gaddis (among my favorites). Most famous for editing (or perhaps 'writing') Raymond Carver, Gordon was extremely opinionated.  Under his slightly tyrannic influence, I surrounded myself with Cormac McCarthy, Cynthia Ozick, Dawn Powell, etc.  

Sheepishly, I shared some of my poetry.  Maybe because I am a songwriter/bassist, he was vaguely complimentary. I also was warned that he was a major womanizer and most of his protégées were his lovers. He  actually showed up at one of my solo performances after which he called me 'brave'.  Despite the fact he lived two doors away, he mailed me handwritten postcards almost daily.  It was flattering... and gradually I began to sort of temper my writing to please him, as one does.  He bragged that he 'wrote' the best passages of some of the new novels he published which were uniformly minimal, choppy, stark and sort of jarring. It was a style. It seeped into me, in a way... and was compounded by the fact he returned my typed manuscripts with heavy cross-outs and suggestions.  Occasionally there would be only one word worth saving. And it seemed enough.

He flattered me by telling me he was going to start an imprint and publish my poetry. Yes, I was duly flattered... and inspired. Of course this did not transpire and either he tired of the 'chase' or genuinely disliked the fact that I rebelliously continued to allow a modicum of human emotion in my lyrics.  Also, I am a musician; I hear rhythms in words... I'm not sure my rigorous editor was listening at all-- he was so busy deleting.

We had kind of a falling out, some years later.  We're still neighbors; I'm old and he's quite old. I saved a quantity of his postcards, and I cherish the many nights we sat in his apartment and talked until dawn. He's brilliant, and his own writing has a particular masculine elegance that is incomparable. I admire him and in a way regret I was an uncooperative pedestrian writer in the presence of genius. 

Tonight, after the show, I scrolled through the published fashion photographs of actors and directors... some of the outfits are wonderful, but some of them, I chuckle to myself, could use editing-- like Dr. Doolittle 'portmanteau' animals that don't belong together... not everything works. What do I know?  I am badly dressed...but I know something.  I know enough to have had Mr. Lish marvel at my library and the breadth of my reading... enough to have him request my company at screenings and lectures. These things affect us.  

Yes, I'd much rather spend early morning hours watching Tarkovsky or Bergman or Khutsiev.  Is this taste?  Does this permeate my own output?  I read daily poetry from various well-respected platforms... some of these are good... some of them endlessly destroy their own soul with the piling of excess and tone-deaf lines.  They weigh themselves down. And then there are the constant wanna-bes whose verse is so clichéd and cringeworthy one could forever give up writing.  These manage to reproduce themselves  in online posts and memes.  On my own Facebook page, Meta mimics me daily with a horrifying AI version of my own words. 

Okay. Surely I could use an editor, but it's late... one becomes one's own audience, and I could never please Mr. Lish entirely. He began to give me orders, such as forbidding me to have a cellphone.  I do barely use mine... and I have included some of my work without his deletions-- as it were, so to speak.   About to publish a kind of abridged 'songbook', I am a little proud of the melodies and musical architecture which frame these lyrics.  And like most projects, they will have an afterlife of their own... or none at all.  I will (still) continue until I cannot. 

Delay

Sunday morning I came across an old diary; it fell out of a bookcase where I'd stashed it long ago behind stacks of calendars and discarded manuscripts.  I recognized the cover from some long-departed stationary shop where I used to browse and dream and finally take home a blank book dressed in old print fabric that in itself ignited memory. 

There I was-- at the age of these students I've been recently interviewing... me trying to find their core-- their soul and academic candor.  At eighteen one is so utterly vulnerable-- a single day is critical and life-changing. My discretion had prevailed, as though I was writing for a future self, and many of the boys and crushes and devastators... are nameless and protected.  Princeton for me revealed itself between the lines... I didn't understand the institution until much later, or absorb the significance of what I was learning, how they groomed us like living plants to become productive and resonant.

Looking around my city, gathering the critical daily news, I am overwhelmed with anxiety. It seems as though the first part of my life was a sort of consistent ascent... and now I am quite on the other side of a kind of lengthy plateau of satisfaction. Things have clearly broken... the progression of humanity toward some version of goodness and compassion has surely been interrupted; things feel uncomfortable and precarious.  What a fraud am I, I think; I am selling these optimistic young people a dream that is no longer there... they will not find what I found between the lines, because the lines have been re-drawn, digitized and replaced. I can't imagine my future in this accelerating singularity, and certainly not theirs. 

Not only have these kids grown up with a pandemic absorbing a good percentage of their adolescence, but the images of their heroes seem to have shifted. Their superstars and celebrities have little solidity. I've noticed the way television children seem staged and odd. Styled and changed and airbrushed, they are either brimming with some kind of dangerous overconfidence or they seem 'rehearsed'. On the subway, I observe school kids on their way home-- still rowdy and energized... but they seem somehow different.  I worry about them, the way I worry about my interviewees, the way I worry about the Mexican and Guatemalan children whose mothers sell candy on the trains with their babies and toddlers tied to their back with shawls and scarves... as though they are accessories, not children. I fear they are using their cultural cliches for sympathy. I have yet to witness a single sale. Please, I want to say... do not do this... I will give you a job.  But I cannot.

I can't imagine how my earlier childhood diary might read; most of those things were pre-sorted and discarded by my sister who cared not at all for sibling nostalgia. Besides some of my grammar school's Facebook posts, I have no photographs of the me I was. But this diary-- well it had the sense of me, of young-woman passion and some kind of vague ambition not to become but to 'be' and manifest my purpose. It was reassuring, in a way... as much as it was mortifyingly embarrassing. The players-- the Romeos and villains.. were not necessary to identify.  

My son tells me every day I grew up in the best time; the price of that, I say often, is my aging at this moment.  It's quite true that the second half of the last century was a spectacular revelation of culture and personal invention. The rich archive of film-- art-- music... is testimony.  I rarely run out of inspiration.  Today Ted Gioia on Substack called the new contemporary product 'Slop'. The present seems a bit of an appropriate place in history to begin to withdraw, to drop out.  I'm not sure what I'm learning.  

Of course I'm a bit behind. I watch films that were on festival programs a few years ago... they've had time to settle... rarely do I see the brand new ones. Hollywood in general seems to disappoint, as does music. Visual art... it's all sort of underbred and over-advertised.  Even streaming.. .these Netflix and Amazon award winners-- scripts often make me cringe. A random browse of cable channels brings a variety of game shows based on the most ridiculous premises... and a gamut of reality shows that seem to be designed to propel the cast into some kind of brand-stardom but instead make the adults seem petty, immature and ridiculous.  They are mean and competitive and small-minded.  They seem to be overstyled and blessed with some kind of monied success in life that is baffling and undeserved.  The digital dirty red carpet. I am embarrassed that incoming migrants watch this stuff and deduce that this is America.

It occurred to me today I'm living in a kind of delay... we all are, despite the instantaneous delivery of news. We are in a kind of aftershock from our own election... from the consequences of button pushing and premature action in moments we did not consider.  It takes a minute to translate events into history-- to assess what happened and extract the truth from the millions of accounts and AI phone video.  

In every guitar player's arsenal of effects probably the most essential is the delay pedal.  It makes amplification sound 'real'... it provides context and space. It supplies the 'room' in which we all exist. I watch films and do not pay for the privilege of being timely.  Some of them dissipate once I have distinguished the hype from the reality. It takes old people time to hear things-- we are slow to translate sounds into words sometimes. I am slow to absorb history, to figure out what happened yesterday and how I will go forward. Digital delay pedals can be set to go on forever.  With the analogue-- we create the template; it is all about the signal decay. It's a kind of prolonged audio shadow fading... a kind of death.

My personal delay settings change; yesterday it was half a century... today it might be a few hours. Love takes time, I have learned, but like history, the way we understand it takes longer.  Sometimes I hesitate to revisit memories; they disintegrate upon opening, like dried old paper, they remove themselves further and further in the delay chain. At 4 AM one can see reruns of earlier shows.  Even the news seems a little stable, unchanged. Who would know, turning it on, what is timely, what is original?  It is what we are not told that is becoming a little threatening... and the way we listen ought to take into account the space of our cosmic room... the delay length not just of the past but forward into the future: what is real, what is important; what repeats, what remains.

La Recherche des Chaussettes Perdues

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.

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.

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 missing!

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.  

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.

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. 

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.  

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.  

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.  

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.

THE ANTI-BARBIE

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'.  

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.

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.

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.

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.  

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.  

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?

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? 

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. 

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.