Talk is Cheap

On the way from the fireworks last night I began absorbing the noise factor in Manhattan.  From my admittedly luxurious viewing space, the  explosions were thrilling and loud enough to set off nearly every car alarm on the block.  Loved it.  But shuffling east in the massive festive crowd--  maybe it's the heat, the constant cellphone chatter in public space--- it seems to me that the general volume is louder than it used to be.  Like the glutted internet, the billion cable stations--- there is just so much chatter, people have raised their speaking level to compete.  I'm listening to snippets of conversations-- of public intimacy-- that I didn't sign up for.  And not at eavesdropping levels; these abused rock-musician ears have been gouged and tortured with cymbals, drum whackers, bad PAs, deaf guitarists with 4-figure wattage... it's a miracle I can hear my old television at night.  But the value of conversation seems to have not just declined but disappeared, while personal audio settings have skyrocketed.

Of course it follows that people no longer whisper but quite audibly discuss and promote their sex life everywhere-- on buses, in restaurants, in 5000 shades of cheap novels.  It used to be those who could, 'did'.. and those who couldn't, talked about it.  Now who the fuck knows or cares.  It seems to me, an old retired babe, that the quality of sex must be suffering along with conversation, journalism, literature, whatever.  Talk is cheap, the phone companies tell us--- we have become the Yngwie Malmsteen version of talkers.  Remember when telegrams charged by the word?  When e. e. cummings' economical response to the Academy of Arts and Letters' invitation to join was 'drop dead'?  

Maybe America needs a Twitter diet.  Like one a day.  Some quality control.  Levels of internet communication.  Asshole filtering.  And I'm not a complete old bitch; I love great loud rock; I love comedy that humiliates; I like the knife and I like the blood.  I spent a lot of years reinventing my personal sexuality brand and don't regret a minute.  But even minutes have lost their edge.  They're unlimited and cheap and low-res.  Like climbing all the way up Everest and finding you can't see a thing.  Or you get a billboard and 3-D glasses.  A view master if you're over 50.  

Look at our pop icons:  Brittany Spears has become a badly-spoken candidate for talent-judge.  We used to have Marilyn.  She fucked not only baseball allstars and the president and maybe even Albert Einstein,  but married the greatest 20th century playwright.   That was interesting.  The sex--- well, our daughters might certainly have learned something Kim Kardashian and Paris Hilton didn't show them.  Now our icons (and I love Brittany--- she's so 'real' (!)) are the Barbie version of what they used to be.  What do we do when our culture is looking up at the American I-doll of what should be...and reality is a fake ill-scripted cheap version of post-Cassavetes television?  Who wants the super sized cup of diet soda?  Not Writerless.  Maybe we should all just give in and go to K-mart online and buy the doll.  Cindy Sherman knows about that.  I will order several of Eating Disorder Barbie.  Bulimic Barbie with a bulge in her stomach/ can be transformed into teenage pregnant Barbie.  Cutting Barbie.  True Blood Barbie.  Collagen lip-enhanced Barbie.  Breast augmentation Barbie in 3 sizes.  I'm not even amusing myself now.  I hate dolls.  PMS Barbie.

Did you women ever think that we spend 25% of our sex life bleeding?  The networks love anything with Blood in the title... but who writes 50 Shades of Blood?  I might.  I'm sitting in Starbucks taking advantage of the free air-conditioning and a young intern is waiting for his iced latte talking about diarrhea.  Loud.  Laughing.  Next to me a hot young Russian trophy wife is talking to her realtor.  Her ring could buy me coffee for life.  To my left a woman is making a reservation and her baby girl is yelling for another M&M cookie.  Another lady had a car accident and is reporting to her insurance company.   Building a case.  I literally hear all of this.  Not to mention the canned coffeehouse Latino-light music which is annoying.  A cheap cowbell.  Sounds digital.  Organ with too many runs... please God, spare us vocals.  Across from me a man with small hands is i-ordering his scarcely adolescent daughter a new phone.  It will be pink.  2 tiny boys in their karate uniforms coming from one of their myriad summer enhancement programs with their over-educated nanny.  Can't be too botoxed or have too many pre-school lessons here in Carnegie Hill.  Who will tell them that all their jiu-jitsu moves won't protect them from what lurks ahead?  

The heat outside is omnipotent today.  My mind is withered.  My Mom who is old enough to have earned a memory award now has Alzheimers and wants to wear an overcoat.  A rebel, she is.  I wonder if she thinks about sex.  She follows my Dad around like a young puppy now.  Tells me how handsome he is.  I wonder if the sex I had is better than the sex I will have tonight.  That 50 Shades book has affected my 1001 Arabian Nights parallel serial virtual novel.  I  don't want the soft whip and satin handcuffs package in any version of a honeymoon suite.  This is corporate soft-hotel-porn.  The Travelocity gnome in heels and black leather.  They ruined rock, they ruined the economy, they ruined medicine and now they're ruining sex.

On the hot asphalt my local homeless true-reality star James-with-no-surname is talking without a phone.  You have to love the guy.  

Garage Thanksgiving.

Thanksgiving. I’m cooking post-midnight in my gym clothes, comme d’habitude… I’m listening to the Novaks—indie garage, not as get-up-and-dance as the Stones, not quite as raunchy as the Dolls, but feels appropriate. I think I saw them in a small club somewhere around Thanksgiving… remember asking how many cds they’d sold. The lead singer eagerly replied ‘You mean, including our parents?’ …and I was a lifelong fan. Even if they break up. You see, I’m old enough now to know what I like.

One of my friends showed up the other night looking thin. It’s the Apartment-renovation diet, she explained. You should try the Break-up-with-a-sax-player diet, I suggested. Which follows the Dysfunctional-jazz-musician diet. Or my neighbor's Cancer diet. The Foreclosure diet.

Last night I drove with my drummer out to Queens and thought I’d get into the holiday spirit by food-shopping at the supersized Pathmark after midnight. Not only was it overstocked with processed cans of yams and cranberry jello, but the price of a 99-cent tin foil turkey pan was $6. No lie. The turkeys, labeled ‘natural’, all contained 8-10% of broth, sugars, sulfites and other ‘natural’ ingredients to enhance the inherent turkey flavor. Right. Like the lead in the McDonald’s glasses. People were wheeling oversized carts overflowing with packaged, processed cakes and pies, breads and puddings. Prices were higher than Manhattan, and most customers were paying with their New York State benefit cards so who really bothers price-checking when we the starving and price-obsessed middle class are weighing every carrot and taking trains to the Bronx to save a few bucks on yams so we can foot their grocery bills with our tax dollars? Tax on things I never imagined-- chicken salad sandwiches and tax once again on new underwear for my son. Tax on his basketball sneakers which are a school team requirement.

On TV that show The Biggest Loser. This confuses me. The Winner is the Loser. The Loser gets smaller while his wallet presumably gets bigger. When my son was 15 he told me I was The Biggest Loser. I guess I lost the title. I actually liked it. It was like being the best B-side Mom. I’m listening to the Novaks singer who wants some girl and is convincing her she doesn’t have to lie down with him and doesn’t have to take her clothes off. He is calling himself a loser. Thom Yorke of Radiohead did this too. Jay-Zee doesn’t call himself a loser. He just admitted to having shot his brother but my son says he is the quintessence of the American Dream. You see, now you don’t start out as a busboy or mail clerk, you sell drugs and fund your first recording. Then at gunpoint you threaten someone to sign and distribute and bingo. You marry Beyonce and become a societal role model because other rappers beat their girlfriends and don’t ‘put a ring around it’.

I used to have a savings passport book and put my babysitting money into a bank where the nice spectacled banker patted my head and stamped my pages. I watched the interest column grow. This is the American Dream, he told me…a tree from an acorn. I wasn’t sure what he meant but today I get charged to write a check and get treated like a lowlife at my local branch where there is no interest column and the tellers are way better dressed than I am and have perfect manicures. An acorn from a tree.

Still... it’s Thanksgiving, I’ve survived another year of swimming against a current of growing conservativism and an increasingly third-world economic climate. I’m still playing bass, still high-fiving the homeless guy on the corner, still pretty happy to have a houseful of what my son considers less and less ‘my loser friends’—my B-side family, my posse who don’t beat their children, who don’t steal from their constituents or have sex with their secretaries because they don’t have secretaries. I didn’t get a single delivery, I carried the 50 pounds of groceries myself, I paid with cash, I’m cooking wih real pots and will use lead-free porcelain plates which someone long-dead once painted with great care and pride, and I will feel like an American. I have earned the right to play blues, to understand jazz, to dis my politicians and to look my gods and ex-boyfriends in their heart’s eye and tell them I’m thankful and content to have this alternative life and I really don’t want any reality show but the camera-free one I live.

Amen. Ah women. Grace.

When

My neighbor is an editor of great renown. Not just an editor but a reader, a self-confessed failed writer who succeeded in promoting a genuine literary style-- a man of knowledge and ear. He passed on to me several recent novels short-listed for some literary awards which I found so annoyingly mediocre that I was compelled to huff and puff in protest on his answering machine... as though he didn't know. Maybe he was just checking to make sure I hadn't gone soft over the winter.

I've lapsed my subscription to the New Yorker, despite their offering me free T-shirts and mugs. Not much in print seems really worth the effort except this Art Pepper autobiography which is maybe the most real, most honest and most literary self-portrait I've read in ages. Cuts to the chase. Killing and true. That was a time when guys could play, really play. When owning an instrument had a meaning. Talking about it-- straight up. Mainline writing.

New York State requires a nominal amount of skill before it issues a drivers license; not so with musical instruments. Guys in the subways, on the subways, in clubs, bars... everywhere... amplifying their mediocrity for everyone to hear-- or at least the remaining few who don't have our ears preoccupied with i-music. American i-dol....don't get me started. The annual Ken and Barbie awards for music.

Everything seems to fall short these days. It can't be me...I'm old but I've got ears, I've got passion... I can fall in love with Bolano and Saramago and empathize with poor Nabokov whose pre-posthumous ramblings have been published in the form of a novelty-book of punchable index card notes. Cute. And what is really pathetic is that the one or two brilliant sentences in the unwieldy volume of fragments and medicated free-associations are actually worth the price, as compared to all these review-ready novels which seem in endless supply. They belong, as I see it, all too well on the short-list, meaning they fall short of literature. Maybe there is just so much out there.. the facebook comments, the tweets and blogs and texts... who has time for a deep read...? The jacket blurb on a review copy I received recently had not one but two blatant misspellings. Who's even paying attention? Looking? Listening?

I passed a typical mother earlier on Madison Ave. yakking on her phone while her perfectly dressed and accessorized little Asian daughter was staring up at her, saying over and over... Mommy, I love you...in a soft voice, and her mother was booking a yoga class, arguing about the rate. I bit my lip a little... I'm still not quite rid of the maternal weakness. Further uptown at that very moment some father left his 8-month-old baby inside a parked car while he picked up takeout and a few beers... and he came back to find the baby dead. Asphyxiated. A Jamaican nanny was walking down the street holding an infant under her arm, wheeling the stroller, drinking a latte and talking on her phone. Careless? Maybe. The Jamaican woman raised 8 of her own, maybe--- some good ones, some bad ones....she's not worrying that some tubercular human will cough on her employer's baby, or that diaper rash will turn into a staph infection, or a brain tumor.

In the 8th grade my first man-crush was on my English teacher-- a macho guy named McCluskey who told us if we couldn't figure out the 'theme' of a book for an essay test, just put down 'You can't be too careful.' That just about sums up every single messed-up situation in life, he said. We all laughed. He was like a Salinger-esque character in my life-- the kind I never seem to meet anymore. I wonder if that father who forgot his baby learned this lesson. I wonder if he'll get charged with manslaughter or criminal negligence or if they'll just let guilt and remorse eat his heart out. I wonder if he ate the takeout, or drank the beer.

My own son had a court hearing Wednesday. I'm trying to let him handle his own affairs... not to enable him. I wonder if he tells his friends what a negligent parent he has... doesn't send him money, doesn't help him out. All those diapers... those feverish nights... the long sweaty relentless afternoons in the park, hot steamy dinners with no air conditioning... no child support, no baby sitter...I listened when we walked together down the street--- I hung on his every word, paid attention to every symptom, tied every shoelace, secretly followed him to the school door even when he was taller than I was.

Maybe I was too careful. Maybe I worried and cared for every little thing. Maybe the responsibility of being the object of such devotion was just too much. Cheating on exams, cutting class, glib lying, the glamour of clubbing and gambling underage were just mesmerizing compared to boring human values and maternal guilt. Maybe I was too literal... maybe I read too carefully between the lines, expected to get some spiritual nutrition from literature, some passion with my music, some grammatically correct entertainment from my television, and something else from things that use the word 'art' with such casual brutality. A phone call from my own son...occasionally.

Of course, we don't want our kids to be neurotic. We don't want them to cry at Nike commercials and smother their own offspring with anxiety and worry. They have medication for such things. Tears are a sign of instability. Do any of these Goldman Sachs guys cry in their Hamptons retreats when the lights go out? I don't think so. They go to Green Day Broadway shows and let other people yell scripted Hollywood versions of punk. They ignore scruples and ethics and fear poverty. They give at the office only. They spend 6 figures on blown-up C-prints of poor people and old cars and nostalgia which they buy in galleries and which, in the guise of expensive art on their walls, reminds them occasionally of life. Behind a frame.

I didn't take enough pictures. I thought life was for living, not for archiving. I'm no longer sure what is real. Last night the bartender in the club I played was pouring a triple scotch for a disshevelled guy. Say 'when', the bartender urged.... Say 'When', as he filled the glass with a double night's worth of anesthesia. Must be my eyes, the customer said to me. I got bad eyes. I can't see When.

I wonder what my editor-friend would make of that sentence.

iQuality

My teenage son is home from his first college year and told me last night that every single parent of every single person he knows has acknowledged I am a loser and a lowlife pathetic failure of an excuse for a parent. This was just the prologue. The meltdown went on and on to dis my religion, my total 3 loser dysfunctional friends, the fact that I have never paid for one single thing in his life (translation: I have paid for EVERY single thing in his life except his iphone), and that all of his friends hate me. Three of them were witnessing this tirade, the same three that seem to endure sleeping in my loser apartment every night because they don’t dare go home. One of them even lives in a mansion on Fifth Avenue and is not allowed to have friends over but chimed in for the chorus.

So was this just a decoy to make his horrid report card seem less heinous? A belated Mother’s Day gift? The effect of his self-medication or failure to medicate or overmedicate? Bad sports-gambling debts which are mounting geometrically? He is the drama queen of the house, but this endless speech made 50 lashes seem quaint.

I went out for a margarita with friends who egged me on to throw the ungrateful wretch out. I came home slightly ‘tempered’ only to face accusations of being a drunk, and a belligerent drunk. Trust me, not only is my annual alcohol consumption less than one average teenage weekend binge, but I no longer have the passion for anger. I am anesthetized by not just the toxic fumes from voluminous media product- garbage, but from the slow ooze of cultural mediocrity. Has anyone else noticed this? Is it a Starbucks conspiracy? Our caffeine consumption has risen to offset the malaise, but it will take a high-magnitude earthquake to wake us up to our own sloth. I summon all my genetic bitchery, order all kids out, and no one moves. Even wrath is diluted... impotent.

Tonight I had dinner with a former rockstar who has the musical genius to compose a shattering soundtrack, but lacks the technology and equipment. Instead we are forced to turn on our sets to inadequate shows with not just derivative but inferior music by craftsmen who have all the technology but no creative depth or maturity. Is it their fault? Maybe not.

Wednesday I turned down an invite to attend the annual induction ceremony at the Academy of Arts and Letters. It seems they are running out of eligible people, because the list was as exciting as summer reality-TV reruns. Even the notion of sitting through these speeches was painful. Dull pain.

Last week an elderly former fashion designer complained to me that he attended an Anna Wintour lecture and all the women looked the same. Everyone has the same flowing hair, the same botoxed face, the same makeup and colors, the same shoes and gestures. Come to one of my shows, I teased him… you will at least see the marginally and mainstream hideous. He laughed. Said my soul was showing unfashionably. Sticking out.

As if I hadn't had enough abuse, the edgy indie director for whom I am writing film music kicked my lagging butt. He also threatened to put my unfinished music up on a myspace site, one by one, as punishment for my personal brand of sloppy perfectionism. Forget your brilliant NYTimes cd review and your poetry. The only books we will soon see in Barnes and Noble are Dan Brown, Harry Potter, and endless teenage vampire chronicles. Aside from that, publishers will take a risk on Paris Hilton's cookbook and Michelle Obama's workout routine. No more literature. Put that in the Academy pipe and smoke it.

Then the Chinese Restaurant we play at on Saturdays cancelled us. Apparently no one is eating this holiday weekend and if they are, they are doing it in front of their TV and saving the service charge. So they certainly do not require musical accompaniment.

My son got an ‘A’ in Business Law. Mostly because one of his teammates loaned him the assignments. He managed a mediocrity ‘B’ in Writing for the Media for which an ‘A’ might not be marketable. Ditto World Politics. But he never showed up for Psychology (surprise!), and had an ‘F’ in a course called ‘Equality’. I queried…perhaps you thought they meant ‘e-Quality’? Secretly I gave him a point.

This morning I emailed one of the young but wise songwriter-poets I consider my spritual offspring. He has lost everything in a fire, the blessing of which he is remarkably able to appreciate. The rest of us have simply lost everything but are still encumbered with rent and storage fees, dustmites and debris, molted skin and unusable lyrics. I told him how depressing the Academy list was, and that I was beginning to crust and crinkle at the edges with the smolder of blackened nasty. So just now, coming in from a Manhattan summer-doldrums-preview night out, I received his 4-word post-conflagration reply which soothed a few stinging maternal wounds and stilled the ache of mediocrity like Amazing Grace: ‘I see a light’, he said. Full stop.

Maybe it will be okay.