Countdown

When I was maybe 4-5 years old, we went on one of those exhausting family educational trips.  These were apparently conceived out of some vague sense of personal neglect. While family memes of the 1950's seem so innocently and traditionally cohesive, parents really had very little idea of what their children were up to on their own. There was a remarkably loose tether of independence: I walked myself back and forth to school at five; in these times that would be a form of neglect or abuse.  

Anyway, once a year or so, we had some arranged pilgrimage to further our historic and patriotic consciousness: Plymouth Rock, Washington D.C., Sleepy Hollow, etc. Eventually it was assumed our school was providing all the necessary education and this tradition evolved solely into mandatory attendance at the annual Army/Navy football game.

But the trip that came to mind today was the one to Sturbridge Village-- probably still intact today, like Skansen in Stockholm. To me, at 4-5, it seemed like some kind of cult with the women in long dresses and strange bonnets and the men with their suspenders and funny accents.  The workshops were cool-- we watched them making soap and candles, weaving cloth, etc. And we were allowed to buy a small souvenir on these trips.  I was super intentional and methodical in the gift shops. It took ages for me to select something on-budget. Tiny things. But here I purchased a small egg timer which consisted of a miniature hourglass mounted in a piece of hand-forged iron. 

Nothing I owned-- no toy had ever provided the utter fascination of this little gadget. I tested it against watches and our old ticking stove-knob; it was pretty accurate.  I held my breath to it, tested the length of my little records. I turned it horizontally, played with its simple physics.  Of course my sister tried to convince my mother it belonged in the kitchen.  Whatever I had, she absolutely needed. But my mother let me keep it in my room where I learned to respect the value of a minute. I didn't particularly like boiled eggs anyway-- they were more like an assignment than a breakfast.

I must have listened today to twenty people remarking on how quickly this year has gone. Yes, I agree, also thinking that for those who have left us, they will remain permanently in 2025.  Their tombstones and memorials will be forever engraved with this number. They will go forward no more.  For the rest of us, our lives continue to be diced into these annual portions which become thinner and thinner as we age. I noticed today how a few of my peers seem to be moving more slowly, more carefully.  A fall, at this temporal moment, can be life-stopping. Maybe the slowed pace makes the actual time passage seem relatively faster... as though the 3-minute egg takes us five minutes now, which results in fewer eggs, translated to minutes.

My beloved neighbor passed in November. The days of agony he endured were slow and painful. The forty days of mourning began to sail by, as the new year loomed.  My Elizabeth-- we left her months ago... Jon Gordon, the Reiners... now Tatiana Schlossberg whose November post was so nationally heartbreaking... she, too, will remain in 2025.

I've been reading the second volume of a Norwegian trilogy which centers on a nationally iconic television producer who may or may not have murdered his wife. It occurs that this was written in a time when the medium of television was central and crucially influential. There were few shows, they were for the most part memorable and great, and we all watched them.  I can't imagine the experience of the Beatles on Ed Sullivan in this time-- or Walter Cronkite on the JFK assassination.  In the 1960's we all sat-- in real time, together.. mourning, celebrating. The collective consciousness had a certain power. In a way the Reiner tragedy has something to do with this former cultural resonance. 

Today I see on one channel alone there will be fifty New Year's Eve entertainers.  It's daunting. I have not even heard of half these performers who will be broadcast worldwide to a media-exhausted audience. Over one million spectators will congregate in Times Square to participate in maybe the world's most watched time ritual. The huge ball is bigger than ever, of course. I will go out and enjoy the fireworks, missing my old bandmates and the umpteen New Year's Eves I got to play a punk rock and roll version of Auld Lang Syne to a room full of drunk dancers. 

Channel after channel broadcasts the sad litany of those who dropped out this year.  We continue to be appalled at the madness which pervades our government. Life goes on... Beyonce has become a billionaire-- even Powerball has ballooned to an obscene monetary prize. Our economy is so bloated we average people cannot process these sums.  And yet we owe more than we earn.  And people are hungry-- some out of greed, some literally starving. Farewell to the poor meaningless penny, to the metrocard and telephone switchboard operators.  

I walk the streets, pregnant in a way with my own nostalgia and poetry.  It comes, like moments-- whether I summon it or not, although I am not sure any of this will actually be delivered.  In addition to the world-stage absolutely thronged with celebrities and superheroes, there is a vast infinite digital universe of performance. Look at me, everyone seems to be saying... or-- yes, I can be you-- I can wear your dress and get my body sculpted to resemble yours.  I can imitate your music and I can use my fortune to own your unique artistic creations.  My name, next to yours, like a museum. Despite all of this, I am trying to quietly log these last countdown minutes, like timing an egg... altogether too many, and never enough.  The 2025 hourglass has surely run its course.

The Sound and the Fury

I'm up to The Sound and the Fury in my Faulkner project... maybe it's the precursive reading, but I'm not struggling with the narrative the way I recall in high school. Maybe also it's the consequence of election season... the fact that I've somehow immersed myself in southern politics and culture, trying to comprehend the swing-state psychology and the way a crass New Yorker with a crooked script could appeal to it.  Rather than being dated, the Compson family seems a little familiar-- something for everyone.  In fact, poor promiscuous Caddie reminds me of my older sister who managed to smooth over her many-layered indiscretions with a colossal and expensive wedding cake which only fooled a few. The marriage was pretty much done before the cake went stale. 

Every dysfunctional family has its parallels... there are the bad eggs, the mean alphas, the deflated father-symbols, the fallen daughters... the alcoholics, the narcissists, the mentally defective and the failures.  The unforgiven.  Many of these have a nanny-figure-- maybe a nurse or housekeeper-- a paid parental figure who heroically loves at least one member, and holds them together for at least a time. Then there are the funerals-- the disgraces, the suicides. As literature, the subject doesn't get old.  We are the Family of Man. 

The thing about being over 65 is that few really fault you for being outspoken... or else they don't bother retorting. I'm subtly motivated by the residue of resentments for the petty injustices I've swallowed during my lifetime; truth outweighs courtesy when time is limited.  I am so very willing to offer comfort to the sweet and fragile who are suffering, but less so to the others who have caused as much pain as they have absorbed. You know who you are, I want to say... but 'you' don't.  These people rarely take accountability. 

The best literature shows us ourselves... it doesn't blame or moralize, it describes and shines a light on the shadows.  It observes, where there are no witnesses.  We have all done things, unseen, that have consequences. Writers take the opportunity of talent to expose their own past sins and injustices.  And we all get to a certain age... the demons and villains of our childhood are long dead... it seems almost safe to write the stories, to point our fingers.  This, we reason, is why I am this way-- why a marriage failed, or why another never had children... why success evaded us or our ambition consumed our capacity for empathy.

There are not many clear heroes in modern literature. We have plenty of those in the classics... and the more complex life becomes, the more we seem to turn to heroics and fantasy in our cinematic entertainment.  It's a little absurd-- the apparently simple thematic formulae of these blockbuster extravaganzas. 

Friday night, late, I watched that Chantal Akerman film where 95% of the action is a bourgeois woman in her little flat performing her daily chores in a sort of domestic claustrophobia.  It's long-- it feels like the day passes in real time-- but it's hypnotic and, for me, mesmerizing.  At a certain point in the afternoon, this woman who puts on a prim housecoat to do dishes turns tricks.  You can't judge a book by its cover.  But I can't imagine my son or any of his friends having the patience to screen this movie; they prefer Marvel or Scorcese... fantasy and extreme violence and gangster culture-- some horror thrown in.  This is entertainment.  

On the political front, I am too nervous to be entertained by any of the Town Halls or celebrity endorsements.  We are immune to the pleading, sick to death of the accusatory and aggressive advertising... we are manipulated and lied to by the very same device that shows us drama-- movies, comedy, sports... it is altogether processed as a form of entertainment rather than our political future. The media describes Beyonce's simple dress and Michelle Obama's suit.  Sure, their words reach some ears, but it is what they represent that remains like an afterimage... and then they are gone.

How can this be happening, I ask myself daily... a buffoon of a man convicted of both tax fraud and multiple sexual offenses,  running neck-in-neck with a seasoned and reasonable politician who stands for American democratic values?  What universe is this that there is even an argument?  The election is not a TV show... it's a major event in our history and will shape not just the next four years but could damage and distort our national trajectory for decades, if we even survive the critical transition. 

Among my friends there are those that threaten to leave the country. I did, too, after Bush, Jr was elected. But I came back.  Then there was Obama... and here we are again, at some kind of brink which feels even more worrying to me now. 

In my own city, today, Madison Square Garden.. where I saw my first Knicks game, Bob Dylan, Paul Simon... was turned into a kind of theatre of the extreme grotesque.  Hideous soundbites were used like ammunition. Some of them went home with audience members, and stayed on their tongue.  We are reduced to two opposing teams here, like a Sunday football match; there will be one winner. 

The villains in our families either pass away, grow old and defused, vanish into cemeteries and old scrapbooks. My sister hurt a number of people by her manipulative behavior and changed my destiny, perhaps. We are forced to lie for these people whose blood we share, even while it changes and destroys people. We are punished by the Jason Compsons who dominate the softer among us. Families, even when we leave home at seventeen, have a kind of co-dependent effect.  We share shadows and genetics and we all have a different take on the central narrative.  It's complicated.  No matter how good we think we are, there is residual guilt and pain in our past.  

In an election, we cast our ballot alone. We get a clean sheet--no one supposedly knows our individual mind and some of us still believe we can change the narrative by a vote. Let us hope that, pen in hand, we put aside the entertainment factor-- the contest, the game... and consider carefully not just our personal but our civic responsibility. 

A-women.

Omicronic

The pandemic, in all its variations and behaviors, has again become the enigmatic chart-topper of the year.  It commands a massive global audience-- we participate, we read, we listen-- suffer, weep and throw up our hands.  It has confused performance with spectators, victim with aggressor, mourner with mourned.  Like a biological fugue, it plays on... movement upon movement-- scherzo upon adagio; just when we think we've reached the finale, there is another coda.  

One thing of which it reminds me is the proverbial sound of one hand clapping.  We have experienced the solitude of isolation-- of grief and loss, of quarantine.  Those of us who are comfortable with ourselves have indulged-- even enjoyed and 'caught up' with scrap books, nostalgia, creative projects we'd procrastinated.  We read from our bedside stack of books... we watch old films and try out recipes.  

The couples among us have either flourished or suffered.  Some compete for space or crave silence... some embrace the home-honeymoon scenario. But the performers-- the singers and players and actors-- have taken a major hit.  Yes, they go on their Facebook pages and zoom-entertain... but I notice the audience is dropping off.  Some of the die-hards look anxiously at their live stats as they sit at a piano, counting the drop-ins and regretting the passers-by.  I feel sheepish sneaking away.  But to broadcast myself? I shudder (shutter). 

I've already admitted to indulging in scads of old films-- way too much television, a healthy amount of YouTube concerts and comedy. Reading-- yes, but proportionately more screen time and channel changing.  The old films are always comforting... and seeing New York City as it was seems more compelling than ever.  Pandemic-era shows are immediately recognizable and besides the incessant news, I grow distant.  

Another thing I've noticed is how quickly the brief cultural timestamps seem... as though the expiration dates are closer and closer.  While old films have a timelessness... the newer ones (aside from Titanic and a few ubiquitously recycled classics) seem irrelevant and cheap. Contemporary celebrity is a vast field of edited heads and faces. Modern options have altered them-- morphed some of them into a kind of generic air-brushed idolatry.  Flash back to Ingrid Bergman or Veronica Lake-- Gary Cooper and Gregory Peck.  They are iconic... unmistakable.    

I am the recipient of hundreds of art blogs and online publications.  I browse auctions and museums-- virtual galleries and whatever I can... but see these sadly as imagery with short shelf-lives.  Yes, I'm old and cranky... but I wonder where Jean Michel would be if he'd survived.  A fat, cigar-smoking billionaire with trademarked colors, photographed in LVMH with Beyonce and Jay Z?  I suppose the riddle answers itself because he did not get that far, nor did he relish the pre-millennial changes as they affected his work.  

The irony of covid robbing us of smell and taste is poignant.  Once the Black Lives Matter violence subsided, I feel as though we all fell into a kind of bland stupor.  We fooled ourselves into reverting to old habits-- crowds and concerts, shopping and sports... and now we are again forced to reconsider.  What did we accomplish?  Our country is a divided mess, we are reeling from isolated natural disasters which raise the bar of anxiety.  But mostly we look into our little social media mirrors with unprecedented narcissism, the way the Queen in Snow White was told over and over she was beautiful.  We sing Christmas songs to one another online, we buy gifts and pretend.  

Who is watching?  There used to be movie magazines and celebrity papers for the kings and queens of Hollywood.. but did a local underwear model have millions of 'followers'?  Girls coloring their hair in front of phone cameras and cats parading in costumes... If we added up all the numbers on instagram, what kind of infinity would this be?  I can't help feeling this is all some catastrophic distraction, and covid aside, there is something wrong with everyone. 

Is it me, one of my friends asked on Facebook, after seeing a few of our old rebel heroes posing with political superstars who veto abortion and refuse vaccines and masks?  Where are priorities? And more important, where is science and data?  How is it possible that the Uber-protector America has let us all slip through its medical fingers, despite our obedience to accept not one but three unproven vaccines?  Are we just narcissistic little guinea pigs who post on our social media our immunity-badge which seems to fail us at just the wrong moment?  Is there something they are not telling us, or have we just lost the ability to listen, to read between lines?  

I've been playing, over and over, on my double bass, a few Christmas melodies.  I could fool an amateur into thinking I am proficient on this instrument.  Over and over in my head and my heart, I wish my friends and even my enemies and fellow countrymen a Merry and peaceful Christmas... with tidings of comfort and joy (emphasis on comfort-- repeat 2x)... 

What's in a Name

Pathmark 125th Street has long joined the ranks of  discarded NYC institutions now--the site under transformation into an enormous residential and retail development.  For me, embracing designated economic poverty as an older adult, it was a reality-experience.  The simple enormity of the space at this location, unlike the crowded Manhattan supermarkets with narrow aisles and limited wares, was spectacular for someone like me who,  excepting road-trip stops,  was under-exposed to mall-shopping.  I visited Pathmark for the sales, the availability, the simple 'gift' of space... the late-night hours, proximity to subway.  Where else could I score a decent fresh turkey for 69 cents a pound?  The scams, the schemes of visiting regulars-- the simple neighborhood habits of those who brought folding chairs and sat basking in the generous 'lobby' air conditioning in summer-- the recycling, the socializing and innocent panhandling...  all part of the past 'innocence' of New York.

Finding bargains these days and living on food stamps is a challenge.  Last week I was in one of my current preferred grocery destinations in Harlem, and I heard a woman yelling... 'Princeton!' with more and more conviction.  So I turned-- yes, there those old days when some random boyfriend or bandmate would refer to me sarcastically by my alma-mater and like 'Mom' which never fails to prick my ears anywhere, I respond.   A small toddler had been leaning against my cart with that dreamy fearless curiosity 2-year-olds can display even in a crowd... eventually the woman came over, grabbed him, gave him a little smack... 'don't you wander, Princeton!'  I couldn't resist... yes, this was his given birth name.  Princeton. In the 'hood.  I had a little conversation with them both, assured the child he was going to be smart and important... and then a little inner monologue with myself on the way home about names.

I have a simple, basic three-letter name.  Actually my mother gave me the French 5-letter version, so the meaning of it would be understood as 'beloved' and not mistaken for the other derivative spelling-- 'friend'.  But the ratio of four-to-one/ vowels-to-consonants is a hard-spell for a child not to mention pretentious in the milieu of the 60's.  Compared to today's 'Beyonce' and Destiny-- the tag-names of the 21st century-- it is minimal.

My elementary school was part of the 1960's bussing experience.  Besides the physical introduction of diversity, there were the names.  We were all basically Tom, Dick and Harrys-- Kathy, Robin and Susans, in those days-- but these kids-- they were named after kings and presidents.  Their names were hyphenated and ornate-- colorful.  The girls were Velma and Darcelle; this elevated and embellished our morning role-call.  I went home and asked my Mom for a better name.  She did not grace this with a reply--  she who had given me one only, insisting when I got married my surname would fall into middle-status.

Many of my fellow students, as the 60's wore on, re-appropriated their African names.  Some of the Jewish kids I met in the city became radicalized and used Hebrew.  Rockers re-christened often--became single-names or branded themselves somehow, while it was fairly common for actors and public performers to round the edges of their ethnicities and smooth out family names into generic and non-specific identities.  My own father's family, like many immigrants desperately seeking 'Americanization'  had done this.   Go figure.

Lately it is rare that, in my local Starbucks where I am currently interviewing kids for my alma-mater (yes, little Princeton, I mention your name often) I rarely see a staff name-tag that looks familiar to me.  The variety of these is like the constantly expanding nomenclature for coffees and drinks-- exotic, conversation-provoking, ethnically transparent or confusing-- non-gender-identifying.  There are kids with names of countries, of seas, of flowers... of foods, of liquor brands and corporations.  Rappers acquire 3-part sentence names or words.  Common-- that one always sticks to me.  My name, in this expanded overpopulated internet world of infinite repeats-- is-- well, common.  Like most everything else.

I have googled my own name to find a whole column's worth of 'me'... I have even received mail and messages for my namesakes.  Three of us know one another-- in this city.  One friended me on Facebook.  Yesterday I asked a girl in the supermarket about her name tag... her Mom couldn't spell, she told me, but now she likes it.  It's different.  Desnity.  Spellcheck did a double-take, too.

While our traditional old-school vocabulary seems to decrease in usage, new languages and acronyms have become part of our work-arsenal.  People actually speak less to one another these days-- they text, they have their bluetooth and earbuds in... they engage less eye-to-eye.  They do listen... and they wear names.  It is hard to find a single human on a subway without a label or-- more often, several.  Wearing someone else's name was always strange to me.

At the end of her life, for some time, my mother could barely speak.  Her caretaker called her 'Queenie' which seemed wrong to me.  Queenie did not protest much of anything at the end.  Inside she'd regressed beyond even recognizing herself as 'Mom'.  But somehow, even at the very end, when I called her name,  I could see a small light.  Gift of God, the meaning.  No matter how we change, alter, edit, revise... no matter what our intimates and lovers call us in the dark, there is something in our original naming that imprints.  I thought about this, reading the obituary of Kirk Douglas... his adopted name meaning 'church', but his original name, 'Issur' meaning 'he who wrestles with God'... surely defined him.   Anyway, I think somehow he might have agreed, in the end.

Post Post-Partum Post

Walking in East Harlem today, summer Fahrenheit beginning to assert in the city mix, the uptick from air conditioner exhaust... a young mother with one baby in her arms, another at her side tugs at her tank and points toward a bakery.  'Did I tell you to shut your mouth?' and she whacks him-- hard... across his ear... his little face scrunching into a silent wince, tear-tracks clearing a clean line down cheeks stained with a long-day's soot and play-dirt...

Babies are little heat-machines... any woman who's carried inside or outside well appreciates the relief a stroller allows, cumbersome as they can be on public transportation.  And children are simply overwhelming-- especially when echoes of your old carefree life creep in like passing car-music-- some 5-inch heels you crave in a store-window... your baby-daddy taking just a little more time to pick up the Happy Meals...  and all new mothers know the shock of cataclysmic hormonal changes--  swimming in estrogen as you are during pregnancy, small issues ride over you like candy... but suddenly you are sweaty and cranky and exhausted and your front door feels like a prison gate.

I noticed this week Alanis Morissette doing the talk-show rounds-- maybe some promo for a coming album... proudly pregnant and bringing her rock-star confessions about post-natal depression.  The Queen of TMI whose well-produced radio-ready emotional cries occupied a generous portion of the 90's airwaves... now the spokeswoman of depressed new mothers.  Who else--Cardi B?  Brooke Shields a few years back?  The society of botoxed, fashion-elitist, nannied, chauffeured, and all-around privileged-- now earning talk-show and book-income as conflicted mothers.   Somehow this high-profile whining doesn't move me.  Even Khloe Kardashian, publicly humiliated by the father of her new baby-- deals with billionaire motherhood.  I salute you, Khloe-- victim of the same insulting behavior so many of us have passed through.  You are a role model.   But my hot friend today with the two babies and God-knows how many at home has no glam squad.  What she does have is food stamps and a place to live in the Projects, unlike some.  What she does not have is help.  Tutelage.  Someone to listen to her. NEI (Not Enough Information).

When I had my son I was already 36.  My career had taken a positive turn-- my record was doing well in the UK-- I had a huge deal on the table-- and then I found myself pregnant-- unplanned, unwarned... with a young husband who pleaded and begged and promised to become the Mister Mom every working woman dreams about.  Okay.  I toured-- I performed-- I wrote, I signed deals, made promises.  The baby came-- my husband, as was his custom, was drinking heavily.  The doctor threw him out of the delivery room and I met my son for the first time as I was to live most of his childhood-- alone.

Okay... many, many dramatic episodes as only the finest British actors can play them... in and out, drunk and sober, on his knees, on planes, on telephones-- with and without flowers... and I found myself back in New York with a baby-- the ultimate heaven-blessed gift of nature-- a healthy, perfect, adorable little boy-- and a heart-splitting slam of psychological claustrophobia that felt like a perpetual car-crash.  Unwilling to share with anyone this sense of abandonment-- failure-- inverted joy, whatever... I wandered the streets of my neighborhood at night with my stroller-- up and down-- in and out of 24-hour stores with my little sleeping bundle... trying to walk myself into exhaustion... but when I returned home, I couldn't lie down--- I couldn't listen to records-- it was too memory-soaked-- or even watch television-- it was like being assaulted.  Reading was impossible-- when it rained I'd talk on the telephone, or move us up to the laundry room where I'd count headlights on the wet asphalt outside and wish I was a passenger.

One night I was so exhausted I was maybe hallucinating, worrying I'd neglect some crucial baby-caring task-- and I wheeled us into a Mental Health clinic.  I need to see someone, I said.  The intake process was weeks.  I am not going to make three weeks, I announced, and while a nurse carefully lifted the baby into competent arms, they sent me upstairs to the facility director who told me he thought my thyroid was completely out of whack.  The diagnosis-- an educated stab in the dark and a kind of pretext-- gave me a little relief... and just confessing to this stereotypical Psychiatric Neurobiologist with a bowtie and a theory... was therapeutic.

What they did not diagnose then was this postpartum depression or postnatal or whatever biological or emotional havoc these things wreak on women.  Coupled with my missing husband and a disintegrating marriage, an abrupt change of lifestyle-- I was used to playing in clubs, hanging out until dawn--- wilding and feeling like an uncaged animal.  Or after breakups-- tough days--- you'd go out to a bar, listen to other people's issues, drink surrounded by good music and flirt a little with a cute bartender who reassured you the future was going to be so much better than the present.

I survived... no meds, no prescriptions--- a few sessions with a therapist while a nice intern played with the baby through a glass door... and of course I never had the urge to hurt my child... I loved him all the more, never drank, never left him even for a second-- I nursed my own wounds and failures into a scar of motherly fortitude and managed somehow, through free clinics, $1 bags of doughnuts, and Goodwill stores, to get through the challenges of babyhood.  Yes, Alanis.  No herbs or oils or mountain retreats.

So I am less sympathetic to the whining celebrities on television-- with their perfect makeup and clothing, looking like cover plates and talking about their tough life... while a gorgeous husband, a team of nannies and assistants waits at home with a clean bathroom, freshly washed crib linens and perfectly mashed organic baby food.  Walls of sympathy for Beyonce and Cardi B-- more than I earn in a year for an appearance to raise awareness of this syndrome.  Did my mother and grandmother not suffer?  Surely this is not new--- what is new are the meds and treatments which earn some people money.  The public whining-- the celebrity confessionality which fuels Instagram and social media like nothing else.  Tiny tragedies-- nothing bloody or gory... just infidelities, rehabs, breakdowns-- that kind of thing.  A little postpartum retrospective, to give some credibility to the perfect image.

Motherhood is hard; single parenthood is long and relentless.  Even when you are sick, there is no relief.  And when something wonderful happens, there is no one who claps their hands with you.  I was a mature woman.  I had no money, nor public assistance, but I had some experience.  For these young unprepared girls without role models there is little comfort.  They have traded their girlhood and their freedom for a dream of family that mostly deteriorates with time.  Every day we hear about abandoned children, hurt and abused children.  I try to understand the sorrows of the mothers-- not to condemn them.  There is help, but not really.  You are in this or you are not.  God save the society that disallows abortions and thereby fails to protect children from suffering future neglect.  I know very few women who have not made these difficult choices, in favor of a life.

It is Pride weekend.  When my baby was young, a gay couple moved in down the hall from me.  They were very handsome and very much in love but withering and sick with AIDS.  They were also so kind and loving... they loved the baby so much and came often in their pajamas just to hold him.  One died and the other threw himself off the balcony; I missed seeing this by seconds... but I will remember them especially on Sunday... two men who somehow empathically understood my mothery loneliness-- they embraced me with the baby and the future they would never have, shunned by their families, but enviably with one another in an eternal bond... they healed me like nothing else, and I cared for them as I could, in vain.  I cannot write this song... and my son is a grown man now.  Even the memory of my sadness has a kind of nostalgic sweetness that never shows in those baby photos.  And unlike the little boy who was slapped today, my son never had to worry that it was his fault... that he was wrong... in any way... because he was just so 'right'... and that is a blessing.  Amen.

Liars and In-no-cents

The US attack on Syrian chemical weapons facilities last Saturday garnered little viewership from the American public.  Certainly the Stormy Daniels interview had better ratings; television in general has lost its centrality in our lives.  I couldn't help thinking back to the Desert Storm airstrikes we watched from our sofas with a bit of nervousness and yet the detachment you feel watching someone else's video game.

It was a small maybe calculated distraction from the smeary smutty onslaught of the latest Trumpery-- an executive wielding of power from our clown-at-the-helm who spent the earlier part of the day bashing James Comey in characteristic unpresidential  excrement-slinging-- his usual weapon-of-choice.  Comey... with a quasi-presidential-scale faux-pas on his permanent conscience, or whatever the political version of poor judgement might be called... will have the last laugh in massive book-sales; there will surely be a seven-figure job for him out there...

Then there was the Zuckerberg testimony... the wide-eyed, studious false sincerity of a billionaire who sold out our privacy, claiming his innocence with every sycophantic reply, sugared over with
an overdose of courtesy and those huge, bloodshot deer-eyes dripping with candor, watery from his contact lenses.  It rivaled the Steve Cohen testimony... he didn't remember, he didn't know... who was actually less culpable than these Facebook thieves.  Nothing in this world can be undone.  The sins of the billionaires have shifted the axis of our political and social morality.  Nothing is free; everything is bait... and we like fish have hook-holes in our palates.  Nothing will ever be the same.  The end of the innocence, what little there was in the well-trod sites and pages of New York before the 70's, the 90's my friends visit frequently... anything but this.

The Wall Street Journal reported that the vast majority of medical and drug trials are not reproducible... that data is manipulated, cooked... so we are given medications and treatments to benefit manufacturers, and do little for our health which is nothing but a vague platform for massive financial gain.  We are the poor guinea pigs, obediently swallowing things, following instructions like schoolchildren... led down useless paths in our quest to cope with pain and the sicknesses that are byproducts of our culture.  There will be a small slap on the wrist.. and then we will go on... Zuckerberg's net worth will dip and then re-surge, as he promises vigilance, having thrown us all under the bus irrevocably.

An eight-year-old this week brought a knife to school and slashed his fellow students.  Sort of a flip-side to the story of the pre-school teacher who threatened a toddler with a slashing.  As I read the online version of the eight-year-old article, a huge pop-up ad accompanied the text-- some new state-of-the-art men's underwear in my face, eclipsing the news... like some kind of obscene big-brother shout-out-- the incongruities of this life-- the disconnects and random juxtapositions, the senseless acts of violence which seem to stem from some underlying emotional seismic rumbling-- the discontent, the warped and confusing version of democracy that is America.  How does anyone process, prioritize these disproportionate images, the flash-like brainwashing of Instagram-style imagery... pop Goddesses and queens with very little content but huge coverage-- Beyonce and her untouchable Coachella moment... the new Statue of Liberty? And it is as though she believes her own legend.  The Midas ass.

Where is compassion, where is humanity when the great God of money seems to have cast a golden shadow over us all, like the looming sky-touching penthouses which shadow and obscure our values and connections?  What is truth when lies dominate.. and win?  No longer does the tortoise come out on top.... they are choking on bad meds... while the hares are full-speed ahead with Ritalin and fat purses.  I see fewer and fewer real faces--- features altered and tweaked, bodies re-shaped-- even our most beautiful actors and actresses are compelled to make themselves more beautiful...  Television ads baffle me-- everyone is being urged to change their emotional state, their skin, their hair... Some days I feel as though I'm conducting a social experiment... trying to maintain a truthful commitment to my values, my modest goal to leave something behind in this world-- not a giant monument or a building facade, but a few songs or lines or poetry that might somehow find their way into a heart and sit there, like a tired passenger-- like company.  I am left behind... no seat for me on this bullet train of the culture which lies to me, which poses and manipulates and convinces... we must all be beautiful, we must all be young.. we must all watch this and that and have this and that... and those that cannot are angry and bitter and desperate.  All of us unhealthy... and there is contagion.

Yesterday on Lenox Avenue I collected 41 pennies between 110th and 126th... lying there on sidewalks like a trail left by some lost angel, like tiny sentries of some lost currency-- little copper discs that somehow made sense although very little cents... in 2018 terms... no one else wanted them... and I collected them.. from the damp street.. like tiny rescues... I tried to make some meaning of the small weight they became, of the cumulative purchase power... of the fact that they were free, they were gifts.. outside the Dollar store where people were hoarding bargains they mostly don't need-- piling packages of cookies and chips and frozen dinners into huge sacks... I wanted to stop them... to tell them something... but no one is going to listen to an aging woman who seems poor and powerless and maybe a bit mad.  I am mad.... I am angry-- not slasher-angry but beating-heart upset.  A penny for my thoughts here? No, actually, not even that.

The See of Faces

My doorman yesterday complained that Hip hop is dead.  He is not even 30-- a former gang-member and South Bronx graffiti tagger-- hooked into the pulse of this culture.  I informed him that he is in the very beginning phases of becoming a cranky-old-man in New York-- which isn't necessarily a bad thing.  We both agreed-- he with his 10 years of artistic perspective, me with my 40-something-- there is a negative progressive pattern here-- like things are born, seem maybe edgy for a minute-- the sharp cry of a wet newborn-- and then they get swaddled-- muted-- begin to blend into our smoggy web.  The imitators and false inventors steal ideas, re-mix… become soon vapid and diluted in the sea of pretenders where art and originality are sadly drowning in the sewage-laced tide.

Walking through the city in this sweltering August weather-- everyone with their plastic bottles and iced lattes, showing off all their tattoos... people taking selfies in the heat... like some kind of tropical paradox… an urban jungle-hell.   I can't help thinking-- things seem to matter less in this oppressive atmosphere… not just the obvious things like clothing-- but ideas and substance.  I feel dumbed down and less passionate-- in a way, maybe less sad.  It's easier to mourn in the fall, in the winter.  Everything seems overlit and even tears, except for cranky sweaty babies in strollers, seem to evaporate before they are born.

For some reason today I'm reminded of that Saramago book-- where everyone in a city is suddenly stricken with white-blindness… searching for water, food-- compassion-- in a kind of living sightless hell.  Where would we be, without the 'see' of faces… with our iPhones and our instant images?  Someone complimented me yesterday on my writing.   I did not reply that it is my public attempt to try to make some kind of artistic and personal sense of what I am able to see, because I begin to suspect-- with everyone absorbed in their phone, that there is an epidemic of reality-blindness

Essentially I am disappointed, like my doorman, in core content-- even in the media spinners-- they err and misspell, they gloss over and misinterpret, they write with their thumbs and think with someone else's ideas.  Music is so plentiful and cheap… a sea of white rice-- of disconnected words and endlessly recycled notes and ideas… of 500 million beat combinations or notes on Jay-Z-blue screens that will be processed in nano-second installments while people are reading the news, breaking up with their girlfriend, checking the score and weather, pre-ordering their smoothie, reserving an uber to some random place which is over-designed and soul-less but where the food is excellent.

In this urban world of 9 thousand TV channels and an internet where every page offers you 1000 options and distractions--  where people experience museums and concerts via their phones, after the fact-- where everything is shared, inhaled and posted-- we seem have lost the art of description.  We are so over-dependent on visuals now-- the number of photos on the web has increased like a hyper expanded universe of infinite space… we no longer have the skill to digest and interpret, express our opinions and passions with art and words and music the way a great chef has to simmer a sauce for hours-- it's all too quick and easy.  

I read a biography of one of my Ab-ex painting heroes… yes, it was great to have some of the anecdotes and details I hadn't known… but there were so many typos and mistakes in the text… I began to doubt everything.  Even the address of her studio-- 2 different buildings on one street?  I need to know-- to go there and dream.   Only one of them with walls that held the great minds and talents of New York in the 1950's-- where floors were covered with paint  spatters and scuffs… where artists had paced, jazz musicians had vented, cigarettes had been stubbed out, bottles had been thrown, glasses smashed, bodies had ground themselves in passionate episodes-- where canvases had been stretched and transformed into museum content.  But which one was it?  It reminds me of the stories I hear every day of people who slept with Elvis, played with David Bowie, traded needles with Lou Reed… documentaries of interviews and hearsay… talking heads reaching into some kind of past with selfish hands and plucking feathers and treasures they turn into lucrative souvenirs.  And who is here to contradict, to witness, to contest their accuracy?

Maybe I'm sick of hearing everyone's version of someone else.  Art has become kind of a Selfie-- like those cardboard portraits of people in Times Square-- you get your picture taken with Beyonce and suddenly there you are, the two of you-- as though this really was a memory.  People insert their input into something pre-existing… pre-recorded-- a remixed album with their own picture on the cover? Like one of those Mad Magazines from the 1960's with the crazy image of Alfred E Newman on the US dollar or Kanye West photo-shopped onto Mt. Rushmore.  Who can tell the truth now? And who knows the truth?  You do, actually.  I do.  But how can we approach art without the message because we don't know where its truth is? We don't have time, or patience to find it-- or does it matter?  People take the cake out of the oven before it's even baked… and in fact the batter is from an instant mix and it tastes sad and artificial.

I spent years trying to find a lost love in someone else's face… and realized at last that the soul of him is all that's left and I must try to honor that-- to write lyrics about him and try to conjure the sense of him, and the kind of songs he would have written had he lived.    In Brooklyn people remember when Marilyn and Arthur Miller briefly walked the streets in love, had their first moments of passion… she the larger-than-life movie star, he the intellectual playwright with the cool Jewish heart of guilt.  An unlikely couple in a world where everyone wanted to touch her, see her, be her-- and then even her husband fell for another woman-- moved on.  Where was this building?  I want to know.  I want to know definitively where Grace Hartigan's first studio was.  It matters.  Not a google-image or to take a selfie in front of it; I want to see it.  I want to describe it somehow… to absorb its memories and sorrows and ghosts-- to listen to its story.

Recently I've become interested in the Rescued Film Project.  A photographer takes old rolls of undeveloped film and puts them through a difficult and tedious process to not just develop them, but to scan them and enhance them with digital technology so we can see images from even damaged negatives.  Most of these are old.  Some rolls are from World War II.    Most of the people are gone now; the children would be old people-- streetscapes are nearly unrecognizable.  They are inherently nostalgic and sad.. but somehow we trust these images; we are moved by them.  They tell a truth which cannot be manipulated or changed or  photo-shopped.  Somehow this past feels like part of us in a way that so much of the present moment does not.  We can't identify the people but somehow we sense their story, and we sense the invisible photographer.

My mother's old photo album is only maybe 40 pages.  There are under 100 photographs and I know most of them by heart.  When my son was small I didn't have money to develop much film.  I don't have as many photographs as my friends do-- certainly I have fewer than an average American family takes these days on an average vacation.  But I never forgot to look.  I remember, I cherish the moments; each one is like a musical passage in the symphony of my son's childhood-- deliberate and meaningful and memorable.

In some cultures there are 100 words for snow, maybe 50 words for the smell of wood-- I want to know these things, to understand something.  I have learned that I can only try to find my own truth, to wade through the 'See' of faces and find my own familiar footholds among the embellished and re-processed people, the invented stories and misinterpretations… to try to wrap my brain around the incontrovertible fact that even this meteor shower we might be able to witness--- if conditions are right, because with all our photoshopping we can do nothing about the actual weather or cloud coverage-- think about this--- this is already a nearly 1000 year old episode we are just finally able to see.  It puts things into perspective.

My doorman will continue to prefer his vintage Hip-hop-- the way music sounded to him when he began to sense some meaning in life-- the way he connected.  Was it better then?  He is sure that it was. I have to say I think I agree.     I read about things like singularity, I hear digitally produced music,  admire the incredible capacity and speed of iPhones and technology, and I still prefer the varied texture and slow vulnerability of the analogue and hand-held.  I have yet to take a selfie.  I have yet to pinpoint my place in the culture of the present, with the mega-quantities of data and where a modern version of art is generated and disseminated in quantity.  I guess I am not ready for the future.  Like the astronomers with their very advanced telescopes and devices, the metaphorical lesson of the Perseids-- we have come all this way to get a clarified view and everything we see clearly is the past.

You, Too…..

For the last 8 years, I take this weekly Latin hip-hop dance class.  The teacher is this dread-locked, sexy, ultra-talented dancer/percussionist/DJ who choreographs routines to great Latin and Brazilian music I wouldn't otherwise get to hear.  Lately he's been playing this version of U2's  'I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For' with a samba beat, and Spanish lyrics--- it's fantastic and grooving and nostalgic all at once.  The chorus is in English… as though there's no translation for this lyric.

I remember well when this song came out-- I was fortunate to be a guest on the Lou Reed/U2 tour and I saw from stage left-- at Wembley-- and other massive stadiums, night after night, Bono come out and sing these lyrics with compelling personal passion.  Backstage the band was all hanging out with various supermodels-- who knows what was going on in his head-- a young mid-life crisis-- a confession, a genuine plateau of confusion, as often happens when people encounter that kind of massive success:  questions rather than answers?  He was sweet and adorable and at some kind of peak in every way, and when he sang this song, he made himself vulnerable… it was like an anthem of self doubt.

But it wasn't until this week, doing my little steps and turns, that it suddenly occurred to me that the lyric doesn't mean just this unfinished search for some kind of answer, but maybe the writer hasn't a clue what it is he is even looking for.  Seems so simple--- but all these years, I didn't get it.

Anyone observing my dance class would undoubtedly see all kinds of 'lost' people: the tattooed and outfitted girls who are living their Beyonce and Janet Jackson fantasy--- the older Hispanic women who shake their hips with real soul and sexiness, the men who can't seem to get the rhythm in their body-- the over-50 women who bare their midriffs that no one wants to see-- one who wears a leather bustier and even manages a split.  It's a little over the top, and one wonders what drives these people… there's significant competition for the front row, and having our teacher grab one of us for a few bars is a coveted reward.  I lose myself in the music-- it's exotic and different, and I'm beginning to understand the bass rhythms.

At the end of the class, there's a cool-down to this Brazilian version of a Bryan Adams song.  Another guy who, in the late 1980's, was looking for his heaven in the arms of the British princess.  He bought himself a house and moved over there, wrote her a couple of songs-- the tabloids printed stories of their affair…who knows?  I'm sure he was devastated by her death.  I guess he didn't quite know what he was looking for-- neither did the Princess, apparently.  Or she knew what she wasn't looking for, which  made the royal family uncomfortable.

I never found what I was looking for in London, although I thought I did, briefly.  As often happens in life, the answer we find doesn't necessarily take us through the next set of questions.  Our lives don't stop-- they roll on endlessly, with our own high and low tides and storms and days of calm.  Sometimes what we most want passes us by when we're asleep or obsessing about something useless.  We fail to love the person in our path because they don't look exactly like our current version of love, and then it might be too late.

As I get older, I think I spend less time waiting.  I used to love the periods in my life when I was pining for some boy or man, crossing off days on my calendar until he came.  There was nothing like those days and nights-- they felt lit up, enchanted-- thrilling.  But these days, I am inclined to reach out and embrace whatever I find in my path.  I love going to flea markets and thrift stores-- you never find anything you want, but the random discovery is what makes these visits amazing.  It's like scraping the bottom of some strange ocean with a net and coming up with a shell or a plant or some amazing rock.  Useless but  day-changing.  You take the thing home and it becomes part of you.

I watch people drop off donation boxes to thrift stores-- the book boxes are sad and predictable--- college textbooks, marriage manuals, What to Expect When You're Expecting, Solve Your Child's Sleep Problems, some Steven King and Joyce Carol Oates, then fitness and diet books, retirement planning, sometimes books about healing or cancer… then self-help books, manuals on depression, dealing with death, meditation tapes-- -a Bible… and there you have it… a man who maybe found what he was looking for, at least on a Barnes and Noble bookshelf,.. and then, like all of us, realized that we have limited options at the end.

Night after night, people dig through our trash on my corner--- looking.  People buy Lotto tickets-- it's uncanny the numbers of dollars spent because they believe they are going to win-- that they will be able to have what they are looking for.  The belief factor-- is mind-blowing.  People of limited income will spend a small fortune over a lifetime… convinced that the next ticket is going to be 'it'.

My rich neighbors seem to have more money than they can count-- -some of them get into collecting.  Men buy expensive guitars which they'll never play like a young hungry musician who cannot do anything but play, because he has no choice, and his heart is already full of music.  These wealthy guitar owners will never find what he has, but they might look around-- play a little, feel something-- fantasize about a different life.  One of my friends tells me she is working at a soup kitchen some nights-- feeding the homeless.  She is looking for something, maybe… paring away at her guilt because she is extremely fortunate… and doesn't realize that this system is failing the truly oppressed and underfed… but she is not looking there, not walking through East Harlem at 3 AM and seeing the numbers of bodies looking for cans and bottles, or dreaming under boxes and blankets-- dreaming of something they may or may not have found.

I think I now know it is the looking that matters--- not really the finding.  And the richest things we find are rarely if ever the ones we are looking for, because life doesn't work that way.  The best we can do is keep postponing the ending, because the finding will go on and on, and that is a gift in itself.  It's just a matter of trying not to predict or ask-- and accept the random order of life as it is, because some things are so constant-- the light and dark, the sky, the stars and moon, the seasons, moving the clock back one hour as we will all obediently do this weekend--gaining an extra hour of looking, maybe an hour of shivering in the cold or rain, an hour of love, of music, of a hotel room you have bought for a night of love, of time spent writing a song, of pain, of pleasure, of looking, as I will see it, because it might just be the hour when I will find something I wasn't looking for at all, like a poem,  and it will be enough.

Sister of Mercy

Did you ever forget the moon?  So absorbed in my earthly noise I have been -- my unfinished projects and my issues-- I completely neglected to look 'up'.  And there it was-- a little tired, but brave enough to follow me all the way up the East River Promenade tonight, reminding me to breathe-- and by the end of the path, venturing to glow on the stage of my admiration -- streaking across the water as it used to, working its magic and mischief.  After all, it's been so faithful and steadfast, this moon-- through its moods and phases-- tolerant while we invent galaxies and downgrade planets-- weathering sun storms and eclipses, asteroids and even human invasion, name-calling and privacy violations-- patient while we blame it for all sorts of things from floods to madness….

Being the Jewish 'Day of Atonement', the city felt just a little subdued.  The Pope will arrive tomorrow; I am obsessed with this. No matter how I steel myself, I cry watching the news coverage;  we are all so moved by his message of mercy (except Donald Trump, so far-- one meeting I could never envision-- Pride and false power vs. Humility and true spiritual majesty).   I thought about my old father-- the one that hates me, that will not forgive me-- the one who observes this day with ritualistic austerity, who asks for forgiveness for his sins, but does not seem to be able to forgive himself, or me.  Maybe that is key: I remind him of himself? His shortcomings?  His failures?  We are so different-- he, the war hero, the emotional stoic-- and me, words and confessions freely flowing through my music and art.  I danced, I sang, I asked questions and experimented and felt things out… I was punished and silenced-- as an adult, I was shunned.

My religion is one of forgiveness and compassion-- not many rituals or ceremonies, but a commitment to honesty and to listening-- to apologizing not to a deity but to those I may have hurt.  On the run along the river, I passed the old site of my son's pre-school-- some warm memories, and one terrible one.  I was trying to resurrect my musical career- went to Nashville for an overnight-- left him, with written explicit instructions, with his father.  One night.  In the morning I received a call from the pre-school; my son had arrived alone; he'd been unable to 'wake' his visiting Dad, got himself dressed and toddled off to school.  He was 3.  Anyone with a child knows how dangerous the city can be, and getting from home to school for a toddler is fraught with obstacles.  He managed to latch our front door behind him, but had forgotten a coat.  It was a rainy November day.  He crossed streets and Avenues, walked underneath the 59th St bridge.. on his own, smart as he was, he knew every landmark on the way.  He arrived a bit early-- (who tells time at 3?), determined but soaked and freezing.  The school contacted me, informed me if I did not appear by the end of the day, they were calling Child Services.  I managed to get on the next plane, left my career somewhere behind, and found my son happily playing, wearing the unfamiliar school spare overalls and sweatshirt… his Dad had been sleeping on the floor, he explained... he couldn't wake him… he didn't  want to be late, was afraid he'd done something wrong…

How do you forgive a parent whose substance use over-rides his obligation to a child?  I couldn't stop inventing scenarios of true horror and thanking our angels for watching over my boy.  I'd left my suitcase in Tennessee-- my husband (ex) was gone when we got home.  The fridge was filled with cans of Sam Adams; the house smelled of whiskey and puke.  There was a stain on the floor.  I'm not sure my son even remembers this incident… at a certain point he was unwilling to talk about anything personal; he drew his boundaries in.  For me, I don't understand how his father, whom we have not seen for some 20 years, and my own, who is rather absent, do not apologize.  I guess they cannot.  Difficult for me to forgive my father.  Somehow I prayed my husband would make things right, would exorcise his demons and be the man I loved, the father he had once longed to be.  But I had gained clarity regarding my primary responsibility and priorities.

For years my son endured some of the hardships of single parenthood-- small deprivations and painful exclusions from things he wanted to do; in the short run it hurt and I apologized, but I knew this was not lasting.  To a teenager, these material things are everything.  I feel guilty.  I used to feel guilty for everything in my house as a girl.  If the dogs misbehaved, it was my fault-- I loved them, failed to lock a door or put away a stick of butter; when my Dad was awakened and cranky, it was my fault… my fault that he withdrew into periods of silence, my fault that he yelled at my Mom.  My fault that he drank.  My son doesn't feel guilty.  At least there is that.

Further upriver in the moonlight I passed the hospital where my father once stayed and shunned my visits, and I feel angry.  There will be no reconciliation, no prodigal daughter.  I have seen too much and I understand now about shame and guilt, and about his failure to atone for these things.  But underneath the Atonement Moon tonight, I began to forgive myself for not forgiving my father, and I began to feel lighter.

I thought tonight, as I often do, about the story of Jacob and Esau, about the birthright and how in my own family my mother is no longer able to protect me and offer my hand for the blessing to the emotionally blind father.  It is amazing that just one touch, one blessing, was airtight in those days.  Now we have lawyers and wills and greedy petty fights among children for their piece of the financial blessing.  How did people have this kind of trust in those days-- this kind of faith and belief, the power of a word, even in the face of a swindle-- although it was a fated or maybe God-ordained 'switch'?  We don't know too much about Esau's future… but the legacy of Jacob was imperative.

Friday I am going to stand in Central Park for hours to catch a glimpse of Pope Francis.  I will listen to him talk about climate change and compassion, and about mercy.  I pray that somehow he will make the specter of Donald Trump and these overblown non-apologizers a little smaller.  I feel his love-- for children, for all people.  Suffer the little children to come to me, and forbid them not.  The Hispanic child who handed him the letter today, begging for her father's immigration status-- so brave.  And her father-- so proud and so loving of this girl who climbed over the fence to greet this Holy Man in whom she believes.  I pray that we will remember his message of love and his example of humility-- of compassion and forgiveness.  Forbid them not.

On Saturday Beyonce will take the stage in Central Park and all bets will be off.  I can't help thinking Jay-Z planned this juxtaposition, this ironic and slightly hideous synchronicity.  We have short memories, some of us.  We forget, we forbid.  We have a bad night, we recover, we clean up and go on, but some of us fail to recognize what we leave in our wake-- even the one we created without consciousness, without clear brains.  Someone will suffer for this twisted legacy,  the flip side of a blessing, which all too many of us have had to endure until we learn not just to forgive but to ask forgiveness.  To look-- up, down, back and underneath us.  To see, to shine.  

This wise Atonement Moon changed me tonight; even the light in my apartment seems different.  I am trying to let go of impossible wishes and to tend to my own dreams.  And when I 'see' that I have made a wrong turn, there is somewhere… even when our parents and lovers and friends fail us… some version of mercy-- within or without, a kind of embrace-- the brilliant broken moonlight streaking across the black river, like the heart of Pope Francis,  shining.

Goodwill Hunting

One of my bad angels has been playing tricks on me.  Beside the trash can on my corner, she's been leaving small piles of books-- old books, from the 40's, 50's and 60's, the way I love them… Mayakovsky, Celine, Rebecca West-- Chomsky, lectures of Nabokov... some days it's Marx, Engels-- Freud, Jung.   I am compelled of course to bend down, sort through them, be observed by my neighbors as a trash-picker.  Sometimes I explain-- plead-- Take these orphaned treasures… someone!  They will be rained on, spat on, trampled, peed on by over-pampered and un-knowing dogs.  I already own nearly every single one; I pride myself on my home library-- this is my family, my furnishings, my confidants and mentors.  So far I've had one 'taker'… a woman from Boston,  wedding-dress shopping with her daughter, who took pity on The Letters of Virginia Woolf after I guaranteed it.

Moments like these, I realize how I am perceived and perhaps scorned by my neighbors--- or not.  I give it little thought, am inclined to keep the lowest possible profile in my old building anyway, where for me the most venerable tenants are the former fashion editor of the New York Times and her photographer husband, who, 60 years ago, were the red-carpet 'it-couple' of Manhattan.   They were surely omitted from the A and B list of last night's annual Costume Institute gala-- even though their knowledge of fashion history, art, photography, culture in general vastly overshadows that of our new celebrity stars.  How many of the red carpet walkers have actually been to the Museum to view the art, to investigate the sources of the classic designers?  I had a glimpse of Beyonce's typically disappearing dress.  Maybe I'm just old and bitter, but is this not the Emperor's New Clothes in all its finery?  She is essentially naked, with a few wisps of blingy fabric clinging to her.  Much like her performances-- sex and strippery-- with a very few references to actual dance and music.  And if you get close, she is 'lined' with a sort of gut-compressing body-stocking--- not even her actual skin.   And really, no matter how many trainers you have,  do we really want to see what her husband maybe doesn't even look at anymore?

A woman visiting from Paris mentioned to me the other day that New York women had lost their style. Guilty, I say, with great gusto.  Most of them, as far as she can see, are walking around in their gym clothes.  Paris women do not do this.  And then these underdressed women overcompensate at events… they over-dress, over-coif,  wear excessive make-up and jewelry.

For me, like the music culture and the myriads of art galleries, it's hard to keep up with fashion.  Quantity has certainly replaced quality as the statistic of choice.   Young designers have achieved status and success that used to be reserved for the very select few.  Old established firms have been re-branded and taken over by another generation of fashionistas; I wonder if their predecessors would approve.  It all seems to be symptomatic of the creeping epidemic of cheap blingy competitive greed culture eradicating the old Manhattan 'facade' of cool casual deco solidity and replacing it with cheap candy-coated money.

When I was in high school, I had a kind of style.  I wore capes and high-laced boots and extremely short leather and suede skirts.  I made clothes out of vintage material, and I re-processed ice skates and work boots.  For events, I had a couple of prototype Betsey Johnson slinky knits.  They were unique and had a presence.  These days,  at late middle age, I've been through many phases and have learned the value of living my life as I choose, and paying the price.  My friends have branded me a financial anorexic.  I buy nothing, live on $4 a day, mostly, and like Bukowski, I don't discard things until they are utterly unusable.  Bukowski had a kind of anti-style.  He hated shopping, as I do.  Stores embarrass me-- I feel sorry for the salespeople, and sorry for the buyers who pile merchandise in baskets with a kind of desperation.  Thrift shops are filled with things that have never been worn-- sad garments that have lost their appeal and never served a purpose.  I pity these things.  I also have an extremely small carbon footprint.  I don't drive; I only use public transportation.   I don't have air conditioning and I don't buy plastic water bottles.  I do buy art.  I starve for this.  Literally, sometimes.  I also starve for the possibility of creating something that might be considered 'art'.  I feel sorry for artists who are brilliant.  I feel less sorry for artists who are bad,  and think there should be some means of clearing the field, of eliminating the handicapped so the gifted can move forward with a little clarity and support.

The day before yesterday, I went to look at an art auction preview; there was really nothing absolutely compelling, and I switched gears and went to browse a Goodwill store.  As usual, there were the book hoarders, the nerds with iPhones price-checking to see if they could turn a profit on an old record or vintage turntable.  Then there were the smelly women shoppers--- the lonely, neglected and bitter husbandless breed who haunt these thrift shops desperate for a conversation, a chance meeting, an argument.   They criticize and malign not just the goods but their fellow shoppers.  One of these pongy women told me, after I declined to rat on someone who was tearing into an unpriced 'pile', that my apathy is exactly what Hitler wanted from me.  I fear these people sometimes; I have much more in common with them than with my rich neighbors who have contempt for the poor and badly dressed.  I fear their smell, and have to confess I find comfort sometimes in my old quilts and over-laundered sheets.  I tolerate the ghosts of lovers and the soft pliable pages of used books with old cracking bindings and inscriptions of people who are long-dead.

I prize soul over style-- can't imagine Otis Redding or Sam Cooke or Robert Johnson on a red carpet-- maybe an old wide-planked wood floor.  Old leather is comforting.  Old friends, old buildings.  I am soft and pliant like my books-- no longer shiny.  I also feel bad about the people that don't get to sit in with my band and wanted to, I feel guilty for the people who come out and buy more drinks than they can afford, I feel terrible that I failed to buy the Mexican kitchen staff their midnight Cinco de Mayo tequila shots last night,  and I am devastated that the Nigerian painter went to the wrong show and was not on the guest-list.  I feel embarrassed that people must buy my music and books, even when they spend the cost of 100 cds on ridiculous shoes that don't fit.   And I am so sorry to the kind man who keeps offering to take me for incredible meals--I no longer have enough spare gratitude for such things and a decent black coffee is really more than I can accept.

Who am I?  I am someone's mother, and used to be someone's daughter.  I am less prized than formerly as someone's lover.  I play other people's music in old clothes and other people's discarded shoes.  I ride home on the early morning subway with poems in my head and songs in my heart, some of which I will never be able to record.  I will never walk any red carpet, unless it is one stained with my own blood.  Last night a fellow musician told me that he'd listened to my album multiple times--- that it was unique and original and I had my own 'style' of writing.  He'll never know how that feels like an award, a trophy.  One listener.  It is enough. 

HeART Broken

So yesterday I went, with caution and a sprinkling of malice aforethought, to maybe the most unabashedly commercial of all art fairs--- Art Expo New York.  The Pier, and even the trip there, already gives me a little spatial anxiety.   I mean, Macy's is not really my store, and in general, selective people with some kind of style and focus do better in a limited space with fewer exhibitors so they can actually 'see' the inventory.  Old-school art collectors are generally selective.  Even the Armory seems small compared to the scale of the Pier which not only dwarfs the art and the audience, but inherently poses the question: if this is 'art'-- a pricey, unique, manually generated commodity-- why does there seem to be a department-store sense of endless supply and mass-marketed over-availability?

Sundays in Manhattan are special for me…. always a little hung-over, that okay-to-be-late-and-not-answer-phones thing, maybe a tiny bit of church-vibe and spirit-access, and generally no gigs.  No cell, no iPad… just me, my mind and myself-- my new BFF.   On the trek west into the outer-borough of the highway Pier strip, I passed a little 'exhibit' of thrown-away furniture outside an old Hell's Kitchen building.  A filthy, saggy sofa which brought up memories of the first furniture I ever actually ordered and didn't 'acquire'…. with hope, a new husband, a little cool apartment with a patch of river view if you leaned all the way out.  Visions of the parties,  visitors now vanished,  nights of early MTV, dinners and cigarettes, bottles and toasts, stray dogs, sleep-over guests, couch-sex, tears and embraces, good meals and bad meals, Christmas gift openings, proposals, promises, discussions, good reads… and finally one day these members of our furniture family are put out for the Salvation Army or dump-maceration.  It had a certain Tracey Emin vibe, this little configuration of past dysfunction and current disuse… of dreams gone wrong, stained and threadbare relationships finally boundary-expelled from hearts and homes… maybe an illness or death, etc. I had a nostalgic pang of material withdrawal… a little tug at that place where old songs and great paintings nest.

But that sofa was to be the beginning and end of my Sunday art quest.  The minute I entered the cavernous Pier exhibition arena, the vague buzz of muted crowd noise, several music tracks muffled by the space, and the maze of booths-- hundreds and thousands, like one of those shanty-town photos with a jillion temporary homes and the sense of a hundred dramas in every one.  I tried to plan a route, but the scale and the arrangement made it nearly impossible to comprehend even the diagram.  Okay, I admit--- I'm not great with geographic technology.  So I tried to push myself like a shopping cart through a couple of aisles.  There they were-- the after-Picassos, the facile abstracts, the pseudo Harings and Basquiats, the graffiti-pieces, the studenty minimalists, the Sunday painter bad landscapes-- the birds and butterflies, the glitterized club-scenes, the tacky blown-up photographs, the mosaics, the paintings on glass, the ceramic monstrosities.  Then there were the lights-- the neon installations and the LED backed glass pieces, the constructions of found objects which failed to improve on their garbage roots, the gimmicks and crystals.  The mere number of these things-- one came down and another one went up.  Even the intricate webby OCD paintings looked as though they were cranked out by the dozen-- no thought, except --look at ME, I'm an ARTIST!

And then--  the celebrity and especially the rockstar art:  Jim Morrrison as a jigsaw puzzle, Jim Morrison out of spaghetti strokes of some kind of resin-paint, Jim Morrison in blue, Jim Morrison in red, Jim Morrison in red, white and blue, Jim Morrison from postage stamps, the Doors as dog-faces and cartoons.  Objects-- painted, cheap guitars with Bruce Springsteen and Bon Jovi and the Ramones… holograms of the Beatles,  Mick Jagger in candy and Swarovski crystals.  Glass guitars with lights inside, lights outside, black lights-- guitars that play music, and endless digital rockstar cartoons on a loop.

I finally made it over to the 'solo' area, hoping that the one-artist concept would have a little booth-consistency and thematic coherence.   But here were the artists themselves, seated like hopeful dogs at the pound-- waiting to be chosen, acknowledged, petted, taken home.  It was beyond sad.  I had to keep that non-engaged expression on my face because every single one of them, despite my sub-par clothing, greeted me like those Celebrity Apprentice contenders trying to lure customers into their pop-up store so they could log attendance.  Also, being late Sunday afternoon, this was their last shot.  Prices were being slashed, deals were being made.  Or were they? One artist-- the only one whose work caused me to stop and browse-- sheepishly admitted, despite the 'Blue Ribbon' she'd been awarded-- like best-in-show in the mutt competition-- that she had not sold a single thing.  Packing up her wares, driving 12 hours in a rented truck… un packing, building, painting, hanging-- the business cards and photos-- then 5 long days of standing or sitting, including a reception-- making smalltalk to people who haven't a clue, conversing with bitter disappointed fellow artists, hoping for a gallery affiliation…  then the depressing de-installation and the long drive home, with a hole in your pocket.  It was unbearable.

The saddest of all-- was the number of galleries and artists from the Ukraine.  People with a hopeless economy, putting all the eggs they maybe do not even have-- into the basket of this Art Expo, and then losing, like gamblers at the roulette wheel with no chips left.  I tried hard to like the Ukrainian art-- even inquired about price, was told I'd get a huge deal-- maybe $500… then the gallery head who looked a bit like the So You Think You Can Dance host-- quoted $1,000, and I left without a bad conscience.  But we owe the Ukranians a huge apology… in Russian, of course.  I am so sorry…maybe you tried to appeal to the Americans who love the Kardashians and Beyonce and brought the worst stuff you had.

Okay… one 'bright' spot… a gallery from Nigeria, which equally underestimated American taste (or not) and hung stereo-typical African art-- but at least they had soul and panache.  One of the gallery reps-- dressed in a suit despite the oppressive heat of the Pier lights and stale air-- took me in and gave me an analysis of a few pieces-- he was the artist-- and the story, and the symbolism, were truly a revelation.  He was so charming and lovely and full of life and passion, and I so wished I could have liked his work a little more, because he broke my heart.  Maybe 30 years ago I would have taken him home; he's going to be in New York for another week, he wrote on his card, hopefully.  But I'm way beyond this kind of sympathy vote.  All I now have is my ear, my heart, my eyes, my love of art, my passion to see something that rocks my aesthetic world and compels me to sacrifice food, phone, cosmetics, clothing, as I do, to support the artist.

I left at 6, with the sounds of de-installing and the sour stench of disappointment oppressive.  The late afternoon air felt a little better and I had to forego revisiting my sofa for a bus ride, because I really needed to get back to my little haven and remind myself about art and spirit and the smell of old paint.  I miss my Nigerian a little, but I can email him, and hope that he never reads my harsh words here, and that he returns to his country and figures out how not to please people with his art and just hunker down and DO it.  Because the saddest thing of all is the wasted talent-- the human ability to draw and paint and make things, and the desire to do this, and the undeniable skill and uber-skill which really has nothing to do with art because being an artist is solitary and sad and difficult, and you must resign yourself to be unloved-- maybe hated-- and you must sacrifice and become horrible and smelly.  Or not.    You can become a Kardashian.  I'm sure we'll be buying their paintings before long.

The World in a Glass Hat

The word holiday in some cultures means a day of rest-- a day with family, maybe religious services-- prayer, feast, fasting…. but once an 's' is added--- it brings a little angst-- the burdensome part of family-- shopping, clothes, parties you must give or attend, gifts you can't afford, gifts you don't want--people you can't face… the face you cannot fake.  So New Year's Day, in a sense, is a bit of relief.  Of course when I was young, it was a terrible reminder that school was about to begin again, that all the great Christmas anticipation was funneling into the dread of grey-white winter days and afternoon sunsets.  The only bright spot ahead was a snow day or two.

Because I am a musician, and my 'work' is often other people's partying, I have begun to crave solitude.  I love my work, but some nights I admit I fantasize about coming home.  These days, with kids grown, relationships settling into a flattish line, I find myself adjusting to 'the rest of my life' with a tranquility that surprises me.  My ongoing resolution is demanding more of myself and less of others.  I am trying hard to minimize my disappointment with others' failure to honor their own commitments.  But I will never fail to observe this failure, and I will sadly continue to communicate my distress in the interest of truth.

Today I went for a late-afternoon run around the reservoir at sunset.  I had spoken to no one since 5 AM; even my voicemail had a day 'off'.  The winter light at sunset, the incomparable silhouette of my city skyline across the water, like a great circle of architectural dreams, never fails to take my breath away, to remind me I am alive in this magical home of enormous challenges and inspiration.  I went up to Harlem to pick up my modest week's worth of groceries, absorbing the passing soundtrack-- Katy Perry blasting from the skating rink sounded almost symphonic, like the ice-dancers version of the Messiah-- and hockey pucks whacking out their own rhythm; a man leading a bike tour, yelling all kinds of misinformation as he pointed out the sights.  I resisted the temptation to knock him off.

Up in Harlem people chilling-- a girl punching her boyfriend, a couple shouting it out in front of the liquor store where the cashier is encased in a bulletproof booth, a huge man on his flip-phone yelling and gesturing madly 'you ain't LISTENING, bro-- that's your PREDICAMENT'… over and over, like a play.  In south Harlem I am still an outsider--- I am usually the only white person in the grocery store, but they no longer ask for ID when I check out my few items.  People in my neighborhood are impatient; the supermarkets are overcrowded and the shoppers are impatient and angry.  Everything is a delivery.  Up here, people buy less carefully; they wait patiently in line, and they walk slowly.  Occasionally women my age and older argue about pricing and sales, but for the most part, people don't question things.  Handicapped people are everywhere; medical issues mean disability; life with a cane or a wheelchair doesn't seem to frighten them.  Their ambitions have either been thwarted or flattened; they seem to accept what is.  They will never own a condo in the new 200 story monstrosity with a google-worthy view of Manhattan, but they will get foodstamps and a decent project apartment for life. Some of them even have park views… so who is the winner here?

On the way back, passing the monstrous dark loom of Mt. Sinai (the ugly Jewish hospital, according to the central park tour-guide), thinking about the patients inside who marked the New Year from a bed… the first city births, and the first city deaths… those that could not quite drag themselves across the timeline... it occurred to me… if everyone simply told the truth, most of our more complex problems would recede.   If the doctors told them.. you have something we can't cure--- we can give you some poison that will maybe make your tumor suffer just a tiny bit more than the rest of you, but we really haven't a clue…  maybe they would have a choice.   I mean, there are certain drugs that work--- like aspirin-- but the biotech culture will continue to roll us into the trillion dollar irony of health-care.

If people went into a store and realized they really don't need these shoes that are $400…in fact, they really only need the ones they have… and if they went to pay for something, and owned that they really don't have enough money, because isn't that what a credit card is saying?  If the cable television executives and the huge entertainment companies just came out and said.. well, all of this crap we're promoting… it's pretty terrible; you don't need to watch it, and we don't need to make it anymore…
If the Academy one year decided to abolish awards because they really don't have many actors of the standard for which these awards were intended.  In fact-- what is competition and awards?  We either have the drive to be the best we can, or we don't.

And Jay-Zee and Beyonce, the so-called NYC 'royalty'… they would be dethroned because really all they have is a shitload of money, and a smart team of 'branding' experts.  And what is branding?  It used to be the cruel mark cattle ranchers burned into animals who are then 'property' and can be marketed, bred, tortured, killed, eaten-- whatever, for profit.  We live in a branded world-- of copyrights and lawsuits and copycats because so little seems original in the way that Mozart and Bach were original-- or Caravaggio or Leonardo.  Branding simply enables the exponential financial growth of mediocrity n this world where so-called experts 'authenticate' a work of art which is not original in the first place.  And if there was no lying, we would not need any of these people.

In fact, this middle-aged couple sitting next to me in Starbucks who obviously met online-- she is an aging Russian beauty with now-dyed hair, and a touch too much make-up, she is looking into his eyes with this desperate glow, like the new LED Christmas decorations on Madison Ave. which look happy but really lack the soul and 'life' of the old ones.  And he is telling her about his child support payments, and she is trying so hard because she needs a husband, even though he is a bit old, and he is lying to her, it is quite obvious he is a fool and a fake, and she is lying to him, too, because she hasn't paid her rent for months, even though she has an expensive haircut and a shopping bag.

Downtown so-called poets are reading Bukowski in an annual festival.  People who imitate and celebrate Bukowski, as though by reading these words, they will become poets, even though Bukowski himself would have told them, this is not poetry, and what was good about him was that he simply tried to tell the truth.  Isn't that what art used to be and when artists made art about lying, well, were they not honest about that?  And somewhere we all know about truth-- children don't lie, at least not until they learn that this is a very useful tool for getting something that they need.  If we consume artificial food we become sick and die… our flesh and blood know this-- but we don't seem to 'get' that we are a bit starved for art and music, some of us-- and for love, real love-- not the invented kind, and maybe even for a sense of God, a real sense of our soul, and we overcompensate with this competitive greed-culture… we stuff and stuff ourselves with crap…. and here we are on the streets, beating people for their iPhones, and paying masters-of-lying surgeons money we do not have to make us look like people we think have better lives than we have.

In Shanghai people stampeded at a New Year's celebration; one theory was that this was triggered by a paper shower of fake $100 bills thrown from a balcony.  The irony of the story was so poignant, so revolting, and so tragically 'real'.  Here we are, the untrammeled of us-- we have the gift of life, and we grow up knowing we must clothe our naked bodies, this is 'civilization', maybe the first 'lie'… but it is also protection, and has a meaning.  Still, we have our eyes, and our ears, and our mouths, and we have invented learning and books, and we can create… we can learn, we can discover…we can look back at our old year and see where we have failed to see, where we have been misled and fooled.

The blessing of the New Year is the illusion that we are turning a page, that we can start clean, we can start over.  Of course, as any addict knows-- it is not this easy, but we believe-- -and for that midnight moment-- the one that walks across the global timeline, hour by hour, country by country… we are all given this chance, together-- this annual chance, or the illusion of it, because it of course belongs to all of us, at every moment.  And we are human, and we will continue to fail to understand this, because we are too busy toasting our own selves, our false happiness or our refusal to be sad or lonely or truthful, and acknowledge that our enormous success or our abysmal failure… there is really little difference, it is part of our process, our life, which tragically, like the Shanghai victims, where we reach for something which glitters and it is death… the truth may feel like failure, but if we are truly honest, we will never fail ourselves.  As Sylvia Plath said in a privileged moment of clarity, and I remember this poem so well from my girlhood… 'we have only come to look'.

I Want the Angel

A few of my friends are hoping for induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.  I heard a radio DJ lamenting the other day the 'slim pickings' of this year's pot.  Somehow the recent nominees (and I am personally guilty for my blues Hall of Fame induction) don't have the 'weight' of Chuck Berry or Elvis or the Stones.  Kurt Cobain.  But they will hang on the wall nevertheless.  There's got to be an internet abbreviation for that.  NTL.

Same with R & B.  Somehow I don't process the Las Vegas-style spectacle of Beyonce as deserving the same category of a Sam Cooke or Otis Redding.  What was it she received at the VMAs?  The Michael Jackson Vanguard award? Entertainer of the Year.   Her husband bestowed this on her, having reserved this title previously for himself.  Awards and accolades have become cheap.  The Halls of Fame should be closed.  Let's skip a Nobel prize year.  I can't see that Patrick Modiano has the resonance of say Neruda or  Eliot or Hemingway.  Tagore.  When I was a student I anticipated this award with the greatest interest.  Now…I can't get through too many Alice Munro stories without craving some 'meat'.  It's literature 'lite'.

The night of the VMAs someone sent me a video of a Nigerian kid playing a funky home-made drum kit.  He was about 11, with true rhythmic brilliance and innovation.  I nominate him for Entertainer of the Year.  He didn't seem to have a TV and the dancers in the dirt didn't give a shit about Beyonce.  Anyway, with the Ebola crisis it would be too difficult to bring his family and friends over here.  That kid definitely has some kind of fever.  The good kind.

I met this painter at my gym.  The self-designated kind, who claims great success.  He's a health freak, so already he doesn't make it in my book where chain-smoking, self-destructive behaviors and utter disregard for dangerous toxins are kind of an industry standard.  He uses acrylics.  No turpentine or oil-based fumes for him.  Artists are dumb, he tells me.  They have no broad vision.  Isn't that the very definition of an artist?  Do we really think those Nobel laureates set out to win a Nobel Prize?  They wrote because they were compelled to write, because their demons kept them awake at night stabbing their heart and informing their lovemaking and wrecking their homelife.  Do I have any need to see this guy's paintings?  I do not.  I have already seen them, about a million times over.

How often have you read that we only use ten percent of our brains, and that is surely twice the national average? I vouch for the fact that I use one percent of my computer, but my keyboards wear out way before the cpu.  I have become 21st-century co-dependent partly because I am often unable to read the lyrics I ink-scrawl in the dark.  But have you ever watched one of those 1970's prison-escape movies?  Those guys used at least twenty percent of their brain figuring out how to make tools, and strategizing their one-shot-of-a-life.  It knocks me out.  Or when you love someone-- really, really crave and long for to the exclusion of all normal human need…what part of our brain is that testing?  Or those dogs that make it back across country, to their rightful family?  I want that GPS.

Just because some random genius existed who warranted the invention of some award category--- it doesn't mean that this is going to become an annual red-carpet event around which the media can create another fashion extravaganza.  This is what art was meant to be.  The rest of us are just hacks in an industry.  A Babe Ruth or Lou Gehrig didn't have personal trainers and coaches but they hit the proverbial ball out of the park.

When I was really small, my Mom took me to see The Music Man with Robert Preston on Broadway.  I was absolutely hypnotized.  This was of course a kind of prototype of the now-standard music industry hoax.  But as I get older, I begin to see the truth in his 'think method'.  I'm essentially just a blue-collar bassist… I learned to play not from Juilliard or Berklee… but by belief.   I still play once a week in one of those NYC jams… and I hear plenty of musicians struggling with their egos--- some hacking away at some kind of mediocrity which still evades them-- some ineptly executing some idea which has validity.  But most of them are up there because they think they can play.  They watch these award shows, and they hear the non-auto-corrected performances on late-night TV and they wonder why they have a day job.  Why no one calls them for a gig.

Go to Chelsea on any Saturday.  Galleries are filled with gapers and collectors.  Prices are rarely on the wall because it is a kind of financial obscenity.  People used to ally themselves with a particular dealer or POV because they loved art and needed to understand, needed to see.  Now it is cheap and overabundant, like crude oil, and seems to have outlived its own purpose.  There is too much of it, there are no filters… like music… and we are seeing the visual version of the youtube and American Idol phenomena.  The rich artists have become whores and jump from gallery to gallery because they are a brand not a genius.

There is a kind of artist's heaven.  I believe this.  Not a hall of fame, and you will be brought there if you have created something worthy and new-- if you have had the patience and strength in this culture to have nurtured your 'egg' until a tiny creation pecked its way out…. no matter if it croaked or sang or flew or was bought or recorded or adopted by anyone.  You will be judged naked and without make-up.  An angel will be sitting on a kind of carved throne with a parchment book and will write your name with a quill and celestial blue ink.  Not gold.  Even if you have made mistakes and injected drugs and are guilty of all seven sins simultaneously.  Maybe that will actually be a prerequisite, because we are after all humans, we who 'think' and occasionally envy and then go hungry and alone into our dark cork-lined closet-rooms with the traffic noise and the banging and the ghosts and the party next door  and the perpetual winter ahead.

When my son was 2 years old, we belonged to a church which had an annual Christmas pageant/service.  All the small children dressed up as some character in the manger, and went up to the altar when their character in the story was mentioned.  So my little boy, wearing a home-made star costume, was having nothing to do with the procession… fine.  Suddenly, during the sermon,  he must have toddled up the aisle, and in front of the TV news cameras and the crowd, I see him tugging at the minister's cassock… and the great man (he was 6' 4") bends down, and my little boy who was precociously verbal and referred to himself in the 3rd person--  has suddenly connected some mental or religious dots, and announces … He needs to see the star.  So to everyone's amusement, he is lifted up to the top of the great tree and this is not enough because he says audibly and clearly, with gravity…He needs to TOUCH the star.   And he is lifted up, way up-- to touch the glittery decoration on top of the wonderful tree, after which he matter of factly toddles back to our seat at the rear of the Church to great applause.

My son, who was totally unaware of his congregational '15 minutes'  at the age of two,  became a great athlete.  Aside from the trophy-culture,  and some genuine life-ambition, he never really had the need to do anything audience or award-worthy.  But I like to think about that Christmas Eve every so often, especially watching some faceless starlet in a blingy gown coming up to some over lit stage to receive some cheap moon man.  As for me,  I want the angel.

Temporary Beauty

Satur-days I am in Chelsea.  Way west, toward Chelsea Piers, the gentrification is extreme.  Commercial square footage is among the priciest in the city now, and the extravagance of the mandatory volume requirements (i.e., vast empty space) in these galleries and occasional fashion boutiques flaunts money.  But for me, it's a proverbial walk in the park-- especially at 11 AM, before the crowds.

Most of the art these days is predictable or pretentious.  The best of it is studenty and overpriced.  Something must pay these rents.  That means you, Mr. 21st century trendy collector with the decorator and the art advisor with the birkins and Balenciaga and absolutely no sense of 'context' or taste.  There used to be a benchmark.  Go to any estate sale at an auction house these days--- there are the 'A' level works of art-- the eccentric furniture and porcelain objects, like an inanimate 'menagerie'-- lush carpets, jewelry… some hideosities and mistakes--but the sense of a personality--- the sense of passion and a point of view.  Of things cherished and used-- of a life.  Not so these days:  apartments look cold and excessively under-decorated.  Furnishing priorities are design, status and then comfort. The paintings are awkward and uncomfortable in their environment--- like they are waiting to be resold.   Like the exhibitions, these works of art have the permanent vibe of the Temporary.

Whatever.  Among the 'shoppers' and tourists in Chelsea there are also the rich young dwellers of these overpriced apartments and loft-like condos which are selling like caviar hotcakes in a city where one million dollars no longer 'cuts it'.  They are buyers or renters of this transient art which has become the biggest status symbol of all.  On Saturday mornings the young handsome fathers are out with their kids--- with the scooters and the bikes and the painted skateboards and the designer hoodies and hats.  They look slightly hung over and exhausted--- yesterday's club kids having to get up on the nanny's day off and 'feel' fatherly.  Many of them have dogs-- these distract and lighten their load with the kids who are often annoying and cranky.  This is their 'day'.  All week they have to follow pre-school rules and vie for their nanny's approval.  But all bets are off today.  They are going to milk their exhausted Dad for everything.  Of course there is always shopping-- a new toy or a $9 cupcake pacifies for long minutes… but nothing compares to a meltdown or a tantrum outside of Comme des Garcons.

Yesterday one of these Dads was lighting up against a 22nd St. wall.  He was boyish and handsome, his shirttails out… his hair uncombed, his face unshaven in that charming way.  His 5-year old daughter was poised perfectly on her Razor, designer helmet on, blond hair cascading down, shiny and smooth… but his 3-year old… was laid out on the sidewalk--- screaming, pounding.  Ohhh yeah, I am thinking, as the father actually pleads with me-- Help.  What do I do now?  I note the absence of a wedding ring.  This, I don't say, is what you get for cheating on your wife.  She has stuck it to you now.  No more weekends… your youth is going to be eaten up with tantrums and toilet training and teachers whining about your lack of participation and manipulative teenage drama.  And not only that.  He is thinking---we had this baby--- this perfect little angel, here.  Magazine-ready.  Looks great in clothes-- sings like a young Beyonce.  So… we go for another.  This is the Manhattan baby competition.  And the second one--- colicky, cries all the time, has sensitive skin, constant diaper issues-- up all night… all the ingredients of a potential high-school nerd.  You go for cocktails after work… you flirt with your co-workers, come home.  Weekends you feel guilty that you 'love' one child more than the other.  And you-- you're the Dad… the girls go shopping, you're stuck with the baby boy.  He doesn't like you either.  He prefers the nanny.  So do you.  Your wife's best friend hints about it… and now you've got 2 pricey apartments, and no more free Saturdays.  You're even losing your urge because it's no longer a quickie and a cheat, it's another potential baby craver.

Yeah, I had one of those husbands.  I mean--- I could smell it on him-- the okay, now I have everything I ever wanted---the wife I craved, the baby…and now… for my next….  And the thing is--- I felt this too.  I felt the 'what now' claustrophobia and restless malaise.  So I left.  I let the guy off the hook.  And I took the child with me.  I didn't want my baby boy to have tired cranky Saturdays with a father who craved a bottle in the same way his son needed one.

The Chelsea father joined me on my art jaunt.  I carried the 3-year old.  He just needed a little bit of love.  A cookie.  His mother.  His Grandma.  I could do this…I was going home, going to a gig… no kids, no nagging wife, no parental angst-- not these days.  Sure--I have plenty of guilt.  I'm sure my son could tell tales about his deprived youth, although that is unlike him…and I did not actually have the second, less magical child.  I did have a pregnancy-- a daughter-- with a young lover who wanted me but not really the child.  We didn't plan it, but this is a consequence of love and passion, as every teenager knows.  And once you have an actual child, the act of terminating becomes more weighted.  Besides, I wanted a daughter so much… maybe in a selfish way-- the sister I never related to,  my alter ego-- my companion in female crime, my kitchen helper, my fashion consultant, my back-up singer… There I was, Ms. cool single Mom with the sexy young boyfriend, 4 months pregnant still wearing my tight yellow and black checked vintage pants and jumping around with my bass onstage… and it went on and on--- my young lover didn't want to share me, but he couldn't leave… the pregnancy goes on… miraculously-- has its own life---you are radiant and curvy and ripe, and those biological conversations you have with your unborn child-- like no intimacy you will ever experience with any man or person…

Months passed… and after a strange accident on the subway, and a few days of worry, everything seemed fine--- until an early labor pang… and I found I had to give birth to a perfect little girl who was too perfect for my world.  It is an unbearable loss.  I never had a funeral, or a service, and standing there with this father on Saturday, holding this strange miserable little boy-- I relived my dilemma.  Maybe I felt I didn't deserve closure.  How could I celebrate my grief, when I failed this baby in the way that this father was failing his son… somehow--- I was so cavalier and took things for granted--- my adorable son.. and now he would have this perfect sister-- little Edie was her name-- she would have braids and a rag doll… I could see her in the sonogram, sucking her little elegant fourth finger, just the way I did… she was graceful and talented… and now she was a loss, a failure--- an angel, a provider of perfect little organs for other newborns, a giver… and I was the loser, the mourner, the lady in black.

The father asked me for my number.  I gave him a look… he needed a mother, too.  A friend.  I don't have a phone, I said.  I'm not letting him off the hook, even though I'd like to… even though I let my husband off the hook because I couldn't bear having him look at his son with this utter disappointment which wrecks kids.  And my little Edie…  who never disappointed me;  it was I who disappointed her.  Still, after all these years, I pray every day that her little rag doll spirit has been born into some island culture where children aren't competitive possessions and eating disorders and plastic surgery and Coachella is not on the agenda.  As for me--- I have a newborn-shaped hole in my heart which is quite permanent, at least in the temporary context of my so-called life.