Song-righter

All young mothers are aware of their children's 'witching hour'... that time of day when little over-simulated egos seem to disintegrate into a state of non-cooperation.  Some have tantrums; experienced parents become skilled at ignoring these, teaching their kids a healthy lesson that drama has little traction in this world.  But for others it becomes a contest of sort-- two emotional sticks rubbing against one another until there is fire.  It escalates.  

Since my son and I were often alone, one on one... there wasn't much 'currency' in escalation, in all-out war.  We had cues... My Baby Does The Cranky Spanky, I would sing, under my breath... and he would 'get it'.  It took the edge off both of us.  We were connected enough so that he somehow knew I needed a break.  How he grew up-- learned some things from me, but mostly via his own childhood charm and curiosity, is a mystery... a small miracle.  He turned 32 last week.  I can scarcely recall being that age myself-- between marriages, hard into the 80's, wading in every kind of musical water I could find, trying to shed the Ivy League shadow which followed me, sewn to my heels as it was, despite my rebellion.

Now that I'm a senior, I have begun to notice my own elder impatience.  Maybe it's the subconscious awareness that time is short-- although waiting seems painless, temporal space is tolerable... it's more the me-as-audience that is demanding and disappointed.  Are things just 'less' than they used to be?  There's a whole sector of journalism devoted to these subjects... even some of my old Professors, emeriti as they are, reminisce and complain that students today do not have the depth of the older generations.  This could be the nature of nostalgia-- everything in memory seems veiled in some poetic optimism, the beauty of 'gone'.  My local library branch shelves are depleted and limited; surely this must reflect the preferences of the current patrons.  After all, with screen time averaging seven daily hours, something must give.  The deep experience of solitary book reading seems a no-brainer.  

I confess to watching too much pandemic television.  But the new shows-- the Netflix, HBO, whatever I am mostly denied by my economical cable subscription-- they don't tempt me.  My preferences are vintage-- new wave French, Fellini, early Almodovar, Fassbinder... Kurosawa, Bergman... odd things... and anything that shows my New York the way it was, with the yellow taxis and street cars, the deco architecture and men in hats and suits, elegant women... even Harlem in the 40's and 50's looks styled and choreographed.  New shows and series-- their scripts disappoint-- the acting, too. And I fail to see the appeal for grownups of superheroes.  I am maybe missing a gene.

Genetically I come from cranky stock.  My father was the all-time criticizer.  My poor mother slaved over meals; while she was a superb cook and baker, his rare compliment was asking for a second slice. He squinted up his eyes at me, declined to comment even when I had a stellar report card... called me an idiot and a moron, didn't even open the gifts I gave him at Christmas-- or made a remark to the effect of 'just what I wanted' when he had not even looked in the box.  The coffee was always too cold, the toast not burned enough, the soup too thin, the spaghetti overcooked.  Whatever.

Yesterday I found myself standing in line at a Starbucks, redeeming some gift card, tasting a $3.54 cup of stale, tepid coffee... pondering whether I return it, comment and designate myself a cranky old pot who needs attention... or suck it up and drink it.   I looked around and not a single person looked unhappy despite the unappealing pastries and the overpriced boutique drinks that smelled like artificial pumpkin spice.  Everyone was in their phones.. either scrolling, speaking or paying.  I had a card and the process of swiping it and deducting the price of coffee was challenging for the cashier.  I could sense her hatred of all humanity over the age of 60.  We're slow and we don't speak their language.  Our orders require conversation and questions.  What I wanted was the only cup of coffee I didn't brew myself in many months.  I wanted it to be hot and fragrant and exotic and dark-- I wanted it to take me to some mountainside in Africa or Jamaica-- I wanted to be charmed and sated.  What I got was soupy and cold and insulting.  The line behind me was snaky and vibrating... the amount of exhalation in the store was way beyond what is medically recommended these days.  Someone offered me a pour-over but that would take fifteen minutes.  And then what?  More disappointment?  

Is it me?  Are we elder people on a sort of bellcurve of satisfaction, where there is an unavoidable path of return to the crankiness of a toddler-- the impatience, the inability to communicate what we want... Am I unable to experience pleasure? Thrill? Exhuberance?  I sorely hope not.  I do know when I walk through a museum... the paintings are not just decor-- they are landmarks.. they are stories-- I know who painted them and when and what they meant.  When I hear music-- original music--  I can decipher the parts;  I understand the lyrics-- the construction.  I am experienced, in the Hendrix sense. I know this. But I am a little clueless and uninformed re: current culture.  I have to keep asking my son what he means when he uses buzzwords.  Am I defective?  Deficient?  I read... I am interested  in current events... I can't possibly digest the amount of newsworthy text I receive daily from umpteen online journals.  I try.. I read my Facebook messages and empathize with friends... but honestly I am aware I have lost tolerance for the masses of posts and stories... for the music... there is just so much I can process-- just so much I even want to.

Maybe it is overload-- or the residual anosmia from having had Covid. Maybe that coffee will never suit me. I do shun gifts and meals... although my beloved friend anonymously delivers fresh fish to me. This is something I can manage... the color and the sheen and the simplicity.  It comes from the sea... it is simple, relies on me to prepare.  

But maybe it is my slow-hand adjustment to pre-pandemic 'normalcy'. Truly, I have never been normal.  I expect more from artists and friends, even from local coffee culture.  Our masks suppress a certain amount of disgruntlement and horror.  With my eyes I expressed revulsion at the family of loudmouths on the subway Saturday whose tasteless criticism of urbanites maybe rivaled my feelings toward them. Go away, I wanted to say.  Maybe I need another quarantine from which I'll emerge fresh and loving and non-judgmental. Unfortunately I have a brain. 

I've watched umpteen live concerts on television.  Last night I was feeling my habitual disappointment at the Jackson Browne live special on PBS.  We're old.. it's been done.  But then I heard the beginning of Late for The Sky... It opened my heart to student days where we lay in bed with this on the turntable,  aching with life and passion... trusting our vinyl treasures to narrate our romance... to navigate life with these iconic songs that were not just personal, revelatory.. Our ears were unprotected then.. not stuffed with earbud content and endless beats.  And the piano player-- probably my age-- sang harmony with such humility and sensitivity... and soul.   

I remember my mother shunning the sounds of rock and roll and putting on her old Frank Sinatra records. Maybe this is my version of nostalgia, of backstory.  Maybe I'm just cranky... but I feel I'm not alone... drinking in JB's immortal words-- and I think they will be so-- 'trying to understand how our lives had led us there'

Snow Lies

I could have made a decent paycheck this week if I could only have agreed to blog the Academy Awards.  Of course, they don't particularly care that I have haven't seen any of the nominated movies--- not a single one, except maybe a documentary because I actually was conscripted to attend a random screening by the filmmaker.  But these are movies not films.  The difference, to me, being the hype and promotion, the 'blow-up' factor.

It's hard for me to diagnose the exact cause of my movie-going malaise.  It could be my age, or the fact that after seeing thousands upon thousands of these-- they become a little cheap-- like a roller coaster ride, over and over.  It's terrifying or amazing, but in the end, we can only remember maybe the first time-- or the time someone threw up on you.  Like I remember a movie-date, when I really liked the guy… or making out with my husband, because that's what we did at the movies.  But I was young.

And of course I won't venture the theory that these movies are not, besides the sensational trailer campaigns and the celebrity overkill, what we used to call 'memorable'.  That they don't resonate in the way that 'On the Waterfront' or 'The Hustler' did… the way these actors used to 'be' their characters… that try as I might, with a few exceptions, I just see celebrities.

I did try to watch the show.  I noticed things like the camera focusing on black people in the audience to compensate for the fact that there was hardly a minority face among the high-profile nominees.  Maybe that explains the Birdman wins?  A Mexican director?  Who knows?

What I did think about was the fact that our television sets, in my day, were black and white boxes.  Actors were miniaturized and the format was square.  The resolution was not great.  The larger the set, the less clarity.  So the movies were larger than life, colored-- you could see  places you might never visit, you could scrutinize the imperfect and breathtakingly passionate face of Richard Burton and you knew you would never ever be these people or these characters and it was stunning.

Maybe 25 years ago I was invited to the home of some prep-school parents who liked musicians.  Not only did they have a complete 24-track studio and rows of guitars no one could really play, but they had their own private screening room.  It was a mini-cinema with leather reclining chairs like first class airline seats.  The speakers were surround-sound and the screen was cinema-scale.  They had some kind of expensive format projector or who knows?  A movie collection.  Of course, like the other 'playrooms' in the house,  including a simulated ski-ing machine with visual moving slopes, it was immaculate and empty.  Everything at their fingertips, these people--pushbuttons and electronic wonderment-- and they were hardly ever home.  Their kids were brats.

My Thanksgiving tradition includes my son coming over to sleep and eat and binge on sports and this year, he begged me to splurge on a new TV.  I have no cellphone, and had an old, small box.  It was getting to the point where even the sports scores were 'off-screen' because my set didn't accommodate the format.  So we got a black Friday spectacular 42-inch screen for very little money… and after my brief adjustment period I have only just begun to 'see' what others have been seeing on their high-def technology for years.  It's pretty spectacular… the visual… clearer than clear.  When my son calls me from a Knicks game, I can see him waving.  Amazing.

But one thing I have noticed-- the lines between cinema and television are blurring.  It is so symptomatic of our culture now-- people with their palatial apartments and oversized homes-- that now we all have a private screening room… and 4 million movies available to us at all times.  I still have my Time Warner triple play--- I don't want HBO and I don't want to be addicted to TV.  I haven't watched a  single Breaking Bad or Madmen episode or even Downton Abbey…I like the randomness of TV, and now that we all have a cinematic format and video quality--- and everyone from Apple to Amazon to your neighbor is producing 'television'… movies are marketed like anything which is cheap and downloadable and viewable on phones while you have a bath.  Or drive in your SUV and cause accidents…whatever.  Everyone has everything everywhere, like a rich person.  And it feels cheap.

Does anyone remember being in love--- really in love?  Not the kind you will marry or possess because it doesn't work that way, but the kind where you are overcome with passion and you 'lift' out of your own body and you are possessed and then there you are, the 2 of you, in some bed somewhere which you will remember for the rest of your life, where you lie  awake because it is your own movie and you need to press this into your heart forever, where you are aware you have slept with some kind of angel, and you have been touched or maybe ruined forever, but it is real.  And maybe this will last for days or weeks or months or maybe years.  Maybe it will come and go, will weave in and out of your life, like a cosmic glowing thread of light, maybe you will become pregnant and bear its child… but it will not stay.  And in the hours or days or weeks, between those episodes, love happens.  You do not text, because that was not available.  You don't even telephone, because you are under a spell, and the technology of even a wire and a receiver-- it seems well, awkward.  You might write a letter and post it, and it will take weeks before you even know it is received, if ever.  You might get a tiny box in the mail with a hand-rolled cigarette or a pressed flower, or a fortune from an old cookie… and it will be from him.  But it is in the space which surrounds these moments--- that the experience becomes something.

In art, space is essential--- real art, that is.  It is what you leave out that is important.  Now, we have no space.  Even my oversized flatscreen during the Academy Awards is crammed with finery and entertainment… thousands of beautiful people and too much music, and film, and live people-- the actors, reminding us that everything is not really art, but a 'layer', an investment, a trick.  People are maybe not really crying, even… we see these little cameos and it is confusing… it is just too much.   In a way it is like massive quantities of food without digestion.  It is all too much.  Everyone is dressed in loaned gowns and the after and before-shows insure that there is no space anywhere.  What is the meaning?

I suppose without the ball and the gown, the Prince would never have noticed Cinderella.  This is an old story.  And without the 'space' of losing her and having to try the shoe on all those girls-- he would never have found his true princess.  Maybe that explains the current obsession with shoes, the celebrity closets with a banker's salary worth of shoes.  Hoarders.

There used to be an expression… you can't have everything; where would you put it?  But now you can put it in your phone, on a chip. It's in your pocket… your money, your airline tickets, 10,000 movies.  Rich people are creating space in the New York skyline so they can own more and more, have bigger screens for their personal lives.  But this is not the kind of space they need.  They don't see that they are starving for the kind of space that they no longer understand-- the kind of space that exists while you miss someone or you want something so badly you must work seven years to have it.  Occasionally a movie director understands this, and tries to show this-- the most archetypal legend of existence-- the search, the quest…what makes us fragile and divine and raises us above our flesh and bones-- our soul peeking out of its human garbage pile of 'stuff'.

I went to a funeral for my friend on Saturday.  It was a devastating loss for me of someone who suffered from cultural under-acknowledgment because we are obsolete, we seekers of music or art or truth among the technology we can't even afford.  My niece had emailed me; a friend of hers OD'd.  I shared some of Vvedensky's Gray Notebook which I was reading.  Brutal and real.  Re: the funeral, It was so hard to see Joy in a box, I mailed her back.  She thought it was the title.  Maybe it is.