My Rider In the Dark

I often wake during the night and browse the news on an iPad my son gave me.  Somehow the technology offers a variety of platforms I would not normally see.  Yesterday, among the dismal global disarray and haunting obituaries was an odd story about a horse which had run off with a pack of wild mustangs and returned, 8 years later-- some pounds thinner-- but somehow, like a Jack London novella, he'd made his way back home.  Of course, unlike the novella, we know nothing of his wanderings-- like a teenager kidnapped by a cult or a runaway gang-- he'd had a life... and somehow decided it wasn't for him.

So I had a stray dog, years ago; he passed me on a street in Harlem, and we both looked back at the same instant, like star-crossed lovers.  He followed me; I fed him.  A few days later I had to go 'on the road' for a gig-weekend, left him with a friend who tied him outside the Broome Street bar while he had a beer.  The dog broke loose, returned to my apartment several miles uptown.  It was extraordinary.  He had some strange habits... God only knew from whence he came, and what had formed his canine version of urban-wild. He was unpredictable.  I made up stories and songs... he was moody-- sometimes affectionate and obedient, but most of the time he was wild and callow and kept a perpetual eye on the door or open window. 

My mother's father left her mother, with two children... never to return.  It warped her, surely, and prompted her to marry a strong man with straight edges-- a war-hero with a certain chip on his shoulder-- my father.  She worshipped him, never criticized.  Her Mom, my Grandma, passed away at a very young age, in her so-called prime.  Did she grieve his absence? I never met her, but I think not. In highschool my Mom's estranged father (presumably my Grandfather) phoned- invited her to his 80th birthday.  She'd not seen him for at least 35-40 years, and declined, with a cold edgy voice (I listened in, as you could do in those old days).  Shortly thereafter he died, and while I begged, she would not let me accompany her to the funeral.  It upset her... after all these years, and in those days, when I was 15 or so and she was still a beautiful woman, she occasionally confided in me.  At the service, her obstetrician.. who had delivered her, was there-- took her aside and assured her there was not a drop of her alleged father's blood in her.  She related this to me, confidentially.  I was an imaginative teenager who wrote stories.  I invented all sorts of scenarios... who were we, after all?   

At Christmastime that year this obstetrician phoned and invited her and her daughters (us) to his grand home somewhere upstate.  She declined.  I begged and pleaded...  but in the end she buried this bit of information and never spoke again of her father.  I don't even think I'd seen a photo of him; there were few enough of my beautiful Grandma and they were snatched up by various cousins.  I mean-- he was a bad father... why was it that she refused to abandon the original narrative?  I don't know...

When I was about 17, an English man approached me and told me he was my real Grandfather.  It seemed plausible... and on my roguish post-college discovery path, it was a kind of fairy-tale.  It appealed. I listened and accepted... he took me all sorts of places and introduced me to Chinese literature and writers I'd not known about (William Gaddis, John Gardner).  He painted, spoke all kinds of languages... told me my Grandma had been a great beauty and he was a boy at the time.  It's unlikely but I believed.  I visited him; he affectionately called me his little mouse or his monkey. Unlike my father he praised my little original songs and was first on line at the London Virgin Megastore to buy my album.  You're right in front of Madonna, he rejoiced (alphabetically only).  He felt like a Grandfather.. and besides, it engendered all sorts of identity odysseys.  

I remember once I came home early after school and the gardener's truck was parked in the driveway.  The house was wide open, with the fragrance of freshly-baked pie. My poor oppressed but still beautiful mother, ditto the gardener, were nowhere to be seen.  I started to climb the staircase to the bedrooms, my heart pounding... but turned around and left the house-- came back hours later, loudly announcing my arrival.  My mother's favorite song was Me and Mrs. Jones.  We watched Billy Paul on Soul Train.  She had the record-- we played it over and over and she sang it.  It gave me joy to see her eyes tear up... we sang together.  

But it occurs to me-- especially in the pre and early post-war years-- that there were all kinds of secrets.  Every family has them.  I have them.  My women friends in successful marriages often tell me the secret to this success is precisely in what remains hidden.  Why confound their spouse when they can reminisce with me about old affairs and crushes? You're only as sick as your secrets I learned at an Alanon meeting.  I did not understand what this meant. I did once tell my son-- it's okay to have secrets as long as someone knows each one... you spread them around, you do not harbor them.  It's healthier.  One of my character flaws is I generally preferred the narratives of my affairs and mistakes; they felt familiar and exciting. 

The literary market is flooded with memoir-- some good, some bad, some fictional.  How can one reveal secrets without conscripting unwilling acquaintances? Or like Proust or Kerouac, do we rape our lives for material? Water it down, romanticize it?  Tonight I watched Interview with the Vampire. I don't normally like Vampire stories but I'd read this one on a plane so long ago. During one of the interview sections which punctuate the episodes, the writer asks 'Is this reality or is this performance?' Even vampires have secrets... maybe especially vampires.  Why would we expect truth from an immortal? Why would he be capable of love, or inclined to tell his truth? 

In the Ethicist column of the Times today there was a query from someone wondering whether she should tell her neighbor's child that her husband is his real father (they'd had an affair).  There are days when I wonder whether I am my father's child.  Certainly not by personality or temperament.  Besides, I am the dark daughter. Neither of my parents had the black hair and eyes-- they were fairer. I am taller than my sister who has the curvy body of my father's family.  My mother called me often her dark horse... which brings us back to Mongo the runaway stallion who surely knows more than he reveals.  My hero of the day.  I've been walking around with the Led Zeppelin vision of Traveling Riverside Blues in my head-- every time they or Robert Johnson mention 'my rider' I get a little chill.  It opens me, as music does, sometimes... especially when it cuts right to the chase, and finds those buried horse-hearts.  

Collections- 2

On the very first day of school I was confused when the teacher announced she was coming around to 'collect' the papers on which we had drawn our self-portraits in crayon.   It baffled me that she wanted to take home our childish work and put it in a box.  My Mom had always given me old candy tins and cigar boxes for my 'collections'.  These I piled up and secured with a rubber band.  Children are natural collectors; my passions were rocks, shells, small rubber dinosaurs and tiny glass animals.  Some children on the block collected insects or worms-- the ambitious ones caught butterflies and pressed them sadly between plastic sheets where they miraculously, unlike other things, retained their beauty although dead.

By second grade, I began to save stamps-- they looked so amazing swimming around in their box, like fragile paper mosaics...  and they were labeled with exotic words and people I'd never seen-- landscapes and fairylands.  Some of them had traveled so far to live in my little room.   On rainy days I'd take the boxes out and look at their contents... I'd line them up and study them one by one-- I'd create little plays and vignettes and move them around, hold them up to the window or shine a flashlight on one and then another.

At school, I began to understand there were other meanings to words.  After all, there was the collection plate on Sundays, the toll collector when we crossed bridges, the trash and bottle collector
who came for pick-ups, and later, the tax collector.  What I don't remember is ever exceeding the limit of my boxes.  I did glue the special shells onto a felt board so I could hang them on the wall... but mostly, my little collections remained happily within the boundaries of their containers.  My father had a stack of Roman coins in a tennis-ball can.  I was not allowed to open this myself, but I often sneaked into his closet and shook it around like a tambourine.

These days, when I visit an art fair or museum, they often ask me-- am I a visitor, a dealer or a collector--  the collector, here, being the preferred tag, because they continue to offer you categories and boxes to check so they can identify your 'area of interest'.  An adult collector is a buyer-- someone who acquires things not just because they are beautiful or interesting, but because they are assumed to have value.  You are not just an audience here, but a necessary participant.  The whole show is for your entertainment, your enticement to support the platform-- to buy, spend money, perpetrate the system.  The wares are a few dollars' worth of canvas and paint, or material-- but pulled from the tall hat of the art gallery, they are transformed into 'art'-- they are labelled not only with a signature and a title, but with a corresponding number of dollars which affects the way you perceive these, after a while.  Of course there is true talent out there, but it is less common among the unending unloading of product.  Imagine the numbers of students finishing art school every year, entering the vast pool of what already exists-- not to mention the posthumous forgotten in overpopulated storage bins.

Despite the galactic numbers of images available on anyone's internet allowing nearly anything to be viewable at any time in your home, the acquisition ambition has never been stronger.  It seems also, each successive generation has a certain nostalgia for objects of the previous generation-- vinyl, vintage leather, watches, jewelry, fashion.   Everyday things, removed from their 'era', are not just collectible but valuable.  Online auctions have grown from primitive eBay beginnings to thousands of high-end auctions which offer anything from old master paintings to cars to grand homes and purchasable islands.  For some items, the more they are traded, the higher the value.  Almost everything is searchable, and eventually find-able.

It's no wonder people become hoarders in this culture.  Things are so available and viewable in numbers-- so easy to 'have' at the click of a button, a PayPal 'confirm'... free shipping, the anticipation-- the arrival.. the joy or disappointment... the perpetual Christmas, the careless cheap collections-- for the ones who find happiness in sheer number, the ones who agonize and painfully decide, the ones who like fickle lovers detest within days the very item they have bought-- the research and storytelling, the 'marketing' of a period or a place-- celebrity provenance... There are people who pay many times the value of an item because it belonged once to Madonna, or Andy Warhol, despite the fact it had little relevance to their life...  it has gained the status of a relic, and is doubly collectible.

The amount of available 'art' on the market is overwhelming.  I grew up thinking I 'knew' every important painting and its location.  Now I can't keep track of the museums opening globally, everyday, in every city... in multiples.  As old collectors die, their holdings are acquired or donated to institutions so we find ready-made collections within collections.  Upcoming artists are promoted and marketed with a vengeance; the Warholian model has been extended-- where he put the soupcan ironically on the canvas, now the art is almost simultaneously produced as skateboards and T-shirts-- coffee mugs and umbrellas-- phone cases and sneakers, toys and souvenirs.  Art advisors and gallerists, like stockbrokers, navigate options for their clients and guarantee their full art wallets remain so.  Artists run their studios like a business, maximizing output, manipulating sales, jumping from gallery to installation to institution, merchandising their product and becoming overnight superstars.  It takes years for a tree to grow tall, but some  seven-figure art is produced in an hour.  It seems wrong.  But the art audience is massive, and buyers are impatient and greedy-- insatiable.  Facile art suits the competitive 'soft' market.  Collecting is epidemic.

The 'look' of contemporary art, to me, has a certain built-in clock.  I can smell obsolescence the way I never trusted those beanie babies children begged for in the 1990's.  It's all too easy-- too facile.  Part of the beauty of being--say, a record collector in the 1960's-- was the chase.  Ask Keith Richards-- how he came to America and went to record shops.  Things were rare-- things were treasured.  They were listened to and looked at and loved, the way I loved the tiny glass animals in my Eldorado box.

I am finished collecting, now.  It is a time in my life to take stock of what I have and look at things.  Besides the art, I'm not sure anyone will appreciate my home 'museum', but I have grown to understand the soul of objects and the words they elicit.  My friends tease me because I still don't have a mobile phone... but I spend many hours outside observing and listening to the city.  I come home and am embraced by modest things I find beautiful and compelling.  It is enough.

Pentimento

I met this medical student in my gym-- speaks Australian English.  He told me he's from Nepal and honed his accent by watching tons of Australian TV.  You can close your eyes and swear he's a native; he's never been there.  What is the meaning of this sort of thing?  Like Madonna when she returned from London?  I lived in London and remained an American.  Sure, when you walk through mud your boots are going to track some dirt in your house, but you leave them at the door.

My friend is dating this guy who just doesn't seem right to me; something 'off', something vaguely dishonest.  Not criminal, but-- like the Nepalese boy-- sort of a forgery.  People who say they went to Harvard when maybe they did go-- to a football game, summer school-- whatever--  but we know what they think we understand.  Things are not what they seem… and in this culture of texting, massive information networks available to us… it baffles me that there is more deception and personal airbrushing than ever.

In my parents' generation… it was name-changing, erasing the edges and accent of your ethnicity, to 'blend'.  The beginning of plastic surgery-- nose jobs to hide your heritage, hair straightening and whitewashing.  Beyonce takes this to a new level-- the Kardashians.  Dye jobs, waxing, lasers… transgender transformations.

Maybe it's my super-Aquarian nature, but I've always been a truth seeker.  In college I studied art history… I obsessed about discovery, attribution.  My degree required a museum colloquium where the final exam was deciphering fakes, comparing signatures.  You had to know.  These days I can't rely on  experts and committees-- too much money to be made by the discovery of an un-catalogued Michelangelo or Rembrandt.  A manuscript-- like the Harper Lee which would never have got past my editorial desk.  The Jean Michel Basquiats.. .the ones he did, the ones he didn't do… as long as they have a certificate, it all seems to be okay.  As though it is 'belief' that is bought and sold.

I've always been obsessed by the story of Jacob and Esau-- how the birthright was switched by a swindle.  How history is changed by deception, by forgeries.  How we sometimes believe what we are handed… because it is too difficult to argue-- and how can we question everything… the water we drink, the air we breathe, the food we are served now, the vegetables in the grocery store.. are they organic? Genetically altered?  We must pick our battles.  Jesus as the Messiah would have a terrible time in our culture today-- he'd have to be managed by Jay-Z or marry Kim Kardashian.  We believed in Milli Vanilli.  Jesus would not be able lip-synch or have pitch-control.

My first truly traumatic moment was maybe at the age of 3… I was going up the escalator at Grand Central terminal, with my Dad; it was maybe rush hour-- -there were masses of people-- and I reached up to take his hand, and realized after a few seconds that it wasn't my Dad-- it was a total stranger-- and for a minute or 2, I was lost-- completely up-ended-- like I had to rely on my own instincts, for the very first time… and fortunately, the substitute hand belonged to a kind man who helped me find my Dad and I was probably smacked for who knows what-- my Dad's own fear, his perilous failure to watch out for me because he was always walking too quickly (something I have inherited).

My niece told me a story about how she had a first date with a guy, fell asleep on his bed, and woke up with his cousin.  There are movies about these kinds of things.  I would like to think I can feel the person I love-- blindfolded.  I would know his scent, his touch-- in a nano-second.  But we've all had these moments-- sometimes we reach for the wrong person, we turn to speak and there is a stranger.

When I was maybe 23 I went to the wedding of a classmate's brother.  They were from one of those super-wealthy New Jersey communities with the grand house and horses and grounds and servants… 21 bedrooms.  I'd actually gone on a date with the groom, although his brother was more my type-- the lost tormented poet/hippy who lived with a dog.  They had matching paisley scarves, he and the black lab.  He was shy and silent and would sit near me in the library and smile with some kind of passion but never touched me.  Anyway, his brother was a preppy young banker-- aggressive and obnoxious.  He spent too much, drank too much, played golf and dated debutantes and bragged about it.  He took me to the opera and made no headway afterward.  We scarcely spoke and I was vaguely surprised to have been invited to the wedding but it was great to see his sweet brother who had been traveling with his dog across the Northwest.  We all stayed up late… there was a pre-wedding night of partying and drinking and drugging…

Anyway, I went to bed in my wedding-guest room with the old lace-trimmed linens and piles of fine down monogrammed quilts… and awoke to find the groom in my bed.  Yes, he reeked of whiskey and dope… he was aggressive and it required some adrenaline and self-defense skills to get him off me so I could turn the light on… was I tempted?  He was disgusting.  Did I believe his sheepish explanation that he really thought it was his bride who was way more padded than I am?  Of course not… and in some vague way, did I wish it had been his soft, lovely dreamy brother who never actually touched me?  Yes, I did.

I never told on him.  He danced with me at the wedding, and with all the other women, with  irreproachable manners.  After all, he was a banker and was to become a hedge fund master.   Did I feel a tiny loss of innocence because I believed somewhat in the magic of weddings?  Do I disbelieve the facade of these power couples of New York?  I did.  I do.  I was the single bohemian Mom at a prep school where once or twice a very married father tried to test the waters after a school function.  They confessed and complained and one of them even sobbed his misery.  Those days are so over for me… all of these advances always threw me; I never expected attention… I am not the conventional bait, but I had more big fish than I deserved.  And I generally threw them all back for canned tuna.  More my style.

Last month I looked over a collection of art; one painting stood out-- I'd known the artist from my first gallery job.  The signature was completely wrong, and so was the painting-- I told them.  Last week I saw it come up for sale at one of the major auction houses.  Do they care?  No.  In the larger picture (pun intended), it matters little… it is a painting.. at face value.. does it matter that it isn't as attributed?  To me it does.  It's sort of a lie-- an insult to the artist who was from the generation where truth mattered, where art was a kind of truth or it mocked itself.  The truth is important.  It is important that we can decipher facade from structure, even though 90% of reality is part of a virtual cloud-- a digital, non-palpable image.

Tonight I walked down Malcolm X Boulevard, or Lenox Ave, where I can still feel the oppressive Sunday vibe of James Baldwin's Go Tell It On The Mountain.  Many of the storefront churches and stoops have been replaced by the Harlem Shake Shop and other upscale enterprises-- but a few old barbershops and liquor stores remain.  I try to listen to these buildings, wonder if the gentrification has disguised their voice.  Some of these Harlem buildings were originally the grand homes of rich Jewish businessmen; the church at 120th Street was a former temple.  The 'I' that came here to find James in the 1960's is no longer recognizable… my facade has changed.  No one is chasing me down any streets to get my phone number.  I remember in school how they showed us an original Picasso composition, visible with a black light beneath the surface painting.  I wonder now which one is more real…for that matter, which one is me and which the ghost of myself?  Truth is that time will  bury us all.

At Last

Beyonce. The name grates. Excess. Nostalgia. Fake class...…all the elements of the tuxedoed and Harry Winston-ed aristo-hypocrisy of the current music scene. The Grammy Awards? Don’t get me started.

It’s all mixed up. Gwyneth Paltrow gets a music award, Jennifer Hudson gets an Oscar, American Idol contestants get Grammies. When I need real medical care, I don’t go to George Clooney, although some of the young clinic doctors I’ve seen recently seem to have less credibility than the ER staff.

But Etta James… well, you go, girl. That’s right. Not only did Beyonce not gain any weight for that role… you had more integrity in your little finger. I actually opened for Etta James one night…okay, maybe she was at her peak weight… but they had to rent a golf cart to ride her up a specially-constructed ramp to the stage where she leaned her awesome behind on a double-seater stool for the show. And she sang her ass off. I didn’t see that scene in the movie. Actually I didn’t see the movie at all, because although I think Beyonce is a pretty girl who can carry a tune, she needs a racial identity check. She’s trans-racial. Whatever.

So yes… the Inaugural Ball… We all realize Obama might not have had the success he did without Oprah and JayZee and the rap world using their large influence on media-hypnotized America. But to ‘do’ Etta at the ball? The President didn’t ask you to sing the National Anthem, Beyonce; he got Aretha. You should have thought over your song choice. Just because you played the role in the film, doesn’t mean you have the right to usurp Etta's identity in front of all those people. Not to mention the string arrangement. And did anyone ask Etta?

We’re so confused by film-roles, ‘reality’ shows, remakes… no one knows what the deal is. Copyrights? Copycats? If you complain to the wrong person, you’ll get a bullet. Ask TI. Ask Biggy. Oops..he’s dead. I nearly forgot.

Now we get to A-Rod, or A-Hole, as the Post had the balls to call him yesterday. Why? In this world of 300 trillion dollar Ponzi schemes which is our own economy… the fact that A-Rod used performance-enhancing drugs should be a shock? In 2003 before the Yankees got him in a trade? Was anyone else suspicious of 300 home runs in a world where apples and oranges are shot with steroids so people will buy them? Where sports betting is a major economy of its own and everything else in America is so surgically altered, whitewashed, media-spun and non-authentic… are we really shocked that Baseball isn’t exactly the home-made apple-pie all-American clean and wholesome sport it was? Was it ever? Maybe before guys got paid to play.

In the 21st century, heroes like the pilot Sully are few and far between. Besides, A-Rod isn’t even American. And Madonna… his pal…what is she but a well-groomed corporation? Is there a single Madonna performance that hasn’t been tweeked and backing-tracked into what Americans see as perfection? Perfection is some plastic surgery-enhanced, personal trained, air-brushed, botoxed, re-edited version of whatever we expect.

And on the subject of performance-enhancement...Wall Street wasn’t happy with ‘real’ profit margins…so they cranked up the volume. As did A-Rod. How would you do under that kind of pressure? And it's not as if he beat his wife or raped anyone. The media crucified him for kicking back at a bar with Chuck Knoblauch in the face of what is 6-year-old news. Joe Torre's book sales have had some performance-enhancement these last weeks. Besides, A-Rod might even have been doing what he was told. But don't go there--- you might get a bullet, too.

So does America really feel betrayed? Is America the innocent 'boy' it was in the 1950's? Madonna dumped him weeks ago. Bad for her image which takes a staff of hundreds to maintain. Give me a break. And no-one complained about Beyonce the blonde bombshell at the ball. No one except Etta. As I said, you go, girl. The gastric-bypass version of Etta who is still pissed off.

What can I say? It was my birthday yesterday. I went into Crumbs to buy myself a cupcake. $4. I thought about it. Better to spend the money on something with protein like 4 cans of tuna which is all the nourishment I can afford these days. As a little joke, I asked ‘So how much for a crumb?’ ‘We don’t sell crumbs’, the girl answered me, without humor.

At last. I personally pledge allegiance, Etta.