(Un)acceptable Losses

Monday night on the way to work, a young woman tapped me on the shoulder and told me a train was coming.  I was standing on the platform, reading; she smiled at me.  Was she flirting with me?  It's not often you get this kind of courtesy from strangers… am I getting old and she worried I was dangerously absorbed in my book?  Was it Maggie Nelson, the author, that prompted this?  Or maybe I was wearing my earplugs, ready for a night of loud music… and she mistook me for a deaf woman?  She was a lovely person-- I could read her spirit-- and I behaved like your typical New Yorker-- insulated and cold.

At the end of the year, the media takes stock of celebrities who have passed away over the last 12 months.  Personally I hold my proverbial breath because it seems someone always dies on Christmas.
I've lost a few friends recently, have been to more than my share of funerals these months… and I just learned that 2 acquaintances suicided on the same day-- both jumpers, same zip code.  Astrological, neuro-biological coincidences suggested themselves-- a bad anti-depressant prescription, dispensed at the same pharmacy?  Finally a poem begins to evolve in my head with each of their psychological 'ropes' intertwining like strands of DNA.  Somehow these desperate people are linked in a sort of ironic coda.

I was kind to one of the jumpers.  I'd reached out to her after a less-than-stellar performance-- I encouraged her and praised her effort.  This was sort of a relief, because we are not always generous enough to one another-- especially we musicians who are wrapped up in our own stage issues, our unmet expectations, equipment malfunctions, audience failures, club politics, inadequate compensation, etc.  We have our petty bitternesses and frustrations, all of us… we are uncharitable and cranky.  I admit to this.  I try to make resolutions to be a better person and bandmate; I take stock of my flaws with a degree of scrutiny-- I come up short.

Funerals and memorials are often a sore point with me.  When you are a musician, people want to honor you post-mortem by performances-- jams, concerts, fundraisers… some of these are moving and emotional, but many of them are just an opportunity for groups to showcase before a captive audience.  Personally I would want nothing but maybe a Bach organ piece; and I'd rather dedicate some music or an evening from a regular gig where my thoughts about someone inform my playing.  But it remains true that death is a kind of attraction-- the idea of it, the shock of it-- the spectacle of a funeral that is not ours still fascinates.  We read obituaries over and over, we tweet and post, we fantasize things we might have done with this person… and some of us actually embellish and invent anecdotes.  Journalists comb and autopsy information-- leak and reveal.  But most of us want to deify the person who has passed.  George Michael-- the most recent-- seems to have more than atoned for any sins he may have committed.  He seems to have evolved into a saint in life, an angel in death.  I never admired his gifts the way I loved the legacy of Prince, Bowie, Leonard, Sharon-- but his talent was huge, his success was undeniable, his fall-from-grace painfully public.  He more than redeemed himself with kindness.

We are so immersed in celebrity information and imagery that we feel connected to people to whom we have no connection whatsoever.  We adopt them, we feel we understand them; we make more effort reading their stories and learning about their likes and dislikes than we do vis-à-vis our actual friends.  We know what is in their closet and on their nightstand.  Some of us feel betrayed when these people pass away; we feel wounded and sad and personally derailed by these public deaths.  For me it seems amazing that death is so finite and precise.  After  9 months of germination, our moment of birth is recorded and celebrated-- the starting line-- this makes sense to me.   But it seems that death should be more of a fade-out--  a winding down after a life of complexity and millions of moments-- of schoolwork and football games, of things we painted, shopping lists-- meals, births, tears, books-- lovemaking, ceremonies-- quarrels and pain-- illness, accidents-- cruelty.  But there is a precise recorded moment, a finish-line, a clocked check-out.  Today it was Carrie Fisher-- she was hanging on in an intensive care facility-- vacillating, still dreaming and breathing… her family and her public reached out, sent love-- and then she was gone.  Now we are here; now we are not.  Some of her fans felt betrayed-- what could we have done? How could we have kept David Bowie alive, made him well? My friend Jimi-- if he was a rich man, if we could have raised enough money-- would he have been sent home with a new heart?  And the jumpers-- more than anyone, we feel betrayed by these people who chose to pilot their own kamikaze flights and trick fate altogether.  They shocked and devastated us, robbed us of an opportunity to reach out and replaced it with yet another obituary, another funeral.  We learned little.

I feel betrayed by my country, in the wake of this year's election.  It is like a kind of death for me;  I keep regretting I did not do more to prevent the outcome-- and it feels incredible that after the interminable months of contest-- like a 2-year-long football match--  just like that, it was done, and the winner was the loser.  The worse man won.  It feels like the death of humanity, the end of hope and democracy. As we go forward into yet another year, we are well aware that some of us will not last until 2018.  We will crash in planes, we will become ill, we will jump.  As the new political regime assumes power, I am especially anxious.  I am trying to find the lesson in this turn of events, and trying to resolve I will try to seize opportunities to prevent bad things, to thwart maybe one of the jumpers or cutters or overdosers.  I will try to remedy my flaws, temper my bitterness and impatience, my critical nature and my futile frustration with the state of our culture.  The lucky among us will log another year.  No one of us will escape tragedy or loss or failure and few of us will foresee the accidents which will devastate our lives.  As humanity grows older and more complex, the trillions of past deaths do not dilute the impact of that one which has just occurred.  Let us remember this as we look around the world and see universal grieving and trouble.  There is celebrity and fame, and then there is the individual human heart which starts and stops and is virtually indistinguishable, one from another.   Amen.

Purple Reign

As the world becomes smaller, information mushrooms, and roads of communication multiply faster than bacteria, generations of cultural phenomena grow smaller and smaller.  Nostalgia is recent and cheap-- songs are recycled and sampled at shorter intervals-- art movements are re-packaged and re-hashed almost as quickly as iPhones become obsolescent.  We download and delete, download and downgrade, download and forget.  Like super-sized boxes of girl-scout cookies, we can't really tell one bite from another, and after all, there is an endless supply of a limited assortment.  What's the point, really?

The whole Warholian joke has become so top-heavy we've forgotten to see the irony in Andy's leavings after all… we're so busy calculating value and counting possessions, we can't see the financial hoax is on us.  Money doesn't seem to be something we laugh about; like dick size, it's something some people obsess over in men's rooms, bedrooms, over lunch and in boardrooms.  It's cheap.  A million dollars is nothing to brag about; a billion-- well, that simply guarantees you a bib in the Wall Street half-marathon.

And what is a 60-million-dollar penthouse in a brand-new phallic glass tower but a place to entertain, to invite designers and decorators to compete for spread, a few walls on which to display your new paintings which are hopefully worth more at market than your apartment which might as well be a hologram?   None of these air-pads existed in the vintage, solid structural versions of real New York we see in old photos and film footage.  They are ghost projections into some future-- air rights become architectural wrongs.

Today I previewed a show of nouveau-grafitti.  Deftly presented, apartment-ready wall-souvenirs which seemed about as impassioned as papier-mâché tacos.  One after the other--the text was vapid, the colors were pastel-pretty, the technique was thin, facile and uninspired, and each whole thing seemed to represent about four minutes of the life of a phone-wielding self-promoter.  Canvas to facebook, to tumbler, to instagram… in less time than an average pop-song.  It wasn't even like I've seen these before.  It was more like something I would never have looked at-- things that didn't deserve a wall-- bad wrappers on generic candy sold in the bus stations of poor countries.  Ready-made Forever-21 art.  Not even kitsch because these people were standing by and taking themselves seriously.  There were prices posted on labels which any reasonable person with an eye might have mistaken for lire or yen.

Of course there were some less wieldy objects, some Banksy-esque garbage-rescues which were decorated or spilled-on or sprayed or mutilated…. a few collages and framed relics…  and then on to the Metropolitan Museum-- my revered house of the art-holy, where one hour before closing, the guards were playing a version of chutes and ladders--- walling off rooms and corralling the tourist crowds into the halls of Greek and Roman, of Oceania and African… I managed to exchange a wink with the Picasso Gertrude Stein who was annoyed at having to compete with the Costume Institute crowds and still wondering how some of her neighbors were getting along politically.  I had a terrible thought that one day in the near future some museum might be hung in order of value.  Descending, ascending… will there be a time when a digital ticker-tape will circle the galleries with daily artist-stock information  and auction results? Or is that someone's conceptual exhibit?

Saturday evenings at the museum are not really the time for serious contemplation-- kids running around playing tag in the Temple of Dendur, shoppers and baby-toting, eaters and drinkers, gossipers and strollers--- I almost missed the days when the magazines suggested single New Yorkers try to look for mates in these places.  Now nearly everyone was taking selfies and consulting their phones.  At least I didn't pay full price.  In fact, an evening rain-shower kept the emerging crowds hovering beneath the monumental pillars and cornice.  I traded my $2 umbrella for a pair of entry stickers; the couple was thrilled at their good fortune and it saved me from the humiliation of having to fork over a meagre $1 each for the privilege of milling around looking for the open rooms at the tail-end of an exhausting art day.

Home to my cherished neighbors and less cherished new neighbors who seem hell-bent on complaining  constantly about my guitarist and poet guests.  Endless renovations have destroyed the integrity of wall insulation in these old venerable buildings and no one cares that the value of my personal privacy has been destroyed.  Mold might be good for you, I would like to say to them.  Stuff is good.  The fact that your decor is minimal and your bookshelves empty terrifies me.  I may have shoeboxes of old polaroids, like Andy did (thank goodness for the market-- these cannot really be forged or reproduced, only faded)… but they have obese, messy instagrams and tumblers--- terabytes of data and family videos they couldn't watch in six lifetimes.  Money in credit cards and online funds and assets which wouldn't fit in any traditional safe… email and texts enough to fill all the theaters of the future with useless dialogue far away into some eternal digital wasteland.

I have a purple Warhol cow visiting at the moment in my living room.  It occurs to me, as she greets me daily, that she looks a bit old and tired.  Her eyes don't follow me with the same attention as I once thought.  She is tired of her frame, of the black marker signature which has made her an icon rather than a milk producer.  And she is one of many thousands.  She is all over the internet… millions and maybe billions, with the harness and her pink nose--- in various sizes, colors… identical.  Forever 1971, or 65, or 86--- whatever date you choose.  A suitable New York wall-pet without shame or upkeep… a symbol of something that belongs and yet doesn't belong in an urban grass-less home.  At least she is not one of those balloon puppies or hideous Koons vases.  But she's a little ashamed that her legacy has been so perverted and her little joke of multiplicity has become so grotesquely distorted.  Still, she doesn't seem to mind her surroundings and she is a little snobbish on the subject of my embarrassing new neighbors.  She greets them with indifference and not even the slightest moo.  She's definitely vegan,  has an affinity for all things Prince, and unlike me, her roommate, has been to most of the best places in the city.  She's a celebrity, a star.  No lemonade drinkers on my wall, no whitewashed blondes on our turntable.  Cows are apparently rather intelligent and I learned today that they hold grudges for years.  Now I know why I like her so much and what Andy was trying to tell us with his wallpaper.  A-cow.

Endgame

I'm sitting in Starbucks… the forced change of scene is necessary sometimes… I isolate with my computer… like a priest living inside the confessional I begin to lose connection.  Even the soundtrack… a dark, early John Lee Hooker now… it grounds me here.  At home I might be ricocheting from youtube suggestions into some pathway of black nostalgic meandering, following some poetic fork in my mind always down, these nights… no bio-rhythm, no sleep pattern… just a kind of palpable emotional exhaustion, like a padded velvet room with a sense of dampness-- evaporated tears.

Death has become a companion; we can only make friends with his presence at this point; he is not going away, but is going to continue to intrude, hang around like mold in old buildings.  Behind new renovations these things exist-- like previous tenants whose obituaries are archived in the hearts of their children who are themselves forgetting in assisted-living communities.  Time is not kind in the second half of your life.  Moments flood into my bedroom, like tides… I am soaked and compelled… the wash-up version of these deja-vus are often weighted and poignant.. or damaged.  Things seem so fragile-- possibilities I'd transformed into life-choices; marriages-- my first husband--was an instant-- an attraction in a way-- nothing more-- but then there he was, months later, coming to New York-- walking side by side for two days while the summer humidity transformed us into animals with a twisted fate.  I believed in the moment then.  Sex was a version of religion-- a kind of dank purity-- or maybe ignorance; it was irresistible and terrifying and the moment was so important.  Nothing was regrettable-- even children-- that incredibly random fragility of unpremeditated chemistry-- like a brilliant solo-- Miles, Coltrane-- at their most fucked up, tangled moment-- with an epiphany.  I can remember conversations-- long distance calls-- as though things were inside the phone-- dreams and words that remained there for years.

Here in a public place-- a store-- people share themselves,  whether we like it or not: their tragedies,  their stories- their likenesses or differences-- some of us because we are so desperate in our loneliness--we pretend to listen, to find a thread-- we try to belong even though we don't belong to anything anymore.  Our descriptions seem pathetic-- we use colors and they are so often pale shades of grey which give me a glimpse into the paint-world of Van Gogh who maybe realized this and filled his work with pigments that lived and fought against the dulling wash of memory.

My father's passing is processing itself with no effort from me.  Those in his life who were parts of his inner circle have chosen not to eulogize him-- not even a public obituary.  The world is a mystery-- we cannot control loved ones and personally I can't control who I love or don't love; it just seems to happen.  I am wearing my Dad's shadow along with my habitual black-- the least pretentious color, I always sensed-- along with the invisible torch of mourning that is maybe the most inspiring aspect of life.  We are here; we are not here.  When my first love died, I was young enough to be unbearably distraught.  He was the most magical human I'd ever encountered; maybe it was drugs and the time, and my emotional innocence-- but I still feel his messages and signs.  I woke up with his scent… balloons in my house would wander into the bedroom while I slept and hang beside me, unmoving.  I talk to him-- I write his songs, I play for him.  But my father?  I feel so little-- a sense of relief that he no longer has to file his 1040 and other things that caused him stress.  He was never just a person for me-- always a kind of symbol of ill-fitting authority and unwanted paternity.  He hated me.  He hated himself… I understood that and he hated me even more for my insight and candor.

At these times of maybe enhanced introspection which is my euphemism for mourning--- we writers are hyper-sensitive to messages and signs.  For me, that makes my day overwhelming even before I leave my apartment.   Last night-- I was at the YMCA.. and I went into a bathroom.  There was blood in a toilet-- maybe one of the young gymnasts mismanaging her monthly issues which gave me a pang of inappropriate compassion-- teenagers are so delicate and at the mercy of hideous parenting, sometimes; or maybe it reminded me of a miscarriage I'd had, in my first apartment in New York-- alone and desolate and left with a souvenir of a passionate night I was unwilling to serialize.   Maybe just a sign of life-- of the least common denominator of us all-- or of death… of wounds, and pain, and the bizarre thought that no matter how much purple Prince ingested, no matter how ill he was, how beautiful, how radiant and costumed-- his blood would look like all of ours.  Ditto my father's, who created no world-shaking solos, no anthems-- my father of the hero's deeds and the bloodshed and the purple hearts.

In the yoga room I peered in for a brief second--watching all the graceful bodies desperately contorting to find peace and some kind of physical meaning.  Just observing this was a kind of violation of the rule-- I am an outsider… a voyeur.   I am just passing, looking into rooms-- not participating but hearing things other people don't always hear, seeing things other people don't see.   When doves cry-- when the soul of an infant wakes in the night--fusses, maybe bawls-- and eventually finds sleep once again, even though no one has come to relieve or comfort… I am listening.  Such is my life.

Last night at 3 AM I was stuck on a train with a tall black man-- the obvious physique of a basketball star-- that quiet loose power I've grown to love especially,  having had a point-guard son.    He was coming from work at the men's shelter downtown-- his job.  He'd had a tough few years, he told me while they repaired track… played in the Final Four, recruited by the NBA, sat on a bench and eventually played in Europe while they negotiated-- went up for a dunk, and came down one night with just a few degrees of torsion… and ripped some ligament in his knee… had a bad surgery, another one… and he was ruined.  Some anger and frustration issues-- drugs, petty gang stuff-- his Mom died.   His voice cracked a little when he mentioned his Mom.  I tear up easily these days.  I've learned from my son not to give into my instincts to touch people or hug them-- I'm an old white lady, he reminds me.  Anyway, he was recovering from addictions, trying to manage his injury… glad to have a job and a place to sleep.  A familiar story… because for every rockstar and athletic miracle there are thousands of random parallel tragedies… a massive infantry for every general.

But somehow, among the Prince videos we are all obsessively watching-- among the Bowie footage, the quiet Lonnie Mack brilliance, the Kurt Cobain and Nick Cave-- the Coltrane and Clifford Brown-- the achingly beautiful crumbs left us by the godsmacked mutants of the human mistake--  there are these unrecorded moments which haunt me.  The grace of my basketball player-- coming down in slow-motion Hi-Def black and white like a dancer, like a genie-- like a diver breaking the water-surface after a triple-pike… or a jumper from some impossible bridge, hitting the current like a bomb… I play it over and over-- his non-existent youtube moment,  his mime of greatness, of perfect athletic prize--this man who hugged me with strength and restraint so that I could feel his heart, at 96th Street… who is lost to me in a kind of death of a moment.  For you-- the former Nike star with the cheap size 16 sneakers now--- I am carrying your torch along with all the others, in my private graveyard of moments, of lives seen like fragile starlight, of the incomprehensible ever-mounting statistical infinity of deaths which will always overshadow our lives in a sort of morbid quiet combat.. where no matter how hard we play and cry and write and love, silence is coming to wash away even the last of memory.