Amateur Our

Every winter  I interview prospective freshman for my alma mater.  It's a rewarding task; it enables me to pay back a little for the really stellar education I received, and it allows me to connect with these amazing young women who are eager for knowledge and skills to change the world, to solve problems, to heal the wounds of humanity and make a contribution.  Most of them come from poorer families and need financial aid.  They are prepared and bright; they are enthusiastic and compassionate.  Few of them will win admission, but most of them deserve this, and all of them will go on to have productive lives, I am quite sure.

To support the mission of diversity, many of these girls are from immigrant families.  For some of them,  they are recent immigrants, and English is a second language; they have overcome challenges and have seen things most American kids can only imagine.  This week several of them happen to be from countries on the new 'banned' list.  While I am a kind of ambassador for my alma mater, we are now confronted with confusing issues and worries I cannot wholly facilitate.  Politics is not a subject on the interview agenda, but this year we cannot help but acknowledge current events.  I feel apologetic and ashamed of my country.  The real irony is, 18-year-olds whose native language is Farsi and Arabic have been studying government and American history-- requirements to embark on a higher education program.  All of them are better versed in constitutionality and American justice than our current president.  What kind of world is this?

My friend is tall and statuesque, and looks like a model.   She loves music.  She is even married to sort of a rockstar.  She sings; she gets up on amateur stages and wails.  She has all the great moves and gestures, but she is truly a terrible singer.  So she got it in her head to try her fortune at the Apollo Theatre.  I have to give her points for guts; she stepped out on the stage with all confidence, and every man and woman in the place was taken with her appearance.  But then she opened her mouth.  The audience, in reaction, opened their mouths in disbelief.  It took about 45 seconds before she was booed off the stage.  Democracy.  Did she learn something?  She is still making recordings, taking lessons from people who are quite willing to take her money, trying to jump onstage with people.  In her favor, she is hurting no one; fooling no one.

Night after night, I play alongside other bands of all varieties.  Some have great ideas and lack the musical skill to execute; some are well-practiced and derivative.  And some have absolutely no clue what music might be.  A classical orchestra requires auditions, a level of achievement and a competitive field of music students who are ready to make the leap to professionalism.  But re: rock and roll and pop-- it seems all bets are off.  Last night a combination of people took the stage who seemed to have no common thread except an umbrella band name.  No one played their instrument with any competence; the songs were formless and the performance was not even comical.  Technical issues and lack of experience kept them onstage far longer than their allotted slot.  No one booed, no one turned the power off.  I guess they had some friends in the house… but it was a true 'Little Miss Sunshine' moment.  I've witnessed altogether too many recently.  What happened to the 'hook' by which I mean not the song, but the stage removal device?

I have recently been to a few young art galleries.  At one, the director started a conversation with me about abstract expressionism, the New York School, etc.  She consistently mispronounced names and
misstated facts.  She seemed to have no frame of reference or context, no sense of art history or even contemporary culture… yet was exhibiting at art fairs alongside established, experienced gallerists, selling student-ish derivative paintings for $20-50,000.  P.S…. she is very attractive and well dressed.  But who are her buyers?  Her next show is 'pre-sold', she bragged.  I couldn't help thinking this was the kind of smoke-and-mirror game we used to play when some guy called us and we claimed we were busy, night after night… until he finally swore eternal allegiance in exchange for one dinner.

Next week is the Superbowl--- an American institution, an athletic contest with a huge audience and the significance of a kind of annual war-game.  Plenty of athletes may not have leadership qualities, but they are fierce and well-trained.  No one suits up for pro football who has not spent thousands and thousands of hours in drills and scrimmages and grueling exercise.  The game itself has a certain number of variables, but either team has hard-earned the opportunity to compete.

Maybe the best man doesn't always win the American presidency, but never before has the reality-show culture usurped our politics.  This is a serious job, with serious repercussions.  It is a position of leadership and power.  Kings and queens in history have on occasion inherited an office for which they were unsuited, but never has the collective consensus of a nation been so willingly corralled into idiocy.  I have had enough.  A week's worth of incompetence, blatant inexperience and bad decision-making has awakened even the most soporific of dreamers and optimists into a reality check.  The inauguration felt to me like a kind of funeral and after 9 days of mourning, I'm sick to death of the cult of mediocrity and amateurism.  I refuse to sell out my fellow countrymen to what is not a compromise but a dangerous regime of lunacy.  One man's hyper-extended fantasy of narcissism and abuse of office is not going to deflate and sicken the platform of civil rights and humanitarian ethics that has defined much of my generation's decency.   I've never been a patriot, but it's damned unAmerican and way past time for the proverbial 'hook'.  Time for the sound of one hand clapping… and as the emcee says, 'NEXT...'

Offside

Athletes are lucky.  They train and they practice, but when it comes to the game--- there are referees, there are coaches;  you're not responsible for bad decisions; your coach is.  But when you make the touchdown, it is yours.  And your attitude--- like that guy Sherman who finished off the interception-- and saved the game for his team, just like that--- he had to throw it in the face of his opponent, who was in the exact opposite position of having lost all for his team.  All or nothing.  But the referees-- the announcers-- the analysts--  you are praised or penalized for sportsmanship, the way no one does this in our lives.  They are lucky, these guys.  They know if they have won or lost.  And they get paid, whichever side they are on.  For the players, all bets are on.

My friend's wife has an eating disorder.  I have tried and tried to figure out her thinking.  I have thought--if we could only vomit up the bad years… and leave the good.  And there is so much regurgitated time… so many of us back it endlessly through some kind of wringer--exploit it, publicize it-- until all the truth has been squeezed out.  Or these girls…with their eating disorders… maybe it is the excess… we all get too much of what we don't need and not enough of what we do.  We are stuffed and starving.  Personally I'm not sure what I need.  I'm so obsessed with proving why I don't need anything these days, I've become a reverse-hoarder-- an emotional minimalist.

My older sister still has her 40-year-old wedding gifts in boxes (both weddings, actually, even though one is unmentionable).  What is the meaning of this-- that she can hoard fresh new love away until she needs it?  That it will stay wrapped in the box?  When we were small, she stashed hundreds of packs of M&Ms under her mattress… every single day I shared mine--- and when I saw the layers and layers--- it was astonishing.  Like a bank-heist.  I wonder what happened to all of them-- all the things we don't need-- in a massive pile, all our old memories sewn into a football-field-sized patchwork quilt.

I've figured out what bothers me about that woman Martha… the Roman Catholic kleptomaniac bag lady.  Maybe like a distorted mirror in a Flemish Painting, she is the hideous image of what I can become if I keep on this path of fierce independence, of refusing to 'need' things.  They say kleptomaniacs don't really need what they take (not so for thieves).  She can't possibly need all those paper towels unless she is burning them for fuel.  The grocer maybe just lets her get away with her petty pilferings of biscuit rolls and tinned meat.  Take them… go ahead.  If I was the check-out girl
I would look her straight in the eye,  I would look at her with the eyes of a judge.

But tonight I watched her from behind a locker door, stuffing things in bags…bags for socks, for sneakers… for the stolen toilet tissue and kleenex and paper towels…for the hand towels…. for the bags she tears off rolls, the super-sized lotion dispensers she somehow makes off with...  bags of bags of bags.  I watch her with disdain and antipathy that shames me.  It's Sunday;  I'm not supposed to have uncharitable thoughts.  Today my unequivocal attitude seemed to nearly dare her to speak to me.  I would have replied I was in a non-verbal mood.  The Patriots had lost, after all (I hate the Patriots); and she would surely have walked over and in the most time-consuming way possible explained how she doesn't care about sports, and I would have had to say 'who's speaking of sports?' and she would have had to think about the Fathers of our Country, etc.

What possible reason does this woman have for belonging to a gym?  Because nowhere else will allow her daily access from morning until night including facilities and showers and opportunities for human conversation?  For her it is a sort of group home?  Why is everyone else able to ignore her?

There is a young guitar player that likes me. He claims he can see my soul and he tells me that he loves me.  I feel pain when I think about him--- the kind of pain I associate with love…but I can't oblige him because I know one day he'll look at me and see Martha.  Her hair is the color of an elephant, and her skin is like an old shoe.  Maybe I am the only one who sees her--- like a reverse Wim Wenders angel, she hovers-- my own personal gargoyle-- and a bleakly terrifying version of my own future.

But I want the Wim Wenders version of angel.  I want him to have the beautiful liquid eyes of Bruno Ganz and the intelligence of a philosopher.  I want him to understand me without words, the way the guitar player does not.  And I want the future-mirror to reflect a gracefully aging woman who still writes poetry and plays cello with finesse. I want a personal referee to tell me it's okay I haven't won, and that my bandmate's behavior was abominable and not that I am necessarily right, but that I am not wrong, and Martha is not my problem, and it is okay that she steals from other's lockers because she needs these things, or maybe because she doesn't need these things.  And despite the existence of extreme greed and extreme want in this world, there are hoarders of gold and hoarders of garbage, the over-fed and the starving---  we are all consuming time in precise unison-- no more, no less-- and the four quarters of our 'game' will be scoreless or filled with touchdowns, wins, losses, injury, bench time, disputes and joy.

Many years ago I bought a Seahawks pillowcase for my son who loved sports.  He was about 7, and he looked at me like I was some kind of moron.  So it was only 99 cents, and I liked the color---what did I know about football?  I looked for it in the back of the closet tonight.  He's all grown up and is now a Seattle fan….and is lucky enough to be going to the actual Superbowl game.  So maybe I'll leave it in my locker tomorrow for Martha.

Kerb Your Enthusiasm

Some mornings I wake up to a strangely un-urban quiet and I wonder, ever since 9/11, has 'it' happened... has my city been wiped out and I am a lone survivor... and I look over at my old clock radio, and there is still electricity... and my phone works... and I can hear the birds now... but I step out into the day with this sense of being newly baptized or finding out no, it is not cancer... and I vow to keep this attitude--- of grace and awe and innocence-- despite the nasty/smelly/greedy meanness I am bound to encounter on my daily route.

I have caught myself several times this week muttering expletives under my breath when someone shoves me aside to get on the bus first or runs a red light and clips my guitar case as I jump back onto the kerb.  When did I become this impatient old crank and how far will it go?  My friends have been leaking bad language, sneering and frowning and growling more than usual.  Is it the humidity?  The Republicans? When does cynicism become malevolence?  In an election year when name-calling and one-downmanhip seem to be the standards of our leadership?

Wasn't there a 'luxury tax' in our old Monopoly games?  We paid it, if the dice brought us there; we went to jail and paid our fines.  We paid extra for houses and hotels on expensive blocks, as I recall.  Have they changed the game to parallel the Bush-era tax cuts?  Not that I know, but I no longer care about games.  After a brief 1981 flirtation with Space Invaders I checked out.  I hate computer games and God knows I still don't have a cell phone.

But some nights I feel I am a stranger in a strange land.  I don't 'fit in' the way I used to... I am eavesdropping more than participating, but in a way I am mentally participating while my fellow urban occupants seem to be mutually eavesdropping.  I see things in three dimensions--- not just as they are, but with their history, framed by time-shadows of meaning.  My life is vintage now-- which for me doesn't mean just aged, but suffused with long-simmered flavor.

I watched an episode of Gallery Girls.  Yes, I confess... okay, I was writing and multi-tasking while I watched--- there was not nearly enough 'meat' to warrant just sitting there-- but there it was, unlike any version of the actual art world I have known, but like most reality TV, styled and watered down with some kind of Kool-Aid-like silly additive.

But Jane Holzer was there, looking substantial and vintage-y, and a little kind.  She was always kind, I think.  And I suppose Bravo shows are a viable variation of Warhol-lite.  Andy might have approved.
At 6 AM after a night of musical drama (I mean the kind that happens among band members), I turned on a TCM film called 'Pressure Point'-- one of those low-budget black and white tough early 60's pieces that resemble theatre more than cinema.  The direction was sparse and brilliant, the acting was breathtaking and razor-sharp.  Bobby Darin--- wasn't he a pop-star? He was like verbal spitfire, and Sidney Poitier's portrayal of a prison psychiatrist treating a bigoted Nazi psychotic prisoner-- was not just heroic but godlike.  There was a story, with political 'weight'... and there was a soliloquy.  There was passion and meaning and a message.  So what happened to our culture?  And why are these micro-talents on TV and in music and film so massively wealthy and poorly iconic to our under-informed young people?

I suppose if one is brought up on an exclusive diet of boxed breakfast cereal, Rice Krispies begins to resemble a healthy choice.  Watching Bill Clinton speak tonight, I grew nostalgic for the 1990's.  Jesus, next to the lame pickings at the conventions (Michelle Obama aside--- you are a sister!), he was oratorial and convincing.  I'd follow the guy to any local bar not to mention the polling booth.  I do like Obama, but liking the man and putting him at the helm of a 300,000,000 passenger ship are different.  And Romney--- this guy couldn't get himself on a decent ballot in any past but now, with the lack of viable competition, he's a contender.  A Mormon president.  Who's next?  Tom Cruise?  These are dangerous thoughts.

Has anyone read Paul Krugman's column this week?  The question should be 'has EVERYONE' read this?  Are people informed at all?  Are they listening and/or thinking or just chilling and watching another political reality show?   Because the lack of enthusiasm is contagious.  Thank the south for Bill Clinton tonight... he had a little of last night's Poitier passion and he got the crowd on their feet.  But will anyone get this country on its feet?  Are we too lazy to stand up and walk, to do more than hit the remote buttons a few times... ?   Of course I love Tom Petty but is this song really the energizing anthem we need?  Am I willing to give something up for my political cause?  Do I have anything left to give?  Is there anyone out there or is it all just television?

My first really vivid Presidential memory was of course Kennedy.  In that era we needed to see family portraits and outings; there was serious dealmaking going on behind the scenes-- international manipulations and villainous politicos.  There was sex and bourbon and blood and foreign intrigue.
Now we don't need to see nice family footage.  We need some rolled up sleeves and some tough talk and bone-breaking conviction and some fight.  Not nasty quips and accusatory twitters and assinine exaggerations about fish-catching and marathon running.  I feel like people are placing bets rather than voting their beliefs.  Is this an election or a Superbowl?  I'd hate to base the outcome on the ratings, but I'll wager the football audience exceeds the voter count. Come on, my fellow Democrats... let's play some Offense before it's too late.

Super-placebo

Mild weather may be diluting February doldrums, but for the hardcore winter sufferers, it's like getting the placebo instead of a bad drug.
I'm no football fan, so Superbowl Sunday for me is a version of a Valentine's Day with no date, but it was almost impossible, in New York City, not to catch some epidemic enthusiasm and old-fashioned American spirit. Not to mention the betting, the bars... for so many, it was better than New Year's eve.. .then the parade... and then the cleanup, and the post-gig let-down. So what is there to look forward to now...I guess baseball season, and we've got Jeremy Lin to distract us from the insufferable Republican bickering. To me, we have the placebo candidates; maybe I'm jaded and old, but the whole election process feels like an audition for Student Model Congress. Or maybe the latest Bravo reality show. Nothing is real-- even the hair dye and lock enhancement. I'm beginning to miss Ronald Reagan.

For the hard-core sports-addicted, the die-hard Giants fans, what can we offer for a 2-day hangover? My son broke up with his girlfriend Superbowl Friday. The game was a bit of a drug for him, but it was like watching through gauze in black and white. Of course I don't have HD and my TV is so small and pathetic, I can hardly distinguish players running around. So I thought about how here I am, sitting in front of the smallish set like a good 1950's-style American, bonding with the non-political majority, trying to enjoy the commercials, trying not to hate Madonna as much as I do, thinking ironically about Whitney's Star Spangled Banner rendition so many years back, not realizing that footage was to haunt me just a few brief weeks later.

But I also thought about non-celebrity people-- how someone was maybe getting married or engaged, someone was about to receive a cancer diagnosis, someone was having a baby, her husband cursing the timing...someone was maybe even losing a baby, burying a pet, tending to a demented spouse or parent, cooking dinner, changing diapers, dying. Someone was robbing the apartment of a family watching the game at a party. Someone was killing. Someone somewhere was being murdered. And underneath my window, to bring me out of my reverie, some kids were outside throwing a football around, unable to keep their dream on hold even long enough to watch the goddam game.

At 5 AM, we'd all binged on the recaps, recaps of recaps, reruns, interviews, repeats of interviews... some were sleeping, dreaming, sleeping it off, having drunk casual sex with a fellow reveller... whatever. Giselle had dissed the team, Donald Trump had come out on her side, Tom looked a little down, but how bad can life be when your consolation prize is the Sports Illustrated cover girl. I didn't even enjoy the game, but I was feeling the slump.

I was in my apartment remembering how it felt when your boyfriend cheats on you, and you obsess all night and finally at 5 AM when you swear you can see the premonition of blue light in the dawn sky, you breathe. You think--- they've done it--- they've maybe done it twice or even three times, and they're asleep, and beginning to anticipate how to greet the morning-after. To slink out, sheepish...to kiss and swear eternal love, to play over their phone messages and regret. To decide how to lie. To lie. Somehow, just knowing it was over gave me a tiny sense of relief. Maybe they felt bad. Whatever; they never feel as bad as I do.

I tried to communicate this thought to my son, but he wasn't buying. Middle-aged insight isn't appealing to a 22-year old. Pain is personal, as most of us have learned. We process it, feel it, medicate or invite it, as we choose. Maybe the only real personal freedom left to us. What I'd really like to tell him is that maybe loneliness is the beginning of something... that so much of life is like the back of a car getting smaller as it drives irreversibly down the road of our past, and we can only helplessly witness this in our present. That maybe some of life is running after that car, or turning around and refusing to watch it.

One day he'll look back and this particular Superbowl, the Giants victory, will be weighted with sadness and loneliness. For Whitney Houston's daughter-- -God knows if she liked football, or will know Cruz who grew up in Newark, her Mom's home town... she will think... my Mom was still here, maybe acting crazy or erratic--- but she was here. I could have told her not to get into that car, I could have emptied the tank of gas.

Maybe these people don't think the way I do... maybe they don't like songs like Mary Jane's Last Dance or say things like 'when blue suede shoes meant something'. Maybe they just talk it out and don't ride the train all night inventing lyrics and looking for the car with the most homeless sleepers so I can absorb their stench and their shadow because I've earned exactly that.

I remember sitting in my infant son's room on a cold January Sunday night, listening to that sweet calm breathing, inhaling the indescribable intoxicating scent of baby, rocking in his chair. I was not marveling at the super-sized 45 point lead the 49-ers had secured over the Broncos. I had no inkling then that for years I'd find myself sharing this night with my growing son, being educated about rushing yards, incompletes, tight ends, penalties and flags. Instead I was wondering about where my husband was sleeping, whether it was important that I know, waiting for it to be over, wanting the placebo-- the way he had the placebo, always... but knowing I'd never take it, because I'd always need it straight up, with the shadows and the curtains and the morning afters and the endless cars driving away down the road.