Hospitality 2

While the Thomas Wolfe title and clichéd aphorism says You Can't Go Home Again, I think you can.  It's not the going-- that's kind of a geographical distance, but the coming that's tough.  'I'm going home', one says, bored at a party, annoyed with a social event-- exhaustion, a literal boundary-- a statement.  But 'I'm coming home' is something you say after time-- to your estranged family, to your ex... to your children, after an absence.  'Come home, baby,' your boyfriend says on the telephone at 3 AM and you cry, because it means a reversal of heart-- a reconciliation, a reunion.  You are not just leaving one place for your own apartment... you are coming 'to' someone-- a safe, familiar reality.

When my mother was in the throes of dementia, she'd phone me and beg me to take her home.  Where are you, I'd ask, and she'd reply she was at 'the apartment'.  Of course she was at her lifetime home, but her altered brain no longer recognized this.  Her heart, however, longed for what she had known and lost. It was poignant and heartbreaking for me who longed only for the mother I had known and lost.

Nearly thirty years ago after renting and resettling many times, I bit the bullet and bought an apartment here.  I searched and investigated and looked at hundreds of candidates... calculated what I could manage and picked a place.  It's old-- it's funky, and for me, living in a studio/loft with my son and sundry stragglers, it seemed palatial. I bought into a coop-- with many wonderful people who wrote for the New York Times, composed music, taught art-- creatives who made this like a sort of communal old home.  There was a live-in Super who'd been born here; single-handed, he kept the building immaculate and repaired things with pride.  It was his home. It was our home.  

As time went on and the city economy evolved, this old economical investment became more of a 'find' for people with money. Lured by modest prices, they bought in, renovated, sold.  The building profile began to change-- the old tenants dying off, and the new electing to have doormen and amenities I would never have preferred.  I realize I am not a homeowner but a shareholder in a corporation whose priorities are no longer mine.  People have combined spaces which were not meant to be combined-- violated wall insulation, installed cooling and heating systems whose noisy apparatus sits outside my courtyard windows. Our monthly costs have nearly exceeded my income.

Sell, my friends and neighbors advise me.  Daily I read real-estate emails listing the various moves of celebrities and investors-- from home to home, from design-space to new design-space.  I look-- I read, I wonder how I will survive.  I have given up most luxuries; I cannot even afford summer air-conditioning bills. My plumbing needs replacement; coop laws require professional insurance certification that is more than I can bear.  So many of my friends have left the city. 

I can remember the first nights I spent here-- the strange sounds in the walls and old radiators... will I ever feel 'at home' here, I wondered?  Gradually I spread out-- I built walls of bookshelves for my library... I hung artwork from friends and acquaintances.  My things occupy niches... furniture has been handed down from various sources.  My son has long ago moved out on his own and more than ever, this place has taken on the shape of me and I have morphed into the shape of this home.  It's old and it's packed with interesting things that inspire me.  I walk the halls at night and look at these things. I have records-- cds, cassettes-- guitars, basses, tools for creating... piles of old fabrics for quilts and small stamp and rock collections. It's a sort of home museum.  People come here-- not frequently the way they used to, but occasionally-- and they marvel at what is sort of my own portrait-- or a mirror of what matters to me.  

For true New Yorkers, we are first of our city, then perhaps Americans.  We love our home town-- huge, complicated, dangerous, overcrowded... endlessly fascinating and thrilling.  It's like a dysfunctional relationship I will never give up; I am married to my city, even in its current love affair with money and the corresponding cultural decline.  I watch the World Cup with interest, but it's the Knicks that have my heart.  The home team. 

The note left by the Iranian soccer team-- thanking America with great sarcasm for 'hospitality' (the lack thereof) was upsetting.  I wonder whether they would have been treated this way in New York City; somehow I think not. It was a complicated issue but in the end this is sports, not politics.  Besides, very few national teams are limited to their own countrymen; players come from everywhere.  I read somewhere that of the many sets of brothers participating in the World Cup, only a few played for the same nation. 

Today in the first real demonstration of dramatic summer heat, I walked from Soho to East Harlem. It was a little brutal... but opening my door-- I felt embraced by the sense of 'coming' home. This has become my family-- the walls, the furnishings, the lights and the old floors-- it's as though we've exchanged DNA. I've absorbed the ghosts and the invented narratives of former tenants from more than one hundred years ago.  There is no one waiting here for me, sadly... and yet there is everything else.

So I began tonight thinking about the Venezuelan earthquake victims... I have had nightmares about these kinds of catastrophes forever.  There is nothing more terrifying than a large-scale natural disaster that erases all safety-- all stability, all sense of home-- of life, family... it is unimaginable and so much worse than tragic. The collapse of buildings... the destruction and death and unspeakable horror of the lost and missing. And yet we still make wars and simulate this kind of destruction.

I guess the graphic news images reminded me of the great blessing of my home-- in the heat, in the absence of luxury, to be able to walk uptown and greet people who sit on stoops in summer evenings... the man with the curved back who sleeps on Madison now and is fed by neighbors... the dreadlocked young man who has built his cardboard castle at the entrance to the Q train-- who has amassed a little library and is writing The Great City Novel in minute ink lines in a tiny notebook.  He gets his morning coffee free from Starbucks and sleeps well these days, he tells me. He would not trade his home, he swears on a dog-eared Bible, accepting into his shopping-cart shelf an old copy of The Count of Monte Cristo which I have no doubt will be well read.

So America has a large birthday coming up.  Here in New York, people are excited about the colossal spectacle of Taylor Swift's wedding.  If one searches history sites, there are several dates for the birth of our city-- typical of its diversity and concurrent narratives.  As for me, I'll catch the fireworks, celebrate as an urban patriot, watch the ships in the harbor.  Somehow after midnight I'll manage the crowded journey back uptown after which I will be (God willing), in the words of Van Morrison, Coming Home.

We Can Be Mayors....

In the midst of the World Series, NBA season opening, football Sundays, I am a little obsessed with the mayoral race.  Of course my son taught me that in sports, there is a clear winner and something uniquely satisfying about clarity in this complicated world.  But in light of the recent gambling scandal, one begins to doubt.  Where politics is concerned, we have once again sunk back into petty messaging and accusations.  These pertain to the contest, I suppose... but once the voting is over, then the real game begins, and this is worrying.

I took an out-of-town break yesterday and visited the spectacular new art museum at my alma mater. The breathtaking concept of the architecture-- the way the building combined a sense of future with traditional breadth of collecting... was uplifting.  Unfortunately, even this project was stained by negative allegations against the architect; still, his design, which was already in progress, is stellar.

Cult of personality, when I was more naive, integrated one's work occasionally with who one was.  Now,  'persona' has eclipsed what they actually do. The whole lucrative business of branding bases itself on the concept that a celebrity can convince us to do/buy nearly anything. It's worrying... as though all of America has this teenage brain which is unable to separate fact and reality from fantasy and facade.

Visiting old universities and colleges, the 'scent' of academia is palpable and appealing.  I wondered what I'd be if I'd stayed with my art studies, as planned.  At this moment, I'd have probably aged out of the new curatorial generation and contented myself with restoring old paintings or regretting not having taken up the bass. Water under the bridge.  I did have some great conversations and reminisced about old days and my intimacy with the objects in the former museum building where I occasionally pored over manuscripts and painted treasures in a back room.

Sunday night I watched a Tarkovsky film-- Stalker.  It's an extraordinary piece of work with even the film texture a particular choice-- alternating from sepia-tone to rich color-- from depressing, dark reality to a kind of spiritual epiphany. Without doing a movie review, it is both terrifying and then reassuring-- from the ominous post-apocalyptic wasteland to the resilience of the human spirit.  The dialogue stands out; it's poetic, philosophical and inspiring.  One quote stayed with me 'Passion is nothing but the friction of the soul against the outside world'... something like that, which may actually have been lifted from Herman Hesse.

On the way back from Princeton it was cold and damp... leather jacket weather... but I found myself waiting on a train platform with a young student dressed in a sequined sort of bathing suit with a small skirt-- no sleeves, no jacket-- bare legs with high-heeled white boots.  Her flesh was on display;  ditto the fact that she did not shave or groom herself anywhere-- an odd combination.  She was freezing, on her way to a Sabrina Carpenter concert where she would go directly from the train to the venue.  No one really stared at her but in case she needed protection, we struck up a conversation-- about the concert, about her studies.  She worked as a valet summers and spent all her money on concert merch.  Within minutes another woman appeared -- in a pink satin mini dress-- bare arms, with gold fishnets and the same white boots.  They did not know one another.  It was extraordinary... the pink dress was studying neuro-biology and had only a bag with books.  A coat, she told me, would ruin her outfit.  She, too, was shivering. 

No judgment.  In my day we wore jeans to concerts-- there were few 'followers' or even pussy hats or costume choices, although the Zappa Halloween show was something to see.  These girls had the confidence to get on a commuter train-- alone, dressed this way... well, it is Halloween week... but this was something else. Still, I have to concede that their passion, their hero-- white pop-Disney-girlie-dress-up icon, was as valid as my Rolling Stones and Proust and Caspar David Friedrich schoolgirl obsessions.

I fail to understand the current culture of superhero movies, the custom of adults dressing up in costumes, imitating comic books.  Is life so terrifying that one needs to arm oneself against it, imagine one can bend reality with these powers and super traits? Superman reversing the spin of the world to reverse time and save his love-- was a novel idea, but the unlikely movie scenarios come one after another, at the expense of what used to be considered the 'art' of film. It seems not just juvenile but absurd. And while I understand little boys wearing sports jerseys and gear to games, I don't 'see' grown men vying for sports jerseys at auctions for millions of dollars-- or even collecting sneakers and dressing up for games. Then I think of the World Cup and there's something legitimately passionate and patriotic about the spectators. 

It all comes down to this nagging question in my head: who are we and have we changed?  I think we have.  I mean, I have to admire these two Princeton students-- not even 20, for committing to their passion...for wearing it in and out of context... like a movement for them, I suppose. The incredibly lucrative marketing of the merchandise-- the commodification of fame-- well, that's another story. In my day star athletes made a tiny fraction of what bench players now command. 

Getting back to the elections, I have a harder and harder time deciphering who the candidates are. Their opponents define them by their mistakes and failures; we the voters try to see beyond this to their leadership capabilities and their true commitment.  No one at this level is pure. Separating ambition from mission is difficult. I can't help seeing Mamdani in a mirror wearing a superhero cape; he seems too much of that generation to me, and I am also influenced by my son who met him as an aspiring rapper. It worries me.

We are no longer either what we eat, or what we say we are, in politics. Nor are we what we wear, as we learn from the athletes who switch teams and uniforms according to payout. Dressing as Sabrina Carpenter doesn't make us singers or superstars or beautiful, but it does take us a little out of our own reality... and it makes us part of something. Those two women made friends on the train... maybe lifelong friends. That matters. 

I am off to the polls at the moment; I am not thrilled with either choice and I am not defined by my vote. I think in my student days-- anticipating my first eligible Presidential election--I WAS that. Despite Watergate, I had belief and conviction... volunteered and worked for them. I was exploring my soul, trying to understand art and uncover my personal 'calling' by experiencing friction with the outside world. Fifty years later-- badly dressed, and certainly not in costume, I'll pick a candidate and tonight I'll watch the World Series, but I'll always take Tarkovsky.

Lebron in the City

Forget the oil spill, the World Cup, Lindsay Lohan’s expiring Get–out-of-Jail-Free card…. Here’s … Lebron. Not only does his sheer stature occupy serious pixel real estate on your TV, but now his management has decided to play with prime –time TV in a new game where the odds are interesting gambling sites a good deal more than the recent play-offs.

Maybe he’s jealous that Lamar Odum is picking up an extra paycheck from the Kardashian show, or maybe he felt jilted that he wasn’t invited to the televised wedding. Suddenly the traditional meaning of ‘game’ is no longer enough… there has to be a press angle, a reality show. For a player who has the potential status of a Michael Jordan, this kind of publicity seems somehow unfitting… but now there is Hitchcock-worthy suspense, a media-spin signing competition with huge ESPN resonance, and no doubt advertising time is beginning to rival superbowl minutes.

The current boy-King is currently in Greenwich--- not a traditionally homey place for black people, unless, of course, you are a Knickerbocker or a Yankee star. This is hedge-fund territory, a town of no malls and many Ferraris, maybe the country’s largest per-capita wine cellar acreage.

Anyway, we will sit looking at our cellphones and take our place in an audience larger than that of any recent presidential address for a one-hour extension of a pronouncement which could at best be slowed down to a 30-second sentence, including family and professional appreciation. What will he be wearing? Armani? Tommy Hilfiger? Will it be blue and orange? Tommy has done these colors-- lives in Greenwich, along with Alan Houston, David Cone….getting warmer? Will he be holding his child, standing with his wife? Will she be wearing a hat? Will Mrs. Obama’s favorite designer be making an emergency trip to Greenwich? What does Mrs. James look like anyway and will she be signing up for the newest version of Housewives of Greenwich?

The suspense is killing me. Not. But speaking of TV, I was forced to sit in front of the set to witness one of those Project Art-star episodes, produced by the fashion-savvy Sarah Jessica Parker who is Bravo-friendly and not well-known for her art expertise. And Simon de Pury…. Was it not enough for Phillips to have sold out to a champagne company…now they belong to a Russian conglomerate whose ruthless retail philosophy has little to do with art but much ado about marketing? The Warholian joke has long been exhausted, and besides the numerous PBS documentaries and the prayer that the computer age will improve the art of television, there is little compatibility between art and the TV runway. Mr. de Pury looks and acts ridiculous and the so-called gallerists are over-styled and pathetically a-philosophical. The Brooklyn Museum must be more desperate than during the 1970’s.

I was frankly baffled by the thought process of each and every one of the ‘artists’, and found one of the bottom-3 pieces very slightly better than the signature work of the visiting art-star of the week whose work is a sad and sorry example of what passes today as bankable and collectible. Bring on the Russian influence--- the grunting sexy tennis stars and the botoxed new breed of Spies--- the litigious girlfriends and models, the histrionic drama-queen skating stars and dancers.

What happened to Tolstoy and Chekhov, Gontcharova and El Lissitsky? Okay, Chagall moved to Paris. What next… Lebron in Moscow? Something suspiciously Russian about all the drama… the Nets have gone Russian… Chelsea… but not many Nets players in Connecticut… So could it be that the Knicks are about to be bought? We’ll be watching at 9 PM… which is 2 AM Greenwich time? The one that’s closer to Moscow.