Everybody Knows

Sunday claustrophobia can creep up relatively unnoticed, like a stray cat with no voice.  The day's television newscasts were relentlessly alarming... not just the Afghan crisis but the hurricane which felt like a terrifying deja-vu.  For those of us with the disease of crippling empathy, it's difficult to convince ourselves that the sidewalks are actually safe; we are the lucky Americans at whom no one is shooting, and we are at least spared for now by the scourges of Mother Nature.

The reservoir at sunset was as smooth as an ice rink.  Not even ducks and geese disturbing the surface as though they were collectively observing the world catastrophes-- the fires and the floods, wars and famine-- sitting it out and celebrating the uptown calm of urban habitat on a summer weekend.  

Indulging in my pandemic television habit, I caught the Elizabeth Murray documentary, Everybody Knows, assuming the Leonard Cohen reference... who knows, I was mildly distracted since I've seen this one before.  I remember Elizabeth; I visited her studio once and was not as much impressed as inspired because she was one of those fortunate people with both a calling and a pathway.  Not only did she rarely doubt her work but she seemed to know exactly where she was going.  Also she had a wonderful husband-- the second-- but he 'got' her... and there is nothing better in this world than a partner who is truly that.  

Seeing the art world of the 70's and 80's is always jarring... there was clarity and importance.  There were critics and gallerists who had a point of view.  There were women gallerists who understood their artists-- who supported and promoted in just the right way-- not intrusive and not pushy and corrupting.  Art from the beginning was generous... it was expressing something without thought of compensation.  Yes, there were commissions and grants along the way but somehow it was the audience who profited, not the dealers.  It was the art world, not the art market.  I loved New York... the studios and the musicians practicing in drafty lofts... making my way up steep flights of old wood, kicking aside the garbage and scraps of fabric that littered the hallways... work was being done.  People with cigarettes hanging from their mouths were mixing colors and hammering things, with vinyl on their turntables-- the shiny black discs often spattered and fingerprinted with pigment.  

I remember being invited to a fancy dinner honoring the sculptor Noguchi who arrived wearing a flannel shirt and khaki pants.  One of his friends took me home to a raw space in Soho where I sat on an old mattress and watched him peel back canvas after canvas like a desert rug merchant.  It was a dream of enchantment-- like seeing the Stones in a small club with barely anyone there... the palpable sense of invention to a backbeat that came from some deep ground soil like audio Delta mud.  I left his place feeling my insides painted.

The death of Charlie Watts this week was another knoll in the endless dirge of my generation.  Like most bass players, I longed to share a stage with him.  In the early 90's when Bill Wyman had had enough, I was sounded for the audition.  Of course they were a male-dominated organization and I couldn't imagine it was anything but tokenism, and I refused.  Besides, I'd been called for famous auditions and the 'stars' were rarely there for the first elimination.  I wasn't going to fall for it.  Their sax player called me day after day-- I'd been lucky enough to share an all-night stage with him, and he pressured me.  Their manager...  but I had a child in nursery school... I couldn't leave.  We've got babysitters, he said... but it wasn't my 'trajectory'.  I wasn't like Elizabeth Murray and those other people with a 'team'.  I was alone, doing two jobs-- three jobs, sometimes.  And this is not about me... 

We'll all miss Charlie.  We have so much of him left behind... and I was also lucky enough to have stopped into Ronnie Scott's during the 80's when he was playing his 'heart' with various local jazz musicians.  He had his calling, and a pathway.  I wonder whether these youtube sensations with their hot licks and their virtuoso renditions of Bonham and Moon, the nine-year-olds who weigh less than an average bass drum but can play every single fill on every single Foo Fighters track.... do they have a pathway?  When you asked Charlie about his playing, he replied simply he liked making people dance.  

Circling the reservoir tonight there were few runners... as though everyone had returned to their nests for the evening to witness more of the drama on CNN.  It is compelling, disturbing and difficult to ignore.  Everybody Knows, Leonard Cohen sang, for the last time, at some point... and yes, we all know he had a co-writer... which matters little, because it is sort of the anthem at the bottom of my catalogue-- the funereal hymn, the accompaniment to every tragedy and nightfall and sunset... I could write endless alternate verses but it wouldn't matter... it suits the time-- the Plague, the racism, the economic divide... infidelity... failed and fragile love-- he covered it all.  For the rest of us-- the 'remainder' I think is the technical word for what is left after the subtracted... what we leave undone does little good and unfortunately not everybody will know.  

Who's Your Daddy

On Father's Day I walked down to the East River.  Like most things I count on in life, it was testing boundaries, flexing its liquid muscle, changing its face from calm rippling smiles to smirks to choppy grimaces and swirls and whorls of angry warning.  The sun had set and there was little moonlight.  The humid air was a prelude to the long New York summer which no longer spreads but looms like a warm dare.  There will be fireworks... there will be sleepless nights in damp sheets with dogs howling  through open windows and passing sirens belting out their urban lullaby with even more urgent frequency.  On the concrete boardwalk, the roar of the current duetted with the city hum, like some symphonic grey wind-- the thick planetary breath which seems to crescendo in these mid-year months.  My son used to complain that he couldn't hear the stars sing.

Who's your Daddy, I wanted to ask the river on that night?  But we know that.  From whence it comes, to where it goes-- the oneness and duality, the calm and the storm.  Men deftly steer their way from one side to the other... on barges, on tugboats... while uptown the Hellsgate Bridge like a kind of red heaven threatens to take any challenger to the deep cold bottom from which few have returned.

My own son grew up without a father.  Or he grew up with me straddling the two endpoints of parenting with limited skill.  I was unprepared by my own dad whom now that he is gone I can witness as a complex mess of post-war PTSD and garden-variety guilt that sabotaged what could have been a happy and productive life.  I feared and hated him most of the time; the feeling was mutual.  Like my son, I adopted a series of role models from ballet-teachers and coaches to movie stars and literary heroes.  One day it was Atticus Finch; the next it was the gardener.  Even the Good Humor man seemed to look at me with something closer to love than any holiday or ordinary greeting from my father.  I'm not sure if it was more painful for him, but I took that on, too.   I never got to have payback, or closure, or any unravelling or confession.  It stayed the way it began-- an awkward pantomime of familial choreography at best, and at worst just the outright poison-gas cloud of anger.  Meanwhile, I was glad to get out of there-- to go off on my own to college... to experience relationships and daily life without the straitjacket of familial angst.  I was happy and in love with the world... maybe a little too generous with emotions, and a little naive.

Tonight I went by the Art Students League to see the work of a young painter and I suddenly flashed back forty-something years to my fresh young urban-independent days.  As much as I obsessed over music-- the boiling pot of fantastic ingredients that produced the bands of the downtown scene-- I was in love with the city arts-- especially the painters, whose spattered clothing and long days of physical dedication to craft were like the wizards and shamans of my imagination.  There was a community of them then-- some in the relative wasteland that was Soho in those days--- occupying huge unheated raw lofts with their yards of canvas and piles of stretchers and stacks of paint cans.  They were tormented.  They were sensualists and passion-seekers.  They looked and listened and agonized.  At night they'd congregate at any one of the bars where a beer and a burger could be negotiated for about $2 for regulars... Fanelli's, the Cedar Tavern, etc...  

They loved the young art students and were too willing to 'father' us into the New York scene.  I slept with them... loved to awake in a strange mattress on a hardwood floor to the thick smell of paint and coffee brewing on an old gas stove.   There were no televisions in these places-- no air-conditioning-- just the hot soundtrack of Coltrane or Miles' Jack Johnson or occasionally Exile on Main Street or even Beethoven for some.  An array of books--- Picasso or Velasquez or Giotto-- poets, Henry Miller, Anais Nin... Beckett.... I inhaled.

The subways were hot and gritty and covered with graffiti-tags... the colorful trains of the early 80's were still a dream... but as a nod to the New York artists, the mayor funded a program called City Walls and a few of these painters got to design and cover a huge conspicuous building-side with one of their compositions.  I remember riding downtown in an old beat-up volkswagon with the back seat removed, my eyes closed for the big reveal... there at the end of Broadway, on Houston, was a huge layering of colored mountains and horizontal strata, like a great desert cake... done by my driver named Mel Pekarsky.  Shitty Walls, he called the commission, but his creation was amazing and I'll never forget how proud I felt to know him.

My young painter at the Art Students league tonight had done a huge landscape divided into grid-squares by lengths of string-- like a fresco design... and I thought about Mel's old wall which had long been covered over but which signaled in a way a sort of go-ahead for legal and illegal appropriations of urban surface for artistic messages.  The age of Haring and Basquiat, of the spectacular trains of Dondi and Lady Pink-- was just dawning.  I looked on the internet and was happy to see Mel is still alive and creating-- teaching-- a regular job to soften his senior years and hopefully pay his studio rent.  The art world will never be the same. The Art Students League gallery tonight was a little empty and without festivity... a little clinical and derivative... no angst, no insanity, no joy.  I remember how Mel wrote me postcards back in those years-- he'd paint and draw and address the verso.  Some of them were x-rated and confiscated by the post office.  Somewhere in the boxes of things stored in my father's old house, these treasures have been turned into trash, I learned recently.  One more tragic loss in this world where Soho is a pricey mall, galleries are stores, artists have become brands and the graffiti of the 1970's is being auctioned to rich men with clean apartments and housekeepers.

Looking ahead at the long summer weeks, I can't know what is in store.  My beloved BB King's is no longer; more of my favorite local musicians have packed up and gone to Nashville or Woodstock... I can't afford much more than a good long walk to the river or an occasional subway ride.  I still have no air-conditioning, live among stacks of paintings and piles of books-- these are and were my fathers, my mentors... my instruments are still my children, waiting for me to come home and wake them up.  Tonight I will close my eyes and remember that ride down Broadway into the enormous colored mirage of that painted desert dream.  Who's your Daddy, the painter blurted out, laughing, when he heard me gasp in awe in that hot Volkswagen with the stacks of canvases where the back seat used to be.   So forty-something years later,  four days past Father's Day, I just got it.