THE ANTI-BARBIE

On the first day of second grade I was sort of the new girl, having skipped a year and moved up into a faster group.  I sat in front of a blond-haired boy who shared his lunch with me on the playground. He was 7 and destined to become a high-school girl-chaser and an incurable romantic, but he'd singled me out (I was all of 6 years old) right there as his primary 'mate'.  

On the first Friday of that term, a stack of comic books was left on the front stoop outside my house.  A blond boy with a bicycle had delivered this, my neighbor announced.  There must have been fifty or sixty-- the pile was quite as high as the milkbox.  Some Nancy, some Richie Rich-- but mostly Superman, and various other galactic beings and heroes.  As an early reader, I devoured books... took my wagon back and forth to the library where I loaded and unloaded. But comics? I'd never tried these, besides the Sunday strips which never interested me much.

It's sort of a love thing, my mother suggested... and being the youngest and smallest in my class, having a handsome attaché gave me status.  So I delved into Superman-- Bizarro world, kryptonite, Mr Mxyzptlk-- Lois, Jimmy and Clark. Besides Elvis on the car-radio it was my first real foray into pop culture.  It was also my first experience of peer-culture affecting my personal entertainment choices.  And while I spent long afternoons playing at the blond boy's house with his dog and his siblings, he never really seemed that into comics.  He could draw and paint, though, and we made things-- built things, played in the yard.  We were sort of inseparable for years... until I hooked up in the 6th grade with his twin brother. By Middle School, we barely spoke.  And besides occasional childhood Superman episodes and the 1978 movie, I had significantly more interest in rock and roll, folk music and anti-heroes. The only cartoons I indulged in were Robert Crumb-- Edward Gorey-- Beardsley... etc.

So it baffles me that the Marvel Universe has usurped a disproportionate sector of our entertainment bandwidth. Movies, Broadway-- as though the cult of the juvenile has infiltrated.  I guess I can relate to science fiction-- horror, although I'm much more drawn to psychological thrillers and historical bio-pics.  But all this costumery and the characters... with super-powers and fantastic abilities... it's fun to consider, but it's a multi-trillion dollar industry. Yes for children wearing capes on Halloween, even the dolls and figurines... but as grown-up film material?  I'm missing something here.

Sometime in the early 90's I was looking for a new apartment and happened on a loft space filled with massive Lego projects.  This was the home of a sophisticated architect and the structures and ideas were compelling; the sheer volume of tiny blocks was staggering.  But now-- the cult of Lego has exploded.  Movies-- theme parks... and of course one must appeal to parents who accompany their kids and buy the toys that engage the whole family.  Well, it's educational-- the building part-- the geometry, the planning, the engineering factor. But the endless contests... in light of our overwhelming world issues... it seems way too much brain-time is occupied with play.  

While we were all sleeping, or building Lego, watching Spiderman-- galactic fantasy and space wars... our own world is more than a little terrifying and overwhelmed. Was this the point?  Instead of worrying about the new NATO and the Ukrainian cluster bombs, it seems we are all watching Barbie.  We pay to have our brains distracted.  More people will see this movie than vote in the primaries, sadly.  

Apparently sixty-one percent of America does not believe in evolution.  While the scientists were debating this week about the designation of an Anthropocene era, the majority ignores the math. Are these the same people who watch the Marvel films?  Jurassic Park? Are the lines deliberately blurred between reality and fiction? While Hollywood was making all those techno-laced fantasy films,  AI was slipping into our entertainment DNA and only this week the actors have decided it was terrifying enough to shut it all down?

Today I saw a news piece about a new cruise-ship that looked like it was manufactured in Candyland.  The toy-culture rules the seas; five intelligent men boarded an expensive toy (directed by a Playstation controller!) and self-destructed on their way to a sort of deep-sea fantasy-fulfillment.  I also saw a 75 year old woman wearing a pink tulle skirt and a Barbie handbag.  Grown men in suits ride scooters around the city.  They wear T-shirts and uniform replicas just like their own children.  When did this begin? 

The NYPL is commemorating HipHop with new cards to attract users. I got mine this morning... and I already miss the old one.  I wanted to become part of this culture... and yes, I embraced Hip Hop... but now I feel a bit duped, like I traded in an old vintage Renault for a Lego car.  Here I am, an incongruous specimen of mid-century obsolescence-- with my books and my records and my technological illiteracy. 

Text me, my son says... and it sounds as though he is asking me to transform him into verbiage.  There's a kind of poetry in my failure to adjust to the mainstream.  I am not just gig-less but gigabyte-less. To me AI is and always will be the first name of the great artist Ai Weiwei.  Irony?  He seems to understand things.  His Lego version of the Monet Waterlilies was spectacular.  But I digress... a symptom of natural intelligence-- one of the flaws and distractions of not just curiosity but the aging me.  God willing I will not descend into some intellectual childhood and betray my adult values.  Victim or villain, persecuted or culturally excommunicated as I am occasionally by the consequences of my analogue stubbornness, I was surely born this way. 

Valentine's Day Postmortem

Valentine's Day always provokes a little reminiscence-- some wisdom-seeking, since true love for me has been more of a temporary phenomenon... or an impossible quest, punctuated by death or tragedy.  And things linger... the scent of it, the absolute certainty of what evaded me-- what I gave away or abandoned. 

There were times, of course, those 'pinch-me' moments, when things seemed ultra-perfect... even during marriage, I was happy.  But I always return to a moment in London in the 1980's... where I'd moved to make my young husband equally happy... hearing him, his terrible voice singing in the shower a Smiths song... Stop Me... the lyric which paralyzed me: 'Nothing's changed...I still love you...only slightly, only slightly less than I used to, my love.'  The 'my love' at the end of the line is the chilling blow.  I can remember I was making the bed, that wonderful bed in the Acton Lane flat, where I  had felt consummated, celebrated, wifely.  But suddenly I began to doubt. Whether the song like a curse oozed onto the windscreen of my vision, or like theatre foretold an impending disaster, it was the moment I began to squirm.  

Maybe I looked for cracks in our perfect wedding portrait and our little romantic life, but there they were... not just the seeds of some discontent, but the evidence.  'Only slightly' would perhaps have been forgivable. In the end there was full-on infidelity.  Of course, as many of these rogue lovers and husbands insist, it is you that created some insecurity-- you, your touring and your band-intimacies and gracious audiences.  It set him off to find his own solace-- with the help of alcohol, and friendly divorcees at his office who were more than happy to accommodate his insecurity, his alleged loneliness.  

No one in this world ever wants to accept 'less'.  Whether it's a smaller tip, a briefer kiss, five times a week instead of seven, it is no longer enough.  We are such fragile creatures-- we speculate, we personalize, we suspect. It is evidence we have been demoted.  To be demoted in love is unacceptable.  It is painful and one step away from rejection.

The inverse of love is not hatred, but the absence of love. Indifference.  Elie Wiesel wrote of this-- the pain of neglect, the sense of abandonment; in this culture, to be 'unseen'.  It damages children, pets... deflates egos and hurts people.  

Our culture is fickle and harsh.  Celebrity can be a flash in the pan. It's not easy to be the best selling artist or most sought-after actor... it's a height from which you can only fall... and even these perfect couples-- well, they sometimes break apart.. or one stops loving the other, or finds someone else... it's difficult to go from #1 to #2.  

I've watched my son over the years go in and out of relationships-- doubt himself when it seems things are optimal... cause things to derail, then regret and try to put them back together.  The Prodigal husband-- it's a thing.  A couple I know divorced, remarried and then divorced again.  

Occasionally I dream about my husband, the one who swore it was just a song... who'd also sworn no one would ever love me the way he did, no one had the capacity of love that he had. Similarly I dream about a dog I had years ago-- that I come home and I've neglected him-- he's unfed, emaciated... My psychiatrist friends say dogs are dream-substitutes for our own selves.  But when I dream of my husband, he's not a dog or a substitute-- he's at a bar talking to someone... or he's walking away-- it's the devastating feeling that whatever peak of emotion you both managed to scale, you are on the way down-- it is 'less'--- he is leaving you... and there is nothing quite as difficult.  I've had affairs where you sabotage-- you anticipate and you ruin things, you 'fold' before the game is played out.  It's a kind of cowardice.   I know many single men who claim to love their bachelor status.  It's hard to trust people.  Nothing makes us more vulnerable than love.  We can lose money, lose our home, our job-- but finding your partner with someone else is the deepest wound.  It is a kind of death.  

In New York City where supposedly single people outnumber couples, Valentine's Day is still a looming silliness with which we tend to measure ourselves-- our relationship health, our single-ness, the admission of envy of some of my friends who have no romantic partner and feel diminished, or the ones that discredit and malign the day.  Coming as it does just days after my birthday, it was always sort of a denouement day for me.  I've been to weddings and received heart-shaped guitar picks engraved with the names of couples who went on to despise one another.  

My ex-husband championed the band My Bloody Valentine which debuted about the same time as The Smiths.  Ironically, they broke up, got back together, etc.  Personally, I'm just relieved it's over.  I never really liked the color red...  and while I cut out paper hearts for my friends and co-workers, I'm relieved to have not slightly less but no expectations.  I love those whom I love.  Some of them are still alive.  Things seem to work out.   Or not. 

Don't Cry for Me, Minnesota

When I first arrived in New York, I dated a printmaker.  Not an artist, but a master printer who worked at a fantastic place where Jasper Johns, Rauschenberg, Warhol made things.  It was hard work-- physical and artistic.  He was from Minnesota; I met him at a dinner. In those days there were these funky 'salons'-- people from Pratt or Parsons or Cooper Union-- they'd gather on weekend nights in small apartments-- walk-ups, or lofts which were under-occupied and commercially zoned.  Music generally came from a portable stereo-- or some people had guitars... but mostly it was artists, all dressed like paraders in thrift-shop wear, eating on boxes and cushions, smoking pot, drinking cheap alcohol.  They rarely shared work at these dinners-- it was about conversation and ideas. Some of them were to become famous... we all knew every single gallery show and the more promising among students stood out. It was like a mixer-- all this talent in a room, with smoke and quiet ambition and melting of ego. No photographs-- only the ones tacked on walls for inspiration.

Anyway, the Printer was out of place here.  He was shy, with his blonde ponytail-- half Irish, half Scandinavian.  He was sober and serious.  We went on a date or two; he had trouble speaking to me... he lived, fortunately, in a fantastic huge loft on the Bowery... which in those days was super affordable and of course he was well paid for his skill.  When I visited the studio to witness his work, I was overcome.  His technique was precise and masterly... the artists trusted and respected him enormously.  He spoke little and executed with brilliance. No, he had absolutely no ambition to create his own; still, he was a kind of maker. I was swept.  

The prints were pulled from these enormous presses of different varieties... laid out and then stacked when dry-- sometimes they were hand colored by the artist, but mostly they were piled up, waiting for the artist to sign, which they did, beginning with the one on top, so the last one pulled would often be numbered one of whatever.  Irony.  Of course they were virtually identical, but people are often seduced by the number '1', while the printer knows the last is first. 

Going through an old drawer of keepsakes last night, I found a handmade 'book'.  It was this lovely card from the shy printer, inviting me to come out with him.  Each page offered a different activity, with these charming illustrations and collages... like a children's book he'd created because it was so difficult for him to look me in the eye, or even touch me.  Last night, maybe 45 years later, it touched me. The smell of the paper and the inks in that studio, the phantom colors embedded in his rough hands... his sweater-- I remembered he insisted I wear it one damp early morning walking me home from one of those all-night soirees. It had a scent.  

My doorman told me last week that Low had cancelled their dates. Mimi Parker the singer and fulcrum of this band was ill and dying.  I remember so well their first album-- I played it over and over, went to an early concert where the breathtaking restraint of the music silenced the audience like nothing I'd experienced.  It was a small-ish club-- Brownie's?  I can't recall... but it was riveting and we went home without speaking.  I had a young boyfriend then-- it was romantic and the 90's in New York now seem so innocently grungy and real.  Night after night we'd put the cd on and it would provide the soundtrack to long hours of some kind of passion.  The music embedded in us-- it created a sort of Cathedral vibe, in my old converted-factory place with the sleep-loft.  Especially for musicians, whatever is on the turntable affects us-- paints a landscape. 

I'm sure thousands and millions of Low fans are mourning the loss of Mimi.  She was the epitome of unpretentious-- her voice true and crystalline-- soft and strong at the same time.  Minimal.  A worker and  musical angel. You'd trust her.  Apparently as a person she was the same.  Her life was perfect although she was a Mormon, but maybe that was part of her solidity.  At the funeral service in Duluth, everyone received a profiterole... and a recipe card. The message here to me-- is go on, be light and make something.  Each family also got a piece of her hand-sewn marriage quilt.  I'm sure the music was amazing... and by request, Tim Rutili performed his exquisite composition: 'All my friends are weeds and rain/All my friends are half-gone birds/Are magnets, all my friends are words/All my friends are funeral singers.'  

All my friends are funeral singers.  It seems not just cruel but wrong that a Mimi Parker is taken-- as though her number came up on the top of the pile, like a mistake.  Nothing is a mistake, Tyrone on 114th Street in Harlem announced last night.  There are regrets, there are omissions... there are secrets and lies, missteps and accidents.  But no mistakes. 

Tim's song is especially haunting for me as it goes on to say, at the end, 'All my friends are keeping time/ All my friends have just quit trying.'  If that is not a mistake, then it must be a kind of sin.  You may take time off to be a mother-- to love someone, to care for someone-- to fight a war, embrace some random person in an elevator.. but you must not drop your own narrative.  You must go on singing-- while you work, while you print-- in the back of your head... to accompany silently a Low melody or a lullaby, or the traffic noise. And at this point-- yes, to sadly recognize that we are all indeed funeral singers. 

Quaranteen

The first slight chill of September is a grim reminder of not just time but his designated reaper.  This summer's diminished celebrations have highlighted the significance of our mortality... of the way things wind down, segue casually into a sequence... or, more rarely-- simply die.  That 2020 may be remembered as the year with no summer, for some of us, is for our future perfect to determine.  

Death after death has been logged, like a thick-knotted rope we blindly grope in an unfamiliar, unlit present.  We are sad-- we are repressed, we are uncharacteristically grateful for small privileges as they are gradually restored... but like a hurricane aftermath, we have not yet surveyed the damaged human landscape.  

Meanwhile we have the fires burning in the West, reminding us that nature is not done with us-- that vaccine or none, there are larger battles in store-- there is perhaps life on Venus, economic disaster for any one of a number of countries... there is still a looming and impressive death toll to digest.  No wonder people demonstrate; fear fuels anger... we are leaderless, disunited, confused and betrayed.  We are the victims of emotional recession.

Tonight I re-watched The Virgin Suicides.  With the added distance of age (the parental Lisbons are a generation younger than I am now), it all seemed both more and less poignant.  The concept of innocence-- especially for those of us who were born in the 50's-- is complex and rooted.  Whether we were raised in a protective, sheltered home or somehow damaged and violated, all women seem to have a mothery response to teenage girls.  As some of us know, they can also be evil and manipulative-- but even in the darkest Lolitas, there remains a 'band' of white.  They get a reduced sentence.  

One of the noted ironies of this film tonight was the quarantine-- which unlike our pandemic culture only served to encourage the so-called malignancy it was meant to prevent.  Teenage suicide is especially tragic because real-life seems so vast and irrelevant outside the small passionate priorities of youth.  I remember my older sister once swallowed a bottle of aspirin because she was docked from some unremarkable party.  At the hospital she confessed she'd only actually eaten seven and they were baby aspirin because she was more terrified of the stomach-pumping apparatus.  In the end it was a worthless exercise and she'd played the death card badly.

The other theme that struck me was the longing-- that hypnotic, all-consuming 'drug' we really only experience from the entry points of love-- the fantastic, elaborate, drawn out sense of endless waiting to consummate or even touch the object of our desire (which can change in a teenage heartbeat).  Halfway through the film, at the bottom of the screen a message floated by informing me, among other bits of news, that Cardi B had filed for divorce citing 'trust issues'. Well... times have certainly changed from nights of holding a telephone receiver over a turntable playing early Todd Rundgren to the instantaneous and public posts of social media.  In the current MO of relationships, those weighted endless hours of courtship have eloped; time snaps back like an elastic weapon in your face.  

I don't know what teenagers hold onto these days... romance has had its wings clipped-- or maybe the quarantine, like the Lisbon sisters, has only stirred the fires of love and creativity.  I have heard all too many stories of death these months-- painful for those of us who stand helplessly on these quiet sidelines, but also somehow comprehensible in this world of 'less-than'.  I look back on my girlhood; as a high school senior I had a brief romance with a handsome young teacher who was installed as a 'draft dodger' .  He let it be known he was interested and as inappropriate and taboo as it was, it superseded any romantic fantasies of my 17th year.  I was fortunate; he treated me with utmost respect and kindness.  We drove off in his Renault to a studio apartment on West End Avenue where he taught me things I had not known, but never violated my 'innocence'.  It was 'everything'.  He even introduced me to Dustin Hoffman.  

My high school romance became a lifelong friendship... we went our separate appropriate ways and I always considered this experience more than first love... During the pandemic I learned he'd passed away, and with it a small chunk of my past buried itself.  For those of us who do not attend funerals or post on social media or weep publicly, these things have taken a toll.  For teenagers, reading about death statistics daily, masking their young mouths and maintaining an amount of sterility-- well, it seems like some kind of deprivation--  the year with no 'teenage'.  It seemed fitting tonight that The Virgin Suicides paid a kind of tribute to the pain and loss suffered by even the 'privileged perfect'.  I remember the criticisms that it 'rhapsodized' suicide... for me it just reminded of the perfect fragility of adolescence... the sad wasted timeline of disappointment and cancellation-- the ambiguous and ambivalent value of quarantine.  But I am old and nostalgic-- empathic and sad.

On the other hand, apparently Cardi B. has just filed for custody of Kulture.  Let's hope not.  

Deja Alanon

So I'm having a bad week. Full moon, pending dreary elections, moody weather, and ending a relationship which feels like a final farewell to anything vaguely impulsive and the last of my serial midlife crises. While virtually everyone in my life disapproved of the guy, now that I've broken it off, they've chosen this moment to rub my nose in the degradation of it and punish me when I'm down and solitary.

Tonight, reluctant to call a therapist and hitting a new bottom, I decided to go to an Alanon meeting. After all, the guy was apparently a drug addict-- or at least an alcoholic, and I'm a lifetime enabler. Not knowing the protocol, I entered slightly late, missed the 'reading' which was the catalyst for the sharing... and I'm listening to person after person trying to be thankful for some kind of abundance but hating themselves, their life, confessing to weakness, sounding totally self-involved and 'stuck'. Still, it is all I can do to keep from crying because I am feeling not just fragile but exhausted from 2 weeks of sleep deprivation and emotional abuse. I relate to everyone... but actually to no one. I pass when it is my turn to share, until there is a request for newcomers to speak....
A young attractive girl begins to cry, she has been engaged to marry a very successful and handsome young executive and has found instead that he is an addict, has witnessed her life falling apart, and she needs to know, wants to know... is there any 'tip' or suggestion as to how to simply get through these nights... it has been a month and she is inconsolable, angry, devastated....doesn't anyone have anything to offer?

And of course, I-- the dysfunctional meddling classic enabler, do the absolutely verboten taboo thing and answer her. I tell her--- I was in exactly her position, 22 years ago... the perfect husband, the perfect marriage, the envy of all my friends... but I was pregnant, and in another country... and it all unravelled. It will be okay, I tell her... you will find something to hold onto, you will find a way to get through and you will be okay.

So the guy who spoke endlessly about putting his left foot in front of his right until the timer-person had to stop him...interrupts me, and tells me there is absolutely no 'crosstalk' permitted at an Alanon meeting. Meaning this is not group therapy, but each person just 'shares' and the rest listen politely, pass a 'hat', hold hands and recite the 'serenity prayer' even though their boyfriend at home has just been threatening them with a switchblade, their mother is dying of some oozing horror and it is on their shirt, or their kids have just locked themselves in the bathroom and are smoking up many grams of crack.

Meaning also that in my current state of utter failure as a romantic partner, as a friend, as a musician because my emotional state is affecting my performance... I have now not only Failed at Alanon, but sabotaged the whole program. Of course, one kind woman sheepishly offered the pathetic defense that my transgression was heartfelt, and it was... but this did little to dispel the aura that there was a traitor in their midst and that the poor young girl whose boyfriend was in rehab was now damaged beyond repair by my maternal instinct and my obviously shitty advice.

I was once warned by an 'ex' not to ever enter these 'rooms'... that this is not the sort of thing I could find credible, that I would absorb the deep unhappiness of each of the participants and I inevitably would question the appropriateness of my candidacy for the program as a whole, as did he...

Of course since no one of my friends is speaking to me, I may now seek refuge with the pitbull himself, or I may have to find a 12-step program for people who fail at 12-step programs.... or I may have to weigh my cross and my star and my horoscope and see which of those might lead me to find my higher power. I seem to gravitate to the lower power, you see... and there doesn't seem to be a B-side to Alanon, or AA, or to any of my issues tonight. I seem to have learned very little from my relationships, except that love still seems to be the thing that all of these people cannot master, despite the steps, the meetings, the higher power thing... that whether or not we love ourselves, we seek some kind of company... and sitting in a circle in uncomfortable chairs, like a pro-tem anti-depressant, is not going to heal me or that poor beautiful girl who was trying desperately to assert that her boyfriend didn't 'deserve' her. Someone will, I wanted to say. Someone will... at least we hope so.

Truth is, we deserve nothing. We get what we get, we give what we give. Some of us give too much and it feels good... or it hurts. People hurt us, things hurt us, we hurt ourselves. This is how I know I am alive. Love hurts, birth hurts, death undoubtedly will hurt too. I read a great Bob Marley quote this morning... he seemed to know something about love...'Truth is, he said, everyone is going to hurt you. You just got to find the ones worth suffering for.' Healthy, addictive, generous, selfish... we all come back for more in some form or other.

So pick up your pen or your guitar and get over it.