TV Husbandry

For a time in my life I thought I'd marry a scientist.  This of course after the phase where I longed to marry a fisherman... a woodcutter... a machinist... to simplify, become a wife in the true sense... to fulfill some biological mandate, cut out the subterfuge and intellectual noise and strip down to what really mattered.  To wake at dawn, fry herring and eggs and pack a hearty lunchpail.. To taste the oceanous salt on my husband's skin, cook his wares and share the damp sheets of his sea-worn exhaustion... inhale the ropy, woody scent of whomever.  

I think it was the Tom Verlaine thing that drew me in like campfire smoke.  The Scientist Writes a Letter, on which Andy Newmark plays the most devastatingly minimal drum-fill.  'I find I have no other lines,' he writes.  Magnetized, I was... over and over I played this track-- the vinyl.  'We men of science---' the confession... and suddenly I understood poetry-- from the mind of someone who could create a universe every time he dreams. The way he would invent-- postulate, discover, turn over brain matter... a man who sleeps with his eyes open, staring through phantom windows, who sees galaxies in a rock. I could hand him something I pick up on the street-- he would explain... he would find me.

For a while I hung around with this research doctor I'd grown up with. He was a narcissistic music fan who held court at gigs and briefly charmed my bandmates with his wide-eyed jargon and exaggerated hand-gestures. They quickly tired of his MO.  He played jazz piano and annoyed his neighbors.  Real musicians do not do this; we are quiet offstage. But he introduced me once.  Where are the scientists, I'd begged?  In their labs... sleeping... dreaming of ways.. of theorems, of methodology. I failed again... Besides, I postulated, In the Beginning was the Word.  That was everything.  I went back to my books and spoke in silent tongues.  

At your highest point, the Devil comes for you.  Fuck the damn Academy awards... and the Grammies.  I cannot get this out of my head... maybe because the Devil is everywhere. In the Procul Harum song, he came from Kansas. He elects himself, he positions and even submits when he must, to re-emerge like smoke.  He is in your bed some nights.  You come for him, try to convince him that even among the wicked, there can be kindnesses.

When a man opens to you-- truly opens-- this is a rare and terrifying thing.  In my father's day, this happened only among the weak, and on battlefields or operating theaters.  In my lifetime, I have had a man pour himself into me as though I were a glass.  These phonographic moments, as I designate them, remain in my architecture like a wedding.  If I monetized them, they might be worth something.  After all, some of these people were important-- from a time when names like Chevrolet stood out-- designations on which you could hang ornaments.  When music mattered-- when the man who turned himself inside out-- well, he was good-- good enough, the way things no longer seem to be.  He met a terrible end-- no one could predict, but his sorrow seemed prescient. 

Time does not heal; it makes things worse. We learn things before we are able to understand and by the time we begin to understand, it's too late.  First there is Church, then Belief.  By that moment, all of us have sinned, and in a secular life this counts. In versions, love becomes pain.  Some pain is unbearable. 

Last week I watched the Anthony Bourdain documentary-- the one which apparently his family did not embrace.  Yes, in between the farmers and typesetters, there were the chefs.  The gentle, doughy ones.  Not Bourdain who was much closer to the husband versions who failed me... but like all tragic figures who come for the Devil first, who beat him at his game, even love was a terrible bloody battle.  This man of knives who could butcher a giant alligator could not manage his heart and took himself down. 

It occurs to me now-- maybe rather than a wife, I have become husbandly... maybe a little tougher, a little wiser (whyser).  Or maybe, like the inevitable theoretical melding of yin and yang, I have become my own 'couple'.  Having failed at the science of husbands, I've become a sort of husband of science myself... the Verlaine version-- writing a sad letter of farewell to myself, perhaps-- confessing regretfully how attractive (in the magnetic sense) indifference can be. 

Bedeviled

Ever since the pandemic began, I've confessed several times to a television habit-- difficult as it is to follow the war in Ukraine these nights; the footage is beyond upsetting, the awareness of sitting in a safe room processing the horror provokes a kind of shame.  This weekend, with the NCAA games as distraction, I nearly overdosed.  I swore I'd avoid the Academy Awards but found myself tuning in just in time to see a few choice moments-- including the Will Smith debacle. 

I'm sure every blogger, journalist, critic, and mouthpiece has had a go at this today.  For me, I knew little of the marriage back-story; I'm old enough that a 20-something year achievement seems unimpressive, although I'm aware that Hollywood years are like dog-ages to the rest of us.  Still, what I did gather is that Will Smith seemed unhinged.  Not just upset or motivated or protective-- literally unhinged.  More than met the camera-eye. 

Of course I'm sort of a Hollywood-hater.  I haven't fallen in love with a movie for some time, now.  Nothing seems inventive or world-beating.  The glam and prep for these events far exceeds the content.  Such is life these days.  And with the world situation as it is, although these superstars and celebrities sympathized and supported the Ukrainian cause, these productions just seem-- well, faithless.  

The whole weekend was kind of a wash-- a storm of bad news and dismay and death.  Taylor Hawkins-- for anyone that plays rock and roll-- is a dream drummer.  He's animated and showmanly, and he plays his ass off-- sings, too.  It's a shock. Of course 50 is nearly twice the proverbial age of tragic loss, but it seems young to me.  I watched over and over footage of their more recent concerts; you try to find something-- some reason, some 'key'... He often took the microphone and sang before an audience.  It takes rock and roll balls to do this, to an arena-crowd.  He had that extra-energy-- the kind that comes often from the drug of performance, but also the kind that comes from a glassine envelope.  Something was not right.  And then it was all wrong.

Saturday evening on the way home I stopped at the Affordable Art Fair.  Granted, I'm tired of my own art-snobbery and disappointment... but honestly there was nothing I wanted to afford. The people exhibiting were so nice and courteous and the gallery staff just enthusiastic and generous-- but I felt sorry for them.  This has nothing to do with art.  It was desperate and meaningless and tarted-up with visual quotes of celebrity images and familiar art memes.  I ran into a friend who was buying a photograph (one of an edition) that reminded him of another photographer whose work reminds me of a Warholian car crash.  I wanted to say to him... look at this-- look at this painting.. there is something obviously missing here... but he doesn't see... maybe even the maker doesn't see-- or doesn't care. When in any reality does a sculpted hamburger take the place of something cooked?  Somewhere there is a line.  Things begin with a line.

Last night at 4 AM I was awakened by a gunshot.  One single shot.  It is unmistakable, this sound, and in a culture and time where suicide has become trendy and topical, it is worrying.  Or violence.  22 shots, they counted in Young Dolph's body...  21 more than he needed.  99 problems...  I am trying hard to get my broken friends to stop nursing their weaknesses, counting pains and issues.  We step out, I tell them.  We pull ourselves up into some kind of presentable walking creature.  We do this.  We are strong; we walk out onstage, like Taylor Hawkins did night after night... we lift weights and carry things. 

King Richard.  Like so many of the Shakespearean royals unhinged by just the pressures of responsibility and the pangs of remorse-- fear of failure, craving for heroic adulation.  Hollywood actors crawl on bloody knees for the success so few of them achieve.  Many hate themselves, despite all the press and hype and good deeds.  It's an unsustainable situation... and it's short-lived.  I remember well cheering my son at games which are equally forgettable and forgotten, but many of them punctuated with a trophy or a symbol; a brief championship.  These show up in thrift shop shelves... or at those memorabilia auctions.  One doesn't know who will be collectible in the end.  Life intervenes and dilutes. 

What I do know is the message of violence is heinous and immature. It's a punch in the face we'd all like to deliver somewhere, but here we are condemning Putin for his war-tantrum and behavior like an upset child with the power to threaten the world.  Nothing worse than a boy with a loaded gun. Not all of us have an audience-- or even a global live audience.  Those NCAA basketball players-- some of them threw their balls up in the air and failed to see them land squarely.  They pushed and shoved a little too hard-- they are boys, and defeat is tough to handle--especially when it is so fleeting and decisive.  They foul out, they receive a technical slap on their hand. In the NBA they are fined.  

It wasn't just the violence with no rebuttal... it was the disturbing acceptance speech, as well... the selfish/unselfish rhetoric of a privileged human-- talented, no question.  But unhinged, the way many of us feel.  The tears were not right.  We were a captive not a captivated audience.  There he was with a stage and a forum to deliver something. We squirmed in disbelief as we watched a man self-destructing.   I wonder what my friend the psychiatrist would say-- the one who calls me out consistently for my inconsistencies and vapid confessions.

I am singing for Ukraine, a girl announced onstage the other night.  I am painting for Ukraine, an artist tweeted... look at me, look at me. At your highest point, Denzel (the other King) quipped, the devil will come for you.   Not to mention your lowest point-- your final swan-song, your night of carousing, your career zenith which may haunt you forever because it is the ledge from which you fell, from which you are measured.  At 53 with a massive career of accomplishments, this was not simply an act of passion-- a bad decision.  

We are not enough, we humans. We have lost the thread of humanity; we have lost the content-- the purity-- the meaning of art.  The soul. It's not enough.  It's not good enough or tough enough or funny enough and it's not going to matter, in the long run.  Most award winners are doomed to become jeopardy questions and record-book entries.  The devil is winning, my friend said to me the other night. He is everywhere, maybe... certainly in the White House at the end of 2020... but one thing is for sure; even he is unreliable.  As David Grohl well knows... in the end, all alone is all we are (repeat ad infinitum...).

The Man Who Sold the World

Now that I've seen so many, I  begin the new year with trepidation-- with reluctance.  It's not that I hate to leave the old behind, but the acceleration of loss in my life is tipping the balance sheet to the dark side.  Even Wall Street is following the pattern.  But the deaths-- the illnesses, the shocks-- the accidents… January is already a bit of a black hole and the downhill track seems to have taken root in only 12 days.

A couple of my friends have already ended relationships... Damage control? Some kind of prescient avoidance of rockier paths ahead?  Who knows?  Maybe the unseasonably warm December cooled their winter passion prematurely.  There was something disconcerting and ominous about a balmy New York Christmas Eve-- a sense that we would be punished for the weather oasis.   I did my New Year's Eve gig--- put on my proverbial red shoes and danced the blues-- had a couple of friends over for second-shift pre-dawn champagne toasts, and was so concerned with other people's drama that I forgot to make a resolution.  I mean, my own expectations are fairly realistic at this point; besides promising I'll do a solo gig or release an album,  I don't overcommit.  2015 was a rough year for goodbyes and memorials; I have a little more respect for fate at this age, and a sense of fragility I didn't have years ago.

The post-New Year's sidewalks of Manhattan are lined with deceased Christmas trees, some in some state of greenery, some quite dead.  The irony of having seen these same trees vertical, healthy-- freshly cut and ready to shine for a family just a few weeks ago makes this seem a bit sadder--- they are now horizontal-- end-to-end, like a funeral procession of firs, sadly waiting to be turned to mulch and maybe returned to the ground from whence they came.  The sheer number is a little staggering-- an imported urban forest graveyard.

Dismantling my tree is a solitary and ceremonious task for me.  I always put on some mood music to make the tedium of putting away ornaments and lights just a little easier.  It brings back so many deja-vu Christmas denouements-- my son's first Christmas when I could scarcely afford a small scrawny tree and sat up for 3 nights with my feverish infant while he suffered through his first life crisis.  I was terrified and alone; my gift was his recovery.  Sometimes it's Beethoven or Bach; sometimes it's the Stones or Game Theory.  The Christmas just after Jeff Buckley had died,  I played his Grace and really 'heard' the Hallelujah for the first time.  It seems there's often a late-December death among my friends-- as though someone just can't quite cross over into the next year and succumbs.  I've always thought it's not quite as bad to die in the cold--- in the snow.  The white blessing seems to soften the blackness of death.  We all dread the New Year if we're smart.  From what I've seen, the future has yet to hold a candle to the past.

Saturday night I was already sad.  I put on the remastered Led Zeppelin which has so many associations it is relatively non-sentimental.  I got up on my ladder and managed to get the job done 

before the second cd had finished.  I took a walk up to Harlem at around 11 to shake my blues and buy a few groceries and on 110th Street, I ran into a prophetic figure.  She was tall, with heavy dreadlocks and a sort of black cape-- softly weeping until I passed her, when she began to wail.  What, I asked her… but it seemed the love of her life had just passed away; she'd left the hospital, was blindly walking toward some non-future, and she grabbed onto me.  She was desperate and I was madly searching my brain-bank for anything I could offer someone in urgent grief.  He was loved, I told her--- he was surrounded by the sense of love as he crossed over… how many of us have this joy?  Most of us shuffle from day to day alone and under-appreciated… but in a moment like this everything is a drop of water to a parched country--- it is nothing.  She wept and howled, blew her nose in my pocket-napkins, and tugged at my now-wet coat (the rain had begun-- even the sky was crying) as she sank to her knees and screamed for help.  I won't leave you, I promised.  And I kneeled with her, while the reality of what had happened replaced shock with some kind of violent emotional retching.  Finally we began to walk.  I was beginning to feel exhausted and trapped, in a way, in a well of sadness which had no bottom.  I tried to distract myself with thoughts… of course I'd had the very same loss-- the one human I knew as my great love-- who had suffered and died-- the one who told me he'd never leave-- he'd left me to grapple with lesser versions of love, failed attempts at marriage and family-- a story I could never relive and a dark shadow which followed me in and out of every single year.  

At least you won't witness the first night your husband turns his back to you--  the first infidelity or indiscretion-- the wounds and injuries that punctuate a lifetime of love, I wanted to tell her… but I didn't.  Finally I walked her to a friend's home and handed her off.  We exchanged first names only; we'd shared a moment of unbearable intimacy; I was covered in her tears and secretions, and I would most likely never see her again.  But I knew this was a sign.  I was about to get some terrible phone call; the next loss of the year had been foreshadowed.  I returned home and listened again to the new Bowie release which I'd heard the night before.  It was even darker now that I began to absorb its meaning.  Sorrow, I kept thinking-- ironically went to my computer to watch the great video version of Bowie and Amanda Lear… it distracted and took me into a world I'd once lived in.  The devil's daughter, I thought, as I processed my bizarre encounter on 110th Street…. I'd lived, though.  Twenty-four hours later I received the news that shook our musical foundations-- the loss of losses, for some of us.  Our Genie, our Hero, our Enchantor… 

The phenomenon of public grief is a little easier than private.  The fact that the music of someone like Bowie has rooted in our hearts at various moments of our life-- has taken us from teenage into near-golden years…. is something that may not happen in this new world.  I can't imagine my son and his friends grieving over a fallen rapper the way this death feels so universally catastrophic and sad.  What I do know, especially after the last week--- is that loss and grief are here to stay, in my life… whether I befriend or fear them, the only escape now is my own death, which is inevitable and closer with each tree that I lay quietly on the curb with its memories and sense of past finery.  Whether we are good or bad, kind and loving or cruel and cold, we can create-- we can produce, we can try to make something of this life, but nothing, as our sadly departed Muse understood long ago-- no, nothing will keep us together.