.. Like a (- -) Cigarette Should...

My father, either from some residual emigré paranoia or fear of commitment, kept a packed suitcase in the  downstairs closet. So when he warned my mother sometime in the mid-60's at the family dinner table, 'Either quit smoking or I'm leaving,' she took it seriously. With wet eyes we ceremoniously flushed the last pack-- one by one. 

Nearly every childhood memory of my mother involves her graceful hands, her perfectly manicured long fingers, and a lit cigarette with old-world elegance between the first and second.  It was so much a part of her silhouette-- of her attitude and her fashion gestalt.  In photographs she is a bit like a 50's film star.  And while her health and life-stamina undoubtedly profited from giving up the habit, I never again found her image quite as seductive and appealing.  It was as though she gave up a shadow-persona or stopped dreaming and became simply a mother.

At the age of ten I used to steal a few cigarettes from the lovely silver and porcelain boxes that were laid out on nearly every end-table and surface in the den and living room.  These were a part of interior design culture-- accessorizing, the way flowers or bowls of things are casually strewn around contemporary rooms-- books and magazines.  Most of one's guests were smokers.  Ashtrays were everywhere... clean-up chores included dumping these before bed.  

But I'd steal one at night while I walked the dogs to the end of our dead-end street... I'd stand in the shadow of the streetlamp and pretend to inhale... watching my silhouette turn into a more womanly version of myself.  I felt grown-up-- and imagined myself in all kinds of mysterious scenarios. My older sister was often scolded for hiding packs of Winstons in her purse... I thought perhaps she and my mother were conspiring in secret. Neither of us really acquired the habit, although most of my boyfriends were heavy smokers. It was part of being cool and nonchalant; it made everyone seem older.

In high school kids smoked on the pavement outside... it was a sort of sign. Everyone had their personal style. As a musician, guitar players had their little tricks-- a cigarette somehow balanced in their guitar headstock, drummers with one hanging from their mouth while they played... and the whole front row a smoky backlit second stage of audience, providing atmosphere. Jazz bands with the spotlight suffused with tone looked magical.

When smoking was banned in clubs and restaurants the whole culture changed... photography changed, attitude.  We were less hidden and in clear, naked resolution.  Of course drugs were invisible... alcohol. But things were different.  I had a boyfriend who would smoke one single cigarette after dinner; this took discipline, but it was kind of a remarkable habit and I envied him his eight or ten minutes of escape into some other world. 

There was a bouncer at one club who against rules would light up after hours.  He was built like a tank and wore a solid gold pitbull around his neck. Who's gonna tell me to put this out he would ask me if I raised my eyebrow?  Ain't nobody.  And he would puff away with his whiskey.  I loved it. 

I've been reading Per Petterson the Norwegian writer.  One after another-- like pack after pack-- it became a two-week addiction. His economical sentences, the clear sense of presence and observation and his brutal self-chastising. Cigarettes are ubiquitous-- not an accessory but a device.  It occurs that what I love most about his writing is an ability to dissect a moment.  One wavers with him-- his human fallibility and hesitance... as he drives or walks-- barhops, weathers relationship failure and loneliness, as he processes grief.  

Somehow I feel I am inside his head-- through the translation, despite the unfamiliar landscape... he recruits the reader somehow. At least I found myself weeping with his disappointments and failures and sadness. And I remember the sense of smoking-- the way it is in a 60's film... the way it accompanies pauses and silences.  A cigarette allows one distance-- breath, ironically... to dissect a moment.  

I can remember putting coins into a machine for my Mom and pulling out Winstons or Kent... it felt like an important task and I knew it was like opening a book for her-- more than a habit, more than a need... more like a change of costume, or a privileged moment.  She escaped, she coped; she dreamed.  More than anything I miss this version of her.  

Often I wonder whether my own son will remember me on a stage, playing bass--- in another kind of state--slightly removed, in a smoky room... not just a mother but a person.  Music, too-- the experience, and even the memory-- allows one permission to dissect a moment... transforms one... of course there is no souvenir here-- no pack to discard or keep... no co-conspiratorial vibe, no grace of inhale... no breath.  Nothing replaces the simple ritual; it's become unhealthy, part of the now visually nostalgic normalcy of 60's movies... 

We've come so far... our 21st century wisdom so easily accelerates action, trades one vice for another, deletes romance, miscalculates the slow revelation of a simple action that was available to nearly all of us. The next generation will doubtless recall their parents differently... will doubtless not feel enchanted and moved by footage of Willy DeVille on a stool, swathed in the smoke of his stage cigarette and the spotlight, while he sings to us how heaven stood still.

Old Poets Society

Last week I binged on four novels by Per Petterson. Four. His clean, simple sentences are humbling and a little comforting in a world that feels so precariously skewed, so far from any sense of clarity. But one of the narrators observed that the past is a kind of foreign country; things are done differently there, he said. This resonated.  

I remember thinking and writing, in 2020, that the pandemic removed the future temporarily, and muddled the present.  For many of my generation, the past became a sort of refuge; it felt solid and safe.  Some of these people forgot completely about the future, and will never again trust in this.  They've become steeped in nostalgia and recollection to the extent that their present is nearly eclipsed by what came before. The issue is, our versions of the past are not as reliable as we think.  And yes, things were done differently there. Many old bets are 'off'. Still, this is not an excuse not to go on; we must do more than criticize and indulge one another with memories.

Facebook as a platform encourages this kind of behavior.  One can't open a page without being reminded of past celebrations and events-- griefs and losses. There we are -- happy and laughing-- in places that no longer exist, with friends who have sadly passed away.  

April being poetry month brings a slew of daily lines I'd posted in past years which at the time seemed more compelling, as though one needed a witness to just 'be'. And as much as one hates to admit, it is audience that affects our sense of self-worth.  I grew up copying poems into a notebook from the age of four, alternating with many of my own I never showed anyone until this 'me' era gave me a little encouragement. I was writing and performing my songs for years before I thought of sharing poems. It surprised me in the 1980's that much of the praise for my first recording was for lyrics.

When I used to take the night bus crosstown to the 3 train, on the way to work, I often met an older man named Bob.  He was a writer; he'd kept his student apartment on the west side for over fifty years so he could spend nights typing without disturbing his wife. Mostly he wrote poetry... he'd recite for me on the bus, old style, and as we got to know one another, he'd tell me amazing stories... he'd translated Neruda, and got to take him around the city on one of his very few visits here. It seemed almost incredulous.  He had incredibly chivalrous manners and always held my hand as I got off the bus.  

One day he dropped off a manila envelope of work... written in fastidious and beautiful longhand... lovely professional poems about nature, about love... about grief.  His wife had died, but he still kept his habit of crossing town to his little writing studio. I got the courage to give him a manuscript of Scars-- my first collection-- and he treated it as though it was established literature.  His praise was quiet but solid and he showed me a good deal of respect.  When the book came, he insisted on buying ten copies which he said he gave out to friends and fellow-poets. They need to know you, he would say.

I often ran into him-- walking, looking down, without a coat like an old Englishman-- no umbrella in the rain...  we exchanged work over the years and he gave me a good deal of confidence.  During the Covid quarantine one day he called me-- to see how I was, but really it was just to connect.  I felt terrible. He passed away two years ago-- his aging undoubtedly accelerated by the shock of the pandemic.  I still rode the bus often-- it was free-- and wrote verse in my head. 

A young woman in his building had somehow befriended him... put his work together in a book which was not of the quality he deserved.  In exchange I think she received much of his estate... his apartment, I'd heard... I don't know why I mistrusted her, but I do. Shame on me.

My other mentor/fellow poet was a woman named Siri... she was eighty when we met and had just published her first book, sponsored by a former laureate who taught at Columbia where she took an evening class.  Somehow we exchanged books and then work.  Her poems were interesting and serious; she had a degree in Botany from Harvard... her text was wonderfully suffused with flowers and tree names... she had also, I learned, been married to a very high-profile financier and lived well. 

For a few years Siri and I met for coffee and critiqued one another. Her respect for me was enormously helpful.  One day I heard she'd ironically tripped over one of those sidewalk tree-garden fences and hit her head.  From then on she was confused.  Soon afterward I dropped off an envelope of work and the doorman told me she'd passed away.  I still have a small pile of her 'new' work-- a poem about twin girls that haunts me still.  Her daughters are sort of celebrities and impossible to track down... but I often wonder if they ever cherished her work.

When I first moved to my neighborhood, in the 1990's, The Unterberg Poetry Center at the 92nd Street Y was active and provided not just a platform for readings but an incomparable library of mostly donated works from important poets who had read and spoken there over seventy-five years. The library was sadly dismantled to make room for a spa, and while the organization exists as an online resource, politics and contemporary financial priorities have altered its meaning. It is no longer a 'home' for old poets.

So now in 2025 I continue to receive the Knopf Poem of the Day emailed April mornings... occasionally a gem in there, but usually, like today-- a tough Anne Sexton-- someone from the more rigorous past.  The new poets-- well, for the most part they disappoint.  Still anxious to discover something... I begin to doubt myself. I have not been taught... I have just transcribed the voice which recites inside. But I am aware that my two under-celebrated mentors have given me the courage to envision some creative future where I will try to approach the standards they shared quietly in private poetic confidence. 

Categorically Speaking

I'm back to reading Javier Marías who sadly passed away two years ago. Now that I know his body of work is static and limited, I ration the few I have not yet read.  This one, like several others, takes its title from Shakespeare... Thus Bad Begins-- ominous words for these times, maybe more so when one considers the quotation ends 'and worse remains behind.'

Not to preface a lecture on Hamlet, but an entrance to one of Marías' mystery narratives which opens with a disturbing comment that truth is categorical. While the old 'me' would balk at such a concept, the quagmire of this political soup in which we find ourselves has broken into my belief system like a thief. I am having trouble maintaining and defending the things we held as self-evident in light of what is dangerously becoming law.

It's not just politics; in this AI era one would think fact-checking was a digital shadow that kept us all honest... but it doesn't seem to be working.  We are able to replay basketball points and foul-calls in great detail, from several vantage points, but our justice system does not have this tool.  Innocent people are deemed criminal and white-collar criminals are sometimes not just exonerated but rewarded according to the manipulations of legalities.  Then again, inside our jails there is another justice system, and an all-too-common abuse of power among prison employees that further obscures the administration of human rights. 

It's like a labyrinth of morality. Our government daily shakes the dice and changes the rules.  Immigrants who came here pursuing a dream under a democratic regime now find themselves hunted by ICE agents.  It's like getting on a train going west and having the sign changed arbitrarily, finding oneself headed anywhere.  Liars and cheaters are winning.  We have less social motivation to be good and kind, except that most of us, fortunately, are made this way.  

I am lucky to have women friends of all ages-- from 16 to 99. Listening to them complain about relationships and the difficulty of finding appropriate partners is one of my constant pastimes.  Of course at 99 the options are limited. But for those who are recently divorced or separated, or still single in this city and searching, truth can be categorical.  Online profiles and apps are filled with shysters and fibbers... men who are still married or partnered... people who like your profile photo enough to temporarily masquerade as exactly what you profess to want. And then all bets are off.  One still, in this digital dating world, goes on analogue dates, develops real attachments and in a city like New York, suffers break-ups and disappointments with someone who can melt back into anonymity in mere hours. 

We are confused; we are betrayed, we are like sheep without a proper pasture.  Most scenarios, like novels, have a variety of endings; some predictable and some, like the best of mysteries, will end in a shocking twist.  I can't help wondering where all of this is going... not even a hundred days into this presidency, and institutions of kindness and generosity are being dismantled, cultural platforms stripped and charitable organizations paralyzed.  Public research will be funded according to an agenda which serves not the people but itself.  

In the background of most Marías novels is the looming history of the Spanish Franco regime-- the way it persecuted freedom and then sort of deflated and petered out, with its proponents skulking away without much ado, and its victims in a sort of heroic limbo. Like the Third Reich in Germany, there's a residual national guilt that doesn't disappear, despite generations born without memory of these times.   Is this going to be the Great American Shame, the darkest era in our young history?  Will a national catastrophe or pandemic cause this terrible government to implode? It's hard to find a safe haven; it's hard to sleep when the very foundation of American justice seems like a kind of sport where the rules are constantly being changed by the Great Orange Moderator. 

When I was small I had a doll-sized figure of Sojourner Truth my nanny gave me. She fought for Freedom, I was told.  I stood her on a special shelf with my favorite shells and rocks. This was a symbol; truth was a solid, provable thing that had to do with freedom and civil rights.  It held the world up like an invisible column-- like God.  Even science was simply a quest to find the inherent truth of things-- the atomic number, the definition.  

So maybe in this era Marías will not see, truth has become simply a category-- an option. Guilt is relative; there are only the jailed and the jailors, the rulers and the ruled, the empowered and the powerless. There is love and there is a great lonely population, I am discovering, in our city which cannot seem to find its footing in these times where its elected leadership is questionably prosecuted but not convicted. 

No wonder people are obsessed with March Madness, with television and netflix and instagram and dating apps, with ordering food and cooking competitions-- with anything, really, where there is a kind of winner and loser. We can't even get a proper diagnosis here, because the business of medicine has subjugated science to profit, and prevents physicians from treating patients equally.  

As for me I am once again entranced by the skill and astute intelligence of Marías who insisted his many accolades were due to the general dearth of quality literature in our time. While temporally and politically skeptical, he has a way of finding his truth, uncategorically. At this moment it's all the closure I may get.

Holm, Sweet Holm

Despite my general aversion to travel, I spent last week in Stockholm. Arrivals in a new city are always a bit blurry and emotional; one sees shapes, rather than specific landscape... a kind of reverse deja-vu, rather than reality. Gradually one acclimates and forms attachments. I remember moving to London... it was so grey and lonely; I couldn't imagine ever having friends and hanging out. 

But this was maybe my 15th trip to Stockholm; it has a kind of familiarity for me.  It is friendly; I can manage the geography and move among the islands with confidence. The coffee is wonderful... the streets are navigable and the traffic, even in the city at rush hour, is near-non-existent. Pedestrians have priority; and yet, for an incorrigible urbanite like me, it is very much a city.

In any European city the history is immersive. Although New York is centuries old, we are hybrid and new; we are a conglomerate of 'others' who more or less chose to make their home here. Besides 9/11, we have not fought wars on Manhattan ground, we do not have millennia of history resonating in our architecture, in our lore. Over the years I have traveled and toured, there was a kind of fascination with Americans.  We were the authors of rock and roll, of rhythm and blues and be-bop. There seemed to be ubiquitous curiosity about our culture.

This time, I felt a little reserved.  Yes, I traveled during the first Trump presidency but most of the world seemed to pass that one off like the anomaly we assumed it was: this will be be temporary... like a reality show gone wrong. We had jokes, memes. This time, people looked at me with a kind of skepticism.  What could we be thinking? Major issues of war, NATO membership, EU unity preoccupied the news. America the hero had turned into America the selfish narcissist. In a country where social democracy and inclusivity are prized, the general sentiment was 'appalled'.

It was a little reassuring to watch the Belgian summit on Sky TV, to appreciate the way these countries stood up for one another; after all, they are neighbors, they share a continent.  But all of them together do not have the economic power of the US; their very existence could be threatened by the New World Order... and suddenly, the values I was taught in 20th century America were off the table.  There is an ocean between you and Russia, Zelensky reminded Trump who seemed irritated if anything by this observation. Between allies-- between democratic nations, there is no ocean but a bond, a spoken or unspoken promise. We grew up with this assurance.

So I found myself engaged in endless conversations about our politics. Rather than getting a modicum of respect for being a New Yorker, I felt helpless and ashamed. Along with my Swedish friends, I ask every day... how could this have happened? No, we are farther from the sounds of war here, but I no longer have faith in any kind of fatherland or protective constitutional assurance; right has become wrong and wrong is being distorted into status quo. 

Sleeping in strange beds in different time zones always produces a unique set of dreams.  For some reason  I woke at 5 AM the first night with a memory of my first Au Pair job, during my college years.  In exchange for room and board I cared for the two young sons of a writer-in-residence at my school.  After a week or so of acclimating myself to something besides a dormitory cot, I found my employer visiting me in my bed. He reeked of bourbon and was aggressive and romantic and begging. It was a pathetic denouement of a person I'd respected.  I'd considered myself fortunate to have this opportunity. What to do?  I could not cause a scandal; I was familiar with drunk episodes from my own family, and knew it was my 19-year-old word against his.  So I managed it... I got up, I resisted.. I paced... I adjusted.  I should have ratted him out; it was unconscionable and invasive.  But why did this come up, 50 years later, in Stockholm? Maybe I was confusing one of those Nobel prize films with my reality... the place, the betrayal, the strangeness. The betrayal.

During the week I was there I prayed for the Pope.  He doesn't need your prayers, my Catholic friend told me; we need his.  But still, I prayed.  I also watched the film Conclave on the plane. Pertinent and worrying. Will this Pope be replaced by someone with less tolerance? Will we care, we in America who seem to be giving up our rights on a daily basis, who will, like Europeans for centuries, perhaps be persecuted for our very beliefs and identifications?

In Stockholm my Swedish friends welcomed me; they publish my books and my cds.  I can find these in the libraries and in store windows. Although it is not their native language, I feel read, heard. Today my French friends told me they were cancelling the retirement trip they'd planned for years.  They do not want to come here now. Before I left I saw Swedes boycotting Starbucks, McDonald's, Tesla.  I brought home a pound of Arvid Nordquist Franskrost coffee-- with ecologically produced paper filters.  Great quality, inexpensive. No one wants US cash there. On the plane back I watched an extraordinary film called 'Bird' directed by Andrea Arnold.  It was both depressing and heartwarming. And it was better than anything I'd seen in a long time that was made in the US. I also brought home a case of food poisoning from the plane... or maybe it was just the stress of arriving in a city where I used to know every building and street, the familiar homeless men and the East Harlem bodega owners. The aggregate sounds of New York-- the sustain and crescendo-- have been the musical soundtrack to my life. I am no longer sure of my city, of our future, of our culture. It occurs to me that maybe I should turn around and return 'holm'. 

Delay

Sunday morning I came across an old diary; it fell out of a bookcase where I'd stashed it long ago behind stacks of calendars and discarded manuscripts.  I recognized the cover from some long-departed stationary shop where I used to browse and dream and finally take home a blank book dressed in old print fabric that in itself ignited memory. 

There I was-- at the age of these students I've been recently interviewing... me trying to find their core-- their soul and academic candor.  At eighteen one is so utterly vulnerable-- a single day is critical and life-changing. My discretion had prevailed, as though I was writing for a future self, and many of the boys and crushes and devastators... are nameless and protected.  Princeton for me revealed itself between the lines... I didn't understand the institution until much later, or absorb the significance of what I was learning, how they groomed us like living plants to become productive and resonant.

Looking around my city, gathering the critical daily news, I am overwhelmed with anxiety. It seems as though the first part of my life was a sort of consistent ascent... and now I am quite on the other side of a kind of lengthy plateau of satisfaction. Things have clearly broken... the progression of humanity toward some version of goodness and compassion has surely been interrupted; things feel uncomfortable and precarious.  What a fraud am I, I think; I am selling these optimistic young people a dream that is no longer there... they will not find what I found between the lines, because the lines have been re-drawn, digitized and replaced. I can't imagine my future in this accelerating singularity, and certainly not theirs. 

Not only have these kids grown up with a pandemic absorbing a good percentage of their adolescence, but the images of their heroes seem to have shifted. Their superstars and celebrities have little solidity. I've noticed the way television children seem staged and odd. Styled and changed and airbrushed, they are either brimming with some kind of dangerous overconfidence or they seem 'rehearsed'. On the subway, I observe school kids on their way home-- still rowdy and energized... but they seem somehow different.  I worry about them, the way I worry about my interviewees, the way I worry about the Mexican and Guatemalan children whose mothers sell candy on the trains with their babies and toddlers tied to their back with shawls and scarves... as though they are accessories, not children. I fear they are using their cultural cliches for sympathy. I have yet to witness a single sale. Please, I want to say... do not do this... I will give you a job.  But I cannot.

I can't imagine how my earlier childhood diary might read; most of those things were pre-sorted and discarded by my sister who cared not at all for sibling nostalgia. Besides some of my grammar school's Facebook posts, I have no photographs of the me I was. But this diary-- well it had the sense of me, of young-woman passion and some kind of vague ambition not to become but to 'be' and manifest my purpose. It was reassuring, in a way... as much as it was mortifyingly embarrassing. The players-- the Romeos and villains.. were not necessary to identify.  

My son tells me every day I grew up in the best time; the price of that, I say often, is my aging at this moment.  It's quite true that the second half of the last century was a spectacular revelation of culture and personal invention. The rich archive of film-- art-- music... is testimony.  I rarely run out of inspiration.  Today Ted Gioia on Substack called the new contemporary product 'Slop'. The present seems a bit of an appropriate place in history to begin to withdraw, to drop out.  I'm not sure what I'm learning.  

Of course I'm a bit behind. I watch films that were on festival programs a few years ago... they've had time to settle... rarely do I see the brand new ones. Hollywood in general seems to disappoint, as does music. Visual art... it's all sort of underbred and over-advertised.  Even streaming.. .these Netflix and Amazon award winners-- scripts often make me cringe. A random browse of cable channels brings a variety of game shows based on the most ridiculous premises... and a gamut of reality shows that seem to be designed to propel the cast into some kind of brand-stardom but instead make the adults seem petty, immature and ridiculous.  They are mean and competitive and small-minded.  They seem to be overstyled and blessed with some kind of monied success in life that is baffling and undeserved.  The digital dirty red carpet. I am embarrassed that incoming migrants watch this stuff and deduce that this is America.

It occurred to me today I'm living in a kind of delay... we all are, despite the instantaneous delivery of news. We are in a kind of aftershock from our own election... from the consequences of button pushing and premature action in moments we did not consider.  It takes a minute to translate events into history-- to assess what happened and extract the truth from the millions of accounts and AI phone video.  

In every guitar player's arsenal of effects probably the most essential is the delay pedal.  It makes amplification sound 'real'... it provides context and space. It supplies the 'room' in which we all exist. I watch films and do not pay for the privilege of being timely.  Some of them dissipate once I have distinguished the hype from the reality. It takes old people time to hear things-- we are slow to translate sounds into words sometimes. I am slow to absorb history, to figure out what happened yesterday and how I will go forward. Digital delay pedals can be set to go on forever.  With the analogue-- we create the template; it is all about the signal decay. It's a kind of prolonged audio shadow fading... a kind of death.

My personal delay settings change; yesterday it was half a century... today it might be a few hours. Love takes time, I have learned, but like history, the way we understand it takes longer.  Sometimes I hesitate to revisit memories; they disintegrate upon opening, like dried old paper, they remove themselves further and further in the delay chain. At 4 AM one can see reruns of earlier shows.  Even the news seems a little stable, unchanged. Who would know, turning it on, what is timely, what is original?  It is what we are not told that is becoming a little threatening... and the way we listen ought to take into account the space of our cosmic room... the delay length not just of the past but forward into the future: what is real, what is important; what repeats, what remains.

Rust Never Sleeps

To distract myself tonight I turned on television... couldn't help checking in on this new Alec Baldwin reality show.  It's been so over-advertised-- teased, excerpted, meme'd and photo-bombed on various platforms, and yet we New Yorkers and NYC expats love seeing our city on camera, in nearly any context. Urban selfies.  

Years ago I double dated with Mr. and Mrs. Baldwin-- the first one, Kim.  We were at a long table in a trendy Tribeca restaurant with a few intimate friends.  They sat at opposite ends; it was obvious from their awkward interaction that either they'd not quite recovered from a pre-dinner argument or maybe they'd interrupted an intimate evening to come out.  Something was off.  I sat by her-- acknowledged one of the most beautiful women in cinema, at that moment.  Honestly, I couldn't stop looking at her face, with little make-up and ungroomed hair; she kept wrapping herself in a sort of shawl, as though she wanted to disappear.  He, on the other hand, was chatty and charming-- funny, using that voice actors learn to project confidence. Like a pointed tone.  

For some reason, that night, I was on the cusp of a new relationship and the tension depressed me. They were so familiar-- it was like a movie and I was somehow part of it. I couldn't shake her emotional shadow... which turned out to be sort of an omen.  I was a new mother and they were maybe not even quite married.

Seeing his aging, subdued persona tonight was surprising. His wife, obviously, was the host and star of the Baldwin show, despite the fact that her raison d'être is her famous husband. I realize he needs a PR renovation... and who wants to put the father of seven small children in prison for eighteen months? But Hilaria with her affectations and fake Spanish accent which she attempted to explain in the minutes I watched, well... I'm not a customer. Like most reality shows since the Loud Family era, it seemed scripted and planned and awkward and cringeworthy most of the time.  Yes, the kids are cute... and the looming cloud of the shooting incident which was clearly devastating was compelling... but it seemed somehow inappropriate for her to speak of it.  The family 'angle' is surely the most convincing plea for innocence... and as always, it is moot to keep on punishing for a tragic incident... but someone died.  The boundary between film and real life was crossed, and there is no happy ending here.  I felt manipulated by his terrible appearance, her perfect little stagey mother-moments. I can only wonder how the family of the deceased will view this.  I've had quite enough and it didn't sway me one way or the other.  At filming, the jury was still out.  Now that he's been found innocent, is there any relief? 

Lately I've been trying to find a way to honor my deceased father whose war record and heroism left him with lifetime psychological scars.  It was often tough simply being around him; as a father he was short-tempered and preoccupied. The more I read about Normandy, the Battle of the Bulge, his difficult path through the war, the more I wonder that he functioned at all.  The killings, the bloodshed, the constant danger and massive destruction. He witnessed not just mutilation and death but stepped on it, parachuted down into it... experienced wounds and undoubtedly overwhelming, unrelenting anxiety.

Yet here is a Hollywood-handsome man-- with a wonderful supportive birth family, and a brood of his own here... maybe a difficult older daughter from the first marriage... but here he is in this perfect Hamptons paradise... accused of manslaughter... from what.. playing with real guns on a fake set? Is PTSD  the same diagnosis as psychiatrists assign lifetime war veterans who were ordered to shoot at maybe innocent people who were simply on the opposite side, and therefore merited death?  Kill or be killed is a conundrum and the very crux of war.

What is wrong with all of us, we humans who settle international vendettas with death and violence... who make statements by destroying monuments, who negotiate with mutilated flesh and the killing of children? There are people just blocks away shooting one another, threatening... angry. It might be more compelling to have us consider these consequences.  Comparatively, Alec is just a broken man.  The spinning narrative is how can we punish seven innocent children by removing their father and leaving them to bear the stigma of this tragedy?  It doesn't seem productive.  Nor does this reality show which hopefully will not annoy the family of Halyna Hutchins with its stilted portrayal of the privileged, happy life she will never have.

A weapon of destruction is not safe in any hands... it's not the manufacturers, it's the people.  It's us.  There is film-- a movie-- acting.. and then there are guns.  It seemed the 'Rust' set was more of a horrifying reality show than anything we will see from the Baldwins this season.

With Your Eyes

On Inauguration Day, the cold air like a knife seemed to split the country in half-- those who celebrated, and those who tried to concentrate on the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. It was like a warning or a judgment-- for those of us who were anxious and upset, the arctic air was not reassuring. 

Unable to sleep, I watched an old film called Crisis-- a documentary featuring President Kennedy and his brother Robert handling a civil rights crisis.  It was another version of America... our leaders, presented in black and white like a home movie... having breakfast with their families-- fathers, credible men... going to work to challenge unlawful segregation traditions.  They were leaders... taking the country from prejudice and injustice into some kind of better future. It felt not just right but righteous.

The confirmation of POTUS 47 felt to me like a TV show-- from what I watched, apparently a badly produced tragic comedy of errors and mistakes, but a show above all-- and the installation of a version of America that feels eerily like the death of Hope. The promises feel like threats, and the concept of justice feels like a kind of volley back and forth between oddly distorted principles.

Seeing our 1963 Attorney General at his desk, waiting for a call... there was a solidity-- the desk, the room.  It was human-scaled.  No one had make-up or airbrushing... there was sweat, there was conversation in real time.  For me it went beyond nostalgia; it underscored this new sense of defeat I have shared with close friends.  We are betrayed, we are slipping somehow. The news is everywhere and overwhelming; the media-- rather than the message-- accompanies our life and we, it.

Continuing my interviews by telephone, I miss the heavy black instrument with the rotary dial... it somehow felt like truth. I speak to these enthusiastic and slightly nervous students and occasionally feel I am selling them a dream-- I am describing things that no longer exist, explaining realities that have evaporated into digital screens. They will never know the version of a woman who misses closing herself into a phone booth in a dive bar and making a romantic call-- a confession, an intimacy.

I've been reading Cesare Pavese. His novels are surprisingly colloquial, although one feels the tensions of fascism, of the German occupation, and the scars of WWII.  I look at maps of northwest Italy... at pictures of Turin... his places, too, perhaps no longer exist. I am listening to and absorbing the author's version of his nostalgia. Pavese suicided at the age of 41, just after he was acknowledged for his writing. Among his best poems is one (translated) line 'Death will come with your eyes'.  It haunts me. His disappointment, his sorrow, his obsession in one novella with a suicidal character-- his empathy.

My friend Elizabeth died very early Monday morning, in the dark.  In her hospice room it was surely lit, as medical rooms are.  She had not been herself for several weeks now. During her illness of five years, we became friends... she called me nearly every night for a year or two... and we gossiped, we laughed, we became intimates over the telephone.  I have a landline, still; it's necessary for this kind of communication. We'd had little in common before, but we grew together.  I miss her terribly; what we created, together, is completely gone. She deteriorated, over the years, but she was brave and never tried to escape her fate.  She was incredibly sympathetic when I had my accident; she joked that I'd ruined my arm just to experience her parallel paralysis.  We laughed and talked about men. It was like an affair... and now it's done.

For months now, I pick up my 12-string at night and play a few songs... the one that comes, every night, is the Free song, Soon I Will Be Gone.  In the year before Alan's death, at one of our back-to-back solo gigs, Alan sang this.  It was withering. I wept. Do not sing this, Alan, I warned him... and he answered me... it is a prediction, with this rare dark look in his eyes that were usually laughing.  But I've taken it up-- it's become my personal anthem that I sing every night in the dark, at 4 or 5 AM. It binds me to him, maybe.  

Tonight brought a fatal plane crash. We who will be gone sooner rather than later are shaken by this kind of news.  We are heartbroken for the fire victims, for the children of Gaza, for the undocumented Mexicans in East Harlem who are afraid to pick up their pantry items because they might be arrested. One mother told me she is keeping her children home from school, from fear they will be somehow seized.

Last night I walked home from a gig in Harlem.  An insane man on 113th and Lenox grabbed me... Read the signs, he kept yelling, with his sour breath. At last he let me go.  Shaken-not-stirred, I'd heard at the bar; it became my mantra for the last 20 blocks. There are people in this city who do not go out in the sun; they are pale and many wear black. It's sort of an unspoken cult-- some are women who with vanity preserve their skin; many are writers and musicians. Some wear sunglasses at night.  When I walk home late, I imagine they are at their sills, looking out-- blessing the dark empty streets and keeping me safe, like black angels... my witnesses.

I am glad to be home. Elizabeth will no longer phone me at 3 AM and I will no longer sit on the floor in the dark trading stories until her drugs put her to sleep. But tonight I will pick up my guitar and like a sort of trance I will sing the song... the dark anthem, the funeral hymn, the Inauguration song...