A paper bag breaks, one you carried
by the handles, knowing they would give.
They give. The weight is gone.
A puddle will receive it. The electric light
reflected in the water ripples with the weight.
You, too -- give way. The weight, the apricots
go tumbling roly-poly toward the puddle
where the night was gathered in a mirror,
making itself conceivable: Los Angeles, collected
in a moment of electric light and water and the street.
Now what will you do? Release the bottomless.
No one at home will mind. No one was waiting for the weight.
You hold the handles to a lighter thing. Sure, you've lost
the apricots, now settled in water.
Someone will kick or eat them.
Sunday, November 23, 2008
Tuesday, October 28, 2008
Heretofore Unreported Joy
I spent an entire weekend cross-legged on the kitchen counter-top in Jolie's Edwardian home in San Francisco, wrapped in a conversation that was as heartening as it was disorienting -- about art and solitude and self-engendered inspiration. I returned to Los Angeles stirred and uneasy. Angel Island was on fire as I left the Bay, and the Porter Ranch was on fire as I passed the Angeles National Forest on the 5, entering LA County. Something was on fire inside of me, but there is no describing, measuring or containing that fire.
Back in LA, I immediately walked to Griffith Park; the sooner I could come home, the better. I ambled up the hill, up the dirt path that leads halfway to the Observatory, walked down the pavement driveway, shook a fist at the millionaire's house when I saw the lock and chain on the gate from the park to Glendower (last year, there was an open passage, then a gate that opened and closed, now a lock and chain). I slid down the side of the paved driveway to where the fence ended (a couple of coyotes below) and climbed back up the side of the hill, and as I was doing this the millionaire's front door opened. But instead of the millionaire, a housekeeper walked out. I nodded to her; she looked either tired or unfriendly, and the thought crossed my mind that pretty soon they will extend the fence further down the hill, and I will have no way of coming through at all except by jumping the fence. I don't know why I should feel entitled to this walking route, but that thought filled me with a profound sense of injustice. Something that was free and open and, somehow, mine was being threatened, I guess.
And then, as I was walking down Glendower, the first heretofore unreported joyful event occurred.
One of my favorite landmarks within my walking periphery, the Ennis-Brown House, is perched on that hill, on the rim where Glendower bends, but the decorated blocks start on the property before it. Which, of course, was once Ennis-Brown House property. At a certain point the wall gives way to the driveway, obstructed loosely by a chain, then the ornate wrought-iron gate, through which I'd caught glimpses of the spectacular view from the terrazzo during the many times I'd passed the house. But this time the chain was gathered to the side and the gate was open. I walked closer, fully prepared to exercise the same level of stealth that had been required in -- apparently -- trespassing across the threshold of public park to residential area (I am still not sure if the actual trespassing occurs in front of or behind the gate, or maybe the gate itself is a kind of no-man's-land, like the distance between customs check points). But as I walked onto the terrazzo I noticed a couple of cars parked within the gate. A man in his late fifties, wearing a Dean cap, approached me with a readiness that meant he was mistaking me for someone else, someone he was expecting, who had not arrived. I was alone, with my bottle of electrolyte-enhanced water, and not anyone he was expecting. He introduced himself as Steve, and he was with the Ennis House Foundation. He'd been waiting all day for a camera crew who had booked the place to shoot an ad -- it was at that point after 5PM and they'd been meant to come at 10 in the morning.
After a brief introduction, he took me on a tour of the place.
The house, which was never intended by Frank Lloyd Wright's clients to serve as a regular residence, is like a structure from another world. As is the case with most of his buildings, the exterior gives little indication of the vast space within. It is a combination of stone and light in such a combination that the stone, geometric and solid as it is, doesn't seem to obstruct the light at all, but to create a way to receive, channel and shelter it. So that the house seems to be built as much of light as of stone. Less a place where you can live, and more a post from which you can imagine yourself some kind of god or hawk or gargoyle looking down on the humming, blinking spectacle below. The two corner windows in the giant, main room (to call it a dining room would be inaccurate -- think more of the scene in Blade Runner when Deckard interviews Rachael, think of the quality of the light in there, the smoke curling up from the crazy, red gloss of her lips -- that room was made less for dining and more for blade runners' interrogations of sexy replicants) are bevelled to provide an unobstructed view. The shades of color in the stained glass vary, lighter at the bottom to increasing saturation, so as to mirror the changing of the light in the evening.
There are ways to leave the planet in every city -- cruising through Rome at night on a motorcycle, for example -- and standing in that house at sunset is one of those portals for Los Angeles. The Ennis House defies the wear and disregard of years, weather, earthquakes, its most recent owner, and the almighty Industry. It is at once a temple and a gargoyle, perched below the bright domes of the Griffith Observatory, seemingly cold and removed, in its way. I had considered it my personal gargoyle, but having seen the inside, I now think of it as a guardian gargoyle, a strange mechanism built for capturing light, for fabricating dreams and delusions of grandeur.
Back in LA, I immediately walked to Griffith Park; the sooner I could come home, the better. I ambled up the hill, up the dirt path that leads halfway to the Observatory, walked down the pavement driveway, shook a fist at the millionaire's house when I saw the lock and chain on the gate from the park to Glendower (last year, there was an open passage, then a gate that opened and closed, now a lock and chain). I slid down the side of the paved driveway to where the fence ended (a couple of coyotes below) and climbed back up the side of the hill, and as I was doing this the millionaire's front door opened. But instead of the millionaire, a housekeeper walked out. I nodded to her; she looked either tired or unfriendly, and the thought crossed my mind that pretty soon they will extend the fence further down the hill, and I will have no way of coming through at all except by jumping the fence. I don't know why I should feel entitled to this walking route, but that thought filled me with a profound sense of injustice. Something that was free and open and, somehow, mine was being threatened, I guess.
And then, as I was walking down Glendower, the first heretofore unreported joyful event occurred.
One of my favorite landmarks within my walking periphery, the Ennis-Brown House, is perched on that hill, on the rim where Glendower bends, but the decorated blocks start on the property before it. Which, of course, was once Ennis-Brown House property. At a certain point the wall gives way to the driveway, obstructed loosely by a chain, then the ornate wrought-iron gate, through which I'd caught glimpses of the spectacular view from the terrazzo during the many times I'd passed the house. But this time the chain was gathered to the side and the gate was open. I walked closer, fully prepared to exercise the same level of stealth that had been required in -- apparently -- trespassing across the threshold of public park to residential area (I am still not sure if the actual trespassing occurs in front of or behind the gate, or maybe the gate itself is a kind of no-man's-land, like the distance between customs check points). But as I walked onto the terrazzo I noticed a couple of cars parked within the gate. A man in his late fifties, wearing a Dean cap, approached me with a readiness that meant he was mistaking me for someone else, someone he was expecting, who had not arrived. I was alone, with my bottle of electrolyte-enhanced water, and not anyone he was expecting. He introduced himself as Steve, and he was with the Ennis House Foundation. He'd been waiting all day for a camera crew who had booked the place to shoot an ad -- it was at that point after 5PM and they'd been meant to come at 10 in the morning.
After a brief introduction, he took me on a tour of the place.
The house, which was never intended by Frank Lloyd Wright's clients to serve as a regular residence, is like a structure from another world. As is the case with most of his buildings, the exterior gives little indication of the vast space within. It is a combination of stone and light in such a combination that the stone, geometric and solid as it is, doesn't seem to obstruct the light at all, but to create a way to receive, channel and shelter it. So that the house seems to be built as much of light as of stone. Less a place where you can live, and more a post from which you can imagine yourself some kind of god or hawk or gargoyle looking down on the humming, blinking spectacle below. The two corner windows in the giant, main room (to call it a dining room would be inaccurate -- think more of the scene in Blade Runner when Deckard interviews Rachael, think of the quality of the light in there, the smoke curling up from the crazy, red gloss of her lips -- that room was made less for dining and more for blade runners' interrogations of sexy replicants) are bevelled to provide an unobstructed view. The shades of color in the stained glass vary, lighter at the bottom to increasing saturation, so as to mirror the changing of the light in the evening.
There are ways to leave the planet in every city -- cruising through Rome at night on a motorcycle, for example -- and standing in that house at sunset is one of those portals for Los Angeles. The Ennis House defies the wear and disregard of years, weather, earthquakes, its most recent owner, and the almighty Industry. It is at once a temple and a gargoyle, perched below the bright domes of the Griffith Observatory, seemingly cold and removed, in its way. I had considered it my personal gargoyle, but having seen the inside, I now think of it as a guardian gargoyle, a strange mechanism built for capturing light, for fabricating dreams and delusions of grandeur.
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
On Becoming an Angeleno
I have just started reading Mike Davis's history of Los Angeles, City of Quartz. It is dense and wastes no time and exactly the book I need to be reading after watching Ric Burns' documentary on New York.
Here is the epigraph, by Walter Benjamin.
"The superficial inducement, the exotic, the picturesque has an effect only on the foreigner. To portray a city, a native must have other, deeper motives - motives of one who travels into the past instead of into the distance. A native's book about his city will always be related to memoirs; the writer has not spent his childhood there in vain."
Here is the epigraph, by Walter Benjamin.
"The superficial inducement, the exotic, the picturesque has an effect only on the foreigner. To portray a city, a native must have other, deeper motives - motives of one who travels into the past instead of into the distance. A native's book about his city will always be related to memoirs; the writer has not spent his childhood there in vain."
Thursday, October 16, 2008
Monday, September 29, 2008
Galatea East and West
I live in a rear apartment of a 1920's New York style apartment building, behind which is an elementary school. At 10:30 in the morning, children are screaming in the courtyard. I remember recess. Today, I realized it was raining (rain in Los Angeles! pure magic) because the pitch of the screaming suddenly jumped a few decibels. I heard that first, and then I heard the rain drops. In the past, I've mistaken certain sounds for rain drops, but it always turns out to be something else, window fans, someone rummaging through plastic bottles in the alley; I'd given up on rain, but the heightened screaming in the schoolyard could mean no other thing. It must be exciting to be a child in sudden rain during recess at a grade school in Los Angeles.
I know the kind of stubbornness required here, plodding forward without considering whether it is any good. Bulldoggedness. The rest is vanity. Who is waiting at the other end of this line, tapping her fingers...? I am.
The atmosphere of this place that feels closest to home than anywhere I've lived before is made up of these things: the schoolyard screamers in the late morning -- and this is why they make their way into the textured folds of daydreaming -- the chatter of the birds in the afternoon, the chatter and bad music of the Italian guy whenever he is home, the cricket frogs at night. It's the rumbling and the smell of laundry from below, the flat light peeling off the brick face opposite my window. I could use another window. One curtain hangs in the window; a matching one hangs from the heating pipe, where a window should be, if not for earthquake reinforcements. I can't stand to see that wall from outside, my phantom second window bricked up as if to keep the gypsies of Madrid from squatting. I would have welcomed that gypsy sun every afternoon and would have bought whatever it was selling. Ack! Afternoon to late afternoon, my favorite light, my favorite time, save Sundays, all day, and I want to be back in the New York City of my brain, standing on the sidewalk outside Bar 6, smoking with a girl named Aiden. That hour, that city, that sidewalk, that girl, unbeknownst to all of them, have come to represent a minor paradise before a minor fall.
I spent the afternoon banging away on my powder blue Webster XL-500 -- grace be to the proliferation of makes and models -- bounding back and forth between it and the electric robot, checking facts, definitions, spellings, checking my temperature and the temperature in Bakersfield. It is a worthwhile experiment, alternating between the two machines; I can actually feel the doors to the other world closing, to the sound of sand draining through the waistline of an hourglass. Quickly! Leave the robot and resume the tapping, return to the impression of ink as a consequence of tapping. Is it the action of the keys? Is it the sound? That sound is like a zip code 90027 YOU ARE TYPING IN LOS FELIZ.
What is relevant to LA, to elections and financial crises? We could start with definitions. Or the correct pronunciation of Aeschylus. Or favorite aphorisms by Sam. Let's do it backwards: "Poetry is an amazingly courageous thing. To be sitting down at a table, still as engaged as you'd be in bed with your muse -- very hard." ES-kyuh-luss. Haptic: adj. 1. relating to or based on the sense of touch 2. characterized by a predilection for the sense of touch.
I pulled off the covers and moved into the pathway of the sun. The books in my friend's room were stacked, it seemed, in no particular order, and yet their order had the effect of a kind of meditation. Gogol resting on a volume of Richard Feynman lectures. Rachel Carson and Chico Buarque -- who knew he writes fiction -- Italo Calvino and Alexis de Tocqueville. One gets the point. Since I can't endow the sun with fingers, much less curiosity, I'll say that other fingers in their haptic curiosity ran coolly from a shoulder to the back of a thigh, a line that, had it been drawn in graphite, would have been a soft, even-weighted contour of human topography. Shoulder, spine, buttock, thigh. I felt like Galatea. Not the original, loved by Pygmalion, who lost her name among the rubble. The Galatea who claimed her milkwhite definition, rewriting her own story: her name has always been there, alongside Pygmalion's. Sunlight traced a continuous vein in the marble; the touch quickened the stone, which arched like a spring-pole, snapped and came to. Voila. Good morning. Santa Monica.
I like those stacked books, that light, that room on 10th St., free of complication, chantage and cliche, free of little notes on mirrors saying, "The truth is we're afraid to look into the pools of each others' beings." Bah.
I asked Jacob, "Are you afraid to look into the pool of my being?"
"You don't scare ME," he said.
I know the kind of stubbornness required here, plodding forward without considering whether it is any good. Bulldoggedness. The rest is vanity. Who is waiting at the other end of this line, tapping her fingers...? I am.
The atmosphere of this place that feels closest to home than anywhere I've lived before is made up of these things: the schoolyard screamers in the late morning -- and this is why they make their way into the textured folds of daydreaming -- the chatter of the birds in the afternoon, the chatter and bad music of the Italian guy whenever he is home, the cricket frogs at night. It's the rumbling and the smell of laundry from below, the flat light peeling off the brick face opposite my window. I could use another window. One curtain hangs in the window; a matching one hangs from the heating pipe, where a window should be, if not for earthquake reinforcements. I can't stand to see that wall from outside, my phantom second window bricked up as if to keep the gypsies of Madrid from squatting. I would have welcomed that gypsy sun every afternoon and would have bought whatever it was selling. Ack! Afternoon to late afternoon, my favorite light, my favorite time, save Sundays, all day, and I want to be back in the New York City of my brain, standing on the sidewalk outside Bar 6, smoking with a girl named Aiden. That hour, that city, that sidewalk, that girl, unbeknownst to all of them, have come to represent a minor paradise before a minor fall.
I spent the afternoon banging away on my powder blue Webster XL-500 -- grace be to the proliferation of makes and models -- bounding back and forth between it and the electric robot, checking facts, definitions, spellings, checking my temperature and the temperature in Bakersfield. It is a worthwhile experiment, alternating between the two machines; I can actually feel the doors to the other world closing, to the sound of sand draining through the waistline of an hourglass. Quickly! Leave the robot and resume the tapping, return to the impression of ink as a consequence of tapping. Is it the action of the keys? Is it the sound? That sound is like a zip code 90027 YOU ARE TYPING IN LOS FELIZ.
What is relevant to LA, to elections and financial crises? We could start with definitions. Or the correct pronunciation of Aeschylus. Or favorite aphorisms by Sam. Let's do it backwards: "Poetry is an amazingly courageous thing. To be sitting down at a table, still as engaged as you'd be in bed with your muse -- very hard." ES-kyuh-luss. Haptic: adj. 1. relating to or based on the sense of touch 2. characterized by a predilection for the sense of touch.
I pulled off the covers and moved into the pathway of the sun. The books in my friend's room were stacked, it seemed, in no particular order, and yet their order had the effect of a kind of meditation. Gogol resting on a volume of Richard Feynman lectures. Rachel Carson and Chico Buarque -- who knew he writes fiction -- Italo Calvino and Alexis de Tocqueville. One gets the point. Since I can't endow the sun with fingers, much less curiosity, I'll say that other fingers in their haptic curiosity ran coolly from a shoulder to the back of a thigh, a line that, had it been drawn in graphite, would have been a soft, even-weighted contour of human topography. Shoulder, spine, buttock, thigh. I felt like Galatea. Not the original, loved by Pygmalion, who lost her name among the rubble. The Galatea who claimed her milkwhite definition, rewriting her own story: her name has always been there, alongside Pygmalion's. Sunlight traced a continuous vein in the marble; the touch quickened the stone, which arched like a spring-pole, snapped and came to. Voila. Good morning. Santa Monica.
I like those stacked books, that light, that room on 10th St., free of complication, chantage and cliche, free of little notes on mirrors saying, "The truth is we're afraid to look into the pools of each others' beings." Bah.
I asked Jacob, "Are you afraid to look into the pool of my being?"
"You don't scare ME," he said.
Thursday, September 25, 2008
Patrick Flynn Eckenrode
As it turns out, Flynn was neither a first nor a last name.
Here is the whole poem, in all its splendor. Thank you, Michael.
Of All the Epiphenomena You Were My Favorite
It seems like everything nowadays has something to do with eggplant.
Not that I'm against this. I'm a product of it. First, of course, a system was
Erected, which was brash and had lots of thought behind it.
Several of us planned to put an end to it, but we were
Neglected by the wealthier peasantry, who were quite pleased
To see an infrastructure spring up overnight like that. Then
Came the pleasantly cool complications of
Aftermath, which will long be associated with a collapse of the fathers.
Finally, the system produced 'children.' I think that's
What they were called. Others have called them other things and
I would not be the first in a long line to call them pernicious.
They infested us with their systematics and put us on the maps
They were writing. From down there, of course, it all looked very similar
To another system I'd heard of, and I don't doubt that the two
Are related somehow and could probably even be triangulated
With the help of some new third system that is still
In its operative stages and hasn't been translated yet. Alas
For the slowness of language to create the bigness of systems.
We all live in your lack, back to back, castigating our homelands,
Finding for every correspondence something that responds
Inadequately and makes matchsticks of our eggplant
Strictness. Belatedly we recognize our eggplant discoveries,
After years of eating nothing but Cheerios and
Corn-on-the-cob. My daughter likes to say things now like,
Isn't that wildebeest coming too near us father? And when I
Remind her of principles like Zeno's paradox, she just shrugs her shoulders
And gets carried off to the wildebeest festivals, where everyone
seems so 'in the know' all the time. I guess that's youth for you.
It creates boredom out of things you thought were pleasurable,
Like wildebeests and their grazing patterns. But then, of course,
It also fills you with a glow of self-satisfaction that looks a lot,
I'm told, like the glow of self-radiation. So there's another bell jar for you.
It's a variation on the funnel effect that's been setting outside
My window for hours now. Tomorrow I will go to school all day and learn algebra.
To read Patrick Flynn Eckenrode's entire book on PDF, go to:
http://chelagallery.org/portfolio/flynnbook2.pdf
Here is the whole poem, in all its splendor. Thank you, Michael.
Of All the Epiphenomena You Were My Favorite
It seems like everything nowadays has something to do with eggplant.
Not that I'm against this. I'm a product of it. First, of course, a system was
Erected, which was brash and had lots of thought behind it.
Several of us planned to put an end to it, but we were
Neglected by the wealthier peasantry, who were quite pleased
To see an infrastructure spring up overnight like that. Then
Came the pleasantly cool complications of
Aftermath, which will long be associated with a collapse of the fathers.
Finally, the system produced 'children.' I think that's
What they were called. Others have called them other things and
I would not be the first in a long line to call them pernicious.
They infested us with their systematics and put us on the maps
They were writing. From down there, of course, it all looked very similar
To another system I'd heard of, and I don't doubt that the two
Are related somehow and could probably even be triangulated
With the help of some new third system that is still
In its operative stages and hasn't been translated yet. Alas
For the slowness of language to create the bigness of systems.
We all live in your lack, back to back, castigating our homelands,
Finding for every correspondence something that responds
Inadequately and makes matchsticks of our eggplant
Strictness. Belatedly we recognize our eggplant discoveries,
After years of eating nothing but Cheerios and
Corn-on-the-cob. My daughter likes to say things now like,
Isn't that wildebeest coming too near us father? And when I
Remind her of principles like Zeno's paradox, she just shrugs her shoulders
And gets carried off to the wildebeest festivals, where everyone
seems so 'in the know' all the time. I guess that's youth for you.
It creates boredom out of things you thought were pleasurable,
Like wildebeests and their grazing patterns. But then, of course,
It also fills you with a glow of self-satisfaction that looks a lot,
I'm told, like the glow of self-radiation. So there's another bell jar for you.
It's a variation on the funnel effect that's been setting outside
My window for hours now. Tomorrow I will go to school all day and learn algebra.
To read Patrick Flynn Eckenrode's entire book on PDF, go to:
http://chelagallery.org/portfolio/flynnbook2.pdf
Thursday, September 18, 2008
Sleepers and Boys Throwing Snowballs
"Of all the epiphenomena, you were my favorite." This is a line -- or the title of a poem written by a young man named Flynn, who, I found at some point from Kamran, had died. I have been trying today, without much success, to recover his other name; all I've got is Flynn, and I don't know if that's his first or last. But I do remember that the poems I'd read of his were very good, and had lines that stuck like ice picks in Trotsky's head, the one about the epiphenomena, or "Isn't that wildebeest coming too near us father...?" Which made me think of other ice picks, too: "maybe I'd like to take a good whack at the pinata," a line from a poem written by a Westover student whose name I don't recall at all. My memory may have taken some liberties with the exact word choices, but the poetic facts are there, intact. And if a bullet plowed through the playground of my synapses, as it does through Anders' in the Tobias Wolff story, what would be the phrase that I'd remember? It might be "Are you speaking French?" what the French girl asked after I had tried to explain to her, at the request of the flight attendant, why our plane was going back to Heathrow instead of continuing on to New York. It was September 11, 2001, and we were misinformed and terrified, releasing fuel into the atmosphere so we could land, and I knew even at that moment what I'd remember most vividly about that day would be the way her face soured at the offensive broken French coming out of my mouth, and my humiliation. Later, I read an article in the New York Times and found another phrase that seemed a likely contender for permanence -- and I wasn't wrong -- written by someone who'd been sitting in a cafe in the East Village that morning. He wrote, "Then suddenly, all the pigeons in the street flew up."
Poetic facts lodge themselves rather unassumingly into the wrinkles of my brain also as images, and I have to wonder what effect my compulsive photograph-taking has on my ability to access them freely out of my imagination. Some photographs feel as if they were my own projections. Gage and Jacob sleeping, no more than 45 minutes after Gage's arrival from New York, Jacob in his T-shirt and jeans, bundled in disheveled sheets on the bed, Gage relegated awkwardly to a corner of the couch, although the whole thing was free, the entropy around them almost visibly in motion in the diffuse afternoon light. And that red spare gas tank. What does it mean, sitting there bright as a lollipop, its phallic spout pointing...
Maybe because he inspires mischief and play, Gage excites my poetic brain, and proximity is a powerful aphrodisiac. This time the three of us sat under Alex Trebek's house, and I got sicker as Gage and Jacob went on endlessly about the differences between New York and Los Angeles. We'd just been peeling around downtown at 2 o'clock in the morning, screaming through the 2nd St. tunnel in Jacob's pick-up truck. Once. Twice. Three times. Gage and I went sliding down the railings of all the escalators around Hope and Grand, with Jacob and the majestic bronze nude watching over us like some complicit chaperons. Los Angeles is a vortex of lost pairs of Ray Ban sunglasses, and "different" is a euphemism -- the woman with the LED-rimmed sunglasses at the H.M.S. Bounty is "different," the ever-bare-chested-daisy-duked Vietnam vet cruising Sunset Junction with his chihuahua is "different," yes -- but why compare it all to New York? Unless to define both cities in the juxtaposition.
Sitting between Gage and Jacob, I meant to define something else: boys throwing snowballs. It's become a short-hand phrase I use to describe a childhood angst of mine, the feeling I used to have watching boys hurling snowballs at each other, and especially if it was at night. There always arose an indescribable yearning to participate in what felt to me like a secret language, brutish, playful, free. My aim was good, and once in a while I could throw as far. Never as hard. But if a boy threw one at me, he couldn't win; if it was as hard as he would throw it at another boy, he'd catch hell for "hitting a girl," and if he lobbed it or missed deliberately... well, I might be relieved, but the purpose, and I, would be left defeated. Sitting between the two boys in Griffith Park, or in the truck, my head on Jacob's shoulder and my arm woven under Gage's, passing beers and cigarettes between us, I was a fool to think I could define my childhood angst. All I could do was relive it.
Fitting, somehow, that the photographs Gage took of me were lost. In fact, they never existed. I am the camera.
Wednesday, July 9, 2008
Sunday, July 6, 2008
The French Version...and a poem by Derek Mahon
The Forger
When I sold my fake Vermeers to Goering
Nobody knew, nobody guessed
The agony, the fanaticism
Of working beyond criticism
And better than the best.
When they hauled me before the war-crimes tribunal
No one suspected, nobody knew
The agony of regrets
With which I told my secrets.
They missed the point, of course -
To hell with the national heritage,
I sold my soul for potage.
The experts were good value, though,
When they went to work on my studio.
Not I, but they were the frauds;
I revolutionized their methods.
Now, nothing but claptrap
About "mere technique" and "true vision,"
As if there were a distinction -
Their way of playing it down.
But my genius will live on;
For even at one remove
The thing I meant was love.
And I too have wandered
In the dark streets of Holland
With hunger at my belly
When the mists rolled in from the sea:
And I too have suffered
Obscurity and derision,
And sheltered in my heart of hearts
A light to transform the world.
Saturday, July 5, 2008
The Best Fireworks Show in LA
I find myself still in that category of Angelinos precariously perched on the brink of coming or going. Admittedly, it has been two years, this month, and a little over one year in the same neighborhood, but in LA, that is the equivalent of the first two, maybe three dates of a relationship I know will end - I'm in it for the laugh, the ride, the coast to the beach, the growing climb and the view from the top!
I have been lucky enough to have had not one but two childhood friends live in LA at various points during the last two years (a real luxury), but now they are both back in New York and Boston, so what that means is plans are not guaranteed for holidays such as New Year's, or, in this case, the 4th of July. Oh, I get invited to things. And I have good, new friends. But as late as three days ago, I had neither plans for the 4th nor the required social wherewithal to make them myself, and so I agreed to pick up Nadia from LAX at 9:15PM. Then came an invitation to Jamie's party in Silverlake. Blake and Conor came to the East side to a party on Alexandria, which I left grumbling at 8:30, dreading holiday traffic and sad to miss the beer, the live music by members of the Young Dubliners, the fireworks.
Not only was there NO ONE on the road, but with the last light gone, the fireworks had started, the elaborate pyrotechnics of the professionally produced shows, as well as the lone stars of various backyards across South Central. Pinwheels and star bursts to my left and right and The French Kicks on my stereo, I felt a giddiness well up inside me, and it gurgled all the way to LAX.
I have been lucky enough to have had not one but two childhood friends live in LA at various points during the last two years (a real luxury), but now they are both back in New York and Boston, so what that means is plans are not guaranteed for holidays such as New Year's, or, in this case, the 4th of July. Oh, I get invited to things. And I have good, new friends. But as late as three days ago, I had neither plans for the 4th nor the required social wherewithal to make them myself, and so I agreed to pick up Nadia from LAX at 9:15PM. Then came an invitation to Jamie's party in Silverlake. Blake and Conor came to the East side to a party on Alexandria, which I left grumbling at 8:30, dreading holiday traffic and sad to miss the beer, the live music by members of the Young Dubliners, the fireworks.
Not only was there NO ONE on the road, but with the last light gone, the fireworks had started, the elaborate pyrotechnics of the professionally produced shows, as well as the lone stars of various backyards across South Central. Pinwheels and star bursts to my left and right and The French Kicks on my stereo, I felt a giddiness well up inside me, and it gurgled all the way to LAX.
Monday, June 30, 2008
LA Sunday Approaches Perfection
The perfection of yesterday came with no warning. I'd gone to sleep with the sound of Doris Day's voice belting "Che Sara, Sara" at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery, echoing across the gravestones where the stars lie "asleep in Jesus," then in my head. I'd woken up at 1, 4 and 6:30 AM. My sleep has been bad for weeks, interrupted either by telephone calls from across the country or by their lack thereof. I wake definitively at 7, biting the outer lip of a dream, in which I am pulling an elongated, glowing cyst from my left breast.
The translation of the first three chapters of Dan's novel is nearly done; we go over the final revisions over instant messenger, but at 9 o'clock I call Jacob. "We are going to the beach."
Lately, if I can help it, I drive West on the 10 late at night, flying, the way Alexandra and I flew a few months ago, blasting The Knife and Depeche Mode. Only now it's Feist or The National, and it's a little different on a Sunday morning, the buzz is missing and and the music can't surround me in all that brightness the way it does in the dark, but it is nearly as good, still flying West, then up the PCH, to El Matador! Jacob, whose voice and laughing and manner remind me of Gage's, pulls out an unexpected bag of baby carrots.
I laugh in my sleep, people tell me. How could I not? Life is infinite jest.
At El Matador Jacob and I talk about the years in between, turn the pages to a book with Indian circus photographs, admiring those dark, glistening eyes, marveling at the contorted appendages, the gentle light. The water is warm now and so the kelp forests flourish and draw nearer to the land and when we come up from under a wave we are garlanded and tangled in the grass. Jacob is very white and boney. He breaks the surface, and he has something of that rock, its bleached head shining in the soft focus behind him. I get rolled a couple of times, and when I try to release the pressure by holding my nose and blowing into it, there is a sound of dolphins in both ears.
We drive back to Santa Monica, where I meet up with Blake and Conor for our first workshop on script analysis. I'd like to take it seriously, but something in Conor's metered exposition makes me want to throw spit-balls and pass notes and screw around in the back of the class. I want to make him laugh. We go to a screening of an Irish film, well-written, good "craic," as they'd say, but it's not cinema. Afterwards, I am racing home on Wilshire, the feeling is real and sweet, I like my skin and salty exhaustion, and there is a half a pack of menthols in the pocket of a coat I haven't worn since I was in New York.
Thursday, June 19, 2008
Home is Someone Else's
My walking/running route takes me up Vermont into Griffith Park, up the sandy slope towards the Observatory, trespassing around property Gage believed for many years belonged to Alex Trebek, then down through the hills along Glendower and Bonvue, cutting down to Berendo and Los Feliz. I walk when I know I'd be running against myself, and yesterday I walked. I'd been cooped up with sun poisoning, and when I stepped out of my building the neighborhood boomed around me, the traffic, the jasmine, the wet warmth gathering between my new and old skin, a taste of stale death/boredom/bacteria, I knew I'd been putting myself through some kind of purification.
The video I made is rendering as I am writing this. It runs methodically through each frame and each transition, and I wait to be amazed if it goes through.
I wasn't expecting the commotion at Griffith Park, which was being flooded by hipsters in cars and on foot, as if on some pilgrimage to the Greek Theater, where, I found out at the top, Rilo Kiley was playing. I was wearing one of my new Goodwill finds, a cream colored t-shirt that says "ROCK ON" in a script meant to look like rocks; I was carrying electrolyte-enhanced water. The young woman climbing the sidewalk in front of me had the whitest, longest legs I'd ever seen, and I video taped her striding ostrich gait for a few minutes until I lost her among the other concert-goers. For a while I toyed with the idea of melting into the crowd, slipping through the gaps in the fence, bounding over the ticket-collectors, flying down from the nose-bleeder aisles to the front row and listening to the well-meaning suggestion written on my t-shirt. I settled in the parking lot behind the stands, next to a motorcycle that said "EAT SHIT" on the back. The sound was good and free and all mine.
I sat on the curb listening to a couple of songs by Benji Hughes before getting on with my walk. Already I'd be getting home after sunset. A couple of weeks ago, I was there skimming over the surface of the vast galaxy of bulbs below; for every one of them there was a word to which I no longer had access, because that is the way things are when you are sitting in the dark next to someone you've partly invented, but love, nevertheless -- or therefore. There were coyotes of course and it sounded like a real fiesta at Alex Trebek's house 'til a voice came on the loudspeaker and said "Attention: The Griffith Observatory is now closed," and I knew the park service would neither be held responsible nor rescue us were we to be attacked by mountain lions. The gate next to the billionaire's house on Glendower said "NO PARKING ANYTIME," and "NO TRESPASSING" and "CONTINUE TO DREAM AT YOUR OWN RISK." I did, and since then, something has been falling down that hill hitting every cactus on the way down, tumbling noiselessly into private swimming pools.
But I like to walk there. I like to say "This house is great," to friends when they come with me for the first time, and we are passing the house that is all stilts and wire and the lightest-looking concrete you have ever imagined, or the house that is all windows, or the "Mayan Temple" (Frank Lloyd Wright's Ennis House). I like less to say, but do, "These houses make me sick," when passing by one of those other horrors. It isn't size that bothers me, although grand scale and poor taste seem to be inextricably linked in these parts. But... spoil the reader, spare the moralizing. I walk through this neighborhood like a street urchin in a free national museum, allowed to enter but kept at a remove, and that ever-imminent alienation may be one of the reasons I love Los Angles. At least, why it suits me right now: I can't get lost.
And sometimes I can even feel at home. Take for example the little house I passed at twilight as I was climbing up Glendower. Jared once pointed it out because it belonged to family friends. I noticed in the following order: the pink flamingo, the ubiquitous floodlights, the heavy-handed landscaping, the pleasant window above the garage (I imagined it to be pleasant, from the inside), light spilling onto the street from the garage, in which there were paintings on the far wall, and a man with silver hair (presumably the family friend) was working at a table saw-- and then, in perfect sequence, I HEARD Beethoven's 7th coming from somewhere inside the garage.
The video is writing to the disk now, and I worry that the whole first half is missing, and it's much too late to start all over.
It's so quiet in the hills that I could hear the Beethoven for a long time. I was already too far down the hill, and it was really getting dark, before I realized that in the stupor of reactions triggered by that scene -- a slow, expanding joy; the distinct pleasure that comes from feeding but not over-sating the senses; the bloom of a narrative thread, a beautiful and purely cinematic shot -- I had failed to extend a neighborly greeting to the silver-headed man who had unknowingly stirred up such a fuss in my imagination. After all, I had a vague entry, I could have mentioned Jared, or not at all, I could have just stopped, as people do, and said, "Hello." Next thing I knew I was running down the secret steps from Bonvue. I don't know why not talking to the man in the garage blasting Beethoven's 7th was causing me pain, but I wanted to put as much physical distance between him and me so that it really would be too far to turn back in such a late hour. I distinctly felt that I had failed to rise to some small, but secretly grand occasion. Perhaps because that scene had been conceived deliberately to make me feel at home.
The video I made is rendering as I am writing this. It runs methodically through each frame and each transition, and I wait to be amazed if it goes through.
I wasn't expecting the commotion at Griffith Park, which was being flooded by hipsters in cars and on foot, as if on some pilgrimage to the Greek Theater, where, I found out at the top, Rilo Kiley was playing. I was wearing one of my new Goodwill finds, a cream colored t-shirt that says "ROCK ON" in a script meant to look like rocks; I was carrying electrolyte-enhanced water. The young woman climbing the sidewalk in front of me had the whitest, longest legs I'd ever seen, and I video taped her striding ostrich gait for a few minutes until I lost her among the other concert-goers. For a while I toyed with the idea of melting into the crowd, slipping through the gaps in the fence, bounding over the ticket-collectors, flying down from the nose-bleeder aisles to the front row and listening to the well-meaning suggestion written on my t-shirt. I settled in the parking lot behind the stands, next to a motorcycle that said "EAT SHIT" on the back. The sound was good and free and all mine.
I sat on the curb listening to a couple of songs by Benji Hughes before getting on with my walk. Already I'd be getting home after sunset. A couple of weeks ago, I was there skimming over the surface of the vast galaxy of bulbs below; for every one of them there was a word to which I no longer had access, because that is the way things are when you are sitting in the dark next to someone you've partly invented, but love, nevertheless -- or therefore. There were coyotes of course and it sounded like a real fiesta at Alex Trebek's house 'til a voice came on the loudspeaker and said "Attention: The Griffith Observatory is now closed," and I knew the park service would neither be held responsible nor rescue us were we to be attacked by mountain lions. The gate next to the billionaire's house on Glendower said "NO PARKING ANYTIME," and "NO TRESPASSING" and "CONTINUE TO DREAM AT YOUR OWN RISK." I did, and since then, something has been falling down that hill hitting every cactus on the way down, tumbling noiselessly into private swimming pools.
But I like to walk there. I like to say "This house is great," to friends when they come with me for the first time, and we are passing the house that is all stilts and wire and the lightest-looking concrete you have ever imagined, or the house that is all windows, or the "Mayan Temple" (Frank Lloyd Wright's Ennis House). I like less to say, but do, "These houses make me sick," when passing by one of those other horrors. It isn't size that bothers me, although grand scale and poor taste seem to be inextricably linked in these parts. But... spoil the reader, spare the moralizing. I walk through this neighborhood like a street urchin in a free national museum, allowed to enter but kept at a remove, and that ever-imminent alienation may be one of the reasons I love Los Angles. At least, why it suits me right now: I can't get lost.
And sometimes I can even feel at home. Take for example the little house I passed at twilight as I was climbing up Glendower. Jared once pointed it out because it belonged to family friends. I noticed in the following order: the pink flamingo, the ubiquitous floodlights, the heavy-handed landscaping, the pleasant window above the garage (I imagined it to be pleasant, from the inside), light spilling onto the street from the garage, in which there were paintings on the far wall, and a man with silver hair (presumably the family friend) was working at a table saw-- and then, in perfect sequence, I HEARD Beethoven's 7th coming from somewhere inside the garage.
The video is writing to the disk now, and I worry that the whole first half is missing, and it's much too late to start all over.
It's so quiet in the hills that I could hear the Beethoven for a long time. I was already too far down the hill, and it was really getting dark, before I realized that in the stupor of reactions triggered by that scene -- a slow, expanding joy; the distinct pleasure that comes from feeding but not over-sating the senses; the bloom of a narrative thread, a beautiful and purely cinematic shot -- I had failed to extend a neighborly greeting to the silver-headed man who had unknowingly stirred up such a fuss in my imagination. After all, I had a vague entry, I could have mentioned Jared, or not at all, I could have just stopped, as people do, and said, "Hello." Next thing I knew I was running down the secret steps from Bonvue. I don't know why not talking to the man in the garage blasting Beethoven's 7th was causing me pain, but I wanted to put as much physical distance between him and me so that it really would be too far to turn back in such a late hour. I distinctly felt that I had failed to rise to some small, but secretly grand occasion. Perhaps because that scene had been conceived deliberately to make me feel at home.
Wednesday, June 11, 2008
For Gage, After a Sunburn
In New York we had the walls the doors
the doorbell to Dawn's house the keys
to after hours (my favorite) trains caught
by margins thinner than -- fingers! God
the charge in them I wrote miraculously --
we had baby carrots and Chianti and a roof
so late or early that we watched the children
filing in to school across the street we had
so little sleep the sidewalks drawn
to scale and walking down the street
I felt like shoplifting I was so happy
even the fact of leaving couldn't touch me
and of course we had Arlo & Esme
where the light was good the coffee hot
the pavement wet.
I got burned in California.
Now there's no one else
I would let touch me. Christ it hurts
even to lie here writing.
I could use a drink in a cold glass.
How far away are you?
I'm coming to you like a bullet
from a gun.
Soft bullet, gentle soul.
the doorbell to Dawn's house the keys
to after hours (my favorite) trains caught
by margins thinner than -- fingers! God
the charge in them I wrote miraculously --
we had baby carrots and Chianti and a roof
so late or early that we watched the children
filing in to school across the street we had
so little sleep the sidewalks drawn
to scale and walking down the street
I felt like shoplifting I was so happy
even the fact of leaving couldn't touch me
and of course we had Arlo & Esme
where the light was good the coffee hot
the pavement wet.
I got burned in California.
Now there's no one else
I would let touch me. Christ it hurts
even to lie here writing.
I could use a drink in a cold glass.
How far away are you?
I'm coming to you like a bullet
from a gun.
Soft bullet, gentle soul.
Saturday, June 7, 2008
Hollywood
I wonder
if there is something
the matter
my brain won't step over
I don't dream
I see you
in the oddest things
a palm tree leaning slightly
and aluminum
bent by a clear, blue light
morning does that to the light
and yesterday
a stuntman hurled himself through glass
and that was so much
like us
that I gasped.
You remember
we were screaming
on the street the traffic
was biting off the ends
of conversations
I felt like throwing up
my hands and leaving
I should have laughed instead
of walking out
of the bar with a glass of wine
thinking like a fool
we'd argue for a while
and go back in
the Belgian stew
might still be warm
but we had gone so far
was it too far?
We had to scream
because we loved
each other madly.
if there is something
the matter
my brain won't step over
I don't dream
I see you
in the oddest things
a palm tree leaning slightly
and aluminum
bent by a clear, blue light
morning does that to the light
and yesterday
a stuntman hurled himself through glass
and that was so much
like us
that I gasped.
You remember
we were screaming
on the street the traffic
was biting off the ends
of conversations
I felt like throwing up
my hands and leaving
I should have laughed instead
of walking out
of the bar with a glass of wine
thinking like a fool
we'd argue for a while
and go back in
the Belgian stew
might still be warm
but we had gone so far
was it too far?
We had to scream
because we loved
each other madly.
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
Saturday, May 24, 2008
Arizona
The Grand Canyon lay supine
beyond the senses I stopped
on the side of the road and the radio
was off a hawk flew over my head
I'd never heard wings beating so close
you can't reach and touch the Painted Desert
and the San Francisco Peaks stand still
until you pass them but the steady wingbeat
focused my attention I could hold it
for a moment can't you close your eyes?
and see how you are holding there
the shadows on the sun?
beyond the senses I stopped
on the side of the road and the radio
was off a hawk flew over my head
I'd never heard wings beating so close
you can't reach and touch the Painted Desert
and the San Francisco Peaks stand still
until you pass them but the steady wingbeat
focused my attention I could hold it
for a moment can't you close your eyes?
and see how you are holding there
the shadows on the sun?
Friday, May 23, 2008
Three poems I love...
For Grace, After a Party
by Frank O'Hara
You do not always know what I am feeling.
Last night in the warm spring air while I was
blazing my tirade against someone who doesn't
interest
me, it was love for you that set me
afire,
and isn't it odd? for in rooms full of
strangers my most tender feelings
writhe and
bear the fruit of screaming. Put out your hand,
isn't there
an ashtray, suddenly, there? beside
the bed? And someone you love enters the room
and says wouldn't
you like the eggs a little
different today?
And when they arrive they are
just plain scrambled eggs and the warm weather
is holding.
We Met at the End of the Party
by Philip Larkin
We met at the end of the party
When all the drinks were dead
And all the glasses dirty:
'Have this that's left', you said.
We walked through the last of summer,
When shadows reached long and blue
Across days that were growing shorter:
You said: 'There's autumn too'.
Always for you what's finished
Is nothing, and what survives
Cancels the failed, the famished,
As if we had fresh lives
From that night on, and just living
Could make me unaware
Of June, and the guests arriving,
And I not there.
On My Own
by Philip Levine
Yes, I only got here on my own.
Nothing miraculous. An old woman
opened her door expecting the milk,
and there I was, seven years old, with
a bulging suitcase of wet cardboard
and my hair plastered down and stiff
in the cold. She didn't say, "Come in,"
she didn't say anything. Her luck
has always been bad, so she stood
to one side and let me pass, trailing
the unmistakable aroma of badger
which she mistook for my underwear,
and so she looked upward, not
to heaven but to the cracked ceiling
her husband had promised to mend,
and she sighed for the first time
in my life that sigh which would tell
me what was for dinner. I found my room
and spread my things on the sagging bed:
and bright ties and candy striped shirts,
the knife to cut bread, the stuffed weasel
to guard the window, the silver spoon
to turn my tea, the pack of cigarettes
for the life ahead, and at last
the little collection of worn-out books
from which I would choose my only name—
Morgan the Pirate, Jack Dempsey, the Prince
of Wales. I chose Abraham Plain
and went off to school wearing a cap
that said "Ford" in the right script.
The teachers were soft-spoken women
smelling like washed babies and the students
fierce as lost dogs, but they all hushed
in wonder when I named the 400 angels
of death, the planets sighted and unsighted,
the moment at which creation would turn
to burned feathers and blow every which way
in the winds of shock. I sat down
and the room grew quiet and warm. My eyes
asked me to close them. I did, and so
I discovered the beauty of sleep and that
to get ahead I need only say I was there,
and everything would open as the darkness
in my silent head opened onto seascapes
at the other end of the world, waves
breaking into mountains of froth, the sand
running back to become salt savor
of the infinite. Mrs. Tarbox woke me
for lunch—a tiny container of milk
and chocolate cookies in the shape of Michigan.
Of course I went home at 3:30, with
the bells ringing behind me and four stars
in my notebook and drinking companions
on each arm. If you had been there
in your yellow harness and bright hat
directing traffic you would never
have noticed me—my clothes shabby
and my eyes bright—; to you I'd have been
just an ordinary kid. Sure, now you
know, now it's obvious, what with the light
of the Lord streaming through the nine
windows of my soul and the music of rain
following in my wake and the ordinary air
on fire every blessed day I waken the world.
by Frank O'Hara
You do not always know what I am feeling.
Last night in the warm spring air while I was
blazing my tirade against someone who doesn't
interest
me, it was love for you that set me
afire,
and isn't it odd? for in rooms full of
strangers my most tender feelings
writhe and
bear the fruit of screaming. Put out your hand,
isn't there
an ashtray, suddenly, there? beside
the bed? And someone you love enters the room
and says wouldn't
you like the eggs a little
different today?
And when they arrive they are
just plain scrambled eggs and the warm weather
is holding.
We Met at the End of the Party
by Philip Larkin
We met at the end of the party
When all the drinks were dead
And all the glasses dirty:
'Have this that's left', you said.
We walked through the last of summer,
When shadows reached long and blue
Across days that were growing shorter:
You said: 'There's autumn too'.
Always for you what's finished
Is nothing, and what survives
Cancels the failed, the famished,
As if we had fresh lives
From that night on, and just living
Could make me unaware
Of June, and the guests arriving,
And I not there.
On My Own
by Philip Levine
Yes, I only got here on my own.
Nothing miraculous. An old woman
opened her door expecting the milk,
and there I was, seven years old, with
a bulging suitcase of wet cardboard
and my hair plastered down and stiff
in the cold. She didn't say, "Come in,"
she didn't say anything. Her luck
has always been bad, so she stood
to one side and let me pass, trailing
the unmistakable aroma of badger
which she mistook for my underwear,
and so she looked upward, not
to heaven but to the cracked ceiling
her husband had promised to mend,
and she sighed for the first time
in my life that sigh which would tell
me what was for dinner. I found my room
and spread my things on the sagging bed:
and bright ties and candy striped shirts,
the knife to cut bread, the stuffed weasel
to guard the window, the silver spoon
to turn my tea, the pack of cigarettes
for the life ahead, and at last
the little collection of worn-out books
from which I would choose my only name—
Morgan the Pirate, Jack Dempsey, the Prince
of Wales. I chose Abraham Plain
and went off to school wearing a cap
that said "Ford" in the right script.
The teachers were soft-spoken women
smelling like washed babies and the students
fierce as lost dogs, but they all hushed
in wonder when I named the 400 angels
of death, the planets sighted and unsighted,
the moment at which creation would turn
to burned feathers and blow every which way
in the winds of shock. I sat down
and the room grew quiet and warm. My eyes
asked me to close them. I did, and so
I discovered the beauty of sleep and that
to get ahead I need only say I was there,
and everything would open as the darkness
in my silent head opened onto seascapes
at the other end of the world, waves
breaking into mountains of froth, the sand
running back to become salt savor
of the infinite. Mrs. Tarbox woke me
for lunch—a tiny container of milk
and chocolate cookies in the shape of Michigan.
Of course I went home at 3:30, with
the bells ringing behind me and four stars
in my notebook and drinking companions
on each arm. If you had been there
in your yellow harness and bright hat
directing traffic you would never
have noticed me—my clothes shabby
and my eyes bright—; to you I'd have been
just an ordinary kid. Sure, now you
know, now it's obvious, what with the light
of the Lord streaming through the nine
windows of my soul and the music of rain
following in my wake and the ordinary air
on fire every blessed day I waken the world.
Thursday, May 22, 2008
LA City Bus
A man in his mid-thirties walks onto the bus, carrying a couple of torn shopping bags, wearing headphones, working out a rhythm in grunts and the march of his feet before he begins half-heartedly to ask the other passengers for spare change. My feet stick out a little in the aisle. He trips, slightly. We both apologize simultaneously. Every other one of five seats in the row along the back of the bus is occupied, and in the center seat sits a woman in her late thirties. Like most of the other passengers, she is doing her best to ignore the noisy newcomer, and even when she nods to confirm the availability of the seat next to her, she is looking insistently out the window. He sits. He adjusts his bags between his feet. He does all this without breaking the rhythm of his banter, which, seeming at first to address the general audience of the bus, becomes focused on winning the attention of the woman.
"Lady, I don't like pain," he starts, without eliciting as much as the raising of an eyebrow. "No pain, no rain," he continues, "but I don't like it. I go out of my way to avoid it, and no way in hell am I going to do anything to bring it on."
His voice gets caught in the filter that traps the voices of madmen and drunks, filtered and tuned out, the way one tunes out the intermittent screeching of the bus's breaks and then following, the rising note of the bus's transmission as it trundles on toward the less seemly blocks of Sunset Boulevard.
"Nope, not a fan of pain, so you can bet that I'm not gonna say anything to piss you off, when I KNOW you've got a mean right hand."
That wins it. Her head turns as if inadvertently toward him, and she looks at him directly for the first time.
"Lady, I don't like pain," he starts, without eliciting as much as the raising of an eyebrow. "No pain, no rain," he continues, "but I don't like it. I go out of my way to avoid it, and no way in hell am I going to do anything to bring it on."
His voice gets caught in the filter that traps the voices of madmen and drunks, filtered and tuned out, the way one tunes out the intermittent screeching of the bus's breaks and then following, the rising note of the bus's transmission as it trundles on toward the less seemly blocks of Sunset Boulevard.
"Nope, not a fan of pain, so you can bet that I'm not gonna say anything to piss you off, when I KNOW you've got a mean right hand."
That wins it. Her head turns as if inadvertently toward him, and she looks at him directly for the first time.
Sunday, May 18, 2008
Arlo & Esme
From Dan Chazin's Trip on the Amtrak Lake Shore Limited New York-Chicago.
"In the meantime, I went back to the lounge car to see what was doing there. I was greeted by a young man with the unlikely name of Gage Pray, who was in the process of moving from Mystic, Conn. to San Francisco. He had a miniature tape recorder with him, and asked everyone to speak into the recorder, giving their name and making any other comments they desired. He also took a number of pictures with a throwaway camera, including several of me. Gage told me that he would be writing a story of the trip, so I gave him my address and asked him to send a copy of the story to me. There were a number of other people hanging out there (including a man who lived in Hackensack), and I was not really tired, so I decided to remain in the lounge car for awhile. Gage had taken a number of trips around the country on Amtrak, and loved the experience of traveling by train and meeting new people."
The fact that those stories and recordings are gone, stolen in the car that was stolen, makes it all the more marvelous somehow and I am thinking of the rolls of film in the camera bag that was stolen from my Sentra on the first day I had it in 2002, when I didn't know you have to hold the handle to lock it. There were three or four rolls, exposed, unprocessed, most particularly photographs I had taken with Adam in a field near the Gorge. I was naked, doing cartwheels; I would love to have such a ridiculous record of my body at that time, now. But the images that have gone missing, those in Poughkeepsie, the Beck show at Brixton, Derek Mahon standing on the sidewalk near the Groucho Club (the one time in my life I took a whole roll of photographs with no roll of film inside the camera) left an imprint like a palm slap on my brain. There are some faces from grade school, David Grobin, Jamie Salvietti; later, when I was already back in Romania escaping a sensible career, medication and a certain kind of spiritual demise, Kroon died in his sleep in New Haven. No matter how much time passes, I can't quite believe that light isn't hitting those faces somewhere in the world.
But I had meant to write about this place, about the step next to the wrought iron gate, about the glasses of gin in the planter and about the way being in a bar in a big city, after hours, anchors you into the heart of that city, in the way that maybe only receiving mail in the post can anchor you, saying gently YOU ARE HERE... I meant to write about all that and not about people who were marked for death.
In A Moveable Feast, the time of the telling is already going off somehow, and even without the greedy fingers of the narrator reaching back from a later present, you can tell that things turned rotten. It is a heartbreaking device, the way Hemingway holds his love for Hadley in suspense, as if writing could retrieve it.
The perfect last days in New York were poised to spill over in more obvious ways, but I could wait and write about that later. I walked from Bar 6 to the Strand to get a new copy of A Moveable Feast, to replace the one I'd finished and left that morning at Arlo & Esme. The day was clear and bright and I was a little drunk already and bracing myself through a sweet, unconquerable exhaustion. I was going to meet Danica at her office in the Flatiron Building, but first I had to go to the Strand. I love the Strand because the books are reasonably priced but mostly because of its name, which makes me think of public swimming pools in Europe. They have the same name, pronounced "shtrand," which is a beautiful word, shallow as the shallow end is shallow, and painted in primary colors. You can't compare the strand to the sea, though people have tried to take the depth out of the sea in places such as Brighton and Mamaia and Metaponto. But there is an urban bliss about the strand and its diving boards and beach balls and peals of laughter not drowned out by the sound of waves. Some even have manufactured waves and those are the best.
The best kind of solitude is walking in New York, tipsy in the afternoon, having left the side of someone you love as much as you can in the moment and given the circumstances, then spending only what you have in your pocket, on only what you need, in a good bookstore that is as bright and bustling as a public swimming pool.
Thursday, May 15, 2008
New York in May (yes, that's still LA, somehow)
Dawn's apartment has a great small room for keeping jade plants and writing letters by the window, though not for reading, since the chair is bare and stiff. It is spring in New York and within the frame of the dirty window two maple trees nearly block the brick facade of the school building, and there is a good feeling of space and vegetation. These small deceptions belong to cities and make me feel that I belong to cities, too, since I have always loved to find a hidden courtyard or a garden on a rooftop.
I have been re-reading A Moveable Feast, to get to Pound.
"When spring came, even the false spring, there were no problems except where to be happiest. The only thing that could spoil a day was people and if you could keep from making engagements, each day had no limits. People were always the limiters of happiness except for the very few that were as good as spring itself."
I think I would say now the only thing that spoils these days is the awful technology. People are welcome. Any minute Simon will call to say he is down on the street. Then he will come up and we will make a salad and talk about the last three years, which is how long it's been since we last saw each other. People on the street below have small, efficient shoulder bags. A city for walking makes for light travelers, and this elicits a moderate degree of envy. I brought too much for two weeks, and anyway I have been wearing the same pair of jeans and the tee shirt with the title of Dan's novel in green felt letters.
I asked Whit for bad ideas; he said cocktails at 4:30 on a sidewalk with a view of walkers. I didn't ask for good ideas, but he said "If you carry a camera make it a mini digital. And if it's a day out and about wear comfy quiet shoes." But my camera is large and my red boots make the sound I couldn't wait to make when I was a little girl. The click clack of a woman's heels on the sidewalk. Walking back late from the subway last night, I carried that rhythm somewhat painfully and woke up at 6 this morning with a charlie horse.
I've been looking at maps of Montana once every two or three weeks. Two hours from Dillon to Missoula, four from Dillon to Red Lodge. Surely there will be time to put something aside and plan a trip. Coffin is going to see his old friend and Sam will be tending the middle cow camp from June to November. For me it is a question of the season, maybe a little of courage, because I have been dreaming for a long time and it takes courage to give up a dream.
But I am drifting. The window is open now, and I have Richard Goode playing Bach, and although I'd like to be comfortable in a tee shirt, I've become vulnerable to the Northeastern chill, which maybe means I've hit the peak of my days in Southern California and am gearing for the long descent.
Simon made an album and it sounds like this: clean out my heart before you leave.
I have been re-reading A Moveable Feast, to get to Pound.
"When spring came, even the false spring, there were no problems except where to be happiest. The only thing that could spoil a day was people and if you could keep from making engagements, each day had no limits. People were always the limiters of happiness except for the very few that were as good as spring itself."
I think I would say now the only thing that spoils these days is the awful technology. People are welcome. Any minute Simon will call to say he is down on the street. Then he will come up and we will make a salad and talk about the last three years, which is how long it's been since we last saw each other. People on the street below have small, efficient shoulder bags. A city for walking makes for light travelers, and this elicits a moderate degree of envy. I brought too much for two weeks, and anyway I have been wearing the same pair of jeans and the tee shirt with the title of Dan's novel in green felt letters.
I asked Whit for bad ideas; he said cocktails at 4:30 on a sidewalk with a view of walkers. I didn't ask for good ideas, but he said "If you carry a camera make it a mini digital. And if it's a day out and about wear comfy quiet shoes." But my camera is large and my red boots make the sound I couldn't wait to make when I was a little girl. The click clack of a woman's heels on the sidewalk. Walking back late from the subway last night, I carried that rhythm somewhat painfully and woke up at 6 this morning with a charlie horse.
I've been looking at maps of Montana once every two or three weeks. Two hours from Dillon to Missoula, four from Dillon to Red Lodge. Surely there will be time to put something aside and plan a trip. Coffin is going to see his old friend and Sam will be tending the middle cow camp from June to November. For me it is a question of the season, maybe a little of courage, because I have been dreaming for a long time and it takes courage to give up a dream.
But I am drifting. The window is open now, and I have Richard Goode playing Bach, and although I'd like to be comfortable in a tee shirt, I've become vulnerable to the Northeastern chill, which maybe means I've hit the peak of my days in Southern California and am gearing for the long descent.
Simon made an album and it sounds like this: clean out my heart before you leave.
Thursday, April 3, 2008
Hollywood Trembles on the Verge of Tears
I used to listen to "I Dream a Highway" by Gillian Welch just to get the rhythm of that knife in my hands before I started writing. But that song won't lend itself, and I just start writing her verses.
Oh I dream a highway back to you love
A winding ribbon with a band of gold
A silver vision come and rest my soul
I dream a highway back to you
John he's kicking out the footlights
The Grand Ole Opry's got a brand new band
Lord, let me die with a hammer in my hand
I dream a highway back to you.
I think I'll move down into Memphis
And thank the hatchet man who forked my tongue
I lie and wait until the wagons come
And dream a highway back to you.
The getaway kicking up cinders
An empty wagon full of rattling bones
Moon in the mirror on a three-hour jones,
I dream a highway back to you.
Oh I dream a highway back to you love
A winding ribbon with a band of gold
A silver vison come arrest my soul
I dream a highway back to you.
Which lover are you, Jack of Diamonds?
Now you be Emmylou and I'll be Gram
I send a letter, don't know who I am
I dream a highway back to you.
I'm an indisguisable shade of twilight
Any second now I'm gonna turn myself on
In the blue display of the cool cathode ray
I dream a highway back to you.
I wish you knew me, Jack of Diamonds
Fire-riding, wheeling when I lead em up
Drank whisky with my water, sugar in my tea
My sails in rags with the staggers and the jags
I dream a highway back to you.
Oh I dream a highway back to you love
A winding ribbon with a band of gold
A silver vision come molest my soul
I dream a highway back to you.
Now give me some of what you're having
I'll take you as a viper into my head
A knife into my bed, arsenic when I'm fed
I dream a highway back to you.
Hang overhead from all directions
Radiation from the porcelain light
Blind and blistered by the morning white
I dream a highway back to you.
Sunday morning at the diner
Hollywood trembles on the verge of tears
I watched the waitress for a thousand years
Saw a wheel within a wheel, heard a call within a call
I dreamed a highway back to you.
Oh I dream a highway back to you love
A winding ribbon with a band of gold
A silver vision come molest my soul
I dream a highway back to you.
Step into the light, poor Lazarus
Don't lie alone behind the window shade
Let me see the mark death made
I dream a highway back to you.
I dream a highway back to you.
What will sustain us through the winter?
Where did last years lessons go?
Walk me out into the rain and snow
I dream a highway back to you.
Oh I dream a highway back to you love
A winding ribbon with a band of gold
A silver vision come and bless my soul
I dream a highway back to you
I dream a highway back to you
Oh I dream a highway back to you love
A winding ribbon with a band of gold
A silver vision come and bless my sould
I dream a highway back to you.
Oh I dream a highway back to you love
A winding ribbon with a band of gold
A silver vision come and rest my soul
I dream a highway back to you
John he's kicking out the footlights
The Grand Ole Opry's got a brand new band
Lord, let me die with a hammer in my hand
I dream a highway back to you.
I think I'll move down into Memphis
And thank the hatchet man who forked my tongue
I lie and wait until the wagons come
And dream a highway back to you.
The getaway kicking up cinders
An empty wagon full of rattling bones
Moon in the mirror on a three-hour jones,
I dream a highway back to you.
Oh I dream a highway back to you love
A winding ribbon with a band of gold
A silver vison come arrest my soul
I dream a highway back to you.
Which lover are you, Jack of Diamonds?
Now you be Emmylou and I'll be Gram
I send a letter, don't know who I am
I dream a highway back to you.
I'm an indisguisable shade of twilight
Any second now I'm gonna turn myself on
In the blue display of the cool cathode ray
I dream a highway back to you.
I wish you knew me, Jack of Diamonds
Fire-riding, wheeling when I lead em up
Drank whisky with my water, sugar in my tea
My sails in rags with the staggers and the jags
I dream a highway back to you.
Oh I dream a highway back to you love
A winding ribbon with a band of gold
A silver vision come molest my soul
I dream a highway back to you.
Now give me some of what you're having
I'll take you as a viper into my head
A knife into my bed, arsenic when I'm fed
I dream a highway back to you.
Hang overhead from all directions
Radiation from the porcelain light
Blind and blistered by the morning white
I dream a highway back to you.
Sunday morning at the diner
Hollywood trembles on the verge of tears
I watched the waitress for a thousand years
Saw a wheel within a wheel, heard a call within a call
I dreamed a highway back to you.
Oh I dream a highway back to you love
A winding ribbon with a band of gold
A silver vision come molest my soul
I dream a highway back to you.
Step into the light, poor Lazarus
Don't lie alone behind the window shade
Let me see the mark death made
I dream a highway back to you.
I dream a highway back to you.
What will sustain us through the winter?
Where did last years lessons go?
Walk me out into the rain and snow
I dream a highway back to you.
Oh I dream a highway back to you love
A winding ribbon with a band of gold
A silver vision come and bless my soul
I dream a highway back to you
I dream a highway back to you
Oh I dream a highway back to you love
A winding ribbon with a band of gold
A silver vision come and bless my sould
I dream a highway back to you.
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