Wednesday, September 28, 2005

The Day After

Things begin to congeal. The energy lessens, and what used to amount to nothing--a strangers accidental touch on the subway, imagery (a bike, a piece of clothing), the approaching winter--becomes charged with meaning, with an immeasurable sense of what is possible at those moments, in the random (but are they random?) crossing of trajectories (and how I know so much about the crossing of trajectories now,) but also what seems impossible. Everything. Sometimes everything. Other times I forget.

She was all around me in the ether today. Meg and I rarely left voice messages for each other, but rather we would leave about 15-20 seconds of a Sade song, a particular lyric: "I want to cook you a soup that warms your soul," or my favorite, "There is a woman in Somalia..." And today, when I got on the plane to return to NYC, a woman sat down next to me and began listening to Sade on her iPod. Then, I got in a taxi, and guess what was playing on the radio? Yes.

Jennifer Miller told me a story today about a pigeon that landed on her windowsill and seemed sure on finding its way inside her loft. She ignored it for a time, but it was persistent, and so she let it inside, where it walked around the apartment for a short while, and then left.

Tuesday, September 20, 2005

A Humble Request

If I should ever write a screenplay, in which there are scenes where the characters make phone calls, please remind me not to write them as such: "Hello, Delta Airlines? Yes, I'd like to change my flight to New York." Or "Hello Szechuan Garden? I'd like to place an order for delivery."

Monday, September 19, 2005

A Novel Commentary

I have been thinking lately of the book as a form -- meaning as a singular form for conveying an idea -- in the way that painting or film is a form, a delivery vehicle. Specifically, I have been thinking about the techniques writers use to discourage, hide, or sometimes illuminate the machinations of the novel -- as opposed to the way they do this in film.

For example, most DVDs these days come with an audio commentary by the actors, directors or writers, and often, if the film is of a certain genre, or appeals to a certain audience, the art directors, animators and costume designers are also given a commentary track. The whole purpose of this is to allow a window into the way the film was created, to show what is fake and what is genuine, to expose the Wizard behind the curtain.

But our purpose in books -- at least as far as I can tell -- is to remove all trace of the handiwork. It should appear to the reader as if it was never cut in fourteen pieces and splayed out across the floor, was never filled with four question marks in a row (my way of saying fix this,) or sometimes even FIX THIS, all caps, when I'm not completely sure what the problem is, and it's just too frustrating to work on at that moment.

What interests me lately is the possibility of providing an audio commentary for novels. The writer giving a kind of play-by-play of the book's creation -- how images appeared or were drawn out, which characters asserted themselves first whenever he sat down to work, what lines of dialogue were stolen from strangers on street corners.

But here's the problem I can't figure out: Would that defeat the privacy that a novel allows? We appreciate knowing the camera tricks if the images are on a screen. But would we feel cheated, feel betrayed, if someone talked us through a book, because the camerawork, the art direction, the costume design is all in our own imagination?

Tuesday, September 13, 2005

New Favorite

My new favorite record is the Kronos Quartet's recording of Steve Reich's Triple Quartet. And on the same record is "Electric Guitar Phase," "Music for a Large Ensemble" and "Tokyo/Vermont Counterpoint."

Steve Reich has always drawn me into myself, the droning combination of the modern and the ancient pressed together to make a sound which comes from nowhere and everywhere, a tumbling momentum, a patience with tempo and patterns. In these times when I'm trying to get more inside myself I listen to Reich over and over, and the textures become deeper, almost like valleys you can walk through if you listen close enough.

Take "Electric Guitar Phase," which at first sounds like a crush of tones. But once you really get to know the piece, and you can count it, hear each thread, each sad, sawwing instrument, you can hear the way it works, you can walk it like space. The doors open up -- like when Keanu finally sees the Matrix; like when Jodie Foster sees the whole picture in the last ten minutes of Silence of the Lambs.

From the Department of Are You Fucking Kidding Me?

The Completely Bare spa, which runs two offices in Manhattan as well as one in Scarsdale, offers a service that they call "Bikini Grafitti." That's where they make your "area" completely bare and then use an airbrush to "paint his name, his number, your lucky number, or your favorite designer logo." Bikini Graffiti lasts approximatley 2-5 days. (Read: depending on how much you bathe.)

Can you imagine the horror which might strike my girlfriends' suitors upon discovering "Versace" painted onto the "area?"

Good ideas: Dior, Chanel, Hermes.
Bad ideas: Anna Sui, Tommy Hilfiger, H&M.

Monday, September 12, 2005

Nominations & Baby Arrivals

One of the acts in this year's Circus Amok show has the audience nominating people to the United States Supreme Court. Names that come up repeatedly are Oprah (of course,) Hillary Clinton, Barak Obama, and Jennifer Miller (it's her show, don't forget.) At the Park Slope, Brooklyn show yesterday someone nominated Ani Difranco. Only in Park Slope, I thought.

At a surprise baby shower I went to on Friday night my friend Wendy was surrounded by stacks of gifts and her three year-old adopted son, Tolya, from the Ukraine. Tolya said: "Why do we need so many clothes for the baby?" Wendy replied: "Because the baby doesn't have any clothes yet." Tolya, looking horrified, exclaimed: "It comes naked!?!"

Friday, September 09, 2005

The Age of Data

Someone in Elk River, Minnesota visited by blog for one minute and thirty four seconds yesterday after having performed a search on MSN for "where do I put my hands on the piano." A link to me was returned because of this post, in which we talk about hands in the comments, and of course, the name of my blog popped up from the word 'piano.' And on August 31, someone in Niles, Illinois visited the same post -- this time for only 7 seconds -- after having performed a Google search for "short stubby fingers."

I think of those TV shows you see where the boats dump hoards of teeming fish onto the deck. Even though they're casting for mackerel, they catch everything else along with it.

Were these people confused by my post? Annoyed at the proliferation of amateur information-farmers, who fill up search results with musings on the culture? Or was seven seconds all this person in Niles needed to learn everything he cared to about short stubby fingers?

Wednesday, September 07, 2005

What Finishing a Novel Feels Like

Imagine that someone has given you the power to create human beings. So you go about your work diligently, quietly, privately, for as long as it takes to get it right. And, of course, you want your fellow human beings to be as real as possible, as absolutely true as possible, because you're going to be living with them for quite some time. You're going to love them and hate them and worry about them and help them make decisions. And so you build them with flaws, with charms and senses of humor, with personalities that don't necessarily suit your own. You build them knowing forgiveness because you sometimes betray them. The idea isn't to build a better human being, but just to build some who will accompany you, flaws and all, through the next part of your life. And, of course, beautifully flawed is the only way you know human beings to exist anyway.

Now imagine the same someone requires that you devise a machine to kill the people that you've created. And the only rule is that it has to do justice to them according to the laws you chose when you made them. The smart and cocky ones go one way, the quiet-types go another. And so this machine has lots of tiny moving parts, which click and grind against each other, ripping your people up into tiny pieces and maybe even incinerating those pieces so that all that's left when they come out the other end is a charred black smoke which rises away from you and disappears.

Tuesday, September 06, 2005

Some Recommendations from the Labor Day Weekend

The "O Magnum Mysterium" CD by Grex Vocalis
Power Surge at Coney Island
Mario's winter squash and pasta bake
Mario (in general)
Shopping for wristwatches at Bloomingdale's
Random Supreme Court nominations: Oprah, Barak Obama, etc.
Transporter 2

Friday, September 02, 2005

Not So Good Morning

The New York Times waiting on the floor in front of my office door showed a picture of a woman standing on an overpass, a dead body floating by underneath.

I heard someone on the train this morning talking up Hinduism, talking about how the world periodically experiences something called Kali Yuga, which is a necessary state of purifiction through destruction. They were trying to make some sense of this tragedy, of course, trying to spin it into something positive. But all it made me think about was how that only proves that people have been creating mythologies to explain the randomness of the world since we began this long, strange journey.

And seeing the pictures in the paper, the anarchy, the rapes and the gunfire, I can't help thinking: would it have been any different if it had been Peoria? Or Beverly Hills?