Famous People

This week has been the week of famous people. On my way to work this morning I was practically run over by Stephen Sondheim running to hail a cab, and then when I turned the corner, there stood Kurt Vonnegut on his landing, smoking his morning cigarette and watching the window washers fill their buckets on the sidewalk.

On Saturday afternoon, I went to see Syriana downtown, where Billy Crudup sat in front of me with his girlfriend, Claire Danes. I wonder if Billy was ever a dancer; he has that dancer's posture. I learned from IMDB that he has been the voice of Mastercard's "Priceless" campaign since 1997.

Ms. Danes is very beautiful, and has that same blank slate quality about her in person that she has so well performed in Shopgirl, and in The Hours, which is, for me, one of her best performances. At one particularly unpleasant to watch moment of....well, torture in Syriana, she turned completely around in her seat and covered her eyes, cowering as if under bomb threat.

Shoe-Shiner Story

He waits, holding the book under his arm like a bird, like an embarrassing gift—the truth is that it is his armor. He removes the dust jackets because it is better if his reading preferences are a mystery to the public. He believes that everyone is judging his character by the kinds of books he chooses to drag up onto busses, into restaurants. He believes this because he judges others this way. The yellow boards of the book are held together with ivory cloth. Gilt letters are stacked on the spine.

Behind the glass is the shoe-shiner, legs crossed at the ankle, sitting on a leather-topped bench, head tilted back, reading the Daily News folded in half, marked at the Sports section. The shoe-shiner touches the tip of his greasy finger to his tongue, brushing it along the bottom side of the paper, taking a page up with it. He looks up, into the eyes of the man outside who is clutching a book.

This is the first moment. Years later, around long wooden tables and empty bottles, with circles of friends on three-day weekends, even having told this story countless times, they will bicker over who saw who, and what it meant, and what the other felt. The fairness--to the naive, to the young--will seem like an argument.

The reader pushes the door open, leaving fingerprints on the glass, cursing himself for the blunder, the body’s constant betrayal. If he had his choice, he'd live forever a life of the mind. The shoe-shiner stands up, motions his palm out to the chair, and at the sight of this delicate gesture, the reader corrects himself: No, he thinks, never merely the fragile, sweatless life of the mind.

The reader sits and the shoe-shiner goes to work. The reader watches the tendons in his forearm rippling like the tendrils of tiny sea creatures. The other foot is placed forward. And suddenly, faster than he intended, he is spent, finished. The shoe-shiner places his hand on the top of the shoe and taps it twice, allowing his fingers to stay longer. The reader looks down at him. The shoe-shiner removes his hand, and looks at the floor, the way you turn away when a child who wants to feel older dresses himself for school.

This is the second moment. Except the shoe-shiner won't remember this detail, and the reader won't remind him of it until they are old men--leaving it out of all the wooden-table-three-day-weekend storytellings, saving it only for each other. And when the reader finally re-enacts the bashfulness, the shoe-shiner will once again feel that knotting in his stomach, that flutter.

The reader steps down. And they kiss. Lips pressed against lips, a hand pressing against the shoe-shiners chest, the smell of polish and rags in the air. His tongue tastes like satin, or warm silver.

It is not the sort of kiss that evokes waves crashing against the shore or flowers blooming in fast-forward. Instead, it is a fast kiss, over too soon, and the reader feels blindfolded, standing under a sky filled with fireworks. When he finally opens his eyes, he can only smell the fading blue smoke, which reminds him just how beautiful the world once was.

Parade Dialogue

A: You're missing the M&M balloon.
B: [from the other room] The what?
A: The M&M balloon.
B: There's an Eminem balloon?
A: No, two huge M&Ms.
B: Two huge Eminem's?
A: No, like melt-in-your-mouth.
B: That's gross.
A: No, like the chocolate candy, M&Ms.
B: Oh.

Grief = Love

A strange feeling: that perhaps I want to stay inside this grief a bit longer, so as to let Meg stay with me for one more hour, another week, through next month, during the horrible motion of the holidays. Retreating from the world into the memories, into the joys of our life together have been extraordinarly comforting. I say inside this grief because it can feel like that. Like a down-filled comfortor. Like protective armor.

The conventional wisdom dictates that you should pass through your grief not quickly, not too slowly, but at whatever pace is right for you. So, I suppose what I'm saying is that I'm not quite done feeling sad. And why should I be? The one year anniversary makes a difference, I keep hearing. And it's been only two months. Two months today.

I'm not incapacitated. I'm still in basically a good mood everyday. (But, for those of you know know me, you know that's pretty relative, anyway.) Maybe this bluntness never goes away. Everything I've read says that it does not. People in the same situation (predicament?) say that it does not. And I wonder, is it strange, unhealthy? Is it abnormal to want to hang on a little longer? There is joy in the sadness, if you look for it.

I started to title this post "How Grief Can Feel Like Love." But what I'm trying to say is that grief is love.

On Mythology

Margaret Atwood was on the Leonard Lopate Show discussing her new book, The Penelopiad, which is part of a series of books retelling great myths, written by great writers. Atwood mentioned in the interview that dogs do not have mythology because their language does not include a past or future tense. They do not ask "Where did I come from?" They do not ask, "What will I be?"

Myths have been given a bad wrap in American culture. Save for, oh, The West with a capital W, and George Washington telling no lies, etc., what stories do we tell over and over? I sometimes wonder if the myths of the future will be told about Bill Gates and Fifty Cent.

Americans view myths as lies. George W. Bush refers to myths as false ideals: "...the terrorists' most powerful myth is being destroyed."* And if I say to you "the myth of politics," or "the myth of morality," even if I say "the myth of grapefruit," what you hear is something that is already understood to be false.

Perhaps someday we will return to the days of mythology in the truest sense. Where the whole of human experience--vast and impossible to comprehend--is shared through stories told to one person by another. Where the pains of the present can be ameliorated by the lessons of the past.


*State of the Union Address, February 2, 2005.

Open Letters, Vol. 2

Dear American Express,

In response to your message found on the piece of cardboard printed with your logo, which was wrapped around my cup of peppermint tea that reads "Careful, the beverage you are about to enjoy is extremely hot," please let me say: Boy, you weren't kidding.

Regards,
Lee

Joan Wins!

Joan Didion was awarded the National Book Award last night for her illuminating work of non-fiction The Year of Magical Thinking. As if there were any doubts.

"There's hardly anything I can say about this except thank you," Joan said, and then thanked Knopf, her publisher, having been glad to be asked to pursue "something that was not exactly anything but personal and that it would work."

Reflexology

Mario surprised me yesterday with a trip to the reflexologist. It was a lovely experience on several levels, both from a purely physical perspective, but also in the kind of mind-numbing brainlessness that I could use some of lately.

For an hour (or however long you choose) you lay back in this comfy chair while one of the talented practitioners at Angel Feet pokes and massages and pulls on your feet, ankles and hands in the most wonderful way imaginable. They were playing music (strings, in our case,) and there was a noise machine which sounded like an ocean and the occasional babble of what might have been actual water, though I could not swear to it. I was mostly concerned with trying to relax.

An interesting thing happens when you really let your mind loose. You begin to hear some things, and not others--for a time I would focus on the waves and not even be conscious of the music, and other moments the opposite. All the things which are stressing me out were still in my head, only I seemed to have placed them in a kind of mental fish hatchery, an organized system with separations, and borders which allowed each one to seem manageable, decipherable, conquerable.

The woman who worked on my feet was gentle yet firm--sometimes vaguely painful in a good way--and at the end of the session she sat next to me for a few moments to discuss all the things that are wrong with my body. "Your left leg is much more open than your right," she said. I know this. Some people show stress in their neck and shoulders, some clench their jaws or grind their teeth. All mine tends to go into my right hamstring and calf. Call me original.

She held my foot up again, "And this part has a lot of stress, you are holding it here as well." I watched her finger trace the outside of my foot, from the base of the heel up to the center of the arch. "What part is that?" I asked. She sat straight up, and indicated the muscle which sits on top part of your butt, and then just above, her lower back on the right side.

This area has indeed been causing me a lot of hassle lately. (I attribute most of the pain to me carrying around Elizabeth Kostova's 650 page novel The Historian in my bag, which rests just there on my hip as I walk. Though, if I'm going to feel discomfort, to Elizabeth's credit, I can't think of a better cause. Perhaps hurting your forearm from lifting too many toast points spread with foie gras, but that's another story entirely.)

I sat in the chair a few minutes longer in silence, my feet wrapped in a warm towel, a chenille blanket thrown over me, in the dim light listening to the ocean, until Mario peeked his face around from his side of the screen. "Are you okay," he asked. I was.

Attack of the Bacteria, and the Subsequent Defending of the Body by Medicine

I woke up last Thursday with the eerie kind of "I feel like crap," feeling which I immediately recognized as something more than my usual morning stupor. I knew that I had to go to the doctor. I knew that there was something actually wrong with me, and that something needed medication. Bodies have a way of telling you what you need if you listen closely. Meg used to say that when you went grocery shopping you could hold whatever vegetable in front of your solar plexus, and if your body naturally leaned toward the food, then you were deficient in whatever vitamins or minerals that food would provide. This is, perhaps, my hokey, sounds-like-voodoo interpretation of what the actual technique involved, but I think I got the basic idea. I needed antibiotics for my throat. And I knew it.

I went up the road to the Rapid Medical Center, a vaguely-decorated office on Broadway in Astoria (where I have been twice before in the eight years that I've lived in this neighborhood) and filled out the paperwork -- after learning that they did not take my insurance -- while occasionally staring into the fish tank, which was empty of fish.

I was called back into room number 1 (though I did not see any other rooms along that hallway) where a nurse took my temperature, my blood pressure, and asked general health questions like "Are you allergic to any medications" and "Do you have any diarrhea?" Moments later, the doctor arrived.

He is a large Chinese man, with thick glasses and an equally thick accent. He proceeded to again ask me the same series of questions that the nurse asked, putting check marks beside what she had written, as if to clarify that my answers had not changed in the last two minutes. Then after listening to my breathing through the stethoscope and looking into my ears, nose and throat, he began sketching something on the paper. He turned the clipboard around to show me a rough drawing of a man, basically just a torso with a head, and then he circled the entire chest with a red pen. "See this," he said. And then he drew an arrow pointing to the throat. "This is what is wrong with you," he said.

My first thought was, of course, "Well, yes, I could have told you that." But I sat patiently while he scrawled the customary impossible-to-read prescription for antibiotics and a cough syrup with antihistimine. The entire experience only reconfirmed my instinct that -- in some cases -- we should be able to prescribe medication for ourselves. Or, for each other, as needed.

While layed-up I watched Kinsey, Born Into Brothels, the last few episodes of season four of Six Feet Under, and several hours of television. I also managed to see Shopgirl in the actual movie theater.

Willy Porter

Sean and I had the pleasure of hearing Willy Porter play at Joe's Pub last night. We got there early enough to get a prime spot in the cushy loungey area, and the place was full without being crowded. The audience was sort of rowdy and calm at the same time--a much more "adult" audience than you find at, say, your standard Ani Difranco or Indigo Girls show. That is to say loud but appreciative. The setlist was, I thought, mostly the greatest hits (that's not a criticism,) although a high point came when his piano player, David Adler, in what seemed a jokey appeal to New Yorker's urban and ecclectic sensibilities half-assed played the intro to the Gorillaz' hit "Feel Good Inc" and after some goading from the audience, they finished the tune with the kind of improv-bravura that only musicians who play together a lot can do.

Willy is now recording each night's shows in 24-bit audio, and then selling freshly burned CDs to the audience immediately after, as a kind of souvenier meets 'let's compete with piracy' marketing idea. It works. There were lots of people in line to purchase the show--myself included--and Willy goes home with a pocketfull of cash. Other artists are getting into the idea including Bauhaus, the Black Crowes, Peter Gabriel, and notably Prince, who was doing this several years ago when the technology first appeared.

I've also been spinning a trio of new records on my iPod: Madonna's "Confessions on a Dancefloor," Imogen Heap's "Speak for Yourself," and Floetry's "Flo'Ology."

Messages

Saturday night was the most recent opening of my friend Barb Monoian's amazing endeavor "Musee de Monoian." She has included me in her gallery space based solely on the fact that Barb understands how one sort of art can be meaningful in context of another, i.e. my words next to a painting, both built around the same theme, even though we worked independently and do not know each other, can potentially create something interesting.

And Meg visited during the opening; I am sure of it.

I had pointed out my pages and showed some friends where they were in the cacophony of artwork, and then I bent down to sign the guestbook that goes along with this particular exhibit. And the DJ began to play Sade. Meg and I spoke to each other all the time in Sade -- it sounds rather strange to other people, I find; it sounds corny. But to us it was something different, a shared something that seemed between only us.

I stood up and spun around. "Are you hearing this?!?" I shouted, to Mario, to Laura and Amy, to anyone who would listen. I wanted someone else to hear it. I wanted the message to be witnessed by someone else, because I was afraid, for only a moment, that I had invented it.

Congratulations

My friends over at Eat Feed have just been honored with the much-deserved Podcast of the Year Award.

The judging committee was asked to look at the following: a) a podcast that stays on-topic and provides unique information to a niche audience not widely available elsewhere, b) a podcast with an informative website and (optionally) quality supporting printed collateral, c) a podcast with exceptional listener loyalty.

Eat Feed does all this brilliantly. Congratulations, Anne!

Details, details

There comes a time when you realize that you have to go on with your life.

The moment that you have to go on with your life comes at the instant you first hear someone has died--in this case, the afternoon of September 22, 2005, when my phone rang. But the realization comes later. And with it you begin to see that for most of the last five weeks you've been floating through the hours without any real direction.

In the beginning, the logistics save you. Buy a plane ticket. Make phone calls. Organize something. Is someone bringing food?

Where before I was always thinking: "Okay, I can't do anything, so I might as well write a check and lick a stamp," now, as the news finally sinks in, the details that previously were your salvation from madness become impossible. Who cares if the electric bill lays on the table for three months? Who cares if the phone rings?

Sweeney Todd

Last night Mario and I went with our friends Michael & Calvin to see the new Broadway production of Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd. It was extremely good. Patti LuPone, Michael Cerveris, and the rest of the extraordinary cast are all brilliant, and their performances play like they're having so much fun that it might be illegal--and I'm sure they really are having this much fun.

The director and designer, John Doyle, has stripped down the show to it's absolute minimum, with the performers not only singing and acting, but working as the entire orchestra. Ms. LuPone plays the tuba, orchestra bells and other percussion, and she plays the triangle with more wit than I previously thought possible. They sing and act while playing, they carry their instruments around on stage, and the whole thing is so gripping, the performances so believeable, that the illusion is completely genuine. London absolutely appears.

I suspect this production will have wavering popularlity with out-of-town audiences, since not only is the subject matter dark and quite adult, but I think primarily this show will serve to draw the line between theater goers who want to be entertained, and theater goers who want to be entertained and involved. Because the show has very few props, and only one set which does not change, you're left with only the brilliant actors and your own imagination.

I smell Tony....big time.