Some Questions

Some actual questions people have asked me at the GreenMarket maple syrup stand:

-Ever think of putting the syrup in, like, the shape of a hot lady?

-Do you have the thick stuff?

-Why is Dove soap so good?

-Do bees make this?

-Can I buy this at Trader Joe's?

-Where is Trader Joe's?

-Does this have egg in it?

New York Vacation

"Your mission," the email began, and told me that I should be at White Street and Avenue of the Americas at 12:30pm. I was early, of course. Kip was earlier, of course. He had arranged a room at the Tribeca Grand, a beautiful modern hotel just below Canal Street in Lower Manhattan. With the special package he got there was a champagne toast in the bar upon arrival, so we leafed through Sunday's New York Times while we sipped. Back in the room, they brought us a goldfish in a huge round bowl (that's one of their guest services) and Kip christened him Popeye. I wanted to feed him, but there was no fish food to be found. (Housekeeping later fed him dinner.)



We walked down West Broadway to a cramped restaurant called Kitchenette, which boasted lots of "home cookin'," and they were so busy that we agreed to sit at a table for four with an other couple--a man and a woman, and I don't really remember what they talked about, which is unlike me. I had the Kitchenette Special, which was bacon, egg & cheese on a buscuit. Served with cheese grits, which were good, though lacking, in my opinion, enough cheese to really be cheese grits.

We walked all around the west side of Lower Manhattan, stopping in all the stores along the way, in the Wintergarden, watching the street performers at Battery Park, enjoying the sunshine. After a nap--oh, such a glorious nap in a king-size bed!--we headed up to SoHo for dinner at a tapas bar called N (that's supposed to have a tilda over it, but I can't figure out how to make Blogger make one, without going through a bunch of crap.) The food was excellent: traditional egg and potato tortilla, chicken and serrano ham skewers, shrimp croquettes, mangecho and membrillo, house-smoked salmon on toast...mojitos and sangria.

The hotel delivered chocolate covered strawberries and more champagne--which we didn't drink, and so it sat, flat and warm in the two flutes all night, and looked so sad in the morning. Breakfast in bed was included--and for hotel food (I thought) it was pretty good. Anything that arrives with a sampling of tiny jars of jelly is pretty good according to me.

After we checked out, we went to South Street Seaport to see Bodies: The Exhibition. Here's where things began to get kind of odd. It's unclear (and somewhat widely talked-about) just where the bodies included in the exhibit came from, because there's a lot of arguing about whether or not they were legitimately....harvested? They're all Chinese, and given China's disgusting history when it comes to human rights, the scientists involved in creating the exhibit did well not to ask any questions when it came to the origins of the, well, participants.



The Bodies exhibition is strangely cold, bizarrely inhuman. And the fact that they are real human bodies (as the literature is always reminding you) is easy to forget, since they look so plastic--they are plastic. It's all just slightly too medical to be aesthetically interesting (except for the one room displaying the circulatory system) and only a time or two do you get that strong sense of creepiness that you'd imagine would be all over you.

There was a person at the end of the exhibit who was there to answer any questions, and I wanted to ask her about the accusations, not because I think they're not true--the more you read, the more depressing it gets--but because I wanted to hear the rehearsed, public relations-friendly answer. I didn't get into it.

We walked over the Brooklyn Bridge, which I had never done, not ever in nine years of living here. The sun was shining; some tourists asked me to take their picture, and then Kip asked them to take a picture of us. We got some groceries for dinner, and I cooked a chicken and some potatoes and we sat around his house watching his cable TV and his cats.

I love New York City.

Rabbit Hole

My friend Ken took me to see Rabbit Hole, the new play by David Lindsay-Abaire, starring Cynthia Nixon, Tyne Dale and John Slattery. I loved it. The acting is incredibly nuanced, and considering the subject matter--a four-year old is hit by a car and killed, and the family must then deal with their individual paths through grief--it's also very funny.

At one point in the second act, Ms. Nixon asks her mother--who in the play, eleven years earlier, lost her son, Ms. Nixon's brother--if "this feeling" ever goes away. Ms. Daly says that eventually you are able to crawl out from underneath it, and then you carry it in your pocket like a brick. Some days you forget about it, and then you reach in and you're reminded, "oh yeah, that."

So much of the play felt like my own experience with Meg's death. (It did occur to me at one point that everyone around me, all the other people crying, were probably thinking that the play felt like their experiences, as well; such is the brilliance of the writing; and such is the nature of grief.) How sometimes you feel like moons orbiting the people you love, empty space spanning the distance between you, impassible. How the objects left behind are both exalted to a new level of preciousness, and yet you carefully remove the reminders from your immediate view, because to have the person staring back at you from the outside is often too much.

So. Run, don't walk, to see Rabbit Hole if you're anywhere near.

G for Get On With It

***This post contains spoilers, so if you plan to see the movie V for Vendetta, and you haven't figured out the ending already from watching the trailer or seeing the posters, then stop reading.***

Okay, so maybe it's not about the ending, exactly. But when they finally blow up the Houses of Parliament, you've been expecting it for almost an hour and a half, and it comes as less a solution, or, as the movie would lead us to believe, a new philosophical (and perhaps actual) beginning, than simply the scenes you watch before the credits.

How can a movie with so much visual appeal, and so many thrilling ideas, be so boring? And the most confusing part is that it's not that boring. It's the worst kind of boring, meaning that it just lumps along (not allowing you to be so bored that you leave) and asks you to suspend so much disbelief that by the end you've both simultaneously forgotten what happened earlier, and you've figured out how the last 30 minutes will play out.

However, I enjoyed it despite all this. Mainly because it's about terrorism as a force for good. And this is an idea that's worth thinking about--especially since in these times we're so often being force-fed permutations of that word--terrorism, THE terrorists, the war on terror. And V for Vendetta asks us to believe, or at least consider, a permutation of our perspective on violence. What if the symbols we hold dear are made more precious by destroying them? Can that destruction kick-start us into action? And what do those symbols really mean?*

The whole time I'm watching V for Vendetta, I keep thinking: Wow, if this movie were better, it might actually change people.

And another thing: Are we to really believe that he tortures her for a year and then she forgives him for an ideaology? I'm always suspicious when art asks us to place our minds over our flesh when we all know in reality that if someone sets you on fire for some idea, we'd stop, drop and roll, and the fuck with all ideas.

*Perhaps a more interesting approach to these ideas are found in the films The Weather Underground, A History of Violence, and The Fog of War.

New Me

I had planned to take a new picture of me this weekend to post on this blog, since not only do I now have a beard (which I like a lot, and not just because it causes people who haven't seen me in a while to touch my face and smile,) but I actually feel like a different person--different from the person who's wearing that blue sweatshirt, on the Bear Mountain Cruise with my friend Sean. But I decided not to take one yesterday since it wasn't as sunny as the weatherpeople had predicted, nor as I had hoped.

In other news, an essay of mine--about my grandfather and his alcoholism, among other things--will be included in the anthology From Boys to Men, which will be published by Carroll & Graf in the fall of 2006. You can see the list of writers included if you go here. It's very good company.

Skating at the Roxy

Kip and I went to The Roxy last night, where on Wednesdays they have roller skating, for a birthday party. Aside from the ridiculousness of the lines (for entry, for ID check, for admission, for coat check and, finally, for skate rental) we had a good time. I had forgotten how difficult skating on the old-school style square-wheel skates, with the brown boots and orange laces, could be. I only fell down once--although it was a spectaularly theatrical fall--and, embarassingly I wasn't even skating. I was just stepping from one spot to another.

I'm always curious about how your brain tends to slow down in times like that--or, rather, it speeds up. You remember every flashing instant of the experience. In my case, the first thing was the knowledge that I was not going to be able to save myself. Then, as my feet flipped into the air and I began tumbling to the ground, I thought: "This is going to look worse than it is." And so I managed to turn my head toward my friends, who were all looking stunned and scared, their own minds working in slow-motion, unable to help (or perhaps unwilling, since everyone just sat there on their asses.)

The place was full of New York weirdos. The guy in pants that looked like they were made from old beach towels, who skated backwards, barely moving, all night. The older couple, also skating backwards, embraced together like Tango dancers. The eighties clones, wearing sunglasses and custom skates. The security guards in white t-shirts, the young girls who looked too young to be drinking their beers. And the man in line out front, who told us that the last time he'd been to the Roxy was Gay Pride 1991.

On Faith and On Panicking

Someone once asked Samuel Beckett if he was an optimist or a pessimist.* He answered that if he was a pessimist, he wouldn't write plays. I have recently discovered this same sense of faith.

When you write a novel you start with nothing. "You wake up with a smile and a shoeshine," as Ms. Didion said once. And you have to have this trust, this unbridled faith: in yourself, in language, in the process, and--most importantly, I think--in art's ability to make the world better. Sounds corny, right?

You panic a lot. (Okay, maybe I panic a lot.) But you sit at your desk hour after hour and you look at your notes and you try to trust that they will either all come together beautifully, politically, artistically, or they will filter themselves out. A sampling of mine: Hindinberg, sperm banks, Agnes Martin, light pollution, Spice Wars, Frederick Jackson Turner and California frontier ideology. You can see why I panic a lot.

But you eventually get over yourself, and the book begins to take shape. Somehow. (Word by word is exactly how, but there's also some mystery to it that no writer I've ever met will attempt to explain or discount.) "It, um, happens," they will tell you. That's the faith.


*(I used to know who asked him this, but I have since forgotten.)

Architeuthis dux

The Giant Squid Lives!

Go here.

Feeling better?

As a matter of evidence, and in order to alleviate the suffering (because I firmly believe that if you look to history to match your pain, even if the world is historically shitty, somehow the familiarity is comforting) I present to you -- via the blog of writer (and self-proclaimed nerd) Ted Gideonse, other movies which won Best Picture over better movies:

1) Rocky over Network, All the President's Men and Taxi Driver.
2) A Man for All Seasons over Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
3) Forrest Gump over Pulp Fiction.
4) Dances with Wolves over Goodfellas.
5) A Beautiful Mind over LOTR: Fellowship of the Ring.
6) How Green was My Valley over Citizen Kane.
7) An American in Paris over A Streetcar Named Desire.
8) Gladiator over Traffic and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

What's Wrong with the Oscars

From an interview with Joan Didion, about her memoir Where I Was From:

"The whole California story as it was told to me had to do with the difficulty of getting here. Once you got here you were redeemed. Nobody ever talked about what you were redeemed for. The survival, the getting through the mountains before the snow fell was the big, big value. And if you had managed that then you were home free, as it were.

As I started thinking about it, or as I passed on through not thinking about into some kind of adult life, survival as an answer in itself began to seem a more and more doubtful value. Survival leaves you more aware. California had always been about, had always celebrated the act of survival. In some ways, I think we were left with no higher value."

Other ideas to ponder:
1) The Academy (as a rule) is old and crusty.
2) LA is self-centered. (Just like NYC is self-centered.)
3) Marisa Tomei won an Oscar for "My Cousin Vinny."
4) America hates gays.
5) America hates gays unless they are played by straight actors.

Missing

I woke up slowly at about four in the morning, completely conscious of each phase of waking, as if I were watching myself from outside. And along with it, came this bizzare sense of loneliness. It wasn't a sadness, but more a joyful longing for everyone in my life, just about everyone. (Then came the dreams: about the bleeding finger, the yellow dirt, and someone I knew from Chicago.) I wondered what that same emotion would have felt like if I weren't asleep when it hit.

Prettier

Does anyone else notice the strangeness of Meg Ryan's lips? On Oprah the other day--I didn't see the actual show, only the promos aired during Monday's show, which I did watch--she looked as if she had, and I don't think this is exaggerating, two little sticks in her upper lip. As if the fat, the silicon, the mongoose liver, or whatever they're injecting people with these days, had set up in two inch-long bars and stayed there.

I wonder, too, if when this happens--we have all seen good plastic surgeries and bad ones--does everyone in Meg's life simply agree not to talk about it? Do the legions of people she runs into every day (or perhaps she is an agoraphobic recluse and sees no one) all pretend that she doesn't look like a freak? "Oh, Ms. Ryan, you look marvelous!" they say, then aside: "Don't tell her about the sticks, she's having a bad morning."

Somehow, the sight of someone like Amanda Lepore does not shock me in the same way. I suppose it's because there is a performance aspect to what Lepore is doing, and Ryan looks as if, rather than end up with Angelina-bee-stung lips, she's been attacked by a whole nest of hornets, and she's just trying to look "normal."