Aug 17, 2009
Nov 2, 2008
[A season can embrace more than its kind.]
A season can embrace more than its kind.
Like a lollygagging drove of doves
Above the L line, momentum
Is split the way kindred multiply—
Scheme eschewed but with all tremor in mind.
I swear that niche between May and September
Contains more spirit, more flakes of a year’s
Sky than old age’s adolescence or dusk-
Knit dialogues in Brooklyn time.
And we—for a spell—lived like tears.
All manner of spilling and streaming and salty sin
Allowed within the beautiful ruse that binds:
Youth is undying, friendship fixed
And no matter which slack damn word we don’t say,
Everything is communion with a hint of the sanctified.
Holy are the rooftops on which Summer,
Winter, Spring and Fall sit
Splaying their courses over one humdrum meal.
Handfuls, armfuls, mouthfuls of anecdotes
Quivering with casual “Thanks” that plumb
The binary stares of the quarry
Of friendship. That was what I got
Each time I walked through the door
One summer on Willoughby
When grace wasn’t a chore.
Like a lollygagging drove of doves
Above the L line, momentum
Is split the way kindred multiply—
Scheme eschewed but with all tremor in mind.
I swear that niche between May and September
Contains more spirit, more flakes of a year’s
Sky than old age’s adolescence or dusk-
Knit dialogues in Brooklyn time.
And we—for a spell—lived like tears.
All manner of spilling and streaming and salty sin
Allowed within the beautiful ruse that binds:
Youth is undying, friendship fixed
And no matter which slack damn word we don’t say,
Everything is communion with a hint of the sanctified.
Holy are the rooftops on which Summer,
Winter, Spring and Fall sit
Splaying their courses over one humdrum meal.
Handfuls, armfuls, mouthfuls of anecdotes
Quivering with casual “Thanks” that plumb
The binary stares of the quarry
Of friendship. That was what I got
Each time I walked through the door
One summer on Willoughby
When grace wasn’t a chore.
Aug 14, 2008
Jul 27, 2008
Dissolved in Nebraska, New York
I stared up at the five-story brick house on Bank Street. In the heart of Greenwich, houses like this blend into the environment like trees in a forest—not because everything looks the same but because everything belongs. And everything belongs because the material from which everything is made has the same source. In this case, everything was hard and rough and manmade. But still so inspiring.
I tried to imagine whether it was nostalgia for the past or stimulation from the present that could stir Willa Cather to write My Antonia—her beautiful tale about the wild and unbroken Nebraska plains—in this cityscape, within the confining walls of this very house. Was it because she missed her old country? Or was it because the city, with all its stimulants, aroused her artistry?
Then I decided it was because she was happy here, as I am happy here. At the beginning of My Antonia, the narrator, Jim Burden, says, “At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great.” But Jim Burden didn’t say this in the middle of writing an American masterpiece, or while living in one of the major cultural centers of the world. He said this while lying on the warm Nebraska earth, with little bugs crawling around him, dirt crumbling between his fingers and air as fresh as a new harvest flowing through his lungs.
But Nebraska is not much different from New York City in that respect. I imagine Willa Cather felt that same happiness here—after all, she chose to move to New York City to write her novel. And I admit the reason I think that is because I feel the same happiness Jim felt in the country here where I am surrounded by pavement and skyscrapers. I am happy here in this city because I feel like I have dissolved into something complete and great. I have become a part of this vibrant, stunning, magnanimous place that is as organic and thriving as a Nebraska cornfield.
To be dissolved into something complete and great does not require a particular type of landscape or a particular disposition or a particular situation. It doesn’t mean you won’t have snakes and bugs and droughts and crowds and smog and commutes in life. Most importantly, it does not imply a dissipation of self or identity or purpose. It simply means belonging. And as Jim puts it, “When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.”
I belong in New York. My transition into this life brought not even a ripple of shock. My absorption into this place was gentle and soothing, and except for the feeling of having come home, I barely even noticed it. Likewise, I imagine Willa Cather felt the same way when she was here and my guess is that is why she moved here, to 5 Bank Street. She belonged in Greenwich because she could be with her kinds of people—people who were all very different, but who all belonged because they were made of the same brilliant substance.
And that kind of belonging, that happiness, is incredibly inspiring.
I tried to imagine whether it was nostalgia for the past or stimulation from the present that could stir Willa Cather to write My Antonia—her beautiful tale about the wild and unbroken Nebraska plains—in this cityscape, within the confining walls of this very house. Was it because she missed her old country? Or was it because the city, with all its stimulants, aroused her artistry?
Then I decided it was because she was happy here, as I am happy here. At the beginning of My Antonia, the narrator, Jim Burden, says, “At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great.” But Jim Burden didn’t say this in the middle of writing an American masterpiece, or while living in one of the major cultural centers of the world. He said this while lying on the warm Nebraska earth, with little bugs crawling around him, dirt crumbling between his fingers and air as fresh as a new harvest flowing through his lungs.
But Nebraska is not much different from New York City in that respect. I imagine Willa Cather felt that same happiness here—after all, she chose to move to New York City to write her novel. And I admit the reason I think that is because I feel the same happiness Jim felt in the country here where I am surrounded by pavement and skyscrapers. I am happy here in this city because I feel like I have dissolved into something complete and great. I have become a part of this vibrant, stunning, magnanimous place that is as organic and thriving as a Nebraska cornfield.
To be dissolved into something complete and great does not require a particular type of landscape or a particular disposition or a particular situation. It doesn’t mean you won’t have snakes and bugs and droughts and crowds and smog and commutes in life. Most importantly, it does not imply a dissipation of self or identity or purpose. It simply means belonging. And as Jim puts it, “When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.”
I belong in New York. My transition into this life brought not even a ripple of shock. My absorption into this place was gentle and soothing, and except for the feeling of having come home, I barely even noticed it. Likewise, I imagine Willa Cather felt the same way when she was here and my guess is that is why she moved here, to 5 Bank Street. She belonged in Greenwich because she could be with her kinds of people—people who were all very different, but who all belonged because they were made of the same brilliant substance.
And that kind of belonging, that happiness, is incredibly inspiring.
Mar 3, 2008
Furry Bomber Hats, Vegan Food and Vomit
On the bookshelf, the furry bomber hat covered the mannequin’s bare head and her large 70’s sunglasses rested on the tip of her nose. There was an old record player sitting on a worn oak dresser under the gaudy vintage lamp. Original artwork covered the plywood walls. Eclectic mugs filled the doorless cupboard. Everything was in place on this hipster stage. If you tried to think of something hipster that was not in that apartment, you would be there until someone started playing a top 20 pop countdown, i.e. forever. Everyone was in place. Guys, in their tight jeans and puffy retro vests and dirty sneakers, had their messy curls falling out of their snow hats just right. Girls wore their coy, apathetic “damn it all unless you want to make out” expression and were appropriately attired in their Urban Outfitters uniform. “Welcome to Williamsburg, Brooklyn,” Val said to me.
And then the show began. Cecil perched himself on the wooden chair, licked his lips and apologized for his quiet guitar. His awkward twitching while he talked and tuned was my first tip off. But it was too late to escape. Before I knew it, he was wailing about “human huggies” and his “pinched penis on the wall” and stringing random words together like he was hurling pieces of trash he had blindly fished out of a dumpster at innocent people walking by; as if language was only meant to confuse. He would shake, convulse, scream, hit his head, pound his guitar and moan and wail and choke. All in the name of art.
And everyone watched, most even with straight faces. I bit my lip and practiced self control. And after reveling in my inner hipster and relishing the Beat-ness of it all, I couldn’t take it any more. This was not art. Or at least, this was not beauty.
It was self-expression. Cecil, I’m sure, was making sense to himself because he was expressing himself. The only problem was that he was just vomiting his inner self out, and it was rather offensive to the ears and the soul. In fact, if any of us just vomited out what was deep down inside of us, we would all severely offend. Cecil was not offering his audience anything worthwhile. Instead, he was divulging his unsanctified crap, without any effort to sanctify it himself. And no one wants that. We have enough of that on our own. He might have felt better after throwing up, but no one else did.
Art, rather, should be an attempt to order, even sanctify, all that is ugly within and without us. This does not mean it all needs to be cleaned up and sugar coated. It can still remain raw and bloody, but the artist’s job is not to just vomit what is inside him but rather to enact some sort of force onto it so that it can become something worth consuming, not just mopping up.
The artist is a chef (to be perhaps overly simplistic). And I don’t care if the artist only uses organic vegan produce from Whole Foods cooked in a hipster kitchen. All that I want to see in art is one person’s personal attempt to actually mold, marinate, color, pound, heat, flavor, tweak, whittle, process the shit and the beauty in him and in the world. Again, I say the artist must be proactive. The artist has the rare tools needed to give meaning and purpose to the amorphous. The artist possesses a sacred function because the artist holds a dash of sanctification in his fingertips. Sometimes that makes things bitter, sometimes sweet, sometimes unusual and sometimes familiar. But it is always artful and beautiful. And that is what nourishes us. Not vomit.
And then the show began. Cecil perched himself on the wooden chair, licked his lips and apologized for his quiet guitar. His awkward twitching while he talked and tuned was my first tip off. But it was too late to escape. Before I knew it, he was wailing about “human huggies” and his “pinched penis on the wall” and stringing random words together like he was hurling pieces of trash he had blindly fished out of a dumpster at innocent people walking by; as if language was only meant to confuse. He would shake, convulse, scream, hit his head, pound his guitar and moan and wail and choke. All in the name of art.
And everyone watched, most even with straight faces. I bit my lip and practiced self control. And after reveling in my inner hipster and relishing the Beat-ness of it all, I couldn’t take it any more. This was not art. Or at least, this was not beauty.
It was self-expression. Cecil, I’m sure, was making sense to himself because he was expressing himself. The only problem was that he was just vomiting his inner self out, and it was rather offensive to the ears and the soul. In fact, if any of us just vomited out what was deep down inside of us, we would all severely offend. Cecil was not offering his audience anything worthwhile. Instead, he was divulging his unsanctified crap, without any effort to sanctify it himself. And no one wants that. We have enough of that on our own. He might have felt better after throwing up, but no one else did.
Art, rather, should be an attempt to order, even sanctify, all that is ugly within and without us. This does not mean it all needs to be cleaned up and sugar coated. It can still remain raw and bloody, but the artist’s job is not to just vomit what is inside him but rather to enact some sort of force onto it so that it can become something worth consuming, not just mopping up.
The artist is a chef (to be perhaps overly simplistic). And I don’t care if the artist only uses organic vegan produce from Whole Foods cooked in a hipster kitchen. All that I want to see in art is one person’s personal attempt to actually mold, marinate, color, pound, heat, flavor, tweak, whittle, process the shit and the beauty in him and in the world. Again, I say the artist must be proactive. The artist has the rare tools needed to give meaning and purpose to the amorphous. The artist possesses a sacred function because the artist holds a dash of sanctification in his fingertips. Sometimes that makes things bitter, sometimes sweet, sometimes unusual and sometimes familiar. But it is always artful and beautiful. And that is what nourishes us. Not vomit.
Feb 6, 2008
Something, even nothing?
"Dear God," she prayed, "let me be something every minute of every hour of my life. Let me be gay; let me be sad. Let me be cold; let me be warm. Let me hungry...have too much to eat. Let me ragged or well dressed. Let me be sincere--be deceitful. Let me be truthful; let me be a liar. Let me be honorable and let me sin. Only let me be something every blessed minute. And when I sleep, let me dream all the time so that not one blessed piece of living is ever lost."
- Francie Nolan in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
This sounds like a prayer I would pray. Or at least a prayer I would have prayed before coming to New York City. Living in the suburbs of Chicago, I was terrified of languishing into a life of passivity, complacency, boredom and insensitivity. Since I’ve been in NYC, I can feel my fear shifting. Now, I am more afraid of drifting to an extreme. Here, the rich are so rich it is repulsive. The poor are so downtrodden they reduce themselves into a huddle of dirty blankets.
I think recently it has been my distant interactions with the homeless that have most affected me. Seeing them coiled up on the subway, often smelling so strongly like manure that other passengers switch cars as soon as they step on. In fact, my theory is that they make themselves smell so horrid so that they can have an entire car to themselves in order to remain isolated in their shame. These unfortunate souls do not acknowledge the living occurring them and they make every effort to not be acknowledged by it. Their pain has reduced to them to the point that they don’t even have faces—the distinguishing mark of a human—because they hide completely within blankets and hooded sweatshirts.
Francie Nolan thinks if she can only live her life in the margin of extremes then she will at least know she is alive; then she will be carpeing the diem. But I think she is mistaken. It is in the extremes that you forget to live.
The rich drift through life on the gentle waves of cash that put them into a slumber or they obsess with money to the point that they forget there is more to life than a bank account. The homeless daze out in hopes of disappearing. And, contrary to Francie's eagerness to dream, even dreaming all the time can also be a curse—just ask a war veteran who can’t shake his nightmares. I think all three of these (even the rich if you can get them to really be honest. See here for example.) would trade in their extreme existences so that they can live again.
Sometimes by being something, you can end up being nothing. Sometimes it is in the mundane that radical living happens most often.
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