1. OK, this is
going to require calling to mind events as long ago as mid-November and, since
it’s already December, that indicates I’ve been elsewhere since most of this
stuff happened. True. I went back to where I’m from for the T-day
holidays, which began for me on the 26th
with a ride on Amtrak. It was good to
get away, especially when one considers that on Monday, the 25th, the center of downtown New Haven was in heavily
armed and patrolled lockdown due to a call that claimed someone was heading to
Yale campus to shoot it up. Nothing like
martial patrols to send you packing. What
did I do for almost a week after that? Not much, except eat more sweets—including apple pie and pumpkin pie—and more turkey than one man should ever consume, drink spiked egg nog, and
watch football galore with me younger bros. Some good games I must say: Baltimore
over Pittsburgh on T-day itself, Ohio State over Michigan on Saturday—down to the wire! (to say nothing of Auburn running back that field goal
against Alabama!)—and both the Eagles (my bro’s team) and the Giants (my team) victorious on
Sunday. If you’ve watched either
team lately, you know what a frustrating task it is to root either on to
victory, much less both. In between—the Broncos over the Chiefs! Somewhere along
the way—day before T-day—was a trip to a local cinema to see Thor 2. More on that later, maybe.
I wish
I could say I read stuff, but not really, except a bit more Bleeding Edge on the train and lots of
book reviews. Which provoked a certain
annoyance at how the book reviews to which I subscribe pretty much review the
same books, but that fact led to me reading two reviews of Malcolm Gladwell’s David and
Goliath that showed me why I like Bookforum so much. Jim
Newell’s take on Gladwell was something of a take-down. Meanwhile, at New York Review of Books, Freeman
Dyson (!) didn’t so much review the book as divulge its contents—tepid book
reviewing indeed. I also—on Black Friday
no less—visited Main Street in Newark which meant shopping at Captain Blue Hen’s where (nostalgia
must be sinking in its hooks) I picked up an omnibus of the first 30 issues of The Avengers from Marvel Comics. This covers
the transition from drawings by Jack
Kirby to drawings by Don Heck as
well as taking me back to the era in which I was first learning to read—five, six,
seven—and the images of Marvel Comics had a way of impressing themselves on my
cranium that was second to nothing at the time. That same day featured a visit to Rainbow
Records and new vinyl purchases: the
dBs return album (for a different era’s nostalgia) Falling Off the Sky (2012) and the first Ramones LP to set to rights, sorta, the fact that I never owned any
of their stuff, and PIL’s album—because, well, y’know.
2. Before any of
that happened, I saw some plays that I reviewed: Almost, Maine, the latest production by The New Haven Theater Company, and two shows at Yale Cabaret: Crave and Derivatives—the
last an interesting take on New Haven itself c. “the Great Recession.” I also saw a trio of plays I didn’t review
because they are the work of 2nd year playwrights and 2nd year directors in the
Yale School of Drama—or, as my friend
Lee nicknamed it, due to the number of couples that have been emerging from it
of late, the Yale School of Dating.
3. On Saturday, 11/9, it was Phillip Howze’s Tiny Boyfriend, directed
by Sarah Holdren, which featured
great work from Mitchell Winter, who
has really come into his own with his performances in the Yale Summer Cabaret,
together with Yahya Abdul-Mateen II,
who has been much in demand this semester, and very memorable work from James Cusati-Moyer as, first, a
flippant and flamboyant boss and, then, a girl-child being raised by two
dads; Howze’s play is ambitious and a
bit all over the place, stopping off at such timely items as online hookups,
office romance, cock-comparing, penis envy, potty training, the Electra
complex, and the vagaries of same-sex parenthood, along with knowing winks at racial
profiling, stereotyping, and sexualizing. It was vastly entertaining.
4. On Saturday, 11/16, I saw Ryan Campbell’s Dead Ends, directed by Jessica Holt, the second play to have
no female roles; Matthew Raich and Dan Reese were incredibly eloquent in
alternating monologues rife with the rhythms of real speech and full of
incidents—a flood in the home of a man who has lost his job, so that he has to
take his wife and daughter to his not very welcoming in-laws; a humiliating day
on the job as a Burger King assistant
manager for a guy who shares a house with his much more successful brothers—that
escalate toward one of those balls-out showdowns that Sam Shepard is famous for; the starkness of this production really
stayed with me, even if there were a few things a bit overboard.
5.
Then, on Friday, 11/22, I took in Emily Zemba’s I’m Sorry I Brought Up God, directed
by Andrej Visky, in which there were
two female characters—Gwen, played by Ashton
Heyl, and Denise, played by Carly
Zien—to one male, David, played by Ato
Blankson-Wood. What started out as
an awkward date situation became—with the re-entry of Gwen’s former roommate,
Denise—an awkward threesome of intimidation and failed communications. The dialogue was full of repetition that
meant every conversation was more or less stymied by its own pacing, but to
what end? My general feeling was that it
was anti hetero-coupling if not entirely comfortable with any alternatives—Gwen
and Denise seem more likely to be lovers, though not quite, than either of the
male-female possibilities, but at the center of it all was Gwen, a very brittle
character played by Heyl as though, no matter what is happening, her mind is
somewhere else. It seems a role that
asks what is a woman if she doesn’t play the role of “woman”—but it was hard to
tell what she might really be concerned with.
6. On Tuesday, 11/12, my favorite poet of our time, John Ashbery, read at the Beinecke. At 86, Ashbery is getting on, certainly, and
was in a wheelchair throughout the reading—he told us not to be too concerned,
as he can walk some—but his very labile voice was still comfortingly in
evidence. And his grasp of the locutions
of our times as amusing and trenchant as ever. Does he still have a lot to say?
Well, not quite as much as he used to, but he still knows how to respond
to the everyday patterns of speech in such a way as to render them prescient
and nostalgic at once. He read a poem “about”
the Ritz Brothers, a more dissolute
version of the Marx Brothers that he
knew of from his childhood. I had a brief
chance to speak with him during the reception as he sat signing books (why the
hell didn’t I bring along Flow Chart—to
get a signature and any comment he might make about it?) and he seemed quite
willing to chat about the movies he didn’t get to see as a kid and attributed
his grasp of the idioms of our day to people like his young assistant. Listening to the reading, I found myself
contemplating a command of American speech mannerisms that bridges the time of
my parents’ childhood to the present day. No other poet makes me feel the existence of time as a part of our very
figures of speech. The idea of poetry as
“timeless” is both achieved and undercut in his poems and in ways that delight
and surprise.
7. On Friday, 11/15, I took another trip into New York, this time to see a recent
documentary by Joe Angio—at the School of Visual Arts--on the Mekons, my favorite band of the
1987-1991 period (yes, I like them even more than I like The Pixies or the bands that were already past their brilliant
early bloom at that time—Talking Heads,
R.E.M.). The Mekons, who continue to make albums and
have had a series of very good releases since 2000, kept up where The Clash left off. Indeed, one of the “lessons” of the film, The Revenge of the Mekons, was that bands who made it—like The Clash, like The Replacements—oftentimes came apart, unable to find, in the
world of bloated concerts and over-played tracks, the conviction that united
the band when they were broke and unknown. It’s not that the Mekons are “unknown” exactly, but certainly more
obscure, perhaps more resolutely Brit (sort of like a latter-day Kinks in that regard) and, as the film
made clear, the band began as a lark on the part of art students during the first
flush of punk. The fact that they couldn’t
play need not dissuade anyone, in those days.
But to keep at it required an
influx of inspiration from elsewhere, which came in the form of bluegrass
honkytonk, Chicago-style. The band
actually learned a thing or two and from The
Edge of the World (1986) to Honkytonkin’
(1987) to So Good It Hurts (1988) to The Mekons Rock’n’Roll (1989) they
followed a track of ever-improving work. So much so that their chance at
greater things came with the latter LP and a contract with A&M
Records. Their next LP should’ve been “the
one” that made their name. But forces conspired against them, the label dropped
them (because the visionaries that signed them got sacked) and their great
album The Curse of the Mekons (1991)
was only available as an import from some no-name label. Sure, the great Indy Turn was about to begin,
but, even so, the Mekons had been at it for over a decade at that point and it
must’ve been rather discouraging to see the ship come in and then sail off
without them. So it goes.
The point of it all—and there’s a lot of high
spirits in the film, particularly with bits like Jon Langford reminiscing about the night U2 opened for the Mekons!—is that the music of the Mekons is
survivors’ music. It’s not the Hit
Parade of any era. It’s raunchy, raw,
inspired and inspiring. It’s the music that,
as Jonathan Franzen (yeah, I know,
it almost made me like him) says in the film, belongs to people of an “embattled
critical stance,” who are vindicated by the fact that things don’t go their way—the Mekons'
music makes misery more bearable. The
misery of missed chances, perhaps, but more like the misery that comes with
knowing that we’re on a fool’s parade, collectively, and there’s no hope for
it. It was great seeing the film with Kajsa
because she’s the person I passed their music onto most effectively. She gets it, in other words. And she was along the one time I saw them
perform live, in 2000, in DC. The fact
that some of the Mekons were present at the screening—Langford, Sally Timms, Steve Goulding—added to the mirth. More than any other punk-rock-rockabilly-altcountry band the Mekons have the
feel of old English folk music and songs that face life’s grim realities with a
gleam in the eye.
8. Around 1994,
when even the Mekons were starting
to lose their edge, and R.E.M. was
sort of on a comeback, I first became aware of the band Kajsa and I went to see
on Wednesday, 11/20, at Terminal 5 in
NYC. Mazzy Star suited us then—newly landed in Connecticut after
Princeton—she none too happy with middle school and me none too happy with the
job market after grad school. But it
wasn’t until 1996 and Among My Swan that we were fully
captivated. Though the previous LP, So
Tonight That I May See, is the one that got people’s attention and put
them on the playlist in the wide world of indie music, the third LP was more
diverse, more sophisticated in its guitar arrangements, less overtly a Velvet Underground knock-off. Swan
was just the right music for depressed dad and his moody daughter and we took
it to heart. So there was no way we’d
miss them on their comeback tour—to support Seasons of Your Day,
their first LP in 17 years (!).
Where
did the time go? You’d never know more
than a few years had passed, listening to their trademark low-key arrangements
and lambent vocals. It’s not laid-back or mellow music, it’s the other side of
that—it’s music for when you’ve been up for so long you’re pratically in slow
motion. Hangover music. Music for the darkest watches of the night
when everyone just wants to ride on some inner path and not interact. Their concert was all in subdued lighting—mostly
blue and violet spots. Hope Sandoval only visible because she
wore a shiny tunic and a large belt; Dave
Roback just a shadowy shape. The
rest of the band—four others—never clear enough to say you could see a
face. Behind them were retro
projections, images that looked like pages from a book of ghosts. They opened with “Look on Down from the Bridge”—the
final, bittersweet track from Among My
Swan, a song that, when I first heard it, seemed an elegy for my daughter’s
childhood.
9. But don’t
think it was all a downer. Earlier that
day, Kajsa and I had lunch at the Whitney
Museum, saw the Robert Indiana show,
which is an impressive array of colorful and bold canvases conveying the
American sensibility as icons, the kind of symbols that might appear on logos,
currency, trucks and buses. We also saw
as much as we could take in of Rituals of Rented Island, a show
that brings together artifacts and films from the late seventies and early
eighties in SoHo and environs, when things were very Mekony all over. It was like being in a time capsule, taking
me back to a time of youthful acceptance of all that is the case. At the time, I would’ve been still in the
belief that art meant a major painter—and that’s precisely what the artists in
this show are avoiding. It’s the kind of
art made by artists who make their living in day-jobs that entail the use of
audio video equipment and cheap printing—and those are the means to the mediums
they work with, not exactly conquering them, but who cares? There’s something fresh and lo-fi about the
whole show—check out things like the room of John Zorn’s Theatre of
Musical Objects, or the props and stills from Jack Smith’s marathon adaptation—with stuffed puppets—of Ibsen’s Ghosts, or Mike Kelly’s
absurdist TV skits, including Baby Ikki crawling into traffic and back on a NY
street. I need to go back to the exhibit
to see more.
Our day also featured a
great meal at Hanci, a Turkish
restaurant near the concert venue, picked out by Jason and made all the warmer
and more cordial by the fact that Christmas seemed to be in the air: Kajsa and
I saw the “Holidays on Ice” displays at Bergdof-Goodman
en route from Whitney to Hanci, and I was stunned to see none
other than Malcolm McDowell surge
across my path, mere inches in front of me. It was the sort of the day that made me feel a Lucky Man indeed.
10. On
the Friday of the Mekons movie, I had some time to kill
and picked up a couple books from the Strand tables at the bottom of Central
Park. One was Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby, published in 1967
and made into a movie, directed by Roman
Polanski, in 1968. I read it in the
train on the way home that day and finished it off on Sunday, 11/17. I don’t know why reading the book attracted
me so much except that it was a nice British paper edition and the prose is so
easy to consume and so settled in its time.
It’s interesting to see how non-WASP people are handled in the book—including
Italians and Negroes—particularly as the book is almost a parody of Catholic
fears at the time. Rosemary, while
drugged and about to be raped by Satan, dreams of John and Jackie Kennedy and the Pope! It’s that kind of world. The film follows the book so well, it’s easy
to read it with images from the film playing in one’s mind’s eye. Though when I watched the film later that
week it made me realize that the sardonic tone comes from the film-makers more
than the source. Levin intends the book
to be a chiller and, in its steady focalization through Rosemary, it is. There’s a grasp of how hysteria feels that, I
suspect, is what made the book popular with female readers—that and the fact
that motherhood takes precedence. The
message: abortion is wrong and a mother will love her child—even if the father
is Lucifer himself.
11. On Sunday, 11/17, I learned that Doris
Lessing had died. I didn’t compose a
commemorative post for her because I don’t feel at all familiar enough with her
work, though I have read three of her novels.
One of them I re-read that day: The Fifth Child (1988). The book followed Levin’s novel in an
interesting way as it’s about a couple who is happily reproducing—though not
exactly solvent—until they produce their fifth child. A painful pregnancy
results in a child no one can love—he’s oddly grotesque without Lessing going
into detail about it. It’s not so much
his appearance as the effect he has on others. He seems not to be human, and yet he is. The boy, Ben, tests the sympathies of his family and of any caregivers
he comes in contact with. His only joy
is in hanging out with a motorcycle-riding older boy who takes him under his
wing for a time (hired by Ben’s parents to do so, to keep him away from the family). Lessing seems to be sporting with different
possibilities—is Ben a figure for the juvenile delinquent or is he rather proof
that even JDs can do a good turn? Is Ben
a figure for the darkest fears about the unwanted pregnancy, the child society
disclaims, the total misfit that can find no acceptance? Ben’s own mother, Harriet, sees him as
freakish and somewhat terrifying, but the bureaucratic types that run child
services act as if he’s simply a somewhat dysfunctional child, thus putting Harriet
under the shadow of “bad mother.” The
book doesn’t resolve well, pulling back from the Gothic aspects it flirts with
while not developed enough to be a statement about parenting or the
socialization of children. And yet
something about the book stays with you: a fear of the outcast and of being the
outcast are strong enough in most of us to see how tenuous are our bonds with
those who accept us, and how easy it is, perhaps, to see monsters in others.
It was an interesting “double feature,” in a
way, entirely fortuitous. Something
about mothers, I guess.
