The semester is over. My final grades are filed. A week from tomorrow I leave for California to visit the family and some friends. Though I’ve temporarily left a number of boxes of things like books and cooking utensils in Buffalo, the bulk of my belongings are now here in Chautauqua. I let myself sleep in until half-past nine this morning, the longest night’s sleep since I can remember when, and I needed it. Today feels like the first day of Christmas vacation, which for me, it is, although there is certainly work to be done and a few catering events with a friend in the Jamestown area before I leave. It doesn’t just feel like the end of the semester; it feels like the end of 2008.
Since my vacation in New York City at the end of June, I really have been moving and changing and moving again and changing again more or less non-stop. It makes me happy that said vacation was so relaxing and indulgent. Since July I’ve done the following:
1. Started working on the Spencer workshops in Chautauqua
2. Stopped working for the workshops in Chautauqua.
3. Stopped working at the restaurant in Clarence where I was hired way back in the summer.
4. Stopped working for my brother.
5. Started teaching at Niagara University.
6. Started spending 3-4 days a week down in Jamestown.
7. Split off from the Elmwood writing group.
8. Bought a car.
9. Became friends and housemates with someone I didn’t really know before.
10. Celebrated a significant personal landmark (sorry, it’s really that private).
11. And turned forty-five this past Sunday.
When I look at the list, I think, Was all that so much? Those are actually all fairly large and important changes, and I’ve logged nearly 5500 miles on that car since September 12, when I secured it. One resolution for the new year is to drive less. Way less. If I never see the Thruway again it won’t be soon enough.
Only about six weeks ago, at the end of October, a friend proposed that I consider starting a writing workshop on the grass-roots level in Chautauqua County. That was when things seemed possible that, due to the severity of the economic landscape, no longer seem possible not only for the short-term, but the middle-term. Though I had hoped to extricate myself or at the very least loosen my ties to the Spencer gradually, I ended up doing so more abruptly when I realized the situation there was becoming hopeless. I spent a couple of week exploring the idea of doing something in Chautauqua County, even going so far as to take a couple of meetings with various parties. At the same time, however, organizations and institutions in the Buffalo metro area showed continued interest in my professional services, and finally, the chair of the English department at Niagara responded that I could teach two classes there in the spring if I was interested. It took some thinking and talking to come to a decision, but I finally decided that Buffalo was continuing to provide me with opportunities (not to mention income) and that the challenges in Chautauqua would be hard and even unpredictable given the financial climate. When my friend raised the prospect of his moving to Buffalo rather than my doing something down here, I said that it had never occurred to me to ask whether such a thing interested him. So we will be looking for a house or apartment big enough to share come March, when his lease here ends. I’m pleased because this gets me back on the track I was on at the beginning of the summer, and though the path since then to now has been rocky and circuitous, it has been packed with experiences both personal and professional that I hope have left me wiser. They’ve certainly left me older!
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
Friday, December 5, 2008
End of the Semester
Yesterday I taught my last classes of the semester. It was a comprehensive review prior to the final exam, and as I went down the list I’d prepared, I thought, my gosh, it’s been so long. The last time I had to worry about a fall semester final was nearly two decades ago. Now I get to be the one making the students worry. There were the usual moans and groans about the material, and everyone seems to want to know exactly what’s going to be on the exam. You want to tell them, but you want them to learn to study at the same time.
I taught The Piano Lesson by August Wilson for the drama component, which I’d chosen mostly because the play was written so recently, not because of race. But it worked out as a good counterpoint to current events in the country, and we even had a racial epithet scrawled on the pavement outside the Arts and Letters building the morning after the election. In my class we discussed (briefly) the N-word as used by the playwright and by the characters in the play. Niagara University is an extremely white, upper-class environment—I shouldn’t have been surprised, really—and though there are non-white students, there aren’t many. The school has nothing like the diversity of the schools in Buffalo proper and it should go without saying that my alma mater, Berkeley, is one of the most diverse schools in the country—so diverse that when I attended there was a kind of competition between ethnic populations to claim Most Marginalized and therefore Most Disenfranchised. (The Filipinos lead by vocal rather than other means, as I recall.) I had two African-American students in my first class, and when we discussed some of the themes and issues involved in the play, the silence and tension were the second-most palpable of the semester. (The classroom was mortuary-quiet for the lecture that covered Queer Theory.)
In my research for The Piano Lesson I was thrilled to discover that the Underground Railroad routes to Canada dropped right through the campus and down into the lower Niagara River gorge. I was able to point right out the window and say, There. There is where history happened.
I found myself suddenly plunged back into the ballet world this week. My brother’s school is doing their annual Nutcracker, and as a favor to family I offered to play one of the extras in the party scene.
Being back just for this small part reminds me that I haven’t missed being in the world that is their professional life. I worked hard to get out of one industry (hospitality) and in a rather short period of time have been welcomed into the one I’ve wanted to be in for so long, writing and teaching. Doing the work I did for them last year was something I did willingly, even gratefully, because they mean a lot to me and have done so much for me in the last couple years. As I came up the stairs into their second-floor studio, the smell of peanut-oil and rice flour wafting up from the Chinese restaurant at street level, and was inundated by the energy that is a Nutcracker rehearsal the week before it opens, I realized that I had truly made my own life here, that the business of the ballet school now means something different to me than it did a year ago.
I taught The Piano Lesson by August Wilson for the drama component, which I’d chosen mostly because the play was written so recently, not because of race. But it worked out as a good counterpoint to current events in the country, and we even had a racial epithet scrawled on the pavement outside the Arts and Letters building the morning after the election. In my class we discussed (briefly) the N-word as used by the playwright and by the characters in the play. Niagara University is an extremely white, upper-class environment—I shouldn’t have been surprised, really—and though there are non-white students, there aren’t many. The school has nothing like the diversity of the schools in Buffalo proper and it should go without saying that my alma mater, Berkeley, is one of the most diverse schools in the country—so diverse that when I attended there was a kind of competition between ethnic populations to claim Most Marginalized and therefore Most Disenfranchised. (The Filipinos lead by vocal rather than other means, as I recall.) I had two African-American students in my first class, and when we discussed some of the themes and issues involved in the play, the silence and tension were the second-most palpable of the semester. (The classroom was mortuary-quiet for the lecture that covered Queer Theory.)
In my research for The Piano Lesson I was thrilled to discover that the Underground Railroad routes to Canada dropped right through the campus and down into the lower Niagara River gorge. I was able to point right out the window and say, There. There is where history happened.
I found myself suddenly plunged back into the ballet world this week. My brother’s school is doing their annual Nutcracker, and as a favor to family I offered to play one of the extras in the party scene.
Being back just for this small part reminds me that I haven’t missed being in the world that is their professional life. I worked hard to get out of one industry (hospitality) and in a rather short period of time have been welcomed into the one I’ve wanted to be in for so long, writing and teaching. Doing the work I did for them last year was something I did willingly, even gratefully, because they mean a lot to me and have done so much for me in the last couple years. As I came up the stairs into their second-floor studio, the smell of peanut-oil and rice flour wafting up from the Chinese restaurant at street level, and was inundated by the energy that is a Nutcracker rehearsal the week before it opens, I realized that I had truly made my own life here, that the business of the ballet school now means something different to me than it did a year ago.
Thursday, November 27, 2008
Crash
This has been without exception the busiest, craziest, wildest year of my adult life. A year ago I was still bright-eyed and bushy-tailed about my new life in Buffalo but on a number of levels I hadn’t experienced much. What I had experienced was life with my brother and his family, and that was a rich and extraordinary thing to have happen at this point in my life. There are always tensions, anxieties, and struggles with family, and this family milieu here has been no exception, but the joys have been of a kind with few precedents in my life. To come around a corner and find Ian, or to have Camille run at me out of the blue and give my legs a hug, to see Nina mugging or just reading quietly on the couch…well, it makes up for the times they drive me crazy being nothing more than little kids. A great big piece of my heart has healed because I can say, The family I have been part of goes on.
The semester is coming to an end at Niagara University, and I have been invited back to teach in January. More significantly, my participation in the program at the Spencer Hotel at the Chautauqua Institution has also come to an end. That job was one of the very best and very worst experiences of my life. I had such high hopes for the idea that I could be part of—even in charge of—something like that. The truths of the job only revealed themselves in the doing—I slowly began to realize that the ownership team had ideas and money to throw at them. I began to realize that I myself was the answer to one of their ideas, and that money was being thrown at me. But by the end of the summer, when the team actually doing the work of putting the program together began to fall apart, and that because of poor decision and execution on the part of the owners…well, I began to wonder what I’d gotten myself into. On top of that, I was doing this first semester of teaching, and the commute was killing me. I managed to finance a car in early September—just ahead of the credit/loan crisis, fortunately—but the miles I’ve logged on it since are substantial.
So now what? Well, having severed my ties to the program at the Spencer, I’m now concentrating on getting back on track with my teaching and other work in Buffalo. For a few weeks there has been a lingering question of whether or not to pursue further work of the kind I was doing at the hotel in the Southern Tier (as this part of the state is called). But I keep getting offers of real work in the Buffalo area, and am growing ever surer that as I was coming to believe however reluctantly, I will remain in Buffalo for a long time to come, that this area is now home. I’ve found work here, I’ve made friends here, I’ve flourished here. The Chautauqua project was an opportunity I don’t regret. It brought awareness about myself as a writer and about writing itself that I didn’t know I had—for example, I believe writing can build a community. I believe writing is for everyone. I believe writing is important not just to me. Don’t get me wrong—it would have been very cool to develop and execute what I (and the hotel ownership) envision is possible, but that role belongs to someone else. My role…well, I know more about what it is in the world.
The semester is coming to an end at Niagara University, and I have been invited back to teach in January. More significantly, my participation in the program at the Spencer Hotel at the Chautauqua Institution has also come to an end. That job was one of the very best and very worst experiences of my life. I had such high hopes for the idea that I could be part of—even in charge of—something like that. The truths of the job only revealed themselves in the doing—I slowly began to realize that the ownership team had ideas and money to throw at them. I began to realize that I myself was the answer to one of their ideas, and that money was being thrown at me. But by the end of the summer, when the team actually doing the work of putting the program together began to fall apart, and that because of poor decision and execution on the part of the owners…well, I began to wonder what I’d gotten myself into. On top of that, I was doing this first semester of teaching, and the commute was killing me. I managed to finance a car in early September—just ahead of the credit/loan crisis, fortunately—but the miles I’ve logged on it since are substantial.
So now what? Well, having severed my ties to the program at the Spencer, I’m now concentrating on getting back on track with my teaching and other work in Buffalo. For a few weeks there has been a lingering question of whether or not to pursue further work of the kind I was doing at the hotel in the Southern Tier (as this part of the state is called). But I keep getting offers of real work in the Buffalo area, and am growing ever surer that as I was coming to believe however reluctantly, I will remain in Buffalo for a long time to come, that this area is now home. I’ve found work here, I’ve made friends here, I’ve flourished here. The Chautauqua project was an opportunity I don’t regret. It brought awareness about myself as a writer and about writing itself that I didn’t know I had—for example, I believe writing can build a community. I believe writing is for everyone. I believe writing is important not just to me. Don’t get me wrong—it would have been very cool to develop and execute what I (and the hotel ownership) envision is possible, but that role belongs to someone else. My role…well, I know more about what it is in the world.
Tuesday, September 23, 2008
Sandalwood and Streisand
It’s seems impossible that it’s been twenty-five years since “Yentl”…and “The Big Chill” and “The Right Stuff” and “The Year of Living Dangerously.” But it has. I was twenty when these movies came out, and I thought I was grown-up. Streisand was someone I grew up hearing. My parents had her early albums (I used to own the vinyl but lost them in the divorce from my former life) and my brother and I used to run around the house like maniacs to her version of “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bag Wolf?” Say what you will about her, if you heard her over the course of her long career as I did you were likely to hear something wonderful at some point. And if you bought or received “The Broadway Album” you actually heard “Something Wonderful” from “The King and I.”
I came across “Yentl” halfway through its broadcast this evening and was a little surprised to find it. The DVD has not been released, as far as I know. Again, however you might feel about Streisand and her ego, despite her flaws and the major ones in the movie (the last scene), despite its easily-parodied aspects, as its best it’s an achingly-beautiful piece of work. Mandy Patinkin had not reached the mainstream and was a LONG way from Criminal Minds and pharmaceutical commercials. To most people Amy Irving was still Sue Snell from Brian DePalma’s Carrie. Streisand brought out the physicality and sexuality of both actors, and intelligently underplayed her own. Streisand succeeds best in drama when she can tap into her own insecurities—Funny Girl works because Fanny is convinced she’s funny and talented but not beautiful; Yentl succeeds because Streisand is trying to convince the audience of her character’s desire for intelligence while the evidence saturates every frame. The need and ego and insecurity behind this is part of what puts people off about Streisand, but these paradoxes also give her best work its power and strength. There are glimpses of this in “The Way We Were” but when it’s obvious, when it’s all you see, as with “The Mirror Has Two Faces” or “The Prince of Tides,” it’s so nakedly egotistical and needy that’s its embarrassing. You want to turn against it. I came to think that it was both sad and strange that Streisand would inevitably record a duet with the Newest Big Thing: Donna Summer, Barry Gibb, Celine Dion. I imagine it’s also hard to find material as a singer, actress, director.
Well, that was the season of “Yentl” and sandalwood soap. I’d received a gift set of sandalwood-scented Crabtree and Evelyn products that Christmas, and would take baths while my housemate played the soundtrack in the living room and my other housemate sang along. The smell of Hawaii in the tub, those Alan and Marilyn Bergman songs on the stereo…gay, much?
I’ve been neglecting this blog because I’ve been so f-in’ busy, but I’m planning to get back on track…fingers crossed.
I came across “Yentl” halfway through its broadcast this evening and was a little surprised to find it. The DVD has not been released, as far as I know. Again, however you might feel about Streisand and her ego, despite her flaws and the major ones in the movie (the last scene), despite its easily-parodied aspects, as its best it’s an achingly-beautiful piece of work. Mandy Patinkin had not reached the mainstream and was a LONG way from Criminal Minds and pharmaceutical commercials. To most people Amy Irving was still Sue Snell from Brian DePalma’s Carrie. Streisand brought out the physicality and sexuality of both actors, and intelligently underplayed her own. Streisand succeeds best in drama when she can tap into her own insecurities—Funny Girl works because Fanny is convinced she’s funny and talented but not beautiful; Yentl succeeds because Streisand is trying to convince the audience of her character’s desire for intelligence while the evidence saturates every frame. The need and ego and insecurity behind this is part of what puts people off about Streisand, but these paradoxes also give her best work its power and strength. There are glimpses of this in “The Way We Were” but when it’s obvious, when it’s all you see, as with “The Mirror Has Two Faces” or “The Prince of Tides,” it’s so nakedly egotistical and needy that’s its embarrassing. You want to turn against it. I came to think that it was both sad and strange that Streisand would inevitably record a duet with the Newest Big Thing: Donna Summer, Barry Gibb, Celine Dion. I imagine it’s also hard to find material as a singer, actress, director.
Well, that was the season of “Yentl” and sandalwood soap. I’d received a gift set of sandalwood-scented Crabtree and Evelyn products that Christmas, and would take baths while my housemate played the soundtrack in the living room and my other housemate sang along. The smell of Hawaii in the tub, those Alan and Marilyn Bergman songs on the stereo…gay, much?
I’ve been neglecting this blog because I’ve been so f-in’ busy, but I’m planning to get back on track…fingers crossed.
Saturday, August 16, 2008
Back To School
I have new school supplies. It’s been a long time since I’ve had to buy some, but I went to Office Depot and got some Sharpies, ink cartridges for my printer, a new pair of scissors, a battery-operated pencil sharpener, and a Rolodex. The Rolodex is for the contacts I’ve been accumulating at record pace, largely due to the Spencer Program.
I used to love getting school supplies. Pee-Chees. Pencil boxes. Crayons. I often tell the story of how my second grade teacher, Mrs. Taylor, made all of us break our new Crayolas in half. “So you’ll have two of each color,” she said. I can still see her brunette flip; I realize only in hindsight that there must have been a lot of AquaNet in that hair. When Mrs. Taylor gave us that instruction, I knew I was going to be in trouble.
Everyone I tell this story to sympathizes. How terrible! I didn’t want to break my beautiful, clean, shiny, waxy Crayolas in half! Neither did a lot of the other kids. Now I see my teacher’s practical point, but it might have been just as useful to let us keep our crayons whole; if we lost one, we’d have to ask our neighbor if we could borrow his Burnt Sienna or Cornflower. We’d learn how to ask, say “please” and “thank you.” Or maybe she thought we’d learn how to steal…and fight. To take someone’s Goldenrod or Aquamarine when he wasn’t looking. I remember that our pencil boxes were milk cartons with one side cut out. We wrapped them in yellow construction paper and decorated them. They looked like boats.
Anyway, I have to prep for my first class next week. I’m trying to convince myself that I know what I’m doing. I take comfort in the fact that I taught high school seniors last year, and so it’s like I get to teach them again this year…only for 15 weeks instead of one. I also take comfort in the fact that I said I wanted a do-over for college. Well, I can’t imagine what would be more of a do-over than having to teach students myself. I was reading some of the selections in the Norton Anthology I’ll be using, and was gratified by the awareness that I have become a better reader than I once was, that a story like Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral” is more layered and interesting than I remembered. I have the freedom to assign other works, and am thinking that the opening story in this recent collection The Boat, by Nam Le, raises the same questions and sets out the same issues as the Grace Paley story in the Norton. Do I dare disturb the universe? Why the heck not!
I used to love getting school supplies. Pee-Chees. Pencil boxes. Crayons. I often tell the story of how my second grade teacher, Mrs. Taylor, made all of us break our new Crayolas in half. “So you’ll have two of each color,” she said. I can still see her brunette flip; I realize only in hindsight that there must have been a lot of AquaNet in that hair. When Mrs. Taylor gave us that instruction, I knew I was going to be in trouble.
Everyone I tell this story to sympathizes. How terrible! I didn’t want to break my beautiful, clean, shiny, waxy Crayolas in half! Neither did a lot of the other kids. Now I see my teacher’s practical point, but it might have been just as useful to let us keep our crayons whole; if we lost one, we’d have to ask our neighbor if we could borrow his Burnt Sienna or Cornflower. We’d learn how to ask, say “please” and “thank you.” Or maybe she thought we’d learn how to steal…and fight. To take someone’s Goldenrod or Aquamarine when he wasn’t looking. I remember that our pencil boxes were milk cartons with one side cut out. We wrapped them in yellow construction paper and decorated them. They looked like boats.
Anyway, I have to prep for my first class next week. I’m trying to convince myself that I know what I’m doing. I take comfort in the fact that I taught high school seniors last year, and so it’s like I get to teach them again this year…only for 15 weeks instead of one. I also take comfort in the fact that I said I wanted a do-over for college. Well, I can’t imagine what would be more of a do-over than having to teach students myself. I was reading some of the selections in the Norton Anthology I’ll be using, and was gratified by the awareness that I have become a better reader than I once was, that a story like Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral” is more layered and interesting than I remembered. I have the freedom to assign other works, and am thinking that the opening story in this recent collection The Boat, by Nam Le, raises the same questions and sets out the same issues as the Grace Paley story in the Norton. Do I dare disturb the universe? Why the heck not!
Monday, August 4, 2008
The Great Leap Forward
What do you do—or say—or write—when suddenly everything you’ve ever wanted in your life begins to manifest? I find myself in this remarkable position, and report that you have to keep yourself as calm as possible and concentrate on one thing at a time. Within days of taking the helm of this substantial new project at Chautauqua, I was offered two teaching jobs that I had to turn down because I couldn’t see a way to honor my commitment to the Spencer Writers Workshops. I have, however, been offered and accepted a position to teach English Literature at Niagara University this fall. I have been seriously wanting to teach at the college level—and to teach seriously at the college level—for some time, and will be teaching two sections of basic Intro to Lit on Tuesdays and Thursdays. So what else is going to happen in my current life? I can’t imagine. I keep laughing, remembering that I was afraid I was going to be bored in Buffalo.
My friend Richard Stafford was here recently for two weeks as a guest teacher in my brother’s ballet school. Richard and I have been friends for five years, but I often feel like it’s been longer. We established one of those rare quick and deep connections back in New York City, and I’m happy to report that it has endured. Don’t get me wrong—this is nothing more than a friendship, but how many of us can say, I have too many friends? I’m not one of those people. In fact, I feel grateful because at times in my life I felt that I was losing friends. Even worse, I didn’t even realize I was losing them—and what kind of friend did that make me? Well, Richard and his partner Peter are now ensconced in a new apartment on the West Side of Manhattan, which is where they lived when Richard and I met. I hope they never have to move again!
So I’m watching the Rangers and the Yankees over my shoulder, and of the sports stories that have come ‘round so far in the first half of ’08, that of Josh Hamilton, the outfielder who set a new record in the Home Run Derby during the recent All-Star Game festivities. If you don’t know Hamilton’s story, look it up online—just Google his name. It’s said that baseball is about never losing faith, but Hamilton’s personal story is about a more painful story, one about losing faith to the point of despair and even death, and then regaining it.
I hope to be a little better about keeping up on this blog than in recent weeks. I can’t afford to fall behind in the count, not with a schedule like this fall’s looming on the horizon.
My friend Richard Stafford was here recently for two weeks as a guest teacher in my brother’s ballet school. Richard and I have been friends for five years, but I often feel like it’s been longer. We established one of those rare quick and deep connections back in New York City, and I’m happy to report that it has endured. Don’t get me wrong—this is nothing more than a friendship, but how many of us can say, I have too many friends? I’m not one of those people. In fact, I feel grateful because at times in my life I felt that I was losing friends. Even worse, I didn’t even realize I was losing them—and what kind of friend did that make me? Well, Richard and his partner Peter are now ensconced in a new apartment on the West Side of Manhattan, which is where they lived when Richard and I met. I hope they never have to move again!
So I’m watching the Rangers and the Yankees over my shoulder, and of the sports stories that have come ‘round so far in the first half of ’08, that of Josh Hamilton, the outfielder who set a new record in the Home Run Derby during the recent All-Star Game festivities. If you don’t know Hamilton’s story, look it up online—just Google his name. It’s said that baseball is about never losing faith, but Hamilton’s personal story is about a more painful story, one about losing faith to the point of despair and even death, and then regaining it.
I hope to be a little better about keeping up on this blog than in recent weeks. I can’t afford to fall behind in the count, not with a schedule like this fall’s looming on the horizon.
Saturday, July 12, 2008
News
This week I was hired to run the Writers Workshops at the Spencer Hotel on the grounds of the Chautauqua Institution. The Institution dates back to the heyday of a nineteenth-century educational and cultural movement that swept the Northern States and the frontier for several decades. In the decade after the end of the Civil War, “chautauquas” sprung up across the country, bringing a sense of “eddicatedness” to the remotest outposts of the country. The facility in Western New York State was originally founded as a Methodist summer camp in 1874, and has continuously run a seasonal program that is now nationally- if not internationally-known. It occupies a 750-acre curve of shoreline along Chautauqua Lake in what is geographically known as the Southern Tier. This term refers to the ridges and hill valleys that follow the New York-Pennsylvania border and are geologically considered part of the Appalachian Mountains. The lake is a couple of miles wide and twenty miles long. Jamestown, the city where Lucille Ball was born, is at the southern end.
The Spencer is a four-story, 24-room, 100-year-old hotel just up from the Ampitheater where many of the Institution’s big-ticket events (lectures, symphony performances) are held. It’s owned and operated by a woman who lives elsewhere in the Institution, and she and her manager scheduled a series of writing and wellness workshops this fall. They are reasonably priced—less than $800 (double occupancy) for a five-night stay that includes the writing workshops, daily breakfast, lunch and dinner, gratuities and taxes. The chef in charge of the hotel dining room recommended me to the proprietress and I was hired over the phone while I was in New York City. The owner has a serious and ambitious vision for what the hotel’s workshop program could become, and I can’t believe my good fortune in being handed responsibility for it. Writers have been scheduled for most of the weeks after Labor Day; a few of the weeks or weekends are given over to Wellness Workshops. I will be responsible for booking writers for the 2009 calendar, for promoting them and the already-scheduled workshops to the region, which will require me to build and create some serious public relations and marketing connections beyond the Buffalo area. I’m very, very excited about this prospect. For the time being I will be doing most of the work out of my "office" in Buffalo, but will be down in Chautauqua once a week to promote the workshops on site. I'll be curious to see if that changes. Personally, I don't mind the driving--as long as I remember to use the time well. I will continue to teach for Just Buffalo, I have another teaching artist position possibility, and I remain committed to helping my brother and sister-in-law in any way I can. And of course I intend to reserve time to write.
Speaking of time, the timing of all this is a bit beyond the limits of my ability to describe. I’d been hoping that someday something like this would come my way; I didn’t expect it to fall out of the clear blue sky, and I wasn’t expecting it to happen now. But I suppose that’s how things like this come—out of nowhere.
The Spencer is a four-story, 24-room, 100-year-old hotel just up from the Ampitheater where many of the Institution’s big-ticket events (lectures, symphony performances) are held. It’s owned and operated by a woman who lives elsewhere in the Institution, and she and her manager scheduled a series of writing and wellness workshops this fall. They are reasonably priced—less than $800 (double occupancy) for a five-night stay that includes the writing workshops, daily breakfast, lunch and dinner, gratuities and taxes. The chef in charge of the hotel dining room recommended me to the proprietress and I was hired over the phone while I was in New York City. The owner has a serious and ambitious vision for what the hotel’s workshop program could become, and I can’t believe my good fortune in being handed responsibility for it. Writers have been scheduled for most of the weeks after Labor Day; a few of the weeks or weekends are given over to Wellness Workshops. I will be responsible for booking writers for the 2009 calendar, for promoting them and the already-scheduled workshops to the region, which will require me to build and create some serious public relations and marketing connections beyond the Buffalo area. I’m very, very excited about this prospect. For the time being I will be doing most of the work out of my "office" in Buffalo, but will be down in Chautauqua once a week to promote the workshops on site. I'll be curious to see if that changes. Personally, I don't mind the driving--as long as I remember to use the time well. I will continue to teach for Just Buffalo, I have another teaching artist position possibility, and I remain committed to helping my brother and sister-in-law in any way I can. And of course I intend to reserve time to write.
Speaking of time, the timing of all this is a bit beyond the limits of my ability to describe. I’d been hoping that someday something like this would come my way; I didn’t expect it to fall out of the clear blue sky, and I wasn’t expecting it to happen now. But I suppose that’s how things like this come—out of nowhere.
Friday, July 4, 2008
"...something new, something of my own..."
In a single week of vacation in New York City I saw so much theater that I began to feel saturated by it. There were a couple of shows I missed that I would have liked to see, including the Public Theater Hamlet in Central Park and South Pacific, but I can’t complain.
Though Spring Awakening has been around for a couple of years, I wasn’t able to see it until last Tuesday. It’s a rarity, a rock musical with lyricism. The show reminded me of the marvelous Hedwig and the Angry Inch. I would have liked to have seen the original leads, but the new cast was just fine. I was very much on board with Rent and its bittersweet triumph on the way from New York Theater Workshop to Broadway, but the show is loud and the material dated. Bringing a punk-rock rebel spirit to an 1891 play by Franz Wedekind Spring gives the aches and urges and joys of adolescence something simultaneously anachronistic and timeless. You feel that had the characters known anything about a punk sensibility they would have grabbed hold of it. Incidentally, Duncan Sheik was an occasional client at a couple of the restaurants I used to manage in Manhattan, while the show’s costume designer was an almost-daily regular at The Red Cat. If Susan Hilferty called or walked in, we always made room for her. One of the show’s early champions, Charles Isherwood of the New York Times, was another regular there.
August: Osage County is a masterpiece of black-on-black comedy. Though the secret that lies under the deepest generational layers of dysfunction seemed one major plot twist too many, it was also of a piece with the script and the characters and their world; perhaps the play would not have been the same without it. Though the Steppenwolf cast had changed, and I got to see the new players (including Oscar-winner Estelle Parsons), the acting and direction were seamless from the get-go. And what a ride this play is! If anyone told me I’d be riveted by three-plus hours of Oklahoma family dysfunction that included active addiction, death, divorce, molestation, and incest, I would have rolled my eyes. But I couldn’t stop laughing. In a corner of my head I kept looking for cracks in the surface of the production, trying to see where the actors were acting, or where the director had had to work harder, but couldn’t find any. Smooth as water.
The Gypsy revival was not my original choice. I am not a big fan of Patti LuPone per se, and would have preferred to see the Hamlet even if it was as weak as others said, but to see her as Mama Rose was a treat. She really did justice to the part; in fact, there were times when it seemed like she was originating the role herself. I’d forgotten that this production (like the long-running Chicago) was one of the City Center Encores! transfers and therefore only semi-staged, but the show wasn’t overly pared down. In fact, the series has lucked out with three shows that have been about showbiz and desperation and that seem to benefit from being only half-staged: Chicago, Follies (the Encores! production might have made it to Broadway if not for the less-than-successful 2001 revival), and now Gypsy. Perhaps those connections (showbiz, despair, revivals) might be worth thinking about further. I wonder if and how the Sam Mendes/Aaron Sorkin film adaptation is coming along.
There used to be a piano bar called Eighty-Eights in the West Village and a barmaid named Rachel whose specialty was a parodic medley called “(Not) Singing Sondheim” to the tune of “(Not) Getting Married” from Company. I miss the bar and Rachel and the parody. I grew up with Judy Collins’s Grammy-winning version of “Send in the Clowns” but it wasn’t until my friendship with Dan, a bookstore colleague who now lives in Seattle with his partner Angel, that I began to appreciate and cultivate my Sondheim sense. I’ve come to understand why some don’t “get” his musicals or his songs; I don’t feel that “getting” Sondheim is necessary or an imprimatur for a poseurish kind of cultural intelligence. But I do love his work, and think there’s more poetry and delicacy than it gets credit for. The recent winning streak of revivals that included John Doyle’s productions of Sweeney Todd and Company, the Encores! Follies, and the Tim Burton movie of Sweeney with Johnny Depp has been extended by the Menier Chocolate Factory production of Sunday in the Park with George. This production got a lot of attention for the technological staging of the representation of Seurat’s painting process and results, and deservedly. But the leads were also Tony nominees (in a tight year), and deservedly. The accumulating minimalism in Sondheim’s music and lyrics here came through in a beautiful way. And had anyone ever commented on the fact that the first and second act mirror each other with the intermission like a kind of hinge? The plot (not conventional turns or twists of action so much as gentle shifts in the characters’ understanding and perception) reflect each other almost point for point as opposites. The first act begins with George teaching Dot to stand still; the second ends with the roles and the teaching vector reversed. The first act ends with the tableau of Seurat’s painting coming together; the second ends with it coming apart. “Move On” has become one of my favorite Sondheim pieces ever. I didn’t know it before, now I feel like I’ll be humming it the rest of my life. I owe the foundations for this appreciation to Dan, with whom I spent many a California drive listening to Side by Side by Sondheim. I owe him in many ways for my first trip to New York and my first Broadway show ever, Into the Woods, with Bernadette Peters, Chip Zien, Joanna Gleason, and others. And Sondheim was right: children will listen...
Though Spring Awakening has been around for a couple of years, I wasn’t able to see it until last Tuesday. It’s a rarity, a rock musical with lyricism. The show reminded me of the marvelous Hedwig and the Angry Inch. I would have liked to have seen the original leads, but the new cast was just fine. I was very much on board with Rent and its bittersweet triumph on the way from New York Theater Workshop to Broadway, but the show is loud and the material dated. Bringing a punk-rock rebel spirit to an 1891 play by Franz Wedekind Spring gives the aches and urges and joys of adolescence something simultaneously anachronistic and timeless. You feel that had the characters known anything about a punk sensibility they would have grabbed hold of it. Incidentally, Duncan Sheik was an occasional client at a couple of the restaurants I used to manage in Manhattan, while the show’s costume designer was an almost-daily regular at The Red Cat. If Susan Hilferty called or walked in, we always made room for her. One of the show’s early champions, Charles Isherwood of the New York Times, was another regular there.
August: Osage County is a masterpiece of black-on-black comedy. Though the secret that lies under the deepest generational layers of dysfunction seemed one major plot twist too many, it was also of a piece with the script and the characters and their world; perhaps the play would not have been the same without it. Though the Steppenwolf cast had changed, and I got to see the new players (including Oscar-winner Estelle Parsons), the acting and direction were seamless from the get-go. And what a ride this play is! If anyone told me I’d be riveted by three-plus hours of Oklahoma family dysfunction that included active addiction, death, divorce, molestation, and incest, I would have rolled my eyes. But I couldn’t stop laughing. In a corner of my head I kept looking for cracks in the surface of the production, trying to see where the actors were acting, or where the director had had to work harder, but couldn’t find any. Smooth as water.
The Gypsy revival was not my original choice. I am not a big fan of Patti LuPone per se, and would have preferred to see the Hamlet even if it was as weak as others said, but to see her as Mama Rose was a treat. She really did justice to the part; in fact, there were times when it seemed like she was originating the role herself. I’d forgotten that this production (like the long-running Chicago) was one of the City Center Encores! transfers and therefore only semi-staged, but the show wasn’t overly pared down. In fact, the series has lucked out with three shows that have been about showbiz and desperation and that seem to benefit from being only half-staged: Chicago, Follies (the Encores! production might have made it to Broadway if not for the less-than-successful 2001 revival), and now Gypsy. Perhaps those connections (showbiz, despair, revivals) might be worth thinking about further. I wonder if and how the Sam Mendes/Aaron Sorkin film adaptation is coming along.
There used to be a piano bar called Eighty-Eights in the West Village and a barmaid named Rachel whose specialty was a parodic medley called “(Not) Singing Sondheim” to the tune of “(Not) Getting Married” from Company. I miss the bar and Rachel and the parody. I grew up with Judy Collins’s Grammy-winning version of “Send in the Clowns” but it wasn’t until my friendship with Dan, a bookstore colleague who now lives in Seattle with his partner Angel, that I began to appreciate and cultivate my Sondheim sense. I’ve come to understand why some don’t “get” his musicals or his songs; I don’t feel that “getting” Sondheim is necessary or an imprimatur for a poseurish kind of cultural intelligence. But I do love his work, and think there’s more poetry and delicacy than it gets credit for. The recent winning streak of revivals that included John Doyle’s productions of Sweeney Todd and Company, the Encores! Follies, and the Tim Burton movie of Sweeney with Johnny Depp has been extended by the Menier Chocolate Factory production of Sunday in the Park with George. This production got a lot of attention for the technological staging of the representation of Seurat’s painting process and results, and deservedly. But the leads were also Tony nominees (in a tight year), and deservedly. The accumulating minimalism in Sondheim’s music and lyrics here came through in a beautiful way. And had anyone ever commented on the fact that the first and second act mirror each other with the intermission like a kind of hinge? The plot (not conventional turns or twists of action so much as gentle shifts in the characters’ understanding and perception) reflect each other almost point for point as opposites. The first act begins with George teaching Dot to stand still; the second ends with the roles and the teaching vector reversed. The first act ends with the tableau of Seurat’s painting coming together; the second ends with it coming apart. “Move On” has become one of my favorite Sondheim pieces ever. I didn’t know it before, now I feel like I’ll be humming it the rest of my life. I owe the foundations for this appreciation to Dan, with whom I spent many a California drive listening to Side by Side by Sondheim. I owe him in many ways for my first trip to New York and my first Broadway show ever, Into the Woods, with Bernadette Peters, Chip Zien, Joanna Gleason, and others. And Sondheim was right: children will listen...
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
A Better Yellow
I’m in New York City on the third day of a ten-day vacation. I lived here for so long and am so comfortable being here that in many ways it feels like I’m home. And yet, as the taxi from the airport rode the approaches to the Midtown Tunnel Sunday morning, I looked out over the Manhattan skyline and felt, I don’t live here anymore. I used to live here, but now I live somewhere else—now there’s a place where I’ve put down roots and watered them and fertilized them and weeded and hoed around them. Maybe some day I’ll transplant again. But not today.
Speaking of that taxicab, my JetBlue flight landed at 11:15, fifteen minutes ahead of schedule. My friend Matthew from San Francisco is here for a month, and over the past few years he and I have independently made acquaintance with some of the same people. He and a friend were going to be in the West Village at noon, and suggested I meet them there, but getting from JFK to the West Village in forty-five minutes would be impossible by public transportation and would be a miracle by cab. My jetway, however, happened to be only a few doors down from the exit to the taxi area, and I was the second one in line, and as I climbed in I thought, Wouldn’t it be crazy if I got there in forty-five minutes? As the cab sped along the Van Wyck and the Grand Central, I thought, Wouldn’t it be crazy if I got there five minutes late? As we moved through the Midtown Tunnel, I thought, I’m going to get there on time. Sure enough, I pulled up in front of the address where I was to meet them with two minutes to spare.
I’m staying at the apartment of my friend Nancy, who left for Paris Monday afternoon. We spend most of Sunday afternoon trying to wrestle with her computer problems. She’s been working on a book for some time, and having had two computers crash on her in rapid succession, fears she may have lost the manuscript. I sure hope she hasn’t, and feel terrible for her. Just the stress of thinking she may have lost the MS is hard on her. I pray she finds the files.
Monday morning I went to the press preview for the Turner show at the Met. If there is such a thing as a Turner masterpiece it is both rare and flawed, yet I’d argue (as others have done, and better) that those few canvases—like Rain, Steam and Speed or The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons—and many of his sketches, watercolors, and oils have a power and energy with no like in the history of art. Their dynamism and Impressionism are often directly related to their subjects: the ocean, the sky, a train, weather. At times Turner’s dynamics were manipulated or marshaled, as with the precise angle of the flames and their reflection in the Thames in the picture of the Parliament buildings on fire, and the artist was criticized for that during his career. The power in his work pulls from within the subject and the composition, but from beyond the canvas as well, from the historical currents—the manifold industrial changes, social changes, political changes—that surrounded Turner and were part of his life and times. Their charge anticipates the Henry Adams essay “The Dynamo and the Virgin” and the canvases of Boccioni and other Futurists. In the sidebar for one canvas I read that during Turner's career oil paints themselves significantly developed and evolved, that there would appear something like a better yellow. He was known for touching up his work on Varnishing Days at the Royal Academy; musing over the retrospective, you get a sense that Turner was so caught up in his work that proprietary fell by the wayside.
By the way, I also learned that Turner is the artist for whom Britain's Turner Prize is named. I hadn't made that connection and in fact must have thought it was Ted Turner! The Royal Academicians would not be pleased, but what do I know? I'm just a Yank...and an Indian at that...
Speaking of that taxicab, my JetBlue flight landed at 11:15, fifteen minutes ahead of schedule. My friend Matthew from San Francisco is here for a month, and over the past few years he and I have independently made acquaintance with some of the same people. He and a friend were going to be in the West Village at noon, and suggested I meet them there, but getting from JFK to the West Village in forty-five minutes would be impossible by public transportation and would be a miracle by cab. My jetway, however, happened to be only a few doors down from the exit to the taxi area, and I was the second one in line, and as I climbed in I thought, Wouldn’t it be crazy if I got there in forty-five minutes? As the cab sped along the Van Wyck and the Grand Central, I thought, Wouldn’t it be crazy if I got there five minutes late? As we moved through the Midtown Tunnel, I thought, I’m going to get there on time. Sure enough, I pulled up in front of the address where I was to meet them with two minutes to spare.
I’m staying at the apartment of my friend Nancy, who left for Paris Monday afternoon. We spend most of Sunday afternoon trying to wrestle with her computer problems. She’s been working on a book for some time, and having had two computers crash on her in rapid succession, fears she may have lost the manuscript. I sure hope she hasn’t, and feel terrible for her. Just the stress of thinking she may have lost the MS is hard on her. I pray she finds the files.
Monday morning I went to the press preview for the Turner show at the Met. If there is such a thing as a Turner masterpiece it is both rare and flawed, yet I’d argue (as others have done, and better) that those few canvases—like Rain, Steam and Speed or The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons—and many of his sketches, watercolors, and oils have a power and energy with no like in the history of art. Their dynamism and Impressionism are often directly related to their subjects: the ocean, the sky, a train, weather. At times Turner’s dynamics were manipulated or marshaled, as with the precise angle of the flames and their reflection in the Thames in the picture of the Parliament buildings on fire, and the artist was criticized for that during his career. The power in his work pulls from within the subject and the composition, but from beyond the canvas as well, from the historical currents—the manifold industrial changes, social changes, political changes—that surrounded Turner and were part of his life and times. Their charge anticipates the Henry Adams essay “The Dynamo and the Virgin” and the canvases of Boccioni and other Futurists. In the sidebar for one canvas I read that during Turner's career oil paints themselves significantly developed and evolved, that there would appear something like a better yellow. He was known for touching up his work on Varnishing Days at the Royal Academy; musing over the retrospective, you get a sense that Turner was so caught up in his work that proprietary fell by the wayside.
By the way, I also learned that Turner is the artist for whom Britain's Turner Prize is named. I hadn't made that connection and in fact must have thought it was Ted Turner! The Royal Academicians would not be pleased, but what do I know? I'm just a Yank...and an Indian at that...
Saturday, June 14, 2008
Downey
I love the combination of butter flavoring, a half gallon of Mr. Pibb in a paper cup, and three hours of air conditioning. In other words, I love summer movies, and this year has already been one of the best since…well, let’s say 2003. For those willing to argue the point, the top three films that summer were "Finding Nemo," "Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl," and "Matrix Reloaded." Not every year is great. Take 2006. "Superman"? "Returns"? Boo. The movie was in the top ten for the year and still didn’t break into the black. But for every big-budget studio clunker, for every "Star Wars: The Phantom Menace," there is the chance of a "Blair Witch Project" or even a big studio hit, as evidenced by the two Narnia films thus far. But I’d go back as far as 1984 for one of the all-time great summer blockbuster seasons: the top three films of that summer were also the top three films of the year. "Ghostbusters". "Beverly Hills Cop". "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom".
Speaking of Dr. Jones, I saw the fourth installment yesterday, and I’m sorry to say that it does not bear up to the wait or the hype. Harrison Ford will be 66 in a couple of weeks, and the trappings of a contemporary Spielberg action blockbuster reinforce that fact, and painfully. Ford was always great at playing stiff and sore after a long fight; now he’s stiff and sore going in. He’s older than Sean Connery was when the Scotsman played his father, and Spielberg treated Connery with proper respect. Here, the director has the sense to bring back Karen Allen and treat her like a gentleman would, but too bad that isn’t the case with the hero this time.
And the plot! What the—? Spielberg doesn’t always know when his access to Industrial Light and Magic and CGI gets the better of him. In fact, the best film of the four Indiana Jones movies is the second, "Temple of Doom". The special effects there support the story and the action, which is pretty realistic. In fact, the film caused a ruckus because of the scene where the Thuggee cult leader takes a living heart out of a man’s chest. I’d be willing to bet that if there had been the amount of metaphysical nonsense there is in the other three films, that scene would have passed by relatively unnoticed. In "Temple" the action sequences, no matter how farfetched, remained otherwise plausible. Sure, they pushed the limits of plausibility, but they succeeded.
I’ve already written about "SATC", but I want to put a plug in for "Iron Man". If you haven’t seen it yet, it’s by far the wittiest and savviest and liveliest of this summer’s popcorn movies. In fact, even in its weaker moments, it’s everything the Indiana Jones franchise is at its best. Downey has always been an amazing actor, part of his talent being his self-conscious awareness of his awesome talent. He has very nearly become a larger-than-life personality, and the movie plays to that idea. Pitt and Clooney are much-too-much larger-than-life. It makes it hard not to see their star power despite roles as simple and good as the ones they had in "Babel" and "Syriana" respectively. Johnny Depp, on the other hand, has learned since his Viper Club and Winona days to play his celebrity cards more discreetly, and has remained not quite larger-than-life. This continues to allow him to slide into roles as diverse as J.M. Barrie or Sweeney Todd, just as Downey slid in and out of the underrated "Zodiac" and the unseen "Singing Detective". I hope he'll be able to learn from Depp’s example. He’s talented enough to take your breath away and should play Indiana Jones in the next movie. Speaking of breath, it would resusitate all of Spielberg's stale ideas. Imagine Downey in a Spielberg film! He’s all the special effects a director needs.
Speaking of Dr. Jones, I saw the fourth installment yesterday, and I’m sorry to say that it does not bear up to the wait or the hype. Harrison Ford will be 66 in a couple of weeks, and the trappings of a contemporary Spielberg action blockbuster reinforce that fact, and painfully. Ford was always great at playing stiff and sore after a long fight; now he’s stiff and sore going in. He’s older than Sean Connery was when the Scotsman played his father, and Spielberg treated Connery with proper respect. Here, the director has the sense to bring back Karen Allen and treat her like a gentleman would, but too bad that isn’t the case with the hero this time.
And the plot! What the—? Spielberg doesn’t always know when his access to Industrial Light and Magic and CGI gets the better of him. In fact, the best film of the four Indiana Jones movies is the second, "Temple of Doom". The special effects there support the story and the action, which is pretty realistic. In fact, the film caused a ruckus because of the scene where the Thuggee cult leader takes a living heart out of a man’s chest. I’d be willing to bet that if there had been the amount of metaphysical nonsense there is in the other three films, that scene would have passed by relatively unnoticed. In "Temple" the action sequences, no matter how farfetched, remained otherwise plausible. Sure, they pushed the limits of plausibility, but they succeeded.
I’ve already written about "SATC", but I want to put a plug in for "Iron Man". If you haven’t seen it yet, it’s by far the wittiest and savviest and liveliest of this summer’s popcorn movies. In fact, even in its weaker moments, it’s everything the Indiana Jones franchise is at its best. Downey has always been an amazing actor, part of his talent being his self-conscious awareness of his awesome talent. He has very nearly become a larger-than-life personality, and the movie plays to that idea. Pitt and Clooney are much-too-much larger-than-life. It makes it hard not to see their star power despite roles as simple and good as the ones they had in "Babel" and "Syriana" respectively. Johnny Depp, on the other hand, has learned since his Viper Club and Winona days to play his celebrity cards more discreetly, and has remained not quite larger-than-life. This continues to allow him to slide into roles as diverse as J.M. Barrie or Sweeney Todd, just as Downey slid in and out of the underrated "Zodiac" and the unseen "Singing Detective". I hope he'll be able to learn from Depp’s example. He’s talented enough to take your breath away and should play Indiana Jones in the next movie. Speaking of breath, it would resusitate all of Spielberg's stale ideas. Imagine Downey in a Spielberg film! He’s all the special effects a director needs.
Sunday, June 1, 2008
SATC
The Sunday afternoon of its first weekend of release, the audience for the new “Sex and the City” movie here in Buffalo—more accurately, Amherst—was nearly all women. There were about a dozen men in the sizeable crowd, including me and my friend Rick.
As a television show, “SATC” is a cultural icon, so the movie’s backers were smart to get a big-screen version done when they could. Because there was a lot of behind-the-scenes juice about the production of this one, the likelihood of a second movie remains uncertain. I for one would be surprised if the stars would commit to doing another, but then the market for movies for women is strong (check out that opening-weekend box office!). So who knows? And who cares, at least this weekend? Why rain on Carrie’s, Samantha’s, Charlotte’s, and Miranda’s parade? Some nearby whispers gave away the presence of a few SATC neophytes in the theater. As for the rest, they were happy to see the girls again. So was I--which is surprising, given how late I came to the party.
I didn’t watch SATC in the beginning. In fact, I didn’t watch it until it was in reruns on cable and later in network syndication. That once was my idiosyncrasy, not watching certain series. It was partly willfulness, a weird kind of snobbery (how can you be snobby about television when you don’t own one and can’t afford cable?), and my own, odd kind of cultural activism. I hated the idea that television was so accessible. I was still attached to the ideal of high art versus popular art, a breach that hasn’t entirely yet healed. SATC…it was television, and wasn’t that slumming? In the cultural capital of the world? I hadn’t come to New York to watch someone like Carrie. I’d come to New York to live like her, to be her. With the Cosmos, without the Manolos.
So it went…for a while. And whenever I was in the United States of Elsewhere, I could glide through family gatherings and college reunion parties on the fact that I lived in New York City myself, on the fact of having met both Candace Bushnell and Sarah Jessica Parker. More precisely, that I had waited on them. Waiting on them was good enough for Elsewhere, but when I returned to Manhattan, I wasn’t Carrie or Stanford or Aidan. I certainly wasn’t Big. I was small. The city was Big. And Reality and the City was tough. It wasn’t a show, and it was on twenty-four-seven. I didn’t Darren Star in it; I falling-starred. And kept falling. At first just in place. Then behind. On student loans. Tax filings. Credit card bills. I wasn’t getting ahead anywhere—not professionally, not personally. Life was kicking my you-know-what. At times I blamed the city itself. I fled to the mountains after 9/11 for two years, only to return thinking I’d changed (or been forgiven). When you try to escape reality, however, it will catch up to you later (if not sooner) and when you meet again, it will not be happy to see you. And you won’t be happy to see it.
I finally did something. I admitted I had to change, or was willing to change. Everything. From the outside in, inside out. I got help. Therapy. Support groups. More therapy. More support groups. Group therapy. And slowly and surely I did change. I genuinely began to feel lighter. My problems didn’t go away—they were waiting for me, and though I wasn’t happy to see them, to have them, because I wanted to change in order to meet them, it wasn’t so bad, wasn’t so hard. An honest confrontation with an unflattering mirror, not a sucker punch to the jaw.
In the fall of 2005, I left one city for another: Jersey City is only a PATH-stop away, but that five-minute ride under the Hudson might as well be under an ocean. Sure, mostly due to the housing bubble, there’d been a sizeable exodus of Empire Staters for the Garden State. They were making parts of Jersey City like the glittering island across the river, but not the part where I lived. I missed it, but I could afford my rent and my bills and I started repaying my loans and tackled my taxes. I could afford television and cable, and to make myself feel better, I started watching SATC in syndication. I was amazed by how funny it was. How schmaltzy at times, at others profound. It was like Friends without Joey, Chandler, and Ross. Seinfeld with a quartet of Elaines and without Upper West Side neuroses. Even edited for syndication, the show was as hopeful and lively as I myself had finally and genuinely become. I didn’t matter that it took me until my late thirties to reach the place I wanted to be in my mid-twenties. I’d arrived. I was there. It was Jersey City…so what? And watching the show made me believe that, properly scaled, a little properly-accessorized comedy and romance of manners, even largely feminine ones, isn’t such a bad thing.
SATC is post-op Tales of the City, Anna Madrigal and Michael Tolliver with the coastlines and bustlines and orientations all reconfigured and styled within a spiked heel of its multiple lives. And that fits, because back in the Eighties Armistead Maupin’s serial was my SATC. It gave me more than information about the life I needed and wanted when I was a young gay man on the West Coast. Through TOTC I learned about poppers, The Castro, the Stud, the baths, the mores and manners that obtain in urban interaction with strangers and other lovers. I learned about AIDS, about loss, about love, about life. I learned too many of those lessons on paper, however, and at times didn’t get to apply them as much as I wanted to. But I tried. I really did.
Now here we are at last, I and the movie and the city, unfolding on different levels, at different paces. And places. I still live in New York…State. Watching the movie at my local multiplex (seven dollar matinees!) I was happy to settle back for my own romance-and-urban-nostalgia trip. There were almost more layers to watching the movie than I could handle. In the last years before I left—and in reality, through personal and professional circumstances, including my last Manhattan jobs, as maitre d’ in two popular restaurants—I’d become friendly with more than a few of the stars onscreen (genuine tact forbids me from mentioning which). In the last years before I left I’d watched the city shed its grime and grit and become close to movie-scene perfect. But like the onscreen rain-slicked shine on the cobblestones of the Meatpacking District, that perfection comes at a cost only some can afford. I couldn’t anymore. That had become real to me, but I had changed. I’d outgrown running from reality; I’d even learned to meet it halfway. But I hadn’t yet tried to create one, one that was mine.
I have vivid memories of the streets and shops and bistros. I even have my memories of meeting Candace Bushnell and Sarah Jessica Parker. I have my memories of watching Parker in the revival of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. Many times during the movie thought, I’ve been there. I know where that is. Oh, my God, there’s _________! I didn’t know he/she was going to be in this! Like cuts on a gem, these facts and facets folded over and under each other in several dimensions while I watched the movie, and when I came out it took me a moment to remember where I was. Then, also like a gem, it was clear. Oh, yes, I thought, I’m here in Western New York. This is my life, where the price of gas is over four a gallon and I’m learning and living still. And not just on paper anymore.
As a television show, “SATC” is a cultural icon, so the movie’s backers were smart to get a big-screen version done when they could. Because there was a lot of behind-the-scenes juice about the production of this one, the likelihood of a second movie remains uncertain. I for one would be surprised if the stars would commit to doing another, but then the market for movies for women is strong (check out that opening-weekend box office!). So who knows? And who cares, at least this weekend? Why rain on Carrie’s, Samantha’s, Charlotte’s, and Miranda’s parade? Some nearby whispers gave away the presence of a few SATC neophytes in the theater. As for the rest, they were happy to see the girls again. So was I--which is surprising, given how late I came to the party.
I didn’t watch SATC in the beginning. In fact, I didn’t watch it until it was in reruns on cable and later in network syndication. That once was my idiosyncrasy, not watching certain series. It was partly willfulness, a weird kind of snobbery (how can you be snobby about television when you don’t own one and can’t afford cable?), and my own, odd kind of cultural activism. I hated the idea that television was so accessible. I was still attached to the ideal of high art versus popular art, a breach that hasn’t entirely yet healed. SATC…it was television, and wasn’t that slumming? In the cultural capital of the world? I hadn’t come to New York to watch someone like Carrie. I’d come to New York to live like her, to be her. With the Cosmos, without the Manolos.
So it went…for a while. And whenever I was in the United States of Elsewhere, I could glide through family gatherings and college reunion parties on the fact that I lived in New York City myself, on the fact of having met both Candace Bushnell and Sarah Jessica Parker. More precisely, that I had waited on them. Waiting on them was good enough for Elsewhere, but when I returned to Manhattan, I wasn’t Carrie or Stanford or Aidan. I certainly wasn’t Big. I was small. The city was Big. And Reality and the City was tough. It wasn’t a show, and it was on twenty-four-seven. I didn’t Darren Star in it; I falling-starred. And kept falling. At first just in place. Then behind. On student loans. Tax filings. Credit card bills. I wasn’t getting ahead anywhere—not professionally, not personally. Life was kicking my you-know-what. At times I blamed the city itself. I fled to the mountains after 9/11 for two years, only to return thinking I’d changed (or been forgiven). When you try to escape reality, however, it will catch up to you later (if not sooner) and when you meet again, it will not be happy to see you. And you won’t be happy to see it.
I finally did something. I admitted I had to change, or was willing to change. Everything. From the outside in, inside out. I got help. Therapy. Support groups. More therapy. More support groups. Group therapy. And slowly and surely I did change. I genuinely began to feel lighter. My problems didn’t go away—they were waiting for me, and though I wasn’t happy to see them, to have them, because I wanted to change in order to meet them, it wasn’t so bad, wasn’t so hard. An honest confrontation with an unflattering mirror, not a sucker punch to the jaw.
In the fall of 2005, I left one city for another: Jersey City is only a PATH-stop away, but that five-minute ride under the Hudson might as well be under an ocean. Sure, mostly due to the housing bubble, there’d been a sizeable exodus of Empire Staters for the Garden State. They were making parts of Jersey City like the glittering island across the river, but not the part where I lived. I missed it, but I could afford my rent and my bills and I started repaying my loans and tackled my taxes. I could afford television and cable, and to make myself feel better, I started watching SATC in syndication. I was amazed by how funny it was. How schmaltzy at times, at others profound. It was like Friends without Joey, Chandler, and Ross. Seinfeld with a quartet of Elaines and without Upper West Side neuroses. Even edited for syndication, the show was as hopeful and lively as I myself had finally and genuinely become. I didn’t matter that it took me until my late thirties to reach the place I wanted to be in my mid-twenties. I’d arrived. I was there. It was Jersey City…so what? And watching the show made me believe that, properly scaled, a little properly-accessorized comedy and romance of manners, even largely feminine ones, isn’t such a bad thing.
SATC is post-op Tales of the City, Anna Madrigal and Michael Tolliver with the coastlines and bustlines and orientations all reconfigured and styled within a spiked heel of its multiple lives. And that fits, because back in the Eighties Armistead Maupin’s serial was my SATC. It gave me more than information about the life I needed and wanted when I was a young gay man on the West Coast. Through TOTC I learned about poppers, The Castro, the Stud, the baths, the mores and manners that obtain in urban interaction with strangers and other lovers. I learned about AIDS, about loss, about love, about life. I learned too many of those lessons on paper, however, and at times didn’t get to apply them as much as I wanted to. But I tried. I really did.
Now here we are at last, I and the movie and the city, unfolding on different levels, at different paces. And places. I still live in New York…State. Watching the movie at my local multiplex (seven dollar matinees!) I was happy to settle back for my own romance-and-urban-nostalgia trip. There were almost more layers to watching the movie than I could handle. In the last years before I left—and in reality, through personal and professional circumstances, including my last Manhattan jobs, as maitre d’ in two popular restaurants—I’d become friendly with more than a few of the stars onscreen (genuine tact forbids me from mentioning which). In the last years before I left I’d watched the city shed its grime and grit and become close to movie-scene perfect. But like the onscreen rain-slicked shine on the cobblestones of the Meatpacking District, that perfection comes at a cost only some can afford. I couldn’t anymore. That had become real to me, but I had changed. I’d outgrown running from reality; I’d even learned to meet it halfway. But I hadn’t yet tried to create one, one that was mine.
I have vivid memories of the streets and shops and bistros. I even have my memories of meeting Candace Bushnell and Sarah Jessica Parker. I have my memories of watching Parker in the revival of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. Many times during the movie thought, I’ve been there. I know where that is. Oh, my God, there’s _________! I didn’t know he/she was going to be in this! Like cuts on a gem, these facts and facets folded over and under each other in several dimensions while I watched the movie, and when I came out it took me a moment to remember where I was. Then, also like a gem, it was clear. Oh, yes, I thought, I’m here in Western New York. This is my life, where the price of gas is over four a gallon and I’m learning and living still. And not just on paper anymore.
Friday, May 23, 2008
Out West
Over the last year here in Western New York, my status as a single man caught the attention of more than a few persons. The majority of them, however, were female.
I find women attractive, and I find attractive the fact that I may be attractive to them, but I am not customarily attracted by or to them. In New York City, even though I’m sure that my orientation was given, from time to time I found myself on the receiving end of an admiring glance from a woman. I also have no problem stating that on several occasions I could have consciously crossed the line, if only temporarily. For the bulk of my life, however, the vast, vast, vast majority of the individuals I found attractive have been male (duh…). Over the last year here in Western New York, however, my status as a single, healthy man has from time to time caught the attention of a woman. I’ve noticed this several times, and I find it amusing.
The first time it happened was in the office of a local newspaper. The receptionist seemed friendlier than necessary. Then the account manager I was there to see made quite the coquettish fuss coming out to speak with me in the reception area. Earlier this year, another of our advertising account managers acted noticeably girlish when we had lunch to discuss our account. Finally, some of the mothers of students at the ballet school where I work have made remarks that assume a heterosexual orientation. In fact, during the recent planning for my brother’s company’s benefit, the idea of auctioning off a date with me was briefly floated. (Thank God that idea didn’t go any further…)
This has happened to me before. When I left NYC in 2001 for the Adirondacks, I was still wearing a small wedding ring. I had purchased that wedding ring for myself because I believed myself wedded to something nobler and finer than a spouse; I believed myself wedded to an ideal—the creative ideal. I haven’t worn the wedding ring for many years, and in fact am regretting that I wore it as long as I did. I now admit both the early-twenties arrogance of that and the possibility that it might have deterred rather than attracted the right person.
I don’t find any reason to publicly set the record un-straight. These are very nice people, and I figure that it’s frankly no one’s business but mine and those who I wish to make it so. Nor do I want to put them off. I do sometimes wonder if I’m reverted to a place where I haven’t lived in a while, a place where I’m not always as open as I’d like to be. But how and where would I be open here? And with whom? Occasionally I go to the coffeeshop down on Elmwood, and notice that there are other gay men coming in and out (ha!). But I’m not gonna do the bar scene. So I’ve been trying the online dating thing, because the car culture here prevents the wonderfully-random and frequent casual encounters possible in a city of nine million, with crowded sidewalks and public transportation. And tonight at the gay center downtown, there’s a movie club that meets every other week. It might be worth a look, and if not, at least I’d get to see a movie...
I find women attractive, and I find attractive the fact that I may be attractive to them, but I am not customarily attracted by or to them. In New York City, even though I’m sure that my orientation was given, from time to time I found myself on the receiving end of an admiring glance from a woman. I also have no problem stating that on several occasions I could have consciously crossed the line, if only temporarily. For the bulk of my life, however, the vast, vast, vast majority of the individuals I found attractive have been male (duh…). Over the last year here in Western New York, however, my status as a single, healthy man has from time to time caught the attention of a woman. I’ve noticed this several times, and I find it amusing.
The first time it happened was in the office of a local newspaper. The receptionist seemed friendlier than necessary. Then the account manager I was there to see made quite the coquettish fuss coming out to speak with me in the reception area. Earlier this year, another of our advertising account managers acted noticeably girlish when we had lunch to discuss our account. Finally, some of the mothers of students at the ballet school where I work have made remarks that assume a heterosexual orientation. In fact, during the recent planning for my brother’s company’s benefit, the idea of auctioning off a date with me was briefly floated. (Thank God that idea didn’t go any further…)
This has happened to me before. When I left NYC in 2001 for the Adirondacks, I was still wearing a small wedding ring. I had purchased that wedding ring for myself because I believed myself wedded to something nobler and finer than a spouse; I believed myself wedded to an ideal—the creative ideal. I haven’t worn the wedding ring for many years, and in fact am regretting that I wore it as long as I did. I now admit both the early-twenties arrogance of that and the possibility that it might have deterred rather than attracted the right person.
I don’t find any reason to publicly set the record un-straight. These are very nice people, and I figure that it’s frankly no one’s business but mine and those who I wish to make it so. Nor do I want to put them off. I do sometimes wonder if I’m reverted to a place where I haven’t lived in a while, a place where I’m not always as open as I’d like to be. But how and where would I be open here? And with whom? Occasionally I go to the coffeeshop down on Elmwood, and notice that there are other gay men coming in and out (ha!). But I’m not gonna do the bar scene. So I’ve been trying the online dating thing, because the car culture here prevents the wonderfully-random and frequent casual encounters possible in a city of nine million, with crowded sidewalks and public transportation. And tonight at the gay center downtown, there’s a movie club that meets every other week. It might be worth a look, and if not, at least I’d get to see a movie...
Saturday, May 17, 2008
365
It’s been a year here in Western New York. That’s a benchmark that might have passed unnoticed had there not been a recent flurry of the kind of activity that one has to stand back from once it’s completed in order to assess the results. The activity included the Spring Benefit that I’ve been working on. The event was an enormous success, and it gives me deep and very personal pleasure to know that it was in service (and gratitude) to my brother and his wife and their vision. For a lapsed egotist like me, it was somewhat confounding to know both once and at the same time that it actually and genuinely was in service to them: all I kept thinking was that I wanted it to be as if I wasn’t there. In fact, the morning of the event I found myself wishing there was some way to turn the reins of the entire crazy thing over to someone's else. But I also knew that I was bringing to the table a sense of social life that took root in me a long, long time ago. It’s deeply part of me, and part of my identity as a member of my immediate family. Maybe it's even older than that, a sense of tribe around the campfire, of chant, and dance, and firelight under starlight. At times ours was the sort of household of which my friends later said, Can I come over to your house for Christmas? It wasn’t always thus; it didn’t easily remain thus, but my parents have always been social people. My brother and sister-in-law seldom have the chance to shine in that sort of setting, and really, when it comes right down to it, that’s what I wanted the evening to be: a chance for them and what they are, what they do, to shine. I wanted my role to be that of the arranger of the black velvet background. That my parents ended up RSVPing to the benefit invitation I sent them (somewhat as a lark) only added to the magic of the evening. They were a big hit, and their new grandson was a big hit to them, and they were a big hit to the kids. I was a little bereft when they left so quickly. Rarely have I enjoyed their company so much and in such depth. It seems a gift of age and time, one that took a long time to reveal itself, yet has done so with undeniable actuality.
Perhaps I naturally find myself wondering, Now what? There are valid reasons for me to remain here in Western New York, and certainly for the time being I have a lot I can keep doing. For one thing, I still want to help around the house, in the yard. I want to put the finishing touches (if you can call a railing a touch!) on the deck my brother and I started last year. I want to get the front door painted; want to fix up the breezeway. I want to see the idea of the production of Midsummer Night’s Dream become a reality. I want to be here when Ian starts talking, and walking. I want to finish the draft of my family memoir—it’s never gone so well, and I know that having been here, with family, living ordinarily and closely and messily despite all the (trivial, trivial) snags, has made the difference. But I’ve felt in recent days and weeks that what might come to be revealed has manifested itself somehow: that for all its depth and surface pleasure, pleasure of a very real kind that I have not really known before, Western New York may not be where I’m really supposed to be. It’s where I’ve been for twelve months now, and where I’ve flourished, but perhaps a healthy plant can take root anywhere, and maybe this may not be where I’ll land for myself. Much of what I’ve done in the last year has been for my brother and his family; it’s been, as I’ve said, a hugely satisfying experience. But now I am a little more than curious to know what my life will feel like once I’ve begun to channel more of those capabilities in the service of a life that will be and remain more entirely my own.
Perhaps I naturally find myself wondering, Now what? There are valid reasons for me to remain here in Western New York, and certainly for the time being I have a lot I can keep doing. For one thing, I still want to help around the house, in the yard. I want to put the finishing touches (if you can call a railing a touch!) on the deck my brother and I started last year. I want to get the front door painted; want to fix up the breezeway. I want to see the idea of the production of Midsummer Night’s Dream become a reality. I want to be here when Ian starts talking, and walking. I want to finish the draft of my family memoir—it’s never gone so well, and I know that having been here, with family, living ordinarily and closely and messily despite all the (trivial, trivial) snags, has made the difference. But I’ve felt in recent days and weeks that what might come to be revealed has manifested itself somehow: that for all its depth and surface pleasure, pleasure of a very real kind that I have not really known before, Western New York may not be where I’m really supposed to be. It’s where I’ve been for twelve months now, and where I’ve flourished, but perhaps a healthy plant can take root anywhere, and maybe this may not be where I’ll land for myself. Much of what I’ve done in the last year has been for my brother and his family; it’s been, as I’ve said, a hugely satisfying experience. But now I am a little more than curious to know what my life will feel like once I’ve begun to channel more of those capabilities in the service of a life that will be and remain more entirely my own.
Saturday, April 26, 2008
Busy
My latest and last residency of the year began this past week. I’m teaching personal narrative to four classes at a high school: two 9th grades, one 11th grade, one twelfth grade. Having taught only 7th and 8th graders so far, this was a new experience.
The school is in a temporary home near the heart of downtown Buffalo. The building itself is fascinating; it’s an old foundry, and in the basement halls the old rails that carts ran on are still embedded in the flooring. The demographics are more mixed than the other schools I’ve taught at—though as I write that, it strikes me that above a certain level, there’s an absence of students of color, and male students of color. In the senior class there are at least two girls with children.
Their writing is better than at the junior high school level, which is a huge relief. Some of it is frankly impressive. I’ve been encouraging them to write about someone they know. Some hide behind silence and outright resistance, but with a little prodding they each still manage to produce a few sentences. It isn’t the quantity that I’m after anyway; it’s the personal quality. Even if they’re writing about a friend or a parent or a boyfriend or someone else in the class, they are still expressing themselves through written language. Several of the kids, though young, have been touched by real life, and not simply in the form of a pregnancy carried to term. One of the juniors lost his mother only very recently; the best friend of one of the freshmen was recently murdered. They write of siblings or friends who drink too much; they write of sisters who have become pregnant.
This all makes me very grateful for the relative simplicity of my own high school years. My mother always said she and her sisters and friends were not the most popular, not the prettiest, not the wealthiest, but had the most laughs and the most fun. She tried to pass that on to me and my siblings. Looking back, I had a lot of fun in high school. It was later that life got real, got challenging.
The benefit I’ve been organizing for my brother’s company is two weeks away. I will be so glad when it’s all over. We have done a lot of work, and are quite ahead of schedule in terms of planning. I’d like there to be about 50 more reservations than we have right now, however; we’re somewhere in the vicinity of 75 to 100. We discovered yesterday that between the caterers, the bartenders, and the performers, we will have about 45 people on staff that night in various capacities. So the venue is going to be full, which is good. I just would like there to be about 50 more people, preferably with deep pockets. I’ve enjoyed the work involved but don’t know that it’s something I could do all the time. Once a year or twice a year at the most. It’s good, productive work and I enjoy bringing my experience in the hospitality business to the meetings. And I have enjoyed the chance to get to know the larger Buffalo community as a result.
The school is in a temporary home near the heart of downtown Buffalo. The building itself is fascinating; it’s an old foundry, and in the basement halls the old rails that carts ran on are still embedded in the flooring. The demographics are more mixed than the other schools I’ve taught at—though as I write that, it strikes me that above a certain level, there’s an absence of students of color, and male students of color. In the senior class there are at least two girls with children.
Their writing is better than at the junior high school level, which is a huge relief. Some of it is frankly impressive. I’ve been encouraging them to write about someone they know. Some hide behind silence and outright resistance, but with a little prodding they each still manage to produce a few sentences. It isn’t the quantity that I’m after anyway; it’s the personal quality. Even if they’re writing about a friend or a parent or a boyfriend or someone else in the class, they are still expressing themselves through written language. Several of the kids, though young, have been touched by real life, and not simply in the form of a pregnancy carried to term. One of the juniors lost his mother only very recently; the best friend of one of the freshmen was recently murdered. They write of siblings or friends who drink too much; they write of sisters who have become pregnant.
This all makes me very grateful for the relative simplicity of my own high school years. My mother always said she and her sisters and friends were not the most popular, not the prettiest, not the wealthiest, but had the most laughs and the most fun. She tried to pass that on to me and my siblings. Looking back, I had a lot of fun in high school. It was later that life got real, got challenging.
The benefit I’ve been organizing for my brother’s company is two weeks away. I will be so glad when it’s all over. We have done a lot of work, and are quite ahead of schedule in terms of planning. I’d like there to be about 50 more reservations than we have right now, however; we’re somewhere in the vicinity of 75 to 100. We discovered yesterday that between the caterers, the bartenders, and the performers, we will have about 45 people on staff that night in various capacities. So the venue is going to be full, which is good. I just would like there to be about 50 more people, preferably with deep pockets. I’ve enjoyed the work involved but don’t know that it’s something I could do all the time. Once a year or twice a year at the most. It’s good, productive work and I enjoy bringing my experience in the hospitality business to the meetings. And I have enjoyed the chance to get to know the larger Buffalo community as a result.
Monday, April 14, 2008
Grill Meets Boy
Two summers ago, my brother Bill bought the gas grill which now sits in the backyard here in Williamsville. He bought it and assembled it in what seemed like a matter of minutes. I have since become intimately familiar with his tendency to do things lickety-split; Bill doesn’t like to pause to think, whereas I sometimes tend to think too much.
We used the grill that first night. I was a little skeptical: gas? How tacky. But that was my Northern California mesquite-wood snobbery; I was thinking like a character from Cyra McFadden’s The Serial. The food—I don’t remember what we grilled—tasted just fine. And now I stand on the other side of a calendar year, having used the grill all last summer and well into the fall. The grill has since received a couple of solid dentings from branches falling in bad weather or high winds (there are so many trees on this property, that during a high wind last fall, the whole family moved down to the living room to sleep, afraid that one would come crashing down in the middle of the night; it didn’t, but everyone caught cold from sleeping in the draft). The grill sat outside under the snow all winter, waiting, waiting. Susie said that Bill sometimes used the grill in the winter, but he didn’t do so this season.
A week ago I bought some pork chops and decided to do them on the grill. I bought them with the bone in; I’ve decided that is the best and only way to get the flavor I’m looking for. I brushed them with olive oil and sprinkled them with salt and pepper; as I liberally salt the meat, I inevitably think of Diana Trilling, who taught me how to salt. When I started to work for her, I was coming off years of low-sodium and no-sodium cooking that started back home. It took a couple summers of cooking with and for her to learn that salt was indispensable for flavoring. Anyway, I seasoned those pork chops and put them on the grill and seared them at a high temperature, turned them, then lowered the temperature and the grill’s lid. They came out a little dry, but better than last year. So I decided to try some thick-cut ribs. I asked the man at the meat counter what he suggested, and he said to use the uppermost rack and grill them for 45 minutes to an hour.
The grill has two racks: the topmost one pivots—I guess you could use it for smoking—so I seasoned the ribs and put them on the top rack. I turned the meat when I could see a bit of pink, about fifteen minutes at 350 (the grill has a handy temperature gauge). After fifteen minutes on that side I turned and rotated the ribs, moving the ones on the inside to the outside, and so on, and basted them once with Asian barbeque sauce. Fifteen minutes later, I did the other side. At an hour, I took them off the grill; I probably could have done them a little less. Still, they were juicier than any ribs I did all last summer. I’m looking forward to a long season of ribs done exactly the same way.
We used the grill that first night. I was a little skeptical: gas? How tacky. But that was my Northern California mesquite-wood snobbery; I was thinking like a character from Cyra McFadden’s The Serial. The food—I don’t remember what we grilled—tasted just fine. And now I stand on the other side of a calendar year, having used the grill all last summer and well into the fall. The grill has since received a couple of solid dentings from branches falling in bad weather or high winds (there are so many trees on this property, that during a high wind last fall, the whole family moved down to the living room to sleep, afraid that one would come crashing down in the middle of the night; it didn’t, but everyone caught cold from sleeping in the draft). The grill sat outside under the snow all winter, waiting, waiting. Susie said that Bill sometimes used the grill in the winter, but he didn’t do so this season.
A week ago I bought some pork chops and decided to do them on the grill. I bought them with the bone in; I’ve decided that is the best and only way to get the flavor I’m looking for. I brushed them with olive oil and sprinkled them with salt and pepper; as I liberally salt the meat, I inevitably think of Diana Trilling, who taught me how to salt. When I started to work for her, I was coming off years of low-sodium and no-sodium cooking that started back home. It took a couple summers of cooking with and for her to learn that salt was indispensable for flavoring. Anyway, I seasoned those pork chops and put them on the grill and seared them at a high temperature, turned them, then lowered the temperature and the grill’s lid. They came out a little dry, but better than last year. So I decided to try some thick-cut ribs. I asked the man at the meat counter what he suggested, and he said to use the uppermost rack and grill them for 45 minutes to an hour.
The grill has two racks: the topmost one pivots—I guess you could use it for smoking—so I seasoned the ribs and put them on the top rack. I turned the meat when I could see a bit of pink, about fifteen minutes at 350 (the grill has a handy temperature gauge). After fifteen minutes on that side I turned and rotated the ribs, moving the ones on the inside to the outside, and so on, and basted them once with Asian barbeque sauce. Fifteen minutes later, I did the other side. At an hour, I took them off the grill; I probably could have done them a little less. Still, they were juicier than any ribs I did all last summer. I’m looking forward to a long season of ribs done exactly the same way.
Sunday, April 6, 2008
Sprung
A friend and I just came back from a few hours outside on this, the first truly glorious day of spring here. We went down to Elmwood Avenue, the commercial district which has a fun, hipsterish vibe. It’s like Seventh Avenue in Park Slope, Brooklyn. Boutiques and jewelry stores and galleries and restaurants and bars and residences and apartment buildings and churches line the street from Delaware Park south to the downtown area. The part of the avenue that one could consider “Elmwood” in this Jane Jacobs-sense is about two miles long and fairly flat. While it’s possible to walk from one end of the entire commercial district to the other, it would probably become tiring, and you would have to walk or bus back, and I haven’t taken a ride on the bus here yet. Along that two-mile length, there are about four or five smaller strips of development, and Spot Coffee forms the urban cornerstone of only one of them. The clientele is younger rather than older, but you do see the random pair of seniors or actual grownups. It hasn’t been taken over by the McLaren stroller crowd the way Seventh Avenue has.
Then we went to Delaware Park and walked around a little bit. My friend is in a rather advanced stage of kidney failure, and has to go for dialysis every other day, so he doesn’t do a lot of walking. But he said the sunshine and fresh air and the brief stroll we took did him good. It did both of us good. The change from winter to spring here this last week has been something to see—palpable and tangible. There are purple crocuses sprouting in the front yard, and the very last bits of snow are the ones in the shadiest corners. The lawn feels like wet springboard, and there was a lot of moss underneath all that snow. I’d like to get busy in the yard right away, but hopefully we’ll have a long spring and summer to do things like finish the deck, paint the door and the breezeway, figure out what to do with the yard.
I find myself wondering what it means to be closing in on my first year here. It is rather incredible that it’s still been only ten-and-a-half months. My life here remains rich and full and busy, and for that I’m deeply grateful. I wonder if it means that I will be staying on here. I don’t think I can figure that out just yet; I don’t think I can even begin to approach it. The timing feels premature. I’m not in my twenties or even my thirties, yet I’ve successfully transitioned into a completely different line of work, one that I could see myself doing for years to come. The kind of work I do for my brother’s studio utilizes all of my skills, and I continue to find it one of the most fulfilling things I’ve ever done in my life. If I were to continue on in the long term, I’d expect certain things from the work like benefits and set hours and such. And I wouldn’t want to be living with my brother while I was working for him. But I’m also at peace because I feel that many of these questions remain to be answered; in fact, most of them remain to be asked. They lie somewhere on the horizon, still out of sight, like summer. Why rush them? It’s only finally become spring.
Then we went to Delaware Park and walked around a little bit. My friend is in a rather advanced stage of kidney failure, and has to go for dialysis every other day, so he doesn’t do a lot of walking. But he said the sunshine and fresh air and the brief stroll we took did him good. It did both of us good. The change from winter to spring here this last week has been something to see—palpable and tangible. There are purple crocuses sprouting in the front yard, and the very last bits of snow are the ones in the shadiest corners. The lawn feels like wet springboard, and there was a lot of moss underneath all that snow. I’d like to get busy in the yard right away, but hopefully we’ll have a long spring and summer to do things like finish the deck, paint the door and the breezeway, figure out what to do with the yard.
I find myself wondering what it means to be closing in on my first year here. It is rather incredible that it’s still been only ten-and-a-half months. My life here remains rich and full and busy, and for that I’m deeply grateful. I wonder if it means that I will be staying on here. I don’t think I can figure that out just yet; I don’t think I can even begin to approach it. The timing feels premature. I’m not in my twenties or even my thirties, yet I’ve successfully transitioned into a completely different line of work, one that I could see myself doing for years to come. The kind of work I do for my brother’s studio utilizes all of my skills, and I continue to find it one of the most fulfilling things I’ve ever done in my life. If I were to continue on in the long term, I’d expect certain things from the work like benefits and set hours and such. And I wouldn’t want to be living with my brother while I was working for him. But I’m also at peace because I feel that many of these questions remain to be answered; in fact, most of them remain to be asked. They lie somewhere on the horizon, still out of sight, like summer. Why rush them? It’s only finally become spring.
Friday, March 28, 2008
The End of the Matter
Waking up to three new inches of accumulated snow at the end of March isn’t an experience I’ve had in a while. The winters in New York City were seldom this long. Last January there had the steady, cold sameness that really made you feel the post-holiday, thirty-one-day length of that month, but here in Buffalo, March has become the longest month of the year. It doesn’t help matters that Easter has already come and gone. That only makes it feel like its May 1, and still snowing. But a glance at the National Weather Service page for U.S. Postal Code 14221 indicates a “warming trend” over the next seven days, the temperature going all the way to the high forties by this time next week.
I’ve been staying busy this winter, though. So busy that sometimes I find myself wondering what I was doing in NYC, whether I was just standing still. And truth be told, I was. I was writing, but not as much as I wanted to; I was working, but perhaps more than I needed. I had something of a social life, but nothing actual. Working in the restaurant business always provided this ersatz social life. I came to enjoy that part of the work a bit more only when I was giving it up.
It’s rather remarkable to me to look back a year and realize that at this time in 2007, I was just at the beginning of the process of the decision-making that brought me to Buffalo. Some circumstances all conspired at just this point in the calendar to make me feel the brunt of my unhappiness in Manhattan. It felt like a personal crisis; it felt like the beginning of the end of a relationship, but I was still at the point where I couldn’t even see the option of leaving on my own. As I said in the first post on this blog, I was waiting for NYC to break up with me.
I had a similar experience just last week. One of the small events that had played a part in my larger decision to come here last year was have heard from a literary agent about a project I’d pitched, a selection of the essays written by Diana Trilling. I’d known Diana personally; I’d actually worked as her assistant for several summers on Cape Cod. Diana was a formidable figure in American intellectual history, and knowing her on the level that I did was one of the great experiences of my life, a personal and intellectual passage with no parallel until then. In her last summer, Diana worked on a piece on the 1961 Kennedy White House dinner for the American Nobel laureates; she and her husband attended, and her memoir of the experience was wonderful. Published posthumously in the New Yorker, it was also selected by Cynthia Ozick for the Best American Essays. When it was published, I thought it too bad that the original, longer piece couldn’t also be made available at some point; there were qualities in the original that were lost by editorial cuts. And out of that thought came my eventual idea of doing a selection of Diana’s pieces myself.
I pitched it to her literary executors in October 2004. Last February they contacted me again, and it was apparent that they were more serious about the project. So was I, and time had helped me see both Diana and her work more clearly and critically. I became interested in aspects of her thinking I hadn’t seen before. So one of the reasons I gave myself for moving here to Buffalo was the idea of having real time to work on this project. It became important to me. Unfortunately, it never seemed to become important to the literary executors or, importantly, to Diana’s surviving family. I pestered them every few months or so, and since the start of the year made a stronger effort, but nothing worked. The insulting thing was that they didn’t even respond at all. That’s behavior I expect from literary agents; from Diana’s family, whom I’d known personally, it was another matter.
I packed up all my research materials and all of the books, the Xeroxes, the notecards, and put them in a box. It felt painful, like packing up the things of someone you’ve lived with, but when I woke up the next day I felt better. Don’t get me wrong: if the project walked back into my life like Mr. Big walking back into Carrie Bradshaw’s, I’d think about it. But not today.
I’ve been staying busy this winter, though. So busy that sometimes I find myself wondering what I was doing in NYC, whether I was just standing still. And truth be told, I was. I was writing, but not as much as I wanted to; I was working, but perhaps more than I needed. I had something of a social life, but nothing actual. Working in the restaurant business always provided this ersatz social life. I came to enjoy that part of the work a bit more only when I was giving it up.
It’s rather remarkable to me to look back a year and realize that at this time in 2007, I was just at the beginning of the process of the decision-making that brought me to Buffalo. Some circumstances all conspired at just this point in the calendar to make me feel the brunt of my unhappiness in Manhattan. It felt like a personal crisis; it felt like the beginning of the end of a relationship, but I was still at the point where I couldn’t even see the option of leaving on my own. As I said in the first post on this blog, I was waiting for NYC to break up with me.
I had a similar experience just last week. One of the small events that had played a part in my larger decision to come here last year was have heard from a literary agent about a project I’d pitched, a selection of the essays written by Diana Trilling. I’d known Diana personally; I’d actually worked as her assistant for several summers on Cape Cod. Diana was a formidable figure in American intellectual history, and knowing her on the level that I did was one of the great experiences of my life, a personal and intellectual passage with no parallel until then. In her last summer, Diana worked on a piece on the 1961 Kennedy White House dinner for the American Nobel laureates; she and her husband attended, and her memoir of the experience was wonderful. Published posthumously in the New Yorker, it was also selected by Cynthia Ozick for the Best American Essays. When it was published, I thought it too bad that the original, longer piece couldn’t also be made available at some point; there were qualities in the original that were lost by editorial cuts. And out of that thought came my eventual idea of doing a selection of Diana’s pieces myself.
I pitched it to her literary executors in October 2004. Last February they contacted me again, and it was apparent that they were more serious about the project. So was I, and time had helped me see both Diana and her work more clearly and critically. I became interested in aspects of her thinking I hadn’t seen before. So one of the reasons I gave myself for moving here to Buffalo was the idea of having real time to work on this project. It became important to me. Unfortunately, it never seemed to become important to the literary executors or, importantly, to Diana’s surviving family. I pestered them every few months or so, and since the start of the year made a stronger effort, but nothing worked. The insulting thing was that they didn’t even respond at all. That’s behavior I expect from literary agents; from Diana’s family, whom I’d known personally, it was another matter.
I packed up all my research materials and all of the books, the Xeroxes, the notecards, and put them in a box. It felt painful, like packing up the things of someone you’ve lived with, but when I woke up the next day I felt better. Don’t get me wrong: if the project walked back into my life like Mr. Big walking back into Carrie Bradshaw’s, I’d think about it. But not today.
Sunday, March 9, 2008
Spring Ahead
This morning the sun is out with a vengeance, and that’s a blessing, because yesterday I spent the entire day confined to about 25 square feet of this house. The snow started Friday afternoon about 1 p.m., and it was clear that it was going to be a doozy. At the clothing store (it was time to put in a fresh stock of men’s “basics,” as they were called at J.C. Penney) I told the clerk, “I haven’t seen it coming down this fast all season.” When he agreed, I felt like a longtime Buffalonian.
I had about 225 invitations to hand-address for the spring benefit we’re doing in May for my brother’s organization. We’re having an auction/wine tasting/cocktail party/performance to raise money for an original production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” This was an idea I had last fall, when my sister-in-law and my brother were talking about dream projects. I realized that there might also be an opportunity to do something more “grownup” than the pizza-and-pop potlucks we do at the end of the year or after the Nutcracker. Now, I’m a party planner from way back. I used to love to host dinners for 12, 16, 20, and I also used to plan parties that never came to fruition (ask me how I actually spent the Turn of the Millenium). But with the resources available to me here—time, energy, motivation both internal and external, and most importantly, help and support—I felt like it was possible to try, just try, to put something together. Not some fancy dress-ball fundraiser, but something reasonably scaled to the demographics served by my brother’s school.
With the snow coming down steadily through most of yesterday morning, I shut myself in my room and started in with the calligraphy pens. I didn’t try to do actual calligraphy, but pseudo-calligraphy. I managed to get through all of the envelopes by the end of the evening—reply envelopes, address list, and return addresses. It’s funny how you sometimes can get on a tear with something. I wanted to give up, but I also wanted to get through the whole kit and caboodle in order to drop them all in the mail first thing Monday. I turned on HGTV for company and got through all the envelopes and some good DIY tips as well (not to mention that HGTV has the best—and I mean the BEST—eye-candy on television.
I have short stories to evaluate today, but with the sun and blue sky and white, white snow, it seems silly to stay inside. But my blinds are up, the drapes drawn, and I suppose if I put my determination-cap on, I can get through those and maybe even get around to reading the book whose review is due tomorrow.
I had about 225 invitations to hand-address for the spring benefit we’re doing in May for my brother’s organization. We’re having an auction/wine tasting/cocktail party/performance to raise money for an original production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” This was an idea I had last fall, when my sister-in-law and my brother were talking about dream projects. I realized that there might also be an opportunity to do something more “grownup” than the pizza-and-pop potlucks we do at the end of the year or after the Nutcracker. Now, I’m a party planner from way back. I used to love to host dinners for 12, 16, 20, and I also used to plan parties that never came to fruition (ask me how I actually spent the Turn of the Millenium). But with the resources available to me here—time, energy, motivation both internal and external, and most importantly, help and support—I felt like it was possible to try, just try, to put something together. Not some fancy dress-ball fundraiser, but something reasonably scaled to the demographics served by my brother’s school.
With the snow coming down steadily through most of yesterday morning, I shut myself in my room and started in with the calligraphy pens. I didn’t try to do actual calligraphy, but pseudo-calligraphy. I managed to get through all of the envelopes by the end of the evening—reply envelopes, address list, and return addresses. It’s funny how you sometimes can get on a tear with something. I wanted to give up, but I also wanted to get through the whole kit and caboodle in order to drop them all in the mail first thing Monday. I turned on HGTV for company and got through all the envelopes and some good DIY tips as well (not to mention that HGTV has the best—and I mean the BEST—eye-candy on television.
I have short stories to evaluate today, but with the sun and blue sky and white, white snow, it seems silly to stay inside. But my blinds are up, the drapes drawn, and I suppose if I put my determination-cap on, I can get through those and maybe even get around to reading the book whose review is due tomorrow.
Tuesday, March 4, 2008
On Time and Writing
I’m halfway through my second teaching artist residency. It’s a different school than the first, and the demographics are more mixed. Furthermore, the girls and boys are separated. It makes for a completely different dynamic than my first school.
The host teacher and I agree to teach a unit on narrative poetry. We are taking the approach of teaching them how to draft and write and edit the narrative (story) first, and on the next and last day we will be pushing them into poetry form. I’ve been very pleased with how this residency has been going. For one thing, we started off very strong: I had the kids pick a photograph and tell the story of what was happening. The pictures were from a collection of the Pulitzer Prize winners over the years. I chose to leave out some of the photographs; some of them are very graphic or have a vivid message. Some of them, however, are more upbeat—a couple color photos from the 1985 and 1992 Olympics, for example. The students in each class had to pick their own in a process of elimination. It was interesting to see how some of them gravitated towards the obvious, while others challenged themselves.
Then to see their imaginations and intellects at work! They really hunkered down and wrote. Sure, there is usually a degree of goofing around to put up with—and yesterday and Friday we worked in the computer lab. I spent most of my time monitoring use of MySpace. On the other hand, I’ve never seen so much use of the grammar and spell checks. Good grief! What will their children have as tech tools?
It’s really fun for me because it makes me think about narration versus story. The kids slide easily into a top-this mode—“There was a car crash, and an earthquake, and a fire, and then someone died, and then another person was shot, and then a bank was robbed.” Even the girls do this—lots of death! So we talked about plausibility and believability. And we talk about dialogue and detail and description. It’s quite something. And some of them can really write—-for example, the seventh-grade boy who has the most trouble with focus nevertheless wrote in a second-person voice that was completely believable and compelling. Another wrote a play about a forest fire—-Norman Maclean would be proud.
Speaking of writing, I had this horrible thought last night at about 4 a.m. (No more Mighty Taco!) I had this thought that I may never finish my book about my family. I hope that’s only a sense of panic and not a sense of truth. I hadn’t felt anything like it in several years. I often have this idea that because I made certain changes, I also paved the way for all possibilities. That kind of panic attack makes me think of my own limitations, my own mortality. And even now, even with a sense of life as I’ve never had before, I can fear that I will leave too much unfinished. Well…I guess if I keep eating Mighty Taco before bedtime, that will be true…
The host teacher and I agree to teach a unit on narrative poetry. We are taking the approach of teaching them how to draft and write and edit the narrative (story) first, and on the next and last day we will be pushing them into poetry form. I’ve been very pleased with how this residency has been going. For one thing, we started off very strong: I had the kids pick a photograph and tell the story of what was happening. The pictures were from a collection of the Pulitzer Prize winners over the years. I chose to leave out some of the photographs; some of them are very graphic or have a vivid message. Some of them, however, are more upbeat—a couple color photos from the 1985 and 1992 Olympics, for example. The students in each class had to pick their own in a process of elimination. It was interesting to see how some of them gravitated towards the obvious, while others challenged themselves.
Then to see their imaginations and intellects at work! They really hunkered down and wrote. Sure, there is usually a degree of goofing around to put up with—and yesterday and Friday we worked in the computer lab. I spent most of my time monitoring use of MySpace. On the other hand, I’ve never seen so much use of the grammar and spell checks. Good grief! What will their children have as tech tools?
It’s really fun for me because it makes me think about narration versus story. The kids slide easily into a top-this mode—“There was a car crash, and an earthquake, and a fire, and then someone died, and then another person was shot, and then a bank was robbed.” Even the girls do this—lots of death! So we talked about plausibility and believability. And we talk about dialogue and detail and description. It’s quite something. And some of them can really write—-for example, the seventh-grade boy who has the most trouble with focus nevertheless wrote in a second-person voice that was completely believable and compelling. Another wrote a play about a forest fire—-Norman Maclean would be proud.
Speaking of writing, I had this horrible thought last night at about 4 a.m. (No more Mighty Taco!) I had this thought that I may never finish my book about my family. I hope that’s only a sense of panic and not a sense of truth. I hadn’t felt anything like it in several years. I often have this idea that because I made certain changes, I also paved the way for all possibilities. That kind of panic attack makes me think of my own limitations, my own mortality. And even now, even with a sense of life as I’ve never had before, I can fear that I will leave too much unfinished. Well…I guess if I keep eating Mighty Taco before bedtime, that will be true…
Sunday, February 24, 2008
Ordinary, Indeed
“31 Days of Oscar” on TCM usually means there’s always something on cable in February to prevent one—-well, all right, to prevent me—-from watching endless reruns of “Project Runway” as if I don’t know every button and ruche. Last night I caught a movie I haven’t watched in many, many years: the 1980 Best Picture winner, “Ordinary People.” Just as I was once in thrall to the Marchmains, the dysfunctional family in Brideshead Revisited, I was also drawn to the Jarretts of Lake Forest, Illinois. I was drawn to the setting, drawn to the brittle, even unpleasant performance by Mary Tyler Moore, and drawn to the dramatization of “a failure to communicate.” I realized, watching the film after nearly thirty years, that I too made the mistake of once believing that communicating was enough.
They’re called movies for mechanical reasons, but I think we Americans also mishear the idea of emotional ones in the label: they move us to laugh, to cry, to “come to terms,” as the ad campaign for another Best Picture would have it a few years after “Ordinary People.” Well, I was moved all right: moved to recognition of how young I was when Judith Guest’s airless family melodrama transferred to screen. But I was also too young to know that the story was airless, or was a melodrama. Watching it now, there didn’t seem to be an authentic note in Mary Tyler Moore’s performance, which I was once naïve enough to think “one of the great all-time screen performances” (as if I’d seen anything yet). But then Moore has always been an odd screen actress. Her girlish, brittle vulnerability worked in television comedy, but on the larger screen she didn’t really connect with the audience until “Flirting with Disaster.”
Donald Sutherland and Judd Hirsch are fine—-Sutherland, with his odd, reptilian face, has never really gotten his due, but seems to be getting it now, and Hirsch is very nearly a caricature of a “Feel! Feel!” movie psychiatrist (a role he ultimately, laughably took in “Independence Day”). Gene Hackman was supposed to play the role of Dr. Berger, but stepped out at the last minute. Hackman would have set up a different and more powerful resonance in the father-son dynamic and resolution, but also might have overshadowed the actor who holds the film together, Timothy Hutton. It’s an amazing performance, and if Robert Redford “deserves” his directing Oscar, it’s for whatever he did to help Hutton in the role of the son coming back to life. Hutton is scared and twitchy at the start, but grows steadier and warmer and stronger. His scenes with Hirsch were shot in nine mere days, and they are the core of the performance in the movie that genuinely deserves to be called great.
As for Redford, he didn’t deserve the Oscar as Hutton deserved his. Scorsese and Polanski were nominated, and probably “deserved” one for the work they did, but so did David Lynch and Richard Rush (if you haven't seen "The Stunt Man" you're missing out). Redford really deserved a directing Oscar for "Quiz Show," however, his deft, sly, marvelous, subtle black comedy about the game show scandals of the 1950s, which was everything I mistook "Ordinary People" for at the time: a rich, complex, and ultimately unresolved story about truth and authenticity, about identity, and yes, love. Love of money, love of fame, love of celebrity. Even love and misunderstanding about and between a father and son—in this case, Mark Van Doren and his son Charles.
The problem with Guest’s story, as I see it now, is that the plot device of the boating accident doesn’t ring true. Not as backstory, but in the quasi-Classical, quasi-Freudian purpose it serves in the life of Conrad-as-hero. Hutton makes Conrad’s suicide very plausible, but I wish Guest’s book editor had directed her to make the circumstances that haunt Conrad the death of a very close friend. Every element in the novel and the movie adaptation would still work—and above all the character of Beth would work even better had her psychology been that of a mother frozen with love and grief and anger over nearly losing a son she didn’t actually lose. There would even be a homoerotic subtext to the passage through loss and love that leads to the (hetero)sexual awakening of Conrad. Some of this is there: the scenes with the other swimmers, the relationship between Conrad and Berger, the final clinch between Calvin and Conrad, the destruction of Beth. But as we have it now, it isn’t entirely real or authentic, even though it insistently calls itself ordinary.
They’re called movies for mechanical reasons, but I think we Americans also mishear the idea of emotional ones in the label: they move us to laugh, to cry, to “come to terms,” as the ad campaign for another Best Picture would have it a few years after “Ordinary People.” Well, I was moved all right: moved to recognition of how young I was when Judith Guest’s airless family melodrama transferred to screen. But I was also too young to know that the story was airless, or was a melodrama. Watching it now, there didn’t seem to be an authentic note in Mary Tyler Moore’s performance, which I was once naïve enough to think “one of the great all-time screen performances” (as if I’d seen anything yet). But then Moore has always been an odd screen actress. Her girlish, brittle vulnerability worked in television comedy, but on the larger screen she didn’t really connect with the audience until “Flirting with Disaster.”
Donald Sutherland and Judd Hirsch are fine—-Sutherland, with his odd, reptilian face, has never really gotten his due, but seems to be getting it now, and Hirsch is very nearly a caricature of a “Feel! Feel!” movie psychiatrist (a role he ultimately, laughably took in “Independence Day”). Gene Hackman was supposed to play the role of Dr. Berger, but stepped out at the last minute. Hackman would have set up a different and more powerful resonance in the father-son dynamic and resolution, but also might have overshadowed the actor who holds the film together, Timothy Hutton. It’s an amazing performance, and if Robert Redford “deserves” his directing Oscar, it’s for whatever he did to help Hutton in the role of the son coming back to life. Hutton is scared and twitchy at the start, but grows steadier and warmer and stronger. His scenes with Hirsch were shot in nine mere days, and they are the core of the performance in the movie that genuinely deserves to be called great.
As for Redford, he didn’t deserve the Oscar as Hutton deserved his. Scorsese and Polanski were nominated, and probably “deserved” one for the work they did, but so did David Lynch and Richard Rush (if you haven't seen "The Stunt Man" you're missing out). Redford really deserved a directing Oscar for "Quiz Show," however, his deft, sly, marvelous, subtle black comedy about the game show scandals of the 1950s, which was everything I mistook "Ordinary People" for at the time: a rich, complex, and ultimately unresolved story about truth and authenticity, about identity, and yes, love. Love of money, love of fame, love of celebrity. Even love and misunderstanding about and between a father and son—in this case, Mark Van Doren and his son Charles.
The problem with Guest’s story, as I see it now, is that the plot device of the boating accident doesn’t ring true. Not as backstory, but in the quasi-Classical, quasi-Freudian purpose it serves in the life of Conrad-as-hero. Hutton makes Conrad’s suicide very plausible, but I wish Guest’s book editor had directed her to make the circumstances that haunt Conrad the death of a very close friend. Every element in the novel and the movie adaptation would still work—and above all the character of Beth would work even better had her psychology been that of a mother frozen with love and grief and anger over nearly losing a son she didn’t actually lose. There would even be a homoerotic subtext to the passage through loss and love that leads to the (hetero)sexual awakening of Conrad. Some of this is there: the scenes with the other swimmers, the relationship between Conrad and Berger, the final clinch between Calvin and Conrad, the destruction of Beth. But as we have it now, it isn’t entirely real or authentic, even though it insistently calls itself ordinary.
Sunday, February 17, 2008
Silver
I recently realized that I have been writing for twenty-five years. And have been a published writer for twenty. I am not a bestselling author, and in comparison to anyone on such a list and many writers who I am privileged to know personally, very, very few people know my name or my work. Many of my "readers" are family and friends, but even as I write that I realize how much writing I actually generate these days, and where and how often it gets published. As my publication record lengthens and the range of places I’ve been published broadens—-newspapers, magazines, and journals from San Francisco to Chicago to Fort Lauderdale to New York City, not to mention the web—-I realize that a significant amount of my work has been read by people I will never know.
Those twenty-five years began a long time ago in a class at West Valley College in Saratoga, California. I was living with my parents then, and was taking classes at the local community college. Although my awareness of my interest in writing goes back to fourth and fifth grade, it was at West Valley, in English 70, Creative Writing, with Carol Abate, that I really began writing—and reading. I remember many of the students from those first classes. Sometimes the writers’ group I belong to here takes me back through some basic discussion of terms and such; sometimes I sense a lack of authenticity in writing and it reminds me of those who were just dabbling in writing in that class. We have a tradition in my writer’s group of beginning our sessions with a timed writing based on a quote; someone is designated to bring the quote each week, and then we write in response to it for seven-and-a-half minutes. Back at West Valley, those of us who were most enthusiastic about writing were just discovering literature—not the classics, but contemporary writing. I’d recently discovered a writer named Breece D’J Pancake who had been published in The Atlantic (I’d also only recently discovered The Atlantic.) I’d also found Bernard Malamud in its pages. I was introduced to the work of Tillie Olsen. I knew the name Flannery O’Connor, but still thought she was a man. But we were learning; I was learning. I read One Hundred Years of Solitude and felt like I'd travelled to another planet. When we enthusiasts found a writer we loved, or a quote from a writer we loved, we shared it with each other loudly, excitedly. The first person I ever saw rolling their own cigarettes took that class; the first person I ever knew who killed himself did too.
Carol Abate once brought in a poem called “The Death of Marilyn Monroe” by Sharon Olds. Through her books Satan Says, The Dead and The Living, and The Gold Cell, Olds quickly became a powerful source of inspiration for much of the work I wrote in those early years. As mentioned in a previous post, I also made my first encounters with Robert Hass and Robert Pinsky at a local writing conference around that time. I’m more familiar with Hass and Pinsky now than I was then, but haven’t kept up with Olds’ work lately; I’ve been making other discoveries. And among the discoveries or rediscoveries I made recently was my work from back then. After 9/11, I saved all my writing to some of the old hard floppy disks where I’d saved everything I’d written until then; the documents were Word for Macintosh files, and around the same time I switched to an IBM ThinkPad, so I wasn’t able to access them. I just figured I’d get access somehow, someday, but the years passed and the files remained where they were. The floppies traveled with me, however, and I finally got around to having them converted. I was gratified to get the files back after all this time, and happy to see how much of the work holds up. Though I never succeeded in finding a place for its publication, and am not giving up on it, here is the first real poem I ever wrote:
Marathon
dead on arrival
you come
exhaust
-ed defeat
-ed you come
you have pound
-ed to bone
your limbs forward
thrust
unerr
-ing unfail
-ing placed feet
in the dust
with the tight
in your muscle
your face set in steel
going on
-going on
going on
do you feel
how the news
when it breaks
it will
break me in
-stead arch your
back toss your
head with the
rhythm the
tread
the end a
-head break the
ribbons and
ribbons and
ribbons and
yes
Those twenty-five years began a long time ago in a class at West Valley College in Saratoga, California. I was living with my parents then, and was taking classes at the local community college. Although my awareness of my interest in writing goes back to fourth and fifth grade, it was at West Valley, in English 70, Creative Writing, with Carol Abate, that I really began writing—and reading. I remember many of the students from those first classes. Sometimes the writers’ group I belong to here takes me back through some basic discussion of terms and such; sometimes I sense a lack of authenticity in writing and it reminds me of those who were just dabbling in writing in that class. We have a tradition in my writer’s group of beginning our sessions with a timed writing based on a quote; someone is designated to bring the quote each week, and then we write in response to it for seven-and-a-half minutes. Back at West Valley, those of us who were most enthusiastic about writing were just discovering literature—not the classics, but contemporary writing. I’d recently discovered a writer named Breece D’J Pancake who had been published in The Atlantic (I’d also only recently discovered The Atlantic.) I’d also found Bernard Malamud in its pages. I was introduced to the work of Tillie Olsen. I knew the name Flannery O’Connor, but still thought she was a man. But we were learning; I was learning. I read One Hundred Years of Solitude and felt like I'd travelled to another planet. When we enthusiasts found a writer we loved, or a quote from a writer we loved, we shared it with each other loudly, excitedly. The first person I ever saw rolling their own cigarettes took that class; the first person I ever knew who killed himself did too.
Carol Abate once brought in a poem called “The Death of Marilyn Monroe” by Sharon Olds. Through her books Satan Says, The Dead and The Living, and The Gold Cell, Olds quickly became a powerful source of inspiration for much of the work I wrote in those early years. As mentioned in a previous post, I also made my first encounters with Robert Hass and Robert Pinsky at a local writing conference around that time. I’m more familiar with Hass and Pinsky now than I was then, but haven’t kept up with Olds’ work lately; I’ve been making other discoveries. And among the discoveries or rediscoveries I made recently was my work from back then. After 9/11, I saved all my writing to some of the old hard floppy disks where I’d saved everything I’d written until then; the documents were Word for Macintosh files, and around the same time I switched to an IBM ThinkPad, so I wasn’t able to access them. I just figured I’d get access somehow, someday, but the years passed and the files remained where they were. The floppies traveled with me, however, and I finally got around to having them converted. I was gratified to get the files back after all this time, and happy to see how much of the work holds up. Though I never succeeded in finding a place for its publication, and am not giving up on it, here is the first real poem I ever wrote:
Marathon
dead on arrival
you come
exhaust
-ed defeat
-ed you come
you have pound
-ed to bone
your limbs forward
thrust
unerr
-ing unfail
-ing placed feet
in the dust
with the tight
in your muscle
your face set in steel
going on
-going on
going on
do you feel
how the news
when it breaks
it will
break me in
-stead arch your
back toss your
head with the
rhythm the
tread
the end a
-head break the
ribbons and
ribbons and
ribbons and
yes
Sunday, February 10, 2008
In Seventh Grade, Again
I got a little out-of-touch with my regular postings to this blog, but blame can be assigned to other work and not laziness or procrastination. Last week I was the resident Teaching Artist at Dr. Lydia T. Wright School PS 89 here in Buffalo, and the week prior was assembling a major grant application, then I received two assignments from a magazine I write for. So the last two weeks here in Buffalo have in fact been incredibly busy and productive, and now I’m trying to get back on track.
What can I say about my first residency? The school was right around the corner from Erie County Medical Center, in a neighborhood called Delavan-Grider. It is just east of NY State Highway 33, which links downtown Buffalo with the airport. The 33, as it’s called, divides parts of the city from and prevents them from interacting with each other the way urban highways tend to do—like the BQE in New York City, the old Embarcadero Freeway in San Francisco, and all the freeways in Los Angeles.
From the get-go, the seventh graders were a challenge. I’m lucky in that I’m a strong presence—which simply means I don’t wear my insecurities on my sleeve—so I wasn’t about to let the kids walk all over me. And those who kept trying to act out I refused to give up on; I don’t know…maybe kids who act out need something besides discipline. We read five poems in five days, and I used the work of Nikki Giovanni and Frank O’Hara and Joy Harjo and Cathy Song. It is both familiar and unfamiliar for me to be so immersed in poetry again, to talk—or try to talk—about rhyme and meter and form and detail and imagery again on such a constant basis. I discovered poetry a long, long time ago—writing Robert Frost imitations in fourth and fifth grade, but that’s also when I realized I wanted to be a writer. For much of my life I have struggled with what that meant—it often seemed something external, an identity, like a mantle, that I would find someday in a store, off-the-rack, discounted, yes, but inarguably designed for me. I didn’t realize that I had to work at being a writer; I didn’t realize that although I had a gift, I still had a lot of weaknesses, a lot of work to do to repair them or to make them seem like strengths or to concentrate on forms of writing that worked with my strengths. It has only been in the last few years that this has finally happened at all, so perhaps it is no surprise that I did not find this kind of work as a teaching artist until now. And honestly, I could not have done it a few years ago; I would have been terrible and egotistical about it. Instead, I was humbled by these kids and their lives. I came away grateful for the fact that I don’t have to go to seventh grade now, or ever again. There was one boy whose uniform shirt was filthy dirty, and I thought, My God…my mother was able to send me to school each day looking not just clean but sharp. My parents were able to do that for all of us kids.
I wondered about the disproportionate number of girls to boys. Is this a simple statistic? Or does it reflect, as I fear it may, the fact that boys of twelve, thirteen, and fourteen in parts of our society are no longer part of our society? That we consider them lost causes, might as well, they aren’t going to make it anyway? What do they turn to, these boys? Those who were in the class were in the throes of puberty—and yet they were still children. And many of the girls were the same. But when they wrote—when they got down to brass tacks and wrote about themselves—and what adolescent doesn’t want a stage to himself or herself?—they wrote deeply and honestly and openly, and at times I was moved as no poetry has moved me before. I wasn’t writing honestly at thirteen—I was trying, but I couldn’t—how could I express what I needed to? I want to look to these children for strength and courage to become the kind of writer many of them allowed themselves to be, at last.
What can I say about my first residency? The school was right around the corner from Erie County Medical Center, in a neighborhood called Delavan-Grider. It is just east of NY State Highway 33, which links downtown Buffalo with the airport. The 33, as it’s called, divides parts of the city from and prevents them from interacting with each other the way urban highways tend to do—like the BQE in New York City, the old Embarcadero Freeway in San Francisco, and all the freeways in Los Angeles.
From the get-go, the seventh graders were a challenge. I’m lucky in that I’m a strong presence—which simply means I don’t wear my insecurities on my sleeve—so I wasn’t about to let the kids walk all over me. And those who kept trying to act out I refused to give up on; I don’t know…maybe kids who act out need something besides discipline. We read five poems in five days, and I used the work of Nikki Giovanni and Frank O’Hara and Joy Harjo and Cathy Song. It is both familiar and unfamiliar for me to be so immersed in poetry again, to talk—or try to talk—about rhyme and meter and form and detail and imagery again on such a constant basis. I discovered poetry a long, long time ago—writing Robert Frost imitations in fourth and fifth grade, but that’s also when I realized I wanted to be a writer. For much of my life I have struggled with what that meant—it often seemed something external, an identity, like a mantle, that I would find someday in a store, off-the-rack, discounted, yes, but inarguably designed for me. I didn’t realize that I had to work at being a writer; I didn’t realize that although I had a gift, I still had a lot of weaknesses, a lot of work to do to repair them or to make them seem like strengths or to concentrate on forms of writing that worked with my strengths. It has only been in the last few years that this has finally happened at all, so perhaps it is no surprise that I did not find this kind of work as a teaching artist until now. And honestly, I could not have done it a few years ago; I would have been terrible and egotistical about it. Instead, I was humbled by these kids and their lives. I came away grateful for the fact that I don’t have to go to seventh grade now, or ever again. There was one boy whose uniform shirt was filthy dirty, and I thought, My God…my mother was able to send me to school each day looking not just clean but sharp. My parents were able to do that for all of us kids.
I wondered about the disproportionate number of girls to boys. Is this a simple statistic? Or does it reflect, as I fear it may, the fact that boys of twelve, thirteen, and fourteen in parts of our society are no longer part of our society? That we consider them lost causes, might as well, they aren’t going to make it anyway? What do they turn to, these boys? Those who were in the class were in the throes of puberty—and yet they were still children. And many of the girls were the same. But when they wrote—when they got down to brass tacks and wrote about themselves—and what adolescent doesn’t want a stage to himself or herself?—they wrote deeply and honestly and openly, and at times I was moved as no poetry has moved me before. I wasn’t writing honestly at thirteen—I was trying, but I couldn’t—how could I express what I needed to? I want to look to these children for strength and courage to become the kind of writer many of them allowed themselves to be, at last.
Monday, February 4, 2008
The Plunge
I’m sitting here at the ballet studio in Orchard Park, and my hip joints ache. Not because of dancing. Because of teaching. This morning I had my first Teaching Artist Residency and it was a full-frontal plunge into the icy cold waters of the profession.
The school where I’m teaching is near the Erie County Medical Center. It’s a well-appointed public school; I’m teaching Grade 7, three classes, in Poetry. The first class was a rowdy group, mostly girls, few boys. The profile of the class (and the school as a whole) is largely African-American. The teachers I’m working with are mostly Caucasian.
I really don’t know how teachers manage these days. The kids in the first class didn’t know how to focus as a group. Individual, they could focus, but not as a group. I heard time and time again that seventh grade would be the hardest grade to teach; I figured I might as well start where it’s hardest. We read a poem by Nikki Giovanni called “The Reason I Like Chocolate” then we talked about it. Does it feel like a poem? Why? Or why not? What are some of things we expect to find in a poem that we don’t find here? What about punctuation? What about patterns? What about feelings? The boys in the back of the class were a bit sullen, but they joined in. I’d be curious to know how they felt having a man in the class for a change.
The second class was the complete opposite from the first: the students were polite and attentive, and they participated with, if not enthusiasm, then at least a sense of willingness. Also, I had that first 45 minute class under my belt and a sense of what I could do better and what I should let go of. I felt more confident as the day went on. And there were five adults in the class, which may have made a big difference.
Feeling like I owned my lesson plan, I went to my third class but as the minutes ticked by, the students failed to appear. After about ten minutes the teachers said they had to go down to the vice principal’s office: apparently the entire class was being held for misbehavior during the previous period. They finally arrived in class with twenty minutes to go, which left us time only to read the poem and discuss it. It went well, considering. Maybe in the office they’d worked out whatever was going on with them as a group.
I’m going to read over the poems they wrote now. I’ve selected my exemplar for tomorrow and am going to talk about rhyme and rhythm. I’d really like to bring in my nieces’ keyboard to have some bass or something to sample underneath. Maybe that'll grab and hold their attention...
The school where I’m teaching is near the Erie County Medical Center. It’s a well-appointed public school; I’m teaching Grade 7, three classes, in Poetry. The first class was a rowdy group, mostly girls, few boys. The profile of the class (and the school as a whole) is largely African-American. The teachers I’m working with are mostly Caucasian.
I really don’t know how teachers manage these days. The kids in the first class didn’t know how to focus as a group. Individual, they could focus, but not as a group. I heard time and time again that seventh grade would be the hardest grade to teach; I figured I might as well start where it’s hardest. We read a poem by Nikki Giovanni called “The Reason I Like Chocolate” then we talked about it. Does it feel like a poem? Why? Or why not? What are some of things we expect to find in a poem that we don’t find here? What about punctuation? What about patterns? What about feelings? The boys in the back of the class were a bit sullen, but they joined in. I’d be curious to know how they felt having a man in the class for a change.
The second class was the complete opposite from the first: the students were polite and attentive, and they participated with, if not enthusiasm, then at least a sense of willingness. Also, I had that first 45 minute class under my belt and a sense of what I could do better and what I should let go of. I felt more confident as the day went on. And there were five adults in the class, which may have made a big difference.
Feeling like I owned my lesson plan, I went to my third class but as the minutes ticked by, the students failed to appear. After about ten minutes the teachers said they had to go down to the vice principal’s office: apparently the entire class was being held for misbehavior during the previous period. They finally arrived in class with twenty minutes to go, which left us time only to read the poem and discuss it. It went well, considering. Maybe in the office they’d worked out whatever was going on with them as a group.
I’m going to read over the poems they wrote now. I’ve selected my exemplar for tomorrow and am going to talk about rhyme and rhythm. I’d really like to bring in my nieces’ keyboard to have some bass or something to sample underneath. Maybe that'll grab and hold their attention...
Wednesday, January 23, 2008
WBFO
Here in Buffalo my radio is more or less locked on the local NPR station. Not necessarily its musical programming, but its news. Though I’ll sometimes seek out alt pop/rock or Air America for variety, from “Talk of the Nation” through “Fresh Air,” whenever I’m driving I’m perpetually listening to WBFO. I’ve been a public radio junkie before: in New York, after 9/11, public radio was a lone voice of sanity during an insane time; a few years after that I got rid of my television altogether, and became something of a WNYC snob. But here in Western New York I’ve had a relapse: I’m officially an NPR junkie again.
I suppose it has as much to do with this protracted run-up to the primaries as the amount of driving I now do. I was addicted to CNN prior to 9/11, and during the 2006 midterm elections, having obtained not just a television set but a cable connection, I became hooked on CSPAN. But ever since their zenith (hey!) back in the early Nineties, since the advent of MSNBC and streaming video, since the coming of YouTube and FaceBook, the cable news organizations, like media in general, regardless of political tilt and whatever the form, have become ever louder and noisier. It goes back to the “crawl,” I guess. Now no matter what the form or channel, it seems to have become standard that the visual frame be as busy and subdivided as the screen in an episode of “24”.
My personal turning point with CNN was Bill Hemmer’s defection to Fox News: no more American Morning eye candy—worse, he was sweetening the day’s start for all those right-wingers! On his departing, Bruno Magli-shod heels came the network’s overhype of the 2006 Hurricane Season following Katrina. You could practically hear the rubbing of dozens of producers’ palms in glee as they unveiled their stratotech, multimillion-dollar CNN Weather Center—and the record-hurricane season predicted hour after hour that spring and summer never materialized (and with due respect to Nobel laureate Gore, so far nothing like it has).
Back in the late Eighties and early Nineties, one of any given week’s highlights was my ritual of the Sunday New York Times. The parceling-out of Sunday paper sections goes back a long way, historically as well as personally. On the way back from Mass at St. Lucy’s Dad used to stop at the drive-up dairy at the corner of San Tomas Aquino Road and Harriet Avenue to pick up that week’s Sunday San Jose Mercury-News. We couldn’t touch it until we got home, but when we did, by choosing the movie section over the sports or the comics—and choosing it over the fight over the comics section—I could set myself apart from my ten siblings. (And I didn’t not-choose the sports section—like my default admission to the roster of a reluctant third-grade kickball team captain during P.E., the sport section not-chose me.) I chose further when I started reading the San Francisco Chronicle—which again, didn’t feel like a choice but a kind of surrender. Who cared about San Jose? There was a whole city to the north, with real stories and lives. The San Francisco network affiliates’ signals being stronger, we San Joseans pulled in news from The City before we pulled in local stories.
By the time I got to Berkeley I was already in some ways looking East (and not the East that others were looking to, across the Pacific). I can see now that I lacked imagination, or at least enough to imagine that I would sometime move away from California; not until my late twenties did the possibility remotely occur to me, and the move itself was motivated by more reckless decision-making than anything like a long-cherished dream. But by then I’d been a regular reader of the Times and the New Yorker for years. Their writers and critics and editors—Johnny Apple, David Richards, “Punch” Sulzberger; Robert Gottleib, Adam Gopnick, John Lahr, and of course, Pauline Kael—I didn’t always know by name (with some conspicuous exceptions), but they prodded and teased and poked and rasped and refined and polished and buffed my mind. Or perhaps they didn’t; perhaps there wasn’t enough there to prod or tease or poke. My ideas were more like mere ideas of ideas, or notions of ideas, usually theirs, and seldom mine. I was far from having the wherewithal to see that, or say that; from my North Oakland apartment I would stroll over to Piedmont Avenue and get a large Peet’s House Blend and the Sunday Times and tuck in. My fingers soon blackened with printer’s ink, and when I licked my thumb or index finger I briefly tasted all three together—the bitter alkaline coffee, sugar and metallic ink. And somehow, without trying to be, I’d also become a sports fan myself, so if there was a game on (NFL, college hoops, or the A’s) my day felt complete. And because my day felt complete my life sometimes felt or seemed complete. It wasn’t, though. Far from it. It would take the move to New York City, and fifteen years there, where for a long time I would mistake that remarkable city’s completeness as a sense of completeness in my own life, in my own self. I was finally, rudely awakened to the falsehood of that, and not all that long ago.
Not just years but decades have passed since the Sunday San Jose Mercury-News, since my discovery of a San Francisco Chronicle columnist named Herb Caen made me feel like I was the only one reading him, like he and I were having a private conversation. Caen lived long enough to see the rise of cable and the birth of the Internet; perhaps he knew that a writer is really writing for one person, and one person only: himself. I suppose in a way that’s what this blog is about. I read the Times online now, which saves paper and all that. I like that you can get news 24/7; no more evening edition or “bulldog” edition—we have website updates instead. I’m no more or less nostalgic about those Sundays back in North Oakland with the Times and Peet’s Coffee and the Forty-Niners games than I am about those back in San Jose. We evolve, and so does technology. For now, radio remains as it was in its earliest days, so I’ll keep listening to those voices in the same way I used to read bylines: Lakshmi Singh. Carl Kasell. Terry Gross…
I suppose it has as much to do with this protracted run-up to the primaries as the amount of driving I now do. I was addicted to CNN prior to 9/11, and during the 2006 midterm elections, having obtained not just a television set but a cable connection, I became hooked on CSPAN. But ever since their zenith (hey!) back in the early Nineties, since the advent of MSNBC and streaming video, since the coming of YouTube and FaceBook, the cable news organizations, like media in general, regardless of political tilt and whatever the form, have become ever louder and noisier. It goes back to the “crawl,” I guess. Now no matter what the form or channel, it seems to have become standard that the visual frame be as busy and subdivided as the screen in an episode of “24”.
My personal turning point with CNN was Bill Hemmer’s defection to Fox News: no more American Morning eye candy—worse, he was sweetening the day’s start for all those right-wingers! On his departing, Bruno Magli-shod heels came the network’s overhype of the 2006 Hurricane Season following Katrina. You could practically hear the rubbing of dozens of producers’ palms in glee as they unveiled their stratotech, multimillion-dollar CNN Weather Center—and the record-hurricane season predicted hour after hour that spring and summer never materialized (and with due respect to Nobel laureate Gore, so far nothing like it has).
Back in the late Eighties and early Nineties, one of any given week’s highlights was my ritual of the Sunday New York Times. The parceling-out of Sunday paper sections goes back a long way, historically as well as personally. On the way back from Mass at St. Lucy’s Dad used to stop at the drive-up dairy at the corner of San Tomas Aquino Road and Harriet Avenue to pick up that week’s Sunday San Jose Mercury-News. We couldn’t touch it until we got home, but when we did, by choosing the movie section over the sports or the comics—and choosing it over the fight over the comics section—I could set myself apart from my ten siblings. (And I didn’t not-choose the sports section—like my default admission to the roster of a reluctant third-grade kickball team captain during P.E., the sport section not-chose me.) I chose further when I started reading the San Francisco Chronicle—which again, didn’t feel like a choice but a kind of surrender. Who cared about San Jose? There was a whole city to the north, with real stories and lives. The San Francisco network affiliates’ signals being stronger, we San Joseans pulled in news from The City before we pulled in local stories.
By the time I got to Berkeley I was already in some ways looking East (and not the East that others were looking to, across the Pacific). I can see now that I lacked imagination, or at least enough to imagine that I would sometime move away from California; not until my late twenties did the possibility remotely occur to me, and the move itself was motivated by more reckless decision-making than anything like a long-cherished dream. But by then I’d been a regular reader of the Times and the New Yorker for years. Their writers and critics and editors—Johnny Apple, David Richards, “Punch” Sulzberger; Robert Gottleib, Adam Gopnick, John Lahr, and of course, Pauline Kael—I didn’t always know by name (with some conspicuous exceptions), but they prodded and teased and poked and rasped and refined and polished and buffed my mind. Or perhaps they didn’t; perhaps there wasn’t enough there to prod or tease or poke. My ideas were more like mere ideas of ideas, or notions of ideas, usually theirs, and seldom mine. I was far from having the wherewithal to see that, or say that; from my North Oakland apartment I would stroll over to Piedmont Avenue and get a large Peet’s House Blend and the Sunday Times and tuck in. My fingers soon blackened with printer’s ink, and when I licked my thumb or index finger I briefly tasted all three together—the bitter alkaline coffee, sugar and metallic ink. And somehow, without trying to be, I’d also become a sports fan myself, so if there was a game on (NFL, college hoops, or the A’s) my day felt complete. And because my day felt complete my life sometimes felt or seemed complete. It wasn’t, though. Far from it. It would take the move to New York City, and fifteen years there, where for a long time I would mistake that remarkable city’s completeness as a sense of completeness in my own life, in my own self. I was finally, rudely awakened to the falsehood of that, and not all that long ago.
Not just years but decades have passed since the Sunday San Jose Mercury-News, since my discovery of a San Francisco Chronicle columnist named Herb Caen made me feel like I was the only one reading him, like he and I were having a private conversation. Caen lived long enough to see the rise of cable and the birth of the Internet; perhaps he knew that a writer is really writing for one person, and one person only: himself. I suppose in a way that’s what this blog is about. I read the Times online now, which saves paper and all that. I like that you can get news 24/7; no more evening edition or “bulldog” edition—we have website updates instead. I’m no more or less nostalgic about those Sundays back in North Oakland with the Times and Peet’s Coffee and the Forty-Niners games than I am about those back in San Jose. We evolve, and so does technology. For now, radio remains as it was in its earliest days, so I’ll keep listening to those voices in the same way I used to read bylines: Lakshmi Singh. Carl Kasell. Terry Gross…
Sunday, January 13, 2008
The Heart(h) of the Matter
Saturday night is my night to cook, and last night I tried a new recipe. It’s from Mark Bittman’s column in The New York Times, “The Minimalist,” one of my favorite sources for recipes. The recipe was for a Puerto Rican pork shoulder roast, and though I’d never made it before, the results were perfect: I’m not always the best roaster in the world, but the meat was perfectly done, and the flavor…well, let’s just say that I’ve had authentic Nuyorican pork and Cuban pork and mine was just as good. I served it sliced, with big bowls of simple black beans and rice, with a plate of sliced ripe mangoes, avocadoes, and limes. The meal was meant to taste like the Greater Antilles brought to Western New York, and it did.
I haven’t always enjoyed cooking even when I think I have: often I’d set myself a goal too ambitious, and following the recipe felt like composing a higher-maths proof. When I was younger I was simply overconfident, arrogant and pretentious—that may be one of the reasons I liked Marcel on Top Chef Season Two; he had the cocksure attitude that comes with being twenty-five, feeling finally validated as an adult, having had few serious setbacks in life and your whole life ahead of you (or so you think, which is part of it). Like Marcel, I was sometimes more interested in end effects than proper process and procedure. I’d start out making a dish that I didn’t even have all the ingredients for, then have to interrupt myself to run out for baking powder or cream of tartar. Over two decades in the restaurant business, I gained a wealth of knowledge and a good palate, but those weren’t connected to any heart or soul. They weren’t even entirely connected to appetite, to hunger. If there’s such a thing as being a gourmand from the neck up, that’s what I was. Sure, occasionally I had a food experience that was a life experience or vice versa, but they were few and far between and I didn’t recognize them for what they are: the heart(h) of the matter.
Now I have a family to cook for, a kitchen large enough, and an occasion both regular and essential (by which I mean that when we sit down to the table on Saturdays, because of the week’s routine everyone is always really hungry and really tired). And I really enjoy putting the time and effort into thinking, Hmm, I’ll bet this pork shoulder will be a little fatty. That’ll be good, but perhaps something clean to go with it. So, the mangoes… Or, I know the girls like simple foods, but my brother and sister-in-law like a bit of flavor. So I didn’t make just a pot of beans, but a good pot of beans. And as I tended that pork shoulder roast—checking the level of the water in the roasting pan, turning it every hour as recommended, watching the color and trying to gauge its sense of doneness—I realized how much I cared about it. And who made me come to care about it. In other words, I found reasons to put love into my cooking because I’m among people I love, and love to cook for. It makes toasting a slice of cinnamon bread for Nina or pouring a sippy cup of juice for Camille an act both simple and not simple, small and large. It sure made that pork roast taste good.
I haven’t always enjoyed cooking even when I think I have: often I’d set myself a goal too ambitious, and following the recipe felt like composing a higher-maths proof. When I was younger I was simply overconfident, arrogant and pretentious—that may be one of the reasons I liked Marcel on Top Chef Season Two; he had the cocksure attitude that comes with being twenty-five, feeling finally validated as an adult, having had few serious setbacks in life and your whole life ahead of you (or so you think, which is part of it). Like Marcel, I was sometimes more interested in end effects than proper process and procedure. I’d start out making a dish that I didn’t even have all the ingredients for, then have to interrupt myself to run out for baking powder or cream of tartar. Over two decades in the restaurant business, I gained a wealth of knowledge and a good palate, but those weren’t connected to any heart or soul. They weren’t even entirely connected to appetite, to hunger. If there’s such a thing as being a gourmand from the neck up, that’s what I was. Sure, occasionally I had a food experience that was a life experience or vice versa, but they were few and far between and I didn’t recognize them for what they are: the heart(h) of the matter.
Now I have a family to cook for, a kitchen large enough, and an occasion both regular and essential (by which I mean that when we sit down to the table on Saturdays, because of the week’s routine everyone is always really hungry and really tired). And I really enjoy putting the time and effort into thinking, Hmm, I’ll bet this pork shoulder will be a little fatty. That’ll be good, but perhaps something clean to go with it. So, the mangoes… Or, I know the girls like simple foods, but my brother and sister-in-law like a bit of flavor. So I didn’t make just a pot of beans, but a good pot of beans. And as I tended that pork shoulder roast—checking the level of the water in the roasting pan, turning it every hour as recommended, watching the color and trying to gauge its sense of doneness—I realized how much I cared about it. And who made me come to care about it. In other words, I found reasons to put love into my cooking because I’m among people I love, and love to cook for. It makes toasting a slice of cinnamon bread for Nina or pouring a sippy cup of juice for Camille an act both simple and not simple, small and large. It sure made that pork roast taste good.
Sunday, January 6, 2008
The Twelfth Day of Christmas
It’s late on the first Sunday of the year, at the end of a very busy and eventful week. (Pushing the envelope, my brother and his family and I went to an indoor water park today; four hours of chlorination and artificial tropics—it was fun, but a bit much.)
My trip to NYC passed in a blur. A lot of restaurant meals, a couple movies (“There Will Be Blood” and “The Savages”, both worthwhile, the former another standout work from Paul Thomas Anderson), a Broadway show (Pinter’s “The Homecoming” in a funny-scary production with Ian McShane), and a day of art at the Met and MOMA. I was gratified to realize, in a variety of ways and moments, and often, that I made the right decision to leave. I could feel the stress coming off city residents in pulses, and was told by one friend that “calm” was coming off of me “in waves.” I kept thinking I was going to feel a moment of regret. Quite the opposite: I very soon found myself thinking, I can’t wait to get back to my life. I do think that to live in NYC and have a life like the one I have here would be very worthwhile; I imagine that such a life would feel rich (and one would probably need to be rich). But since I don’t have that life, I don’t know that it would feel better. I was also struck by how much New Yorkers like to complain. I was a sounding board for a lot of people in a very short period of time, and often as not it was not something abstract or remote they were complaining about. It may also be the people I know there. I will just add that a number of people also said they would love to get out of the city, and can still say that I am glad I did.
As for events on Thursday in Iowa, I have been cautiously wondering which of the several qualified Democratic candidates to support, and have been biding my time because this has been an unbearably long run-up to this first contest, and we still have nearly an entire year until November. Many things will happen between now and then. It’s appalling that for several months we had eighteen (qualified) candidates for the highest elected office in the land without a single candidate running as an independent. Speaking of the kind of change Senators Obama and Edwards (and Governor Romney) love to espouse, that is one thing that needs to—more independent candidacies. (And let’s stop calling them third-party.) I did not expect things to turn out quite as upended as they did, but am not at all sorry about the results—on both sides. But it is time to think about how far we have fallen behind, and about how lousy we feel about it deep down inside (on all sides), and about who really shows the potential to change that—or be that.
My trip to NYC passed in a blur. A lot of restaurant meals, a couple movies (“There Will Be Blood” and “The Savages”, both worthwhile, the former another standout work from Paul Thomas Anderson), a Broadway show (Pinter’s “The Homecoming” in a funny-scary production with Ian McShane), and a day of art at the Met and MOMA. I was gratified to realize, in a variety of ways and moments, and often, that I made the right decision to leave. I could feel the stress coming off city residents in pulses, and was told by one friend that “calm” was coming off of me “in waves.” I kept thinking I was going to feel a moment of regret. Quite the opposite: I very soon found myself thinking, I can’t wait to get back to my life. I do think that to live in NYC and have a life like the one I have here would be very worthwhile; I imagine that such a life would feel rich (and one would probably need to be rich). But since I don’t have that life, I don’t know that it would feel better. I was also struck by how much New Yorkers like to complain. I was a sounding board for a lot of people in a very short period of time, and often as not it was not something abstract or remote they were complaining about. It may also be the people I know there. I will just add that a number of people also said they would love to get out of the city, and can still say that I am glad I did.
As for events on Thursday in Iowa, I have been cautiously wondering which of the several qualified Democratic candidates to support, and have been biding my time because this has been an unbearably long run-up to this first contest, and we still have nearly an entire year until November. Many things will happen between now and then. It’s appalling that for several months we had eighteen (qualified) candidates for the highest elected office in the land without a single candidate running as an independent. Speaking of the kind of change Senators Obama and Edwards (and Governor Romney) love to espouse, that is one thing that needs to—more independent candidacies. (And let’s stop calling them third-party.) I did not expect things to turn out quite as upended as they did, but am not at all sorry about the results—on both sides. But it is time to think about how far we have fallen behind, and about how lousy we feel about it deep down inside (on all sides), and about who really shows the potential to change that—or be that.
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